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Yet Another of Those Days
Yet another. Other people have lots of Those Days too, right? It’s not just me?*
So, for those of you too sensible to waste your time reading other people’s maniacal screams on Twitter, yesterday . . . I ordered my iPhone 4. And no, Orange never did email me to say they were in stock. I’d been thinking I ought to go check their site again, in case they were being ungleblargers, which they were, and then I got an email from Computer Men wanting to come argue with the Nightmare That Is My Email yet again, plus little things I would like them to address like that the sound on the mews laptop is dying, which is very inconvenient when you need to listen to Dido’s Lament 463 times on YouTube. ** So we arranged that they’ll come on Tuesday . . . and my thoughts turned to my future iPhone.*** Because I will probably need help cracking the iPhone code†. So, you know, if I had my iPhone by next Tuesday, then I could gloat exceedingly over both Computer Men who only have 3s, no, no, no, I would be very grateful for their assistance.††
So there the iPhone 4s were on the Orange site and I ordered one.†††
And then I begged and whined and wheedled poor Peter into agreeing to cottage-sit today, because they will only deliver your glittering platinum gewgaw to the street address attached to the credit card you paid for it with, which delivery may happen any time between 8 am and 6 pm. I love delivery services so much it makes my teeth ache.‡ But I had to hurtle hellhounds and then I had to go to the dentist.‡‡
Meanwhile . . . Bronwen had decided she was driving down from Orkney‡‡‡ again and could she come handbelling tonight? Of course she could come handbelling. And then Colin phoned at about 11 o’clock this morning, as I was attaching leads to eight furry leaping legs and a lot of noise, to say that he wasn’t going to be able to make it till 6, 5 being our usual handbell foregathering time, and 5 being the time I had confirmed with Bronwen. Bronwen is by now on the road, of course, and her phone is turned off. I then email Niall at work, saying, can he meet Bronwen and me at 5 anyway, since I can’t get hold of Bronwen to tell her not till 6. Now I can’t get hold of Niall.
So I add my howls to the general din, and three of us scamper outdoors, leaving Peter quivering on the sofa with his hands over his ears. We have a very nice hurtle§ and come back to the cottage to an iPhone and a beaming Peter, who therefore gets to go home. We all troop down to the mews, including the iPhone, with which I begin the approach-and-placation process while Peter addresses the preparation of lunch.
Peter is successful with lunch. I am not successful with the iPhone, which at present is a sleek gleaming paperweight, and whose directions, such as they are, are possessed by demons. Well of course. It’s not like I was expecting to figure it out.§§
And while I was questioning the parentage of the writers of iPhone quick-start instructions, I had an email from Bronwen saying that her car had broken down and she was not coming handbelling.
Whereupon I emailed Niall again, saying, never mind about 5 o’clock.
At this point, having managed approximately three mouthfuls of lettuce and olives§§§, I had to rocket off to the dentist. GAAAAH. So I got there with two minutes to spare . . .
. . . and discovered that they thought my appointment was at 3:45, not 2:30. GAAAAH. We will never know if this is my atrocious handwriting, a gremlin deep in their computer viscera, or a secretary with a mumble. But the end result was that I was adrift on the streets of Mauncester when I could have been at home eating lunch.
I went to Marks & Spencer and bought underwear. This is what Englishwomen under stress do. I have irrevocably gone native.
As dental affrays go, this was on the mild-skirmish end of the scale. I rang Peter to explain why I wasn’t back yet, and when I rang off I stood there staring at the soon-to-be-supplanted RaspBerry, thinking, I’ve finally learnt to do this.# Siiiiigh.
I got home at 4:59 to a phone message from Niall saying, happy to be there at 5 to ring with you and Bronwen. AAAAAAUGH. Frantically rang him. If I were going to be there at 5, I’d’ve left by now, he said. I only just got back from the dentist, I said. Good thing we’re not meeting till 6 then, he said.
So I staggered out with happy, frolicsome hellhounds, had three more mouthfuls of salad and olives, and addressed myself to handbells. And triumphantly rang the 3-4, which in the first place I haven’t done in months, and in the second place the middle pair are the most ratbaggy. So the combined agonies and exasperations of insubordinate iPhones and Cthuhlian dentistry have not yet destroyed me. This is good. I also have a novel to finish.
* * *
* Please lie if necessary.
** And I’ve just bought an iPhone. I am not buying a new laptop.
*** And my future Fingerzilla. Of course.
† I am not cracking anything else, you understand, which is why I already have a hard case on order.^
^ Pink. You had to ask? It’s not, I admit, a very thrilling pink, but I was compromised by what there was, what I could afford+, and the absolute need for a case that will survive both hellhounds and barbed wire. I fancy it will save my life some day, like Wendy and the acorn.
+ Try to imagine how much I don’t want Hello Kitty or a Coke bottle in Swarovski crystals. http://www.dsstyles.com/en/iphone-4-cases/swarovski.html
†† I will be very grateful. I will also gloat.
††† Not without some difficulty. As soon as I said I wanted the 32 GB instead of the mere 16, the person on the other end of the phone gasped and passed me on to someone else. This happened twice more. The woman who finally grudgingly sold me one said that everyone was buying 16s. Uh. As I have been saying since to everyone, didn’t we go through this with computers years ago? You always want more memory? You get as much memory as you can and then you stick extra memory cards in all the little slots? I’m not going to stop with Fingerzilla, you know.^
^ And the freller had better load multi-CD operas. The Walkperson totally sucks dead bears in storage and data retrieval. Totally. Sucks dead bears. It alphabetizes using ‘A’ and ‘The’. It alphabetises by performers’ first names. Not to mention the little matter of refusing pointblank to load multi-CD operas.
‡ Which possibly explains a lot.
‡‡ It is so unfair when you have to go to the dentist on a day when Your Life-Changing Technology is due to be delivered. You want to be at home ironing the floor and detoxing the wiring when it arrives.
‡‡‡ Or maybe Skye
§ To Sweeney Todd. Most of life’s frustrations are better for Sweeney Todd.
§§ Besides, I might give Computer Men heart attacks.
§§§ But the hellhounds ate their lunch!! It wasn’t really a bad day. The hellhounds ate lunch. And dinner.
# I even figured out texts. I found Merrilee’s from June. Um. I still don’t know how to send them, but I know where to find them. On the RaspBerry, that is.
Moan* Or, Possibly, Lament
My second to last voice lesson with Blondel today. Moan. Now he’s gone for a fortnight, the ratbag, moonlighting at the three choirs festival**, and then he’s back just long enough to give a few valedictory*** lessons and for him and his wife to throw everything they own in boxes . . . and then they’re gone. GONE.
Moan. I’ve been tweeting about this with @emoontx and @violinknitter on Twitter: that’s it’s more than a little absurd that it matters that my voice teacher is leaving.† I’ve only ever been in this singing game because of some cranky idea about widening my musical appreciation, specifically making writing songs a little more comprehensible, encompassable. Or something like that. But I’m old, I have no dependents, few responsibilities††, I have a certain amount of disposable income and I love music. Why not?
And then I had to go and like it.††† Get, you know, involved. And of course a large part of that liking is that Blondel really suits—suited—me as a teacher. I’ve now got the cherub’s—Blondel’s infant successor‡—phone number; I have it written down in the little notebook that lives in my hip pocket, and I can feel it back there, lurking, like a very small snake that might bite. Blondel says he’s a very talented singer. That doesn’t mean he can teach. It especially doesn’t mean he can teach ordinary slobs: too much talent too often means you aren’t able to empathise with the slow and the clueless, or tell them anything they can use. I went through this with riding instructors: it’s the ones who had to work hard at it themselves who could teach me.
A good teacher messes with you, you know? You try scary, dangerous things because your teacher tells you to—because you’ve learnt to trust your teacher enough to give the alarming things they suggest a shot. Violinknitter wrote: It does matter. The rhythm of teacher/student relationship takes a while to establish. And it hurts when it’s broken. (As a teacher, too.) —I hadn’t thought of the teacher side, but yes, this makes sense to me; the teacher has to engage for the student to risk that trust business. I do understand why Blondel is taking this new job (drat him) but I bet he’ll miss us, the students he is deserting. Okay, let me put that another way: he’d better frelling miss us.
I wrote: Maybe it’s the fact that performing (however badly) changes your relationship to music, and your teacher is crucial to the process.‡‡ Emoon responded: That’s certainly part of it…was it as strong with ringing as with singing? Wondering if it’s the same for instrumentalists.
We need a diverse group of people who are good at method ringing, playing a more standard musical instrument and singing to give this interesting topic the consideration it deserves. Tonight you’ll have to make do with me. I’m delighted to hear someone who doesn’t do it herself call change-ringing music; it’s certainly music by my definition. But the crucial, and for these purposes differentiating, thing about method ringing is that you have to do it in company. You may get a few early bell-handling lessons by yourself, and there are computer programmes which will ring the other bells for you so you can practise, but generally speaking method ringing only happens with several of you present.
The other crucial aspect of bell ringing as against more conventional music making is that there are no dynamics involved in change ringing. As soon as you start getting into dynamics you’re getting into emotional response and expression and that’s scary and dangerous and revealing.‡‡‡ And here for me there is a difference between making a fool of myself at the piano and making a fool of myself as a mezzo soprano: the piano is at least itself.§ It’s not like you can hide behind (or under) it in any useful or comforting way; those wrong notes are . . . wrong. Thoroughly, chillingly wrong. But your piano is there. If you hit a key (supposing you are keeping her in tune), it is always that key. The really appalling thing about singing—at least as someone who got into this voice-lessons fix via the piano—is that it’s your body. And there’s almost nothing set or given about it. Are you in good voice today? Is that high G going to be there when you reach for it? Who knows? And all that wretched business about keeping your tongue forward and your larynx relaxed, and singing through your eyes, or coming at that high note from above, or going down when you go up or forgetting about the notes§§ and singing the phrase. . . . Oh come on. I’m trying to remember the frelling tune, all right? It’s not like I am or was ever going to be a great pianist—but there is a limit to the number of things you are trying to keep track of at once, because the piano is a lot of them. With singing there is no limit.
So since last Thursday I have listened to every performance of Dido’s Lament on YouTube at least 463 times§§§, and I’ve worn a little laser-bruise in the Dido’s Lament space on my CD of Dido and Aeneas. And I went in for my second-to-last voice lesson today trying not to think about its being the second-to-last and the need to go out on a relative high and that last Thursday has scarred my psyche forever. I think Blondel was a little worried about this too, so when he asked me what I’d been looking at and I said well, Dido, of course, but I also went back to Che Faro#, he said, let’s try Che Faro.
Che Faro has been good for morale these last few days because singing it now I can see I actually have made progress since I was first learning it for Blondel a few months ago. The funny thing is—that high F? Piffle. It’s nothing. This is not to say I sing it well. Only that I’m singing it better. And so, flushed with (relative) victory, Blondel said bravely: Let’s look at Dido’s Lament.
I’m here to tell you that listening to (almost) every performance of Dido’s Lament on YouTube at least 463 times is not a bad learning tool.## I got through it. I did. It was not wonderful. I have no plans whatsoever to hang a clip of me singing anything, let alone Dido’s Lament, on YouTube any time in the foreseeable future. But it was a whole exploding-planet’s worth better than it was last Thursday. It was recognisable. It was enough there that there was stuff to work with. If Blondel weren’t leaving, I would learn to sing it.
And the high G? The G above the F that almost killed me in Che Faro a few months ago? The G was there. It was there. It was there every time. I have no idea.### Aside from the fact that human bodies are perverse.
* * *
* I am GOING TO BED EARLY TONIGHT. DO YOU HEAR ME? EARLY.^ I barely made it in before dawn this morning^^ and had to roll out too few hours later for another appointment with Rajan . . . which has made me worse. Maybe osteopathy is not the wave of my future.
^ Peter is on his way to bed as I write this. Go to bed earlier tonight, he says. When I woke up last night at 2:30 and you were still here with the lights on I nearly came downstairs and read you the riot act.
Blah blah blah blah blah BLAH BLAH all right.
^^ Shut up, you frelling birds
*** cough cough cough cough. Well, valedictory only means last; it doesn’t necessarily mean there’s a worthwhile product involved, like a diploma, or a ridiculous robe in a silly colour with badly coordinated stripes and a cheezy hood.
† Moan.
†† Except finishing PEG II before my readers run out of patience. Remember, if anything unpleasant happens to me, you’ll never find out how it ends.
††† There is a serious downside to being an easy enthusiast. Twenty four hours in the day, remember? —Remember what? What did you say?
‡ My gods but I would not have taken it well if some pushing-sixty-year-old kept calling me infant and cherub when I was twenty-three.
‡‡ Note that I am detweeting what we all said, not having a 140 character limit in force on the blog.^
^ Ha hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha ha.
‡‡‡ The advantage of an almost total lack of talent here is obvious: you’re so busy struggling with the sheer technicalities of producing any remotely accurate noises you can’t possibly spare any attention for particulars of expression.
§ Or herself, in the case of my piano. Or himself, in the case of Oisin’s.
§§ AAAAAAAUGH
§§§ All right, there are a few that made me snarl and cut them off halfway through.
# http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=brGYq97Of6w Janet Baker is one of my major heroines and this clip of her doing almost nothing but just singing the freller reduces me to a little pile of ash every time I watch/listen.
## I’m playing my Dido CD again now. And like automatically my hand picks up and clicks back to the lament.
### And Emoon, if you are reading this . . . I would happily trade in my increasing range for half an octave that anyone would want to listen to. Although I can at least say that my aspirations for the back row of the unauditioned chorus are beginning to look reasonably plausible.
Howling, various
Today has NOT been one of my better days. Let’s start over. It’s 3 am and I’m already asleep.
Blondel had a wedding in London to sing today and it had occurred to me after we’d already made our plan of a second voice lesson Thursday afternoon that, in my experience of weddings, he might be being a little optimistic about timing. So I had a plan for an alternate afternoon in Mauncester. What a pity I didn’t use it. It would have had to have been more successful than the one I lived through. Blondel was in fact a little late, but more to the point he arrived tired and ruffled—having managed to get lost finding his way back out of some London labyrinth*—so we ran a little later yet while he had a glass of water** and de-ruffled.***
And then . . . oh gods . . . the lesson itself was a disaster. Dido? Dido is spinning in her grave. And Janet Baker probably has an unimaginably ghastly stomachache of metaphysical, not to say necromantic, origin.† I was then so freaked out by the destruction I was wreaking that when Blondel suggested we try something else I couldn’t get through Fear No More. I can sing Fear No More.†† But not today. AAAAAAAUGH.†††
There were two brief moments when I wasn’t looking around for a sword to impale myself on. One of them was that Blondel has given me a goofy new exercise that I very nearly have to learn like a new song—but it’s amusing. Kind of a lot of your warm-up exercises are a snore, they’re just excercises for the purpose of waking your voice up and telling it has to work for a living.††† It’s not a big deal; I like scales. But this one’s fun.
The second not-nearly-long-enough moment was . . . Blondel sang Fear No More—upon request, and I suspect he only agreed because he too wanted to end the Hour That Should Not Have Been Born(e) on a better note than any of them thus far—so I’ve finally heard him sing. Ooooooh. My.‡ Maybe I should revert to the impaling scenario. Siiiiiiiigh.
It was now a good deal later than I realised. And I had handbells at 5 pm. Well, I was supposed to have handbells at 5 pm. I rang Penelope and asked her to please tell Niall I was going to be late. Half past latest, I said. But I was still in Mauncester at that point.‡‡ And you may have noticed the way they joyfully rip up the roads in high tourist season.‡‡‡ So by the time I got home I had written several sharp letters to the Hampshire County Council in my head and I was flatlining in both energy and morale—and I had to give poor sad patient hellhounds at least a token hurtle before I went off and left them again. But my presence for handbells wasn’t crucial, because Titus was coming—which was why it was at Niall’s house instead of my cottage, he of the big enough and relatively tidy sitting-room—so he and Colin and Titus could get on with minor (six bells: three people) while I sat down for five minutes and ate a nectarine. And I hadn’t looked at the bob major (eight bells: four people) enough anyway, so—especially after the voice lesson I’d just had—I wasn’t minding the idea of putting off the revelation of my handbell deficiencies a little longer still.
So it was more like 5:45 when I arrived . . . to find Niall and Titus sitting alone in silence. Because Colin was not there. Which I should have known, but I’d forgotten, and I hadn’t written it down. OH. GODS. And the only reason they didn’t kill me is because they’re British. Also, I suppose, because they still wanted to ring handbells. Which was what we were there for after all. Some of us sooner than others.
Handbells, once begun, were relatively successful. I’ve told you about Titus: he’s the one had the stroke fifteen or so years back and only has proper use of one hand—so he rings both bells in one hand, and I cannot BEGIN to tell you how confusing this is, not to mention the inevitability of rather a lot of rows that have seven or eight dings in them instead of the statutory six. But I stayed late enough that we could stop when Titus’ hand started getting tired, by which time people were even smiling at me again. Although Niall, who has no conscience whatsoever, while I was still in grovelling and whimpering mode, whipped out his diary with an evil gleam in his eye, and booked me in for handbells in Frellingham with one of his demon ringers on a Wednesday they haven’t got a third ringer. He’s been trying to get me to Frellingham for months, and I keep weaselling out of it, but this has got harder since I don’t have Wednesday Ditherington practise as a permanent shield and defense any more. GAAAAH. I think I’m nailed on this one.
And now I have a little dog to finish. The way this day is going . . . well. I’ve already decided I want to put my lament through my friend’s door on my way back from my piano lesson tomorrow.§ It won’t be finished, but the friend is, as I’ve said, musical, and if he doesn’t just throw something large and heavy at me the next time he sees me, he might have some editorial input. Also I want to have made the gesture some time before the new puppy he brings home in six months or so reaches its second birthday.
Okay. Onward. And I’m hoping for upward.
* * *
* My immediate reaction was, you drove? When you’ve got a train station in your back garden? I’ve got the American’s view of the British train system too—it may make you frelling crazy, and it often does, but it exists. After almost twenty years here I am still blown away by the sheer fact of the public footpath system, and of the national rail network. Even if the reason I finally broke down and bought my first mobile phone is so that I could make ‘I’m sitting in a train a hundred yards^ outside Waterloo and have been for the last twenty minutes, and I’m going to be late for lunch’ phone calls. Which I suppose is the answer to why he didn’t take the train. The day you’re late to perform for a wedding is the day the wedding will run on time.
^ Or metres, if you prefer
** Normal people would have a cup of tea or a double scotch. Singers are always thinking about their throats.
*** And we compared notes on the weird stuff some people lay on for the euphonious exaltation of their weddings. I am forced to conclude that the average level of musical education among the general populace is even worse than the boffins say.
† Okay, Janet Baker does not have a stomachache of unknown origin today, because if she had a stomachache every time some voice student—even the slightly smaller category of voice students who think she walks on water—mangled something she is famous for singing heartbreakingly superbly, she’d be too weak to get out of bed in the morning, and I’d prefer to think she is still enjoying her retirement.
†† I didn’t say well, okay?
††† Note to self: Do not agree to a second voice lesson in a week. Not even if you’re planning on spending all night at the piano and beating that frelling G into submission (while Peter is safely elsewhere playing bridge). Clearly the pressure is Too Great for a spindly amateur.
‡ Think Keystone Kops.
‡ Golly gosh wowie zowie eeep. Geezum. Gazinklebats. Bryn Terfel had better look to his crown. Although one of the things about Terfel is the size of his voice. He could fill Heathrow. Tear out all those ugly terminals and put in some bleachers. And Blondel says that his own voice is not that large. You couldn’t prove it by me: he was pasting me to the back wall of his studio clearly without trying. I can see/hear why people keep giving him jobs. Although I kinda wish he’d been having an off day when he applied for the job he’s going to the end of August.
‡‡ Sort of the backwards version of the ‘I’m sitting 100 yards outside of Waterloo’ mobile-phone call.
‡‡‡ This makes some sense in Maine, where the temperature may drop below freezing and snow begin falling any time, you just get to complain if it happens in June. In southern Hampshire. . . .
§ My voice lesson today was the little dog’s fault. I may have spent most of last night at the piano, but quite a bit of it was about a lament for a little dog, not for a queen of Carthage.
Happy 26th and tra la la
I know what the calendar says, but officially it’s the 26th. I tweeted about this earlier: we celebrate two anniversaries, our wedding anniversary the third of January*, and the 26th of July, which is the day, now nineteen years ago, that I drove to the Bangor, Maine airport to pick up this skinny, nervy, twitchy**, odd *** English writer wallah whom I knew very slightly, for a harmless tourist weekend and . . . unscheduled things happened. Peter asked me last week if I’d like to go out to dinner for the 26th, which is what we usually do, and I said oh yes, please, definitely.
Then I noticed that the 26th fell on a Monday this year. Wait, no! Not Monday! Now that Wednesday Ditherington practise is no more, Monday is semi-sacred second weekly tower practise! † Peter had already made the booking. I was as humble as possible when I asked if we could change it to Tuesday.††
And it is now rather late at night (as it so often is, about 300 words into tonight’s blog entry) and I am, in truth, a trifle the worse for wear.††† Although a certain amount of this is the calculated fiendishness of restaurants: they ply you with booze, because that’s where the easy mark-ups are, and half a glass of champagne on an empty stomach and I can’t find the floor with both hands. Sigh. You’d think I’d learn to say ‘not till the first course, please’, wouldn’t you? But you scamper into the restaurant—or you do if you don’t go to restaurants much, and we don’t—in a festive mood, so when they come round waving the wine list and lo!, there is champagne by the glass‡, I lose all self-control ‡‡. . . .
Would that‡‡‡ I could lose a little more self control in another direction. I’ve just been having a tweet exchange with EMoon on the subject of practising our singing at home: neither of us does it well or easily, because we’re too self-conscious. Arrrgh. Relax, open the mouth and the throat and the sinuses and let rip: Um. No. Tweet is sadly not a bad description of the kind of noises I make: a sort of muffled eeeping noise. Siiiiiiiigh.
And thus I tell you about today’s voice lesson with mixed emotions. In the first place I can’t stand it that he’s frelling leaving.§ And soon—the end of August and he’s away for a fortnight between now and then. In the second place . . . I’d about decided that Dido’s lament was a bridge too far. Purcell is, in my admittedly limited experience, always harder than he looks—all those lovely long legato lines are full of beartraps and tigerpits of tune and timing—and I’d just about struggled through the early bits of poor Dido’s final moments AND THEN THERE’S THAT FRELLING HIGH G, and . . . nope. No way. I must have been mad to think I could do it—blurt it out there all stark and exposed like that. I’ve been known to hit a G when I’m doing exercises, but then you’re just creeping up the scale while thinking hard about something else.§§ I know the G is there, but . . . it doesn’t come when it’s called.
So I went in today thinking that I’d rather go on with Finzi’s Fear No More, which is what we worked on last week, and I’ve got just about enough voice a year after we started to begin making some attempts at interpretation, cough cough cough cough.§§§ And Blondel sat down at the piano and masterfully opened Dido and Aeneas and started playing. What’s an elderly hag to do? Chiefly what she does in these circumstances is botch things up in a truly amazing manner.# But Blondel, after a year’s practise, pulls my strings pretty well, and just over the course of the hour Dido began to emerge from the banshees and the scalded cats and . . . I actually hit that damned G. I was so astonished that I instantly reverted to scalded cats, but the point is . . . it’s there. It is there, and not only when I’m creeping up on it while thinking of something else.## Okay, this is a good thing, but . . .
And furthermore, because I have no sense, I’m having another voice lesson on Thursday###, to spin out the misery a little more, and get me really cranked for our LAST lesson after he gets back from holiday. It’s going to be a very. . . er . . . a lamentably musical week. I also still have a little dog to finish. The little dog is going rather nicely, I think, thank you. But Peter is playing bridge tomorrow night, and I’m going to stay down at the mews and crouch over the piano and work on a little dog . . . and sing. I am.
* * *
* JRR Tolkien’s birthday. Yes. And your point is?
** Have I told you about him giving the beginning of his Library of Congress speech with his chin on the table because he was pulling up his socks?
*** Also tactless, but that’s another story. Remind me to tell you about lunch.
† Very slightly in my defense, Colin only holds practise if he knows in advance he has enough people, and I’d already said I’d come. On Fridays at New Arcadia^ we just turn up and hope for the best.
^ Peter would know better than to suggest we go out to dinner on a Friday.
†† Clearly it serves me right to have rung like a blind water buffalo last night.^
^ Blind can be done, although not by me. But that lack of opposable thumbs is a ratbag.
††† I might be emphasizing this a little more except it was only a few weeks ago that Alicia and I were forced to drink an entire bottle of champagne almost by ourselves, and I don’t want any of you getting the wrong idea. I am a sober old frump, I’m afraid, and . . . believe it or not, I do feel a strange responsibility to model Sober Old Frumpness as a positive lifestyle choice. I want to work tomorrow, whatever tomorrow we’re talking about, Tuesday, Friday or Zingwath^, and July or November or March, which means either dreadful abstemiousness or an awful lot of water before bed. And the problem with an awful lot of water right before bed. . . .
^ This is a Gflytch day. They have eight or nine in a week, which isn’t a week either, but it depends on the planet. They get around, the Gflytch.
‡ Peter and I had a simultaneous mutual FAIL moment in the taxi^ on the way over when we realised we both forgot the champagne stopper. I’d even got the sucker out. It was lying on my bed next to my keys. I picked the keys up, and . . .
^ So I can get lit, right?
‡‡ Besides, I had something to celebrate. Never mind anniversaries, the hellhounds ate their dinner, despite the fact that it was earlier than usual and there was clearly something else going on.^
^ No, no! No dog noses on this skirt!
‡‡‡ She says cagily, wrenching tonight’s topic progression so violently aside that it screams like a hellhound whose tail has just been stepped on.^
^ This actually depends on the hellhound. Darkness shrieks. Chaos prostrates himself because clearly he was an Evil Dog and left his tail in the wrong place.
§ Not to mention that several of my nearest and dearest—including Peter, Merrilee and Hannah—have made gentle, indirect, non-hellgoddess-rousing noises about how perhaps, since I’ve had what was supposed to be my year to find out what singing feels like as research for writing songs^, maybe I would take Blondel’s departure as a sign and STOP voice lessons. ARE YOU CRAZY? I’M JUST STARTING TO GET INTERESTED.^^
^ Do your homework. Just as I was saying the other night in Ask Robin.
^^ No! No! Not interested! Interest is deadly! Interest takes more time!
§§ Keeping your sinuses open, say. And your tongue forward. And your support supportive. Your body never feels as squashy, eely and lumpy as when you’re trying to organise it for singing.
§§§ And this is really INTERESTING!!!
# Have I told you that Blondel’s replacement at the cathedral is asking if Blondel has any students to pass on to him? And that he’s even younger than Blondel? Can I bear to take voice lessons from a cherub? Can a cherub bear to give voice lessons to an elderly, self-conscious hag with a little skinny voice and a G that does not come when called? What if the cherub is not unflappable? What if he is mean? What if he makes me burst into tears? What if I make him burst into tears?
## Interest is a terrible, scary, despotic thing.
### Right before handbells. Gah.
Another day, another drama
I’ve only barely reunited Bronwen with her vehicle* and set her back on the motorway to weave and o’erleap 1,000,000 roadworks on her way home**, and it seems to be nearly one in the morning and I have a blog entry to write. Oops.
It’s not all Bronwen’s fault. The day probably went irrecoverably off the rails early on, when I overslept by an hour***. Hellhounds and I then had to blast out on our hurtle† to get me home in time for my make-up appointment with the osteopath.†† Have I mentioned that it has finally deigned to rain? Yes. We had a useful bit overnight, which was lovely, and meant, on this epic day, I did not have to water the garden, but I would have been grateful if the black, black clouds seen rolling and thundering and chasing each other at speed to the north hadn’t taken a hard right and come streaking back to dump a lot of rampant wetness on an already-cranky woman and her two rain-allergic hellhounds. Hellhounds, among the sweetest††† of creatures under most circumstances, grow sullen when wet.‡ I think they actually absorb water, like sponges, which is why they get so ungleblarging heavy, dragging at the furthest ends of their leads and glowering. Feh. Bah.‡‡
With the result that we got back to the cottage late and I looked wildly at the clock and decided that I didn’t have time to change my sodden jeans because I was not going to risk Rajan thinking for even thirty seconds that I was going to miss another appointment. I sprinted down the street and through his door and . . . he emerged from his inner sanctum to say that he was running about a quarter-hour late. I should have gone back to the cottage and changed my jeans. I did actually turn back in that direction . . . but was instead drawn inexorably through the door of a new dress shop that said sale in its front windows, the way dress shops will, where I was much entertained by the other clientele and absent-mindedly fell in love with an adorable little denim jacket which I—gleep—bought.
It was a good twenty minutes before I got back to Rajan’s and . . . he wasn’t running fifteen minutes late. He was running nearly an hour late.‡‡‡
At which point the day had definitely gone off the rails. §
So I wasn’t surprised at all when I got off the phone with a very good friend having a very lousy time §§ and the phone rang again instantly and it was Bronwen saying that she was in her 674th roadworks queue and was going to be about half an hour late. I may have said something soothing like ‘of course you are’. I then rang Niall to warn him that our replacement third for handbells, Colin being disloyally on his way to Wales, was going to be half an hour late . . . to be informed by Penelope that Niall had told her that handbells had been cancelled tonight. GAH. ARRRGH.
Bronwen was not, in fact, half an hour late—she too was an hour late. Niall (having been mercilessly tracked down to where he was hiding§§§ and dragged relentlessly to the cottage with his handbells) and I had solved most of the problems of the world# by the time she arrived, and had a cup of tea and begun disposing of the cake. We still got a few touches of bob minor in before Bronwen and I had to hare off to tower practise at Crabbiton, Bronwen having declared when she first planned this repeat southern madness that she wanted the complete bell experience this time. Bronwen has never met Wild Robert, who teaches at Crabbiton on Thursdays, and this seemed like a good opportunity given that she was driving down from Orkney to ring bells at all—and as I’m missing Wild Robert pretty badly myself since Wednesday Ditherington practise is no more, I was somehow susceptible to being talked into this double bell whammy.
And therefore it is perfectly logical that Wild Robert was not at Crabbiton this evening. . . . Never mind, said Bronwen. I’ll come back again. Although probably not next week.##
Hey, it’s tomorrow. Yesterday is over. And maybe today will be better.
* * *
* She is White Van Woman. Be afraid.
** Wait a minute. Fiona was only here yesterday. I’m not becoming . . . social, am I?^
^ See next footnote, on the subject of the sure signs of reincarnation.
***. . . Oh I’ll just lie here a minute listening to the nice radio. Have you read about how leaping out of bed as if shot^ when the alarm goes off is bad for you? No, you’re supposed to lie there and gently regain consciousness over the course of several minutes. Which is, or would be, all very well, if that’s what happened. I’ve looked at those imitation-dawn lamp-clock things that brighten over the course of like fifteen minutes so you wake up naturally. In the first place they are Very Expensive. In the second place they are Very Ugly. In the third place, if I ever believed that I was waking up on account of the increasing light of dawn on my face I would know I had died and been reincarnated as someone else, and I’m sure that’s even worse for you than leaping out of bed as if shot when the (old-fashioned) alarm goes off.
^ Or gnawed in a friendly fashion by a hellhound.
† Wait—wait—clothing. Glasses. Shoes. Humans are so feeble. Hellhounds are ready for combat and excitement from the moment the crate door opens.
†† He needs a name. Let’s call him Rajan.
††† If a trifle intemperate
‡ And, speaking of cranky, I will also remark that I am tired of guaranteed waterproof Goretex shoes that leak. I might as well wear All Stars. Which are cheaper.
‡‡ Also it’s been so dry for so long that the water doesn’t soak into the ground. It bounces, and then waits at its leisure, swinging back and forth in the various grass- and leaf-pockets and the elbows of trees and hedgerows^, ready to dump itself generously down the backs of hellhounds and the jeans-legs and un-waterproof Goretex shoes of cranky women.
^ I think it also floats, in little wet bubbles like invisible water balloons, but I have thus far failed to accumulate sufficient evidence to support this theory.
‡‡‡ Not that the time was wasted. I read a very interesting article on pruning.
§ However having, as it proved, totally crippled myself watching my bat roost empty on Monday—this body does not stand still with its head raised at a sharp angle for half an hour at all graciously—there was no question that I was going to stomp off in a huff. For one thing stomping is beyond me at the moment. Although I can still do the huff.
§§ Is frelling Mercury in frelling retrograde or anything? There are too many people having unusually lousy times right now. The count stands at two sudden deaths and a terminal illness and the week’s not even over yet.
§§§ People who don’t want to be found really need to learn to turn their mobile phones off. However it would have been very embarrassing if Bronwen had got here and there had been no handbells—have I mentioned that she lives in, like, Orkney, so when she pops down here for a spot of handbells we’re talking hours on the road? Even barring roadworks—so I’m glad Niall’s phone was still on. And that he wasn’t on his way to Wales. With or without roadworks.
# At least those involving bells
## And it’s not like Crabbiton wasn’t glad to see us. They were thrilled. We made the fifth and sixth pairs of hands, so they could actually ring something. But it wasn’t quite the transcendent experience ringing for Wild Robert usually is.
