Cough
I am a walking cough; a cough on two legs; cough made flesh. Cough. Talking is a mistake.* Eating is perilous.** I think the arrival of the cough is supposed to indicate you’re improving.*** I’m too tired from coughing to tell. Cough.
But SHADOWS is still going.†
I am however cranky†† about the bad news about ultrasonic jewellery cleaners. I had thought part of the point of the ultrasonic gadgets is that they’re gentle on jewellery, possibly to the point of being so gentle they don’t really clean anything. (I do know that you can’t do anything to pearls except smile at them and wear them against cashmere.) I also didn’t know, or had forgotten, since I’ve barely worn my tourmaline ring in twenty years, that tourmalines are fragile. Feh. And yes, of course I can ask our nice local jeweller for advice about cleaning, but he will feel obliged to go all professional on me and I was hoping some of you guys might have the answer without the official hedging.††† Ah well. More little brushes and washing-up liquid in my future then. I guess I can bear it.
And before I bore you all to death . . . I am loitering frivolously with the thought of going ringing at Forza tomorrow. This is a really bad idea. I don’t have the time, I don’t have the energy, I have a novel to finish—the bells there are tricky sods, I already know Gemma is not going to be there, and I might find myself the only mediocre ringer present, with my usual additional burden of not being able to handle those particular bells and the supernumerary burden of the lurgy.
Maybe I’ll just stay home, and post a recipe. And cough.
* * *
* Why do hellhounds insist on waiting till I say something? Isn’t the mad waving of hands containing harnesses enough to tell them they should sit?
** Eating is always perilous. Ask Darkness and Chaos. AAAAAUGH. Having given the impression that he was on the mend last night, Chaos barely made it outdoors this morning to start the diabolical double-ended geysering all over again. AAAAAAAUGH.
*** http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2012/jan/09/new-year-health-regime-last The headline in the paper version is more eye-catching to me in my present state: ‘Dr Luisa Dillner Says Switch Off the TV, Stop Snacking and Start Exercising to Ensure You Feel Good Beyond January.’ I haven’t watched TV in YEARS,^ I am post-menopausal and my daily energy allowance is 3.5 calories and I NEVER snack, and I walk an hour and forty five minutes to two hours EVERY DAY. WHY DO I HAVE THE LURGY WHEN I AM A PARAGON OF VIRTUE?^^
^ I talked to Hannah today. “Hi,” I said. Cough. “Wow,” she said. She still hasn’t read CHAOS. After she does we’re going to read either JANE AUSTEN or CHARLES DICKENS by Claire Tomalin. Or both, because we have so much time to read. She was telling me about the TV programmes her daughters are watching and I’ve never heard of any of them. I haven’t been deeply involved in a TV show since BUFFY. No, really. ANGEL? Too gruesome. FIREFLY? Eh. It had its moments, but it never entered my heart and mind the way BUFFY did.+ It’s probably safe to say that I wouldn’t be writing my first high school novel at fifty-nine if I hadn’t watched BUFFY at an embarrassingly advanced age which was nonetheless more impressionable than it should have been. Which may or may not be a good thing.
Oh, and the mysterious non-cooperation affliction of our de-cabled TV? We changed the batteries in the remote and it still refused to climb away from BBC 1. So there was a knock on the door one afternoon and there was the Nice Man who had installed our freeview box who wanted to ask if one of us would read his CHILDREN’S BOOK MANUSCRIPT. Fortunately Peter answered the door and dragged him into the sitting room and thrust the remote at him. There are too many buttons on the wretched thing. And Peter is reading his manuscript. I had my mouth all open to do my rant on this subject which is that ASIDE from the fact that I am a cranky cow, what I think about an unpublished manuscript has no more to do with its chances of getting published than what Chaos or Darkness thinks of it.++ Go start researching AGENTS. What you need is an AGENT who likes your work. But I was forestalled by Peter’s old-fashioned gentlemanliness AKA the man is nuts.
+ And I’m the only person on the planet who didn’t/doesn’t like THE SOPRANOS or David Tennant.
++ Er—you aren’t expecting us to eat it, are you?
^^ Of course they also tell you to get seven to eight hours of sleep every night. They must be joking.
† And my email seems to have settled down . . . for the moment. Sort of. Or, possibly, not, and I just don’t know it. It was even weirder than I told you yesterday, as I eventually found out when I stopped abusing my damaged larynx with screams for vengeance and had a look for the easily findable stuff that had reappeared. When I got back to the mews and turned the old laptop on—which is the one I’ve been using the last several flu-demented days of filing and deleting—I was braced for what I’d just seen on the cottage machines. But what had come back was NOT what I’d deleted that morning. It was some OTHER stuff. Whimper.
So . . . I basically have no idea. GIBBERGIBBERGIBBERGIBBER. Right. Enough of that. I have a novel to finish.
As to why I still use Outlook . . . I forget. I will ask Raphael to remind me. I think it’s to do with my apparently somewhat unusual requirements combined with my total lack of patience, interest in, or skill in understanding anything to do with computers. I think it’s what they’re willing to support me with. The bright spot, such as it is, is that the shiny new laptop with the vibrantly hated Win 7 on it did in fact discharge its battery by 50% overnight despite being turned off. YAAAAY. For once something goes wrong even when there is an archangel present.
However, those of you hopefully offering advice about the hellhounds: I think you’re probably late to the party. Long-time readers have heard all this before. My hellhounds are five and a half years old and I spent the first two of their years of life on this planet trying to find out why they had diarrhea all the time. The answer is, as I eventually figured out with absolutely NO help from any of the fantastic and expensive panoply of vets, specialist vets, and specialist vets’ laboratories and techno-gizmo whatsits that I consulted, that they are allergic to all cereal grains. (Pancreatitis, as someone mentioned on the forum but I can’t find it now, is one of the things they were temporarily diagnosed for.) I’d tried an elimination diet nearly first thing, but I took them off brown rice while continuing to use barley and oats, and then swapped. It took me a long time to think of all cereals. But two years of eating something they were wildly and violently allergic to has left them with some permanent damage.
And the only time they won’t eat when I’m nearby is when they’re already looking for an excuse not to eat, and me being an ogre will do. (I think this has more to do with the fact that they know I want them to eat and I’ll be testy if they don’t.) I’m actually not very fond of the alpha theory. Why would a good leader want his/her colleagues not to eat? The alpha business as the great comprehensive answer to everything is less popular than it was, for which I am grateful. When it first came crashing out it was The Solution, and I thought, since it clearly didn’t apply all that well to my experience, that I just had weird dogs. Well, I do have weird dogs, but the alpha theory has also lost centre stage. I am, however, a great fan of what works. If something makes you and your dog(s) happy and healthy and comfortable and satisfied, then it’s the answer for you.
†† Cough
††† Note to self: The Answer never exists.
I can’t very well ask the fellow who bought the stones for us. That was twenty years ago in Maine and I have more or less deliberately^ forgotten everything about him except that he was a self-absorbed twit.
^ Ie making a virtue of Middle Aged Brain
Flu, hellhounds, SHADOWS and Jodi Meadows
Okay, that’s not your average mixture. Let’s have the good news first:
http://www.jodimeadows.com/?p=525
YAAAAAAAAAAAY. It’s alive!
* * *
. . . We are now, I fear, about to plunge down a steep slope. I was feeling a little odd last night but in my current state of whatever it’s always easy to put oddness down to a surfeit of quantum physics.* Unfortunately not so in this case. I nearly didn’t get out of bed this morning, except that there are hellhounds. And SHADOWS. Which is still due the end of the month. I can’t frelling believe I’m ILL again. I was ill in October, for pity’s sake**. I’m not sure yet whether this is merely (!!!!) a sick cold or whether it’s going to insist on the full panoply of flu. At the moment the jury is still out. But I feel like stale death on toast. AND CRANKY.
So I got out of bed at about . . . noon. I barely fell down at all. There are hardly any bruises from caroming off the four-poster on the way to the bathroom, which had mysteriously moved to a new location overnight.
I got dressed. I don’t guarantee that my tee shirt is on the right way around (who cares? It’s covered up by six woolly jumpers) but I got the shoes on the right feet.*** I hurtled hounds. Yes. I did.† Twice.††
And I worked on SHADOWS. I did.
. . . And this is as much blog entry as I can hold myself together for.††† Good night. May you sleep better than I’m likely to.
* * *
* Brief, according to my present state of non-brain, update on ABSOLUTELY SMALL: It’s all maths. I don’t know how even a crazed mathematician/physicist can have had the effrontery to look Average Reader in the face in the introduction and claim that understanding quantum mechanics does not require mathematics. You are so lying, Professor Award-Winning Scientist Bloke. It’s all maths.^
What is true is something else he said in the introduction however: that in most physics books the author says something like, blah blah blah blah, and here are the equations to prove it. And you’re supposed to read the equations. What’s different about ABSOLUTELY SMALL is that he then tells you the equations over in words. The equations are still there. You still have to deal with equations. They may not look like a lot of equations to Mr/Ms Science Brain but they are totally equations. But once he gets away from those poor cats waiting trembling in boxes for the Killing Look, he explains stuff pretty well.^^
If you’re up for it . . . it’s pretty fascinating. It’s so insane. It’s so not Newtonian.^^^ I also just love that most of it you can’t know exactly. HA HA HA HA ALL YOU CREEPY OVERBEARING SCIENCE BRAINS WHEN I WAS IN HIGH SCHOOL. HA HA HA HA HA. Granted I still don’t get it, but I’m a lot happier with the concept of a world that cannot be known/measured exactly—can’t be nailed down. This sounds a lot more plausible to me—more like my experience of the daily life this book is supposed to let me fit quantum theory into. ^^^^ And as he says, approximate doesn’t mean wrong: it means . . . approximate.
Anyway. It’s fascinating. But it’s probably not a book you want to strain to your bosom when you stagger off to lie on the sofa with hellhounds and minister to your brain-destroying illness.
^ Now that I’m committed, which is to say I’ve bought the thing, twice, audio and hard copy,+ I notice with a jaundiced eye that the three encomiums on the back cover about how This Is The Book We’ve Been Waiting for to Explain Quantum Mechanics in Daily Life are all by hard liners. There are two scientists and a lawyer. I’m sure he’s a very hard-line lawyer. And probably the author’s best friend since childhood. I want a hat check girl/boy or a brewer or ballroom dancing coach to tell me it changed their concept of life.
+ I cannot believe that anyone would survive the experience by audio only. If audio helps you focus, as it does help me, then the audio is worthwhile, and audible’s reader gets a medal. But you’re still going to have to have the hard copy. For the equations. If it takes the reader too long to say one of the frellers, you’ll have forgotten the beginning by the time he gets to the end. Lambda squared of the hypotenuse of the lobotomy . . . um. . . .
^^ I do wish he’d stay away from real-world examples. Even I know that a baseball is not a free particle, even when it’s left the field and is busy arcing over the stands. Speaking of the physics of gliding, however, is anyone playing Tiny Wings? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x6pT_2E5xI0 I don’t know what I think of the game, but I love the graphics.
^^^ I have a new theory about why Newton was such an ugly piece of work as a human being. It’s because in his secret heart he knew he was wrong.
^^^^ Look at human nature. Look at hellhound nature.
** I think it was October. Autumn anyway. A few months ago. And my stupid throat hasn’t recovered from the last assault which is why the Muddlehamptons are forgetting my name. ARRRRRRRGH. And here I am again with an inflamed throat, a throbbing head, and that interesting kind of fever that makes you feel like you’re made of boiling aluminium. I RARELY GET THESE MALADIES. RARELY. Except lately ARRRRRRRRRGH.
*** One right foot. One left foot.
† I also deserve a medal. But so do they. At the ripe old age of five and a half, although generally speaking the advent of maturity is a little thin on the ground, they are very good about waiting till I get my crap together, even when I seem to be having unreasonably more trouble than usual with said crap, and of hurtling slowly, with pauses, once we get outside. I know the location of every public dustbin in this town . . . I also know the location of every bench, not that kerbs won’t do in a pinch. They probably just think I’m having a bad ME day. Multi-application hellhound training.
†† And the dog minder is going to take them out tomorrow. Another medal.
††† I told an American friend that what I really needed, Peter having made some excellent turkey stock for the bodily nutrition side, was someone to tell me Really Bad American Jokes. So she’s taken it upon herself to send me Really Bad American Jokes all day at intervals—for the support of my suffering soul. Here’s my favourite:
It’s the old west, and a newcomer to town sees there’s a big crowd gathered in the town square. So he spots the local newspaperman, and asks him what’s going on.
”It’s a hanging,” says the newsman. “They’re hanging Brown Paper Pete today.”
“Brown Paper Pete? Why do they call him that?” asks the visitor.
“Because he always wears brown paper pants, a brown paper shirt, a brown paper hat, and carries a brown paper satchel,” says the newsman.
“Wow,” says the visitor, “What are they hanging him for?”
“Rustling.”
She’s just sent me this one, but she says that I’m sick enough to worry her if I think these are funny.
Guy walks into a bar, sits down and orders a beer. While he’s drinking, he hears a tiny voice say, “Hey mister! I like your tie!” He looks around, but doesn’t see anybody. A few minutes later, the same tiny voice says, “Hey mister! Nice shirt!” Again, he looks around, but there’s no one around except him and the bartender. A little while later, the voice says, “Hey mister! You look like you’ve lost some weight!” So the guy calls the bartender over and asks him what’s going on. The bartender says, “Oh, that’s the peanuts. They’re complimentary.”
The Tourmaline Ring
So it’s twenty and a half years ago. Peter and I have decided to get married.* All the important stuff has already been decided, like that I’m going to emigrate.** But that means we have to get married: the fiancée’s visa only lasts for six months. That’s not a problem: we’re both old-fashioned: we want to get married, and I’m the kind of old-fashioned that furthermore wants a proper ring to go with the deal. Hey. I like jewellery.
I’d originally assumed we’d find one suitably old and hoary and glamorous and possibly mad in an antique shop somewhere for an engagement ring; wedding rings to be practical need to be plain and could be dealt with separately when we knew what the flashy one looked like. We spent some time in this pursuit*** but we were finding nothing nearly unique and fabulous enough, I had to finish DEERSKIN and we wanted to get on with the moving and the new life and so on.
I can’t now remember who recommended this jewellery designer to us. But we went to see him and explained we wanted something definitively Maine for me to wear in England. He suggested Maine tourmalines—I think I didn’t know about Maine tourmalines at that point—and we eventually agreed that he’d design and make not only an engagement ring with the tourmalines, but wedding rings that would all fit together as part of the same design. Peter felt this was mostly my show† and I did try to tell the bloke the sort of thing I liked: flowing lines, mainly, swirly or woven or floral. Maybe sort of art nouveau. I liked the stuff in his shop. And I liked the idea of the Maine designer working with the Maine tourmalines.
We went back to see the stones when they arrived. I don’t know if the designer bloke asked for triangular, or if that was what he could get. Okay. This would make it unusual. And pink and green are excellent.
We never saw any designs. We saw the rings themselves when they’d already been cast (if cast is what I mean) and although they weren’t finished yet it wasn’t like we could go backward and say, uh, no, I meant Charles Rennie Macintosh, not Cecil Balmond.†† The wedding rings had these little hooks in the middle like the two ends of a twist tie bent together—and with the squared-off ends sticking out up and down your finger. Can you say CATCHES THE FRELL ON EVERYTHING? My tourmaline engagement ring fit down over the top ensnaring bend of my wedding ring, but that still left the sharp bottom edge to cause havoc and mayhem. They were certainly . . . different. But they were not sensible, and while many of the details of that whole era of the beginning of my life with Peter are blurry with exhilaration and terror, I do remember Peter telling the bloke that he works with his hands a lot, he spends hours every day in the garden, doing carpentry and cooking and he needs a ring that won’t get in the way.
The man smiled and nodded. These creative types. They’re so in their own little world.†††
But part of the swoop and breathtakingness of a runaway romance like ours is that you do kind of want it to glide as far as it can before it founders on some ineluctable aspect of ratbagging reality. The wife in the attic. The outstanding warrant. The gerbil fetish. The chocolate addiction . . . And I don’t think the designer bloke was cheating us in any overt way: I think we paid an honest amount for his time and his materials. He just didn’t listen.
Almost the first thing we did after the wedding was over was . . . run to the nearest ordinary jeweller and buy two utterly plain smooth gold rings and wear them. The barbed designer versions came out for fancy occasions and the rest of the time lived in my jewellery drawer. Sigh. This had not been the plan . . . and while the plain gold ones worked fine as wedding rings‡ I was rather wistful about my Maine tourmalines wasting their glory in a drawer.
I think it was around our tenth anniversary that Peter said, for our twentieth, we’ll have the tourmalines reset.
So that’s what we did. And this time we went to a jeweller we’ve been going to for . . . twenty years. He listens. He made my fabulous silver whippet belt buckle.‡‡ And we saw designs. We saw several designs. I wanted my new ring to look like it fit next to the plaited-gold-with-tiny-diamond-chips ring that was my fiftieth birthday present‡‡‡ and which I now wear as my wedding ring. And it does, doesn’t it?
This time it worked.
Mmmmmm. ::Beams::
* * *
* And our friends and family are all going, what? Well, it was a somewhat precipitate decision. We’d known each other maybe sixty hours in total.^
^ I’ve told you how we met, haven’t I? I was on a Literary Tour of England and he was one of the speakers.
** Somebody had to. Peter originally suggested we divide our time, but I knew—and I’m sure I was right—we’d both hate it. And Peter had lived in this area of Hampshire over forty years at that point, had four kids, the first two grandchildren, three brothers and their families, eight first cousins and . . . I had a whippet, and a background as a peripatetic military brat.
*** This was the occasion of one of our most important Bonding Moments. THELMA AND LOUISE had been bigger than god, Spacelab and Boris Yeltzin for months, and it was playing at a theatre in Portland, Maine, where we’d gone to cruise antique jewellery shops. I’ve told you this too, haven’t I? We walked out. We walked right after the dumb one spends the night with Brad Pitt the robber on the lam AND THE MONEY IN THE FRELLING DRAWER while the smart (!!?!??) one goes off to have a deep, sensitive evening with her supportive boyfriend.
† He’s got a much better eye for jewellery than he thinks he does—see: silver whippet belt buckle, below—but it’s true that this was my Big Symbolic Thing about leaving Maine to live in England with him.
†† http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-14027083 Okay, I don’t know what Balmond was doing twenty years ago. Designing engagement rings, possibly.
††† I do wonder if Designer Bloke already had this idea in his mind and he wanted to use it, whether the triangular stones inspired it, or what. But he sure wasn’t too interested in the interface with his clients.
‡ Anybody aware of the standard behaviour about such things of English gentlemen of Peter’s vintage will be gobsmacked that Peter wears a wedding ring at all. Well. Yes. I don’t think it ever occurred to me that he wouldn’t—I wanted us both to wear them—and that’s what happened. It wasn’t till later that I realised that Peter was humouring me about this too.^
^ I tell myself that if I have to choose I’d rather he wore a wedding ring than remembered to shut the door behind him.+ I perhaps tell myself this rather often. But romance over practicality? Sure. Why do I have sixty rose-bushes in a garden the size of a large ping-pong table?
+ This includes refrigerator doors. Just by the way.
‡‡ I hope I’ve told you this story. I told Peter I wanted something significant and wearable for my fortieth birthday.
‡‡‡ Also bought in Maine. Hmm. My sixtieth is next year . . .
Christmas Eve Eve
I’m not READY. Hells, I’m not started. I REALLY must get the Christmas decorations out of the attic at Third House . . . tomorrow. Must. Really. Our nice little plastic tree has one rather serious disadvantage, which is that it’s a ratbag to put together* . . . and after Peter retires snarling** I will have to slam all the ornaments on at extreme speed.*** I ALSO HAVE TO WRAP ALL THE PRESENTS. Well, all of Peter’s presents. I withdraw further and further from the whole Christmas thing every year—the official clan and/or people I don’t know very well and/or owe favours to tend to get plants by post† and charity certificates of one sort or another.†† Peter still gets presents.††† Which means WRAPPING.‡
I have a novel to write. In five weeks.‡‡
. . . .I’m listening to Handel’s MESSIAH on Radio 3. A while back, and I can’t remember which singing thread, there was a certain amount of giggling on the forum about how doing it yourself makes you more critical of other singers, and I meant to say, but I think I never did, that it also makes you more in awe of other singers. How do they do that. Wow. Golly. Swoon. Adore. Despair. ††† What I do find absolutely true however is that doing it myself, however feebly, engages me in other people’s performances to a degree that is sometimes frelling inconvenient. It’s beginning to remind me of what a cow I can be about other people’s books—I don’t care if it won the Pulitzer, it’s not good enough—which is marginally more understandable in my professional field. It’s just shameless when I start getting snippy-pernickety about singers. But . . . this is a very nice MESSIAH, but where is the passion? ‘He Was Despised’ shouldn’t be beautiful, it should make you cry.§
* * *
* Peter does this. But I’m not giving him much running-in time.
** This is approximately the only time all year that I see Peter snarl.
*** Fortunately there are rarely speed traps in Peter’s sitting room.
† Which I’m extremely relieved to report seem mostly to have arrived with a loud simultaneous thump today. This includes mine.^ One of which is clearly frost damaged and since there hasn’t been any local frost in several days^^ has to have happened en route somewhere. SIIIIIGH. The fact that any recipient of a little frill of festively decorated twigs that looks more like a voodoo fetish than a live plant will know that it’s not my fault is very little comfort.
^ Since they have this system for the orderer to order something for herself by ticking ‘myself’ during check-out, you’d think they could follow this through so that ‘myself’ doesn’t receive a card that says, ‘look inside for a message from the person who gave you this gift!’ and in my case says ‘Happy Christmas, Mrs McKinley Dickinson!’ which begs the question slightly about ‘to’ and ‘from’. ^^^
^^ Except the imaginary kind that gives the indoor jungle something to complain about the nights I don’t bring it in. At the moment I can’t bring it in, the top of the hellhound crate is covered with not-yet-wrapped Christmas presents. One them is kind of . . . large. No frost tonight. NO FROST TONIGHT. ARE YOU LISTENING? —It was tipping it down earlier, creating a bottleneck of wet, cranky, last-minute-shopping people midtown even of little New Arcadia. Hellhounds and I sat in Wolfgang, listening to the rain drumming on the roof and feeling smug, having returned from our hurtle about forty-five seconds before the heavens opened.+ I am now paying for this complacency, as the frelling weather has cleared off and the temperature is dropping . . . and dropping . . . ++
+ I spent that forty-five seconds chatting to Phineas, who encouraged me to let the air out of the tyres of Mr Gormless, should I be so unfortunate as to have contact with his misdeeds again, and whom Phineas apostrophises as not the full shilling.
++ Speaking of plants, Katinseattle wanted to know about this one from Gemma’s gift: http://www.hardys-plants.co.uk/product.asp?plant=131
^^^ There’s a Schrodinger’s cat opportunity here, although in this instance the cat is permitted to be alive in both its states.
†† I give driblets and drablets all over the shop including the obvious big guns like Amnesty, Greenpeace, Medecins sans Frontieres, National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children—insert your forty-six favourite charities here. But I do like to give slightly cheerful things at Christmas, although I realise this is the wrong attitude for celebrating the birthday of someone who was willing to be crucified in the hope it would do the rest of us some good.
Admirable intentions don’t always translate into reliable admin, and there are several Big Holy Green Guys I will no longer touch with a barge pole, but for anyone who’s interested, here are a few UK furry-critter organisations that I’ve been subscribing to successfully for years.
What they offer you varies from year to year, but I’ve put in an awful lot of hedgerows.
http://www.dogstrust.org.uk/sponsor/default.aspx?view=all
Lurchers and sighthoundy critters never seem to need sponsoring, or not for long. At present I sponsor Hamish. I admit I have just a flicker of doubt about these guys: your sponsoree never dies, they’re always placed with a private owner and so don’t need sponsoring any more. Really?
http://www.guidedogsgiving.org.uk/sponsorapuppy/?gclid=CJju7qCnma0CFUUPfAodYFhsmg
I’ve been doing this so long and they roll over so fast I can’t remember the name of the current half-grown critter. But the cuteness factor is extreme. Not only do you receive regular ‘pupdates’ of your own protégé but they send you stuff like the Guide Dog Puppy Calendar every year which is all little fat furry darlings and is a good thing to stare at while you’re waiting for your first cup of tea of the day to turn black.
And I’d belonged to the Bat Conservation Trust for years before I realised I had a problem. I hadn’t noticed you can now adopt bats. I, of course, don’t need to.^
http://www.bats.org.uk/pages/adopt_a_bat.html
^ Hee hee hee http://www.bats.org.uk/ecards.php?action=ecard&id=43
††† So do a variety of friends. But rarely at Christmas. Or at their birthdays. When I get around to it. Sometimes it takes years. There’s this box in the corner of my bedroom. . . .
‡ I suppose the next boundary to withdraw over is wrapping . . . but stuff looks so pretty after it’s been wrapped.^ I’m hyperventilating slightly about Peter’s Very Large Present however. It’s . . . Very Large.
^ Aside from questions of blog photos.
‡‡ Only four people showed up for tower practise tonight YAAAAY. We hardy few barely waited the obligatory quarter-hour before declaring a bust and all rushed downstairs and out into the night. The other three may have gone to the pub. I went home to SHADOWS. Which is still going well, except for the ‘five weeks’ part.
‡‡‡ Why don’t I take up knitting?^
^ I haven’t ripped out the leg warmers lately. Because I’m cravenly knitting hellhound squares.
§ Sung in this case by one of my new heroes, Iestyn Davies. How embarrassing. But . . . http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qH3E64G0oCI
Audience
Bronwen emailed me the end of last week that she was going to be in this area on Monday, and could she drop in? Sure, I emailed back. I have my voice lesson Monday afternoon, but we can go ringing with Colin in the evening, if you like. I can meet you at the cottage after my lesson, at 6:30 or so.
. . . I was hoping I might come to your lesson, she answered.
WHAT? ARE YOU FRELLING JOKING?
I was, in fact, so blitherblathered, nonplussed and gobsmacked by this insane and unexpected request that I couldn’t immediately think of what to say, other than NO. AND NEVER DARKEN MY DOOR AGAIN WHILE YOU’RE AT IT.* Since I’m fond of Bronwen I restrained this natural impulse and . . . emailed Nadia. Do you have a policy about people sitting in? I said. Do you . . . by any chance . . . FORBID it?**
This was happening last night at about two a.m.*** when I am perhaps not at my best anyway.† For some reason†† Nadia hadn’t answered by the time I crawled out of bed again (later) this morning . . . and meanwhile the hours were ticking by and Bronwen was climbing in her car and turning the key in the little hole††† and . . . and . . .
And when I went to warm up today with my piano at the mews I couldn’t sing at all. Here I had been comforting myself that at least yesterday’s indisposition (which has much lessened, thank you) had had nothing to do with my throat . . . and I still couldn’t sing. I was producing these nasty horrible thready little noises.‡ Ugggh.
Beginning to panic now I texted Nadia saying, perhaps you didn’t see my email (which I sent at about 3 a.m. and you’re probably feeding your kid her oatmeal before facing your first student of the day and haven’t checked your inbox) and thank the gods this time she answered, and in Best Professional Manner, that she did not have a policy about sitters-in and she did not object to teaching with an audience, but that she felt that unless this was a run up to an exam or a performance it was not helpful to the student and advised against. YAAAAAAY. I pretty well burnt my fingers racing to email Bronwen: NOOOOOOOOO.‡‡
Then we’d managed to get the lesson time crossgartered somehow so I was waiting‡‡‡ for half an hour before Nadia was ready for me which did not help my tension level any. § So when it was finally my turn I went in and, setting my knapsack down and removing my music as if I were an insufficiently tested beta model, squeaked that I had been ill yesterday and today I can’t sing at all. When I admitted upon questioning that it had been a Digestive Issue Nadia said, well, of course. The bottom half of your body isn’t speaking to the top half, so you’re not getting any of the support you need not to sound thin and reedy. Lie down on the floor and breathe.
So I lay down on the floor and breathed.§§
And, after that, the lesson went pretty well.§§§
At the end she said, your homework for the next fortnight is to go home and ENJOY singing all these songs you’ve been working so hard on. ENJOY. You know about ENJOY, right?
Oh. Kind of.
And then I came home# and finally met up with poor Bronwen. And we went ringing at Glaciation.## We came back to the mews for supper and then she knitted while I got on with SHADOWS. It’s very . . . shadowy. In a good way. I hope.
* * *
* And you can post that knitting book you borrowed back to me.
** Please. Please forbid it. Please.
*** Having spent an unhealthy amount of time bringing the jungle indoors again. No frost tonight. Yaaaaaaay.
† I’d also just found out that I’d been a thundering and inexcusable scoundrel to a harmless and inoffensive member of the human race and was reeling from the karmic backlash. This does not serve to focus the mind in a positive way.
†† I realise this will come as a shock to all of you, but not everyone lives by their email, their texts, their DMs, and their tweets. Fancy. And a substantial number of these non-virtual people have children still too young for email, texts, DMs, and Twitter. Very real, small children.
††† I spent SIXTY ONE QUID filling Wolfgang’s petrol tank today. SIXTY. ONE. QUID. Strongest argument for internet shopping that I know. The next time I fall afoul of one of these barking and berserk sites that demand four passwords that add up to the square root of 19^ and then tell you that according to numerology your birthday declares you to be an axe murderer and/or a bad financial risk and therefore they are rejecting you and the credit card you rode in on . . . I will whisper to myself ‘sixty one quid’ and persevere.
^ 4.358898943540674 http://www.math.com/students/calculators/source/square-root.htm
‡ It’s all relative. Nastier, horribler, threadier. And definitely littler, which in the circumstances is just as well.
‡‡ Under most ordinary conditions I have no problem saying No, and please fall in a large mud puddle on your way out.^ But I know that I am a neurotic wet^^ about singing and performing, and—I also understand being interested in the process. What happens in a voice lesson with a good teacher is just interesting, and never mind if the student sounds like a hamster someone just sat on.^^^ I ought to want to spread the voice-lesson joy around. Well, I do. Just not in a way that involves someone having to listen to me sing.
^ And may you be wearing drycleanable-only.
^^ Possibly a neurotic muddy. And my ego absolutely needs the delicate cycle.
^^^ Shrill and flat.
‡‡‡ Knitting. I’m producing a very nice series of hellhound squares in varying textures of knit and purl. This activity is interspersed with ripping out the first half-dozen rows of leg warmer again.
§ Possibly the small-child-amusing CD of small-child songs Stella was listening to in a rapt and pensive manner had something to do with this. When someone is trying to lisp breathlessly and, as you knit, wait for your voice lesson and try not to think about the half a page of SHADOWS you could have got through in this half hour, you are thinking (testily) that they are probably getting paid for the noise they’re making, and here you are paying for the privilege of trying to sound less like this.
Okay, I have never lisped. And I’m only breathless when I forget, uh, to breathe. Still.
§§ Her mother came in with a cup of tea for her while this was going on. Don’t worry, said Nadia, she’s used to my students lying on the floor.
§§§ I was probably just really grateful that it was only the two of us.^
^ And the cat.
# Muttering about sixty-one quid
## Where I was pretty much a disaster on all fronts SIIIIIIIGH. I haven’t really got enough brain for a voice lesson and a tower practise in the same day. Especially when there’s a little matter of a novel to finish in six weeks.