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New and Old Toys
Well, it’s all about the iPhone. Oh, and handbells.
Let me see. Where was I? I’ve tweeted and/or forummed* some of this. About twelve hours after Gabriel retired from the field in defeat on Tuesday, I happened to glance down** and saw . . . that my latest small enigmatic black box was registering a phone signal. And, since then, it has—mostly—continued to fly a few tiny bars in the upper left-hand corner. It’s worst indoors, but that’s what landlines were created for, right? To back up your mobile? I managed to ring Peter this morning, waiting for it to cut out the minute he picked up, but—it didn’t. And the speaker-phone option works surprisingly well. Okay, I was surprised. But if I’m not expected to clamp it to my skull so I can listen to my brains frying, I might actually, you know, use it, like, as a phone.***
Raphael and Gabriel did come back yesterday and negotiate with management for better working conditions.† I didn’t want to know the details. But I did demand that they try loading a 2-CD opera before they left me to girn and greet alone.†† So we tried Gluck’s Orfeo, which was the vanguard last time that alerted us to the Walkperson’s treachery. And it . . . promptly loaded three discs of a two disc opera. Which is at least an interesting new approach.††† AAAAAAAUGH.
So let’s talk about handbells for a minute.
Some of you may recall that a fortnight ago I inadvertently stood up poor Titus—and not-so-poor, ratbag, advantage-taking Niall, when I’d thought that Colin was coming to ring handbells, which would mean there were still three of them before I got there. Only Colin wasn’t, so my absence meant that nobody was ringing anything till I finally arrived.‡ Whereupon I was overcome by guilt and shame and Niall immediately whipped out his diary and forced me, in my shocked and weakened state, to agree to ring handbells with one of his Demon Handbell Friends, who happens to live in Frellingham, which is too far away, as I keep saying, when I have said no thanks to repeated applications on the subject.
So last night was the night. And while we had not discussed it I was not entirely surprised when, in the car on our way over, Niall said brightly, okay, we’ll ring a quarter peal first, and then you can get some practise in on other stuff.
A quarter. Of course. Of course we were going to ring a quarter.
And . . . we did. The Demon Handbell Friend—let’s call him James—is actually one of these extremely nice, easy-going, laid-back ringers who just happens to be able to ring anything.‡‡ And while I won’t say I exactly relaxed and enjoyed it,‡‡‡ I will admit that it was a very pretty noise, which isn’t usually the case when Niall and Colin and I are hacking away together: Niall’s a good handbeller, but Colin and I outnumber him. Last night the good ringers outnumbered me. And the truly awful thing is that the experience has made me rather wistful about, oh, learning bob major§ or something. Which would mean coming to one of Niall’s other handbell practises. . . .
No, no, no, no. I have a novel to write and an iPhone to fill up with apps.
* * *
* So, what do you think? Does forummed have one ‘m’ or two? I vote for two, because then Microsoft’s dranglefabbing autocorrect doesn’t change it to ‘formed’.
** Probably from my hunched and heavy-breathing posture over the iTunes Store. Good Golly Miss Molly, a kid in a candy shop doesn’t begin to suggest the instant oversatiation and crazy-mad craving which assaults the new iPhone owner when entering the unhallowed portals of the iTunes Store for the first time. Or even the second or third. Or fourth.^ And we’re not even talking all the other stuff, the you-need-never-do-anything-again-but-keep-your-incredibly-battery-hungry-iPhone-topped-up-who-needs-to-eat stuff. We’re only talking apps. And the big problem with apps is that far too many of them are far too cheap, which provides you no useful barrier against which to brace yourself against the storm-tide of desire.
It all started with Fingerzilla, of course. If I ever go for the digital Olympics, Fingerzilla is my honey. I’m even getting better at the helicopters. I—or possibly Cathy—told you that I was particularly taken by the fact that the little people, when you eat them, scream. Some of them have labels. Some of them are just little tiny people and they run away and you stomp after them, roaring.^^ But sometimes you get a teeny pop-up banner: lawyer, it says. Or banker. Or tax collector. Or stockbroker. I would go for one that says irresponsible dog owner. Or queue barger. Or voter for prop 8. Roarrrrr.
But one can’t stop there.^^^ And Raphael had kept me quiet for a good half an hour months ago, before Peter got ill or the RaspBerry started misbehaving, with a lunatic exercise called Angry Birds.+ This is the dumbest thing I ever saw, I said, eyes riveted to the screen and finger stretching the virtual elastic on the next autodestruct bird-bomb yet again. This is so dumb. It even has dumb sound effects.
I downloaded it right after Fingerzilla. Or rather Gabriel did it for me, because at that point we were still in the early screaming++ stage of iPhone integration. But he was trying to be, I don’t know, adult or something+++, and only downloaded the lite version. It only has three levels!! I had to go back and download the full rich massive 59p version myself later.~
Okay, now, somebody tell me why there are never any instructions~~ to any of these games? We’re all telepathic now? Or maybe everybody but me already has that usb slot in the backs of their necks? Take The Screetch, for example, which is very pretty and rather hypnotic in a Tetris-on-hallucinogens sort of way. And if you read the info page in the iTunes shop carefully, you will learn that you’re supposed to line up three swirly spheres of the same colour and they will explode, and if you explode enough of them you win, and go on to the next level. But . . . but . . . or am I looking for logic where there is none? Shut up, McKinley. Turn on, tune in and drop some spheres.
^ You know I’m strangely short of sleep. . . .
^^ The roars are almost as good as the screams. The roars could be louder though. Hey, this is Fingerzilla, crusher of continents.
^^^ No, really. It’s in the fine print. Read your contract.
+ Raphael said, my two-year-old loves it.
++ Speaking of screaming. I needed to play Fingerzilla.
+++ He really should know me better by now.
~ There’s a cheat app for Angry Birds. In fact there are several. Dear gods. Now I’m getting frightened. Hey, guys, it’s a game.
~~ Except for Plants vs. Zombies. There is a truly excellent ‘help’ screen which reads in its entirety: When the Zombies show up, just sit there and don’t do anything. You win the game when the Zombies get to your houze. –This help section brought to you by the Zombies.
*** Except I hate phones. Okay, scratch that idea.
† One of management’s apparent requirements is WiFi. Sigh. I’ve kept putting off getting the cottage wired, because I sleep there. All those wandering waves are implicated in ME. But it’s increasingly the case that there’s so much of it around that you’re swimming in it anyway—it’s like I wonder how much my initial savage acute phase of ME was aggravated by the fact that at the old house we were surrounded by agrochemicalled farmers’ fields. So having prospectively yielded to the inevitable, last night back at the cottage I turned on the iPhone’s WiFi search . . . and was offered a choice of five networks. Soon it will be six. But I’m going to have a password on mine.
†† The Walkperson not only declined to load more than one CD of any given opera—we tried three, just in case it was a production glitch—without merely overwriting what went before, I also later discovered that it was harbouring nine copies of Beethoven’s ninth symphony.
††† It was, for reasons which escaped all of us, objecting to Che Faro, which is the famous aria that every mezzo-soprano in the universe sings, even me. It decided that this aria was just so special it should have a disc all of its own.
It did, however, agree to load all nine of Beethoven’s symphonies.^
^Well, I think. I admit I haven’t tried playing any of them back yet. . . .
‡ I don’t know why nobody seems to ring minimus—four bells—on handbells. But apparently nobody does.
‡‡ They’re a different species. Homo campana. I’m sure I have more genes in common with chimpanzees.
‡‡‡ You enjoyed that, didn’t you, Niall said firmly, on the way home in the car. Erm, I said. And any of you out there keeping track, yes, Thursday is our usual handbell evening and yes, we rang handbells tonight too. I think I’m probably chiming gently when I move. No, wait, that’s the iPhone.
§ Which is roughly speaking the same pattern as bob minor, but on eight bells. Which means some extra twiddles.
SUNSHINE Ask Robins
Blast and curdle it, how did it get this late? I only got home from bell ringing . . . uh . . . well, four hours ago, now that you mention it. The wretched days are drawing in so frelling fast—you can only hurtle hellhounds after tower practise in daylight for a few weeks in high summer, and that’s already over.* The sun sets fabulously across a field from the South Desuetude church, which means (as I said to Niall as we strolled toward the bell tower this evening) that you can see it getting later and later every week. Which is how it feels.
And now I’m sitting here eating scrambled eggs** and reading through some of the suggested bakery items from the SUNSHINE drawing just past*** . . . and feeling increasingly hungry, scrambled eggs or no scrambled eggs. Okay, gang, there has got to be another drawing in this somehow, for those of you willing to share your actual recipes. Black Bear and I are working on this†. There are two immediate problems: a lot of people are not going to want to hang their favourite recipes on line, and there are even—brace yourselves, I know this comes as a shock—people who don’t bake at all. But . . . but . . .
Meanwhile, without moving away from the topic at all, let’s have an Ask Robin question.
Did you base the baked goods in Sunshine off actual recipes? And if so, would you be willing to share them?
(I did see all the lovely recipes you’ve already posted on your blog, but nothing Sunshine-specific. As a pastry cook, the absence of “Death of Marat” in this world makes me very sad!)
Some version of this question is probably the second-commonest I get about SUNSHINE.†† To anyone who is a baker/cook, the answer has to be yes, doesn’t it? Of course they come from actual recipes. But after that the answer gets a little gnarlier. I’m always a little surprised when the question is put like this, but it’s probably just a way of trying to be polite, rather than, Yo, Dumbface, you gonna give us some of these recipes or what? My editor and agent—both themselves serious cooks and bakers—attempted to discuss with me the possibility of publishing some of the recipes in the back of the book but didn’t get too far with me screaming, No no no NO NO NO NO NO THIS IS NOT A COZY BOOK!!!! I DO NOT WANT TO BE REVIEWED IN THE DOMESTIC SECTION OF YUMMY MUMMIES MONTHLY!!!, so after a while they gave up. I still think I’m right about this—recipes do not belong in SUNSHINE—but I’ve been surprised at how persistent the requests for recipes continue to be.
And I do toy with the idea of a SUNSHINE cookbook. But . . . Sunshine bakes rather like I do (ahem) plus she’s a professional, which means her hands and eyes know what they want and how to get it, and her brain, let alone her measuring spoons, are frequently left in the cupboard. One of the reasons I’ve never got round to posting my How to Make Yeast Bread (which I’ve been promising off and on now for almost three years) is because so much of it is based on feel—on experience. Every frelling bag of frelling flour is a little different, and what makes cooking fun and interesting and dangerous is learning to respond to your ingredients and when to ignore the recipe. There’s a reason why so many of us old, experienced, not to say self-willed and cantankerous, cooks say of ourselves ‘I can’t follow a recipe’. This is pretty hard to quantify. And—however you feel about the relationship between author and character—the idea of Sunshine and me, who are both self-willed and cantankerous, sitting down together, and you can define ‘sit’ and ‘together’ any way you please, and creating a book’s worth of clear, precise, works-every-time recipes is . . . pretty dranglefabbing funny.
Okay, it’s also true that because Sunshine is a professional, she has a lot of her recipes down pat, in her head if not on paper, and could probably be wheedled into writing them out—she lives to feed people, after all. So Sunshine’s recipes are still an open question . . . which I’m doing precious little to answer. Feh. Unh. Well. What I need to do in my copious free time is go through SUNSHINE again and write down the names of every decadent foodstuff she mentions, and match up the ones I know to the recipes out here in this world. A lot of the stuff I’ve posted, which you can find in Playing with Your Food, is unalloyed Sunshine however—Three Chocolate Truffle Brownies? She totally makes these, and she doesn’t swear at her white chocolate either. Oh, and Death of Marat exists—but even Sunshine admits it’s a ratbag. Back in the days when I still made stuff like this, it came out about one time in three—it always tasted good, but sometimes it was a puddle and sometimes it was a pudding.
First, what do mik-bars taste like?
For those of you still intent on SUNSHINE, mik-bars are from HERO. And they’re a chewy-crunchy, brown-sugar-fruit-nut-and-the-Damarian-version-of-oatmeal cookie bar. I’ve always meant to investigate what out of that category in this world you could safely feed your horse—I’m mostly an apple and carrot girl myself—since Talat gets through quite a lot of them. But it’s one of the things I still haven’t got round to.
And second (and probably more important), are there actual recipes for any/all of those baked goods from SUNSHINE (Killer Zebras, Bitter Chocolate Death, etc)?
Killer Zebras certainly exist. I’m also bemused that this, with Death of Marat, are probably the two that get asked for the most often. Death of Marat, as above, is vexed. But I can absolutely give you Killer Zebras, with perhaps some head-scratching and furrowedness of brow, because they’re really only slightly dressed-up what-you-call-’em, I think I first met them in an old Betty Crocker cookbook under the name Harlequin Cookies. You make a basic cookie dough, divide it in half, add chocolate to one, and then roll each out and squidge ’em together. But I’ll post that recipe. One of these days.
Frell. I’m doing it again. Okay, I was going to answer another SUNSHINE question, but I’ll save it. Because I want to show you the following, which came in today, while we’re talking about SUNSHINE. I know I’ve posted other book mail recently, but partly because I know I’m a crank and partly because if this blog is supposed to be the public manifestation of me as a writer-person, it should include book mail as well as bell ringing and hellhounds and roses and Dido’s Lament††† . . . because book mail really does get me out of bed in the morning and opening the work-in-progress file. I’ve said this many times elsewhere: I’d be a storyteller whether anyone was listening or not, because I can’t help it, it’s the way I’m built. But I have had this huge, huge, HUGE stroke of luck that I can write the kind of stories that strangers are willing to pay me to read‡ . . . and a storyteller really only exists if she has an audience. Otherwise she’s a poor sad lost shadow of herself. And the thing that any storyteller wants most of all is to matter to her listeners/readers. You can’t help it; it’s part of the storyteller make up. And here’s an email that tells me that my stories matter.
I first read Sunshine in the spring of 200-. That spring had been enormously difficult. . . . Books were one of the few bright spots . . . and Sunshine was nothing short of a beacon. It is a wonderful book for all of the usual reasons: it is well-written, beautifully developed, and has a distinct narrator who is easy to relate to, especially in her flaws. It is vivid to the point where you want to crawl inside the book and live there for a while. It features vampires as they ought to be–as dangerous predators, NOT as swoon-worthy dreamboats. The relationship between Sunshine and Con is a rare kind of perfect–an awkward bond/sort-of friendship that is constantly developing. I loved it and recommended it to anyone who expressed even a remote interest in fantasy.
Recently, I had to [revisit the situation of the spring of 200-]. I put ‘Sunshine’ in my overnight bag because I’d been meaning to reread it. All of its good points were still valid, but what struck me this time was Sunshine’s journey as a character. She was handed a whole lot of baggage that she thought she couldn’t handle, baggage that made her question her identity as a person. And maybe this sounds silly, but this is what got me through the past couple of weeks . . . Having someone, even a fictional someone, who was also unsure of her ability to handle the cards she’d been dealt made the past couple of weeks a little less lonely and a lot less dreary. There is much inspiration to be found in someone who can have doubts about herself and still manage to kill a vampire with a kitchen knife.
‘Thank you’ seems rather inadequate, but it’s the best I can do. . . .
Trust me: ‘thank you’ is never inadequate to a storyteller about her stories.
* * *
* And despite what I wrote last night I’m not sure it is such a good thing that it’s easier to get to bed before dawn than it was a few weeks ago. I’ve always been inclined to press my luck.
** Don’t get me wrong, I’m extremely fond of buttery, gooey scrambled eggs. They are a Staple of My Existence. Like chocolate.
*** These are random pulls from the first Facebook column. I’m going into sugar shock just from reading: I’d bake a souffle with fresh summer peaches ready to explode in the center. A lava fruit surprise. . . . I’d bake my soon-to-be-notorious, Cranberry/Coffee/Choc Chip Just-Can’t-Stop Organic Cookies. . . . I would bake Extra-special Chocolate Porcupine Cake (with lashings of buttercream icing) and Chocolate Brownies of Extreme Temptation. . . . I would bake chocolate cupcakes with chocolate ganache filling and chocolate chocolate chip icing. . . . I’d bake beautifully light cupcakes made with butter, free range eggs and Earl Grey tea, topped with pastel coloured buttercream and decorated with lavender flowers, crystallised rose petals or violets. . . . I’d bake Descent into Oatmeal Madness Cookies. . . . I’d bake Bloody Doomsday Chocolate Raspberry Swirl Muffins. . . . I’d bake Persephone’s Peril – a dark chocolate torte with a secret layer of white chocolate and pomegranate mousse, smothered with dark chocolate ganache, drizzled with pomegranate syrup. . . . I’d bake a braid of lemon curd bread. AAAAAAAUGH. WANT. WANT.
† To the extent that either of us can focus. We both have a slight weakness in the Baked Goods direction.
†† The commonest, as regular blog readers know, involves the s-word. Has anyone noticed the mysterious disappearance of any noisy, obnoxious neighbours who go on too much about books needing to have sequels? Do you really want to know why so many of my roses are twice their normal size?
††† Which is playing right now, as I weep despairingly into my keyboard.
‡ Or at least post recipe suggestions
Same bat time, same bat station*
I have bats. No, really. In fact I have a lot of bats. Stop that laughing.** These are real bats. Pipistrelles, in fact: the common pipistrelle, which is also the commonest bat species in the UK; but all bats are protected, and you’re not allowed to disturb a roost. Not that I want to. Eat bugs! Eat more bugs! Bats are my friends! Yesssssss!
There are about a million and a half links for info about pipistrelles*** but here are a couple to get you started. I admit that the opening screen of the first one is not exactly reassuring, but they’re tiny and furry and they eat millions of bugs so never mind about the teeth, and I persist in finding them cute. Which is a good thing, as it turns out.
http://www.bio.bris.ac.uk/research/bats/britishbats/batpages/commonpipi.htm
http://www.arkive.org/pipistrelle-bats/pipistrellus-pipistrellus-and-pipistrellus-pygmaeus/
My bat odyssey began about three weeks ago. I was out in the garden at oh . . . ten o’clock or so. In the evening, I mean. It was an evening Peter was playing bridge and I was not bell ringing and it wasn’t dark yet†, so I was still out there. I don’t know why I happened to look up—well, I like watching flying things swoop around†† and something must have caught my eye. I looked up. There were several of them, whatever they were, darting and swooping. My eye was drawn to where they seemed to be coming from . . . which was a corner of my house. As I stood there another one shot out from under the eaves. And another one. And another one. Eeep.
I assumed they had to be swifts or house martins or similar because they were so noisy. I did think of bats because they were emerging at dusk, but anything that likes bugs might very well come out for a cruise at twilight—and, as I say, they were noisy. Bats are silent, right? Their echolocation pings are out of range unless you have very good hearing, and I haven’t had very good hearing in a couple of decades.††† I stood there getting a crick in my neck and watched them blip into existence, one after another after another after another after . . . little dark winged bodies materialising in the dusk and then zinging off in all directions, whoop zap. I counted about thirty after I started counting, and there’d probably been a dozen or so before that. Golly. Whatever they are, they like it here. They’ve brought all their sisters and cousins and aunts. And however many came pouring out, the mad chittering under the eaves didn’t seem to be getting any less.
I went indoors thoughtfully (rubbing my stiff neck). Next day I went up into the attic and stood in the corner where the things had come from the night before . . .and I could hear them chittering away like anything—I’m glad I sleep a floor down and on the other side of the house—but I could see no traces of them inside (whew).
I told Penelope about them the next time I saw her, because she’s very good on natural history, and her first reaction to the chittering was the same as mine—us old folks can’t hear bats. It must be some kind of bird. But she agreed to come round one evening the following week and watch the exodus. I took her up into the attic first‡ and she listened to the chittering—so far as I can tell they sit around up there and talk all day—and said, Mammal. That’s definitely a mammal noise.
We then retired to sit‡‡ in the garden and wait for the air show. First one popped out and Penelope said, bat. Yup. Bat. You have bats. This time of year it’ll be a nursery roost: mums with babies. And the next day she sent me the contact info for the Hampshire Bat Group [sic].
This time of year official bat group members are out every night counting bats. My local pair had trouble fitting me in. But they said they could come round tonight, at about 9 pm. And I said that I probably wouldn’t get home till about 9:20‡‡‡ but I’d leave the greenhouse door open and they could come through into the garden for the bat spectacle.
I got home to find two wired-up people in my back garden, staring up at my roof, listening to their radio gizmos on headphones, and clicking their counters furiously as my bats dove out of their hideaway and into the bug-laden air. Go bats! Eat! Eat! Click click click clickclickclick click click . . . Blimey, said the man. Turns out there’s a second exit round the corner in the peak of the roof, so he was getting more bat-clicks than his wife. They told me my tenants are the common pipistrelles, but while they’re not endangered, all bat populations have been dropping, which I knew, and the woman said that by percentages the pipistrelles have dropped more drastically than some—which I did not know—so it’s always good to see them thriving somewhere.
Okay. Are you ready for this?
Final count: 410. I have four hundred and ten teeny-weeny pipistrelle bats living between my roof and my attic ceiling.§ And maybe a few more, since any late babies may not be flying yet.
They said that this is the biggest mum-and-baby roost they’ve seen, and that it’s a sign of the good health of the environment—well, I don’t spray, so all the bugs they’re eating in my garden are finest kind, and I use eco-green stuff indoors, so there are no noxious fumes in my attic either.
I don’t just have bats. I have serious bats. Beam.
* * *
* And no, actually, I am not a huge wet nostalgic fan of the old Adam West TV show. As far as I’m concerned it came out at exactly the wrong time with the result that my life was made a misery for several years by teenage boys saying, Hey, Robin, where’s Batman?, and then laughing like drains.
Although my then-boyfriend did convert me to comic books when The Dark Knight Returns came out in 1986. Ah, yes, the 80s, when I finally got round to having my adolescence. I was way too weird and serious when I was a teenager. Aggravated, possibly, by a lot of teenage boys shouting HEY ROBIN, WHERE’S BATMAN during a delicate transitional period.
** You’re going to hurt my feelings.
*** And an awful lot of video. Once you get on YouTube you could be there for a week, although a lot of it isn’t very good, and some of it is rather alarming, like one of someone letting a pip crawl through his fingers. I don’t think the pip is having a very good time.
Bats apparently count pretty high on the ick-o-meter though because I notice that the come-hither column of other video clips down the right hand side moves into monster spiders pretty quickly. Anyone out there remember Attack of the Fifty-Foot Spider^ last autumn? I posted photos. I’m also still suffering traumatic flashbacks and view the approach of this autumn nervously. One of the videos shows someone letting one of these gigantico house spiders climb over his hand. Although I don’t think the spider is having a good time either.
^ Which Black Bear kept insisting was a male looking for a mate. It was a FEMALE, okay? F-E-M-A-L-E. Females are bigger. It was not a male. Not. Very, very, very not.
† It kills me that less than a month after the longest day the nights are already closing in again. I know they do this every year. Every year I get all whiny about it.
†† Yes, this predates PEGASUS.
††† The Bat Conservation Trust^’s own downloadable pdf tells you that you can’t hear the radar pings and doesn’t say a thing about social calls.
^ which I belong to. Just by the way. Conserve a critter? You bet. Where do I sign.
‡ And derived the distinct impression that she looked round at everything up there a little wildly.
‡‡ Yes! Sit! As any crazed gardener knows, the last thing you do in your garden is sit in it!!
‡‡‡ I went bell ringing. With Niall. To Colin’s tower. I said to Colin, so, on a scale of one to ten, how bad was yesterday’s quarter? And he said (more or less), lighten up. The striking was not 100%, no, but I don’t like Grandsire Triples^, I call by the treble, and if you hadn’t led bang right every row, we wouldn’t have got the quarter.
Whatever. I still need more practise. Aside from needing more practise anyway because bell ringing is like that and time on a rope is the only grail there is, I need practise ringing on eight. And I don’t know how I’m going to get it, since eight-bell bands are kinda rare in my bailiwick, even where we’ve got the bells, drat it.
However I rang several touches of Stedman doubles (six bells) and a not-all-that-bad-and-was-only-yelled-at-twice plain course of Cambridge minor (six bells) tonight, which was very good for morale—and feels pretty idiotic that I’m ringing comparatively high level stuff on six when I can barely stagger through trebling on eight. I said as much to Niall on the way home and he said, crossly for him—neither he nor Colin does cranky like readers of this blog know cranky—stop beating yourself up, okay?
I still need more practise on eight bells.
^Even Colin has faults
§ And no, I don’t have to worry about this. I knew bats weren’t rodents and don’t gnaw, but I didn’t know they don’t do anything but crawl into spaces that are already there and hang out. And their droppings are dried-up insect bits, and unless the roof leaks, they disintegrate into dust. As tenants go you can’t really ask for better. So long as you aren’t trying to sleep in the next room.
An Unscheduled Night Off
So I got back from home tower practise* and found this in my Twitter feed:
tessagratton In Which My Friend Sends a Piece of God in a Pink Envelope: http://tinyurl.com/232y7g3 @mstiefvater @robinmckinley
And I figure if your sins** have caught you out, you might as well get a free guest-post substitute out of it.*** Furthermore, how often is a hellgoddess† truly granted her rightful divinity?†† This is obviously a moment that should be commemorated as widely as possible.†††
PS: Tessa, I hate your fingernails. Because I am horribly jealous. I stopped bothering with make up way early.‡ But I would have liked to play with nail varnish. I can’t: I’m allergic to the stuff. It makes my fingernails fall off.‡‡ Curses.
* * *
* I have to ring a quarter peal the day after tomorrow. Somebody. Please. Shoot me. Just a nice little tranquillizer-dart gun. You want to do it Sunday morning, so someone has an opportunity to discover my unconscious body and find some other eighth ringer by 5 o’clock in the afternoon.
** I still haven’t decided if that should have been ‘who’ or ‘whom’. As you will notice by its strange indecipherability. Pretend it’s like Vina in The Menagerie.^ It will be whatever you want it to be.
^ Pathetically geeky ST: The Original reference. Menopause brain has wiped out most of my higher learning. Star Trek, however, remains.
*** It’s also here: http://tessagratton.livejournal.com/563891.html I’m dubious about how many times a link will copy and paste and stay linky.
† You will note the pink envelope. I almost sent her a red one in acknowledgement of her position on the arc of unusual public personas, but I decided that no, the hellgoddess should be manifest in this case.
†† Mind you, I read it and went ‘eeep.’ Although I read her original BEAUTY post and went ‘double eep.’ Possibly quadruple eep. I’m also very impressed that she had the generosity of spirit to be willing to read anything that contained a so obviously drippy useless heroine with a serious skin condition and pink horns.
††† Although I wish to point out that I am never weird, as regular readers of this blog already know.^
^ Except on days beginning with M, T, W, F, or S, and between the hours of midnight and 11:59 pm.
‡ I’m creeped out by the choice of photo that seems to be everybody’s favourite for copying, which is from the wedding I went to two years ago in which I am wearing lipstick. Ewwww. Okay, my fault for posting it, but how was I to know that would be the one?
‡‡ Speaking of ewwwww.
The V&A, part two
But first, a message from our sponsor:
YAAAAAY TREE FROM HELL* IS TOAST
. . . or at least chippings to mulch the flower borders. Got back to the cottage last night to a message from the Tree Man. He’d had the unofficial okay from the Arboreal Department** of the county council some weeks back but the paperwork has only just come through. YAAAAAAAY. 22 July is the day I am to be rid of this turbulent . . . I mean this ungleblarging tree.***
And then the fun begins. The unofficial word was that the Arboreal Department would like to see another more suitable tree take Mr Ugly Tree Monster’s place, but I want a tree there, I just want some other tree. Liquidambar styraciflua ‘Worplesdon’† is presently at the top of the list of possibilities. Although I will have to consult about planting a new tree where an old one has just come out. I don’t fancy replacing 1,000,000,000 cubic yards of soil to get rid of the traces of Mr Ugly.
Meanwhile, back at the V&A: This is the music stand I want.††
A rude bagpiper††† would so improve my artistic focus.‡
[INSERTING TOTALLY POINTLESS TEXT HERE IN A WILD TECHNOLOGY-HATING ATTEMPT TO MAKE WORDPRESS LEAVE THE TEXT WHERE I PUT IT WHICH IS, SURPRISE!!!!!!!!, WHERE IT BELONGS]
[COME ON YOU FECKLESS CHUCKLEHEADED PIECE OF RANCID GARBAGE, THE NEXT LINE GOES DOWN BEYOND THE PHOTO OF MY FOOT AND NEXT TO THE LINK. WHAT ARE YOU, STUPID?]
[Oh. Flapdoodle. I've only just noticed: you're going to have to click the Foot Photo big to be able to read the label about the rude bagpiper. Hmm. You may have to big-up the lecturn photo as well to see him.]
[Blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah . . . nearly there . . . ]
But the thing I have to tell you about is this.
http://www.vam.ac.uk/collections/architecture/smallspaces/index.html ‡‡
We only saw two of them and only got photos of one, but they are so absolutely fantastically fabulous I may have to go back before the show closes and find the other ones.
Here’s the one we got photos of:
You climb up the ladder into its belly (you have to take your shoes off first), and there’s a tea kettle on the tiny grate in the infinitesimal fireplace and a built-in bench along the wall, and a table, and you want to pull out your notebook or your laptop‡‡‡ and settle in.
It doesn’t actually get any more fabulous than this, but the other small built space tried: it’s a tiny multi-storey ‘house’ made of bookshelves. (There are reasonably evocative photos on the exhibition site.) It’s just big enough around to contain its endlessly-turning-another-corner staircase§ and the rest is just . . . books. Every ‘floor’ has a tiny two-seat-if-you’re-friendly padded bench tucked between the bends of the staircase and the rest is just . . . books. The backs of the shelves have a single narrow board discouraging anything from falling outward onto the heads of the passersby, but for the rest, they’re all open, so you can peer through from either side. And the books are all paperbacks, just ordinary paperbacks of the sort of thing ordinary people read. Terry Pratchett, not The 1918 Index of the Proceedings of the Cathartic Knee Sock Society. Cathy said she was sure there was a McKinley title in there somewhere if we only had the time to look. We didn’t find one but it could have been there. It was that kind of collection.
And finally a random photo of Peter and me. We took Cathy out to the local pub with the best food, the Hammerklavier and Rosebush, on the Mottisfont evening. You may recognise the t shirt. And the belt.
* * *
* The bad hell. Not the nice hellhound hell. Or even the dubiously unsafe but entertaining hellgoddess hell. The bad hell.
** A kind of small down-market Lothlorien. The flets are covered with linoleum to protect them against the office furniture, and power, including wireless internet connection, is run off discreetly disguised solar panels, although the staff is expected to take their laptops home overnight and charge off the mains.
*** Note that by the evening of the 21st of July I will have wound myself up into a fever of terminal guilt. It’s not the tree’s fault it’s three hundred and twelve feet tall and ugly!
†† I neeeed an inspirational music stand. Blondel keeps harping on about stuff like passion and commitment. A song is not a shopping list, he says. Think about what the words mean. —Gah. I asked him if he had any advice about learning ‘off copy’ in his quaint phrase since one of the things that always happens to me even when I am reading^ it off the page, is that as soon as the accompaniment starts I go to pieces and lose my place. He was silent a moment and then said, Believe that you’re right and then . . . jump off the precipice.
Oh. Thanks. I feel better already.
^ Well . . . ‘reading’
††† Not only are these shoes deeply cute, but they are as comfortable as All Stars. 
‡ And passion, commitment, and precipice-jumping.
‡‡ I bet their luxury eco-friendly tree house holiday does not have lino on its floors.
‡‡‡ Or your iPhone
§ Being a bell ringer accustomed to climbing endless twisty bell tower stairs is valuable experience.
