I have just been trying to book next season’s tickets to Live from the Met(ropolitan Opera) and . . . ARRRRRGH.  Glasnost and jelly donuts THERE ARE A LOT OF FRELLING AWFUL WEB SITES IN THE WORLD.  The heavy hand of my suspicion falls on the shoulder of the Met Opera itself in this case, although the home site of the national Rapscallion Cinema chain is not my favourite battleground either arrrrrrrrgh.  But in the first place you have to book every individual opera separately.  This is such a confounded nuisance it literally loses them some of my custom—if I’m wavering about whether I want to see The Pirate, the Anglerfish and the Epipelagic Zone* I’ll decide against it just so I don’t have to groan through their horrible purchasing system again.  This includes timing you out if you take too long.  They timed me out three times tonight.  Once it was because their site had hung.**  The other two times I wasn’t anywhere near the end of their so-called time limit, they just threw me out for laughs.  And then I had to START ALL OVER AGAIN.  Now, I am a member of the sodding Rapscallion community, for the single purpose of being able to book Live at the Met a week or something early before rank and file are allowed in***—which system is at least finally working.†  When I log on it greets me by name, and is happy to present me with my back catalogue of many, many Met Live tickets.   But the moment I try to book another one . . . they want my name, several times, my email address, several times†† . . . you’ve got something like ten screens to get through FOR EVERY GODSFRELLING SODBLASTED TICKET, including things like ‘choose credit/debit card’ and you click the drop down AND THERE IS EXACTLY ONE CHOICE:  CREDIT/DEBIT CARD.  But if you don’t tick it, the page wipes itself and tells you you need to choose a credit/debt card.  There are also at least two screens that merely say ‘confirm’.  One of them is the one that crashed me.  One of them is also the screen that prevented me from booking Francesca di Rimini at all.  It hung for a while and then said Oops!  There’s a problem!, and crashed me back to the beginning.  I tried three times and gave up.  I don’t know whether I want to see Francesca di Rimini anyway.†††

            The day did not get off to a good start when we had a frelling tourist invasion.‡  Go.  Away.   I feel you notice the ‘not our town, we don’t give a rat’s ass’ much more strongly in a village than you do in a city—I remember this from Maine.  In New York City it’s the tourists who are at risk.‡‡  Today’s high points were (a) when hellhounds and I were rolling along the wide green way to the mews and found an SUV the size of at least one House of Parliament rolling down the PEDESTRIAN PAVEMENT straight at us.  He wanted to park on the grass so he didn’t have to pay the fee in one of the car parks.  Like it costs a lot in a town the size of New Arcadia, you know?  But most of the green way is blocked off from the road by trees.  If you want to be the world’s biggest asshole, you have to drive on the pedestrian pavement.  ARRRRRRRRGH.  And (b) when both hellhounds picked up chicken bones.  I want to kill people who throw their trash around anyway, and I really want to kill people who throw food trash around . . . but I suppose it’s just conceivable that some of our overweight not-at-all-wild‡‡‡ ducks might eat sandwich-ends before the rats got there, but CHICKEN BONES?  People who throw chicken bones on the street should be buried standing up under the cornerstones of important civic buildings, and thus be of some use to society at last.

            Okay.  I’m not in a good mood.

            But, speaking of wildlife—and of tantrums—cross-species adolescence, I love it.  After various responsibilities and crises had been dispatched I said THE HELL WITH IT and rushed out into the garden, where I dug and toiled and planted for . . . longer than I should have, but I came indoors much more cheerful.§  My adolescent robin was perched in the apple tree right outside the greenhouse—the greenhouse where the saucer of mealworms lives§§ having a complete paddy that dad wasn’t dedicated to bringing him mealworms.  Hey, you big fat turkeybutt, go get your own mealworms.§§§ 

* * *

* They all die in the end.  Including the entire crew of the bathysphere.  But the soprano goes out on some amazing top notes from the helium.  

** You’re sitting there, knitting furiously^, and glancing periodically at the large banner heading that says ‘do not hit refresh or not only will this transaction crash and burn but we will refuse to let you back on our delicate, easily disturbed site forever and your kitchen will blow up’.  So you don’t and . . . tick tick tick . . . eventually you time out, and then you get a snooty message telling you that if you’re going to frell about you deserve what you get.  ARRRRRRRGH. 

^ Got a couple more inches done yesterday, thanks to a forty-five minutes late bride.  Who as a result got about seven minutes of ringing because most of the band had to go on to another wedding.  Why it’s not in the contract that you’re hiring your ringers for exactly one hour from the time your wedding is scheduled to be over . . . I have no idea.  Us hoi polloi keep suggesting this and the higher-ups keep muttering inaudibly and not doing anything. 

*** After three years I have my seat.  If My Seat is ever already taken I may have palpitations.  I even found myself, this time, thinking, as I viewed with deepest gloom the six hours of Parsifal, that I wouldn’t book now, I’d wait till nearer time and if My Seat wasn’t taken . . . ^ 

^ This won’t actually help me much.  It won’t be taken.  The long Wagners are only attended by the faithful, which doesn’t often include me.  There are many valid excuses for staying at home and doing your knitting from the comfort of your own sofa.  I have ME.  ‘I can’t stand that misogynistic Aryan bully, I don’t care if he knew a few chords’ is also valid.  One of the things I have against Shakespeare is he goes on so.  Wagner??   Dear merciful gods.  

† First year I tried it, they took my membership money . . . and then declared ‘special events’, as for example the Met Live broadcasts, were not included.  GAAAAAAAARGH. 

†† They will also throw me out randomly for having ‘non matching email ID’.  The first time, maybe.  Typos are always a possibility.  The second, third and fourth times, no.  I guarantee my email address was accurate.  But the gremlins were clearly getting bored. 

††† And I decided I really can’t face Rigoletto in 1960s Las Vegas.  Gods, demons and bell-bottoms.  Why are directors allowed to pull idiot feckless crap like this?  WHY?^  Stick to Broadway, honeybun.  They love you there.  

^ If every critic in the solar system gives it five stars, I’ll reconsider.+  

+ But My Seat will have been taken, for a five-star Rigoletto. 

‡ Trippers who stroll up my cul de sac because it’s quaint and part of their Sunday afternoon expedition should have boiling oil or at least hot borscht poured on them from an upper storey windows.  I keep thinking about it.  You know how beetroot stains—?  So, you want a memento of New Arcadia?  It can be arranged. 

‡‡ ‘Hey, wanna buy a nice bridge?’ 

‡‡‡ And Darkness is going to nail one, one day.  I’m just hoping he doesn’t take both himself and me into the river in the process.  There would be language.  

§ Until I decided to tackle the Met Live. 

§§ I wouldn’t dare show my face in the garden if I didn’t top up the saucer both when I come out and when I finally go in again.  In between I may be sworn at, but there are some limits. 

§§§ Although speaking of the robin’s unbridled passion for mealworms:  while I was inconveniently using the potting table in the greenhouse, I’d put the saucer farther in, on a shelf near the other door.  Dad robin was not best pleased with this arrangement, and kept whirring in and out trying to dodge around me (and the paddying offspring in the apple tree.  Dratblast it, where is the new nest?).  I’d come back to the greenhouse when, apparently, he wasn’t looking, and was bending over to fetch a trowel off the ground as he came fizzing back in again—more or less as I was starting to straighten up.  Both of us were dismayed—and neither of us stopped fast enough, and I briefly had a robin on the back of my neck.  He trampolined off again . . .

 . . . Most of which regular blog readers will have seen before. 

Mrs Redboots posted a link in the forum last night, to a blog post by a friend of hers who also has ME: 

http://dawnknits.livejournal.com/13423.html?view=40559#t40559

Much worse than mine.  As I keep saying, mine is a mild case.  I know what she’s talking about though—I had eighteen months on the sofa when I first went down with acute ME after two years of regularly recurring glandular fever, which is a very common lead-in.  But then I started finding things that worked for me, and I started being able to get up off the sofa occasionally.*  And oh, glory, how I know about things like avoiding your kind supportive neighbours because you haven’t got the energy to chat.  You get horribly selfish with a disease like ME—or you may do—because suddenly you have so much less livable life at all, and you can’t bear to waste what little is left to you.  I’m a cranky introvert anyway—even in my pre-ME days social stuff was tiring, even when I enjoyed it.  Now?  . . . Don’t even ask.  It’s hard to be a nice person when you have a chronic freller. 

            I want to put in a word on the well-meaning but clueless world’s behalf however.  Dawn mentions acquaintances saying jovially that they’d like a ride in her stair lift, that it looks like fun.  Well, I’d snarl too, because I’m not good at being patronised, and of course you wouldn’t be using a stair lift if you didn’t frelling have to.  But . . . there’s another thing that happens, and sometimes I recognise it when it does:  the person who puts their foot in it may be trying to include, or re-include, you into the human race.  Oh, a stair lift, oh, okay, no big deal, it looks like fun.  From your angle it is a big deal.  From their angle, they may be trying to say that it isn’t—in the way that counts.  They’re trying, clumsily, to close the gap between you:  to say that the important thing is that you’re both human beings. 

            I get something like this kind of a lot when I am so unfortunate as to have to try to share a meal with someone.  Uggh.  I’m dairy intolerant, chemical sensitive, and on the rheumatism diet,** and when my digestion is in a bad mood (and it is more than it isn’t) I avoid gluten too.  You’ll have to take my word for it that at home, with my organic grocery boxes coming twice a week, it’s not that big a deal.***   Out in the real world . . . I am hell to feed, and I rarely enjoy the attempt.  Which leaves me, sometimes, reluctantly having conversations with people who stare at me, trying not to let their mouths drop open at the idea of not being able to eat pizza or brownies or milk in their coffee† and after a dumbstruck silence they’ll say something like, Oh.  Yeah.  Um.  My sister-in-law is allergic to spinach.  So we can’t have spinach quiche when she comes to dinner.  At which point you have a choice:  you can kill them.  Or you can recognise they’re trying.  They’re trying to close the gap between you.

            Uggh.  Of course, you’d rather there wasn’t the gap. ††

            Slightly similar, in that it’s a perspective thing, is something from the article I posted the link to last night, that I was going to mention and then, because I had so many other things to moan about, I didn’t get around to.   Someone told the journalist anonymously that a GP at her clinic had suggested that she take up meditation as therapy.  I may be reading this wrong, but my impression is that she—and the journalist—felt that the GP was telling her it was all in her mind.  But . . . it sounds like a good idea to me.  It’s well known (isn’t it?) that a regular discipline of meditation has enormous physical benefits—as well as calming and centring your butterfly mind.  ME is a real disease—we’re not whiny self-absorbed victims who only need to get a grip—but mind and body are one critter.  Any disease is a disease of the body and the mind.  Let’s not forget that, in our necessary attempts to get the respect—and the research—that we need.††† 

* * *

* In my case chiefly vitamins, homeopathy and Bowen massage.  I had a friend with fibromyalgia^ who sent me to her doctor.  For which I am still, twelve years later, grateful, since he took me seriously—and started me on vitamins.   The very first thing that made a difference to my pain and energy levels was magnesium supplements.  This won’t be part of everyone’s answer but it was the first thing that gave me some hope that there was something that I could do—that there was a way to alleviate some of the worst symptoms.  And I remember the terrifying shock of that first small improvement—the shock of hope.  This was also years before the NHS had been dragged, kicking and screaming, into recognising ME as a real disease.  My friend’s nice doctor was private, and I couldn’t afford him after the first few visits—and my NHS doctor ‘didn’t believe in ME’. 

^ Speaking of neuro-immuno-whatsits as syndromes:  fibro is another one.  I read up on fibro too because the overlap with ME is considerable, and the boundaries of both are fuzzy.  

** No tomatoes, potatoes, eggplant, peppers, or (weirdly) mushrooms, except Shiitake.  They’re all nightshades, except the mushrooms, but mushrooms are still on the list.  Dairy is on the list for some people—turns out it is for me too, but I was already off it for other reasons.  But I gave up my once/twice a year ice cream blow outs when they started giving me severe joint pain.  Feh. 

*** Peter is mostly pretty tactful about eating the stuff I really miss, like toast, or ice cream, when I’m not around.  This is not a household rule, however, nor is the ice cream hidden at the back of the freezer or the bread in a cupboard I never look in.  I don’t want any more walls around me than I absolutely have to have, even when they’re for my benefit. 

† I’m violently allergic to coffee.  Just by the way. 

†† Personally I do have a lot of trouble with the ‘you don’t look sick!’ thing—which I also get kind of a lot, because I don’t (usually).  This presses my buttons so hard that I can’t tell if this is another clumsy effort to close the gap between me and the healthy moron who just uttered those words, or whether they are telling me I’m malingering.  And I guess that as I’m at the high-functioning end people have trouble with my issue about driving:  driving is exhausting because of that constant, split-second awareness you must maintain behind the wheel, and that healthy people don’t even notice they’re squandering.  I have to kind of crank myself up for it—and I can do it, but it costs.  So I do it as little as possible.

            I suspect that my fury about the enforced-exercise so-called ‘treatment’ is partly fuelled by the fact that morons who know or recognise me as someone who is ‘naturally’ physically active seem to think that it would suit me—that I just need a little prod toward pulling myself together again.  This is not an attempt to close the gap.  This is being a flaming asshole.  The irony is that—see:  Lack of Slack Syndrome—that you do need to keep as physically fit as your illness allows because it makes good days as good as you’re capable of and it’s a fragile but crucial buffer on bad days.  Normal healthy people can do their twenty minutes’ exercise three times a week and then go for a fifteen-mile hike on the weekends.  I can’t.  I do a couple of hours a day, every bloody day, with attendant hellhounds—and some days we cover seven or eight miles.  Sometimes we cover one.  Sometimes we keep going a clip (rather to hellhounds’ annoyance.  They like mooching).  Sometimes we sit down a lot—or, lately, with the drought rivering past our knees, lean.  I try not to force myself a micro-millimetre past what my body is willing to do that day—but I try not to do much less than a micro-millimetre of what it’ll bear either. 

††† And one of these days I will take a deeeeep breath and write about depression.  Do I know about depression?  I sure do.  Speaking of uggh.  Very, very big uggh.

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

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

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

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

* * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * *

* Not a good idea from this tower.  GERONIMOOOOOOOOOO! 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

            Um.  Why?

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

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

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

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

Arrrrrrgh.  Ringing at the abbey.  Arrrrrrgh.  My first go of Grandsire Triples tonight was a complete retro meltdown.  METHOD BELL RINGING IS A STUPID OBSESSION.  I AM GOING TO TAKE UP SOMETHING SENSIBLE LIKE CUTTING USED PLASTIC BAGS IN STRIPS, PLAITING THEM TOGETHER, AND MAKING RUGS OUT OF THEM.  And then, as if this was not humiliation enough . . . Peter and I went to Tabitha, the Bowen-massage lady, this afternoon, and she has this frelling fixation on drinking water.*  She gives you this frelling ewer of water to drink at the end of your session ‘to help flush the toxins out quickly.’  Uh huh.  By the time we got home again I had barely an hour before bell ringing . . . and of course I had to have a cup of tea.  Face Grandsire Triples with a bell-rope in my hands without a recent injection of caffeine to stiffen my resolve?  No chance.  And the result was. . . .

      I had thought there was a loo at the abbey.  Well, there is, but the public one closes at the end of abbey-as-museum visiting hours.**  And the staff one is available only by Delphic utterance, and while Og gave me the correct orison, no one had a spare golden apple with which to placate the guardian dragon.  So . . . I climbed down through the centuries again to ground level . . . and staggered dizzily out into a good-sized town with dozens of public loos—the fabulous public loo system is high on my list of good reasons to live in this frelling country—all of which were closed.  Nobody needs to pee after 6 pm.  It’s probably in the fine print of my visa.  Eventually I gatecrashed a hotel.  I might as well have been in New York City.  Arrrrrgh.*** 

      And, not that these two events had anything to do with each other . . . but my second trial of Grandsire Triples . . . was not too bad.  Therefore I am writing this blog rather than getting my sword off the wall to make it easier to fall on. 

I did realise I was speaking rather provocatively the other night about tea and critters. . . . 

Mirkat

Have I shared this before? http://www.adagio.com/teaware/ingenuiTEA_teapot.html 

Hmm.  Do you use this?  Do you like it?  I’m having a little plaintive ‘why?’ moment.  I like my teapot.  And it works just fine.  But if this one makes you happy then that’s good.  

Or do you have a favorite tea infuser? 

About fifteen years ago some bright spark finally invented—or anyway marketed—or anyway marketed in the UK—a proper frelling tea sieve.  It’s the shape of a tea mug, and just enough smaller to fit inside the mug, and with a lip around the top so it hangs on the rim and you don’t have to fish for it.  Peter and I have several, partly in case of accidents or visitors, and partly because since I tend to like my tea STRONG any infuser I employ regularly tends to pick up flavours, so I want different infusers for different teas. And that’s what I use.  I also have two teapots with very large lids, which means very large holes where the lids fit, which will take one of these infusers—or an even bigger one, suitable for teapots belonging to people who like their tea STRONG.  Whittards was the first I know of to introduce these purpose-built mesh infusers, but most tea shops that sell loose tea have them now.  

EMoon

I think being in central Texas defeats the whole notion of tea. 

Phooey.  Don’t any of you forum people watch THE AFRICAN QUEEN at regular intervals?  In which Katharine Hepburn drinks lots of hot tea in the tropics? 

When visiting in England, I loved tea. . . . But here I have a) sulphury, hard, heavily treated water, b) water that is, for much of the year, emerging from the faucet warm to hot, and c) no real desire for anything hot to drink because it’s so hot. 

Have you ever tried a cup of good tea in hot weather?  I drink it year round and while English summers are nothing on Texas summers, in a bad year we’ll get weather quite hot enough to lay me out and make me miserable.  Hot drinks may have the curious effect of cooling you off.  

And no desire to waste the water that filling a pot with hot water, tossing that water, and then filling it again means, because we’re still in drought. (Or for that matter having the stove on long enough to boil that much water.) 

Good lord, who said anything about tossing it?  You put it back in the kettle.  It’s still half-warm too, so the kettle will re-boil that much quicker.  AND YOU NEED AN ELECTRIC KETTLE.  You can now get them in America although I’m not sure how common they are.  But they are THE BEST. 

In our rare cold spells, I wish very hard for good hot tea. But make it? In these conditions? Probably never. 

Different water filters will deal with different things;  presumably your local Water Filter Experts have not endeared themselves to you.  I doubt I’d drink the stuff you’re describing either in tea or at all.  But there is always bottled water.  Bottled water varies too—there’s a lot of fancy expensive mineral water out there I actively dislike the taste of—but if you used bottled water just for tea you wouldn’t get through it fast enough to put the mortgage at risk. 

nickithomas

I use loose tea in the cup . . . Put milk in cup first ( . . . I am one of those unreasonably fanatical milk-firsters), a generous spoon of tea in a strainer, shake strainer over bin (to get rid of the dusty bits that will end up floating on your tea otherwise) before putting on cup then pour boiling water in SLOWLY and moving around to cover all the tea. When full, leave a minute or 2 before removing strainer and stirring. 

SHUDDER.  Well, as above, to each her own.  If this works for you then that’s fine.  But your tea can’t infuse properly if you treat it like this.  Milk first isn’t a problem—you just brew your tea in a one-mug-sized pot, and pour it into your mug with the milk in it.  PS:  Good tea does not have dusty bits.

Have to admit that this does not work well with the really good expensive tea that tends be much bigger leaves and requires more steeping – but I can’t afford that very often anyway. 

It’s not just more steeping—you need hot water.  There’s a whole fal-lal about water temperature, and how different teas do better at different temperatures.  Generally speaking you don’t want furiously-boiling water, which may burn or anyway damage good tea.  You want it some kind of just-barely-off the boil.  Which if you’ve already put your milk in, isn’t going to happen. 

glanalaw

I drink PG Tips, but only because it’s the only halfway decent loose tea to be had in this part of the country. 

I’ve heard rumours that PG Tips does a not-bad loose tea.  As someone who remembers PG Tips in their heyday of powdered charcoal briquettes and black widow spider legs, I am dubious, but I will take your word for it.  Since I plunged into the Fussy Snob Tea world a long time ago I’m not likely to try it myself. 

Short of mail-ordering from England, which isn’t an option on the poor-starving-college-student budget. 

Oh, now wait a golly gosh darn minute.  I don’t for a minute believe there aren’t a million posh tea web sites in America.  The British tea fetish is pretty much a myth—the overwhelming majority of cuppas are made of (bleaugh) cheap tea bags, and overall, the British drink more coffee than they do tea.  Sacrilege.  But cult tea is alive and thriving—it’s come on pretty much parallel to the availability of proper strainers, I think.  In the dark ages your only option for loose tea was those damned little tea balls on chains that you hooked round the handle of your tea pot.  Except that they were TOO SMALL so you might as well use bags after all, the tea still had no room to expand.  Mostly I just dumped the tea in the bottom of the pot (or the mug) and let it swirl.  Since I like loooooong steeping, by the time I was ready to drink it the tea leaves had all settled tactfully to the bottom anyway.  If I was using a pot, I poured through a sieve.  This did mean that by the time you drank your last cup it was getting kind of . . . violent.  But one of the laws of the universe is that good tea does not stew.  It may get a little exciting, but it never goes bitter.

If I was making tea that someone else was going to drink with me I would sometimes use a festoon of those wretched little tea balls, so I could pull them out.  I had about six.

Regarding cats vs. dogs: I’ve always preferred cats (and at my present stage of life, a dog would be impossible because I’m not home often enough). 

Buy two dogs.  Then they keep each other company.  People roll their eyes when I say this, but it’s perfectly practical.  It’s the first dog that’s the huge leap of responsibility.  Dog or no dog is the big one.  One dog or two dogs is details—including important details such as getting two dogs that like each other—and a little extra dog food. 

But then most of the cats I’ve know, definitely including the current one, seem to think they are dogs actually, at least in terms of the being-glad-to-see-you and the cuddling. 

It’s individuals really, on both sides, the humans and the critters.  If I have to come down on a side, then I’m a dog person.  Clearly.  But there are plenty of dogs out there I wouldn’t have even if they came with a guaranteed charm for ringing Grandsire Triples (just add boiling water).  And even within categories of dogs I don’t like—little frelling terriers, say—there are individuals I’m all over.  I met up with Titus’ little frelling terrier puppy again about a fortnight ago and he’s still adorable.  And I was taking care of the hellcat again while Cathy was here, while Phineas was golfing in Scotland [sic].  I’m actually pretty pathetic:  if it’s furry and it acts like it likes me, then it’s my friend.

I hope your baby robins don’t wash away! 

Me too.  I’m worried I’m not seeing more little rustling things in the shrubbery.  I did see dad robin stuffing mealworms into something yesterday, so I think there’s at least one of them still undrowned.

Blogmom

Cats rule! Dogs drool.  

Flapdoodle.  In the first place, you have a dog, and I bet he does not drool, any more than the hellhounds do, who are an entirely drool-free zone.  In the second place, worst droolers I’ve ever met have been cats.  I’m told it’s something to do with having been weaned too young.  But they knead your lap or your chest and DROOL.  Ewwwww.  Give me an honest Great Dane any day. 

Kathy S

Dogs set booby traps. Cats courteously bury it. 

Again, flapdoodle.  I have cat crap all over my garden at Third House and I don’t feel the least kindly and tolerant about it.  One of my absolute pet peeves is the fact that cats are allowed utter freedom to trash other people’s property, shred, roll in or dig up their plants, crap all over their driveways, claw their doorframes, eat their endangered songbirds and have yowling cat fights under their windows and that’s just the way cats are.  I completely agree that dog owners should pick up after and generally control their dogs . . . but it bites me big time that there is no regulation of cats.  Including that they get to make your dogs’ lives hell because it amuses them to act like jerks. 

b_twin_1

I will acknowledge that dogs are inclined to leave landmines. BUT…. Cats also leave them. In your garden beds. Where you can find them whilst you are on your hands and knees weeding…. 

Yes.
I think that we’re frelled no matter which side we take… 

Yes.  That’s about it. 

Diane in MN

I like cats–at least, I like doggish cats–but I seriously do not like litterboxes, or the little kitty feet on the countertops after they’ve been in the litterbox. I admit that my dogs can slime the countertops, but there is a difference, however slight. 

This is pretty much the deal breaker with me.   The little kitty feet on my counters.  I’ve lived with cats.  And I’ve liked the cats I’ve lived with, and I find purring very soothing to go to sleep to.  But cats leap.  That’s the way they are. 

shalea

I love both dogs and cats, but I have an absolute No Feet or Butts on Food Preparation Surfaces rule for everyone — cats, dogs, small children (who might sit on countertops). 

And how do you ENFORCE this?  Dogs and children are (relatively) straightforward to train.  Cats, not so much.  I know they can be trained, and that what I react to as head games is the cat idea of social interaction, but how do you keep them off your countertops?  Barring poisoned spikes, that is, which would be kind of in the way at suppertime. 

AbigailW

So what kind of tea do you drink? I like a good cup of black tea and I know that bags are cheating, but what do real Brits drink? I suspect it’s not Twinings. 

CathyR

Well, this Brit drinks Twinings. Teabags. English Breakfast. Weak, no milk, 1/2 a sugar. A brew less like Robin’s it would be hard to imagine! 

Which is to say everything is about individuals. 

* * *

* Speaking of obsessions.  I wonder if she’d like to go halves on developing the plastic rag rug market. 

** I think the loos stay open later if there’s a late service or a concert.  —The admin, and the proliferating admin decisions, about trying to run a major national centre of practising Christianity and an internationally famous tourist attraction must be mind-blowing, and not in a good way.  Any big corporation is a complex mess to run but when the widget your factory produces is spiritual enlightenment, wowzah, oil and water are soulmates in comparison.  I know people who know people, and the abbey is a complex mess.  And I’m told our tower captain watches the abbey diary like Jeremy Lin watching the ball,^ and not infrequently phones up this or that person and says, pardon me, but shouldn’t the bell ringers know about this?  Oh—er—yes, says this or that person.  Sorry. 

^ Good gods, I just made a sports reference+.  Sorry.  But I like stereotype breakers, and he is one. 

+ That isn’t about horses.  Hey, did you know that Great Britain has a very strong dressage team for the Olympics this summer?  First flicker of interest I’ve felt in the Olympics, which I would much rather were being held somewhere else. Katmandu. Neuquen City.  

*** Gemma had given me the keys to her house.  This would have involved driving, for pity’s sake.  For a LOO?  I thought she was joking.  She wasn’t.  I was jingling her keys in my pocket and wondering what the chances were that Wolfgang would start not once but twice only about twenty minutes after I’d turned him off^ when I took a sharp right and shot through the doors of the Hotel Forza Verduta.  Fortunately the only receptionist was on the phone.  I heard her say ‘There is a train from London . . .’ 

^ No, I still haven’t booked him in to get his starter motor replaced.  I know, I know.  And I don’t like living dangerously.  I’m just disorganised.

Hellhounds and I put Cathy on the train in Mauncester this morning.*  Hellhounds and I then headed farther out, to Warm Upford, to check on the bluebell situation.  And the heavens opened.  Sweet bleeding demiurges, I thought it had been raining before.  This was the solid wall of water variety, coming down so hard you not only can’t see out of your windscreen, but you wonder uneasily if it’s going to dent your roof and rip your windscreen wipers off.  You’re going at 20 mph because you can’t see . . . and then you fall into the Mississippi River, SPLASH, and here you thought you were in southern England and what the frell happened to the frelling levees?**  Fortunately Wolfgang is equipped with an amphibian button from his secret life as a stunt car for James Bond, and so we swam to shore and continued on our way, which had become brown and given to whirlpools.  We were the second car behind a monster lorry, and when it hit a road-flood I swear the bow-wave was taller than Wolfgang.  This kind of downpour doesn’t last, I told myself, clinging valiantly to the steering wheel, and indeed it didn’t, it slacked off to mere sheeting between onslaughts of cannonball rain.  We got out to Warm Upford and turned around despondently to come back by another route and . . . there was suddenly and unexpectedly this astonishing manifestation called ‘blue sky’.***  I pulled Wolfgang over at the first opportunity and hellhounds and I got out for a sprint. A wet sprint.  A very wet sprint.  A very, very wet sprint.  A very, very, very wet sprint.  A . . . .†

            I had a concert to go to tonight.  In Frellingham.  Arrrgh.  Frellingham is about forty-five minutes from here.  Nina lives there now, and she emailed me a while ago about the schedule at the little concert venue a few blocks from her and her bloke’s new house.  We had agreed that tonight’s visitation looked amusing:  a ragtag collection of old folk-hippie musicians who have (apparently) banded together against the encroachment of electro-techno alternative art prog dance-punk-metal experimental grungehorror cyberthrash, and gone on tour.   Nina had bought tickets.  Hellhounds and I got back from our wet sprint, and having used up sixteen towels getting half dry, I emailed poor Nina in a bit of a panic saying I’m not driving to Frellingham in this. 

            It cleared off.  Sort of.  Comparatively.†††  Hellhounds and I only got semi-wet on the afternoon hurtle, and the wind wasn’t blowing more than 80 mph except for the occasional gust, so I slid a few extra lead weights into the special James Bond slots under Wolfgang’s chassis†† and we went.

            The concert was . . . amusing.‡  Sometimes it is a good thing to be reminded that your youth is something you get to grow out of.  And I only got slightly lost on my way to Nina and Ignatius’ new house—I’ve only been there once before and which way you go on the unmarked roundabout(s) may take a little while to lodge in the memory.

            Tomorrow . . . reality bites.  And SHADOWS reign.‡‡ 

* * *

* Waaaaaah.  But . . . pretty much everything about the timing of this visit sucked dead (you should forgive the term) bears.  She was supposed to be coming after I had finished and handed in SHADOWS.^  She was supposed to be coming after I was caught up to Hamaker New Thing Monkeywrench #s 1 and 2.^^  She was also supposed to be coming here to have long walks through the countryside and, it being bluebell season, she would not only see bluebells, but we might possibly get a hellgoddess and hellhounds surrounded by bluebells photo.^^^

            No.  None of the above.  But she did see baby robins.  And we lay on the folded-out sofa at the cottage with a plethora of hellhounds# and watched WONDERFALLS## on the Shiny Two-Ton No Longer New Entirely Rebuilt Ex-Lemon### Laptop, thus proving it can do something right.~  Also, that bartender is hot.~~  And the rain drummed on.        

^ And was far enough along on the doodle backlog that you could actually get into my office again.  Not, I suppose, that she needed to get into my office, but it’s easier to browse my F&SF shelves, which are what live (mostly+) in my office, from within arm’s length than . . . not within arm’s length. 

+ There’s a wall of homeopathy too.  Which is why SF&F spills into the bedroom. 

^^ When in fact I’m writing ep 12 and it’ll be another one or two before we get to HNTM one.  We started #3 while she was here anyway. 

^^^ Instead she drank a lot of tea out of my bluebell mug+, since that was as close as she was going to get.  Well, there are a few bluebells in my garden, but given the, ahem, lushness of the planting out there, you’d get just as soaked going to look at them as if you went and found some wild ones. 

+ http://www.emmabridgewater.co.uk/flowers/bluebell-12-pint-mug/invt/ngbb002/

Hmph.  It’s got more expensive since I bought mine.

 # They expand to fill available space.  I’ve noticed this before. 

## http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wonderfalls 

### She says with dramatic emphasis. 

~Including, evidently, playing a region 1 DVD.  I am so clueless about all of this. 

~~ So is Beth. 

** Ask George W. Bush. 

*** It was still raining, of course.  This is southern England^.  It rains out of blue sky all the time.  But it doesn’t usually rain the pummelling you all over your body kind of rain out of blue sky.  Usually. 

^ Unless it’s the Mississippi delta. 

†  And I’m afraid the rumours that it’s a bad year for bluebells appear to be true.  There aren’t as many flower stalks at all, it seems to me, and the ones there are have four or six little bells per, and usually you get twelve or fifteen.  Aside from the tricky questions about taking photos in the rain, if I can’t find a better forest floor of them, there won’t be bluebell photos this year.  I have a couple more places to try, but I’m not too hopeful.   That was my best bluebell sea today.

†† Very bad for mileage, but they do keep you on the road. 

††† I’ve just had a frelling email from frelling Cathy saying it was beautiful and clear all day where she was on the south coast.  WELL ISN’T THAT SPECIAL. 

‡ There wasn’t a single person there under forty.  There was also way too much khaki hemp^ and Birkenstocks, but I lowered the level as much as I could in a salmon-coloured turtleneck and All Stars and a watermelon-coloured pullover.   My frameless glasses are against me though.

^ No, no, not that kind of hemp.  

‡‡ And New Thing gets a nice padded footstool.

Niall and I went haring across the landscape this evening*, looking for Curlyewe.  Our new lot of handbell ringers are from Curlyewe and last time they came to New Arcadia Niall suggested, despite my frantic gestures,** we come to them next time.  ARRRRGH.  I do not commute.  Commuting is something other people do.***

            Niall picked me up tonight, so all I had to do was hold onto my seat.†  But Curlyewe is in the same section of enchanted landscape that Tir nan Og†† is, which is to say that you can’t get there from here, and even if you could, you’d miss it in the fairy mist.  Maps lie, and signposts move around.  Possibly Niall had in mind outrunning the magic.

            I guess it worked, since we got there.  Eventually.  I had been even less enthusiastic about our expedition when I found out they were expecting us to ring at the church.  Doesn’t someone have a sitting-room we could use?  A nice warm sitting-room with mod cons like an electric kettle and a loo?  Whimper.  So I was wearing six extra layers and fingerless gloves††† and a good thing too.  Although there was both a loo and a kitchen with an electric kettle . . . there was even an electric fire, which Enoch put up on a shelf and angled down at us as we sat in our little circle . . . and I was still freezing to death.

            But handbells were rung.  Farrell is back at university, but Oliver is beginning to ring little touches of bob minor;  Enoch is beginning to get through plain courses of bob minor;  and Olga . . . needs more self-confidence, and an iPhone with Mobel on it.  She is bringing back horrible memories of Niall and Esme trying to teach me. . . .

            But the main thing is, the three of them really aren’t ready to cope alone, and neither Niall nor I have a regular free evening left.  I don’t know what we do now.  Pity we can’t use a little of that fairy magic and call up a handbell-ringing golem. . . . 

* * *

* At an extreme rate of speed.  Frell it, honeybun, I want to live to my sixtieth birthday.   

** You could see him thinking, poor thing, she has cramp. 

*** Yes, I’m a cow.^  But it’s a little like judging a book by its cover.  There are too many books.  If I really, really hate the cover well, great, there’s one I don’t have to buy.  DISCARD.  YAAAY.  There are too many interesting things to do and see and get involved in.  If they take more than twenty minutes to get to, great, there are closer ones.  DISCARD.  YAAAY.

            I admit there’s a sliding scale about this.  If Nadia were a bell tower, I’d be looking for something closer.^^  And the Japanese conversation lessons I’m still promising myself after I finish SHADOWS, which is a little perverse, but there’s no way I have brain or energy to start now, will be farther away than Nadia.  However, they have helpfully said that a good deal can be done via Skype.^  While they also, equally helpfully, send me occasional links to interesting events at the Japan Society in London. 

            Anyway.  Niall is a nicer human being than I am.  If it were up to me, if a bunch of beginners want to learn to ring handbells, they can come to us.  A bit like I go to Nadia—or to the language school.# 

            . . . Oh, and yes, both my Japanese cookbooks arrived.  Someone on Twitter (?) asked a few days ago.  I think that’s one of the things that got buried in the post-flu avalanche of Missed Stuff.  It’s not that the flu was all that severe—it was a ratbag but it wasn’t serious—it’s just that I’m always not quite coping as a way of life, so any spanner in the works really does me in, like a mild wind will knock over a cardboard house.  I was going to blog about my new cookbooks—they’re lovely.  Maybe I still will.  I can pull them off the shelf## and add them to the pile of things to be dealt with NOW.  RIGHT NOW.  I MEAN NOW.   

^ I’m also a cow with ME, and driving is a genuine bugbear. 

^^ On a heavy Monday, let’s say when I’ve done a particularly intense stint of work before my voice lesson, and Niall isn’t going to Colin’s that night so if I want to go I have to drive myself, when I get home again I may be just beginning to see the little smoke wisps in my peripheral vision that mean STOP NOW. 

^^^ Supposing Skype is in the mood.  A language I know—which is to say English—is usually pretty challenging and video?  Are you kidding? 

# Which may indeed turn out to be too far.  In which case I will have to find a Skype pixie/hobgoblin/troll and bribe the frell out of it. 

## Yes.  They’re on a SHELF.  I hope you’re impressed. 

† YAAAAAAAAAH.  It’s amazing what a 15-year-old Peugeot can do. 

††  Er—Tir nan Og, Hampshire.  I have rung there occasionally.  When I can find it. 

††† NO NOT THOSE FINGERLESS GLOVES.  They’re still in a bucket in the greenhouse. 

Diane in MN

I’ve never had a plastic bag break, but oh how I appreciate the ewww grossness of your situation. I have taken to using plastic gloves–the disposable exam-glove kind–when doing public pick-up duty with my critters, and keeping an extra one in my pocket just in case of some unexpected disaster. So far so good. 

I have a large-economy-size box of those disposable gloves because I seem . . . to get myself in icky situations, one way or another, somewhat regularly.^  But as a town dog owner, I go through one to four plastic pick-up bags a day.  Even if we get out to the country for the long morning hurtle, the afternoon hurtle is pretty much invariably in town.  That’s a lot of plastic.  The local pet store, after listening to me whine about it for several years, finally found a source of biodegradable dog crap bags that seem to be genuinely biodegradable even after you’ve read the fine print . . . but it’s still a lot of plastic.  I certainly use the gloves . . . but I’m under the impression the bags leave a smaller, you know, footprint.

Re Williams

As someone who milks cows on a dairy farm two days a week, I can tell you that it does wash off. 

Well personally I draw AN ENORMOUS THICK LINE, LIKE MAYBE ABOUT A MEDIUM-SIZED ASTEROID WIDE, between herbivore crap and carnivore crap.  I’ve spent years of my life mucking out stalls, but I think I’d have trouble working at a kennels, and I’m even a dog person.  Herbivore crap is just not that big a deal.^^  I’ve come into direct personal contact with . . . well, an awful lot of horse, including scouring foal, which is pretty unpleasant, cow, which is always sloppy, goat, including scouring goatling, sheep and rabbit.  There are probably others.  But it never occurred to me in my barn days that washing my hands and putting my jeans and flannel shirts through the washing machine wouldn’t be enough. 

PamAdams

I would argue that rolling over in one’s sleep, only to discover one’s face in a pool of kitty vomit, is worse. 

Oh gods.  Oh gods.  I’m not laughing.  I’m really not . . . RRRMBGGLK.  NOT.  LAUGHING.

 b_twin_1

. . .  given the number of people on the forum who have access to animals with copious excrement of all types I humbly suggest we don’t carry on with “mine’s bigger than yours” 

::notgigglingeither::  ::NOT::  I don’t think that’s what was happening here, but you’re probably right we want to ensure that it doesn’t.  But I’d differentiate between indoor pets and you farmers.  I’ve worked on farms, and it’s also a different mindset.  So PamAdams’ interesting experience and my exploding dog bag are in the same category, as are you and Re Williams in the same other category.  

^ This includes in the garden.  I scatter pelleted chicken manure by hand, because it’s quick, easy and efficient that way.  The bags all say STERILIZED but I am much happier in gloves somehow.  And I once had a carton of mealworms break all over the kitchen floor, and having very promptly shut up hellhounds, scrabbled (most of) the escapees out from under the corner overhang of cupboards and so on by hand.  Speaking of mealworms I haven’t checked on the robin’s nest in a couple of days. . . . 

^^ Which, since there’s so much more of it, is a very good thing.+ 

+ I don’t think I’d do too well mucking out the big cat cages at the zoo either. 

The delicate, easily disturbed and faint-hearted should look away NOW.  (You can skip down to the opera review.)  

GROSSNESS ALERT.  DON’T SAY I DIDN’T WARN YOU.

So, what is the worst thing?  The very, very worst thing?

            Think about it a minute.  I can wait.

            Hint:  It has to do with dogs. 

            Do I see a certain dawning horror in your eyes?

            Yes.  That’s right.  It’s when your plastic bag breaks and you find yourself holding a NAKED HANDFUL OF DOG SHIT.*  And have I mentioned lately that hellhounds, due to their little digestive issues, tend to produce squishy excreta? 

            I was also wearing fingerless gloves at the time.  So maximum vileness, disgustingness and destruction of personal property.**

            I WILL NEVER USE THIS BRAND OF PICK UP BAGS AGAIN.  Part of the complete scenario here is that I know these bags are, ahem, crap, but I was loath to throw out the rest of the packet not because it was a waste of my money—pick up bags are cheap—but because I worry about all that additional plastic in the environment that town-dwelling dog-owners produce and so I’ve gone on using them checking them carefully first.  HITHERTO the breakages have been visible as soon as you drag the thing open to use it.  Not today.

            And no, we weren’t even on the river walk at the time, with nice easily available water.

            I will spare you the details of the rest of the walk home.  In this case hurtle is an understatement.

            AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAUGH.*** 

* * *

I wasn’t sure even La Traviata, my favourite opera, could save this day.  When I was failing to get to Manon last week due to the remains of the lurgy I was telling myself that NOTHING was going to stop me going to La Trav this week.  NOTHING.  And in fact nothing did.  Not even the need to keep washing my hands every five minutes. 

            It was Natalie Dessay’s first Violetta† and I’m a big fan of Dessay—she’s an actor as well as a singer, so you don’t have to close your eyes and concentrate on the music.  And she had Matthew Polenzani as her Alfredo—and Dmitri Hvorostovsky as her Papa Germont.  What could go wrong? 

            Well, the first thing is the production—it’s the famous Willy Decker Red Dress, Big Clock and Doctor Death production.  I’m embarrassed to say I’m not sure if I’ve seen it before or not.  I don’t like surreal††, so it’s not naturally going to, ahem, sing to me.  And there was a lot of it I didn’t remember—but there was quite a bit I seemed to remember so . . . whatever.  Maybe that’s all part of the surreality.  At least with this team a lot of it did work.  One of the built-in problems with La Trav is that Alfredo, the romantic hero, is a nasty, spoilt, self-centred little wet.  I don’t know how he does it, but Polenzani is good at making wet-tenor characters you badly want to slap understandable and appealing.  He managed it here, but this is also one of the things the production (I think) gets right:  he is really persecuted by the dissolute crowd Violetta hangs out with and you can sympathize with him going a little off the rails. 

            Another inherent problem is that the only reason you know Violetta is dying of consumption is because the plot says so.†††  What you see is some singer strong enough to carry an extremely demanding role.  In this production Violetta totters onto the stage during the overture, spends some time bent over coughing (silently) and has her first encounter with Doctor Death.  So you’re set up for the situation.  And you see her pull herself together and morph into the heartless courtesan as the party starts.  (This is the sort of thing Dessay is really good at too.)  And she periodically addresses herself to the doctor during the action, which reminds you that she’s under a death sentence.   I thought this worked really well.

            The things that didn’t work so well . . . in the first place, poor Dessay was having an off night.  You could hear it, and during the intermission interview she said as much—and you could see her dismay in her face.  I’d guess her to be a perfectionist, possibly beyond the perfectionism any Met singer needs, and here she is in her first Violetta, which is one of the plum soprano roles, at the Met, and on the Live in HD night broadcast across the globe. . . she’s having to nurse her voice along and still isn’t quite succeeding.  Her speaking voice sounds like she has a head cold, but that wouldn’t necessary screw up her singing voice.  Except that it did.

            After a killer first act—Alfredo’s wooing and her response is especially effective—I thought most of the second act sucked pond scum.  The basic stage set is very stark, which is fine, and the beginning of the second act, when Violetta and Alfredo are tucked up in their jolly country love-nest, everything is draped with great swathes of fabric covered in big fat pink and red cabbage roses.  Duh.  Okay.  Got it.  They’re wearing dressing-gowns of the same stuff and—first mistake—our hero, under his dressing-gown, is wearing an ordinary business shirt and boxer shorts.  This is not a look even a major heart-throb could bring off, and the pudgy Polenzani does not succeed.  The business of Alfredo finding out that Violetta is bankrupting herself to keep him in the style to which he has become accustomed is bungled . . . and then Papa Germont shows up.  Violetta is  still in her dressing-gown.  What?  She’s an effing courtesan and this is the seriously bourgeois dad of her lover.  She would be rupturing herself to be as proper as possible—and when he starts out being rude and she says that she’s a lady in her own house—done well this is terrific putdown but SHE’S IN HER DRESSING-GOWN.  And . . . the awful truth is that I was not convinced by my hero Dmitri.  He sang well but . . . but . . .

            And then when she realises he’s asking her to give up Alfredo forever SHE TAKES HER DRESSING-GOWN OFF and trails around in her slip.  Oh gods how I hate the wandering around in your underwear to indicate vulnerability and innocence thing.  (She does it again later at the party.  OH STOP IT.)  The face-off between dad and son is no better.  This is an inherent problem that this production did not solve.  Dad starts the ‘come home to your loving family’ routine just as Alfredo has read the letter from Violetta saying she’s leaving him, so he’s not at his most relaxed and persuadable.  And the poor actor playing Alfredo doesn’t really have anything to DO except fulminate for several minutes while dad sings.  I’ve never seen this done persuasively.  In this case they made it worse by Papa slugging his son . . . and then instantly dropping back into his ‘all is forgiven’ refrain.  What?  Who needs to forgive whom here?  Papa Germont is the most awful thug to begin with.  He doesn’t need any help.

            The third act was a mixed bag.  I was smarting from the second act—and there’s no way to get around the fact that the reason the Germonts come to see her is because they know she’s dying and won’t mess up Papa’s snug little middle-class life much longer.  Although the surrealism does mean that they get away with the doctor saying authoritatively ‘she has only hours to live’ which kind of whacks your suspension of disbelief in most stagings;  and that there isn’t a bed solves the problem of whether Violetta, with only hours to live, gets out of it and runs around or not.  And Dessay is a very, very good actor.  I usually do burst into tears at the end—indeed I feel all coitus interruptus if I don’t—but I didn’t have to think about it this time.  I was totally heartbroken. 

            Oh, and that second leg-warmer is almost done.

 * * *

* I admit this may tie for first place with projectile diarrhoea indoors, which I also have some direct experience of, but despite the sheer grossness factor the really distressing part of that isn’t the clean up but the throat-closing, heart-squeezing worry about your critter.  

** Can These Gloves Be Saved?  Probably not.  I’ll boil the right one a few times, but . . . probably not. 

*** I’ve washed my hands so often the skin is coming off.^ 

^ Will I Ever Use My Right Hand Again.+ 

+ Probably.  Typing one-handed is a ratbag.  And while I can use chopsticks with my left hand, it’s not a fun time. 

† At the Met, anyway.  I think she said in the intermission interview it was her first ever. 

†† I like practical fantasy.  I like the magic to have rules, and I want to know where the latrines are and if they’ve got good drainage. 

††† And whoever wrote this year’s synopsis is a moron.  It begins:  ‘Violetta Valery knows that she will die soon, exhausted by her restless life as a courtesan.’  SHE’S DYING OF TUBERCULOSIS, YOU CRETIN.  Her lifestyle is certainly contributing to the speed of her decline, but if that were all that was wrong with her she’d last a good while yet.

Diane in MN

Your condition reminds me of the last time I had real, honest-to-goodness influenza, a couple of decades ago. I made it worse by attempting to go to work on the days I felt marginally better–that was the first week; the second week I just stayed home. My husband had been out of town the first week, but since he caught it as soon as he got home, we were both knocked out the second week, barely able to stagger downstairs to heat up soup. I hope you do NOT have honest-to-goodness flu and see the end of your current affliction very soon. 

Yes, along about the third day you have trouble getting out of bed you start thinking about the Spanish flu that killed 50 million (or so) people in 1918, right?  A little learning is a dangerous thing, especially when you’re ill and less emotionally stable than your usual calm, sane self.*

            I finally heard from Hannah today (we having missed connections mainly due to germ ramifications this last week) that she got home and went down with bronchitis.  Joy.  I can’t wait to find out that’s next on my agenda.  At the moment it’s mostly a really alarming head cold with this bloody cough, and some fantastically exciting gastric complications.  And I didn’t fever-spike last night which I want to believe is a good sign.  I’m getting the hellhounds hurtled.  Where is my medal.  But I do miss breathing.  And tasting my food.  And my eyes not starting to go fuzzy after about two hours of reading or staring at a computer screen.  Yet another mark for the excellence of knitting:  you can knit when your eyes are too fluy to focus on print.  

EMoon 

I agree–don’t know how I survived waiting and boring events before knitting.  

Boring events including having flu.  Here I thought it was just about badly organised handbell evenings and very long stoplights on your way to your voice lesson. 

jmeadows 

YAY!!! *so proud* 

Well at least you’re continuing to accept responsibility for your part in my yarny downfall.

Isn’t that an awesome feeling? Just . . . casting on and knitting? 

Um. . . . Okay.  Yes. 

I won’t lie and say you’ll never have to fiddle and retry ever again 

If at the point where I can do the exact same ribbing I just did for 1,000,000,000 rows for the first world’s longest leg warmer without thinking about it for the second, there were no challenges left ahead of me . . . knitting would clearly be unworthy of us.  So what a good thing I HAVE MANY HOURS OF BEING DRIVEN OUT OF MY TINY FREAKED-OUT MIND to look forward to. 

 – because it happens to EVERY knitter no matter how long she’s been knitting – 

Especially if she keeps being drawn farther and farther into the dark side.  A friend is sending me the pattern for a rose intarsia pullover—or I think it’s intarsia;  I don’t actually need to know at this stage—that I have about as much chance of making successfully as I do making the world safe, happy, peaceful and environmentally sound by pointing out that the majority of our heads of state are morons.  And blondviolinist tweeted me this today:  http://www.amazon.com/gp/reader/0307586715/ref=sib_dp_pt/181-5660244-9068349#reader-link which I instantly found over here and ordered, despite the fact that I’m pretty sure even the flowers the author has labelled ‘starting out’ will be beyond me—and besides, I want to knit the rose, which is probably in the ‘resolute’ category. 

but that’s a great step. 

Yes, actually, it is, isn’t it?  Hee.  Also, I really need to FINISH something.  

Mockorange 

But may I just say that it amuses me that yesterday’s blog, preoccupied as it was with not only handbells but the miseries of illness, roused comments about what on the forum? Knitting

Well, naturally. Some of us are knitting again for the first time in years entirely due to your proselytising on this blog. Let’s see if we can derail to knitting again. KNITTING! KNITTING! KNITTING! KNITTING! 

All right, you woodwork-lurking knitters:  go for it.  And I’m delighted to be able to provide the evil role model of degradation and despair for a few of you that jmeadows and blondviolinist so generously offered to me.  

Birdreader 

I hope you feel better soon. Of course you had your knitting. It can be an ice breaker, with some curious person coming over to be interested in what you are making. (We shy people are absolutely not hiding behind handiwork – of course not!)  

Well—are you certain it is shyness?  Shyness has the implication that you can’t talk, that your mind goes blank or you’re overwhelmed or something.  Maybe you just don’t want to talk, maybe you don’t want to be in this situation, whatever it is, and knitting is a way of preventing you from doing something you might regret later, like throwing a chair through the window and running away.**   Most social occasions make me uncomfortable and I’m mostly bad at them, but it’s more about being introverted and cranky with it.  

Diane in MN 

You were absolutely primed to be a knitter by ringing handbells. You HAVE TO COUNT if you’re a knitter, too. (You also have to add, subtract, multiply, and divide. Knitters get plenty of arithmetical practice.) 

I am not hyperventilating.  I am not hyperventilating.  I no longer fear and dread maths.  I don’t.  No. 

            . . . But I’ve told you, haven’t I, that the tower captain at my old tower—East Persnickety, a million years and a century ago—used to say that his wife picked up change ringing instantly because she was a lifelong committed*** knitter? 

PamAdams 

Then I went back to bed (which was popular with hellhounds†)

I find that cats are equally helpful in an emergency such as this. During my own bout with the Martian Death Bug earlier this year, I was constantly surrounded by and/or covered in cats. 

Oh, the Martian Death Bug?  Maybe that’s what I have?  NOBODY SHOULD FEEL THIS CRUMMY.  ESPECIALLY NOT DAY AFTER DAY.  Oh, and let’s have a little sideswipe at ‘the wisdom of the body’, okay?  I love homeopathy, and I do think it keeps me on the road—and, for example, is the reason why hellhounds are still being hurtled right now and I’m not in an oxygen tent at the local hospital—but there are times when the la-la-la aspects do get to me a little, and now is one of them.   So, in the depths of my illness, what does the wisdom of my particular body declare?   Chiefly that it craves strong black tea and champagne†, and it doesn’t want ANY FOOD AT ALL.††  And if I attempt to remonstrate with it, it turns nasty.  Oh, and ‘if you feed a cold you will have to starve a fever’?  Bulltiddly.  Or maybe this depends on what stage of life and/or immune system you are.  But I have to eat.  Aside from being dragged out behind a brace of hellhounds twice a day.

† Oh reckless dog owner beware of precedent.

On the other hand, they do make adequate substitutes for the electric blanket…… 

It’s the self-motivating factor I find problematic.  This includes the bizarre hierarchical struggles to do with Contact with the Hellgoddess.  The last generation got this sorted pretty well immediately.  These guys are still at it after (almost) six years.

            . . . . Is it late enough?  Can I go back to bed yet? 

Ajlr

I’m more of a Radio 4 addict – sleep comes peacefully after listening to the Shipping Forecast. 

That’s it!  I need an endless loop of the Shipping Forecast! 

* * *

*  Who?  What?  

** Not an option the other night.  In the first place we were in the undercroft, and in the second place, Niall was my ride home.  I wasn’t going to make seven leagues on foot, thank you very much, especially not this week. 

*** No remarks please 

† Cider, prosecco, whatever.  Alcohol with bubbles.  But it needs to be alcohol.  Fizzy water is inadequate.  And my wise body wants more than its two units. 

†† Not even chocolate.  I am truly not myself.

Blah blah blah blah SICK blah blah blah SICK blah blah blah blah SICK.  Blah.  SICK. 

            I’m actually better—sort of—but not all that much, and after hurtling hellhounds twice and doing some work, now by evening blog time I’m pretty much cole slaw again.*  Not being able to breathe really takes it out of you.  And I have a cough to frighten small children.  Hell, it frightens me.  I have to stop and lean against a wall, or a hellhound, if that’s what’s available.  I’m also at the my-nose-has-been-running-for-so-long stage that smiling makes the entire centre of my face crack painfully.  My ears and forehead throb.  My stomach doesn’t want to know about food.  Since I realised last night was going to be grim I left the radio on—Peter sleeps with the radio on pretty much every night which I am sure has a detrimental effect on the quality of his sleep but we won’t get into that here but I close the book and turn the light and the radio off in the same habitual gesture.  Last night I left the radio on and it was comforting in the dark unpleasant hours.**  And then—I can’t remember if it was at 6 or 7 o’clock—it suddenly got all chatty.  I am an obsessive listener to Radio 3, which is classical, with a few unappreciated-by-me forays into jazz, and they don’t do the in your face DJ thing on classical stations.  But they can get fatuous*** and they can certainly get garrulous.  And apparently the given wisdom is that people staggering around getting ready for their office jobs want chat.   Uggh.  People late (even for them) in bed with demonic head/upper respiratory colds do not want chat.  Blah.  Sick.

            It took me three tries to get out of bed at all and then I only remained upright long enough to shiver downstairs and let poor patient hellhounds out of their crate.  Then I went back to bed (which was popular with hellhounds†).  It was after noon by the time I managed to make and drink my first cup of perilously strong tea . . . gods.  It’s PERFECT gardening weather†† and I’m too wasted to take advantage.  My fritillaries are blooming away like anything, my robin is still sitting on her nest and my new roses came three days ago and I haven’t been up to anything but ripping the packages open and making sure the roots are damp.  Today I at least got them heeled in and roses will last a surprisingly long while merely heeled in . . . ahem . . . although planting them would be preferable.

            Blah.  Sick.  Blah.

            I’m also reading another perfect book for low lurgified distraction—Patricia C Wrede’s A MATTER OF MAGIC, which many if not most of you know since many (if not most) of you have recommended it.†††  And now, if you’ll forgive me, I think I’ll go lie down again and read some more of it.‡  Well, no, first I’m going to go back to the cottage and bring the frelling sweet peas indoors again.

            Blah blah blah blah SICK blah blah blah blah blah STILL FRELLING THRICE BLASTED SICK BLAH. 

* * *

* And I’m sure my mayonnaise has gone off.  

** I can’t believe the timing of my electric blanket going phut.  I’d managed to buy a new one before the lurgy prostrated me . . . but I presently haven’t got the energy to spare to rip the bed apart^ and put the freller on. 

^ It’s an under-your-bottom-sheet one, which seems to be standard over here, and what I’ve got used to. 

*** As during the week of non-stop, all Schubert all the time, which is finally over.  I love a lot of Schubert, and Schubert lieder make me want to get to German sooner with Nadia^, but not continuously, relentlessly, day after day after day after frelling day.   

^ Although this is a classic case of, we have Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, so why?  Stick to Jingle Bells, honey.  

† Oh reckless dog owner beware of precedent.  

†† Except for the fact that we’re having ANOTHER FROST TONIGHT and since I didn’t know that earlier everything at the cottage is still outdoors . . . but in fact I probably will get home earlier than usual tonight.  Like . . . maybe now. 

††† For any of you who read the originals, it’s a one-volume of Mairelon the Magician and The Magician’s Ward. 

‡ But may I just say that it amuses me that yesterday’s blog, preoccupied as it was with not only handbells but the miseries of illness, roused comments about what on the forum?  Knitting.  Most of you remembered to say off handedly ‘oh, hope you feel better soon!’ but clearly your focus was on the knitting.

. . . and hold the toast.  I can’t immediately remember when I’ve been quite this ill* . . . and as I was whinging last night, I don’t actually get these aggravated head cold/flu/upper respiratory evil things very often, and I just had one recently.  And I think I’d had one fairly recently before that.  One of the curious, ahem, benefits of ME is that it tends to be a jealous god and doesn’t want you consorting with other, vulgar ailments.  I wish I thought this meant I was going to be shut of the ME at last, but a case of Taittinger’s against a case of plastic dog crap bags says it doesn’t work like that. 

            There was minimal hellhound hurtling today.   On some earlier occasion of haplessly abbreviated hurtling Diane in MN remarked that it was very nice when puppies grew up and became dogs.  Yes.  If I’d had to try to hurtle two hours today . . . I wouldn’t have come back.**

            Unfortunately there was also abbreviated sofa lying.  I didn’t get down to the mews till very late*** and then I tried to . . . ahem . . . do some work.  Silly me.  But I’ve said here before that it’s disconcerting† how little effect my physical and mental state have on my writing:  if I’m in a bad way all that happens is that I become very slow.  The story is the story.  It’s like you have x miles to cover:  you can choose to walk or to run††, but the journey from y to z doesn’t change.

            But the handbell seminar was tonight and I was going to go if I had to borrow a sack trolley so Niall could wheel me from the car park.†††  When has there ever been a proper, organised education-day-by-the-local-guild handbell seminar?  I was even going as a helper.  I’m generally in the peon category at ringing events.

            So I was all excited.  Or as excited as I could presently manage.

            Um.

            Fortunately I had brought my knitting with me.‡

            The seminar was perhaps not as beautifully and thoughtfully organised as it might have been—?‡‡  I may have expressed myself with some force on the drive home to Niall about this.  The other thing is . . . if you’re going to learn handbells, you have to ring frequently and at length.  This whole show will have been for nothing if there’s no follow up for any of the beginners who’d like to give it a proper shot to find a group that will drill their tiny brains out, which is what they need.

            . . . I’m sure there’s something else I could talk about.  But I can’t stay in this chair any longer.  You’ll excuse me if tonight’s post is a trifle compact.  

* * *

* Well, in my current state of unhealth I can’t remember anything much.  Give me a minute, I can probably come up with my name . . . Chaos?  Darkness? 

** And hellhounds could perform the Lassie ploy and guide the ambulance crew to my motionless and raspy-breathing body.  

*** Last night was epic.  Not in a good way. 

† Not to say downright humiliating 

†† Or to crawl, moaning

††† Peter says he nearly tried to me forbid to go.  This would not have gone over well.  Even if he was right, which he probably was.  I tried not to breathe on anyone.  Niall is getting over his lurgy.  Whimper.    

‡ I don’t think I’ve mentioned that I am not merely working on the second leg warmer, but that I cast on and immediately started ribbing—not only without having to redo the first few rows about forty-seven times, but without even thinking about it.  I cast on and started knitting.  Yaaay.   Progress. 

‡‡ Urgle yurgle gleep arrrrgh.  Colin and I were in a group with four helpers and two learners—and only three sets of bells.  So three of us were always sitting out.  Er.  Why?  Niall was in a group with three learners and two helpers . . . and he said he could have used more help.  Colin, who is a forceful sort of fellow, after the tea break, went off and fossicked for an extra set of bells for the leftover three of us in our group.  He found three pair of buckets . . . I’m not sure they even count as handbells:  I think you could hang them in a tower with a sally.  But they were better than nothing.  I mean, I’m happy to knit, but if I was just going to knit I could have stayed home. 

            Also, handbell ringers—remember I’m talking about change ringing on handbells, not tunes—are not thick on the ground.  To arrange something with twenty or thirty people attending, and enough helpers to give all the learners a chance, meant that some of these people were coming from a considerable distance.  But the entire evening was scheduled for only an hour and a half—and we spent a good twenty minutes milling around having vague awkward conversations with people we thought we half knew^ at the beginning and another fifteen minutes for the tea break. 

            At least I had brought my knitting.^^ 

^ Okay, I’m projecting.  I’m not good at milling, even when I’m healthy.  And I was happy to chat with a few of the people I did know.  But we only had an hour and a half. 

^^ I am already—after only slightly more than a year with needles, and still not having finished anything yet—wondering how I managed before I had knitting to take with me.  I’ve always had a book with me everywhere, but reading really is anti-social.  I couldn’t have pulled my book out tonight.  But I could perfectly well (well, I  think I could perfectly well) pull out my knitting, and prove that I’m still paying attention by making the occasional comment.  (You HAVE to count!  You ABSOLUTELY, TOTALLY HAVE to count your places when you ring handbells!!)  I have the occasional backwards advantage as a beginner teacher, in that I’m not such great shakes that I don’t remember with painful clarity what it’s like learning your first appalling method on handbells.  (YOU MUST COUNT.  I don’t care what any of these hot guys are telling you.  YOU.  MUST.  COUNT.  YOUR.  PLACES.)