Shoes
Tuesdays are usually good days. I have my riding lesson on Tuesdays.* Today I had to go to the dentist.**
It took three stabs to render me sufficiently numb, which means that now it’s worn off again my jaw feels like it was broken like a potato chip/crisp and then stapled together, supposing you can use staples on a potato chip/crisp, and after only the first jab I found the top of my head lifting off and the rest of me juddering like a sapling in a tornado.*** I feel very odd, I said, hanging on to the chair to keep from falling out of it, I feel as if I’m having a . . . like an adrenaline attack.
Oh yes, said the dentist blandly. That happens sometimes.
!!!!!??!???!??!?!????????!!!!!!!!?
There’s adrenaline in the anaesthetic, he went on, to constrict the blood vessels, so the anaesthetic lasts longer. Occasionally a little of it leaks directly into a blood vessel during the injection, and then this may happen.
So then we had to wait for it to wear off before he could get on with the show.
I was in there for the relatively nontraumatic-in-terms-of-physical-pain matter of having the three crowns put on the three teeth he disassembled last time†. So he banged and hammered and pulled stuff off and put stuff on for a while and then he said . . .
These crowns just aren’t good enough. I’m going to send them back to the lab.
SO WE HAVE TO DO IT ALL OVER AGAIN! AND IT’S WORSE THAN THAT, BECAUSE HE’S GOING TO REDO THE MOULDS AND BLAH AND WHATEVER TOO! So rather than coming out today having something finished, I’ve just regressed two appointments. In a game of Snakes and Ladders I’ve hit a snake. And they can’t fit me in till the end of September. The second appointment is the beginning of October. And I was already demoralised†† by his having run through the options for the next piece of major reconstruction (similar in scope and expense to restoring Windsor Castle after the fire) while we were waiting for the adrenaline to wear off.
So I rushed wailing out onto the street and . . . bought shoes. Of course. Anyone would. It’s not quite that bad. No, it’s worse. But, I mean, buying shoes. Peter came into town with me, and we were going to meet back at the car after my appointment, long enough for me to run a quick errand. The errand in question was to go to the Surprisingly Comfortable without Being Small-Child-Scaringly Ugly Shoes Shop, and look for sandals, which should be on sale by now. This is a perfectly legitimate errand. The problem is that they were having a major end of season Everything Must Go sale and about 90% of it was in my size.††† Well, at least I did get the sandals. I was also twenty minutes late back to the car. I said, I prostrate myself grovellingly at your feet. Peter said, No, no, I knew this would happen, I brought something to read.
We could now take bets that I’ll finally get around to the organised-and-thoughtful tomorrow.
^^ Do you remember the pigeon?
** But I barely got my book out of my knapsack before he came bounding down the stairs for me. This was after the receptionist said with awful emphasis, He’ll only be two or three minutes!
*** Or a chucklehead after her third mug of tea. Well, I don’t always count very well. My mind is on other things.
† And kept me waiting forty minutes and then charged me £1,000,000. The forty minutes is true. The £1,000,000 is slightly exaggerated, but it’s all relative. Relative to my bank account, it was £1,000,000.
†† Well that’s a non sequitur. I’m demoralised automatically, walking across his threshold.
††† This happens to me kind of a lot. The rest of me is small enough that there are often really interesting things on the sale rack in my size^, and my feet are enormous, so there are quite often shoes in my size too. Oh, sob, poooor me, such torture. Trying not to buy everything! Ak! Agony! Affliction!
^ See: Best Hot Frock
Glyndebourne, II
I’ve lived in this country eighteen years, I’m an opera nut*, and up until last year I’d never been to Glyndebourne. It’s not even as if it’s in Yorkshire or something–it’s only about two hours away. This is like being horse mad, living two hours away from the Spanish Riding School and never going there either.** But it’s desperately expensive and desperately elite, and I’m a little twitchy about the rich, who are different, and a four hour commute is still four hours. And for the first decade or so we were going to London a lot, and were (comparative) habitués at the ENO.
But then we kind of slowed down on the trips to London, and then recently I developed a bad case of hellhounds.*** Meanwhile even getting tickets to Glyndebourne has become more and more difficult, never mind good tickets, and I don’t want to bother if I can’t have a good seat. And then Peter found out, last year, that his neighbours at the mews are subscribers.† And as subscribers they’re eligible to buy more tickets than they ever do. Furthermore the brief Glyndebourne season includes the end of July. Our wedding anniversary is the beginning of January; our Other Anniversary is the end of July. It celebrates the day that I picked Peter up at the Bangor, Maine airport for a no-big-deal weekend of keeping this eccentric and rather terrifying Englishman amused. I assumed I would survive the experience. I was not expecting that I would see Peter walk through the airport door and think, oops. It was Some Enchanted Evening except with tripping over stuff and saying the wrong thing. I can’t remember if I spilled any food on him that weekend or not. Probably. Fortunately more or less the same thing was happening to Peter, so he didn’t notice.††
We celebrate both anniversaries, usually in the dinner out with lashings of champagne category. But thanks to hellhounds I’ve kind of given up on holidays for the moment . . . and in fact it was Glyndebourne last year which inadvertently ushered in that regime. A year ago I was still pretending whatever it was was something hellhounds would grow out of (although I’d already spent kind of a lot of money trying to find out what it was, that they were going to grow out of) and I was also trying to find a reliable overnight dog sitter.††† After various failures I hit on the plan of hiring someone from one of these national house- and pet-sitting companies. Their, um, operatives, have heaps of experience etc and while they cost a freaking fortune, at least there’s no tricky negotiating as with a friend of a friend, and you can just tell them what you want and how you want them to do it. First operative, first overnight away from home, I went to a homeopathy seminar in London, and it all went beautifully. Hellhounds even ate for her.
So Peter and I got all excited and decided to take a tiny holiday, two or three days, as part of going to the opera. (And hope that the hellhounds’ chronicity didn’t come on them at the wrong moment.) The same sitter wasn’t available, so–ever paranoid, but this is exactly the sort of experience that makes you paranoid–I asked for someone who could come one night before I’d be leaving my precious (and peculiar) hellhounds with them for several nights. I disliked the new guy on sight . . . well. The company paid for the actual physical damage to the house he did, but they did so without ever really admitting that he’d done it, and said gaily that he was one of their best and oldest and most loyal employees, that nothing like this had ever happened before, they just couldn’t imagine, and of course they would continue to use him. ‡ And they gave me to understand that they were doing me a big favour letting me cancel the longer booking at the last minute. So much for the professional national firm idea.
Which left me/us with seven days before my first experience of Glyndebourne‡‡ to figure out what we were going to do. It was Peter who came up with the idea of a car with a driver. Peter drives very little any more and I don’t like driving much, and there’s always the possibility of the ME falling on me. And, as Peter said, if I can’t go on holiday we’re saving all this money and we can spend it on a kind of short intense one evening holiday. So that’s what we did.
And it worked so well we did it again this year. Last year it was sheeting and cold; this year was Best Hot Frock weather, and, just by the way, going by taxi was worth it alone for the fact that the taxi was air conditioned.‡‡‡
And I guess I’ll tell you about Carmen tomorrow night.
* * *
* at a fairly hoi polloi level. Yes, I do Strauss and Wagner–Monteverdi^ and Gluck–Britten, even Janacek. I’m still a Verdi girl at heart.^^
^ As I write this, the Glyndebourne production of The Coronation of Poppea in its semi-staged Proms version is playing on Radio Three. Poppea is the one this year I really wanted to see–I’ve seen dozens of Carmens and never a Poppea–but its run was over with too early. There are rules about important celebrations.
^^ Yes, of course, Mozart and Rossini and Donizetti and Bizet and Gounod and Tchaikovsky and Bellini and and and and. I’m just choosing a few that aren’t the dead centre of the canon. Oh, and I don’t love Fidelio. Sue me.
** If it were the Spanish Riding School, I’d've gone. And the one time we were in Vienna–for Peter to win a literary prize–it was closed. I bought the t shirt however. Sigh. Which I never wear, however, because it is a Totemic Object.
*** I spoke too soon about last night. They’ve been off all day today. SIGH.
† My little commoner’s heart beats faster.
†† Knowing Peter, as I now do very well, he almost certainly spilled food on me. But I don’t remember. QED.
††† Kennels are problematic because the overwhelming majority of kennels’ insurance companies demand that dogs be vaccinated every year. I have no intention of vaccinating the hellhounds every year. The thing that really infuriates me is that if you get a kennel employee in a neck lock, they will often admit that they’ve read the articles and they know that annual vaccination is not only unnecessary but a positive danger to the dogs’ health . . . but that’s just the way it is! Arrrrrrrgh!
‡ I’m still wondering what he had on the president of the company.
‡‡ Yes! Peter had been a number of times before me!
‡‡‡ Which our elderly but faithful VW Golf is not. I thought we might be coming to the end with Wolfgang, his last check up: there was something very weird going on with the steering. Turned out to be nothing worse than bent wheel rims. I really must learn to drive on the road.
Extremes
It has been a day of. And if my nerves twangle any harder I won’t be able to type. It should have been a good day. Any day with a Connie lesson in it should be a good day.*
I have mostly avoided telling you about the relentless lack of progress on the hellhound digestive front. I know I told you about the joy and delight of picking up a sample of every crap they crapped for three days, for the Every Lab Test Known to Human and/or Canine Kind Comprehensive Diagnostic Campaign. And I assume I told you that it came back positive for an evil little ratbag bacteria/um called campylobacter, which the vet warned me is a fiend to get rid of. We’re into the fiend stage. Except we’ve been in the fiend stage for the last two years. They’ve been like this–cyclical chronic diarrhea with lashings of vomiting and extreme weirdness about food–since I brought them home. And I’ve already reached the end of my rope. I reached the end of my rope months ago. And the latest, campylobacter-specific remedy is working to exactly the same pattern as everything else that’s been tried in the last two years–both the allopathic and the alternative–which is that the things that work at all work somewhat, for a while, and then they stop working. I told the vet about a week ago that we were emerging from the working-somewhat phase and moving into the stopping-working phase and he said no, no, it takes a while for campy to clear up, just keep going a little longer. . . . Chaos is streaming at both ends, and I mean streaming. This began after he pointblank refused lunch. I left it down, because sometimes he changes his mind. After about half an hour he had maybe three mouthfuls, at which point I picked it up. Half an hour after that, the three mouthfuls abruptly re-emerged into the light of day. . . which was the beginning of the rest of my interesting afternoon.
Meanwhile Merrilee sent me an email yesterday evening saying, CHALICE has a starred review in PW**! Hurrah! –And that she’d send it to me today. This morning I had a further email from one of my editors, saying, Congratulations on a great review! But nobody has sent me the damn thing. I wrote Merrilee a cranky email saying, You could at least ring me up and read me the beastly thing over the phone.
And I was working happily on HELLHOUND and thinking hey, we may even be ahead of schedule for turning in FIRE ELEMENTALS the end of August when, um, hellhound mayhem began. . . .
And when I took them out for their afternoon walk, because we tend to carry on through these things because nothing else works any better and at the moment at least there’s nothing wrong with Darkness, we met . . . a Labrador and two Jack Russells off lead. The hellhounds have actually begun to be somewhat less hellish about other dogs. They’re not going to win the Miss Manners Poise and Deportment Trophy or anything, but the veins don’t pop out on my forehead so much any more, holding onto them. Also, Chaos is not at his best. So I wasn’t expecting trouble, except insofar as the Lab or the JRs chose to provide it. So fancy my rapture and jubilation when hellhounds took a tremendous lunge after one of the Jack Russells, and, because the footing was bad and I hadn’t bothered to brace myself, pulled me over . . . into a bank of nettles.***
I’m wearing shorts. I’m not at all sure I’m going to sleep tonight.
I got back to the cottage roaring. And found a message from Merrilee on the phone machine saying, okay, I’m here, where are you? So do you want to hear this review or don’t you? So I rang her, and screamed for at least a full minute about hellhounds. And then she read me the review.
. . . And I can’t give you the link, because there isn’t one.† And I can’t write it out because that violates their copyright. But I’ll quote you the beginning and end: ‘Fans and new readers alike will greedily devour McKinley’s latest, a high fantasy as perfectly shaped and eloquently told as BEAUTY and THE HERO AND THE CROWN . . . a lavish and lasting treat.’
And Chaos ate his small plain chicken and rice dinner, which I hope is a good sign. Yes, for a normal dog with diarrhea this severe I’d let him fast. I don’t dare let a hellhound fast, because when they stop eating they don’t start again, and since Chaos in particular lives on the edge he goes downhill as fast as a penguin on an ice floe. However, if I’m not sleeping anyway, it won’t matter much if I have to get up to let a hellhound out.
Sigh.
* * *
* You may remember: I hate Labradors. And I hate terriers, especially Jack Russells. I am also a sap. Jenny has Jack Russells. Two of them: mum and daughter. When Jenny is teaching they’re locked up in her tack room.^ Usually. I already have a few Jack Russell and Riding Lesson stories. When Jenny is not teaching they’re usually loose in the yard. They perform a useful function: like Black Beauty put into the field next to the train when he was just a baby, and having run in terror from the great puffing monster a few times and noticed that none of the other horses ran with him, he stopped being afraid of trains. Horses on Jenny’s yard don’t mind dogs. They’re both terribly friendly–not unlike my hellhounds, only shorter. They also have a habit of rushing up to you and flinging themselves down on their backs so you can rub their tummies. Mum is getting a bit old and stately and would really rather you came to her; daughter Clover, however, is perfectly happy to chase you around the yard, upending herself on your feet any time you pause. As observed, I am a sap, and they also probably know me better than some of even the long-time boarders because I use Jenny’s tack room because Connie is Jenny’s horse. Contemplate, if you will, trying to clean tack with two Jack Russells lying tummy-up on your feet, wagging their tails like blazes. Anyway. I had occasion today to zigzag across the yard several times after I’d put Connie away, and had Clover weaving through my ankles most of the way. Eventually I gave up, stopped, let her do her fling-and-upend trick, and then, because rubbing a dog’s tummy silently is kind of boring, started asking her if she’d enjoyed her first sexual experience, and what he’d looked like, if he’d been young and cute, and whether he’d wanted it to be good for her too, and whether she’d missed her first period yet, and how I hoped she would be sensible and not have too many puppies at once, and that I also hoped she was a conscientious young person and was reading up on how to be a good mum and raise a socially responsible litter, and that there were probably web sites about this now too if she had internet access and . . . and I looked up and saw . . . hmm. You know, sometimes I think the British reputation for being potty about their animals is exaggerated. But my point is merely that if it’s furry and friendly I am its slave, and I don’t care what its DNA is. Some day I’ll tell you about the Labrador out at Montmorency’s Folly.
^ Life was easier in some ways when I had a part-share of a boarder, and was using the boarders’ tack room. Getting out of a door carrying a saddle without letting a Jack Russell determined to escape through your legs is . . . challenging.
** Publishers’ Weekly. The trade mag.
*** This is of course the least of my problems, but this little performance also made me look like a complete twit to the owner of the other dogs. This is the sort of behaviour that in other dogs makes me angry and scornful.
† As I recall, there’s something funny about PW and links, and there may not be one later either. If there is, I’ll post it. You can just bet I will.
Not a Good Day
I nearly came off Connie this morning.
The dentist kept me waiting forty minutes. . . .
. . . And charged me twenty five hundred pounds for the privilege.
And when my jaw and I tottered out for the final hellhound walk around town, we were set on by a lab mix and a corgi, and Darkness ducked out of his harness and bolted. Which was very sensible of him really, as I was busy fending the lab mix off Chaos and the corgi, thanks to its minimal leggage, had arrived at the affray a bit late and gone for Darkness as more available.
Who says people who stay home all the time don’t have adventures?
I’m going to go through the day’s events backwards which is their order of troublingness.
Have I mentioned how much I hate other people’s off lead, out of control, vicious bullying bloody dogs??? In this case the twit who was evidently responsible for the brutes sat on her bicycle and, after they’d already attacked my dogs–they’d shot from clear the other side of the rec ground, right past her, she could hardly have failed to see what was coming–said vaguely, Here, Fudge, here Something-or-other [I missed the corgi’s name somehow]. I, rather mysteriously, didn’t panic–that would have come later–but that’s partly because I couldn’t defend two dogs from two dogs and Darkness getting loose did even the odds. I have this strange dislike of watching my hellhounds being bitten. And Darkness did not, fortunately, light out for Cornwall; he just ran away from the damned corgi, who really did rush up snapping and snarling and launched himself on Darkness. With the twit sitting on her bicycle watching. Words are not precisely failing me, but words suitable for an all-ages blog sure are.
The lab cross was rather elderly from the look of it*, and the corgi admirably unfit, so they both gave up pretty quickly. Fortunately. [insert exclamatory utterance] This left me with one outraged, leashed hellhound and one bemused, unleashed one, presenting himself in a series of breathtaking heraldic poses which I was very sorry there wasn’t someone with a camera there to immortalise, especially because someone there could have hunted the corgi down and killed it while I recaptured my hellhound. This was, just by the way, all happening at the edge of a busy street–and in the bloody street: everybody but Chaos and I (and the twit on the bicycle) were in the street for quite a lot of it. It’s sheer luck there weren’t any cars passing at the time: it was slightly after the getting-home-from-work rush, but as I say, this is a busy street. The second time I called him, Darkness came, quietly, and I admit I grabbed him (while telling him what a goooood boy he is, to the extent that Chaos had to wedge himself between us, which is what Chaos always does) just in case the corgi got its second wind and came after us again. I then had the interesting experience of trying to keep hold of him while unfastening his harness–it’s one of the kind that comes to pieces before you can put it on–and wrapping it back round him again. (Plus a wiggly, demanding armful of Chaos. Yes, I could have made him sit and behave, but we were all feeling a trifle traumatised.) And yes, his harness is loose–both of their harnesses are loose–it’s loose because if it’s tight, it gives him blisters. They have thin skin and not a great deal of fur, especially places like behind the elbows, where the harness runs, and the standard sighthound anatomy is not best suited for harnessing anyway.
I came home even totterier than I went out. I feel that Darkness has come round to stare at me a few more times than usual this evening, but he does come round and stare, so I may be imagining it.
I also hate my arrogant male genital of a dentist, which will also come as no surprise to long-time readers of this blog. He is such a . . . male genital. I’m there for a two and a half hour session with him and his drills, and we start off with him being forty minutes late. No warning. No explanation. Minimal, which is to say no, apology. After twenty minutes I said something to the receptionist who said, oh, he’ll be here in a minute. After half an hour I said something again, and she started to go upstairs and then stopped and said, oh, I’ll write to him. Does this suggest anything to you as it does to me about the way he treats his staff? So she sat down at her computer and sent him a message. Then she says to me, he’ll be right here. And then she left. Cute.
And when he finally showed up in the full flower of his smarmy arrogance and I said grimly, forty minutes, this is really not good, he got all shirty. He’s always right, you know. We’ve been here before. He’s apparently the best specialist I’m going to get short of trekking up to London again, which I can’t face anyway, and several-times-over so now with food-allergic hellhounds, but I’m damned if I’m going to put up QUIETLY with this jerk’s overweening conviction that the sun shines out his rear end and nobody’s life or schedule matters but his own. Specialist doctors are exactly the same. We should be weeping with gratitude that they are deigning to address our piffling little concerns. We should hell. I’m weeping, all right, but I’m weeping at the size of the cheque I had to write to escape out the front door again. And I get to go back in a month and have the work finished. Only this particular job, mind you. I have a lot more mouth to bleed copiously at the wallet from. ARRRRRSODDINGRRRRRRRRRGGGGHHH.
So. I can end with Connie whom I only almost came off of, and other than that it was a good lesson and a good time, which time with a nice horse always is, and how have I been living these last few years without one or some or something? I’ve been remaking the acquaintance of Jenny’s old retired jumper star, let’s call him Drambuie**, he’s rather that colour, who is a sweetie on the ground–I was official horse-holder at a few shows, years ago, when I was at Jenny’s yard the first time–but rather a handful on top of. From front on you’d know him at once as thoroughbred, he has the TB head and neck, or anyway you’d know that he had TB ancestors that had given him that face. From behind you’d think he had something heavier in him: the boy has bone. But he sticks his nose out and says hello, and he’s right beside the tack room, so saying hello to Drambuie is part of the Connie-riding experience. It’s just so nice to be around horses again. I’ve been saying for as many years as I’ve been without, that I miss horses, not so much the riding. The riding is good, but the horses are what is necessary. But it’s frequently not that easy, as any of you who long for horses and live in a city, or have no money, or no time, or tiny children and no one to hand them over to for a couple of afternoons a week, or whose only commutable-to barns are run by evil creeps who think horses are a kind of four legged car*** know. I really don’t mean to sound like I’m gloating–I really do not feel that I’m gloating. I’m just so amazed. And happy.†
It was SHEETING again this morning.†† So we had to use the indoor school. Jenny’d had the sprinklers on to lay the dust and sprinklers are erratic little beasts so there were inevitably a few slithery spots. The lesson went fine, allowances made for the fact that Connie does what you tell her and I don’t always tell her right–the best flying change we had was not one I’d asked for–and gods’ blood but all that lateral work requires all your feet and fingers and seatbones and ears and elbows and napes of necks and things to be doing something unique each unto themselves and all of them simultaneously and then Jenny says things like ‘think in terms of a few steps of shoulder-in for the transition from canter to trot’: this because Connie has a habit of doing a bit of a superfluous bounce there. YES. AND FOR MY NEXT TRICK I WILL HANG OFF THE SIDE OF THE SADDLE AT THE GALLOP, AND PICK UP ROPES LYING ON THE [note: watered, and dust-free] GROUND IN MY TEETH.
For our last manoeuvre we were doing a series of three twenty-metre circle loops as we cantered down the long side of the school. The ceiling of the school is way overhead–high enough to jump quite big fences under with feet to spare for claustrophobics–but the door is only slightly over person-on-horseback head height. So there’s a big gap between the top of it and the roof. Birds, especially pigeons, like to perch there. And Connie is, after all, half thoroughbred, and, as Jenny says, does want to remind us occasionally she’s not braindead. So as Connie and I came out of our last loop and cantered past the door, some idiot pigeon burst out at us. I was myself startled, and Connie did a tremendous shy and slipped on a wet spot. I came out of the saddle in several different directions simultaneously while Connie was trying to drag her feet back under her again. She succeeded. I didn’t fall off. I might very well have: it was more a case of the horse being under me when I came down again. One of Connie’s many virtues is that she wouldn’t dream of trying to get you off, of using something like a shy and a slip to drop the old shoulder and finish the job: I’ve only known her a few weeks and I already know this. ††† Anyway, having found our way back to our normal relations of course we had to do that canter circle a few more times. The first time around I was shamelessly holding onto her mane, and she did shy again, but only half-heartedly, and then we went round a couple more times and were actually getting it together as well or better as we’d done all lesson so it was pretty much worth it although not necessarily on the terms provided.
Meanwhile the news of Jenny’s new Project is that he’d stood around in his field thinking to some purpose all day yesterday because this morning he’d come out and dropped his nose and rounded his neck out rather than inside-out and let her take a little feel on the bit, let her steady him a little. She even cantered him–but she’s a brave woman. I’d've expected him to fall down going around one of the short ends, and no pigeon needed.
* * *
* Pity it still had so many of its teeth.
** Word hasn’t heard of Drambuie. It offers as alternatives: Drawbore, Dreamboat, Drumbeat and Dayboy. All with init cap, please note, although this appears in the middle of a sentence. Drawbore? I thought Dayboy was quite weird enough, although Word’s dictionary claims that it is a boarding school kid who goes home at night, which in my life would be called a day boy. But drawbore? Word’s dictionary doesn’t even have it. So called ‘research options’ still draw a blank. However: http://www.woodworkingtips.com/etips/etip09.html
There are just basic definitions in some of the free dictionaries, but in the first place the ads make my head hurt (more) and in the second place this is more fun.
*** Or a lot of other things that horses aren’t. Let’s not go there. The things that people do to horses in the name of this or that are beyond appalling.
† Because I didn’t come off. . . .
†† I’m going to put the link to those Camelot lyrics in ‘about’ on this blog. Maybe I’ll learn to sing it. Well, I can’t sing much worse than Richard Burton.
††† I said as much to Jenny and she was horrified–well, Jenny doesn’t do horror, but you know what I mean–at the mere thought. Connie is a very, very, very nice horse. I should stop with the raving about her: when I finally manage to post some photos she’s going to come as rather a shock. She has a nice face and four nice straight legs, but she’s very short-coupled and has rather a grass belly on her, and she’s just going to look like a horse to you, not the saintly equine embodiment of an over-imaginative middle-aged woman’s prayer. All of her virtues are the quiet, amenable kind, which dazzle only more or less invisibly in the riding, and none of them are going to photograph; she’s got none of the charismatic flash of someone like Drambuie.
Another blurg day
The ME has been seriously vicious today. Bluuurg. I think yesterday’s list was a mistake: the ME had a committee meeting and said, Hey, we’re letting her get away with waay too much. New policy. Take a memo.
Getting hellhounds sufficiently hurtled has been the day’s heroic effort. Yes, they did get their two hours, but we covered a lot fewer miles than usual, and it took several tries to rack up the needful number of minutes. Other than that I’ve mostly been reading proofs v. . .e . . . r . . . y slowly.* The slowly is not great but the reading is good–proofs reading is always one of those things I put off because it’s only** reading proofs, and I was supposed to finish DRAGONHAVEN today because I have to get going on SUNSHINE.***
It’s been interesting reading DRAGON through the ME headache, and the goofyland ME headspace. Dragons? Sure. I saw one or two when we were in Australia. I remember. Although one of the ones I saw was red, and I don’t think Jake mentions red. Something in the water, maybe, or the hole in the ozone over Oz. The thing that does kinda squick me is that I wrote it before I brought the hellhounds home. Yes, I’ve been through puppyhood before, but I’ve never been outnumbered before . . . nor have I ever had dogs with some kind of unrelenting indefatigable† digestive weirdness before, where I find myself staying home all the time because you can’t really expect a dog minder to cope with sudden bouts of squirts and I’m the only person with enough authority to bully them into eating (sometimes) when they don’t feel like it. It’s not the same claustrophobia, but I get it about claustrophobia from small-dependent-creature(s) in a graphic new way.
But I’ve always done this–precogged some piece of my life from a slightly different angle in the stories I write. It began way back at the beginning, with BEAUTY: I’d never been to Blue Hill when I wrote it, but I’d seen it on the map and I liked the name. A few years later I moved there, and lived there eleven years–till Corlath, I mean Peter, kidnapped me and took me to England. Although he didn’t have to walk through any walls and I went willingly. Very. I admit I wish I had a little more control over what bit of a story gets taken up by reality: but I could at least get my screenplay finished. It’s about a famous, best-selling writer. . . .
* * *
* And I watched some television! Golly! First I had to figure out which little buttons to press . . . although that may have been the ME as much as lapsed familiarity. After marvelling yet again at the astonishing number of channels there are with nothing on them I want anything to do with–and since I watch TV so rarely, pretty well every time I turn it on Sky has provided me with yet more programmes to flick shudderingly past: Soap Stars from the Fifties, Where Are They Now? (Soap Stars of 2008, What Are They Doing?) How to Spin Very Short Fur, Like from Your Dog, Cat or Ferret, and Create Pot Holders, Bed Socks, and Turner-Prize-Winning Collages with the Result. Cricket. Big Brother.
I watched an episode of Xena Warrior Princess. I never got into Xena–I never watched enough of them to develop the necessary momentum–and the finest Victoria’s Secret Push Up Breastplates get on my nerves, although a lot of those gym bunnies are pretty damn cute, and I’m even het. But speaking of het, a friend told me that there’s this whole great controversy about Xena and Gabrielle’s relationship. What controversy? They’re gay. There’s no way they aren’t lovers. Or if they aren’t, they’re in denial, and so is everyone around them. The last episode I saw, probably a year ago, probably on another day when the ME was grisly, was Xena pregnant and throwing up, and when she told her henchfolk the news, Gabrielle’s reaction was absolutely that of a lover who knew she had no rights but. The episode I saw today was of Xena’s grown up daughter, who just by the way looks older than Xena who has herself aged not an hour–that noise you hear is the sound of the Passage of Time being hastily torn up–being condemned to death by a bunch of irritated Amazons. After she’s rescued and she’s saying goodbye to her mum and her mum’s lover she says to Gabrielle, I’m so glad of the joy you’ve brought to my mother’s life. This is not a phrase you use to a best friend or even a right-hand swordsperson! And just by the way, when did Gabrielle learn to fight? When she signed on–I saw that episode–she could barely walk across a room without tripping over something (I can relate), let alone engage the queen of the Amazons in a tricky bout of hand-to-hand (and foot-to-foot).
And do we know who the daughter’s dad was? When Xena was throwing up, she claimed not to know. Gabrielle was, I feel understandably, a little testy about this. But presumably it wasn’t Ares, since in today’s episode he had obviously been doing the daughter, and while I’m sure that wouldn’t bother Ares in the least, this is a family programme. More or less. The copy I was watching had the bad language bleeped out.
** Only! Only! Only she says! Arrrrrrgh!! Yes, it’s true, I can’t even depend on me.
*** I am praying that the UK reissue is just using the American pages and not fiddling around with them. I cannot face another set of proofs.^ On a relatively clean set–as DRAGONHAVEN appears to be–you do feel like a complete anal-retentive twit for having insisted on reading them. Lots of writers don’t: they proof the first set for the first edition, and that’s it. After that it’s up to the publisher. Such touching faith in the basic rightness of the universe, and the professionalism of professionals.^^ I bet they sleep better than I do too. But I wonder how many of them have been abruptly converted to anal-retentive twitness after the climax of Part Three, when the evil wizard falls into the pot of boiling barbeque sauce, gets left out in the paperback edition. It’s bad enough the stuff you can’t do anything about, like the third Damar novel that was in Books in Print for years.
^ And thank you to the several of you who have offered to read proofs for me. But while I can beg a spare set of pages for an old friend with professional proofreading experience, publishers will usually say, oh, tut, tut, you don’t need another reader.
^^ It’s not just publishers! Let’s talk about banks! No, let’s not talk about banks! But the idea that it’s banks that are handling my money is right up there with visions of repealing the two-term law and having the malignant Shrub for twelve years^, or that if you can’t make nine miles an hour you can’t go outdoors after dark because the vampires will get you. I’ve been through the mortgage mill twice in the last five years and I’ve never seen such direly, mind-bogglingly, hopeless incompetence! I have no idea why my hair didn’t turn white overnight! Twice!
^ Hey, he didn’t get elected the first time. Anything could happen.
† One might almost say dogged