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Gloom
I have (mild) stomach flu. (I think it’s stomach flu.)
I definitely have ME. In the ‘hello darkness my old friend/ I’ve come to talk with you again’ sense.* Glurb. Unggh.** It comes back with knobs and brass knuckles on whenever there’s anything else wrong with me.
And Blondel has left forever. Well, Thursday. He’s leaving forever. On Thursday. His house is full of large bulging cardboard boxes covered in heavy plastic tape. And his mum. I was thinking about hurling myself at his feet and weeping into his shoes, but not after I saw his mum. I wouldn’t want to embarrass him or anything. Under more ordinary circumstances I would have cut my voice lesson today since I can barely breathe let alone make an attempt at that wrestling-with-several-alligators business of organising your disorganised body to produce pleasant melodic noises. But today was THE LAST. LAST, LAST, LAST.
Waaaaaaaaah.
There are, furthermore, supernumerary reasons why this is a Personal Disaster of Epic Proportions. In the first place, I’ve already created the cherub, Blondel’s nearly frelling underage replacement***, in my mind as humourless, demanding and mean.† In the second place . . . Blondel is married, so the cathedral gave him a house. The only person whose life I’ve made a misery in a year of Tuesdays is the neighbour on Blondel’s music room’s side of his terraced house who has a strange compulsion to hang around in his garden in the afternoon. Well, Tuesday afternoon anyway. The cherub is not married, so he’s going into shared accommodation . . . and he’s going to be sharing with not merely another cathedral singer with similarly erratic hours, but a cathedral singer with similarly erratic hours whose mostly-live-in girlfriend is a soprano of some national standing. AAAAAAAUGH. Okay, so, fine, he’s not going to be teaching at home. Where is he going to be teaching?†† One of the cathedral’s rehearsal rooms? (Which I know from Blondel exist and are available.) AAAAAAAAAAAAUGH. I’d be hyperventilating if I had the energy.†††
Blondel did sing for me today: some of Schubert’s Winterreisse, which was divine, and Whither must I Wander? from Ralph Vaughan Williams’ Songs of Travel, which would have made me weak in the knees if I hadn’t already been lying more or less full-length on the chair in his music room (good job they hadn’t packed that yet). I’d bought Songs of Travel for me a while back, when I was starting to get into the (ahem!) baritone repertoire—when I was having such a good time [sic] with Finzi’s Garland. I’d brought it along today to ask Blondel if I might try having a bash at something while I waited for the cherub to arrive—he doesn’t, till September—and he suggested The Vagabond (right answer) and Whither (also an excellent answer) and then stood there staring at the latter a few seconds and said, I’ll sing it, and scampered back to the piano. Golly. I admit that singing some of this stuff that I know quite so well on CD is kind of a mixed, uh, curse, because even if you don’t know what you really sound like you do know you don’t sound anything like Bryn Terfel. I know Bryn Terfel singing Finzi’s Garland and Vaughan Williams’ Songs of Travel as well as I know the first page of THE FELLOWSHIP OF THE RING.‡ Bryn is a hard act to follow. Blondel can do it. And he’s going away forever.
I think I need to go lie down now and draw some comforting hellhounds up to my chin.
* * *
* I am so old I remember when that song came out.
** You can imagine Paul Simon standing on my flimsy, supine body at this point, wearing big black Doc Martens and looking threatening. Okay, maybe it better be Simon and Garfunkel. Neither of them is really large and threatening-looking enough to sub for the ME Monster. The ME Monster also has extra limbs and a migraine-inducing red shift. And it drools.
Actually as I think about it it looks a lot like this: http://www.goodshowsir.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/Continuum-2.jpg
(Thank you, Jodi Meadows, for the inestimable favour of directing me to http://www.goodshowsir.co.uk/ )
*** It’s been bad enough taking voice lessons from someone who isn’t thirty yet. The cherub is barely into his twenties. And according to Blondel he’s very talented—well, likely he is, or he wouldn’t have got the job. But the thought does loom that very talented young people tend to be rotten teachers because they haven’t got a clue what to do with the untalented, let alone the old.
† Because I’m a twit. Next question.
†† The one thing we do know is that he is actively seeking to take on Blondel’s betrayed and abandoned students. This might be a good sign, except it probably just means he’s broke. He probably has student loans to pay off.
††† It did occur to me, as I crept along in the slow lane of the bypass to Mauncester—ordinarily I’m a hot smokin’ fast lane pedal to the metal driver—that as the frelling years pass, I don’t know if the edges of the ME get blunted or whether I’m just learning focus. But driving a car is one of my measuring sticks for how bad the ME is. I don’t drive much any more—to Papua New Guinea to look at a garden is about the limit, even on good days—but there have been many days when getting behind the wheel of a car was not an option. I don’t have those much any more. It never occurred to me today that I was going to have to cancel: only that I was going to have to allow a little more journey time, because I was going to be in the slow lane, and focussing.
‡ ‘When Mr Bilbo Baggins of Bag End announced that he would shortly be celebrating his eleventy-first birthday with a party of special magnificence, there was much talk and excitement in Hobbiton.
‘Bilbo was very rich and very peculiar . . .’
)](**&^%$£”+={:@?#}[!!!!!!!!!!
And I was in such a good mood when I got up this morning.* I was going to get my iPhone set up today! Tra la! Traloo tralay! Happy happy happy!
GAAAAAH.
The first thing that went wrong was that I was sitting at the cottage reading back issues of The Ringing World surrounded by one cool pristine virgin iPhone4 and various pieces of sulky middle-aged malfunctioning technology while Gabriel was down at the mews wondering where I was.** Once he was installed at the cottage*** however the havoc fairies exploded out of the walls and got to work.
I don’t think I can bear to go through it all again point by point, even supposing I could remember the order of events, which I probably can’t, having burst quite a number of blood vessels over the course of the day†. The short form is:
At present I have no working mobile phone. You may remember that my sudden, slippery descent into the 21st century began with needing a RELIABLE mobile phone which would be turned on 24/7 and never leave my side††, because I’ve been feeling seriously freaky about Peter since he was so ill in the spring, and his mobile is now loaded to speed dial both the cottage and my mobile.††† Furthermore he came off his bicycle yesterday and has been limping around today complaining about his knee, and I’m having what-if visions of it suddenly giving out on him while he’s coming downstairs and . . . and I’m really looking forward to his saying to me disgustedly tomorrow, having read the blog: I’m fine. I have never been close to falling downstairs. I’m fine. ‡
The SIM card from the RaspBerry‡‡, with my old phone number, transferred beautifully under Gabriel’s masterful handling. There’s just one little problem: no signal. No. Signal. Yes, okay, this is an iPhone4, the one noted for signal problems—but there’s no signal when it’s lying on the desk, either, with no hot sweaty human in any kind of contact—except the steely-gaze kind of contact. The steely-work-you-freller-gaze kind. Now, New Arcadia is the Bermuda Triangle of southern England, but that’s why Orange: Orange works around here. Usually. And I’ve never failed to get a signal on the RaspBerry. It may take some waving and swearing, but eventually the little bars appear, like small goblin teeth, and I’m on. Oh, and have I mentioned that the iPhone4 case hasn’t arrived? The case which, according to both Apple and the sellers of iPhone4 cases, will solve the signal problem. Five working days, the case-selling web site said. That would be today. Nope. No case. I went out and fossicked around behind the water butt, where things get left‡‡‡, to make sure there wasn’t a small iPhone case sized package hiding among the half-used bags of compost, but no. Still no.
Gabriel talked to Orange while I got on with the new holes in the walls and the screaming. Gabriel eventually went away, stooped and careworn, with promises to return tomorrow with fresh artillery and Raphael in a vibrant new set of shining armour.
Meanwhile . . . no phone. No phone. And, obviously, no internet. No lovely fascinating iPhone cruising—the poor RaspBerry is hopeless about the web—no binging and biffing from hither to yon on my shiny black cutting-edge tech. No.§
The one thing that has worked is . . . setting up my account with the iPhone store. The thing may not work but it can still be a time-waster§§ and money-sink.
I got to level six of Fingerzilla in about an hour. I’m not sure how many levels there are, but I was feeling a trifle motivated by the shrieks of the dying. You do want to get to level six, however, because that’s when you get to start crushing San Francisco’s Victorian houses§§§ which offers a nice change from factories and glass skyscrapers. I spent a good deal of the afternoon honing my technique# while various iPhone aps downloaded incredibly slowly: the Chambers English Dictionary took thirty-five minutes, for pity’s sake. And slowed my computer down to early-Amstrad speed.
Somebody, please, tell me this wasn’t a horrible, gruesomely expensive mistake. . . .
* * *
* It was even raining! Yaaaay! I don’t have to do any watering! More time to play with my iPhone! Hellhounds, of course, not having any deep interest in the iPhone, failed to share my enthusiasm for the weather.
**However he contrived to give Peter’s spam filter a boot up the backside, so time was not wasted. Yet. At this point.
*** Having run an extremely thorough gauntlet of hellhounds. Gabriel’s problem is that he likes them and encouraging them only makes them clone at a terrifying rate. Twenty-four hammering tails! Thirty-six cold wet rootling noses! One thousand six hundred and forty-eight gambolling limbs!^ A mere archangel hasn’t a chance against them!
^ Reminds me a little of something that happens toward the end of a book called SPINDLE’S END
† Making new holes in the walls of a three-hundred-year-old cottage with your head is surprisingly difficult. Not to mention painful, but in a situation like this, you desire pain.
†† Except in the bath, or when I forget
††† Of course the one time I can remember receiving an important call on it, to wit, Cathy, to say she’d arrived and was en route to Hampshire, I hit the wrong button in a panic and hung up instead of answering. And I was even expecting the call. Very slightly in my defense, tangling with machinery was made somewhat complex at that moment, as I was several miles from civilisation, surrounded by sheep, and in the company of two hellhounds who were expressing their dissatisfaction with my attitude toward things that would run away if chased.
‡ Peter doesn’t really do emphatic the way I do emphatic.
‡‡ Somebody tell me why, when the RaspBerry lost the SIM card, it kept the contacts list but banished all the telephone numbers. I am not joking. I wanted to ring Gabriel about some damn thing or other after he’d left for the day^ and automatically reached for the RaspBerry. There Gabriel’s name was and . . . that’s all. Phone number is gone. Warily picked up iPhone and clicked on Gabriel. Yep. Phone number. Next thing that happens is that I discover all the email addresses have disappeared from my old paper Filofax. Don’t ever try to tell me that technology isn’t self-aware and isn’t out to get us. The Borg are so out there.
^ He can run away. Just like a sheep.
‡‡‡ By delivery persons who bother to read the instructions. I’m always glad to see another box left on my front stoop bearing in large letters the directive: leave beside house behind gate and water butt.
§ And does it have a fabulous, breathtakingly sharp and vivid screen, as you scroll through the icons of stuff you can’t use because you can’t get on the web? I don’t know. I haven’t noticed.
§§ There are some really astonishingly icky aps available out there.
§§§ My favourite newspaper headline—you get the headlines at the end of each game—is: Mayor Feared Eaten
# I’m still having trouble nailing those pesky helicopters.
Yet Another of Those Days
Yet another. Other people have lots of Those Days too, right? It’s not just me?*
So, for those of you too sensible to waste your time reading other people’s maniacal screams on Twitter, yesterday . . . I ordered my iPhone 4. And no, Orange never did email me to say they were in stock. I’d been thinking I ought to go check their site again, in case they were being ungleblargers, which they were, and then I got an email from Computer Men wanting to come argue with the Nightmare That Is My Email yet again, plus little things I would like them to address like that the sound on the mews laptop is dying, which is very inconvenient when you need to listen to Dido’s Lament 463 times on YouTube. ** So we arranged that they’ll come on Tuesday . . . and my thoughts turned to my future iPhone.*** Because I will probably need help cracking the iPhone code†. So, you know, if I had my iPhone by next Tuesday, then I could gloat exceedingly over both Computer Men who only have 3s, no, no, no, I would be very grateful for their assistance.††
So there the iPhone 4s were on the Orange site and I ordered one.†††
And then I begged and whined and wheedled poor Peter into agreeing to cottage-sit today, because they will only deliver your glittering platinum gewgaw to the street address attached to the credit card you paid for it with, which delivery may happen any time between 8 am and 6 pm. I love delivery services so much it makes my teeth ache.‡ But I had to hurtle hellhounds and then I had to go to the dentist.‡‡
Meanwhile . . . Bronwen had decided she was driving down from Orkney‡‡‡ again and could she come handbelling tonight? Of course she could come handbelling. And then Colin phoned at about 11 o’clock this morning, as I was attaching leads to eight furry leaping legs and a lot of noise, to say that he wasn’t going to be able to make it till 6, 5 being our usual handbell foregathering time, and 5 being the time I had confirmed with Bronwen. Bronwen is by now on the road, of course, and her phone is turned off. I then email Niall at work, saying, can he meet Bronwen and me at 5 anyway, since I can’t get hold of Bronwen to tell her not till 6. Now I can’t get hold of Niall.
So I add my howls to the general din, and three of us scamper outdoors, leaving Peter quivering on the sofa with his hands over his ears. We have a very nice hurtle§ and come back to the cottage to an iPhone and a beaming Peter, who therefore gets to go home. We all troop down to the mews, including the iPhone, with which I begin the approach-and-placation process while Peter addresses the preparation of lunch.
Peter is successful with lunch. I am not successful with the iPhone, which at present is a sleek gleaming paperweight, and whose directions, such as they are, are possessed by demons. Well of course. It’s not like I was expecting to figure it out.§§
And while I was questioning the parentage of the writers of iPhone quick-start instructions, I had an email from Bronwen saying that her car had broken down and she was not coming handbelling.
Whereupon I emailed Niall again, saying, never mind about 5 o’clock.
At this point, having managed approximately three mouthfuls of lettuce and olives§§§, I had to rocket off to the dentist. GAAAAH. So I got there with two minutes to spare . . .
. . . and discovered that they thought my appointment was at 3:45, not 2:30. GAAAAH. We will never know if this is my atrocious handwriting, a gremlin deep in their computer viscera, or a secretary with a mumble. But the end result was that I was adrift on the streets of Mauncester when I could have been at home eating lunch.
I went to Marks & Spencer and bought underwear. This is what Englishwomen under stress do. I have irrevocably gone native.
As dental affrays go, this was on the mild-skirmish end of the scale. I rang Peter to explain why I wasn’t back yet, and when I rang off I stood there staring at the soon-to-be-supplanted RaspBerry, thinking, I’ve finally learnt to do this.# Siiiiigh.
I got home at 4:59 to a phone message from Niall saying, happy to be there at 5 to ring with you and Bronwen. AAAAAAUGH. Frantically rang him. If I were going to be there at 5, I’d’ve left by now, he said. I only just got back from the dentist, I said. Good thing we’re not meeting till 6 then, he said.
So I staggered out with happy, frolicsome hellhounds, had three more mouthfuls of salad and olives, and addressed myself to handbells. And triumphantly rang the 3-4, which in the first place I haven’t done in months, and in the second place the middle pair are the most ratbaggy. So the combined agonies and exasperations of insubordinate iPhones and Cthuhlian dentistry have not yet destroyed me. This is good. I also have a novel to finish.
* * *
* Please lie if necessary.
** And I’ve just bought an iPhone. I am not buying a new laptop.
*** And my future Fingerzilla. Of course.
† I am not cracking anything else, you understand, which is why I already have a hard case on order.^
^ Pink. You had to ask? It’s not, I admit, a very thrilling pink, but I was compromised by what there was, what I could afford+, and the absolute need for a case that will survive both hellhounds and barbed wire. I fancy it will save my life some day, like Wendy and the acorn.
+ Try to imagine how much I don’t want Hello Kitty or a Coke bottle in Swarovski crystals. http://www.dsstyles.com/en/iphone-4-cases/swarovski.html
†† I will be very grateful. I will also gloat.
††† Not without some difficulty. As soon as I said I wanted the 32 GB instead of the mere 16, the person on the other end of the phone gasped and passed me on to someone else. This happened twice more. The woman who finally grudgingly sold me one said that everyone was buying 16s. Uh. As I have been saying since to everyone, didn’t we go through this with computers years ago? You always want more memory? You get as much memory as you can and then you stick extra memory cards in all the little slots? I’m not going to stop with Fingerzilla, you know.^
^ And the freller had better load multi-CD operas. The Walkperson totally sucks dead bears in storage and data retrieval. Totally. Sucks dead bears. It alphabetizes using ‘A’ and ‘The’. It alphabetises by performers’ first names. Not to mention the little matter of refusing pointblank to load multi-CD operas.
‡ Which possibly explains a lot.
‡‡ It is so unfair when you have to go to the dentist on a day when Your Life-Changing Technology is due to be delivered. You want to be at home ironing the floor and detoxing the wiring when it arrives.
‡‡‡ Or maybe Skye
§ To Sweeney Todd. Most of life’s frustrations are better for Sweeney Todd.
§§ Besides, I might give Computer Men heart attacks.
§§§ But the hellhounds ate their lunch!! It wasn’t really a bad day. The hellhounds ate lunch. And dinner.
# I even figured out texts. I found Merrilee’s from June. Um. I still don’t know how to send them, but I know where to find them. On the RaspBerry, that is.
Howling, various
Today has NOT been one of my better days. Let’s start over. It’s 3 am and I’m already asleep.
Blondel had a wedding in London to sing today and it had occurred to me after we’d already made our plan of a second voice lesson Thursday afternoon that, in my experience of weddings, he might be being a little optimistic about timing. So I had a plan for an alternate afternoon in Mauncester. What a pity I didn’t use it. It would have had to have been more successful than the one I lived through. Blondel was in fact a little late, but more to the point he arrived tired and ruffled—having managed to get lost finding his way back out of some London labyrinth*—so we ran a little later yet while he had a glass of water** and de-ruffled.***
And then . . . oh gods . . . the lesson itself was a disaster. Dido? Dido is spinning in her grave. And Janet Baker probably has an unimaginably ghastly stomachache of metaphysical, not to say necromantic, origin.† I was then so freaked out by the destruction I was wreaking that when Blondel suggested we try something else I couldn’t get through Fear No More. I can sing Fear No More.†† But not today. AAAAAAAUGH.†††
There were two brief moments when I wasn’t looking around for a sword to impale myself on. One of them was that Blondel has given me a goofy new exercise that I very nearly have to learn like a new song—but it’s amusing. Kind of a lot of your warm-up exercises are a snore, they’re just excercises for the purpose of waking your voice up and telling it has to work for a living.††† It’s not a big deal; I like scales. But this one’s fun.
The second not-nearly-long-enough moment was . . . Blondel sang Fear No More—upon request, and I suspect he only agreed because he too wanted to end the Hour That Should Not Have Been Born(e) on a better note than any of them thus far—so I’ve finally heard him sing. Ooooooh. My.‡ Maybe I should revert to the impaling scenario. Siiiiiiiigh.
It was now a good deal later than I realised. And I had handbells at 5 pm. Well, I was supposed to have handbells at 5 pm. I rang Penelope and asked her to please tell Niall I was going to be late. Half past latest, I said. But I was still in Mauncester at that point.‡‡ And you may have noticed the way they joyfully rip up the roads in high tourist season.‡‡‡ So by the time I got home I had written several sharp letters to the Hampshire County Council in my head and I was flatlining in both energy and morale—and I had to give poor sad patient hellhounds at least a token hurtle before I went off and left them again. But my presence for handbells wasn’t crucial, because Titus was coming—which was why it was at Niall’s house instead of my cottage, he of the big enough and relatively tidy sitting-room—so he and Colin and Titus could get on with minor (six bells: three people) while I sat down for five minutes and ate a nectarine. And I hadn’t looked at the bob major (eight bells: four people) enough anyway, so—especially after the voice lesson I’d just had—I wasn’t minding the idea of putting off the revelation of my handbell deficiencies a little longer still.
So it was more like 5:45 when I arrived . . . to find Niall and Titus sitting alone in silence. Because Colin was not there. Which I should have known, but I’d forgotten, and I hadn’t written it down. OH. GODS. And the only reason they didn’t kill me is because they’re British. Also, I suppose, because they still wanted to ring handbells. Which was what we were there for after all. Some of us sooner than others.
Handbells, once begun, were relatively successful. I’ve told you about Titus: he’s the one had the stroke fifteen or so years back and only has proper use of one hand—so he rings both bells in one hand, and I cannot BEGIN to tell you how confusing this is, not to mention the inevitability of rather a lot of rows that have seven or eight dings in them instead of the statutory six. But I stayed late enough that we could stop when Titus’ hand started getting tired, by which time people were even smiling at me again. Although Niall, who has no conscience whatsoever, while I was still in grovelling and whimpering mode, whipped out his diary with an evil gleam in his eye, and booked me in for handbells in Frellingham with one of his demon ringers on a Wednesday they haven’t got a third ringer. He’s been trying to get me to Frellingham for months, and I keep weaselling out of it, but this has got harder since I don’t have Wednesday Ditherington practise as a permanent shield and defense any more. GAAAAH. I think I’m nailed on this one.
And now I have a little dog to finish. The way this day is going . . . well. I’ve already decided I want to put my lament through my friend’s door on my way back from my piano lesson tomorrow.§ It won’t be finished, but the friend is, as I’ve said, musical, and if he doesn’t just throw something large and heavy at me the next time he sees me, he might have some editorial input. Also I want to have made the gesture some time before the new puppy he brings home in six months or so reaches its second birthday.
Okay. Onward. And I’m hoping for upward.
* * *
* My immediate reaction was, you drove? When you’ve got a train station in your back garden? I’ve got the American’s view of the British train system too—it may make you frelling crazy, and it often does, but it exists. After almost twenty years here I am still blown away by the sheer fact of the public footpath system, and of the national rail network. Even if the reason I finally broke down and bought my first mobile phone is so that I could make ‘I’m sitting in a train a hundred yards^ outside Waterloo and have been for the last twenty minutes, and I’m going to be late for lunch’ phone calls. Which I suppose is the answer to why he didn’t take the train. The day you’re late to perform for a wedding is the day the wedding will run on time.
^ Or metres, if you prefer
** Normal people would have a cup of tea or a double scotch. Singers are always thinking about their throats.
*** And we compared notes on the weird stuff some people lay on for the euphonious exaltation of their weddings. I am forced to conclude that the average level of musical education among the general populace is even worse than the boffins say.
† Okay, Janet Baker does not have a stomachache of unknown origin today, because if she had a stomachache every time some voice student—even the slightly smaller category of voice students who think she walks on water—mangled something she is famous for singing heartbreakingly superbly, she’d be too weak to get out of bed in the morning, and I’d prefer to think she is still enjoying her retirement.
†† I didn’t say well, okay?
††† Note to self: Do not agree to a second voice lesson in a week. Not even if you’re planning on spending all night at the piano and beating that frelling G into submission (while Peter is safely elsewhere playing bridge). Clearly the pressure is Too Great for a spindly amateur.
‡ Think Keystone Kops.
‡ Golly gosh wowie zowie eeep. Geezum. Gazinklebats. Bryn Terfel had better look to his crown. Although one of the things about Terfel is the size of his voice. He could fill Heathrow. Tear out all those ugly terminals and put in some bleachers. And Blondel says that his own voice is not that large. You couldn’t prove it by me: he was pasting me to the back wall of his studio clearly without trying. I can see/hear why people keep giving him jobs. Although I kinda wish he’d been having an off day when he applied for the job he’s going to the end of August.
‡‡ Sort of the backwards version of the ‘I’m sitting 100 yards outside of Waterloo’ mobile-phone call.
‡‡‡ This makes some sense in Maine, where the temperature may drop below freezing and snow begin falling any time, you just get to complain if it happens in June. In southern Hampshire. . . .
§ My voice lesson today was the little dog’s fault. I may have spent most of last night at the piano, but quite a bit of it was about a lament for a little dog, not for a queen of Carthage.
Big dumb yuck
How has it been a bad day? Let me count the ways.*
The phone rang at mmph o’clock plus four, and I’d forgotten to unplug the sucker.**
The weather is like being suspended in wet foam rubber. Wet grey foam rubber. You can’t see, you can’t breathe, and sudden gestures, supposing you have the energy to make any, make the air squelch. But will it RAIN? Noooooooo. It keeps dripping, like a leaky pot, and every time hellhounds and I venture forth it dribbles a little harder. It extravasates just enough to soak your All Stars, muddy your jeans-bottoms and make your hellhounds cranky. But rain? I wouldn’t go that far. I have put on and taken off my raincoat several times today in a hopeless, ritualistic manner . . . I want it to rain hard enough to need to put it on, you know? But the pressure of the soggy foam meteorological rubber makes the weight of a raincoat across my shoulder and the contact of Gore-Tex against my bare arms feel like burning brands, or at least a large boa constrictor. And yes, this weather has a severe effect on brain function, aside from being woken up after four hours of sleep by the phone going off like a hand grenade.
So maybe it’s a good thing that Blondel stood me up. Maybe he had an aural vision*** of me practising my Italian,† and decided he couldn’t cope with that and being wrapped in wet grey foam rubber. But I was then already in Mauncester, and I didn’t want to waste the journey . . . so I went to a garden centre. AAAAAUGH.††
And then I stood up my new osteopath††† because I am a stupid cow, and they’re going to rescind my hellgoddesshood if I’m not careful. This missed appointment I will of course have to pay for.
We will not discuss PEG II at all.
And I will only briefly animadvert on the topic of my New Least Favourite Mail from Readers, of which there have been several prime examples in the last few days, all of which begin, thematically if not literally: I know you said you aren’t going to write a sequel to SUNSHINE, but . . . You’re not getting it, guys. You. Are. Not. Getting. It. And I hope this blog is not leading you into the error of believing that I have a sense of humour. No. Wrong. I have tanks, swords, bazookas, hand grenades, hellhounds, boa constrictors, and extra-extra-extra large, hungry pitcher plants . . . but no sense of humour whatsoever. I suggest you make a note.
I am, however, reading a delightful book, which I look forward to blogging about in due course.‡ What this stupid, dank, revolting day needs is a nice bath and the last few chapters of a delightful book ‡‡. And may tomorrow be better. Gaaaah.
* * *
* And my quotation-mangling doesn’t scan. This is the sort of thing Peter will point out tomorrow morning after he reads the blog.^
^ I am trashed to the depth and breadth and height
My hand can reach, when feeling out of sight
For the lead-ends of Darkness and Chaos.
I am trashed to the level of everyday’s
Unjust wallop, by sun and vampire night.
I am trashed freely, as trashings blight,
And I don’t think anything rhymes with ‘Chaos’
At least not when you’re trashed
Beneath your station.
I am trashed with every bruising breath,
Screams, tears, etc, etc, and if fates so lash,
I shall be but better trashed
In my next incarnation.
** Thus the punishment of a Deputy Ringing Master organising her first quarter peal. I’ve already done it. Go away. I don’t want to hear any more about it till 5 pm next Sunday when everyone bounces jovially up the ladder beautifully on time. What I particularly don’t want is the phone call Saturday night . . . or Sunday afternoon at 3:30 . . . saying that something has come up and they can’t make it. Vicky has a lot of these stories. I’m avoiding Vicky this week too.
*** Auralion. Aurision.
† KEY VA JEH JAR POO MAHEE
†† Furthermore, while it is a very large, very shiny garden centre, which is why I do occasionally go there in spite of tearful pleading from my good angel, it is the sort of suspicious, ill-natured large shiny garden centre that chains all its trolleys up in a long awkward cordon. To wrest one away from its gulag, you have to stick a pound coin in the slot on the handle and slam it forward, which makes the end of the chain drop out on the far side. You get your pound—or somebody’s pound—back again at the end when you reverse the process and slam the end of the chain into the rear of the slot and the pound springs out. But the system is a nuisance, aside from needing a pound coin when your pocket is full of pence and 20p pieces, and it means that when the trolley you have freed for your very own turns out to be possessed by demons you probably don’t go to the customer service desk and ask for change for a fiver and go wrestle with chains and pounds till you find a well-behaved one, you probably just stagger around with it while it tries to drag all of your joints out of their sockets and then ram the nearest wall, causing passing staff members to wonder if you need a breathalyzer test. Several hours later you will be sitting at your kitchen table writing your blog entry for the evening and wondering if your rheumatism has taken a shocking turn for the worse or if it was that damned trolley.
††† Whom, you understand, I really needed today. I needed him before I was bested by a garden-centre trolley too: I was seriously peeved at Darkness^ this morning and as he was walking primly on short loose lead to have time to contemplate his dreadful sins without distraction by interesting smells and little rustling things in the hedgerows my hand rather froze on his lead, and the paralysis went zinging up my arm and sank KA-CHUNG into my shoulder. At present my head only turns to the left. Until I can rebook with the osteopath.
^ No, really? Lovely adorable sweet obedient only-lives-to-please Darkness?
‡ I seem to be amassing positively an alp of books to be blogged. I should get my literary butt in gear.
‡‡ Which she had better not frelling frell up. The way this day is going . . .
