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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.
Subarticulate
Zo, grahf umgub FRABDABNABBLE arnyagixxit. Glag. Juvverund racondil brirt. WANGLETHORP. Deprath.
It’s been a long day. Raglsolsby. Dopperilplunk. Etc. Fridays are always extra-long because I’m trying to stuff two extra-curriculars into one day, which is both insane and forbidden. I do it every week. I am insane and forbidden. I like the concept of being forbidden: I embody forbiddenness. Hmmm. I could probably write a story about embodying forbiddenness*. . . .
Where was I? Oh yes. Friday.
The morning got off to a bad start when a delivery man managed to take out one of my pots of pansies, and I was as yet insufficiently mobile and caffeinated to remonstrate with him in a manner suitable to his transgression.** This did not put me into the ideal frame of mind for spending too much time at my desk pre-hurtle dealing with 1,000,000 overdue stupid frelling business-type things all of which I’d had reminder letters/emails of varying degrees of politeness about yesterday. GO AWAY, WORLD. YOU’RE REALLY BORING.
And I tweeted about this: when hellhounds and I finally got out, we were climbing over a stile following a public footpath that crossed a field, which path the farmer had kindly cleared*** through the standing crop, a standing crop which is now about waist high, and I saw someone ahead of me ambling down the slope . . . and a strange violent wavelike motion on either side of him in the crop. Which were his two giganfrellingtic Labradors and a medium-sized spaniel, knocking hell out of the poor bloody farmer’s harvest. What the frelling gistelflurtz is the matter with people?† What is going through what passes for this moron’s mind? ‘Oh, my dogs don’t count? Oh, it’s only this once? Oh, but they enjoy it so much?’ What? How about, ‘oh I don’t give a sh_t and it’s not like they’re going to catch me, and even if they did it would cost them more than it’s worth to take me to court, so you can’t make me give a sh_t, ha ha ha ha ha.’ Jenny told me a while ago that local farmers were starting to put locks on gates—farmers who generally speaking have been kindly disposed to walkers and riders and don’t mind if we stray off posted footpaths as long as we use common sense about where we go and what we do—because a really fun thing to do is take your SUV into a field with a tall crop in it, and play motocross. People are amazing. Not in a good way.
Pause to take a deep breath.††
I did in fact get a piano miniature tweaked into Oisin-look-atable condition—I got one and a half in demonstrable shape, although half a miniature is pretty much three notes and a squiggly line. Never mind. They’re a good three notes, which is to say they collide with a crash and a scream, which is how I like ’em.††† But Oisin and I have fallen into the reprehensible habit‡ of sitting around and having a nice cup of tea and agreeing with each other about all the ways the world needs to change.‡‡ This has become sufficiently established that the mere fact that I had some music to show him this time only meant that we tacked it on to the end of the cup of tea . . . which means the rest of the afternoon grew suddenly rather short, and I did want to write one or two more lines of That Dranglefabbing Novel before hound-hurtle and bell practise. Which is where the subarticulation begins. I do write words and notes on the same day sometimes, but I rarely write what-passes-in-my-case for significant numbers of both on the same day. Today was one of those rare days. Blerg.
And I still had bell practise. And there were actually five other inside ringers plus a treble and a tenor available, so we rang Grandsire Triples if you want to call it ringing. Well, if you want to call it Grandsire Triples. GAAAAAAH. The best part was when I said, whoever is standing next to me has to keep an eye on me—since we did not have anyone left over to be a standing-with minder—and everybody shot over to the other side of the ringing circle. Hee hee. But I had Felix on my right and Edward on my left, and they shimmied me through like bouncers escorting a troublemaker off the premises, and urginchbletty twag and blingo tam. Arp. Zigdab ock. Etc. . . .
* * *
*Arguably Nathaniel Hawthorne already has: Rappaccini’s Daughter. Great story. I’ve recommended it before. Never mind it’s by the Scarlet Letter/House of Seven Gables guy.^
^ I like Scarlet Letter and Seven Gables+. What was I just saying about insanity? But the scene where the extremely fey Pearl’s dad goes mental in public is worth being bludgeoned by a few metaphors about Guilt and Purity.
+ Except the ending, where Hawthorne wants you in absolutely no doubt that Phoebe is going to Devote Her Life to Making Her Husband’s Life Comfy So He Can Get on with Important Male Stuff.
**. Death by sword-thrust.
*** Theoretically they’re required by law to keep public footpaths passable, but not all of them do. You want to be particularly nice to the ones who make the effort.
† There is good insanity and bad insanity. This is bad insanity.
†† As we were heading back to Wolfgang again, at the end of a rapidly replotted hurtle, since I don’t want to mess with off lead Labradors even when they’re not engaged in destroying other people’s property, there was a strange whooping noise which I was only hearing imperfectly because I had my Walkperson’s headphones on, but the strange whooping noise was persistent enough to be intriguing. Turned out to be a young man leaning nonchalantly on the bumper of his large beat-up Land Rovery object, calling his cows. Down at the bottom of the hill—the other side of the hill where the Labradors had been cutting crop circles—a large herd of rather irritated-looking cattle were trotting purposefully, having just been prodded through a gate at the far end. The Land Rovery object^ was parked at an insouciant angle outside another gate that the young whooping man had opened. The cows, evidently, were going to come trooping up the hill, angle past the not-a-Land-Rover, and pour beautifully through the third gate just beyond. No cow was going to take it into her head, for example, to duck around the not-a-LR and hightail out for the bright lights of Ditherington, only a different short bit of slope away. Now there often are cows in the field beyond the third gate, so manifestly they are got in (and out of) it somehow. But I’m just as glad hellhounds and I were not on the spot to find out how well it worked. Including the whooping. As we were passing through, the cows were still trotting hard along the bottom fence, looking like they wanted a manager to complain to.
^ I mean it wasn’t a Land Rover, but was of that ilk
††† This insanity theme is going to start making me nervous here in another example or two
‡ Energy levels have not been high since I got Peter back from hospital. Also I have a novel that needs writing which is driving me crazy.^
^ Damn. There’s that theme again.
‡‡ Let’s start with good music programmes in primary schools, and some state funded support for lessons on actual instruments in middle school. And elective music theory in upper school. Composition even. HA HA HA HA HA HA. I’m raving. Yes, but composing does astonishing things for your engagement with music. You may still not have a clue, but you’re now in it up to the neck, and yes, those mermaids are singing, each to each, and to you.
Varieties of vocal expression
The day plunged into an exciting start when hellhounds got off lead for a superhurtle the first time in probably a fortnight, mainly because it’s been too hot and they haven’t been interested. Yesterday the temperature dropped and you could see them sort of cautiously opening their eyes and looking around* and today we went on one of the walks where there are a couple of big fields that are sometimes sufficiently unoccupied that I can let them run havoc. There’s a nice bit of life jigsaw that summer when the crops are tall and there aren’t many fields available for hellhound tumult, there’s likely to be a lot of hellhound-oppressing weather. We were lucky today: the bigger, better field has a nasty habit of having horses in it** and the smaller field is much too near town (Ditherington in this case) and usually has someone tottering across it with their overweight pug, their six Labradors, or their screaming school group. Usually also hellhounds are pretty good about asking, and about taking no for an answer, but today it was like, Hey! You haven’t let us off lead in forever!—having conveniently forgotten that if I’d taken their leads off pretty much any time lately they’d’ve merely collapsed where they stood, until I went back after them with a forklift, or at least one of those wheeled shopping trolleys. Today, however, we hit Field #1 and Chaos was all over me, Darkness, and the landscape: you are not off lead yet, you big thug, mind your manners or I’ll tie all four feet together and hang you in a tree. And then they simply lucked out: Field #2 was also empty. They almost never get two goes in one walk—although that’s partly because I don’t want them to start thinking that off-lead is standard and not a thrill and a luxury. That’s life with a running dog: they are terrifyingly fast***, and unless you’re the owner of a large walled estate, they’re somewhat challenging companions in this regard. I’m working on my second generation of mostly-whippets, and it still amazes me how quickly they become little dots in the distance.
Field #2 was empty probably because it was raining. We need the rain; rain is fine†. But the frelling weather report said we were going to have teeming downpours this afternoon: that great fists of rain were going to mug us silly. So after being frolicked on by happy, muddy-footed hellhounds, I left them in the warm, dry kitchen while I sallied out to stake my delphiniums. Two of the three at Third House didn’t make it through the winter, but there’s one there and five [sic] at the cottage, only two of which have been staked already, because I am a lazy cow and have been busy potting on millions of little things that keep arriving in the post.†† I am a lazy cow who furthermore hates staking, especially in a garden under which runs all the plumbing in Hampshire.††† So I was outdoors in the rain at the cottage festooned in mud and green garden twine, fighting off the attentions of Mme Gregoire Staechlin and Lady Hillingdon‡, and breaking bamboo stakes right and left despite poking the holes first with A Long Thin Steel Tool of Unknown Original Purpose, ARRRRRRRRRGH. And shouting edifying adages like I hate my life! and *&^% you, you *&^%er!, feeling reasonably secure that there wouldn’t be anyone immediately over any of the assortment of garden walls around me—unless, of course, they were also staking their delphiniums, in which case why wasn’t I hearing their monologue(s) on the subject? Possibly because all the plumbing in Hampshire only goes under my garden.
And this afternoon‡‡ I had my first voice lesson in forever.‡‡‡ Wow. Gosh. And I went in there again thinking what a total disaster this was going to be—as I did the last time I had a long involuntary break—and, again, it wasn’t. I think there’s some kind of Magic Lintel or something over Blondel’s door: Cross Me If Thou Darest, for Thou Shalt Sing Beyond Thy Capacity. Mind you, we’re still talking back row of the chorus, but we’re talking back row of the chorus without the other chorus members turning purple with suppressed laughter. And what I want to know is, why can’t I do this at home? When I’m having lessons regularly every week, the magic-lintel aspect fades a little under the onslaught of simply learning the tune I’m going to be trying to keep with Blondel playing the frelling piano§ accompaniment.§§ But when I’ve been trying to claw myself back from silence and strange gargling noises to something more nearly resembling singing it’s like trying to . . . stake delphiniums in the rain with bamboo stakes in a garden full of local plumbing.
Some of the disparity is—rather blindingly—Blondel’s ability to define what you’re doing as opposed to what you should be doing, and then suggest how to do it. Some of it is just . . . I don’t know what it’s just. But I am cringingly aware that there’s a big difference in the way I walk under the magic lintel prepared to make noise and how at home I’m always worried about Peter and the neighbours and the fire station a quarter of a mile away and the ungodly terribleness of my piano playing§§§ and . . . I’ve got myself both coming and going: my voice is so negligible you can’t hear me across the room unless I drop into chest voice and bellow# . . . or, my voice is so terrible it will drive strong men to leap out of their upper-storey bedroom windows and run down the street to the fire station, begging the firepersons to come and put me out. I also really have to do something about my music stand. Which kept dropping bits off and falling over till Peter and I uttered a mutual cry of ARRRRRGH and threw it out, which means I’ve only got the music stand on the piano at present. But Peter has promised to replace it as soon as I find the Music Stand of my Dreams. I don’t feel worthy of the music stand of my dreams, but . . . you know, oooh! pretty! Shiny! It’s very hard to tell yourself, no, get the plywood one.
PS: There have been no torrential downpours this afternoon. At least my delphiniums are now staked.
* * *
* They are such wusses about heat. They make me look like Stanley and Livingstone. Or Allan Quatermain.
** Of course horses are lovely. But not when you want to hurtle your hellhounds.
*** I told you about Chaos catching one of the mews’ cats a little while ago. Came up alongside it, leaned over, and grabbed it across the shoulders, all in about two-thirds of a second. He’d’ve made a great rabbiter.
† Except in terms of Souvenir de la Malmaison’s flowers this year. Sigh.
†† We do seem to be down to a trickle now, unless my evil twin has done something I don’t know about yet.
††† Turns out that at least some of the plumbing in Hampshire runs under Third House’s little strip of front garden. But the delphinium is in the back, and the stakes sank in just fine.
‡ More climbing roses, right? This is Lady H’s second year and she’s been really moving so she should be pretty glam in a week or two.
‡‡ Still a little muddy around the edges
‡‡‡ He’s leaving in three months, so of course I’ve had to waste most of the last two being ill and floppy and having stupid deadlines and things. Gaah.
§ Speaking of pianos, Blondel may be about to be given a Bechstein grand. If I didn’t have my own sweet upright darling (as well as no space for a grand) I would be hideously jealous.
§§ I have two new songs to learn this week. Eeep. One of them is relatively straightforward but long. The other one is short but a ratbag.
§§§ Play and sing at the same time? You’re kidding, right? I will stumble through a few bars to find out what Blondel is going to be playing next lesson, but I learn the melody by playing the melody with one hand, and even that is pretty challenging. Because I’m also trying to count the beats and stresses and all that miserable stuff about which syllable goes with which note and . . .
# See: mind your manners or I’ll tie all four feet together and hang you in a tree.
Tea and Bell Ringing
Oisin was glad to see me today. I brought tea.
There have been kind of a lot of Fridays this winter when I have crawled to my piano lesson on my metaphorical hands and knees and curled up (metaphorically) under the piano* rather than playing it. There’s usually some accessory whimpering. I don’t remember when Oisin started offering me a cup of tea, but I’m afraid the cup of tea** has now become rather standard, and last week when he didn’t offer me one—I think we were somewhat embroiled in Finale—I asked. Hey, I’m an American. I’m blunt. And hey, it got me the cup of tea.
But I like my tea strong*** and while I can be palmed off with British Rail Tea† I am very grateful when someone is willing to dedicate that many tea leaves to making me good tea. Oisin found this stuff and I think he was suffering from that unfortunate first flush of wanting to share a great discovery, the way one does, and then it was too late. I had passed on Earl Grey years ago as a pleasant diversion for small children and old feeble people who can’t take the real strain but not up to my standard,†† so some time this winter when Oisin emerged from a cupboard waving a tea canister that said Earl Grey Supreme I smiled blandly and thought about the real cup of tea I’d make when I got back home. No. Wrong. Wow. Gonzo. This stuff is something else. This stuff is serious.
And for any tea drinker now in a state of terminal frenzy: http://www.charteas.com/ProductDetails.aspx?p_id=4
Over the course of the winter, however, at the rate I get through tea leaves poor Oisin is probably losing what I pay him for lessons in large mugs of extra-strength Earl Grey Supreme. So today I took him a Large Silver Zip Bag of . . . Earl Grey Supreme.
Although it probably didn’t have any effect on his reaction to Poor Wolfgang, or, But I Bet He Spins in His Grave a Lot, which I started composing this week. I’ve been wondering when the channelling of bad Mozart pastiche was going to happen. Oisin is always kindly and supportive about my composing, and is only rude about my inability to get the flipping stems pointing in the right direction and the way my rests tend to splinter. †††
The appended cup of tea was particularly crucial today because my piano lesson was an hour late due to the exigencies of Oisin having a funeral to play for. I barely had time to get home and finish lunch‡ and hurtle hellhounds‡‡ before bell practise. It looked like it was going to be an unusually exciting evening when there were only four of us for about the first twenty minutes, which meant that our beginner got a very good workout.‡‡‡
But then people started trickling in, and Niall did it to me again. There was no way a Cambridge band tonight . . . oooooops. Well, okay, in theory we had a Cambridge band, but not really; two of our number are not entirely to be relied on and our best ringer tonight while he is himself first-class he doesn’t have Colin or Wild Robert’s gift for keeping an entire band herded in the right direction—and no I’m not talking about Niall. Niall, as I’ve told you, is another grind, like me, he’s just streets in front of me. But he struggles with conducting, and he can only do a little band-herding. So we were totally doomed. And this was a situation rife with potential for making me feel half an inch tall§ because among the New Arcadia regulars—which all of us were—I’ve been the bottom of the heap for so long it is clearly an impertinence that I should be trying to ring Cambridge at all. Drat you Niall. And then we crashed and burned. Okay, Niall said, we’ll try it again in a little while. Dogged, our Niall. So I went off in a corner and stared at the frelling line some more. Niall checked up on me occasionally. Are you ready to try Cambridge again? he said. No, I said. Okay, he said, you can have a few more minutes. —Are you ready for Cambridge? he said a few minutes later. No, I said. You can have five more minutes, said Niall.
Five minutes later. Cambridge, said Niall. I emerged from my corner with a heavy sigh. And we crashed and burned again . . . although a little farther along than the first time. Let me also insert here, for those of you who are wondering why I am insisting on making such a saga of ungleblarging Cambridge, along with it being a good idea if a beginner has her very own minder, which is, of course, only possible if you have an extra Cambridge ringer which we did not, which is why Niall was out of his flipping mind, but the standard way of learning it is by individual lead. There are five leads in Cambridge. And we were gaily setting out to ring the whole diabolical five-lead thing.
The second time we crashed and burned I figured that was that, bridge too far etc, and to my surprise after we were yanked back into rounds, Cambridge was again called. . . .
And this time we made it through. It was not a lovely sight—I have yet to ring Cambridge even adequately, let alone beautifully—but we did get through to the end, and despite Roger going astray, although fortunately he was going wrong at the other end of the pattern than I was in at that moment, and I wasn’t more than three-quarters lost three-quarters of the time, and thank heavens for the ringing tradition that everybody who does know what they’re doing nods, winks and whispers at the sweating beginner: ‘you’re over me’, ‘dodge with the four’, ‘follow me down’ . . . Colin and Niall and I were talking about this last night over handbells: a lot of team sports can to some extent cover for a weak member. Not frelling bell ringing. Every one of you has to be crucially, split-secondly on the spot. It’s part of the fun, of course, but it’s also part of the aaaaaaaugh.
* * *
* Grands are convenient that way. It’s very hard to curl up under an upright. Actually, given Oisin’s organisational skills, which are definitely of the McKinley philosophy^, it’s not very easy to curl up under Oisin’s baby grand either.
^ See: boxes of books under the bed. And the not-so-unconscious reason why I’m so fond of the old four poster that you have to take a short running leap at because it’s higher than anything made since 1900. I wonder if this has any functional relationship with the way old houses never have any closets.
** With accessory moaning, usually about publishing, which, Oisin being not only evil but a fellow free lancer with a fellow free lancer’s view of the world, he enjoys with the flourish and eyebrow-wagglings of a connoisseur.
*** In the long-ago days when I drank it with milk^ I had got to the point where I couldn’t make it strong enough. Once I stopped dairy and was back in black^^ it once again became possible to make my hair stand on end and my eyeballs bulge.
^ Note that I picked this habit up in the first place as a tourist in England.
^^ I’m an AC/DC girl, not Amy Winehouse. Even feminists have their weaknesses.
† So called, ie, cheap, nasty and strong. There is an urban myth with in my experience a certain amount of truth to it that the cheap and nasty teabags you can buy in an American supermarket are rarely anywhere near as mouth-shrivellingly, stomach-peelingly, nerve-fryingly, brain-boilingly STRONG as what’s available off the rack over here.
†† I did have a serious thing for Lapsang Souchong, aka Old Tarry Ropes, many years ago, which is a bit like Earl Grey on steroids^, but I’m not sure if my taste buds started blooming in a different direction or if I merely moved away from The Only Tea Shop in the Universe which had the really good stuff.
^ All right, all right, I can hear the cries of outrage from both the Lapsang Souchong gang and the Earl Grey contingent from here.
††† It’s frelling Finale! The software was written by mutant walruses with pathological cerebrovascular conditions! Tell me any reason whatsoever that anyone but a mutant walrus who isn’t getting enough blood to the brain would write code that results in rather than one minim/half note rest Finale in its infinite wisdom festoons my page with four eighth note/quaver rests!!!!
‡ I was busy trying to finish the first movement^ of Poor Wolfgang and kept forgetting to chew. This happens to me.
^ Cough cough cough. Although it’s true it’s going to have three separate bits. The first fast bit. The second slow bit in a different key. And the third fast bit again.
And yes, you’re right, I still owe you the second verse of the lullaby. I haven’t forgotten. I’m just disorganised. You’re used to the fact that I’m disorganised by now, I hope. Also getting the first part up was rather traumatic.
‡‡ Although since it’s sheeting rain the hurtle was more of a slow disgruntled jog involving a good bit of tripping over hellhounds who are trying to climb under my raincoat. Neither of them wants to wear a raincoat himself, they just object to getting wet.
‡‡‡ This is all very, very, very old news to Vicky and Niall, but I had quite an exciting time on the four trying to ring up in peal with our beginner on the treble. Ringing steadily is not a big beginner forte and ringing up or down in peal, especially ringing up, is a trifle challenging, long dranglefabbing after you frelling well ought to know what you’re doing.
§ And squishy
