Unnnnh
Yesterday was a totally lost day. Uggh. From a sane, rational, grown up, mature standpoint that Cambridge at Friday tower practise which fried my eyeballs was a mistake. You push something like ME, it pushes back. Harder. But I’m not sane, rational or mature (just old), and I refuse to see it as a mistake. As I crawled around the house(s) yesterday in a grey fog of bleh I kept whispering to myself: I ring Cambridge.* The woman who didn’t go back to ringing a decade ago, after she got up off the sofa again after eighteen months horizontal with acute ME, because she was too stupid to learn to ring inside, is ringing Cambridge.** Life is funny. Leaving the old house nearly killed me, but the reason I started ringing again is because the cottage is two garden walls over from the church and its bell tower and I couldn’t frelling stand it. I swear they were ringing about three quarter peals a week that summer, and you can’t escape the sound of the bells at the cottage.*** I know I’ve told this story. Maybe someone else remembers how long I held out. Six weeks, maybe. And then I was on the phone to Vicky, asking if they would take on a recidivist beginner. A stupid recidivist beginner.
Well.
The other thing about choosing to be unwise on Friday is that we don’t get a Cambridge band around here that often; there are crack bands at some little distance but I scare easily and I haven’t got the nerve or the time.† And Anthea was going to be my minder. Anthea is armour. The Light Brigade would have come right out of that valley again if they’d had Anthea with them. What noise is this? Give me my longsword, ho! †† We ring Cambridge!††† But I’ve been whingeing in these virtual pages, I believe, not long ago, that one of the inevitable dilemmas about gaining competence in something obscure like bell ringing is that it becomes harder and harder to find the necessary band of adepts more competent than you to haul you on that next step, that next method, that next incomprehensible dimension.‡
So I’m not sorry.‡‡ But that didn’t make yesterday any more fun. And I clung, blearily, to the treble this morning for service ring: No! Mine! That didn’t stop Niall‡‡‡ from fishing a small bit of paper out of his pocket and handing it to me however (as I held onto the treble rope with the other hand). Did you see this in Ringing World? he said. I didn’t want you to miss it.
Handbells for sale, said the little piece of paper, and a phone number.
HANDBELLS FOR SALE? I DON’T NEED A SET OF HANDBELLS. I ONLY RING HANDBELLS AT ALL BECAUSE NIALL IS THE IRRESISTABLE FORCE, AND HE HAS HANDBELLS. HE HAS LOTS OF HANDBELLS.§
I took the little piece of paper home§§ and stared at it for a while, thinking, if I wait long enough, and this week’s issue arrived a couple of days ago, the bells’ll be already gone by the time I ring up about them. Yes.
Late this afternoon I rang up. I’m third on the list.
Pray for me. I don’t need a set of handbells.
* * *
* Almost.
** Almost.
*** This is why I’m such a fabulously reliable Sunday service ringer. Well, I’m fabulously reliable about being there.
† This is not entirely my fecklessness. Of the three local crack bands that I know exist, I have had direct experience of two of them, and you could cut their total indifference to anyone who isn’t as good as they are into large bricks and build an impregnable fortress with it. I believe one of them is nice to its own beginners if they’re clever enough—so I would have failed there too—the other one isn’t even nice to its own beginners, how the hell do they think they’re going to keep their bells ringing? Immortality? A really good zombie spell? The third one is supposed to be the friendliest, but they’re also the farthest away.
†† Give me my bell of burning gold and something something something something, till we have rung out over England’s green and pleasant land. With apologies to Mr Blake. And Mr Shakespeare. And Mr Lord Tennyson.
††† Almost.
‡ Speaking of incomprehensible.
This is the line for Cambridge—which you saw louring from under YOU ARE MY SUNSHINE the other day. I’ve had it out because I’m supposed to be learning the frelling trebles—the one and the two—for handbells. Handbells you ring by counting frantically and watching the treble like it’s your last hope, which it is; there’s not a lot of physical skill in ringing handbells, although there is a right way to do it, and quite a few wrong ways. Tower ringing is far more physical because of the size of the bells, and while again you ring by counting you also engage individually with the other bells: you’re feverishly looking around for the bell you’re passing in seconds place, then the new bell you’re passing in thirds place, then the bell or bells you dodge with, which is where the line goes jagged. Tower ringing is inevitably slower although it doesn’t feel like it—I’ve told you before you have about a third of a second to ring in the right place: or of course the wrong one, always a too-attractive option—but you haven’t got time to look around when you’re ringing handbells.
On the extremely unlikely chance you’re interested, what the one (the real treble) is doing is treble-bobbing: treble bobbing is always that pattern; in a treble-bobbing method, that’s what the treble is doing, whatever kind of mayhem the other bells are getting up to. The red line is the mayhem that is particularly Cambridge. I was ringing the two on Friday and the four last Wednesday: all the bells (except the treble) ring the same pattern, they just start at different places. So I was starting at the beginning on the two, but I started at the top of the fourth column when I was ringing the four . . . and then I rang the fifth column to the end (ignore the knitting to the right of the fifth column: that’s one of the many superfluous forms of method notation I don’t begin to understand), then dropped off the edge of the universe and climbed back on again at the beginning. And no, the bells don’t necessarily arrange themselves in order: that would be way too easy. The six starts at the top of column two. Go figure.
But. Yeah. You have to have the entire line memorised to ring the freller. You learn it in bits, of course, and some of the bits, by the time you get this far in your method book, look familiar.
Even so.
‡‡ Although I’m going to be in a seriously bad mood tomorrow evening if I haven’t improved enough to go ring at Colin and Anthea’s home tower. Did I tell you that Ditherington on Wednesday is about to go onto a fortnightly schedule? So I have an excuse to go out an occasional extra evening a week. Peter just needs to find a Monday bridge club.
‡‡‡ I’ve finally figured it out. Nothing stops Niall.
§ He has about twenty. Most people who change ring (as opposed to ring tunes) on handbells have six or eight or maybe ten. Even twelve. Not twenty. Niall has twenty.
§§ Peter has been laughing like a drain. Even my own husband doesn’t take my agonies seriously.
Short* NASTY Monday
I got up what passes in my case for betimes today because I was having an early lunch with Penelope and wanted to have hellhounds well hurtled beforehand.
Except that it was raining. Not just raining: RAINING. Rain on a mission to dissolve planet Earth and leave a large muddy spreading splodge in the solar system.**
While I was waiting for either a break in the downpour or the void to open at my feet when both the road and the ground underneath were washed away*** I discovered that I had a dead phone. I had a dead phone because a hellhound had chewed through one of the wires.
Eighteen kinds of panic at this point. He’s eating WIRES???? I know who it is—Darkness, usually my better behaved, more mature hellhound. He does get into random acts of mastication occasionally.† He actually chewed the spines off a couple of books, and the fact that he’s still alive since I discovered this proves what a soft option I really am. I’d caught him having a go at the phone wire a few weeks ago, lectured him SEVERELY and, as I thought, tidied the wire out of reach. But tidied is not really a concept that applies to the cottage and obviously . . . it didn’t stay where it was put. Very like the hellhounds themselves.
BUT . . . HE’S EATING WIRES?!?
We finally got out on our walk. What with rain, wind and appropriate headgear I don’t hear too well and at one point we were slopping along a farm track and I whirled around, convinced that we were about to be run down by one of those tractors with tyres so tall the driver wouldn’t be able to see a woman and two hellhounds down at ground level, especially in this weather . . . and I dropped one of my pink suede gloves and TROD on it.††
It’s barely worth mentioning that the hellhounds shook themselves violently the moment we got indoors again.††† This is not really the best means by which to have your house plants misted.‡ One of the reasons the carpets don’t get hoovered often enough is because I spend so much time mopping the kitchen floor. And walls. And cabinet fronts. And snarling.‡‡
Lunch was a bright spot. Obviously I was under Penelope’s protective aegis for the duration.
And then back to RATPEGASUSBAG. Maybe I’ll just email everybody the ending. You don’t really need all the details, do you?
And because I haven’t had a good practise ring in long enough to feel my fragile grip on [name any method here] slipping I decided I was going to go to Colin’s tower practise tonight. And Niall was even going to come along quietly.‡‡ I was already standing out at the end of the long mews driveway wondering what was taking Niall so long when there was a small breathless voice behind me and Peter had come pelting down the same long driveway to tell me that Niall had just rung to say that Colin had just rung to say that they couldn’t start practise till eight.
So I frelling cancelled. EXTENSIVE AND CREATIVE RUDE GESTURES HERE. I know I don’t go to bed till most people are thinking about getting up, but most of that late time is spent doing stuff. RATPEG or blog or something torturous with the piano, and I don’t dare be out too late or my brain refuses to go back to work. It’s late! it says. I’m not supposed to have to work this late! I’ll have the union on you! Nyah nyah nyah nyah!
And speaking of something tortuous with the piano, I have a voice lesson tomorrow. I haven’t got Evening Hymn anything like learnt, I’ve been so busy trying to learn the wretched thing I’ve not got any further on It Was a Lover AND I committed the CARDINAL ERROR of taping myself singing last night. JEEEEEZUM. What the hell was I thinking of?
* * *
* FRELL FRELL FRELL FRELL FRELL I AM SPENDING WAAAAY TOO MUCH TIME ON THE BLOG STILL AGAIN ETERNALLY ETC ARRRRGH.
** In all the dystopian returning-to-a-changed-Earth-after-years/generations/centuries SF I’ve read I don’t recall anyone exploiting the large muddy spreading splodge denouement.
*** Hey! Stop that! I have roses to plant!
† Although it was Chaos—I’m sure I’ve told you this story, but it remains vividly etched in my mind—who bit through the cable plugging my electric keyboard into the wall at the cottage. UNGLEBLARG GLURP. Cheez. I was at my desk, and there was this funny sharp alarming noise, and . . . there was a half-grown hellpuppy smiling at me with the two halves of the severed cable lying over his paws. Why he didn’t electrocute himself I have no idea.
†† It’s actually not ruined. I think. It’s pretty handsomely waterproofed or I wouldn’t be wearing it in this weather in the first place, and the mud is cracking nicely, like Death Valley in August. I think it’s going to brush off. What is really miraculous however is that . . . this being a farm track and all . . . it seems to have fallen in honest mud rather than slurry.
Oh, and no, there was no tractor.
††† Raincoats have no effect on this behaviour. They still shake, and they still irrigate the vicinity.
‡ Maybe the reason I’ve still got a little of a certain three-week-old bouquet left is because it is regularly misted by hellhounds.
‡‡ Relatively quietly. He did tell me that Titus’ wife loves dogs and does not love handbells, that he had told her my flimsy excuse for declining Saturday morning handbells and her response was that if I wanted to bring the hellhounds some Saturday morning she would walk them while I rang bells. I asked Niall how large she is and if she has shoulders like a football player. I am not sure I was satisfied with his answer.
How do I . . .
. . . get myself into these things.* Or at least if I have to get into things, couldn’t I get into ones that aren’t going to cause other aspects of my personality to stab me repeatedly with sharp pointed panic? I really should have taken up knitting.** Nobody watches you while you knit.***
I told you that Blondel gave me Purcell’s Evening Hymn for next week. He played and sang it through for me before I took it away and while I was entirely riveted by the eighty-seven bar one-breath Hallelujahs, the time signature itself didn’t impress itself upon me as being too bizarre or anything.† Because I am lazy and irresponsible and doing twenty-seven other things on Wednesday, I didn’t get the hymn out to look at by myself till yesterday. And discovered the freller is in 3/2. Not 3/4 or 6/8 or 3/8 or 2/4 or anything remotely normal. Three two? How the bleeding dranglefab do I count 3/2?††
So I spent a little while confusing myself badly and then thought I’ll take it to Oisin. Which was very sensible of me. Unfortunately I didn’t stop there. I have no idea how I got from this sensible decision to the manifestly lunatic one of bringing my Finzi along too and asking if Oisin can play It Was a Lover and His Lass. I mean, of course he can. He’s an accompanist. It’s one of the things he does. His first love is playing the organ, but he also runs a choir, teaches piano and half a dozen other instruments†††, plays duets and . . . accompanies people. Including singers. So, why would I want him to play It Was? Please remember that I’m the person who was about to indulge in a nervous collapse Tuesday afternoon when it looked like Blondel and I were on our way to the cathedral’s practise room, because it might not be soundproof enough. Or someone might come in while we were there. Yesterday my 3/2-addled brain was groping along some path of non-thought to do with the fact that Blondel struggles with the piano for It Was—he doesn’t struggle nearly as much as I do with the singing, but he’s not having a totally good time—and . . . uh. . . . This is where the breakdown in logic occurred.
I’m pretty sure I told you I’d asked Oisin . . . quite a while ago now, if he’d play for me to sing to some time and he agreed much too readily. I wasn’t planning on getting to this point however for . . . oh, years yet. Years and years.‡ But I think I’ve painted myself into the corner. I think I have to come to my next . . . er . . . music lesson with Oisin prepared to sing.‡‡ Hey, we could have a crack at Fear No More while we’re at it. AAAAAAAUGH.‡‡‡
Meanwhile I think the lullaby from PEGASUS is more or less finished. My printer is giving me gyp but I need to get it printed out since scrolling down and across your computer screen while you’re trying to play the piano is not ideal and even Oisin is slightly confounded. I want to test out the playability of the accompaniment (!) on me before I release it to a semi-waiting world. Maybe next Friday.
* * *
* No dabble setting is how. I’ve told you this story, haven’t I? Except I can no longer remember if it was Hannah or Merrilee who first came up with the ‘no dabble setting’ as the explanation of my personality. I do remember that whoever it was promptly told the other one and Peter and they’ve all been quoting it at each other and laughing like drains for fifteen years or so. VERY FRELLING FUNNY. HA HA HA. So what’s wrong with being enthusiastic about the stuff you do? Maybe slightly too much stuff? Maybe slightly too enthusiastic? It’s the sign of a lively and wide-reaching intelligence that you have bookshelves on all your walls^, subscribe to 1,000,000,000 magazines and journals on 1,000,000 topics, and never get to bed till at least mmmph o’clock in the morning because you can’t tear yourself away from one or twelve of them any sooner. This last possibly exacerbated by your having been out pursuing one (or twelve) of them earlier in the day.
I suppose deliberately gaining possession of two puppies who could be expected to grow up to require two hours of hurtling a day—when you live in town—might also be the result of a dabble-free personality. Three and a half years ago I didn’t know just how bad the menopause/calorie situation was going to become. I’m glad I didn’t decide on goldfish. Although dabble-free goldfish would probably require excessive struggling with large heavy aquaria etc. But I imagine hurtling is a more efficient calorie-burner.
^ I’ve even managed to put together an entire shelf of books on change ringing. This takes some effort. There aren’t a lot of bell ringing writers.+
+ Yes. Hmmm. THE BELLS OF MAZAHAN is probably after ALBION which is probably after PEG II. But don’t count on it.
** Note past tense. It’s too late. Yes it is. Although I got another Ehrman’s catalogue a few days ago. Remember Ehrman? http://www.ehrmantapestry.com/ Sigh.
*** Or if they do you can tell them to stop because they’re being weird.
† Actually I did notice on Tuesday as I was watching over Blondel’s shoulder that while the notes themselves looked all right there seemed to be kind of funny collections of them between bar lines. But I was busy being riveted by the hallelujahs, and I tend to go into a trance when Blondel sings anyway.
†† I keep telling you I’m not musical. I just like the noise. And I like clubbing myself senseless with unsuitable challenges.
††† If he ever replaces his flute, I’m first in line to nail the old one. For my copious free time.
‡ So, I was wrong. Enthusiasm is bad for you.
‡‡ The rest of the day I’ve been hallucinating with bitter and harrowing vividness that moment some months ago when I had to come in for the first time on a note all by myself in He Was Despised while the piano—and the pianist—just sat there. It’s going to be like that but worse.
‡‡‡ Maybe I keep doing stuff like this to myself because it makes such good blog material? But the thing is . . . I really enjoy messing with music. I love playing the piano. I love composing. I even . . . well . . . I even love singing. Somehow or other I have got to get over this crippling sick-making stage fright nonsense. I’m not asking to be Marilyn Horne or Maddy Prior^. Or Angela Hewitt.^^ I’m just trying to have some fun. I do this for FUN.
You are used to really bad singers, aren’t you? I said skittishly to Oisin. Oh, absolutely, he said, way too cheerily.
^ Or Bernarda Fink, whose album of Schubert lieder I’m listening to as I write. Mmmmmm.
^^ Or Hildegard of Bingen. Or Amy Beach.
In which life trifles with me
In that way that life has. The day did not get off to a good start. I paid bills. Ewww. So then I had all these things to post. My all-Hampshire-weather-purposes hurtling coat has stupid pockets that you can’t quite get a normal sized envelope into, let alone several. But since I don’t walk anywhere without hellhounds if I can help it—that two-hour minimum daily hurtling requirement significantly curtails my desire to go out for any additional strolls—this means I take them with me even three blocks to the post box.* Since this was their first leg-and-bowel stretch of the day there was a good deal of picking-up-after to be done.
And I have a new least favourite thing in the universe. Some of you may recall that the previous incumbent of this exciting position was stepping in someone else’s dog crap while picking up your own. No. I have discovered worse. Worse is the envelopes in your badly-designed pocket falling out of your pocket and onto somebody else’s dog crap while picking up your own.
I will spare you the rest of this scene.
* * *
I have mentioned before—grimly—that we live in a world of sequels, and that as soon as anything is good or popular, and sometimes when it isn’t, the next thing on the schedule is A Sequel!!! And the next thing after that is Another Sequel!!! And the next thing is . . . well, you get the idea. Some authors, some illustrators, some filmmakers, some butchers and bakers and candlestick makers thrive on this system. Some of us do not. Mornings** when I open nuraddin’s inbox for the first time that day and run the traditional jaundiced eye over a longer than usual number of unfamiliar return addresses,*** my heart sinks because experience tells me that some robust percentage of them, sometimes all the way to all of them, will concern the sequel to SUNSHINE. Which does not exist. I now have the address to the blog entry There Is No Sequel to Sunshine on my desktop where I can copy and paste it into reply windows quickly enough to give me barely enough time to mutter a short imprecation.† At what point, do you think, did the ease of both direct contact and available information on the web devolve some responsibility on seekers and questioners to do some of their own homework? Because it most certainly has so devolved. It was annoying and disheartening twenty years ago to get a steady stream of street mail letters demanding the third volume of the Damar trilogy [sic], but twenty years ago following a few mouse clicks to the news that Damar is not and has never been a trilogy, and that I may or may not write more about it during some presently unknown period in the future, wasn’t an option.††
I was moaning about some of this to a friend the other day, it having been a Heavy Virtual Mailbag Day and she replied:
I wonder if they have this vision of you with a mountain of books written, yet not published, sitting around your office as you think, “Nah–I don’t think I’ll publish THIS one unless 50 people email me before 2 o’clock Wednesday…” Do they think it’s like the home shopping network? “Call in the next 20 minutes, and you can have a sequel to Sunshine! This is a limited time offer, folks, we can’t do this all day!”
Snork. And the first hundred callers will get ABSOLUTELY FREE a cubic-zirconia-studded potato peeler with their order.
* * *
* I have mentioned before my aversion to the post office itself. This intensified when they banned dogs. Don’t talk to me about the British national soppiness for their animals: it’s a frelling myth.
** Or possibly afternoons
*** I was contacted recently by a hot young writer about signing a bookplate for a friend of hers, and she mentioned in passing that her latest book is hooking four thousand emails a month. If I started getting four thousand emails a month I’d change my name and hair colour, dye the hellhounds and join the witness protection programme^. Or whatever they have over here instead of the witness protection programme.
^ Peter would object to the upheaval. We’d have to work out some system for staying in touch. Slouching around New Arcadia in our tweeds and Burberries, the hellhounds and I would be watching for signs. A chalkmark in a corner of the library window. A vase of pink flowers in the mews’ kitchen window. A blue balloon tied to the walk-light pillar halfway down the main street.
Peter and I would be a disaster at clandestine. We’ll just have to meet at the pub for a beer. No one will recognise me in a Burberry with two Dalmatians.
† Sometimes I don’t bother. Depends on how cranky I’m feeling and how many of them there are that day or there have been recently. Four thousand emails a month . . .
†† I haven’t handed down my final judgement on text emails. It’s very hard to quarrel with I red yr book 10 x u rock even while my inner schoolmistress is having spasms. And my attitude toward text-like abbreviations^ has undergone a revolution since I started Twittering. A hundred and forty characters. Feh. But in one thing my inner schoolmistress and I are united: if you don’t put a name at the end of a communication to a stranger, you are slime. I don’t even say it has to be your name but a name.^^
^ I do not pretend to have a clue about how real texters do it, and I have enough other stuff to learn, thanks
^^ As Robin Hood once said to a scrawny young man with a bad attitude
PEGASUS Tuesday
It has been a seriously sucky day. It started with oversleeping by two hours. Which meant I did at least get two hours of sleep, but this is still not optimum. I’m used to having bad nights, and a lot of the time it’s not a totally huge deal; for one thing, if I can’t sleep, I turn the light back on, and read. Insomniac nights are probably my best opportunity for catching up on all the homeopathic journals I go on subscribing to; I have found through trial and error that I will be less pissed off at myself in the morning (I’m going to be tired; at least I can try not to be pissed off) if I’ve actually done something with that time I would rather have been asleep in. But in the middle of the Week of the Copyedit Nightmare, I don’t dare. I put a pillow over my head and try to count sheep.*
I have cancelled Blondel so many times that when I finally go next week** I will probably find I’ve forgotten his street number—I’m sure I remember his street*** but assuming that I will have let the RaspBerry go flat† and in this mobile-phone era the nearest public phone†† being about a mile away I am having no trouble at all imagining††† trotting up and down that hill looking for a front door that seems familiar. . . . And Niall was having one of his Upper Level Handbell Evenings tonight which I had briefly entertained a fantasy of taking an hour off this evening‡, if I’d got my daily page count sufficiently appeased by then, to attend long enough to have a go at plain bob major‡‡ Silly old me.
There have been a positive cascade of yucky publishing details that discretion, a desire to go on getting published by someone, and Fear of Merrilee prevent me from detailing here, much as I long so to do.‡‡‡ One bright spot however is that—I remember telling you that this was happening, but I haven’t been telling you how many times we’ve gone over the Final Cliff of Failure and then been snatched painfully back to the possibility of firm ground, and let me tell you, standing on the possibility of firm ground is unpleasantly vertiginous—we do, in fact, have a cover for the new YA edition of the much-repackaged SUNSHINE.§ I thought the end of last week that this had crashed and burned at the foot of the Final Cliff of Failure—they wanted to use a photo cover and I Have This Thing About Photo Covers.§§ And there wasn’t time to try again. Was. Not. Time.§§§ I knew this. So I went off to have a sulk over the weekend# and . . . lo and behold, yesterday they had magicked something out of nowhere and today . . . we have our cover. Yaay. ##
And then there is PEGASUS. PEGASUS, as often happens at this stage, is rapidly deliquescing into mrgmp*&^qvvvll%@j????frell. I should get through it tomorrow, leaving myself an evening### and the following morning to make sure my notes look like they make sense, whether or not they relate sensibly to the manuscript, before I shoot them back to Putnams. Supposing I can recognise relative proportions of sense/nonsense when I see it/them. If you’ve got any candles to spare, I could use one or two.~
Let’s have a couple more pictures of roses.
And then I’m going to go lie down in that bed thing again and think about sleep.
* * *
* Or pegasi, or hellhounds, or bottles of champagne, or roses, or bars of Green & Black’s. . . .
** Yes. Next week. Nothing shall come between me and a voice lesson next Tuesday. Although we’re just about going to be starting at the beginning again. Larynx? Soft palate? Vocal cords/folds? I forget. Coming in on a note all by yourself with no accompaniment? Hell. I remember that bit.
*** Nothing is sure in this life, especially when it relies to any extent on my memory.
† Oh, it’s good for another day . . . oops
†† Mobiles fry your brains! Bring back phone booths! And stop ripping out the old red ones^ which are not merely an ornament to the countryside and an enticement to the tourist trade but a haven in a sudden hailstorm! Ask me how I know this! And yes, I can get the hellhounds in too!^^
^ Unless you’re going to do something really wizard with it http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/somerset/8385313.stm
^^ Disturbingly underfoot is kind of their default position anyway, unless there are rabbits, pheasants, or trundling bits of wind-galvanized garbage to attract them.
††† But I have a vivid, one might almost say overactive, imagination
‡ Note that Blondel, with commute, takes two hours, and he’s earlier in the day. There was never any way I’d’ve got enough pages done by midafternoon.
‡‡ Eight bells. Ie needs one more person than Niall, Colin and me.
‡‡‡ Mmph! Mmmmmblrggggglphmp! ARRRGH!
§ All my books have been through the odd new edition or two, but SUNSHINE is in a league of its own. The one constant is the Neil Gaiman quote.
§§ Also about Body Parts. What is it about pieces of people that is so popular on today’s face-out bookshelf? Ugh.
§§§ This is all based on a promotion opportunity that will either include SUNSHINE or it won’t. The promotion is already scheduled.
# I haven’t had time to sulk. I have three weeks’ work to get done in six days.
## Yes, I’ll post it here when I can. I think they’re still gajoining up the squirglicks and blethering the gazambles. Art departments. You know.
###Will I make it to Ditherington bell practise tomorrow night? Stay tuned
~ Although Luke’s need is still a whole lot greater. I think we’ve still got about a month before the next big consultants’ summit.

