The front door of the mews since last night after dark.

Wreath.  Tactful, Peter-placating***, reusable wreath.†

Tree. You will note Large Box to the right.

I admit I didn’t manage to hang every ornament we own on it, but it’s definitely decorated.  The important baubles are up.  The robins.  The horses.  The roses.  The bells.  Some time between yesterday and New Year’s I’ll probably finish getting the tinsel over the lampshades, picture frames, candlesticks, and piano.

Another view of Large.

Yes.  It’s Large.  Peter said, You wouldn’t buy me a microwave.  I said, No, I wouldn’t, and it doesn’t weigh enough, unless they’re now making plastic microwaves in which case I’m not going to buy you one twice.

::LOUD RUSTLING AND RIPPING NOISES::

Highlights:

Gasp!

Yes.  It’s true.  I bought Peter a Kindle.  Now all we have to do is figure out how to use it.  Georgiana and Saxon will be here tomorrow:  I’m proposing they do it.  Hey, I bought it.  My job is over.††  But the point is that you can dial up the typeface size, and even with his reading specs Peter finds tiny mass market paperback type size trying.

Oooh! Roses!

Peter bought me a book on roses.  How . . . surprising.  Okay, so I’ve been eyeing it on line for months.  But the gorgeous slipcover is a surprise—as is the fact it’s signed and numbered.

Yes, it's still a thrill when other people sign their books.

I had assumed it was just another drop-dead-glam coffee table book full of glossy pictures but it’s a lot more, well, beautiful than that, and a pleasure to handle as an object and never mind its subject matter.†††  It’s smaller and fatter than a coffee table book—like a book you would, ahem, read—and the edges are gilt!—and the pages are matte not shiny, and it’s paintings not photos.  You even have a sewn-in bookmark.

La France. Usual historical suspect for first Hybrid Tea. Blah blah blah.

I grew her at the old house.  She was a frail heroine, prone to fits of the vapours, and a terrible head-hanger.

The GUARDIAN is always full of helpful suggestions this time of year, and look at what I found only a few days ago on offer at http://www.tattydevine.com/ :

Hee hee hee hee hee hee

I immediately turned to Peter and said, don’t you really want to buy me a Perspex bat necklace?  What? he said.

Oh and the large parcel/small coffin/medium-sized old-fashioned maiden aunt?

It's a bin.

No, really, this is a great present.  We have terrible bin luck at the mews.  This kitchen is where most of the heavy cooking happens, and you want a serious bin with a lid, and you want something that it doesn’t take both hands to open.  We’ve had a series of expensive foot-pedal-lid-opening bins which are the joy of our hearts for about six months and then they break.  But they’re so expensive you don’t just rush out and replace them.  Well, the last (broken) one is over a year old and . . . I saw this in a catalogue (yes, I have some strange tastes in catalogues) and it had all these rave customer reviews and . . . ask me in six months.

. . . And now I seem to be extremely full of turkey and champagne and Christmas pudding and brandy butter and . . . I forget . . . zzzzzzzz . . . .

Hope yours was merry.

* * *

* Not, perhaps, for very long.  But on four and a half hours of sleep I’m doing very well.  Bells were rung, hellhounds were hurtled, SHADOWS was gently drawn a little closer to being finished . . .  oh yes, and it’s Christmas.

For the first time in my life I have a Christmas cactus blooming on Christmas.  By garden centre error and mismanagement.  On one of those raids last autumn, when I went for a £2.99 replacement spool of green gardening twine and came home with so many plants I could hardly wedge them all in Wolfgang, I bought another Christmas cactus.  I need more Christmas cacti like I need . . . uh . . .  more rosebushes.  At least the roses live outdoors.  But this one was a particularly pretty pink with white edges.  It was just starting to come out.  So I bought it and brought it home.

And all its flower buds immediately fell off.  ARRRRRRGH.

Christmas cacti are generally extremely tough so I assumed that it would be fine next year but that this year was going to be a bust.  Nope.  About a month ago I noticed it was producing little pale tippy knobs . . . a fresh lot of flower buds.  Yaaaay.  I’m not even going to complain that it’s reverted to the standard pale pink of which I have lots.  I have lots because fallen-off or pruned-back branches root really easily.

Stop press! A Christmas cactus blooming on CHRISTMAS!

** And yes, I’ve been singing.  But I haven’t touched Dove Sei in three days.  I’m singing Christmas carols.

*** ‘I don’t need a wreath.’  

† With my eccentric bent for befriending inanimate objects, I find this is another advantage of things like fake, that is, reusable, wreaths and trees.  So every year it’s like, hey, how are you, how’s it going?, good to see you again.

†† I told the archangels when they were last here that I’d bought Peter a Kindle for Christmas and it was so sleek and shiny that if he didn’t like it I’d take it over.  Raphael and Gabriel exchanged a long look.  Robin, said Raphael after a minute, do you really want another piece of technology in your life?

No.  And besides, Astarte has Montezuma too.

††† Well, okay.  Do mind the subject matter.

Fiona was here today, so the first wodge of auction stuff has finally been shipped out.  Everything takes longer than it’s supposed to.  The wodge that was posted today was much smaller than it should have been, for a variety of reasons, chief among them that I’m trying to write a novel in five months, and two of them are already over.  The irony is that one of the reasons the auction finally went live so late is because I was preoccupied with the final throes of this summer’s PEG II crisis—and then I hurled myself into SHADOWS, needing to believe this was a story and I could write it—and now of course I’m slowly doodling my way through all your lovely bell-supportive orders—while continuing with this madness of trying to finish* SHADOWS by the end of January.**  I was telling Fiona that most days I keep thinking I can maybe extrude one more paragraph, one more sentence, and then I will certainly do a stint of doodling . . . and what happens is that I hammer away on story-in-progress to the point of collapse, pirouette through about three doodles, and fall off my chair.***

Roses for ROSE DAUGHTER. Not all the book + doodles are so . . . um . . . um . . . snork.

Also there was a terrible accident with a cup of hot tea about ten days ago which I will leave to your imaginations because it was far too emotionally scarring for me to describe it in all its graphic horror here.  Then Darkness frightened me half to death† with the projectile geysering, and as a result this week my general energy level has resembled an underachieving pancake or a badger-gnawed doormat.

But EVERYTHING takes longer than it’s supposed to.  I wanted to get the first load of books off today, but the auction is finally forcing me to do something I should have done years ago, which is hire a frelling mail box for a return street address that isn’t where I live and that has business-hours staff who will sign for parcels that require a signature.††  The nearest mail-box-hire is in Zigguraton, which is not ideal, but it could be a lot worse.  I examined the web site carefully, and nowhere does it say that they need a blood sample, a retina scan and £400,053.27 collateral.  So I sent Fiona in to do it for me, while I kept doodling.  Which, when she got back again, is how I found out about the extra requirements. ARRRGH.

Fox. With tail. Tails are IMPORTANT.

Fortunately my bank’s local branch office is a full-service agency so I obtained a blood sample and a retina scan from the clerk, and then I wrote ‘£400,053.27’ on a piece of paper and he stamped it††† with the bank’s seal of authorised fiscal reality‡, and I sent Fiona off again.   About half an hour later I received the critical text on Pooka:  SUCCESS!

Sleeping dragon. You don't want to be downwind.

Meanwhile, however, the day was mostly over.  Fiona has printed off the rest of Blogmom’s batched orders and organised as many of them as I’m likely to get through in the next fortnight, when she comes back again for a Special Auction Put-Through Day, which will include an awful lot of book-packaging, and I will keep doodling.  I want to emphasise here that I enjoy the doodling‡‡—including the excuse to doodle—what is turning my eyeballs red and my hair white is the time.  I don’t like making all of you wait, although I am making you wait, and the complicated stuff—the doodle-icious books, the knitting, the musical composition—is at the bottom of the pile.  I’m sorry.  But I am a disorganised scatterbrained‡‡‡ dipstick at best, and I do need to keep eating. . . .

But look at what Fiona brought me:

Hermione the hellbat

Why do I doubt the original pattern called for PINK?

* * *

* Well, ‘finish.’  No way in any of the eleven hells^ am I going to finish finish.  But I’m hoping to have it to the final-frantic-yanking phase by the end of January.

^ According to Damarian cosmology

** If I’d been in any shape to think, I should have slammed the auction into action (Blogmom did keep asking me when I was going to provide her with x or y so she could get on with building the thing) as early as possible.  But although blaming myself for being a purblind git is one of my favourite leisure-time activities, it’s hard to get around the fact that when you’re in the middle of a book crisis, one of the symptoms of its being a crisis is that you can’t think.

*** I should never attempt to pirouette.

† No, three-quarters

†† Curses! snarl the carrier companies.  We’ll have to think of something else!

††† Sucking on his sore finger

‡ Which is at least as reliable as anything else in the in the global financial market these days

‡‡ Although I reserve the right to laugh hysterically at some of the special requests.  More about these in future blog posts.

‡‡‡ —brain?

Today has been mostly head down over the writing desk (or the writing kitchen table, as it may be), looking up occasionally long enough to regret a good gardening afternoon . . . the things I do to get paid.*    

              Atlas has been hacking back Mme Alfred Carriere who was showing signs of pulling down my semi-detached neighbour’s house wall, and while Phineas is an exceptionally easy-going fellow, I think even he might protest being involuntarily catapulted into my back garden.  I wouldn’t like it either:  the garden’s small enough already, I don’t want the contents of two bedrooms, a study, a kitchen and a bathroom scattered around** although loose bricks are popular as plant-pot stands.  Since I don’t do heights, Atlas is the one who’s been out there with the ladder and the loppers.  It’s astonishing how much more light there suddenly is:  Mme Alfred is kind of a monster.  But the best kind of monster:  the kind that produces lots of big fat roses.  She needs her autumn feed, as does everything else in this garden and Third House’s.  Meanwhile I’ve got the autumn bulb orders arriving any day now—yeep.   With less of Mme Alfred shadowing that side I can get more tulips in.

             Autumn has kind of snuck up on me*** partly due to the coldest August in seventeen years†† . . . I am not ready for it to be autumn.†   I used to like autumn better than I do now;   that first crackle of cold meant adventure;  it used to feel like the time of year I woke up after the sultry hedonism of summer.  But I’m not very interested in adventures any more—or rather the adventures I am interested in are things like learning to ring Cambridge minor or having a high A available during choir practise, and not only erratically after midnight and a glass of champagne on a good day.   Back in the days when autumn meant adventure I didn’t have increasing numbers of tender begonias, geraniums, dahlias, cosmos, fuchsias, blah, blerg, blug to try and frelling overwinter.  Have I told you I keep thinking about buying a second, extra-small grow-lamp and hanging it over the Winter Table that goes over the hellhound crate at the cottage—?  The summer/greenhouse at Third House is starting to get kind of crowded. 

* * *

* Yes, in many ways very like what most people do to get paid.  I keep telling you writing is not glamorous.  It has its brilliant moments, but glamorous?^  No.  And I splattered salad dressing on my white shirt today (again).^^  Frelling springy frelling lettuce frelling leaves. 

^ A friend was telling me about the book convention she’s just back from and I was thinking yes, I remember why, when I moved over here, I wasn’t particularly sorry to be too expensive to import to most American book cons any more.  It’s the same thing in a different medium as book mail:  most of the people who want to talk to you about your books are really nice, or at least complimentary, even if both of you are so desperately embarrassed and uncomfortable by the encounter you each run away afterward to hide under the bed.  But it’s the skirmishes and confrontations—including the occasional downright scary one—I remember.+ 

            The main drawback, for someone like me, lacking in most public social skills++, is that I have totally lost what habituation I once had+++, and when my poor publisher starts talking about promotion and that of course they’ll pay my travel expenses I’m like, What?  Are you kidding?  I only so much as cross the Hampshire border with a written permission from Queen Mab.  She’s not noted for her good temper either, and I don’t want to press her too far.  An extra thimble of Laphroiag is acceptable as a thank-you for allowing me to go to London for the day:  I don’t want to imagine what she’d demand for a trip to New York. 

+ And the frelling patronising ones.  The whole ‘oh, when are you going to write a real book?’ brigade, and its outliers, like the hug from the perfect stranger who says, BEAUTY was such a sweet little story.  I want to believe there’s a lot less of that around these days when YA is hot, but thirty years ago . . . especially with this face which thirty years ago looked about sixteen.  I looked like someone who might have written a sweet little story.  This involuntary circumstance was not good for the development of my attitude toward my public.  I’ve told you all this before, haven’t I?  Sorry.  The unexpected shaping experiences of one’s life are, I find, harder to integrate and forget.  —Grrrr.  There’s one stranger-hugging woman I could probably still pick out of a police line up . . . but that scrimmage was also when I was still in the early, first-book, I’m a Published Author! phase, and hadn’t started biting people yet~.  She probably went away thinking she’d brightened my sweet little life. 

~ Yes, Jodi, I’m looking at you.  But I don’t think you’re the natural viper that I am.

++ And for anyone who has met me at a con and thought I came off fairly human:   thank you.  Clearly you made it easy for me. 

+++ And gained a sweet little case of ME . . . and more lately, a sweet little couple of majorly flaky hellhounds. 

^^ Yes, I should wear a bib or an overall or something.  Except that I hate it.  It makes me feel like a drooling idiot.+  Of course I’m not thrilled with using spot remover several times a week either.  These critical dilemmas of life. 

+ If the shoe/bib fits . . . 

** Not to mention the potential for highly distressing contact between the ex-hellkitten and the hellhounds.

            I think I tweeted about the hellhounds attempting to chase the statue of a cat.  I entirely agree it’s a very lifelike statue of a cat but I thought dogs had a highly developed sense of smell??  And yes, I know, sighthounds, but they pick up scent-trails like foxhounds and cruise along with their sterns in the air and their noses to the ground.  Maybe there’s a switch buried deep in their medulla oblongatas^ that auto-sets for whichever stimulus comes in first, eyes or nose, and then turns the other one off.   But hellhounds have taken this daunting rebuff to the way things are supposed to be—cats are cats, and they run away—very much to heart.  Chaos checks that statue now every time we hurtle by—he has grasped that there is something wrong with this cat:  it doesn’t run away and, upon closer investigation, it smells funny—but he’s still sure he’s missing something.  Darkness keeps an eye on Chaos keeping an eye on the non-cat. 

            Today we met a cat—a live, breathing, tail-twitching cat—of very much the same colouring and demeanour as the non-cat . . . and the hellhounds didn’t know what to do.  Ears and tails went up, and butts sank halfway to the ground in that ready-for-anything posture and . . . nothing happened.  I’d already put the brakes on the leads in case anything did happen.  But the cat just went on lying there, curling the end of its tail up and down, and the hellhounds went on looking at it, waiting for it to prove that it was not a non-cat . . . and eventually we pottered on, befuddled hellhounds following on a loose lead. 

^ Or equivalent.  My knowledge of the architecture of the canine brain is nil. +

+ Yes I know I could google it.  Tomorrow.  If I remember. 

*** Not that everything to do with the passage of time isn’t, in my experience, essentially sneaky. 

† Ho hum.  Like I don’t say this about every season, month, year, week, hour, blog post, bolting hellhound. . . . 

†† Which is fine with me.  And reminds me that when I first moved over here we used to have English weather, which is to say cold and wet, including in August.  Ah, nostalgia.

An annually dreaded moment happened today:  the arrival of the new David Austin Rose Catalogue.  It’s not like I don’t have both his and Peter Beales’ sites favourited*, and it’s not like they’re not both places I go when I’m cross/tired/cranky/frustrated/procrastinating. **  But there’s something about a shiny new paper catalogue. . . .

Ooooh. Aaaaaugh.

 This particular rose, the lead-off for this year’s introductions, is called ‘William and Catherine’ (Catherine??).  Snork.  I may have to give it/her/them a go anyway.   Austin is claiming that it/her/them is ‘extremely healthy’ which would be a first in a repeating white rose.

Ooooh. AAAAAAUGH.

 I grow St Swithun (on the left) and Tess of the d’Urbervilles (on the right).  I do not yet grow Teasing Georgia or Snow Goose (in the middle).  Yet.

OOOOOOH. AAAAAAAAUGH.

 I grow Mortimer Sackler–that’s the flowering pink triffid on the right–in a pot by the front door of the cottage.  Apparently I will be in trouble soon.  I have noticed she’s a little more exuberant than I was entirely planning for.  Oh, I also grow Scepter’d Isle–middle on the left–and Wedgewood, bottom left.  And clearly I have to add Maid Marion–top left.  I missed her last year somehow.   One of the nice things about keeping a list–of, say, roses to be acquired–on your iPhone is that it keeps looking short even when it . . . isn’t. 

. . . . But this also brings me nicely to what I’ve been meaning to blog about for several days and things keep intervening.

            There are two high-ticket items in the auction.  One of them is the personally tailored masterwork by that hitherto little-known composer, Robin McKinley.***  The other one is the limited-edition ROSE DAUGHTER illustrated by Anne Bachelier.  

http://www.cfmgallery.com/Anne-Bachelier/Anne-Bachelier-Books/Anne-Bachelier-Rose-Daughter.htm

And before you freak out because you’re not high-end gallery-art collector types—with which I sympathise:  keeping oneself in reading books† tends to be quite enough—I wanted to flash a few of the illustrations at you.   I think those are all the plates on the CFM site, but I think they look a little bland lined up in rows like that, if you don’t know Bachelier’s work and don’t know that ‘bland’ is approximately the last word applicable.  They’re much more fabulous in situ in the book.  Bachelier is not to everyone’s taste—but then neither am I, and neither is anyone whose work is genuine and individual—but I adore this book.  As an explicit rendering of my ROSE DAUGHTER, no, it’s not, but if you’re asking me it’s not supposed to be.  What it is is a magnificent dreamscape of Beauty and the Beast with my ROSE as a jumping-off place—or a jumping on place, where she can bring her vision back and tie the red thread of story to it so all may follow. 

Roses. Well of course. It's a slightly shiny, jacquard-y fabric, like expensive bed linen.

Title and facing page. They're all already signed, but Your Name Is Added Here.

First page.

Random gorgeous picture from the middle somewhere.More random gorgeousness.

The glasshouse. (And yes, all the illustrations are tipped in.)

Oh, and yes--ahem!--I own one or two of the originals. (Don't strain your eyes. It's Purcell's Evening Hymn.)

* * *

* http://www.davidaustinroses.com/english/Advanced.asp?PageId=1988

http://www.classicroses.co.uk/

** Now joined by Etsy http://www.etsy.com/ and Ravelry http://www.ravelry.com/ , both of which wave cheerfully and say, hi, hellgoddess!, when I go there.  Well, ‘Robin’ was already taken when I needed a username.  A username I could remember.    

*** But four of you are going to club together and commission me to write something for French horn, bodhran and two mezzo-sopranos, right?  Fine.  Just don’t make me learn to orchestrate. 

† And yarn.^ 

^ A friend has just been yanking my chain about my knitting needle collection.  Feh.  I’ll do a knitting-needle post some night and you’ll all just crumble away with admiration.+ 

+ You non-knitters . . . I don’t know . . . you’ll have to go bowling that night or something.

Okay, I knew I was pushing it.  WordPress has eaten one of the photos and added its caption to the previous photo.  ‘More random gorgeousness’ was another photo.  But it’s late and I’m tired and I’m not going to try to re-insert the missing photo, and WordFrellingPress won’t let me cut the superfluous text.  At least the formatting is back (I hope):  it disappeared the first time I hit the ‘publish’ button.

Fiona has been here today.  The minions of entropy and mayhem tremble and, wailing, flee.*   She hauled another 1,000,000 books off to Oxfam . . . which leaves me only about 1,000,000 left to deal with.  It is fatal to re-sort through books Marked for Dea—I mean, marked to go to the used-books shop where they can find nice new owners who will APPRECIATE them.  Siiiigh.  However, Fiona had quite enough to drag off to Oxfam today—I don’t want them to lock the door and run away the next time they see her coming.  And you don’t know . . . I might have RE-re-sorted the books I re-sorted today and put them back in the Oxfam mountain by the time she comes again next month.  I might.  And pigs might fly, it might STOP raining, and I might finish PEG XXIV tomorrow.  But it’s not very likely.  Especially the flying pigs. 

            Fiona then went on to tackle our backlist.  Was there ever a heroine so heroic?  She began by carrying an awful lot of it upstairs because I keep not quite getting around to doing this.  I will carry a box or two and then remember that my roses need feeding and clearly that needs to be done first.**  So while I was resorting*** Fiona was staggering up a lot of stairs.†  And hellhounds were lying aggrievedly in a corner of the sitting room where I could quell them with a Hellgoddess Look.  This actually works pretty well, it’s just it keeps needing to be reapplied . . . like a sort of high-speed fertilisation plan.  I shovel food onto my garden a few times a year.  I pin my hellhound with a beady eye a few times a minute.  Chaos in particular—Darkness has the occasional impulse toward adulthood††—has the most extraordinary creep.  The moment I looked away he was halfway across the floor—still obediently lying down, mind you—merely by stretching out his long hellhound legs and somehow arranging that his body should remanifest at the other end of all those legs—without actually moving at all.  While staring at me hypnotically with huge golden eyes.

            Hellhounds think that Third House exists to torment them.†††  But they were spoilt for choice today in terms of hellhound affliction.  It’s been raining so heavily that I think some nasty old git of a rain god has got rain’s gravity designation changed so it literally falls harder.  Ow.  We’re now working on our third inch of the stuff since someone at headquarters found the ‘on’ button again.  So when after our abbreviated morning hurtle I brought them indoors at Third House you could see them trying to decide what to, you know, object to.  If they objected too hard to Third House I might make them go outside again.‡

            The Original Plan had been that I would meet Fiona at Third House, having already hurtled hounds.  HAHAHAHAHAHAHA.  So, she came to the cottage first.  And as we were (finally) collecting ourselves to go up to Third House she said, You know, I think you’re the only person I know who has flowers in their attic.‡‡ 

It's a total waste of a window NOT to have flowers. And geraniums will grow ANYWHERE.

But Fiona also says that Secret Project #1 doesn’t look nearly as awful as I think it does.  But she would say that, wouldn’t she?  She’s IMPLICATED. ‡‡‡

 * * *

 * Do you suppose I could train them to run away at the sound of her name?  —If my Training Effectiveness Rating with the hellhounds, those spirits of lawlessness, is any indication . . . No.  

** My Tour de Malakoff is flowering nicely.  She’s been sitting in a dark shady corner and a pot too small for her for the last three years not because I’m like this, although I am like this, but because Tour de Malakoff is purple http://www.davidaustinroses.com/english/showrose.asp?showr=402

and the creature wearing her label, whoever she is, is white.  I suspect that whoever she is, she’s going to turn out to be large, and after three years I’m still deciding where I want to put an unscheduled, unknown Large White Thing That Furthermore Only Flowers Once—and am meanwhile stunting her growth by keeping her in a weeny pot.  However she gets full points for tenacity since I have tended to forget her in her corner.  I finally fed her during the early summer top-up this year . . . and next year she’ll be mugging passers-by on the footpath.

 ***  Resorting to threats of violence.  You, there!  Yes, you!  You book!  Get back in your box or I will re-re-re-sort you!

† I could hear tiny minion cries of frustration and despair in the background.

†† In that idiotic-but-not-entirely-useless dog-years calculator, they’re in their mid-thirties.^

^ Okay, I have known human males who are still pretty silly in their mid-thirties.+

+ I was saying thoughtfully to Fiona about some embarrassing aspect of hellhound behaviour, that I was just very unused to Entire Males, that the hellhounds were pretty much the first time I’d ever dealt long-term with Entire Males.  Fiona with a perfectly straight face said calmly, I think Peter might object to that remark.

††† Lie on THOSE BLANKETS?  Are you JOKING?  Those are the WRONG BLANKETS.  We can’t POSSIBLY lie on the WRONG blankets.

‡ One has critters because they’re fun to watch, of course.  Jodi has drawn up an inventory of How Being a Writer Is Like Being a Ferret

http://jmeadows.livejournal.com/870815.html

And I was thinking that it’s a lot like being a hellhound too.  I have a great creep away from my desk.  Zero attention span?  Check.  Looks to fickle goddesses (whose omniscience I dare to doubt:  see:  The Away-Desk Creep) to get me out of trouble?  Check.  Likes to lie on sofa with a good book?  Check.  And all three of us watch TV.  When we get the chance.^

^ It’s quite disconcerting to glance down at two pointy little faces staring straight at the screen with their ears pricked.  What are they seeing?

‡‡ And, speaking of my aversion to horror fiction, I’m glad I didn’t know V C Andrews.

‡‡‡ But she’s also bought a pair of rosewood needles AND subscribed to the same evil yarn site that I am in thrall to.^ Mwa hahahahaha.  Hellgoddesses always get some of their own back.

^ Which this week is having a sale on the other yarn I’ve been looking at.

Much too tired again.  Bleaugh.  Even a hardened old veteran of the Story Wars such as myself eventually grows weary of being pummelled, throttled and stomped by Work in Progress.  Yo, didn’t your mother teach you any manners?  It’s probably my fault—I didn’t raise PEG I right and PEG II is determined to outdo the older sibling in heinousness and writer persecution.  Maybe I should complain more, play for pity.  Ohhhhhhhh, singing, what misery.  Ohhhhhhh, bell ringing, what wretchedness and suffering.  Ohhhhhhhh, roses, it’s all blackspot* and thorns.

            I was out carolling to the hellhounds (and the sheep) this morning, and I thought, Wait a minute, why doesn’t this count as warm-up?  And while I don’t know why, I bet it has something to do with the over thinking thing.  Just singing for fun?  I what?   No no no.  Not on the permitted list.  Okay, now tell me why—and I’m aware that I’m not alone in this—as soon as I decide that I want to learn to do something better it immediately stops being fun and becomes hard and earnest and work?  I know that responsibility and application—and obstinacy—are good things, generally, but is it really necessary that they stomp** all the fun out? 

            Oh gods, it’s already Thursday again the day after tomorrow and I’ll have FORGOTTEN EVERYTHING when I go back to the Muddlehamptons.  AAAAUGH.***

Mismatched Socks says:

My teacher used to have me practice singing a piece entirely on the vowels, because it forced me to pay attention to them. It’s harder than it sounds, at least until you get used to thinking about vowels all the time.

Nadia had me try to sing a few lines of The Ash Grove—Eeeeaaaaoooo—only on the vowels a fortnight ago.  It was extremely ridiculous.  But occasionally when out hurtling—and singing something I don’t quite remember the lyrics to—I shift over to vowels, rather than singing la la la or unnnnnnh.  Just for laughs.  But it gives me a good excuse to drop my jaw and Make Space for the Sound.  Which is another of Nadia’s things.  Also, if I don’t know what the words are, I can choose my vowels.

Diane in MN

I have been taking dogs into conformation rings for almost twenty years, and self-consciousness and over-analysis and too much thinking about it accompany me every damn time, so if you get the trick of doing this, I will congratulate you wholeheartedly and then ask what is it? Interestingly enough, I don’t feel this way when I go into an obedience ring, even though the potential to be made a fool of by the dog is much greater. Resigned to the inevitable, I suppose.

But isn’t it also to do with the fact that you have more to do in the obedience ring?  The outcome has at least some more to do with what you do?  As I understand it, conformation is rather awfully a crap shoot a lot of the time, and you’re almost totally at the mercy of the judge’s own views on the matter.  With obedience while there’s certainly (too much) room for interpretation (I know this with great gruesome clarity from dressage tests) but you do have to be able to heel and sit and stay and so on (or walk, trot, canter, and make round circles), and you know the result if you fail.  There’s something for your brain to do.† 

            The trick, I assume, in frelling singing like in frelling everything frelling else, is going to be learning where to put my brain, so it can do the most good and the least harm possible.  If I learn that trick I will certainly let you know.

E Moon

David is also a fan of bluffing. My problem is that most of the time, when he says “Pretend you’re an opera singer” my brain sees a vast stage populated by real singers, all properly costumed and made-up and with bios in the program, and a highly critical audience out front, all dressed up, and overweight & aged me in jeans and T-shirt and my mud-stained, manure-stained shoes, my bare face hanging out and my hair scraped back into its usual “three pins will hold it” knot, and I open my mouth and squeak.

Occasionally–very occasionally–I can take on the persona briefly, but at that point my music-reading brain unhooks from my voice (opera singers already know the music, right?) and I start making up what I’m singing instead of singing what’s in the score. If I play the part, some part of me knows it’s fake, and plays it for laughs.

You’re not helping, you know.  You’re not helping at all. 

            In the first place, you have an excellent bio.  How many books have you written?  In the second place, overweight is far from either unknown or a source of discrimination in the opera world.  And you brush up just fine, or people wouldn’t keep asking you to cons. 

            And speaking of cons, you’re not going to try to b*llsh*t me that you don’t have a public persona, are you?  Please.  The trick here—for you and me both—is tweaking the writer-persona into a shape we can use for singing.  Unfortunately the ‘earning a living by SALES OF BOOKS’ doesn’t work as spur here. 

            I’ve always loved dressing-up—preferably inappropriately††—and one of the less gratifying aspects of choir membership is the extremely boring clothing most choirs seem to expect their members to wear for public performances.  White shirts and black trousers or skirts:  Yuck.  One of the few compensations—indeed inducements—for having to go be an author in public is getting to wear silly clothing.  Hmmph.

            But . . . yeah.  The curse of an overactive imagination.  I’m extremely sorry to hear that you still have squeaking problems.  I don’t want to squeak!  No squeaking!  I don’t want to hear about squeaking! 

Ajlr

Apropos of the being able to write anywhere, do you also find that the Story – whether the current one or something else that tries to elbow its way in – also can arrive when you’re anywhere? You’ve described in the past how some of your most useful development times can come with hurtling the hellhounds and I wondered if a (fairly) long period of such simple (!) physical movement allows you to listen more productively than, say, a series of shorter and more mixed activities?

Yes.  Anywhere.  The more inconvenient the better.  And yes, I’m probably at greater, ahem, risk out hurtling—overactive body like overactive mind (see above).  Hurtling gives my body something to do so it’s not fidgeting and I can think of other things without having constantly to mind [sic] it. . . .  For example I’m trying to write a guest blog about the stories that folk songs tell—the story-telling aspect appeals to me as much as the music carrying it along, and my favourite folk songs are almost invariably ones that also tell a good story—and this morning while hurtling I was entirely deflected from both the guest blog and PEG FRELLING II by a story arriving unheralded but with a decisive thump in response to listening for the 1,000,000^th time to an old folk song that has always bothered me because it tells the story wrong.  Now, do I want to risk pissing PEG II off even more by taking a day to scratch an outline down? 

 * * *

* http://www.gardenersworld.com/how-to/problem-solving/rose-blackspot/

Also rust:  http://www.gardenersworld.com/how-to/problem-solving/rose-rust/

And mildew:  http://www.gardenersworld.com/how-to/problem-solving/rose-powdery-mildew/

There are plenty of others, but these are the big three.  Unless you choose badly, are very unlucky, or have a ratbag climate, roses are not hard, as I keep saying.  But anything that puts on a flower show as spectacular as roses do needs liberal amounts of food and water.  If they don’t get them the evil blackspot, rust and mildew fairies will likely visit your garden.  And gardening organically does mean that you will probably have some spots and speckles however well you take care of your roses.  The rose world is catching on to the need to breed for disease resistance rather slowly.  Even a mere twenty years ago when I was first buying hundreds of roses and then watching kind of a lot of them turn funny colours and keel over, the philosophy was that you had to spray . . . and breeders didn’t give a damn about anything but how spectacular the flowers were.  This is changing.  But not fast enough.

** Speaking of stomping 

*** And furthermore I’ll have just come from my first handbells in a fortnight and that is sure to have been chastening, if not downright traumatic.

† Forget the test route.

            I’ve also trotted a few horses around a conformation ring and hated it.  The perceived helplessness not only makes me a bigger klutz, it makes me stupid. 

 †† Generally speaking I find being old much to be preferred over being young, but it does make me sad that I’m too old to wear my barely-butt-covering black leather mini any more.  Okay, probably too old.  I did say ‘inappropriately’.

It’s raining.  Really.  Genuine tipping-it-down, puddles-to-the-ankles, hellhound-outraging rain.  In the last week or so we’ve had nearly half an inch, mostly in a couple of fairly spectacular meteorological displays of bad temper*, but while I’m sure everybody’s gardens appreciated anything they could get, it’s barely laid the dust, and anywhere that isn’t a pampered private garden and heavily mulched I suspect it ran straight off again.  I was still watering my pots yesterday (and complaining).  Today . . . today it’s raining.

            I’ve forgotten how to cope with rain.  I got rain on my glasses on the way to the tower this morning.**  I was wearing my leather jacket, and I hadn’t zipped it up.  I was also wearing ancient All Stars with holes in the bottoms***.  What Is This Wet Stuff Falling From the Sky?  What do I do?

            And the hellhounds . . . the hellhounds are not the least impressed by the interruption of the drought.  They want a nice hurtle, like the nice hurtles they’ve been getting pretty well uninterrupted for the last three or four months.  I had to drag† them out on our shortest round—and these guys are a lot chattier than the whippets were.  Rowan could do a fair peevish grumble, but when Darkness doesn’t approve of current events by golly you hear about it.  At least neither of them belongs to the ‘I’m not gonna crap till the weather improves’ school of dog perversity.  We’re really all still in shock.  Wet!  Stuff!  Falling!  From!  The!  Sky!  But if it’s still doing this tomorrow we’ll have to go out for a proper hurtle regardless or we’ll all be dangling from the chandelier with restless cooped-up-ness.††

            But, you know . . . rain.  Rain is good.  It’s been raining hard and steadily enough today that it should be getting into the ground.            

* * *

* Not at all popular with someone who has windows permanently open for the easy egress of bats.  And the bat update is . . . I went so far as to risk closing the bathroom window a couple of nights ago when the rain was coming in sideways.  And . . . there have been no repercussions that I’m aware of.^  Atlas managed to come in a third day again last week and finished sealing up (I hope) both the kitchen and the linen cupboard^^ . . . but he’s coming back this week to do the sitting room as well.  Despite the apparent lack of bats at the moment, the sitting room beams are in the exact same state as the kitchen beams were, and I predict that Hermione and Eadgyth will become cranky one day soon and start looking for alternate exits as their old ones have disappeared.  Once you introduce a bat to a chandelier she’s not going to give it up again easily.  I did wonder, if Ajlr’s resident eco warrior is correct about Bat Cottage having more summer tenants this year than usual because of the dry weather, if perhaps they’d disperse again if it rains hard enough.  But I suspect it’s too late this year—by mid-June the first babies are already born, and I don’t think anyone’s going to move once there are babies involved.  Also you may remember—or you bat people already knew this—that the point about nurseries is there need to be enough babies to huddle together to stay warm while the mums are out hunting.  We’re also having an unusually cold season so some of the smaller nurseries maybe have been abandoned this year for that reason as well as the drought.  I really should not have allowed myself to be pleased at the Largest Bat Nursery in Hampshire cognomen last year.^^^  This is the kind of thing fate latches onto, laughing maniacally. 

            Anyway.  I haven’t seen a bat in nearly a week, although I heard wings once or twice early on.  But the attic window is still open.  And it will stay open till at least one night after Atlas finishes stoppering up the sitting room.  Bats are, you know, mammals.  They have brains.  You’re not going to teach a wasp or a bee where the open window is.  But I would expect Hermione or Eadgyth, if they manage to find a new way through in the sitting room#, to be able to find the emergency exit.  I can stand wet carpet for a few more days if I have to. 

^ Insert nervous ritual gestures here. 

^^ And while the attractiveness rating of the inside of my linen cupboard does not greatly concern me the kitchen is going to require some cosmetic rehabilitation.  Which probably means the sitting room will too. 

^^^ As a result of a series of frivolous emails with a friend and the promiscuous following of links I found this site:  http://www.habitataid.co.uk/   I’m a little tempted to contact them and ask what they might recommend for a very small garden that supports an awful lot of bats.  For all I know the Chiropteran population explosion started when Bat Cottage’s new owner started stuffing rose-bushes in every available gap.  Pssst—all the aphids you can eat—pass it on. 

# aaaaaaaaugh  

** This is the second time Niall has managed to be away for a long weekend over an Old Eden practise night.  I’m having to run three bell-meets in four days.  This is absolutely not allowed in the Care and Handling of Fragile Deputy Ringing Masters Who Don’t Know What the Frell They’re Doing.^   We pretty much got through Friday practise by the skin of our teeth.  Or the sleight of our hands.  We only just got through service ring this morning—we were piteously ringing minimus (four bells) when Edward, bless him, showed up^^—but it’s looking bad for Old Eden tomorrow.  I’ve been having top-level consultations with Colin.  We are hoping that a battlefield alliance of our two sadly depleted forces^^^ may result in one bell practise somewhere.

            Meanwhile those of you who follow me on Twitter already know that I fell downstairs yesterday morning (ow) and this morning managed to impale my forehead on the sharp steely# corner of Wolfgang’s driver’s side door (double ow).##   Both my left shoulder and most of my left ribs were testy this morning### and service ring was while both eyelids still opened fully.  Colin’s nasty little garage flower-pot ring never looked so good as it does to me tonight in prospect of wrestling those possessed-by-demons clankers tomorrow night at Old Eden. 

^ I could have a word with Penelope, who is responsible for forcing Niall to go on holidays in the first place.  Unfortunately she’d laugh.  

^^ There are four-bell towers and ringers who love kinky four-bell methods.  But most of us feel that real method ringing begins with five working bells:  doubles.  Doubles, however, is supposed to include a sixth, tenor-behind, bell.  The drawback to this morning is that the other four were all good ringers which meant we rang Stedman without a tenor behind.  I know I tell you that this happens now and again.  It’s still terrifying. +

+ I’m ringing master in name only, you realise.  All these people outrank me.  If I hadn’t called for Stedman, they’d merely have mutinied.

^^^ Yes.  I’ve been writing PEG II for quite a lot of the afternoon and it’s not looking good for our gang.  

# Modern cars are made of plastic.  Until you impale yourself on a corner of one of them. 

## The parking-space-side flowerbed is perhaps a trifle richly planted.  This includes . . . uh . . . several roses.  One of them is Ayrshire Splendens, which Peter Beales http://www.classicroses.co.uk/products/roses/ayrshire-splendens/

describes as a 15-footer but she was 20-plus at the old house and still in world-conquering mode when we left.  She’s supposed to be climbing the fence and launching herself into my (*&^%$£”!!!! neighbour’s frelling forest here in New Arcadia.  But roses don’t always do what you want them to.+  She’s got a couple of thorny tendrils out investigating that empty area on the side opposite the forest.  Because I am too stupid to live I was ducking out of her way at the same moment that I was opening the car door. . . .

+ HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA. 

### I would fall left-side-down.  Left is Chaos’ side in the hellhound hierarchy.

*** I wear them till I can no longer tie them on, okay?  And I’ve been known to use duct tape to delay the day. 

† Ow.  Oh, well, Chaos may be more chaotic but he weighs noticeably less in all-four-feet-braced posture. 

†† With the bats.

I spent a lot of the afternoon in the garden.  Longer than I meant to, which is how it usually goes with us gardeners.*  I planted one rose** and two dahlias—yes, I know, but the dahlias are getting urgent:  one of them is even threatening to bloom, which is a little rude for a dahlia in mid-June.***  And I wasted too much time trying to figure out where I could wedge some more roses in and, in Wedging Mode, what shape of pot is going to work best in this or that imaginary space. . . .

            And then I came back to the mews for supper and Peter said, oh, I was going through back issues of the TLS and I think you said you wanted this. . . .

http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/the_tls/article7175082.ece

YES.  I CERTAINLY DO WANT IT.  THANK YOU FOR REMINDING ME.†

And hey, it’s nearly half off if you order it from the Book Depository. 

http://www.bookdepository.co.uk/Rose-Jennifer-Potter/9781848871762?b=-3&t=-20#Fulldescription-20

Mmmm.  Roses. 

* * *

* I was just complaining to Georgiana, who has an amazing allotment^ and brought us strawberries to die for last week, that the problem with this time of year is that of course you want to spend as much time as possible in your own garden—but it’s also the time of year that if you want to see anyone else’s, the National Garden Scheme plus every other garden occasionally open to the public for charity^^ is in full spectacular roar.

^ You non-Brits, you know about allotments? http://www.allotment.org.uk/articles/Allotment-History.php 

^^ All proceeds to the Distressed Werecritters and Vampire Protection Agency. 

**  This one:  http://www.roselocator.com/rose_locator/roses/hybrid_tea_other_form_flower_form/1402_proper_job.php

You can see why I had to have it:  dark red old-fashioned and very fragrant.^  But . . . the name?  ‘Proper Job’?  They named a rose ‘Proper Job’?  What?  This shouldn’t have been allowed.  The Rose Anti-Defamation League should have sent the registry form back with a big red DENIED and told them to try again.

            But I’m wondering if rose names, never a strong point, are getting worse.^^  Here’s another one I bought on Tuesday:  http://www.roselocator.com/rose_locator/roses/hybrid_tea_spiral_bud_form/590_global_beauty.php ‘Global Beauty’.  Ewwwwww.  And that photo wouldn’t necessarily have grabbed me—I already grow Graham Thomas and Golden Celebration—but this stopped me in my tracks as I was cruising the plant tables last Tuesday:

So--in theory--I get the heartbreaking hybrid tea bud shape plus a big fat riot of petals once she's full out. Mmmm.

 I don’t think this photo does her justice either however:  you’ll have to take my word for it that the shading from cream to dark yellow isn’t a trick of the light, that’s the bud itself.  I’m watching it closely and hope to have a smack-you-silly photo of the final flower later on.  Oh—and even the bud is scented.  I’m so happy.

^ Mine is just a little green thing at the moment.  I hope this is what she turns out to be.  See below.  Nervously.

^^ Although ‘Sexy Rexy’ takes some beating as a really really really bad name.  http://www.rosesuk.com/rose_locator/roses/floribunda_less_100cm/121_sexy_rexy.php  She was very popular in my early obsessive days+ so I gave her a shot++ and she was a frail heroine and had almost no scent.  You can afford the occasional scentless wonder when you’ve got over 500 roses but I wouldn’t have her now.+++          

            I was about to go off on a little riff about how scent and scentedness is very individual and you can’t really trust catalogue descriptions of scent—even more than of colour, and catalogues always lie about colour.  As an example of this I was going to cite [Madame Mmmph] whom I’ve also just bought—partly because she is already in full flower and I therefore know her scent is fabulous, despite the catalogue description of her as having little scent.  Even with the windows open, driving home with a car full of roses, she was magnificent.  I’m now looking her up on line for you since the catalogue doesn’t have a photo of her and I foolishly haven’t taken one and  . . . that’s not the rose I bought.  Oh.  Um.  Well, that explains the discrepancy about scent.  I wonder who she is?  That also explains why her growth habit clearly isn’t as described either.   Hmm.  Rose growing.  Always an adventure.

            Never mind.  Whoever she is, she’s fragrant. 

+ Of course I’m still obsessive.  But these are my later obsessive days. 

++ Using her breeding name of Macrexy on my label.  When she was good she was, admittedly, very good, so I had people on our open days asking me about that mysterious rose, Macrexy, they were sure they’d never seen that name in a catalogue. 

+++ I do have two scentless wonders . . . but I’ll come back to them some other post. 

*** Although one of the ones from last year is already in flower.  Whoa.  Geez.  I’d better feed her again if I want her to keep going into the autumn.  This is the one that spent the winter in its pot in a corner of the sitting room—rather too near the radiator, although with the Aga and a small house I don’t use the central heating much.  I knew it had to be dead;  this is not how you overwinter dahlias.  You overwinter dahlias by digging them up, hosing the tubers down, letting them dry (mostly) off, and then playing Russian roulette with sand, vermiculite, crumpled newspaper, cardboard boxes, and plastic bags.  They also need frost free but cool and dark.  I never got around to doing whatever it was I was going to do with this one—it came in as part of the jungle last winter and never got moved up to Third House because why?  This is not how you overwinter dahlias.  So before I threw it on the compost this spring I watered it (still in last year’s plastic pot) and put it out back and . . . she promptly produced leaves and a stem.  Oh my gods you’re alive.  The only problem is that there will now be a row of pots with dahlias in them in my sitting room this winter and since this isn’t the way you overwinter dahlias my luck may very well run out and I’ll have a lot of dead dahlias next spring and be all cast down and sad and everything.

            Meanwhile . . . only about a fortnight ago I was in the attic ferreting in the corners for bats and discovered . . . a paper bag with a leaf growing hopefully out of it.  Oh my gods it’s another dahlia.  Why aren’t you dead?  When did I dig it up and tuck it away?  I have no recollection of doing this.^  So I took her out and potted her up, assuming she’d promptly collapse from the shock . . . and she’s growing away like anything.  Maybe I’d better stick to pots in the sitting room however.  They’re harder to forget. 

^ Maybe it’s an Alien Spy Dahlia.  I’m the perfect choice because I will assume I just forgot.

† Peter has this inexplicable habit of wanting to finish reading his TLS before I start ripping pages out.

Indeed I did not sleep marvellously well last night although nothing went out of its way to wake me up. I’m now suspicious of all noises* which is unfortunate at midsummer when there are only about three hours of darkness anyway and people tend to be coming home hilariously till the time the wretched birds start trying to drag the sun up even sooner than scheduled.

I got up almost as early as I do for Sunday service ring, to take hellhounds for a brief decisive sprint.

Ugh.

No, I’m staying home. Sigh.**

So I put hellhounds in the car and took Peter to the train, and then the hellhounds and I went for the rest of the morning hurtle in a skulking, edge-of-town-in-case-of-excretions-that-cannot-be-picked-up kind of way

I want to know who planted the rose. That's not an 1888 type rose. This is the edge of a half-wild cemetery with nothing else around but trees.

. . . and Darkness, the streaming, keeping-the-hellgoddess-at-home one, within half an hour of Peter’s train departing, reverted to if not normal exactly, still, if he’d been doing this all day yesterday, I’d’ve been on that train.***

Sigh.

I put hellhounds back in the car. I may have been muttering a little. But not very loudly. Because last night, when the likelihood that I would not be on a train to London today had begun to loom in a large Darkness-shaped darkness, I had devised an alternate plan.

We’d go to a rose nursery.

Mmmm. Roses.

The hellhounds were a little nonplussed† but I had a great time.†† I even got . . . um . . . three roses that were on the list.  Among a few others.  Um.  Well, you don’t want to get everything on your list too quickly, what’s the fun of that?

Patient if underwhelmed hellhounds.

We were hardly back††† again‡ when Peter rang that he was on the train home. And then I finally got a few of my thorny new family members to the cottage. Peter gallantly offered to heel in‡‡ any I hadn’t decided on the future of, but this is a dangerous precedent, leading to more roses at the mews and my vague feeling that I have room for more roses.

Twelve. There are twelve. If you're counting. Are you counting? I'm not counting.

Now I need more large pots.

* * *

* . . . she says, turning up the radio. This is a radio/CD player thingummy and modern which means the wretched thing ONLY functions with its remote. ^

And we’ve lost the remote.

Fortunately—well, fortunately for me—the remote got lost while it was on Radio 3. Which means, until the new remote arrives—and of course it took us about a fortnight to go round humbly to the shop and order a new one because WHERE COULD A FRELLING GREAT REMOTE HAVE GONE? Tahiti, with its paintbox, apparently—I can listen to Radio 3. Or silence. Or strange shrill tinny noises from my elderly laptop.^^ Therefore of course tonight Radio 3 is playing the end of Stravinsky I loathe—Rite of Spring^^^ and Dunbarton Ughs.

^ Although I have the next edition at the cottage and it has touch-sensitive controls on its face as well as its remote. And for its next edition I hope they got the decorative face controls to work.

^^Rather angry-pipistrelle noises, as I think about it. Hey, I’ll sing for you . . . if you promise only to play back on elderly laptops.+

+ Note: joke.

^^^ Yes. Sue me. Although I like the two-piano version. I’d love a look at the sheet music but it’s not the sort of thing you can download for free.

** Peter’s prep school—sic—was having a reunion. They were evacuated during the war—WWII, of course, pay attention—and that era is remembered as a kind of thrilling semi-anarchy. So some of them put together a book of anecdotes and some (blurry) photos and all the Old Boys who were still around and interested were meeting up for a launch-party lunch at somebody’s regimental whatsit at The Tower of London. Really. And after lunch they got to knock a lot of tourists out of the way so they could stand on the steps of the regimental whatsit and get their photo taken.^ If anyone sends Peter a copy of the photo I’ll let you know. The book is pretty much a you-had-to-be-there.

^ No the Beefeaters were not involved. I don’t think there were any ravens either. Or Crown Jewels. Or the heads of any of Henry’s ex-wives.

*** And we wouldn’t have needed to be skulking near storm gutters and wilderness.

† Especially by the fact that I was outdoors in clear sight of hellhounds and . . . persistently did not return to the car, despite the pressure of four beady little eyes, and let them out to cavort with me as is The Way. That I was spending my time wrestling with large numbers of tall many-legged green things over a ridiculously small area clearly did not register: they would sort these minor delinquencies out as soon as I let them out of the car.

Dogs are a hoot. I love having dogs.^ Hellhounds didn’t give up and lie down till I finally moved over to the other side of the nursery and out of their sight. They stood there STARING at me for over an hour.

^ Except for the streaming bits.

†† Peter says I had a better time at the rose nursery. That his reunion would have . . . ahem . . . made me feel very American. Yes. This possibility had occurred to me, before Darkness made all such potential anxieties superfluous.^

^ I would have behaved myself! I would!

††† Hey! It’s a long drive!^ And we’d had our hurtle first! I didn’t spend (nearly) three hours at the nursery! Nooooooooo!

^ Thank the gods. If I lived near a large specialist rose nursery—this one’s only medium-sized, doesn’t have any of the truly insane obscurities that feature conspicuously on my list, and is a significant distance from New Arcadia—I would be a danger to society.

‡ The mews, not the cottage. The cottage has been full of Atlas, two stepladders, and bits of timber all day. Really it’s just as well the poor hellhounds were not trying to spend the day there.^ But this has meant a lot of shifting roses in and out of the car. I suppose I could have put a blanket in the boot for Peter. The roses certainly wouldn’t have fit back there.

^ Yes, I did think of asking Atlas to keep an eye on Darkness and let him out into the courtyard if he showed Signs of Distress. But I didn’t think of it long. I want a happy, trusting Atlas who is innocently willing to go on working for me.

‡‡ http://www.ehow.com/how_2272122_heel-bareroot-plants.html

But my new roses are already in pots, which makes heeling in even more dangerous, because the rose doesn’t realise she’s only heeled in, and, especially this time of year, immediately starts growing.

The view from the hellhound courtyard at the kitchen door. Enter at your peril.

It’s not absolutely all roses.  There are a few freshly planted dahlias that you can’t see unless you’re really good at differentiating one green leaf from another.*  And how about a nice poppy?

Poppy in MORNING sunlight. That's MORNING sunlight.

She’s just off screen to the left.  Or a nice miniature clematis in a hanging basket: 

Yes, I should PLANT her in her hanging basket. But this is the famous hanging-basket pole that BOWS under the weight of a, er, hanging basket. I found this out AFTER I had Atlas cement it into place so it would stop taking out the rose that climbs up it every time it levered itself out of the ground. If I planted her she'd weigh more.

She’s just out of sight on the right hand side.  Her name is Filigree . . . and in the process of scampering through the Taylors Clematis site http://www.taylorsclematis.co.uk/ to rediscover this since of course her label has been eaten by wolves, I’ve compiled quite the little list of new clematis I’m sure I need.  **

But I admit there are a lot of roses.  That dark red babe on the right is Tess of the D’Urbervilles, which has–heretofore–always been a total flimsy fainting heroine–she even died on me at the old house.  I’m not even sure why I bothered to try again at the cottage when I have NO space for flimsy and fainting.  But–when she produces them–she really does have flowers to swoon over.

Mmmmmm. She also smells divine. It is perverse how many red roses there are that have no smell.

Her first couple of years at the cottage she tried the feeble thing and I was like yeah, yeah, get on with it, either pull yourself together or croak so I can put something else in there.   I do keep feeding her.  Last year she was pretty good and this year she’s amazing.

Amazing.

She grows in a great tangle with Mme Isaac [Periere], who also likes to bow and lean, but of course I have completely failed to get a persuasive photo of this phenomenon.  This is one of those things about photographing gardens that many of you will know:  your eye picks out the flowers.  The camera relentlessly points out that actually the view is mostly green. 

And the combined scent--Mme Isaac has a notoriously powerful fragrance--will make you drunk. Or at least a little giggly.

The flowers are unmistakably different as soon as you have the chance to compare them.  Mme Isaac is a deep raspberry pink;  Tess is rich dark red.  Mme Isaac is a genuine old rose and Tess is one of David Austin’s little darlings,  and clearly modern.  But hey.  With roses this superb, whatever. 

Roses. Mmmmmmmm. Roses.

To Be Continued. 

* * *

*Plants.  Gaaah.  I have [rmmph] dahlias to plant out, standing in little rows in their little pots.   They arrived as cuttings, and you whap them into small pots to give them a chance to develop a root system, and then you put them where you want them to grow and be dazzling.  You watch them–well, theoretically you watch them–so you can get them out of their little pots before they get cramped and cranky.^   So I’m trying to plant them out as they’re ready.  I have one that’s already a good two foot high so I thought, yeep, get that one planted.  So I Prepared the Hole and tipped her out and . . . she has no visible root system yet.  The faintest of white threads.  GAAAAAAAH.  I planted her anyway.

^ Although I’ve grown some astonishingly large dahlias in astonishingly small pots when I’ve not been paying attention.  Oh, gods, I’d say, and dump a little more flower food on it, and stab in another bamboo pole for it to lean on.

** I also seem to have lost most of an hour.  Hmmm.