In the first place:  

http://a2.sphotos.ak.fbcdn.net/hphotos-ak-ash4/s320x320/423615_272724886138698_100002035654088_610973_443590055_n.jpg

 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: 

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/13/business/in-e-reader-age-of-writers-cramp-a-book-a-year-is-slacking.html?_r=1

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.

 . . . 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.

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

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

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

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

* * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * *

* Not a good idea from this tower.  GERONIMOOOOOOOOOO! 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

            Um.  Why?

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

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

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

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

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.

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?

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

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

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

* * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * *

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

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

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

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

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

†††  http://www.peterdickinson.com/ 

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

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

‡‡‡ And annoying. 

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

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

§§§ Furnace 

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

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

THE ROBINS’ NEST IN MY GREENHOUSE IS INHABITED.  Er.  By, you know, robins. 

            It was time for the day to start improving by then.  It had not begun well.  It had not begun well several days ago.  The old mews laptop has been off line since last Friday, which is a mega frelling pain in the patootie, since while the little knapsack computer is a gigantic patootie-saver, in all other ways it is too dagblaggingly SMALL.  Somebody sends you something you want to look at?  Forget it.  You have to scroll around so much it’s a seven blind persons and the elephant show.  The keyboard is almost big enough, so you type on it as usual, only you’re making as many errors as Frodo the Nine Fingered would, playing Liszt’s Transcendental Etudes.  

            I had emailed the archangels the beginning of the week, and Raphael had responded that he’d be in touch Tuesday or Wednesday to come out Wednesday or Thursday.  By last night—Thursday night—I hadn’t heard from him so I sent him a one-word email:  whiiiiiiiine.**  This morning there was an email back saying that he’d left a message on Pooka on Wednesday.  WHIIIIIIINE.  In which one’s technology lets one down again.   New phone calls or texts are supposed to show up ON THE OPENING SCREEN of your semi-reliable*** iPhone, and I never think to go looking for them as I go looking for email.  There it was, sure enough:  but Pooka had apparently been having the vapours when it came in, and failed to put it where I could see it.  Meanwhile, however, the little laptop was beginning to emit dark smoke and chittering noises—and the mews had been entirely off the air for about three hours one evening and two hours the next AND I was getting very tired of writing the blog on the off-line mews proper-sized laptop and putting it on a memory stick to plug into a live socket somewhere. †

            So Raphael, who is a wonderful human being, I mean archangel, rejuggled his Friday and came out anyway.  I texted Oisin that I might be a little late . . . I guess maybe.  Two and a half hours later I texted Oisin again, saying, cup of tea or do you want to kill me?  Raphael had walked in the door, pressed ONE MYSTIC SYMBOL—I mean it’s not even a button or a key it’s a perfectly flat, non-contoured symbol—on the semi-dead†† laptop and LO! it was live again.  Kill me.†††  However . . . nothing else was the slightest bit straightforward and two and a half hours later he had to leave because he had to leave‡ . . . and while he had convinced the iPad update not to delete everything stored in my library, iPod, photos, etc, he hadn’t convinced it to, you know, update either.

            ARRRRRRGH.

            I’m also trailing around at one-quarter speed because I was comprehensively shattered by yesterday’s events.  I had slept badly night-before-last in dread of yesterday, and I couldn’t really separate out grief for Gloriana and Gloriana’s family and simple fear of walking into my old ringing chamber.  I also wanted to go to the funeral, but where was I supposed to sit?  With the ringers because I was ringing or not with the ringers because I’m not a member of the band?  I don’t think this is covered by Miss Manners. 

            I was also, of course, terrified that I was going to put my foot or my head through the frelling rope, or break a stay, or fall down in a fit, or something. . . . But in fact in terms of blood and horror it was a complete failure.  I’m pleased to say.  Admin was extremely gracious and I was gracious right back.  And I’m not a good ringer, and I’m a twitchy, jerky ringer but I’m still a ringer, and the feeling of my hands on a bell rope is automatically steadying.  And those bells are—aside from the crucial health and safety stuff that made the work necessary—noticeably easier to ring.‡‡  I had thought it was ‘open’ ringing where everyone who knew how was welcome to come have a pull, but there were only eight of us for the eight bells.  We rang.  Hands on ropes:  bong.  Bong.  Bong.  This is what the bells are for:  well, change ringing was invented by Christian bell ringers for Christian churches, but I cast the net wider:  for me the sound of the bells is a declaration:  there is something beyond us.   You want it at a wedding, but—for me—you need it at a funeral.‡‡‡

            Admin wanted to try to ring after the funeral too.  I had been planning on opting out, but that would have left them with only five—six is a good number, and five isn’t really.  So I stayed.  The funeral itself was pretty gruelling—the church was packed out;  she had a lot of friends, and quite a few of them spoke—and when we got back to our ropes we just rang rounds:  one-two-three-four-five-six, one-two-three-four-five-six, the bells in order, smallest to largest, over and over and over and over.  Your heart lifts at the same time as you’re trying not to burst into tears. . . .

            So.  Yes.  I went.  I faced all those people§.  I rang on several of the bells in the ringing chamber that used to be as familiar to me as my own furniture in my own sitting room.  It was a bit miserable, but then it was a funeral, and Gloriana will be much missed.  And . . . it was still a good decision for me, quitting my tower.  I don’t like that it was a good decision, but it was a good decision.  And I think I slept fine last night, I just need a month or two of hibernation.§§

            . . . So I went along to Oisin’s nearly two hours late this afternoon.  And I drank several cups of tea and raved, chiefly about bell ringing and computers§§§ and after I eventually wound down a little Oisin asked if I’d like to sing something?  I’d even brought my music.  How about that.  I must be beginning to believe in the system.  So I sang something.  And it wasn’t too bad.  I may even learn my entries on Dove Sei.  It is very confusing having some piano galumphing along with you and throwing you off.

            And then I came home and rushed out into the garden because there was a little daylight left and since I don’t dare plant the frellers I’d better pot up the blasted sweet peas . . . and there was a little robin face peering out at me from the shelf in the greenhouse.           

* * *

* Books?  Why would it be about books?  No, it’s not about books. 

** He’s used to me.  It’s a good thing.  

*** This is similar to ‘a little bit pregnant.’  

† Diane in MN

On a typewriter. Remember typescript? [ . . .] Nostalgia.

Yes–but it’s tempered nostalgia. I like word processors a whole lot. I think of my mother, going to work out of high school in a lawyer’s office and having to retype entire documents for a single error because corrections weren’t allowed . . . I really really like word processors! 

I have also spent time typing contracts that you couldn’t make an error on—and while I’m sure that someone on salary who wasted hours retyping wouldn’t be long for that job, it was immediately critical for a free lancer like me who got paid by the assignment.  So.  Yes.  And I love the internet, but a lot of the frenzy of that love is on account of needing underpinning and maintenance for the sodblasted blog which itself wouldn’t exist . . . without the internet.  You didn’t get error messages with typewriters and they broke or blew up only RARELY.  You didn’t have to buy a new one every few years . . . and when you did buy a new one you were not legally required to buy with it a new keyboard layout, a new return mechanism, a new brand of error cover-up paint (with a new dispenser), a new dictionary, new encyclopaedia, a new language . . . all of which you would have to LEARN TO USE.

            Er.  Hurrumph.  I like word processors too.  But I’m not a whole-hearted fan.  Especially not after a week like this one.  And if you’re going to go all snippy on me and say that a word processor has nothing to do with internet connection . . . I shall become CRANKY. 

†† Very like ‘semi-reliable’ and ‘a little bit pregnant’.  

††† Oisin having declined. 

‡ I think this may be very like being paid by the assignment. 

‡‡ Siiiiiiiigh.  Nicest set of bells in the area just got nicer.  

‡‡‡ I know this isn’t going to happen, but I wish ringers were on retainer, so more weddings and particularly more funerals had bells.  We ring ordinary services as part of our charter, but bells for your individual event are expensive.  

§ Most of whom, in a few cases to my surprise, are apparently still talking to me. 

§§ And, tension level?  I seem to have sprung just about every muscle in my body.  Pulling a big, ratbaggy, awkward bell, you may feel it—or anyway I¸ who am not very good at it, may feel it—in my shoulders and stomach.  Ordinary ringing on ordinary bells, no.^  But yesterday . . . my chest, shoulders, arms, belly and back . . . all of them were telling me that I had been toting barges and lifting bales all day.  Good grief. 

^ It’s never about sheer strength.  It’s always about (sheer) skill. 

§§§ And the continued non-existence of the New Arcadia Singers

I put Hannah on the train this morning.  Waaaaaaah. 

            I put Hannah on the train way too early this morning in an absolute sense aside from the losing-Hannah aspect.  I haven’t been out of bed that early since I stopped service ringing. . . . and we just lost our frelling spring-forward hour this weekend.   I am seriously not of this planet right now.  But (being awake for) millions of hours of daylight is, I admit, rather jolly, and the weather goes on being spectacular* if spectacularly dry.**

            So I put Hannah on the train and, sobbing brokenly, parked Wolfgang under a tree near the station and took hellhounds for a hurtle.  Of course I brought them with me.  Doesn’t everyone with companion canines take advantage of every possible excuse for hurtling? 

Mrs Redboots 

I love the way you stress that you know every pub in Mauncester by name only. . . . I have to admit I’d been wondering. . . . 

Well, there are critter-friendly pubs, but we’re generally not going inside even when we can.  We’re hurtling.  But Mauncester is a good walking town, I’ve lived in this area for twenty (and a half) years, and ferreting around in the twisty back bits is fun.  I don’t remember when I crossed the line where I (mostly) stop worrying about getting lost because I know enough of Mauncester that I won’t stay lost very long, but at this point I seek out the bits (especially twisty back bits) I don’t know.  During the foot-and-mouth crisis when the entire countryside was closed we hurtled that generation of resident four-legs in Mauncester and Prinkle-on-Weald.***  Prinkle-on-Weald is now pretty much too far away for anything but an adventure, but Mauncester is closer than it was from the old house.  I also have a very minor fantasy about living in Mauncester—where you can be walking distance of a library†, a cinema and a train station, as well as some very nice English countryside.  It’s not going to happen, but it makes an agreeable directional fantasy:  okay, do I want to live in this neighbourhood?  How does the pub look?

            After this we went back to the mews where I alternately poured cold water over my head and guzzled hot caffeine in a (mostly futile) attempt to wake up.  But I still managed to pretend to sing a little, and went off to my voice lesson.  You are probably aware by other standards that life is full of ratbaggishness?  Over the weekend I’d sung less well than I can, because I was busy being nerrrrrrvous about singing for someone.  While, perversely and simultaneously, I found myself able to ham it up more than I can for Nadia or Oisin—because my audience was a relaxed, friendly and nonprofessional one††.  Nadia, of course, heard what I was (or wasn’t) doing almost immediately, sorted me out with rather embarrassing swiftness††† and then threw me into Dove Sei, which I had cornballed up in a shocking manner for Peter and Hannah.  And of course I stiffened up and sang it like a funerary urn, if funerary urns sang—and this despite the fact that I was making a better quality of noise, if you follow me.  ARRRRRGH.  That’s fine, said Nadia, that’s a very nice tone, now sing it like you’re ENJOYING it.

            Sigh.

Diane in MN 

. . . as an opera fan, I tend to cringe when opera singers decide to make crossover albums.  South Pacific may have worked for Ezio Pinza, but Placido Domingo as Tony in West Side Story was not a good idea.  And there is a cruel recording of Jose Carreras singing Jingle Bells. . . . 

JINGLE BELLS?  Oh my . . .  gods.  Oh.  Eeeep.  Did Domingo do a West Side Story?  OUCH.  I lose all respect, etc.  Kiri te Kanawa and Jose Carreras—poor old Jose is listening to the wrong advice, clearly—were bad enough:  I agree that crossover is mostly dire.‡  But I’d gladly—gladly—forfeit all possibility of singing Maria plausibly‡‡ in exchange for sounding like te Kanawa.‡‡‡ 

* * *

* Anthea tonight on the treble commented on the excellence of the view:  where you stand to ring the treble at Glaciation^ is opposite one of those little high arched church windows, and in this case you could see a shiny crescent moon and some glittering planet or other through it.  I had been ringing the treble before her, but I had been staring at the floor in an agony of concentration.  If I’d noticed the moon I would merely have instantly gone wrong. 

^^ I’m still in two wool jumpers to ring there, although it’s shirtsleeve weather in daytime sun.  You wander down the path to the church in your t shirt with your bulging knapsack over one shoulder.  You walk through the vestibule and shiver.  You enter the main part of the church and pull out your first jumper and put it on.  Then you walk into the ringing chamber, hastily don your second jumper, and race to plug in the two electric fires. 

** I was out watering in the cottage garden this afternoon^ and thinking I ought to have a built in irrigation system with All the Plumbing in Hampshire running under my tiny plot of land:  I ought to be able to drill a few tactful little holes, attach those leaky-hose things, and bob’s your uncle.  Pipes should have a nice colour-code system like electric wires, so you know you’re drilling in the right pipe. . . .

^ And swearing.  Later in the year when I shift from my PINK wellies to my (brown) clogs because it’s too hot to be in rubber to your knees, I become resigned to slopping water in my shoes.  It takes skill and dedication to pour water down the inside of your pink wellies.  

*** I missed telling you yesterday that the garden Hannah and I went to was in Chappington Fritworthy.  It’s not like I get to mention it very often. 

† New Arcadia does have a library, but it’s the two shelves and a plastic chair, open alternate Thursdays from 2:45-3 pm and every third Friday from 7-7:17 pm variety.  Mauncester has a proper library. 

†† Not to say clueless.  Clueless would be good. 

††† It’s so obvious after the fact.  Sometimes it’s obvious before the fact too, but that doesn’t necessarily mean you can DO anything about it.  I was aware that my throat was only about half open, the roof of my mouth and my ‘mask’ were pretty well as bright and light as an anvil, and my abdominal support had decamped for Toulouse.    

‡ In both directions.  I HAAAAAAAATED Sting singing Purcell and Dowland.  HAAAAAAAAATED.  

‡‡  heeheeheeheeheeheeheeheeheeheehee 

‡‡‡ Or Deborah Voigt or Janet Baker or Marilyn Horne or Joyce diDonato or Beverly Sills or Tatiana Troyanos or Cecilia Bartoli or . . . see really I’m easy to please.

So, last night, I had begun writing the blog*, and the frelling little Outlook pop-up box kept getting in my face and whining about not being connected.  Oh, shut up and cope, I snarled—I mean I murmured softly.  And then I went on line to check something—I forget what—and Internet Explorer declined to connect either.  Fie. 

            So then I went through the whole stupid exasperating tarantella** of unplugging and replugging and closing down and restarting and hanging from the ceiling singing a merry song and making dents in the plaster when you throw chairs at the wall.  ARRRRGH.  And I remained disconnected.  Hence the note from Blogmom last night that I was having Raging Technical Difficulties and would not be posting a blog.  Yes, I could write a blog off line and . . . uh . . . figure out how to send it to Blogmom and ask her to post that.  But writing a blog without internet back up is way too much like hard work.  At least when you have a sieve-like memory.***  I was thinking about this last night, while I was (fruitlessly) waiting for the mews wifi to shake itself loose from the grip of the doldrums and refrellingconnect.  My old hard copy Britannica is in Peter’s bedroom, and he’s asleep by the time I’m writing the blog . . . and the annual volumes, after Peter got cranky about the annual volumes,† now live at Third House.  This is not deeply convenient for when you’re writing a blog entry right now.  At my end of the kitchen table at the mews I have within easy reach:  the 1977 edition of the Chambers [British-English] Dictionary which is fabulous††, the Penguin thesaurus, the Oxford Compendium of English lit, Brewer’s Phrase & Fable and 100,000 Names for Baby, which is an unbelievably bad and badly edited book, but it serves the purpose of stimulating me to come up with names like Zgruban.†††   This still only gets you so far.

            So I read back issues of the London Review of Books for a while . . . and nothing happened (‘the server is not available.  If this condition persists, please contact your administrator, however, blunt instruments are not recommended and we take no responsibility for the damage you may do to your singing voice’).  So I emailed Blogmom from Pooka, telling myself that it was time I got an all-options plug-in toggle for Astarte because the keyboard on an iPhone is suitable only for flower fairy fingers . . . and went back to the cottage‡.

            Today . . . the plot thickens.  It’s only the old mews laptop that won’t go on line.‡‡  Peter’s computer goes on line fine.  Astarte goes on line.  And my little knapsack computer, brought down to the mews for evidentiary purposes, goes on line.  Waaaaaah.  I just want stuff to work and leave me alone.

            Meanwhile . . . in the first place, of course, having been glued to Pooka all morning, the moment I left her hung over the back of a chair so I could get on more freely with watering 1,000,000 potted plants‡‡‡ she started barking at me.   Hannah has landed§ and will ring me again with a rendezvous point as soon as she meets up with her driver.  I’ve said I can find anywhere in Mauncester, just tell me where.§§

            . . . She rings back:  the driver says he’s going to drop her at a pub, the Egg and Custard, on the Caerphilly Road.  The Egg and Custard? I said, under the just-proven-erroneous impression that I’d at least heard of all the pubs in Mauncester, the Caerphilly Road?

            Emphatic male quacking in the background.  Egg and Custard, confirmed Hannah.  On the Caerphilly Road.

            Okay, I said dubiously.  I can look it up.

            One frantic, husband-involving search later:  There is no Egg and Custard in Mauncester.  The nearest Egg and Custard is in . . . I don’t know, Brittany, Alsace, Hokkaido, somewhere.  Not Mauncester.  It’s a long way to Hokkaido.  Oh, and there’s no Caerphilly Road in Mauncester either.

            And the mobile phone number I have for Hannah doesn’t work. . . .  

TUNE IN THIS TIME TOMORROW FOR THE NEXT THRILLING INSTALLMENT.§§§           

* * *

 * And this is what I wrote (waste not, want not):

HANNAH IS COMING, HANNAH IS COMING, HANNAH HANNAH HANNAH HANNAH IS COMING.  YAAAAAAAY.

            . . . The consequent need to do housework.  Unyaay.  In fact, uuugggghhhh.

            Mostly visitors do just fine up at Third House.  Easier on everyone.  Everyone can go to bed when they want to^ and get up when they want to and make their own breakfasts (when they want to), and not only when they want to but as they want to, with no resident gremlin saying, You can’t scramble eggs in that pan!  You aren’t going to drink coffee out of that mug, are you?   There is also an extra loo at Third House for those occasions when the person in the bath falls asleep.  Third House has many advantages. 

            But there are a few people even in the life of a forty-eight-yesses-out-of-forty-six-questions-on-the-introvert-test introvert that one positively wants to have underfoot.  In my life one of them is Hannah.^^  Therefore I need to ensure that the cottage is not so frightening a habitat that she decides she has urgent and permanent business in the Azores.

            There are no mice nesting in the sofabed:  check.

            The coffee filter thingy is not wrist-deep in dust and dead beetles:  check.

            There is nothing living in the back of the refrigerator that bites:  check. 

            The cobwebs at the top of the stairwell that I can’t quite reach, even with my telescoping dustbrush at its full extent, are staying at the top of the stairwell and have not descended to become over-friendly with stairway users:  check.

            The vanguard of the outdoor jungle has not penetrated round either the door or the kitchen window frame sufficiently to be a danger to the urban unwary:  check.^^^

            The hoover hasn’t exploded, and I can still use the freller . . . sigh.  Check.^^^^           

^ Hannah, sadly, is an early riser. 

^^ I will still tell her which pan to scramble eggs in however.  But she’s allowed to use any mug.  Probably.  I can’t be sure till I catch her using the wrong one. 

^^^ This becomes more of a problem later in the season. 

^^^^ I haaaaaaaate vacuuming.  HAAAAAAAAAAATE. 

** Spiders have a lot in common with computers when you stop to think about it.  They both have too many legs (material or immaterial), a bad attitude (graphic), and a ghastly habit of rushing at you (literal or metaphoric) when you’re not expecting trouble.  But really you can tell they don’t have your best interests at heart the moment you set eyes on one.  

*** This would be a sieve that has also been used for target practise by the local rifle club. 

† Which is cheek, you know, since he married me for my Britannica.  I’ve told you this joke, haven’t I?  He married me—twenty years ago, remember, before the internet was a resource for commoners and the technically challenged—for my Britannica.  I married him for his membership in the London Library.  Peter has dropped his membership in the library—which means I’m groaning under the extreme subscription price by myself—I haven’t pulled a Britannica volume off the shelf in years . . . and the annual volumes are accumulating at Third House.  

†† It and the old American Heritage Dictionary of 1969 are my favourite dictionaries.^  The OED is . . . second.  It’s a very good second, but it’s still second.  And neither the new Chambers nor the new American Heritage is a patch on the classics. 

^ The poor old AHD is in fairly rough shape as I spent several years sitting on it.  I wrote HERO sitting on my old AHD.  I’ve never had a proper desk with a proper desk chair, which means height adjustments must be made.  The AHD was the perfect extra thickness for that particular chair, and conveniently butt-breadth.  

††† And rather a lot of books on knitting and learning Japanese. 

‡ Where, yes, I can get on line, but that’s not where I spend my evenings. 

‡‡ It really wants to retire.  Really really really. 

‡‡‡ We’re going to have a hosepipe ban any minute:  driest March in meteorologically recorded history, I think.  Just so long as they don’t have a madperson-carrying-a-gazillion-cans ban. 

§ . . . at the right airport.  In England. 

§§ I should know better than to say things like this. 

§§§ Hey.  You already know I’m a cow.  And I’m a cow who needs to go to bed early because Hannah does^ AND BECAUSE THE SODBLASTED CLOCKS GO FORWARD TONIGHT. 

^ Yes.  She’s here.  You can relax.

I went ringing at the abbey again tonight.

            Pause.

            More pause.

            Even longer pause.

            . . . I wonder how long before they ask me politely not to come back?

            SIIIIIIIIIIIIGH.*

            I then came home to a query from Blogmom about all those doodles and doodled books I haven’t sent out yet.  Yes.  I haven’t sent them out.  I said that I was going to have the rest out by the end of March.  I lied.  I didn’t mean to lie, but I lied.  I was at that time in the grip of the delusion that I would have finished SHADOWS . . . about a fortnight ago.** 

            I’m still working on SHADOWS.  And as I keep moaning to everyone who doesn’t quickly run away from me, it’s going fine.  It’s just not going fast enough.  I’ve had to slow down, indeed, precisely because I’ve been ramming it through slightly faster than it’s wanted to go, and I came to the point with the third draft—which is usually my final one—that I had to slow down or risk botching the job.  As it is I’m skating over stuff I didn’t want to skate over.  I’m hoping I might get to use this world again—like ALBION takes place in SUNSHINE’s world—which might give me a chance to poke more ignorant fun at quantum physics and chaos theory.  But I think the algebra is specific to this book, and the Japanese language and culture, which appear to be settling in for the long haul in my life***, are tied in SHADOWS to a specific character which is inconvenient since I don’t write sequels.†

            And it’s hard to judge what to put on the blog—about anything, really.  I’m never in a good mood when I wonder what kind of an absolutely weird impression of Robin McKinley I’m giving by the public persona who appears here.  I don’t think I’m quite as TOTALLY FRELLING SELF OBSESSED as you’d be forgiven for thinking I am from these (virtual) pages:  it’s just that I’m my own safest material, since I don’t have to worry about hurting, humiliating or infuriating anyone else when I talk about me.††  At the same time I’m so conscious of what I’m not saying about me that I genuinely can’t guess what I look like to all of you.†††

            And . . . I don’t like whiners.  If I whine here, I’m very sorry.  My judgement was off that day(s).  So I’m not telling you how the undone doodles pray on my conscience and how grim my office at the cottage is, full, as it also is, with heaps of books, lists, and mailing envelopes.  Circumstances conspired—PEG II crashing and burning, and my then urgently trying to get on with SHADOWS as fast as possible—but that still leaves you waiting over six months for something you paid for last autumn.

            Since I mostly write here about all the rushing around doing too much that I do, you would also be more than forgiven for thinking‡ that if I stopped flitting about the landscape and concentrated I would be getting both SHADOWS and doodles (etc) done a lot faster.  You’ll just have to take my word for it both that it doesn’t work that way—and that there’s perhaps less flitting than you think.  I work seven days, remember, and I don’t take holidays, or anyway I can’t remember the last time I took one.  For one very minor example of this wombly balance:   I guarantee that if I weren’t whacking myself silly over SHADOWS I would be getting on with learning how to ring the beastly abbey bells at least fractionally faster than I am.‡‡  Indeed I’d be getting on with bell ringing generally at least fractionally faster if I didn’t pretty invariably have no functioning intellect left by the time I go to bell practise in the evenings.‡‡‡

            But believe me, you will be the first to know when I send SHADOWS to Merrilee and instantly morph spectacularly into a Doodle Factory. 

* * *

* Well . . . I’m getting a lot of knitting done while I sit out.  There’s no point even watching Stedman on twenty-seven:  it’s just a storm of ropes to me.   But I can sometimes learn something standing behind someone with his or her hands on a rope, and intently watching what they’re doing.   And at the abbey I can use all the help about anything that I can get.  So I stood behind the treble for some Cambridge Major^, because in other towers I can treble bob, which is what the treble does in Cambridge . . . and got horribly lost.  So when, later, they called for Bristol Major, which is another treble-bobbing method, I decided to stick to knitting.  But I’ve been tagged as a stander-behind—it’s one of these how-you’re-wired things:  some people find standing behind of zero use—and one of the other ringers said to me afterward, oh, but you should have stood behind the treble again!  I decided it would be impolitic to say I’d rather knit.

            I was knitting on Monday at (bell) practise and Anthea, who did use to knit, and quite glamorous things too, says she doesn’t knit any more because ‘nothing happens fast enough’.  But I knit in waste time:  those three minutes at that exasperatingly long light on my way to Nadia’s, sitting out in bell towers, during break at the Muddles, waiting for my computer to stop sulking and do something.^^  And all that effort, even at my knitting speed, does blerg or bludge into something eventually:  I now have the world’s longest leg warmer and I’d better cast off and start the other one.  It would be nice to have a pair by November. . . . 

^ To the extent that I ring it inside, I ring minor, which is six bells, not eight. 

^^ Yes, I can sing while I knit.  As necessary. 

** Positive thinking doesn’t always work.  Sometimes even putting something on the blog to make sure I do it doesn’t work. 

*** Have I mentioned that I’ve found a language school in Hampshire that offers Japanese?   I’ve told the woman who is my contact that I can’t commit to lessons till I’ve dealt with an overdue work project.  Ahem.  But this is so much old-unfinished-business-coming-back-to-bite-me, not a brand-new, for-godssake-McKinley-get-a-grip fascination.  I’d be more inclined to see it as some kind of serendipity rather than actual unfinished business if it weren’t that Damarian has a certain amount of Japanese grammar in it—as well as some funny alphabet stuff.  I only started writing down what I think I know about the Damarian language in the last ten or so years, when I would have told you I remembered nothing of Japanese except how to count to ten and say ‘hello’ and ‘thank you’.  That’s true, but the Story Council apparently saw an opportunity and pounced.  

† PEGASUS is one story in three books!  It’s not a trilogy!  The word ‘sequel’ will not be bandied here! 

†† I have arguments with myself all the time. China is sometimes broken. 

††† Don’t tell me.  I’m sure I don’t want to know. 

‡ Simultaneously grinding your teeth optional 

‡‡ This is hardly a silver lining, but it did occur to me that . . . the abbey has always been my best local opportunity to learn some of the slightly-more-upper-level stuff that the New Arcadia band can’t reliably support.  But given how steep the learning curve for adapting to the abbey’s bells is, the only way I’d ever have stuck the course is by something like this—having cast myself off from New Arcadia first.  As it is . . . I’ll stick the course unless they tell me to go away. 

‡‡‡ I write the blog every night on fumes, okay?