Writery things
In the first place:
Hee hee hee hee hee hee hee. (Peter’s publishing daughter sent me this.)
Okay. That was your light relief.
Now, in the second place, a lot of you will have seen this already, including anyone who follows me on Twitter:
The headline reads: In E-Reader Age of Writer’s Cramp*, a Book a Year is Slacking. And any sane author’s reaction is: Killlllllllllllllllllll Meeeeeeeeeee. (Maureen Johnson’s retweet says: Here’s an article in the [New York Times] about how everyone is trying to kill authors.)
Well. Yes. I would love to attain a novel a year. Or a novel most years. Or a novel every eighteen months. Or something. And there are writers—a few—who can write two novels a year at least occasionally** and still stab you in the heart with their amazingness. Or if you’re producing stories that genuinely aren’t supposed to do anything but while away an hour or two—I hope I’m not getting myself into too much trouble here, but I do think there’s a place for stories that are only trying to divert: and, if I’m not getting myself into too much more trouble, I might suggest Agatha Christie as the sort of thing: I don’t think anyone goes to Agatha Christie for empathy or catharsis, do they?—then maybe, that’s maybe, you can write more than one book a year and keep your quality (and your pride in your work) up.***
But for the rest of us . . . for those of us who essay the occasional well-rounded character, who wish to evoke rather than report, who hope for readers who don’t quite shake the dust of our stories off their page-turning fingers at the end . . . I’m a slow writer. I know I’m slow. But I flatly don’t believe any mere human can produce two good books every year and go on doing it.†
I had a lot of lovely tweets from people†† saying they’d rather wait for books that have been written rather than not wait for those that have been churned out to an anti-human schedule. And I don’t really have a choice: this is how I am. This is how I write. If this doesn’t work, I am going to have to run away to the circus.††† I tell myself that the world has always claimed to be on the brink of final breakdown of one sort or another—I imagine this dates back to gossip around the fire just after that seditious object the wheel had been invented. But I admit that the particular part of my world that is disintegrating as a result of what is in many ways a great invention, the internet, worries me . . . more than a little.
To end this post on writery things, I give you, in the third place: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/13/books/review/the-writer-in-the-family.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1
I don’t, in fact, agree with a lot of it, but then I’ve also never been a member of the standard family, with growing-up children I’m somehow part responsible for and all that, so my view is skewed. But I love the exchange: ‘Would I have read anything you’ve written?’ from some clueless dweeb you’ve just been introduced to, and Rosenblatt’s reply, ‘How should I know?’ I’m going to remember that one.‡
But the paragraph that had me in hysterics is the one about E L Doctorow trying to write an excuse slip for his daughter, who had missed school the day before. YEEEEEEEEEEEES. This is exactly what happens when you pull your specialised, carefully conditioned, writery bits out of the rarefied atmosphere of fiction and try to make them produce a grocery list or a thank-you note or an email to the department store that sent you a toaster instead of an electric blanket. Yesssss.
Hee hee hee hee hee hee. Which is a much better place to both come in and go out.
* * *
* Which should be recategorised anyway as writer’s repetitive stress injury
** Peter did this more than once
*** Is this writing as craft rather than art? Sometimes you don’t want to be engaged. Sometimes you just want to sit quietly and drink your tea and read a rose catalogue.^ Sometimes you want your chair to have four legs and a seat and not be a dazzling heirloom for the ages when you stagger downstairs in the morning and reach for your electric kettle.
^ Credit card engagement is a different issue.
† Even Charles Dickens, for example^, took holidays, and the quality of his writing is drastically variable, from the mind-explodingly tremendous to the diabolically awful.
^ I’m reading Claire Tomalin’s biography of him right now. I knew he was—erm—a complex character and not all of it good, but the thing I probably find the most fascinating is how narrow the line is between socially aware and engaged literary genius with some personal issues and WHINING, SELF-ABSORBED COMPLETE TICK . . . who by the way wrote some fabulous stories and did some amazing things. You may have guessed I incline to the latter opinion. It’s all about him, all of the time. And I don’t deal well with the sins of the extrovert.
Fascinating book however. I recommend it. And it’s not that Dickens didn’t have to cope with more than one human’s fair share of bulltiddly: he did. I’d have drowned his unspeakable father, for example, and I’d’ve had apoplexy if I’d been trying to earn a living as a writer back in the days before there was an international copyright law. I am riveted by the standard accusations thrown at Dickens when he had the balls—and good for him—to stand up and say stealing people’s work is wrong. He is being greedy, sneered the newspapers, and he should be grateful that people want to read his books. Plus ça frelling frelling change. And we’ve even got, or anyway had, international copyright law for quite a while—although the whole e thing is busy taking that to bits too. Greedy? Grateful? How, pray tell, are us storytellers supposed to earn a living? How do you think we frelling eat and pay the mortgage if we don’t sell our stories? Leprechaun? Printing press in the cellar for counterfeit money? Wealthy indulgent lover? What? What? I get really bored with people who think that all writers are wealthy, but at least these people are acknowledging that being a professional writer involves money. The people who think that writers^ are supposed to give it away and be grateful if anyone wants it . . . should frelling try it some time. Show me someone who is giving it away and doesn’t have either another, paying job, a trust fund, or a joint bank account with a Fortune 500 CEO, and I’ll show you a hologram, an alien from another dimension, or a homeless bag person who is about to die of starvation.
Which is more or less where we came in . . .
^ I assume that painters, sculptors, jewellery-makers, knitters and so on have the same problem. Maybe it’s that we work in words that it seems to me we get so much (wordy) stick. Maybe it’s just that I’m a writer, I notice writer-aimed stick more.
†† Including a gratifying rant from our own Maren. Thank you. And a horrified fellow-feeling my-fingers-are-shrivelling from Jodi, who had already seen the article.
††† And to you who tweeted me about this too: hellhounds would love the circus, once they got a little used to the uproar. And if New Thing’s heroine can haul a rose-bush around in a pot, why can’t I? I can put it (or them) on the steps of my trailer every time we stop.
Peter, I admit, is a problem. I don’t think he’d like the circus at all.
‡ I can hear Merrilee clutching her forehead.
More about ME . . .
. . . Most of which regular blog readers will have seen before.
Mrs Redboots posted a link in the forum last night, to a blog post by a friend of hers who also has ME:
http://dawnknits.livejournal.com/13423.html?view=40559#t40559
Much worse than mine. As I keep saying, mine is a mild case. I know what she’s talking about though—I had eighteen months on the sofa when I first went down with acute ME after two years of regularly recurring glandular fever, which is a very common lead-in. But then I started finding things that worked for me, and I started being able to get up off the sofa occasionally.* And oh, glory, how I know about things like avoiding your kind supportive neighbours because you haven’t got the energy to chat. You get horribly selfish with a disease like ME—or you may do—because suddenly you have so much less livable life at all, and you can’t bear to waste what little is left to you. I’m a cranky introvert anyway—even in my pre-ME days social stuff was tiring, even when I enjoyed it. Now? . . . Don’t even ask. It’s hard to be a nice person when you have a chronic freller.
I want to put in a word on the well-meaning but clueless world’s behalf however. Dawn mentions acquaintances saying jovially that they’d like a ride in her stair lift, that it looks like fun. Well, I’d snarl too, because I’m not good at being patronised, and of course you wouldn’t be using a stair lift if you didn’t frelling have to. But . . . there’s another thing that happens, and sometimes I recognise it when it does: the person who puts their foot in it may be trying to include, or re-include, you into the human race. Oh, a stair lift, oh, okay, no big deal, it looks like fun. From your angle it is a big deal. From their angle, they may be trying to say that it isn’t—in the way that counts. They’re trying, clumsily, to close the gap between you: to say that the important thing is that you’re both human beings.
I get something like this kind of a lot when I am so unfortunate as to have to try to share a meal with someone. Uggh. I’m dairy intolerant, chemical sensitive, and on the rheumatism diet,** and when my digestion is in a bad mood (and it is more than it isn’t) I avoid gluten too. You’ll have to take my word for it that at home, with my organic grocery boxes coming twice a week, it’s not that big a deal.*** Out in the real world . . . I am hell to feed, and I rarely enjoy the attempt. Which leaves me, sometimes, reluctantly having conversations with people who stare at me, trying not to let their mouths drop open at the idea of not being able to eat pizza or brownies or milk in their coffee† and after a dumbstruck silence they’ll say something like, Oh. Yeah. Um. My sister-in-law is allergic to spinach. So we can’t have spinach quiche when she comes to dinner. At which point you have a choice: you can kill them. Or you can recognise they’re trying. They’re trying to close the gap between you.
Uggh. Of course, you’d rather there wasn’t the gap. ††
Slightly similar, in that it’s a perspective thing, is something from the article I posted the link to last night, that I was going to mention and then, because I had so many other things to moan about, I didn’t get around to. Someone told the journalist anonymously that a GP at her clinic had suggested that she take up meditation as therapy. I may be reading this wrong, but my impression is that she—and the journalist—felt that the GP was telling her it was all in her mind. But . . . it sounds like a good idea to me. It’s well known (isn’t it?) that a regular discipline of meditation has enormous physical benefits—as well as calming and centring your butterfly mind. ME is a real disease—we’re not whiny self-absorbed victims who only need to get a grip—but mind and body are one critter. Any disease is a disease of the body and the mind. Let’s not forget that, in our necessary attempts to get the respect—and the research—that we need.†††
* * *
* In my case chiefly vitamins, homeopathy and Bowen massage. I had a friend with fibromyalgia^ who sent me to her doctor. For which I am still, twelve years later, grateful, since he took me seriously—and started me on vitamins. The very first thing that made a difference to my pain and energy levels was magnesium supplements. This won’t be part of everyone’s answer but it was the first thing that gave me some hope that there was something that I could do—that there was a way to alleviate some of the worst symptoms. And I remember the terrifying shock of that first small improvement—the shock of hope. This was also years before the NHS had been dragged, kicking and screaming, into recognising ME as a real disease. My friend’s nice doctor was private, and I couldn’t afford him after the first few visits—and my NHS doctor ‘didn’t believe in ME’.
^ Speaking of neuro-immuno-whatsits as syndromes: fibro is another one. I read up on fibro too because the overlap with ME is considerable, and the boundaries of both are fuzzy.
** No tomatoes, potatoes, eggplant, peppers, or (weirdly) mushrooms, except Shiitake. They’re all nightshades, except the mushrooms, but mushrooms are still on the list. Dairy is on the list for some people—turns out it is for me too, but I was already off it for other reasons. But I gave up my once/twice a year ice cream blow outs when they started giving me severe joint pain. Feh.
*** Peter is mostly pretty tactful about eating the stuff I really miss, like toast, or ice cream, when I’m not around. This is not a household rule, however, nor is the ice cream hidden at the back of the freezer or the bread in a cupboard I never look in. I don’t want any more walls around me than I absolutely have to have, even when they’re for my benefit.
† I’m violently allergic to coffee. Just by the way.
†† Personally I do have a lot of trouble with the ‘you don’t look sick!’ thing—which I also get kind of a lot, because I don’t (usually). This presses my buttons so hard that I can’t tell if this is another clumsy effort to close the gap between me and the healthy moron who just uttered those words, or whether they are telling me I’m malingering. And I guess that as I’m at the high-functioning end people have trouble with my issue about driving: driving is exhausting because of that constant, split-second awareness you must maintain behind the wheel, and that healthy people don’t even notice they’re squandering. I have to kind of crank myself up for it—and I can do it, but it costs. So I do it as little as possible.
I suspect that my fury about the enforced-exercise so-called ‘treatment’ is partly fuelled by the fact that morons who know or recognise me as someone who is ‘naturally’ physically active seem to think that it would suit me—that I just need a little prod toward pulling myself together again. This is not an attempt to close the gap. This is being a flaming asshole. The irony is that—see: Lack of Slack Syndrome—that you do need to keep as physically fit as your illness allows because it makes good days as good as you’re capable of and it’s a fragile but crucial buffer on bad days. Normal healthy people can do their twenty minutes’ exercise three times a week and then go for a fifteen-mile hike on the weekends. I can’t. I do a couple of hours a day, every bloody day, with attendant hellhounds—and some days we cover seven or eight miles. Sometimes we cover one. Sometimes we keep going a clip (rather to hellhounds’ annoyance. They like mooching). Sometimes we sit down a lot—or, lately, with the drought rivering past our knees, lean. I try not to force myself a micro-millimetre past what my body is willing to do that day—but I try not to do much less than a micro-millimetre of what it’ll bear either.
††† And one of these days I will take a deeeeep breath and write about depression. Do I know about depression? I sure do. Speaking of uggh. Very, very big uggh.
ME Awareness Week. And some bad bells.
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:
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.
More tea. More lack of sympathy. More frelling bells.
Arrrrrrgh. Ringing at the abbey. Arrrrrrgh. My first go of Grandsire Triples tonight was a complete retro meltdown. METHOD BELL RINGING IS A STUPID OBSESSION. I AM GOING TO TAKE UP SOMETHING SENSIBLE LIKE CUTTING USED PLASTIC BAGS IN STRIPS, PLAITING THEM TOGETHER, AND MAKING RUGS OUT OF THEM. And then, as if this was not humiliation enough . . . Peter and I went to Tabitha, the Bowen-massage lady, this afternoon, and she has this frelling fixation on drinking water.* She gives you this frelling ewer of water to drink at the end of your session ‘to help flush the toxins out quickly.’ Uh huh. By the time we got home again I had barely an hour before bell ringing . . . and of course I had to have a cup of tea. Face Grandsire Triples with a bell-rope in my hands without a recent injection of caffeine to stiffen my resolve? No chance. And the result was. . . .
I had thought there was a loo at the abbey. Well, there is, but the public one closes at the end of abbey-as-museum visiting hours.** And the staff one is available only by Delphic utterance, and while Og gave me the correct orison, no one had a spare golden apple with which to placate the guardian dragon. So . . . I climbed down through the centuries again to ground level . . . and staggered dizzily out into a good-sized town with dozens of public loos—the fabulous public loo system is high on my list of good reasons to live in this frelling country—all of which were closed. Nobody needs to pee after 6 pm. It’s probably in the fine print of my visa. Eventually I gatecrashed a hotel. I might as well have been in New York City. Arrrrrgh.***
And, not that these two events had anything to do with each other . . . but my second trial of Grandsire Triples . . . was not too bad. Therefore I am writing this blog rather than getting my sword off the wall to make it easier to fall on.
I did realise I was speaking rather provocatively the other night about tea and critters. . . .
Mirkat
Have I shared this before? http://www.adagio.com/teaware/ingenuiTEA_teapot.html
Hmm. Do you use this? Do you like it? I’m having a little plaintive ‘why?’ moment. I like my teapot. And it works just fine. But if this one makes you happy then that’s good.
Or do you have a favorite tea infuser?
About fifteen years ago some bright spark finally invented—or anyway marketed—or anyway marketed in the UK—a proper frelling tea sieve. It’s the shape of a tea mug, and just enough smaller to fit inside the mug, and with a lip around the top so it hangs on the rim and you don’t have to fish for it. Peter and I have several, partly in case of accidents or visitors, and partly because since I tend to like my tea STRONG any infuser I employ regularly tends to pick up flavours, so I want different infusers for different teas. And that’s what I use. I also have two teapots with very large lids, which means very large holes where the lids fit, which will take one of these infusers—or an even bigger one, suitable for teapots belonging to people who like their tea STRONG. Whittards was the first I know of to introduce these purpose-built mesh infusers, but most tea shops that sell loose tea have them now.
EMoon
I think being in central Texas defeats the whole notion of tea.
Phooey. Don’t any of you forum people watch THE AFRICAN QUEEN at regular intervals? In which Katharine Hepburn drinks lots of hot tea in the tropics?
When visiting in England, I loved tea. . . . But here I have a) sulphury, hard, heavily treated water, b) water that is, for much of the year, emerging from the faucet warm to hot, and c) no real desire for anything hot to drink because it’s so hot.
Have you ever tried a cup of good tea in hot weather? I drink it year round and while English summers are nothing on Texas summers, in a bad year we’ll get weather quite hot enough to lay me out and make me miserable. Hot drinks may have the curious effect of cooling you off.
And no desire to waste the water that filling a pot with hot water, tossing that water, and then filling it again means, because we’re still in drought. (Or for that matter having the stove on long enough to boil that much water.)
Good lord, who said anything about tossing it? You put it back in the kettle. It’s still half-warm too, so the kettle will re-boil that much quicker. AND YOU NEED AN ELECTRIC KETTLE. You can now get them in America although I’m not sure how common they are. But they are THE BEST.
In our rare cold spells, I wish very hard for good hot tea. But make it? In these conditions? Probably never.
Different water filters will deal with different things; presumably your local Water Filter Experts have not endeared themselves to you. I doubt I’d drink the stuff you’re describing either in tea or at all. But there is always bottled water. Bottled water varies too—there’s a lot of fancy expensive mineral water out there I actively dislike the taste of—but if you used bottled water just for tea you wouldn’t get through it fast enough to put the mortgage at risk.
nickithomas
I use loose tea in the cup . . . Put milk in cup first ( . . . I am one of those unreasonably fanatical milk-firsters), a generous spoon of tea in a strainer, shake strainer over bin (to get rid of the dusty bits that will end up floating on your tea otherwise) before putting on cup then pour boiling water in SLOWLY and moving around to cover all the tea. When full, leave a minute or 2 before removing strainer and stirring.
SHUDDER. Well, as above, to each her own. If this works for you then that’s fine. But your tea can’t infuse properly if you treat it like this. Milk first isn’t a problem—you just brew your tea in a one-mug-sized pot, and pour it into your mug with the milk in it. PS: Good tea does not have dusty bits.
Have to admit that this does not work well with the really good expensive tea that tends be much bigger leaves and requires more steeping – but I can’t afford that very often anyway.
It’s not just more steeping—you need hot water. There’s a whole fal-lal about water temperature, and how different teas do better at different temperatures. Generally speaking you don’t want furiously-boiling water, which may burn or anyway damage good tea. You want it some kind of just-barely-off the boil. Which if you’ve already put your milk in, isn’t going to happen.
glanalaw
I drink PG Tips, but only because it’s the only halfway decent loose tea to be had in this part of the country.
I’ve heard rumours that PG Tips does a not-bad loose tea. As someone who remembers PG Tips in their heyday of powdered charcoal briquettes and black widow spider legs, I am dubious, but I will take your word for it. Since I plunged into the Fussy Snob Tea world a long time ago I’m not likely to try it myself.
Short of mail-ordering from England, which isn’t an option on the poor-starving-college-student budget.
Oh, now wait a golly gosh darn minute. I don’t for a minute believe there aren’t a million posh tea web sites in America. The British tea fetish is pretty much a myth—the overwhelming majority of cuppas are made of (bleaugh) cheap tea bags, and overall, the British drink more coffee than they do tea. Sacrilege. But cult tea is alive and thriving—it’s come on pretty much parallel to the availability of proper strainers, I think. In the dark ages your only option for loose tea was those damned little tea balls on chains that you hooked round the handle of your tea pot. Except that they were TOO SMALL so you might as well use bags after all, the tea still had no room to expand. Mostly I just dumped the tea in the bottom of the pot (or the mug) and let it swirl. Since I like loooooong steeping, by the time I was ready to drink it the tea leaves had all settled tactfully to the bottom anyway. If I was using a pot, I poured through a sieve. This did mean that by the time you drank your last cup it was getting kind of . . . violent. But one of the laws of the universe is that good tea does not stew. It may get a little exciting, but it never goes bitter.
If I was making tea that someone else was going to drink with me I would sometimes use a festoon of those wretched little tea balls, so I could pull them out. I had about six.
Regarding cats vs. dogs: I’ve always preferred cats (and at my present stage of life, a dog would be impossible because I’m not home often enough).
Buy two dogs. Then they keep each other company. People roll their eyes when I say this, but it’s perfectly practical. It’s the first dog that’s the huge leap of responsibility. Dog or no dog is the big one. One dog or two dogs is details—including important details such as getting two dogs that like each other—and a little extra dog food.
But then most of the cats I’ve know, definitely including the current one, seem to think they are dogs actually, at least in terms of the being-glad-to-see-you and the cuddling.
It’s individuals really, on both sides, the humans and the critters. If I have to come down on a side, then I’m a dog person. Clearly. But there are plenty of dogs out there I wouldn’t have even if they came with a guaranteed charm for ringing Grandsire Triples (just add boiling water). And even within categories of dogs I don’t like—little frelling terriers, say—there are individuals I’m all over. I met up with Titus’ little frelling terrier puppy again about a fortnight ago and he’s still adorable. And I was taking care of the hellcat again while Cathy was here, while Phineas was golfing in Scotland [sic]. I’m actually pretty pathetic: if it’s furry and it acts like it likes me, then it’s my friend.
I hope your baby robins don’t wash away!
Me too. I’m worried I’m not seeing more little rustling things in the shrubbery. I did see dad robin stuffing mealworms into something yesterday, so I think there’s at least one of them still undrowned.
Blogmom
Cats rule! Dogs drool.
Flapdoodle. In the first place, you have a dog, and I bet he does not drool, any more than the hellhounds do, who are an entirely drool-free zone. In the second place, worst droolers I’ve ever met have been cats. I’m told it’s something to do with having been weaned too young. But they knead your lap or your chest and DROOL. Ewwwww. Give me an honest Great Dane any day.
Kathy S
Dogs set booby traps. Cats courteously bury it.
Again, flapdoodle. I have cat crap all over my garden at Third House and I don’t feel the least kindly and tolerant about it. One of my absolute pet peeves is the fact that cats are allowed utter freedom to trash other people’s property, shred, roll in or dig up their plants, crap all over their driveways, claw their doorframes, eat their endangered songbirds and have yowling cat fights under their windows and that’s just the way cats are. I completely agree that dog owners should pick up after and generally control their dogs . . . but it bites me big time that there is no regulation of cats. Including that they get to make your dogs’ lives hell because it amuses them to act like jerks.
b_twin_1
I will acknowledge that dogs are inclined to leave landmines. BUT…. Cats also leave them. In your garden beds. Where you can find them whilst you are on your hands and knees weeding….
Yes.
I think that we’re frelled no matter which side we take…
Yes. That’s about it.
Diane in MN
I like cats–at least, I like doggish cats–but I seriously do not like litterboxes, or the little kitty feet on the countertops after they’ve been in the litterbox. I admit that my dogs can slime the countertops, but there is a difference, however slight.
This is pretty much the deal breaker with me. The little kitty feet on my counters. I’ve lived with cats. And I’ve liked the cats I’ve lived with, and I find purring very soothing to go to sleep to. But cats leap. That’s the way they are.
shalea
I love both dogs and cats, but I have an absolute No Feet or Butts on Food Preparation Surfaces rule for everyone — cats, dogs, small children (who might sit on countertops).
And how do you ENFORCE this? Dogs and children are (relatively) straightforward to train. Cats, not so much. I know they can be trained, and that what I react to as head games is the cat idea of social interaction, but how do you keep them off your countertops? Barring poisoned spikes, that is, which would be kind of in the way at suppertime.
AbigailW
So what kind of tea do you drink? I like a good cup of black tea and I know that bags are cheating, but what do real Brits drink? I suspect it’s not Twinings.
CathyR
Well, this Brit drinks Twinings. Teabags. English Breakfast. Weak, no milk, 1/2 a sugar. A brew less like Robin’s it would be hard to imagine!
Which is to say everything is about individuals.
* * *
* Speaking of obsessions. I wonder if she’d like to go halves on developing the plastic rag rug market.
** I think the loos stay open later if there’s a late service or a concert. —The admin, and the proliferating admin decisions, about trying to run a major national centre of practising Christianity and an internationally famous tourist attraction must be mind-blowing, and not in a good way. Any big corporation is a complex mess to run but when the widget your factory produces is spiritual enlightenment, wowzah, oil and water are soulmates in comparison. I know people who know people, and the abbey is a complex mess. And I’m told our tower captain watches the abbey diary like Jeremy Lin watching the ball,^ and not infrequently phones up this or that person and says, pardon me, but shouldn’t the bell ringers know about this? Oh—er—yes, says this or that person. Sorry.
^ Good gods, I just made a sports reference+. Sorry. But I like stereotype breakers, and he is one.
+ That isn’t about horses. Hey, did you know that Great Britain has a very strong dressage team for the Olympics this summer? First flicker of interest I’ve felt in the Olympics, which I would much rather were being held somewhere else. Katmandu. Neuquen City.
*** Gemma had given me the keys to her house. This would have involved driving, for pity’s sake. For a LOO? I thought she was joking. She wasn’t. I was jingling her keys in my pocket and wondering what the chances were that Wolfgang would start not once but twice only about twenty minutes after I’d turned him off^ when I took a sharp right and shot through the doors of the Hotel Forza Verduta. Fortunately the only receptionist was on the phone. I heard her say ‘There is a train from London . . .’
^ No, I still haven’t booked him in to get his starter motor replaced. I know, I know. And I don’t like living dangerously. I’m just disorganised.
Pan-galactic finals
Grandson did not win. Grandson came fourth in the vocal category. I wouldn’t have expected him to have stage nerves—he’s been in amateur and semi-professional gigs pretty much since he was old enough to toddle on by himself, and was eye-catching enough at one of the latter to have had the offer of a scholarship at one of the big flashy London performing-arts schools but decided for himself he didn’t want to be that single minded and that far away from home yet—but my guess is that there were some nerves in attendance. He’s a charismatic performer, and that was a little muted today.*
But it was a much more interesting show generally than either Peter or I was expecting, I think. The first thing that happened was a reprieve. The order of performance is done by lot, and his mum said that he always draws early, so we were going to have to be there for the first shot over the adjudicators’ bows. And then last thing last night, news—he was going to be in the second half, after the break. So we could drift in in an idle and well-rested manner at about 11 . . .
Except we didn’t. We didn’t leave that much later after all, had an easy soar down there** and only missed the first performer.*** And . . . what it was was a free concert with great seats. I’m not sure what I was expecting—these are the national finals after all, and the Pan-galactics are no slouch. But. Wow.
In the absence of pianists† I was far more interested in the singers, not only because we had our hero to cheer for (who was, just by the way, the only boy). But (as I emailed Nadia, because I had to talk to somebody who would understand) while before Blondel and Nadia I would have been able to pick out the bits these young singers haven’t quite nailed yet†† I wouldn’t have been so aware of how they were trying to do what they were doing—and of some of the pitfalls on the way they have successfully negotiated. I don’t think anyone who cares deeply about music and listens intensely is ever unaware of what a lot of work doing it well is, but there is definitely a difference in kind of your appreciation if you’re having a small stumbling whack at it yourself.
There were a few repertoire choices that I thought were a bit ill advised, but the slightly unsatisfactory deliveries may also have been nerves rather than that the singer was overfaced by her material. And there were a few real jaw-droppers. The girl who won looks about twelve. She came quietly out and announced her pieces with perfect self-possession but no particular panache . . . and then started to sing. Big major yeeeeep.††† Golly she was good. She was one of the first, and was instantly one to beat. And then as it happens the last song by the last performer was the other real jaw-dropper, Cherubino from the Marriage of Figaro raving about love. She sang it with exactly the right wildness for the adolescent male‡, but it was also the most fully realised complete performance: an ordinary teenage girl in a nice party dress suddenly transformed into a lust-maddened teenage boy. It was extraordinary. She came second. The girl who came first was probably the more polished performance but this last babe had passion.‡‡
And I got a lot of knitting done. I really am going to have a pair of leg warmers by next autumn.‡‡‡ Possibly conceivably just-believably even two pairs.§
* * *
* I admit I’ve never heard him in public before. But he knocks the back wall of the kitchen out when he sings here. His voice has got amazing over the last few years. I remember him as starting out a perfectly nice light tenor and he says he’s still a tenor but I’d call him a baritone. He’s got the baritone boooom at the bottom of his range, although he says it’s the top end that’s stretching. Well, I bet the bottom end will stretch too. Or maybe he’s just going to grow up to be one of the heldentenors of our time. 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.
** My gods. The Jaguar. Yeep. I don’t ride in fancy cars all that often and I forget. The sensation of gliding rather than sitting in something with mere wheels. The way you are forced back into the leather upholstery if your driver decides to pass some mere vehicle.
Caligula
What sort of Jag was it?
I haven’t the faintest idea and they didn’t know. (It originally belonged to Saxon’s dad.) I did ask.^ Georgiana said that it’s a Sovereign, and I can tell you that it’s the xj type, but in the great hierarchy of Jags I haven’t the slightest.^^ I’d be surprised if it was more than about ten years old, but then Jags age well. But speaking of charisma. . . .
^ I said someone on the blog wanted to know. Most of the members of the immediate clan are aware of my curious nighttime activity.
^^ Slatey blue-grey with creamy leather insides. You want to have brushed hair and clean fingernails when you sit in it. Hellhounds need not apply.
*** Okay, here’s an oddity that perhaps some music teacher out there can explain. There was one cello and one violoncelle—I don’t even know what a violoncelle^ is and it’s the one person we missed—and everything else you blew into, and all but one were winds. The one blowing-into that wasn’t, was a euphonium, which I wouldn’t have been able to describe to you either, but I can tell you now it’s a bit like a big rectangular French horn and has similar big fat scary notes and I have no idea how he managed to get so many of them out of the thing so accurately. The rest were three flutes, a clarinet and a very snazzy recorder. No violinists? No pianists?
^ And the only on line definitions I can find are in French. Is it the French word for cello? There has to be some reason to call it a violoncelle rather than a cello?
† !!!!!!!!!!!!!
†† Someone sang Dove Sei. Snork. But the irony about her performance was that she didn’t take advantage of her opportunities to hit that note and hold the freller till your audience begs for mercy. You come in on a fermata: Doooooooooooooove sei, and there’s another one in the ‘vieni’ before your top G, which is as hair-raising as it gets in this innocent-seeming little aria^, but that little phrase is set up for you to go for it. Nadia, whose mission in my life is to loosen me up, has even said go for it, and that (if I need a light whip of vengeance to get my blood circulating) here is my opportunity to make Oisin follow me, because this is the Singer’s Big Moment. You even repeat the vieni-with-top-G phrase on the second go-through—and then run down the last few bars to the end. I can’t do it, but I do grasp that it’s rife with opportunity. And this little girl with the lovely sweet voice and the appealing manner went straight through all her hot chances without anything remotely resembling a fermata. This may, of course, have been her stage nerves, but I’d’ve said the accompanist was expecting it.
Speaking of the accompanist(s): most of the performers brought their own.^^ There was one fellow who appeared several times whom I had little trouble identifying as the one laid on locally, and I wasn’t too impressed. Till the introducer mentioned that he had in fact stepped in with about forty-eight hours’ warning when the fellow they had booked went down ill. Yowzah. Suddenly he’s a hero too.
^ Nadia keeps telling me it’s not that difficult a piece and I’m just reacting to the fact that it’s from an OPERA.
^^ Our hero’s accompanist is lovely.
††† She sang an aria from Cosi fan tutte, where Despina is chirpily and dancingly telling her mistresses (she’s their maid) how to catch a bloke, and then this moooooournful legaaaaaaato lied by Brahms.
‡ Yes. It’s a trouser role for a mezzo.
‡‡ Other standouts for me included one of those Italian arias from the notorious soprano student’s ARIE book that I sing: Se Tu M’ami. She did it a lot better. Surprise. Not. And ‘Batti batti’ from Don Giovanni was also charmingly and flirtatiously done—which is the only way to bring it off. Mozart is so frelling tuneful you can forget what complex personalities his characters are.
‡‡‡ Barring rogue yarn-bomber raids where masked individuals steal your projects to wrap around lampposts and bollards.
§ Well I need an assortment of COLOURS, don’t I?