Today has been a long spectacular hurtle that even almost six years with hellhounds ill-prepared me for.   I am expecting to fall off my chair and lie on the floor moaning and twitching feebly . . . probably before I finish this blog.  I can possibly semaphore to Darkness what buttons to press to hang it* but I do not guarantee my usual elegant peroration and epigrammatic finish.**

            I was so unnerved by Oisin’s praise last Friday that I’ve hardly known how to practise.  This is that old ‘something to lose’ thing.  The great thing about beginnings is that you don’t know how yet.  It’s all good.  Once you start learning anything . . . you have somewhere to fall.  Down.  It’s very frustrating having no particular talent—or in this case, voice—but it’s also liberating.  I don’t have to take it seriously.  I can obsess, because I will obsess, frivolously.  La la la la la la.  And (for better or worse) it’s not like I’ve discovered my inner Beverly Sills or anything.***  But there are increasing numbers of (fleeting) moments when there is maybe even something going on with my singing . . . and occasionally, thrillingly, a few of these moments string themselves together.  It’s not the high F in Che Faro—F is not high—it’s the terrifying sticking your head above the parapet.  This is your big moment . . . Noooooooo.  Eeeeeeeeep.  And I tend to sing it accordingly.†  Plus that ratbag ‘ben’ you have to sing it on, which is not singer-friendly and which does not help.  The other song I particularly wanted to look at is The Minstrel Boy—yes, I am a sap, sue me—because I start the run up to that first (unhigh) F without much trouble and it’s like ‘okay I can do this’ and then on the second run up to that same F I lose my nerve and get all thin and squeaky.  I think it’s something about emotional engagement—you may remember that this song got mixed up with Diana’s death for me—and it’s like suddenly, whoa, uh, no, maybe not.  But I love the song.  I want to sing it.  Singing is so frelling revealing, even when you do it badly.  Your Blasted Body Is Your Blasted Instrument, Get Used to It.  Um.  And I don’t know what Nadia did—I never know what Nadia did, even though she tells me††—but my last go through was rough and raw and rather awful, but there was something there, you know?  My problem is mostly about shutting down.  This was about opening up to the extent that I could no longer control it.  Speaking of eeeeep.  Eeeeeeep.

            The day was already going a lick.  I’d got down to the mews late (of course) and had my head down over my computer slightly longer than I should have and thus fed hellhounds lunch slightly later than I should have.  But they were milling around my feet looking for Mysteriously Dropped Chicken Bits Oops so I (foolishly) wasn’t expecting trouble.  Whereupon Chaos decided not to eat.  This was absolutely classic Chaos—he was clearly hungry, it wasn’t that he’d picked up some bloody tourist’s dropped chicken bones in the street yesterday—but some frelling ritual or other for a Monday in an even-numbered year when Aldebaran is in the ascendant and Jupiter aligns with Mars had been left incomplete.  ARRRRRGH.  At slightly after the last minute he ate after all YAAAAAAAY, and we then tore back to the cottage because I had an errand to run on my way to Nadia†††.

            I was at best going JUST to make it back to New Arcadia for Niall to pick me up and blast off to Curlyewe.  But I made it.  And then we sat outside the Curlyewe church for fifteen minutes because our handbell apprentices were late.‡ 

            We rang handbells till people started showing up for tower practise.  And then I grabbed my new tower.  And . . . the worst of it is, I like Curlyewe.  Nice bells.  Very nice bells.  And, furthermore, eight of them.  We rang Grandsire Triples.‡‡  The last thing I need is another Monday tower that is, furthermore, too far away. 

              And now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to fall out of my chair. 

* * *

* No, you’re wrong.  If I can learn to circumvent the WordPress gremlins and hang a blog post . . . so can a moderately intelligent dog. 

               Of the local selection, Darkness is the one who is willing to find problems outside his immediate self-focus interesting.  Chaos . . . not so much.  Chaos does not speak the standard human-canine language.  There certainly are days when I shout YOU ARE THE DUMBEST ANIMAL I HAVE EVER MET . . . but I’m speaking to myself.^  Sighthounds have been bred for thousands of years^^ to make their own decisions.  They can’t be asking you for help when they’re flat out after a gazelle.  This has its drawbacks in modern urban life.  Darkness, however, is clearly trainable as most of the world understands dog training, and I am a Bad Owner because I am neglecting this because I don’t know what to do with his brother.  Chaos has his own view of the structure of the universe and while I am the centre of it—more theatrically so than I am Darkness’ holy altar of all—manifestations of his zealous dedication are his own and not particularly open to negotiation or adjustment.^^^ 

            Anyway.  If this post ends abruptly and there are a few short dark steely-grey hairs drifting across the margins, you know why. 

^ Today, for example.  I had a major hissy fit meltdown this afternoon—worst in some time.  Worst since I started singing when my computer is really pissing me off because screaming hurts my voice. +   The cause is that most of my ME symptoms, barring the really life-stopping no-brain, what planet is this, no-energy, never mind I don’t care worst ones, have all come back in a mean-spirited rabble, as a result of . . . wait for it . . . my daring to eat a little restaurant food with Fiona the other night.  I ordered carefully, it was a small meal and there was nothing in it I’m not allowed.++  All my joints hurt, sleep is something that happens to other people, and anything I eat makes me ill.  THIS IS SO GREAT.  THIS IS SO, SO, SO GREAT.  I was running upstairs at the cottage just before I shot off to a long rest-of-day series of events and one of my frelling knees gave out and I had suddenly  Had.  It.  Paroxysm ensued, complete with radical and substantial screaming.  This was right before my voice lesson.  It’s also a really idiotic waste of energy, when you already have ME. 

            I’ve never met a dog this stupid. 

+ I admit this works better some times than other times.  There was a fair amount of shouting at the Metropolitan Opera last night.  

++ Okay, what was in that tea bag? 

^^ No, really.  Salukis have been around recognisably since 7000 BC or so.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saluki 

^^^ See:  eating. 

** What?  

*** All right.  I admit it.  Siiiiiiigh. 

†  Siiiiiiigh.  Another category of sigh. 

†† Except occasionally.  When she invokes Teacher Secrets. 

††† My watchband broke.  Months ago.  It’s a perfectly good watch.  And they don’t make watchbands for it any more.  Finally about the third jeweller I took it to said that she thought their repairpersons could do it.  And they did.  But it still doesn’t close correctly and I predict the mend is not going to last long.  Then what.

            And so to cheer myself up, on the way back to Wolfgang, I made a lightning raid on WH Smith and bought . . . five knitting magazines.  Just to see what they’re like, you know?  The one I was looking for was Vogue Knitting, because they keep trying to sell me a subscription to my iPad, and I have this nostalgic craving to see it in hard copy first.^  On first glance, VK wins hands down for the yarn porn aspect.

            I need more stuff to read.

^ One of the ones I bought is American, so it’s not that imported knitting magazines are too subversive for the UK market. 

‡ It’s okay.  I was knitting. 

‡‡ Only a plain course.  But something went Horribly Wrong and I thought nooooooo I can’t even ring a plain course any more, kill meeeeee, but Niall told me afterward it wasn’t me, it was someone else.  Well, I’m sorry for the someone else, but I’m relieved to be permitted to go on living.  Even if I did make a, ahem, dog’s dinner of Cambridge.

I have just been trying to book next season’s tickets to Live from the Met(ropolitan Opera) and . . . ARRRRRGH.  Glasnost and jelly donuts THERE ARE A LOT OF FRELLING AWFUL WEB SITES IN THE WORLD.  The heavy hand of my suspicion falls on the shoulder of the Met Opera itself in this case, although the home site of the national Rapscallion Cinema chain is not my favourite battleground either arrrrrrrrgh.  But in the first place you have to book every individual opera separately.  This is such a confounded nuisance it literally loses them some of my custom—if I’m wavering about whether I want to see The Pirate, the Anglerfish and the Epipelagic Zone* I’ll decide against it just so I don’t have to groan through their horrible purchasing system again.  This includes timing you out if you take too long.  They timed me out three times tonight.  Once it was because their site had hung.**  The other two times I wasn’t anywhere near the end of their so-called time limit, they just threw me out for laughs.  And then I had to START ALL OVER AGAIN.  Now, I am a member of the sodding Rapscallion community, for the single purpose of being able to book Live at the Met a week or something early before rank and file are allowed in***—which system is at least finally working.†  When I log on it greets me by name, and is happy to present me with my back catalogue of many, many Met Live tickets.   But the moment I try to book another one . . . they want my name, several times, my email address, several times†† . . . you’ve got something like ten screens to get through FOR EVERY GODSFRELLING SODBLASTED TICKET, including things like ‘choose credit/debit card’ and you click the drop down AND THERE IS EXACTLY ONE CHOICE:  CREDIT/DEBIT CARD.  But if you don’t tick it, the page wipes itself and tells you you need to choose a credit/debt card.  There are also at least two screens that merely say ‘confirm’.  One of them is the one that crashed me.  One of them is also the screen that prevented me from booking Francesca di Rimini at all.  It hung for a while and then said Oops!  There’s a problem!, and crashed me back to the beginning.  I tried three times and gave up.  I don’t know whether I want to see Francesca di Rimini anyway.†††

            The day did not get off to a good start when we had a frelling tourist invasion.‡  Go.  Away.   I feel you notice the ‘not our town, we don’t give a rat’s ass’ much more strongly in a village than you do in a city—I remember this from Maine.  In New York City it’s the tourists who are at risk.‡‡  Today’s high points were (a) when hellhounds and I were rolling along the wide green way to the mews and found an SUV the size of at least one House of Parliament rolling down the PEDESTRIAN PAVEMENT straight at us.  He wanted to park on the grass so he didn’t have to pay the fee in one of the car parks.  Like it costs a lot in a town the size of New Arcadia, you know?  But most of the green way is blocked off from the road by trees.  If you want to be the world’s biggest asshole, you have to drive on the pedestrian pavement.  ARRRRRRRRGH.  And (b) when both hellhounds picked up chicken bones.  I want to kill people who throw their trash around anyway, and I really want to kill people who throw food trash around . . . but I suppose it’s just conceivable that some of our overweight not-at-all-wild‡‡‡ ducks might eat sandwich-ends before the rats got there, but CHICKEN BONES?  People who throw chicken bones on the street should be buried standing up under the cornerstones of important civic buildings, and thus be of some use to society at last.

            Okay.  I’m not in a good mood.

            But, speaking of wildlife—and of tantrums—cross-species adolescence, I love it.  After various responsibilities and crises had been dispatched I said THE HELL WITH IT and rushed out into the garden, where I dug and toiled and planted for . . . longer than I should have, but I came indoors much more cheerful.§  My adolescent robin was perched in the apple tree right outside the greenhouse—the greenhouse where the saucer of mealworms lives§§ having a complete paddy that dad wasn’t dedicated to bringing him mealworms.  Hey, you big fat turkeybutt, go get your own mealworms.§§§ 

* * *

* They all die in the end.  Including the entire crew of the bathysphere.  But the soprano goes out on some amazing top notes from the helium.  

** You’re sitting there, knitting furiously^, and glancing periodically at the large banner heading that says ‘do not hit refresh or not only will this transaction crash and burn but we will refuse to let you back on our delicate, easily disturbed site forever and your kitchen will blow up’.  So you don’t and . . . tick tick tick . . . eventually you time out, and then you get a snooty message telling you that if you’re going to frell about you deserve what you get.  ARRRRRRRGH. 

^ Got a couple more inches done yesterday, thanks to a forty-five minutes late bride.  Who as a result got about seven minutes of ringing because most of the band had to go on to another wedding.  Why it’s not in the contract that you’re hiring your ringers for exactly one hour from the time your wedding is scheduled to be over . . . I have no idea.  Us hoi polloi keep suggesting this and the higher-ups keep muttering inaudibly and not doing anything. 

*** After three years I have my seat.  If My Seat is ever already taken I may have palpitations.  I even found myself, this time, thinking, as I viewed with deepest gloom the six hours of Parsifal, that I wouldn’t book now, I’d wait till nearer time and if My Seat wasn’t taken . . . ^ 

^ This won’t actually help me much.  It won’t be taken.  The long Wagners are only attended by the faithful, which doesn’t often include me.  There are many valid excuses for staying at home and doing your knitting from the comfort of your own sofa.  I have ME.  ‘I can’t stand that misogynistic Aryan bully, I don’t care if he knew a few chords’ is also valid.  One of the things I have against Shakespeare is he goes on so.  Wagner??   Dear merciful gods.  

† First year I tried it, they took my membership money . . . and then declared ‘special events’, as for example the Met Live broadcasts, were not included.  GAAAAAAAARGH. 

†† They will also throw me out randomly for having ‘non matching email ID’.  The first time, maybe.  Typos are always a possibility.  The second, third and fourth times, no.  I guarantee my email address was accurate.  But the gremlins were clearly getting bored. 

††† And I decided I really can’t face Rigoletto in 1960s Las Vegas.  Gods, demons and bell-bottoms.  Why are directors allowed to pull idiot feckless crap like this?  WHY?^  Stick to Broadway, honeybun.  They love you there.  

^ If every critic in the solar system gives it five stars, I’ll reconsider.+  

+ But My Seat will have been taken, for a five-star Rigoletto. 

‡ Trippers who stroll up my cul de sac because it’s quaint and part of their Sunday afternoon expedition should have boiling oil or at least hot borscht poured on them from an upper storey windows.  I keep thinking about it.  You know how beetroot stains—?  So, you want a memento of New Arcadia?  It can be arranged. 

‡‡ ‘Hey, wanna buy a nice bridge?’ 

‡‡‡ And Darkness is going to nail one, one day.  I’m just hoping he doesn’t take both himself and me into the river in the process.  There would be language.  

§ Until I decided to tackle the Met Live. 

§§ I wouldn’t dare show my face in the garden if I didn’t top up the saucer both when I come out and when I finally go in again.  In between I may be sworn at, but there are some limits. 

§§§ Although speaking of the robin’s unbridled passion for mealworms:  while I was inconveniently using the potting table in the greenhouse, I’d put the saucer farther in, on a shelf near the other door.  Dad robin was not best pleased with this arrangement, and kept whirring in and out trying to dodge around me (and the paddying offspring in the apple tree.  Dratblast it, where is the new nest?).  I’d come back to the greenhouse when, apparently, he wasn’t looking, and was bending over to fetch a trowel off the ground as he came fizzing back in again—more or less as I was starting to straighten up.  Both of us were dismayed—and neither of us stopped fast enough, and I briefly had a robin on the back of my neck.  He trampolined off again . . .

IT’S HALF PAST MIDNIGHT, I’M FINALLY EATING DINNER* AND I STILL HAVE TO WRITE THE BOONDOGGLING BLOG.**

            Fiona had booked tickets for the Gigspanner*** concert months and months ago.  And months.  I think she booked them slightly before the tour had been confirmed or the dates settled on.†  This is also before the doodle situation broke down under the strain of trying to write a novel in five months††.  Our previous set up has been when there’s a concert in view she takes the day off her real job††† and comes down for a few hours during the day and terrifies some corner of my office/files/desk/attic into behaving itself, and then we frolic in the evening.  But while I still have many, not to say numberless other corners of my life that could use Fiona’s services, with 1,000,000,000 doodles‡ hanging over my head like 1,000,000,000 Damoclesian swords I can’t frelling face my office, let alone sort out something for Fiona to do in/with it.‡‡

            But it’s a long frelling way for Fiona to come for a concert—even longer when it involves better than an hour of surplus driving to come and fetch me.‡‡‡  And then another one to take me home.  So I was casting about for something to make the day more value-added . . . and devised the cunning plan that we could go see AVENGERS ASSEMBLE in twoD at a theatre that involves the Greater Footling Triangle, a lesser known but statistically more savage area of geophysical mayhem than the better known Bermuda.  The attraction of this theatre (aside from the straightforward appeal of 2D) is that, if it weren’t for the geophysical mayhem part, where you turn right and find yourself on Mars, it would be my best option for some of the other live-streaming opera broadcasts that are becoming increasingly popular. 

            Fiona, who is agreeably broad-minded, agreed to this plan.  And then the frelling theatre changed the times on us.  And we were no longer going to have time to scamper from the cinema to the concert several towns over before Roger started beating up Peter’s fiddle.§  A mad flurry of emails ensued.           

            We compromised.  We decided to go to a new yarn store. 

            But the yarn store happens to be in pretty much the same area as the cinema, so Fiona offered to take us past the cinema first, so we could find it—who knows, we might even go to a film there some day—before we went on to the yarn store.§§  So she fired up her satnav and . . .

            I think possibly I have been rude about her satnav before?  Shut up, Billy.  Shut up, Billy.  You get various choices for your voice.  Fiona has Billy Connolly.  The Scottish accent, when he’s saying sensible things, is pleasing.  He rather too frequently deviates from the path of virtue however.  Clearly satnav tech is not proof against the Greater Footling Triangle.   Or the Greater Footling Multidimensional Roundabout, where, whichever exit you take, it’s the wrong one, and Billy will be telling you to turn around in a minute.

            HE EVENTUALLY TOOK US TO A SEWAGE STATION AND THEN CLAIMED WE’D ARRIVED AT OUR DESTINATION.  I know most modern films are rubbish but . . . §§§

            We finally saw the theatre—on the wrong side of the dual carriageway [four lane highway] of course—on our way back, retracing our steps to find the yarn store. 

            The yarn store was extremely satisfactory.  Extremely.#  Oh dear.  And as soon as I get this posted I am going to race upstairs and discover that . . . I haven’t got enough of the yarn I want to use for the new pattern I just bought## with the idea of it being my first cardigan.###

            And the concert was fabulous.~  It was also long, which is why it was half past midnight before I even looked at my computer, but it was the kind of long that when you finally look at a clock you think, it can’t be that late.  That second set was short, I know it was.  Live music is just . . . necessary.  Technology these days is so amazing (sometimes even for good) that it’s easy to sit at home with your 1,000,000 favourite CDs and think that’s all you need.  It isn’t.  You need it live sometimes too:  you need to see the musicians doing it and hear it as they do it.  You need to pick up the electricity of what they do together—which is not recordable.  Oh, yes, certainly, some performers can put over that fresh vibe to be caught for the ages by the latest equipment. ~~  But it’s not the same.  And these guys really connect, with each other, with you the audience.  Love love love.  Why aren’t they famous? 

* * *

* Well, we had a dinner-like meal at about 6.  But I don’t eat dinner at 6. 

** Yes, I did think of holding New Thing 10 one more day because I knew I’d be back late tonight.  But I didn’t think I’d be this late . . . and I also knew it would be a day rife with blog material.  I possibly didn’t know how rife. . . . 

*** http://www.gigspanner.com/ 

† What?  She hired a good prognosticator.  How do you think? 

†† Which I also have signally failed to do.  Siiiiiiiigh.  It has not been one of my great years. 

††† What?  Oh, she makes jgrrmgles.  To order.  There’s a long waiting list.  She’s the best jgrrmgle maker in Britain, and possibly the world.  

‡ And a few other random items 

‡‡ Hellhounds and I occupy a narrow strip near the door.  The rest is . . . AAAAAAAUGH. 

‡‡‡ See:  I don’t drive much.  Especially to anywhere I don’t already know.  Yes, this means that anywhere I hadn’t already learnt the route to by the winter of 2000, when I went down with acute ME, I probably won’t drive to now.  And don’t I hate it when they change the road layout. 

§ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c2Rx2KSW3-c&feature=youtube_gdata

Blondviolinist, avert your eyes. 

§§ Film and yarn possible in the same expedition.  Hmmmmm. 

§§§ Which was being renovated or expanded or something.  We sat there while the giant thing with caterpillar tread trundled around moving heaps of rock in an aimless manner and Fiona fired up her iPhone—Pooka, I might add, was refusing to connect:  the signal was fine but she was sitting there going Can’t! Won’t! And you can’t make me!—and ascertained that the post code on the cinema web site was wrong.  Oh.  That’s helpful. 

# Ask Fiona. 

## Yes, I know you don’t knit from stash.  Stash is stash.  If you want to knit something you have to go out and buy yarn.  But I find that—um—sometimes you do want to knit up some of your yarn.  That sometimes you bought yarn not merely because it was gorgeous and was clinging round your leg and refusing to get back on its shelf and what can you do when it knows your name?, but because you want to wear it or throw it over the back of your sofa or something.  That you bought it sure that the pattern it yearns to become is out there somewhere, just possibly not in this shop and besides you’ve already been here six hours fondling yarn and your hellhounds need walking and your husband wants to know where you are and if you’re ever coming home^.  But you want to, you know, knit this yarn up, even if maybe it will have a sort of interregnum period of looking like stash.  Um—does this mean I’m not a real knitter? 

^ And when, bringing your purchases into the house, if you will fit through the door.  

## Hint:  open front.  No buttons.  No buttonholes.  And with only a few changes.  Like about six inches shorter^ and the sleeves will be STRAIGHT not belled.  Ugh^^.  The sleeves will probably also be longer to accommodate my gorilla-length arms.  Sigh.  I am looking FORWARD to sleeves that are LONG ENOUGH.^^^ 

^ Maybe I’ll have enough yarn after all. 

^^ Maybe it makes a pretty line.  All I can see is ‘gets into your tea, your soup, the mouth of the dog you’re petting’ etc.   It’s like Fiona was wearing lady shoes today and then complaining about the stairs.  You’re wearing lady shoes.  

^^^ And for anyone with a memory so good you ought to be ashamed of yourself, yes, I have at least one other First Cardigan, and I even bought the yarn for that one at the same time I bought the pattern.  The problem with it is that it pretty much trumpets EASY KNIT FIRST CARDIGAN, which kind of puts me off because I’m like that.  I still like it and still plan to make it (!!!) but . . . I think I’d like to make something that isn’t quite so obviously holding my hand and saying ‘there, there’ first.+ 

+ Says the woman who is about a third of the way through her third leg warmer having still not sewn up the first two.  But I started sewing up last night and . . . it’s working.  Sewing up was my downfall last time—my squares looked reasonably okay individually, but as soon as I started sticking them together their jolly little eccentricities became serious vice and corruption.  Sigh.  Some day I will have the world’s largest knitted hellhound blanket.   Also the most irregular knitted hellhound blanket of any size. 

~ And I have a crush on the drummer.  Just by the way.  And none of the youtube clips do him justice, so don’t give me that ‘ewwww’.  

~~ Gigspanner has two excellent albums out themselves^ . . . but it’s still not the same. 

^ Although they’d better record their Tom o’ Bedlam soon or I shall grow rude and violent

Hey.  People.  I read the forum.  But you don’t seriously believe I’m going to post the second part of Corellia’s saga right away, do you?  Blow off two guest posts in a ROW?  If I had two nights in a row off I’d have established a habit of lying on the sofa covered with hellhounds during blog-writing time, eating bonbons and reading trashy novels.  Marabou-trimmed satin lingerie optional.  No, no, no.  Besides, torturing blog readers is one of my few pleasures.

            . . . ‘Pleasures’ certainly not including bell ringing.  Oh gods.  Practise tonight at the abbey was unbelievably awful.  Awful.  As I said to Albert as I raced out the door* to escape as soon as possible, this habit of taking one step forward and two steps back is getting discouraging.**  Profound and utter humiliation is disagreeable at best but in this case I don’t know what to do about it.  I’ve only ever learnt . . . well, pretty much anything, but particularly bell ringing . . . by grind.  Relentless grind.  You don’t get to grind at the abbey—there are too many ringers at too many different levels (especially upper) to have time for grinding any of them.***   I’d been hoping that I was far enough down the ringing road generally that I wouldn’t need to grind the way I used to . . . wrong.  But the big spiky unmediatable situation here is that it’s specifically the abbey that’s the problem:  those bells, that frelling ringing chamber, the fact that it’s the abbey.  I can ring Grandsire Frelling Triples at other towers—not gloriously well, but I can ring it.  Or I could.  I think I’m forgetting, because what I’m chiefly doing lately is failing to ring it at the abbey.  I cannot begin to tell you how WILDLY FRUSTRATING it is to listen, or to stand behind and watch someone else ringing, something that in any other tower I’d give my eyeteeth† to have a go at—I should be consolidating my Grandsire Triples and practising bob triples and major, Stedman triples, Cambridge minor, treble bobbing to surprise major.  But I can’t ring at the abbey. 

            I wasn’t even expecting the worst tonight.  Usually I’m horribly good at expecting the worst.  Tonight when I pulled off the bell felt familiar—it is not, in fact, the bells, it’s the ballroom-sized ringing chamber and the abbeyness of it.  And I thought, pulling on this familiar bell, oh good.  I’m getting there.  I’m making progress.  This is, or at any rate is going to be, my new home tower.

            Does anyone have a bridge handy that I could throw myself off? 

* * *

Meanwhile . . . @cambridgeminor/CathyR tweeted me this today: 

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-2141230/All-mind-Why-critics-wrong-deny-existence-chronic-fatigue.html 

I know there have been ME awareness weeks—possibly every year at this time, one of the symptoms is really bad memory—but I’d missed we were having one now.   And ME, like way too many other badly understood and/or scary don’t-want-to-think-about-it-because-it-might-happen-to-me afflictions and ailments, can use all the good press it can get.  Yes, it’s a real disease.††  No, we’re not all malingerers.†††  Hurrah for journalists who write articles‡ saying that ME is a nasty kick in the head from fate and to take it seriously.  And I’m very glad to see someone making a noise about the appalling so-called ‘treatment’ of enforced exercise, which I’ve railed about here before.  If you have ME the last thing you should do is force yourself to do stuff.  That only makes it worse.  As I’ve also said—but to me, being someone with ME, this is all worth saying again—there may be a few ME-diagnosed people out there for whom enforced exercise worked . . . but I’d personally doubt that in that case what they did have is ME.  It’s a fairly slippery disease/syndrome and there’s a lot of overlap with other fateful kicks in the head. 

            But I want to add (again) that my experience of it is also that what energy, physical and mental, you do have you MUST USE, because if you don’t it will not only go away again—but you’ll feel worse, just like if you forced yourself to do too much.  The Lack of Slack Syndrome.  One of the things this article also mentions, and good for her, although I’d put quite a few underlines around it too, is the good days and bad days thing—you may also have good half days and bad half days, good hours and bad hours . . . good minutes and bad minutes.  She mentions people who have to put their lives on hold because they can’t do anything consistently.  Yes.  This is one of the big ratbags about managing it—and leads to why I seem to get away with so much.  I’ve told you (often) before there are a lot of smoke and mirrors on the blog—well, if I have to lie down for an hour or a day, I just do it.  I don’t have to tell you or my boss about it—and the hellhounds adore it, of course.  But one of my bottom lines is that I have no stamina, despite all that hurtling.  I gave up horses (several times) because I can’t ride regularly enough.  I don’t ring quarter peals because I never know when I’m going to have a bad day or a bad hour, and you’re letting down five or seven other people if you fold up unexpectedly.  I don’t travel for a variety of reasons, but head of the list is the ME.  Managing it on the road is . . . well.  I’d rather have bell practise nights like tonight, when throwing myself off bridges seems like a rational reaction, than cope with a bad ME day away from home.

            This is one of the things I’d like to see more recognition of—that most people with ME are still capable of doing something—and most of us want to:  who wants to be helpless, hopeless, dependent and bored?—but we need SLACK from the healthy, functioning world.  We need FLEXIBILITY.  The business/working/income-oriented world is still lousy about people who don’t fit their pattern.  It’s like the colossal waste of energy and talent of parents who want to, you know, raise their kids themselves.  The corporate world still seems to think that kids are something you do in your spare time, and that making widgets and earning money is the real centre of the universe.  What is wrong with this picture.

            Everybody would be happier if they could work and live to a model that suited them better, you know?  You don’t have to have ME or little kids.  Elasti-world!  Now all we need is a logo and catchy tag line. 

* * *

* Not a good idea from this tower.  GERONIMOOOOOOOOOO! 

** I’ve also started wondering again how long before they tell me not to come back.  

*** Except in terms of ‘into little pieces’.  I came home in a basket.  

† As if anyone would want these eyeteeth.  I did, however, get my crown glued back in today. 

            Dentist from R’lyeh was on holiday, so I saw An Extremely Chirpy female dentist.  Extremely Chirpy.  Except that I guess you aren’t allowed to make jokes about doctors on drugs I’d say she’s on drugs.  Nobody is that chirpy without chemical assistance.  I commented, as I produced the small offending object, that it was remarkably clean, as was the post-stub it used to be stuck to.   This is, in fact, a crown put in by Dentist from R’lyeh himself, so they could look it up in their records and the chirpy dentist went off into peals of tinkling laughter when the assistant declared that he’d glued it in originally with Glurpbggg™ ^ which is a temporary cement.  Oh, that’s why the crown was so clean! sang Ms Nitrous Oxide.  Temporary cement always dissolves over time!

            Erm, I said, spitting out the crown, which she had spronged back in place to check rapport and congruity with the surrounding teeth, and then couldn’t dislodge again, why?

            Oh, because it’s such a good fit! she trilled.

            Um.  From where I’m sitting . . . the temporary cement was always going to dissolve?  Therefore I was always due to be back here in this chair having spent x number of days chewing on one side of my mouth and worrying there was something actually wrong, and then spending an afternoon I might have spent getting on with novel-in-progress schlepping into Mauncester to have it put back in?

            Um.  Why?

^ I can hardly wait to see what WordPress does to the TM symbol.  I wonder if I need popcorn. 

†† Although I personally think it’s a syndrome.  As I keep saying.  If I were going to guess more, I’d guess that it’s caused by a variety of sensitivities to the extremely not-what-we-evolved-for life we lead now.  A kind of uber-allergy.   

††† Note that of course there are malingerers among us.  It’s like some accountants embezzle.  That doesn’t mean the definition of an accountant includes ‘embezzler’.  

‡ Although please the frelling gods couldn’t they have hired a PROOFREADER?  Text as bad as this undermines both the message and the professionalism of the journalist or the paper or both . . . or maybe that’s just that I’m a professional writer with ME.

IT’S THE FIRST DAY OF A THREE-DAY BANK HOLIDAY WEEKEND.  AND THE CROWN ON ONE OF MY HORRIBLE STUPID TEETH HAS JUST FALLEN OUT.  I’m so happy.  Happy, happy, happy, happy. 

            It has not been a brilliant day and furthermore Peter is in Cardamomlinghamshire visiting relatives so I don’t even have him around to blame.* 

            Gemma told me last night, cheerfully, on her way out the door after handbells** that she probably won’t be there for afternoon ringing at the abbey on Sunday.  She saw the stark panic flood my face and said hastily, you’ll be fine.  You’ll be fine.  I’ll be fine, eggs grow on trees, teabags make the best tea, and Charlemagne was a girl.  AAAAAAUGH.  Last Sunday it was five fabulous male ringers . . . and Gemma and me.  AAAAAAAAUGH.

            I’ll be fine.  Yes.  I’ll be fine.  I’ll take my knitting. . . .

            AND WE’RE GOING TO HAVE A FROST TOMORROW NIGHT.  A FROST!  A FRELLING, FRELLING, FRELLING, FRELLING FROST!  IT’S MAY!  IT’S MAY IN SOUTHERN ENGLAND!  WE’RE ALLOWED TO PLANT LITTLE TENDER GREEN THINGS OUTDOORS IN THE GROUND IN MAY IN SOUTHERN ENGLAND!***

            Usually.

            I had quite a nice time in the garden a couple of days ago—when it finally stopped raining long enough to make this practical—playing eenie meanie with all the racks and rows of little green mail-order things that arrived during the floods and are still waiting to be put somewhere they can settle down and grow.†  I planted the sweet peas, finally, some begonias, some (tender) fuchsias, most of the rest of the glads, some petunias.  Today . . . today I (furiously) planted the dahlia cuttings in pots two or three sizes smaller than I meant to—I don’t have TIME for endless potting-on:  stuff goes in an intermediate pot and then it goes into the ground or into its big permanent pot—so they’d all fit on a tray in case I’m bringing them indoors tomorrow night.  The stuff that is already in the ground is going to have to take its chances†† . . . but the sitting-room is going to be frelling impassable if I have to bring in all the unfrost-proof things in trays and pots or still in their mail-order plastic cells. . . .   

* * *

* You made my crown fall out!  You did!  You know you did! 

** Have I told you we seem to have morphed into Thursday and Friday handbells??  Wait, wait, I have a novel to finish and I do need to reserve some brain.  I think I’ve told you Gemma is a doctor, and she’s just changed clinics/surgeries which means her schedule has changed, and Thursday afternoon handbells are no longer possible.  So we had, I thought, moved handbells to Fridays right before New Arcadia bell practise^ . . . except that it turns out Colin can’t do Fridays but was too polite to say so.^^  I have this habit of not really paying attention to details and therefore found myself saying to Niall and Colin, well, okay, we’ll just have to keep on with Thursdays, and Niall and I can ring with Gemma on Fridays . . . WHAT AM I SAYING.  This week was the first of the new schedule and . . . two days in a row of handbells is . . . intense.  

^ Which means I will now stuff hellhounds into their harnesses and pelt out the door so as to be out of earshot by the time they start ringing up.  I’m getting better at sleeping through Sunday mornings though. 

^ The British.  ARRRRRRRGH. 

*** I’m having another of those ‘why do I DO this to myself??’ moments.  I moaned this to Peter tonight over the phone and he said, because you’d think less well of yourself if you didn’t^, which is true as far as it goes, but it still begs the question why do I have to choose activities where terror will be my natural environment?  Why couldn’t I collect stamps or go to more films?^^ 

^ And given my standard level of self-appreciation this could get dangerous.  

^^ No horror, of course.+ 

+ Avengers Assemble is playing semi-around here this weekend and I am half-tempted to go except for two things:  (a) it’s in frelling 3D, and my loathing for (frelling) 3D was renewed and reinforced by (multi-frelling) THOR and (b) I haven’t got time.  If I’m going to ring bells and sing and rescue all the little green things drowning in my garden(s) and finish a novel before the hellhounds and I have to stop eating, although the hellhounds wouldn’t mind, I haven’t got time.#  And, just by the way, Sunday morning ringing at New Arcadia is forty minutes plus a one-minute bolt from the cottage to the tower and a more leisurely several-minute stroll back.  Sunday afternoon ringing at the abbey is an hour, plus a half hour commute.  Also, terror is tiring.  

# And the blog is a not insignificant eater of time.~ 

~ And there are a lot of doodles waiting to be doodled.  Siiiigh.  I should draw you a Venn diagram of Available Energy Usage by Robin McKinley some time.  I don’t know if this is the frelling ME, or advancing age, or just that I’ve always been peculiar, but what I can and can’t do isn’t just about whether I feel (relatively) alert and intelligent or as if I have ham salad for brains and limbs made of half deflated inner tubes.  It’s more of a Chinese-menu situation where you want stuff from as many columns as possible.  And your fortune cookie is still going to tell you you’re frelled. 

*** Meanwhile friends in the Midwestern prairie are having temperatures pushing ninety (°F).  

† I’m still seeing disturbingly few little feathered things in the shrubbery.^  I wouldn’t have thought literal drowning was all that likely in my garden-on-a-hill, and there’s still the greenhouse to take shelter in.  Nor would I have thought I have many predators out there, although what is that unpleasing line about there always being a rat within five feet of you?  I’m sure my local rats would be more than happy to tuck into adolescent robin.  But dad robin is still hanging around for mealworms.  Robins are such fearless little critters^^ that you get a prime view of what’s going on with them.  There were still two adults^^^ when I started putting mealworms out but they were very chary of me—which served to reinforce my guilt about how little gardening I’ve been doing recently and it’s not all down to the weather—but robins don’t really do chary and dad, at this point, pretty well gets in my face and says, Mealworms?  Where are the mealworms?, if he’s dispatched the previous serving.  I put them out twice a day, and he must be feeding them to someone because if he ate all of them himself he’d explode.  The mealworm saucer normally lives on my potting table in the greenhouse but I put it out in the courtyard by the kitchen door when I want to use my table, on top of a tall pot that will have a dahlia in it eventually.  He knows this.  So first he sits in the apple tree next to the greenhouse and stares at me, and then he perches on that pot and looks at me meaningfully.  I may have to start buying more mealworms. 

^ I did get a couple of photos of the babies, but they’re not very good.  The nest is tucked back behind various jars and plastic boxes of plant food and it’s dark.  I didn’t want to blow a flash in their tiny fluffy faces and I haven’t been very lucky with the right angles of sunlight . . . or any angles of sunlight, lately.  They’re only in the nest about ten days, I think—maybe two weeks.  Not long at all.  And I didn’t notice they’d hatched immediately—they were already beginning to grow feathers by the time I saw them—since I’d been trying to leave mum alone so she’d go on sitting.  But I’m reasonably sure there were five of them to begin with.  Five’s a lot.  

^^ Unlike their human namesake  

^^^ If there’s only one parent left, it’s probably dad, because mum has sashayed off to start a new nest somewhere else. 

†† I may raise the odds a bit by throwing a bit of bubble wrap around.  After potting up the frelling sweet peas—usually I just slap them in the ground to begin with—and bringing them in and out for about a fortnight I am VERY RELUCTANT TO LOSE THEM NOW.

It’s okay.  I can write a blog tonight.  Darkness ate dinner.  *&^%$£@#~}+!!!!!!!!!!!  Cathy, on the other side of the table, is breathing a deep sigh of relief.  She’d made the perilous, not to say fatal, offer to write another guest blog if I found myself incapable on account of the extreme reprehensibleness of hellhounds and the resultant need to wail and rail incessantly all evening.*  Which is to say, Darkness stopped eating.  Yesterday. 

            I know, I know (and you regular readers know, you know).  Normal dogs—well, normal sighthounds—miss meals occasionally.  It’s not a big deal.  It’s a big deal with these guys because of their history.  And it’s a big deal to me because I’m the human supposedly in charge of managing they survive their history.  And they are a lot better, about food, about eating food, and about stopping eating (food) and about looking like they’re at death’s door after about twenty-four hours of not eating.  And I may have an ever so slight tendency to hit red alert before it’s absolutely necessary.  But. . . .

             If you graphed hellhound appetites and the amount of food I actually manage to get in them, the lines would swing up and down wildly anyway, like the surface of Lake Superior just before the Edmund Fitzgerald went down.  I’m used to this.  I don’t frelling like it, but I’m used to it.  Occasionally, however, one or both hellhounds ship a really big wave and head for the bottom.  If I hadn’t been distracted by having fun with Cathy—because I am an irresponsible dog owner and a horrible selfish thoughtless human being—I might have noticed that the current oh-well-maybe-I-will-and-maybe-I-won’t food mood was hardening into something more drastic.  It had crossed my mind that the current lack of enthusiasm phase was going on a little long.

               AND THEN . . .

               It has not been a good day.  Today was our last chance to get out into the country and look at bluebells.  And it rained.  Again.  It’s been raining all week.  It was raining when I picked Cathy up at the train station.**  It was raining as we both arrived at and left the abbey.***  It was raining most of Sunday in both Hampshire and Bristol, although Cathy managed to find a little sunlight and follow it around for a few hours.  It rained on my voice lesson.†  It rained on our going to Glaciation to ring with Colin.  It rained on our trip to Mauncester yesterday.††  IT’S BEEN RAINING FOREVER.  IT IS GOING TO RAIN FOREVER.†††  It is just about hip deep around town and squelching out over the countryside when Cathy only has two pairs of shoes with her is not really a credible option.

                AND THEN DARKNESS STOPPED EATING.  AAAAAAAAAAAAAAUGH.

                It has not been a good day.

                 But Darkness ate dinner.  Enthusiastically.  So I can revert to being all wet and soppy and droopy and soggy, not about the rain, but about the fact that Cathy is leaving tomorrow. . . . 

* * *

* The deep sigh of relief may have been as much to do with the lack of incessant wailing and railing as the fearful prospect of coming up with another 1000+ words that could pass for a coherent synthesis of some damn thing or other only two days after the previous guest blog.  

** It had only just started raining (again), fortunately, since I was late.  Of course I was late.  I’m always late.  And then we had to hare off at extreme speed for the Reification of the Overgoddess at Forza.  I have rung my first service at Forza del Destino.^  Eeep.  This blood-freezing adventure began last Wednesday, when Ulrich said at practise that it was an all-hands-to-the-pumps situation Saturday afternoon for the reification.  I looked away and shuffled my feet because I am not, after all, an abbey ringer, but Gemma said, oh, go on, I’m going to.  So I checked with Cathy about train times and then, in fear and grovelling, although it’s difficult to get grovelling across in an email, I wrote to Ulrich, asking if they still needed extra hands for the reification, and he wrote back pretty much by return electron saying they’d be happy to see me.  Oops.  Now I’m for it. 

            In fact they didn’t need all of us shmo-level ringers, but they were nice enough to pile us all on for rounds on forty-eight.  And Og came by with his clipboard and said to me, smiling in what I’m sure he was under the impression was a friendly manner, You are now on my LIST.

            I may have a bell tower again.  That is, I admit, may.  I’m still expecting them to pull themselves together and bounce schmos like me.+++  And I wish it weren’t a gigantic, ancient, tourist-magnet, one hundred and twelve bell frelling ABBEY.  However, I’ll take what I can get.  And they’re still, with an irony so shiny and sharp it needs a scabbard++++, my best practical choice for a new tower.  Hahahahahahahaha.  Ouch, that hurts. 

^ I’m feeling just a trifle creeped out by my having long ago carelessly blognamed+ it The Force of Destiny.++ 

+ I invent a verb.  I feel it could have wider application however. 

++ It could be a lot worse.  I could have named it La Traviata or Aida. 

+++ Or I could revert to not being able to ring anything.  Anything.  But we are not considering this possibility.  We reject it.  

++++ And its name may be Doomblade. 

*** With a spectacular escort of guards.  Yeep.  We never had guards at New Arcadia, but then we didn’t rededicate goddesses either.  But Cathy and I crossed three different cordons, getting in—I’m a bell ringer! I kept squeaking, feeling a complete fraud—and two getting back out again.  Our favourite was the nice German lady (in the scary guard uniform) who wanted to know about bell ringing.  

† Yes.  I took Cathy to my voice lesson.  And if she tries to write a guest blog about that I will destroy her.^ 

            It was pretty interesting though.  I hadn’t thought about this when I asked Nadia if I could bring a friend that Monday, but it was the day after Diana’s memorial and I was going to be another jigsaw for Nadia to put back together, as well as in (fractured) avert mode because There Was Someone Else Listening.  It was not my most brilliant lesson—but it was not, in fact, my most embarrassing either.  Nadia says sometimes your worst practises and your worst lessons are the most educational—and this one taught me some stuff.  Nadia spent some time talking about channelling emotion into your singing.  The impulse—my impulse anyway—is to stomp all that slithery, squishy stuff down, and the stomping process is a lot of what breaks you up into jigsaw pieces.  Feh.  I’ve told you about the frelling chasm between what I can do at home when no one is listening, but where I don’t have all of Nadia’s tricks for getting a better quality of sound out of me, and what I can do for Nadia, whom I want to please and therefore am afraid to get stuff wrong for—I mentioned that I’d torn the heart out of Che Faro over the washing-up and Nadia said briskly, I look forward to hearing it next week.  EEEEEEP.  This is pretty much the same kind of exciting and same kind of terrifying as the prospect of maybe having a bell tower again.  I would LOVE to work on Che Faro with Nadia, but I’ve assumed that was seriously down the line from where I am now.  And it probably is, you know?  I’ll take it in to her and . . . 

^ No, wait, I can’t destroy her, she’s helping me with New Thing.+ 

+ And in answer to some forum question or other, yes, it will get a title, at least of sorts, as soon as you learn the protagonist’s name, which is in ep nine or so. 

†† More *&^%$£”+=}]~#@!!!!!!  Our trip was supposed to produce a certain outcome which was going to produce a particular blog post.  And we were FOILED by . . . well, never mind what we were foiled by.  I’ll get there in the end.  And then I’ll write a blog post about it.  Grrrrrrrrrr.  

††† I tell myself, rain is good.  We’re in a drought.  We need this rain.  I AM SURE I AM GROWING MOULD ALL OVER MY BODY.

. . . in more ways than one.  In the first place yes, the weather is completely crazed.  Because of other issues* the hellhounds got a series of short hurtles today rather than one long and one medium-length one, and trying to fit these in between cloudbursts was all part of the jolly fun.  So I’d just had the latest bit of bad news about the weekend’s Adventure** and I was blitzing around the cottage in a dangerous, bruising torpor because the archangels were due ANY MINUTE*** . . . and I finally thought to check my email and the archangels were going to be an hour later than scheduled.

            I could have had a little more sleep.

            I could have given the hellhounds a little more hurtle.

            I could have hung from the rafters screaming about the reality of Sunday travel a little longer.

            I did make myself a second cup of tea, left it on the Aga to stew, and took hellhounds for their second sprint of the day.  And got back to the latest parcel of little live green things, longing to be potted up and too tender to leave outdoors.  I’m hauling in trays of the little ratbags every night—and back out in the morning.  I’m running out of trays.  And the sweet peas, which arrived weeks ago, are starting to need repotting.  ARRRRRRGH.

            The archangels arrived†, were here for two hours . . . AND COULDN’T DO ANYTHING I WANTED THEM TO DO.  With the exception of a few bits and pieces, and getting the kanji-support Japanese download installed.††  But I need both Pooka and Astarte, both i-gizmos, frelling updated . . . and they couldn’t do it because my broadband is TOO SLOW.  Meanwhile, my so-called provider has changed hands, changed its name and logo, raised its prices and lost my Direct Debit details.  And claimed never to have received the archangels’ email, attachment and fax from a month ago about upgrading . . . they plainly raised their prices to pay the designer for the new logo which is undoubtedly larger, flashier, and in full colour, and which will cost more money to produce every month at the top of your invoice. 

            So the archangels sent it all again, and then went back to wrestling with various gremlins, ogres and unidentified snarly things.†††  Raphael checked in with my nonproviders in about fifteen minutes.  No, they hadn’t received the resend.  Half an hour.  No, they hadn’t received it.  An hour.  No, they hadn’t received it, hahahahahahahaha, isn’t this comical?  Meanwhile Gabriel had taken the lid off my phone housing, or whatever you call it, where the wires come in from outside, and did a hissing-between-his-teeth equivalent.  You will remember when this came up a week or something ago, that there’s nothing I can do about Brit Telecom’s utter indifference to the connectivity trials and tribulations of a small cul de sac in New Arcadia, and BT owns all the wiring.  Gabriel stared thoughtfully out the window at the telephone pole that various hysterically-laughing linemen have nearly fallen off.  Your Problem Is Obvious.  However between them they think that Raphael can bedevil my provider into providing something, and Gabriel can do something about the connection between Outside and Inside. 

            But meanwhile . . .

            I took hellhounds for another sprint and fulminated.  Work did not go at all well in what remained of the afternoon.  Also meanwhile . . . I had to go to Forza tonight.  I’d missed last week’s practise due to family arrivals and Morse-code electricity, the week before was some rangleblagging scheduled cancellation or other, and I’m going to miss next week because they’re having one of their forty-six-and-a-half bell practises.‡  I didn’t want to go tonight.  I didn’t want to go a lot.  I’m completely demoralised on the subject of tower ringing and I’ve pretty much turned the fact that I can’t deal with the abbey into a self-fulfilling prophesy of doom, and I’m short of sleep, dreading the pogo-stick journey on Sunday, and totally furious with my technology.  I’m clapped out on adrenaline and I’m exhausted. 

            I had to go.

            I went.

            Oh, and did I mention it was TIPPING it down?  On the way over in Wolfgang we were creeping along in third gear because I couldn’t see out of the frelling windscreen.

            And when I got there there were people crawling around with cameras.  What?  Leaving now.  And the Scary Man was in charge.  Whimper.  Why was I ever born?‡‡

            The Scary Man swooped down on me and said, Come ring some Grandsire Triples.  —Wait!  No!  I was going to run away!

            . . . I actually haven’t dwelled on how bad it’s been, the last few times at the abbey.  I had what I thought was that little breakthrough ringing on six bells rather than eight a while back . . . and then it went away, and I couldn’t ring on six either.  I am not joking about the demoralisation.  If it weren’t that it felt like either go on facing the abbey or give up ringing, I’d be staying home with a good book. 

            Anyway.  Yeah.  Clearly I’m setting you up to say . . . it was okay.  It was okay.  I didn’t ring frelling Grandsire frelling Triples flawlessly, but I was ringing it.  I wasn’t just blindly pulling on a rope and doing what my minder was shouting in my ear, which is mostly what it’s been so far.  I am going to do this.  I am going to learn to cope with the abbey.  Which is to say I may even have a bell tower again.  I’m sorry it’s a frelling abbey . . .  but it remains the nearest tower that rings methods if I’m not going back to New Arcadia and, hint, I’m not, and therefore my best option is an abbey. . . . where things like BAFTA-winning documentary makers come round and frelling film you.  Apparently we’re going to be part of a son-et-lumiere deal for some Hampshire festival.  We had exactly thirty-seven ringers for our thirty-seven bells and the Scary Man told us all to catch hold which therefore . . . included me.  We just rang rounds . . . but I’ve told you about this before:  when you’re ringing rounds on four hundred and twelve or even only thirty-seven you pull off and then hold up for frelling EVER while you’re waiting for the other thirty-six bells before it’s your turn again.  This doesn’t happen on six.  It’s very disconcerting to someone who is used to ringing on six and finds eight a stretch.  Oh, and if you see the film . . . I’m wearing a bright turquoise cardigan which would not have been my choice if I’d known I was going to be immortalised.  I’d have gone more for dark brown and a bag over my head.

            I also have to say a big fat shiny word for Gemma here.  She’s an abbey ringer, and she knows what a struggle I’ve been having.  She’s the one who’s kept saying, no, no, they will not tell you to go away and furthermore you will catch on.  She’s also the one who suggested that I try a different bell for triples because she found it easier to see from . . . and she’s right.  I think that’s one of the things that helped tonight.  She does keep smiling at me in this Rather Amused Fashion, but I have this effect on some people for some reason.  And I was so giddy tonight that I let her convince me to come to the pub after. . . .

            I may have a bell tower again.  My life is not over.

            And the OTHER THING?  I HAVE A NEST FULL OF ADORABLE FLUFFY BABY ROBINS IN THE GREENHOUSE.  They’re so cute you could die.  I rushed out and bought mealworms.  

* * *

* Including sleeping really badly because I’m starting (early) to stress out about an Adventure I’m slated for this weekend that I am dreading extremely.  So . . . of course.  I turned the alarm off and went back to sleep in one fluid movement.  The sleep I’d spent the last x hours not getting.  

** You cannot go ANYWHERE on a Sunday in this country.  They close the roads^, they close the railway lines, they lock all the barn doors before and after the horses have fled, they glue the wheels of all locally-flying airplanes to the runways, and the Sunday dog sled teams are booked years in advance.  Maybe if I started walking now. . . .  

^ Including bicycle paths and rickshaws. 

*** And I’d overslept.  See above. 

† Gabriel reported that they had been given a very suspicious look by one of my neighbours.  Hey, two young men in hoodies.  And Gabriel has a two-day beard. 

†† Do I even have to tell you that this did not go the way it was supposed to and I would have gotten totally screwed up and berserk if I’d tried to do it myself?  Whatever.  They pulled out one of their Magic Discs and made the software(s) talk to each other.  And now my Learn Japanese site isn’t mostly little empty rectangles. 

††† I sat on the floor and knitted.  With some help from hellhounds. 

‡ The half is the tower captain’s gerbil. 

‡‡ Don’t answer that.

Niall and I went haring across the landscape this evening*, looking for Curlyewe.  Our new lot of handbell ringers are from Curlyewe and last time they came to New Arcadia Niall suggested, despite my frantic gestures,** we come to them next time.  ARRRRGH.  I do not commute.  Commuting is something other people do.***

            Niall picked me up tonight, so all I had to do was hold onto my seat.†  But Curlyewe is in the same section of enchanted landscape that Tir nan Og†† is, which is to say that you can’t get there from here, and even if you could, you’d miss it in the fairy mist.  Maps lie, and signposts move around.  Possibly Niall had in mind outrunning the magic.

            I guess it worked, since we got there.  Eventually.  I had been even less enthusiastic about our expedition when I found out they were expecting us to ring at the church.  Doesn’t someone have a sitting-room we could use?  A nice warm sitting-room with mod cons like an electric kettle and a loo?  Whimper.  So I was wearing six extra layers and fingerless gloves††† and a good thing too.  Although there was both a loo and a kitchen with an electric kettle . . . there was even an electric fire, which Enoch put up on a shelf and angled down at us as we sat in our little circle . . . and I was still freezing to death.

            But handbells were rung.  Farrell is back at university, but Oliver is beginning to ring little touches of bob minor;  Enoch is beginning to get through plain courses of bob minor;  and Olga . . . needs more self-confidence, and an iPhone with Mobel on it.  She is bringing back horrible memories of Niall and Esme trying to teach me. . . .

            But the main thing is, the three of them really aren’t ready to cope alone, and neither Niall nor I have a regular free evening left.  I don’t know what we do now.  Pity we can’t use a little of that fairy magic and call up a handbell-ringing golem. . . . 

* * *

* At an extreme rate of speed.  Frell it, honeybun, I want to live to my sixtieth birthday.   

** You could see him thinking, poor thing, she has cramp. 

*** Yes, I’m a cow.^  But it’s a little like judging a book by its cover.  There are too many books.  If I really, really hate the cover well, great, there’s one I don’t have to buy.  DISCARD.  YAAAY.  There are too many interesting things to do and see and get involved in.  If they take more than twenty minutes to get to, great, there are closer ones.  DISCARD.  YAAAY.

            I admit there’s a sliding scale about this.  If Nadia were a bell tower, I’d be looking for something closer.^^  And the Japanese conversation lessons I’m still promising myself after I finish SHADOWS, which is a little perverse, but there’s no way I have brain or energy to start now, will be farther away than Nadia.  However, they have helpfully said that a good deal can be done via Skype.^  While they also, equally helpfully, send me occasional links to interesting events at the Japan Society in London. 

            Anyway.  Niall is a nicer human being than I am.  If it were up to me, if a bunch of beginners want to learn to ring handbells, they can come to us.  A bit like I go to Nadia—or to the language school.# 

            . . . Oh, and yes, both my Japanese cookbooks arrived.  Someone on Twitter (?) asked a few days ago.  I think that’s one of the things that got buried in the post-flu avalanche of Missed Stuff.  It’s not that the flu was all that severe—it was a ratbag but it wasn’t serious—it’s just that I’m always not quite coping as a way of life, so any spanner in the works really does me in, like a mild wind will knock over a cardboard house.  I was going to blog about my new cookbooks—they’re lovely.  Maybe I still will.  I can pull them off the shelf## and add them to the pile of things to be dealt with NOW.  RIGHT NOW.  I MEAN NOW.   

^ I’m also a cow with ME, and driving is a genuine bugbear. 

^^ On a heavy Monday, let’s say when I’ve done a particularly intense stint of work before my voice lesson, and Niall isn’t going to Colin’s that night so if I want to go I have to drive myself, when I get home again I may be just beginning to see the little smoke wisps in my peripheral vision that mean STOP NOW. 

^^^ Supposing Skype is in the mood.  A language I know—which is to say English—is usually pretty challenging and video?  Are you kidding? 

# Which may indeed turn out to be too far.  In which case I will have to find a Skype pixie/hobgoblin/troll and bribe the frell out of it. 

## Yes.  They’re on a SHELF.  I hope you’re impressed. 

† YAAAAAAAAAH.  It’s amazing what a 15-year-old Peugeot can do. 

††  Er—Tir nan Og, Hampshire.  I have rung there occasionally.  When I can find it. 

††† NO NOT THOSE FINGERLESS GLOVES.  They’re still in a bucket in the greenhouse. 

Diane in MN

I’ve never had a plastic bag break, but oh how I appreciate the ewww grossness of your situation. I have taken to using plastic gloves–the disposable exam-glove kind–when doing public pick-up duty with my critters, and keeping an extra one in my pocket just in case of some unexpected disaster. So far so good. 

I have a large-economy-size box of those disposable gloves because I seem . . . to get myself in icky situations, one way or another, somewhat regularly.^  But as a town dog owner, I go through one to four plastic pick-up bags a day.  Even if we get out to the country for the long morning hurtle, the afternoon hurtle is pretty much invariably in town.  That’s a lot of plastic.  The local pet store, after listening to me whine about it for several years, finally found a source of biodegradable dog crap bags that seem to be genuinely biodegradable even after you’ve read the fine print . . . but it’s still a lot of plastic.  I certainly use the gloves . . . but I’m under the impression the bags leave a smaller, you know, footprint.

Re Williams

As someone who milks cows on a dairy farm two days a week, I can tell you that it does wash off. 

Well personally I draw AN ENORMOUS THICK LINE, LIKE MAYBE ABOUT A MEDIUM-SIZED ASTEROID WIDE, between herbivore crap and carnivore crap.  I’ve spent years of my life mucking out stalls, but I think I’d have trouble working at a kennels, and I’m even a dog person.  Herbivore crap is just not that big a deal.^^  I’ve come into direct personal contact with . . . well, an awful lot of horse, including scouring foal, which is pretty unpleasant, cow, which is always sloppy, goat, including scouring goatling, sheep and rabbit.  There are probably others.  But it never occurred to me in my barn days that washing my hands and putting my jeans and flannel shirts through the washing machine wouldn’t be enough. 

PamAdams

I would argue that rolling over in one’s sleep, only to discover one’s face in a pool of kitty vomit, is worse. 

Oh gods.  Oh gods.  I’m not laughing.  I’m really not . . . RRRMBGGLK.  NOT.  LAUGHING.

 b_twin_1

. . .  given the number of people on the forum who have access to animals with copious excrement of all types I humbly suggest we don’t carry on with “mine’s bigger than yours” 

::notgigglingeither::  ::NOT::  I don’t think that’s what was happening here, but you’re probably right we want to ensure that it doesn’t.  But I’d differentiate between indoor pets and you farmers.  I’ve worked on farms, and it’s also a different mindset.  So PamAdams’ interesting experience and my exploding dog bag are in the same category, as are you and Re Williams in the same other category.  

^ This includes in the garden.  I scatter pelleted chicken manure by hand, because it’s quick, easy and efficient that way.  The bags all say STERILIZED but I am much happier in gloves somehow.  And I once had a carton of mealworms break all over the kitchen floor, and having very promptly shut up hellhounds, scrabbled (most of) the escapees out from under the corner overhang of cupboards and so on by hand.  Speaking of mealworms I haven’t checked on the robin’s nest in a couple of days. . . . 

^^ Which, since there’s so much more of it, is a very good thing.+ 

+ I don’t think I’d do too well mucking out the big cat cages at the zoo either. 

I had FOUR new songs to learn, or to try on for size and choose from, the last fortnight, since Nadia, the lazy slut, was taking Easter Monday off,* they just don’t make voice teachers like they used to.**  And then I had flu.***  I’ve only been really singing for about the last three days.†  So, at rather a pelt, I learnt a song and a half:  Long Time Ago arranged by Aaron Copland†† and half of When Daisies Pied by Thomas Arne†††. 

            In some ways the increasing gap between what I do or can do at home and what I do or can do for Nadia is INCREASINGLY FRUSTRATING.  I do my most emotive singing . . . mostly over the washing-up.  Please.  But there’s something about having something that is just slightly distracting‡ to do with your hands and about one-tenth of your brain, as well as no audience‡‡, that enables all kinds of freedom.  I caught myself breaking my heart over the dead Eurydice some time this weekend . . . and of course the moment I noticed it went away and I couldn’t get it back.  Arrrrgh.  But in terms of sheer howling frustration at the perversity of self-consciousness . . . I was doing scales at the sink.  It was, again, some time this weekend.  I’d been singing for a day or two at that point but this was my first attempt to get back into my top end.  Oh dear, I thought, that A is still very squeaky.  So I went to the piano because sometimes having the piano to lean on is comforting.  And it wasn’t the A.  It was the B.  I don’t have a B—yet—but I’ve thought I probably will because I have the A# most of the time at home and an occasional chalkboard squeal above that.  This was definitely a B, and while it was far from a thing of beauty, it was real enough that if I could make it on demand it would be useful in a choir where I’m being covered up by a lot of better Bs.‡‡‡

            Of course it only lasted long enough for me to go, glibberglingglang, that’s a B!  That’s a real, live B!  Whereupon it went away so emphatically I could barely hack my way to the A.  Siiiiiiiigh. 

            When I went in today the first thing Nadia did was make me do a lot of physical stretches to get the bits reconnected since, post-flu, they’ve all shut down in postures of rigid defense.  The point being that I was even singing badly . . . but I had still managed to produce that top B I don’t have (yet) simply because I knew I had had flu and wasn’t expecting much.   ARRRRRRGH.

            She then asked me what, of whatever I was singing, I’d most like her input on, and I pulled out Long Time Ago.  And here’s the thing . . . she didn’t say anything about the notes and all that basic stuff (despite the fact that they are not perfect).  She went immediately into phrasing and interpretation. 

            You know this improvement scam is kind of intimidating. . . . 

blondviolinist

Yep. So the performer who listed it as “cello” was probably a nice enough person, and the performer who listed it as “violoncelle” was full of themselves.  

I did wonder.  It’s the ‘violoncelle’ performer that we missed.  The cello player was a nice young man—and I think I remember he placed in the instrumental category.  I did know about the “ ’cello” from reading lots of old books, but I assumed that since this was in some other language it must be some other instrument. 

Diane in MN

Unfortunately he’s not the least interested in opera and unless he has a voice teacher at some point who wakes him up to the glories of the operatic repertoire I think we’ll lose him to the West End. Feh.

How good are you at subverting voice teachers? 

SNORK.  That approach hadn’t occurred to me.  Well, the family have been threatening to move south, to be nearer the rest of the clan. . . . 
I didn’t hear Traviata this afternoon and from your description, I would have disliked the production a whole lot. As when:
[. . .] she realises he’s asking her to give up Alfredo forever SHE TAKES HER DRESSING-GOWN OFF and trails around in her slip. Oh gods how I hate the wandering around in your underwear to indicate vulnerability and innocence thing. (She does it again later at the party. [. . .])
This would have taken me right outside the performance, 

YES.   THAT’S EXACTLY WHAT IT DOES.  ‘Surreal’ has rules (even if I’m not sure what they are) just like ‘fantasy’ does, and if you break them, you ruin the story, and the spell.  The end of the first act, when she’s singing about how she has to be free, and then she hears Alfredo off stage singing about the power of love, in his wet way, and it stops her . . . in this staging, he comes on stage and confronts her, although I think you don’t have to know the standard set-up to recognise the dream-like quality of it here:  she is confronting herself really.  And it works.  That’s one of the things that works a treat.  It’s hard to believe that someone who came up with this would also come up with trailing around in your slip. 

even if other elements (like Alfredo in his underwear) had failed to do so.  

Indeed.  I was having a little trouble, although I would have coped, with the cabbage roses.  The boxer shorts broke my suspension of disbelief snap.  Reasons Never to Be A Stage Actor:  your director can make a fool of you and there’s nothing you can do about it. 

I dislike and am distracted by staging that wants to trump the music or libretto or both.  Aaargh. It’s too bad that on top of that, the singers were not at their best. 

Yes.  And part of the frustration is that a good deal of this staging was really interesting.  But . . . I was talking to someone else who saw it, who agreed that Dmitri sang like a stick.  It may have been characterisation—Papa Germont is a stick—but it was not a good choice. 

Blondviolinist

I haven’t seen many productions of La Trav, but I’ve yet to see one in which the 2nd act didn’t bore me. (Well, except for Papa Germond’s aria. He’s being a jerk, but oh! is it gorgeous music.) This includes two of Zeffirelli’s stagings. Maybe the act is simply hard to stage effectively. 

We-ell. . . . I wouldn’t say boring, myself, but then I love the opera too much.  I do absolutely know what you mean.  For me the music, well sung, can deal with anything (and Dessay, even not in top voice, was well worth watching, and I’d see her in it again without hesitation).  What I guess happens with me is that I look forward to all three scenes, and I would have said that it’s pretty hard to get both Germont and Violetta and the party scene wrong, they’re both oozy with easy drama.  All right, it’s not hard:  put Violetta in her dressing gown, and then make her take it off, and then wander brokenly around the rest of the stage pulling all the cabbage roses off the furniture.  ARRRRGH.  Anyway.  It shouldn’t be hard to stage both those scenes.  The rough one is the one between Papa the Thug and Alfredo the Wet Brat. 

              And yes, since you ask, I’m insane, we knew that, I’d love a chance to try. . . . 

* * * 

* I think this was a toddler-minding problem rather than a desire to loll around at home in her dressing-gown all day eating bonbons and watching soap operas.  

** WHAT AM I GOING TO DO WHILE SHE’S ON MATERNITY LEAVE FOR TWO MONTHS?  I’LL FORGET EVERYTHING.^ 

^ Drama queen?  What?  Clearly you don’t take music lessons from a Nadia. 

*** I know.  I still owe you a what? blog about how the New Thing came to be.  It may be some help if I mention now that ‘raving with fever’ had something to do with it.

 † And I still have one spectacularly blocked ear which is very, very boring.  

†† http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-D8wqsmkYT8  So I have a thing for baritones.  Sue me.  Of the half dozen that come up immediately on YouTube this is my favourite.  And having listened to all of the ones I liked twice (and this one three times) I have STOPPED because Nadia doesn’t like me listening to YouTube—I told you this, that she believes that you pick up interpretations without meaning to and she wants her students making their own mistakes.  And their own not-mistakes.  As recently as when I was first learning Dove Sei I thought she was straining at gnats with me—I could certainly see why she’d be thinking about this with a student who, you know, had a real voice and was really singing—but . . .

               Um.  Okay.  Yes.  I’ve crossed that line too.^  Granted that Long Time Ago (or When Daisies Pied) is a simple song, but my excuse for heading for YouTube was to learn the actual line as quickly as possible without worrying about my eccentric piano-playing.  But I was pretty much ignoring the melody because I knew I could pick it up, and listening to the phrasing.  How does he do that—oh.  Oops. 

EMoon
It is amazing, as I take more lessons and crawl slowly forward in the singing, how much more I can hear in others’ singing. 

Yes.  Exactly.  I’ve been aware of it increasingly—as I mentioned again on Friday after the Pan-galactic finals, that your listening is different in kind if you’re having even a feeble and talent-free stab at doing whatever-it-is yourself.  But I don’t think I had realised till I started listening to good professional singers singing Long Time Ago the other night just how far down this road I’ve come.  Oh wow.  Look.  Elephants.  Toto, I have a feeling we’re not in Kansas any more.  

All I need is more work, more work, more work, and no other things interrupting it. (Bwah-ha-ha-ha! she sings, with expression and only the right amount of vibrato. . . .

Well . . . that might be true with you people with voices.  It’s certainly true that I could use more practise time to good effect but . . . I’m still going to hit the wall with this voice-equivalent sooner rather than later.  Good reasons to keep singing off the McKinley Obsession List. 

My friend Susan . . . mentioned today that a great contralto died a few days ago at age 90, Lili Chookasian. I knew nothing about her, but Susan gave a link to one of her recordings and I was completely wiped out by it, tears and all. Well below both our ranges, on the low end, but in case you’re interested, here’s a link:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xrZTUm8IUAU&feature=relat ed 

Oh my.  Yes.  (Which is why I’m sticking it in here, for musical blog-readers who don’t look at the forum.)  I would love Kathleen Ferrier anyway, but I also love her because she’s the only true contralto I’ve pretty much ever frelling heard of. 

              I also sing Blow the Wind Southerly and even though I love the song and there’s no reason I shouldn’t, still . . . why?  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WjvHg9cBriw ^^  

^ For better and worse.  Generally speaking I’m fine with the fact that I’m not going to be a (very) late-flowering Beverly Sills.  But I do kind of catch myself wishing that I had the chops+ to be a big frog in even a very small pond.   Some of this is worrying about the future of the Muddles:  I’ve told you we’re going to be getting a new director and Who Knows.  And thanks to having more throat trouble this last year than I have had since I was a bronchitis-prone preteen and that the Muddles have lots of long breaks from rehearsal, I’ve never quite fully committed to them.  If our new leader wants us singing medleys of old Beatles hits I’ll be out of there so fast I’ll give myself road burn.  

+ Er . . . croaks? 

^^ And Che Faro.  And He Was Despised.  And O Waly Waly.  She sang a lot of my favourite repertoire.  And I am a glutton for self-punishment.  

 ††† http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HxiTrRwsW0E  

‡ There are good musical moments out with hellhounds too.^  But you can never afford to be too distracted from continuously scanning your surroundings for sudden perils.  And I’ve never had a spoon or a tea mug leap out of my hands and go scalding off after a rabbit. 

^ Even if Chaos will not stop looking up at me earnestly when I sing.  When we’re out hurtling he trots at my side.  At home he gets out of the nice comfy dog bed to stand near me and stare.   No, I’m not in pain.  Go away.   

‡‡ Other than a deranged hellhound.  

‡‡‡ Or at least Griselda.  You really only need Griselda.

It’s funny how different something looks from one perspective than it does from another.  I thought that the first few words of the first sentence of New Thing* would clearly, unmistakably and irresistibly label it as fiction.  People who read the blog even occasionally (I thought) would be aware that I mention Peter from time to time** as an ongoing part of my life***—and if people who don’t read the blog at all might be intrigued at the possibility of one of those scary train-wreck blogs where people describe their bosses as pustules and how they had it off with the plumber last Saturday† while their spouse was buying Marmite at the corner shop,†† hey, whatever keeps them reading.  But it never occurred to me that even the least regular reader could get to the end of the first sentence, and we will pass over the reference to computers and conferences since not everyone knows who Peter is†††, absorb the reference to the fourth volume of The Epic of Flowerhair and not at least suspect the presence of a fragrant rodent.  The Epic of Flowerhair?  Seriously?  I must be even farther out of touch with my genre than I realised.‡  And the only reason this blog exists is because I’m a writer.  A fantasy writer.  Um.  People do read sidebars, don’t they?  Where mine outs me as a fantasy writer.  I always read sidebars.  There is vastly, universe-crackingly too much content out there in internet land.  You need a fast way to say ‘no’‡‡ occasionally.  Sidebars (sometimes) provide one. 

            And haven’t I been chirpy and upbeat about the New Thing?  Well, I thought I’d been being chirpy and upbeat‡‡‡ about the New Thing.

            Anyway.  It’s fiction.  There will be more of it.  And, you know, thanks for worrying . . . 

* * *

I know I promised you a What?  You’re doing what? semi-explanatory blog tonight but I’m several leagues beyond shattered and I have to get up EARLY tomorrow.

            About six weeks ago, I think, we received a very chirpy email, speaking of chirpy, from the parents of one of Peter’s grandchildren, informing us that the grandchild in question had reached the finals of the national division of the Pan-galactic Gargle Blaster Young Musician of the Year competition, which is being held in Dastardly, which is not impossibly far from here.  So we’re going.  Tomorrow.  EARLY tomorrow.  We’re going (EARLY) because we’re getting a ride—from Georgiana and Saxon who are getting out of bed even earlier to swing past here and pick us up.  They are noble and wonderful human beings.§

            It’s going to be a clan gathering—I believe they’re pegging off one whole section of the arena for us—but the finalist grandchild and his immediate family swooped through here a day early and stayed overnight last night at Third House.  It seemed like a good idea at the time.  It seemed like a good idea before I had this flu§§ and it still seemed like a good idea up until the electricity started flashing on and off like an urgent Morse code message yesterday morning.  I was (serendipitously) out buying batteries when one of the other clerks came flouncing back in the shop and announced crossly that both our little local grocery stores were closed, allegedly because of automatic-till problems.  Oh.  My next stop was some little local grocery, for supplies for the troops who were arriving in a few hours. . . .

            With reference, the other night, to the question of protecting your technology from erratic power delivery:  I have this great boulder of an object under the desk at the cottage, which is both hard drive back up, enough battery to let you close your desktop down without data loss or meltdown if the power goes out, and a kind of super-whammy surge protector, in that it cost ridiculous amounts of money, but you don’t have to keep changing the freller every time something like yesterday happens.  It has a major drawback, however, which is that while the power is out it screams.  It screams incessantly for as long as the power is out—and it doesn’t stop screaming until the power is back on again AND you have reset the wretched thing. 

            It spent a lot of yesterday screaming.  I did not enjoy this.

            And then when I finally got to Third House to make up the beds, I couldn’t get the frelling heat to turn on.  The OLD boiler§§§ was thirty (or forty) years old and it had pretty much two settings:  On.  And off.  And it had a dial, so you could set the temperature.  That was about it.  It also made a reassuring roaring noise when you turned it on and it came on.  I am capable of understanding this system.  The new boiler, which was installed when I had all that fun having the Weight Bearing Floor built for the attic a couple of years ago, will make a cherry pie, sew a fine seam, and calculate pi to 1,000 places.  All I want it to do is heat my house.  And I couldn’t figure out WHY I COULDN’T TURN IT ON.  I wasted a lot of time on this, to the detriment of the bed-making, but it was cold last night#. . . .

            They had been keeping me up to date with their progress by text, including the indefinite delay when the M-something motorway stalled out due to a traffic accident.  Then I didn’t receive the last two texts about their getting underway again, and the next thing I knew there was a sudden influx of tired, chilly human beings who were bemused by the fact that Wolfgang was preventing them from parking in Third House’s drive, and after everyone is home from work there never are spaces on the street.  Oh.  Technology, you ratbag.  You get careless, when things are working.  You assume they will go on working.

            I have to go to BED.  I have to get up EARLY.  PS:  our grandchild is going to blow the rest of those weaselly little suckers out of the water. . . . ##           

* * *

* It doesn’t have a name yet.  You will be the first to know. 

** See:  I am my own best material because I don’t have to worry about taking my own name in vain or hurting my own feelings.  And poor Peter suffers the disability of being the only other person who doesn’t have an alias.  So I do try to protect him. 

*** I suppose, since I’m always reminding you how much I don’t tell you, you could have leaped to the sudden, horrified conclusion that our marriage is actually a seething rancorous mass of barely restrained mutual loathing, and that this had broken out at last.  Um.  No.  And even Gelasio isn’t a villain.  At least I don’t think so.  At least not yet.  I suppose he could . . . mmmph mrgle gmmmph.  

† Cheaper than weekend overtime rates.  If the plumber fancies you. 

†† Sorry, you hopefuls.  I don’t write that kind of blog.  Nice knowing you. 

†††  http://www.peterdickinson.com/ 

‡ Hoist by my own petard again.  I also keep saying that I’m very under-read in everything because I’m a very slow reader and read over too wide a range.  True. 

‡‡ Or even ‘yes’, unfortunately.  Noooooo!  I do not want to receive email updates!  Noooooo!  I do not want to be on your RSS feed!   Nooooooooo! 

‡‡‡ And annoying. 

§ I believe there is also a classic Jag involved.  Oooooooh.  May I be awake enough to appreciate it. 

§§ There was a noxious miasma hanging over Bologna this year.  I know several people hitherto innocent of any crime who went home plague-bearers. 

§§§ Furnace 

# Yes.  I am extremely tired of bringing this year’s baby plants indoors every night.  

## PPS:  The boiler had turned itself off at source.  I guess because it got tired of the Morse electricity.  It did allow itself to be turned back on again—when someone other than me figured this out.