Grandson did not win.  Grandson came fourth in the vocal category.  I wouldn’t have expected him to have stage nerves—he’s been in amateur and semi-professional gigs pretty much since he was old enough to toddle on by himself, and was eye-catching enough at one of the latter to have had the offer of a scholarship at one of the big flashy London performing-arts schools but decided for himself he didn’t want to be that single minded and that far away from home yet—but my guess is that there were some nerves in attendance.  He’s a charismatic performer, and that was a little muted today.*

            But it was a much more interesting show generally than either Peter or I was expecting, I think.  The first thing that happened was a reprieve.  The order of performance is done by lot, and his mum said that he always draws early, so we were going to have to be there for the first shot over the adjudicators’ bows.  And then last thing last night, news—he was going to be in the second half, after the break.  So we could drift in in an idle and well-rested manner at about 11 . . .

            Except we didn’t.  We didn’t leave that much later after all, had an easy soar down there** and only missed the first performer.***  And . . . what it was was a free concert with great seats.  I’m not sure what I was expecting—these are the national finals after all, and the Pan-galactics are no slouch.  But.  Wow. 

            In the absence of pianists† I was far more interested in the singers, not only because we had our hero to cheer for (who was, just by the way, the only boy).  But (as I emailed Nadia, because I had to talk to somebody who would understand) while before Blondel and Nadia I would have been able to pick out the bits these young singers haven’t quite nailed yet†† I wouldn’t have been so aware of how they were trying to do what they were doing—and of some of the pitfalls on the way they have successfully negotiated.  I don’t think anyone who cares deeply about music and listens intensely is ever unaware of what a lot of work doing it well is, but there is definitely a difference in kind of your appreciation if you’re having a small stumbling whack at it yourself. 

             There were a few repertoire choices that I thought were a bit ill advised, but the slightly unsatisfactory deliveries may also have been nerves rather than that the singer was overfaced by her material.  And there were a few real jaw-droppers.  The girl who won looks about twelve.  She came quietly out and announced her pieces with perfect self-possession but no particular panache . . . and then started to sing.  Big major yeeeeep.†††  Golly she was good.  She was one of the first, and was instantly one to beat.  And then as it happens the last song by the last performer was the other real jaw-dropper, Cherubino from the Marriage of Figaro raving about love.  She sang it with exactly the right wildness for the adolescent male‡, but it was also the most fully realised complete performance:   an ordinary teenage girl in a nice party dress suddenly transformed into a lust-maddened teenage boy.  It was extraordinary.  She came second.  The girl who came first was probably the more polished performance but this last babe had passion.‡‡

             And I got a lot of knitting done.  I really am going to have a pair of leg warmers by next autumn.‡‡‡    Possibly conceivably just-believably even two pairs.§ 

* * *

* I admit I’ve never heard him in public before.  But he knocks the back wall of the kitchen out when he sings here.  His voice has got amazing over the last few years.  I remember him as starting out a perfectly nice light tenor and he says he’s still a tenor but I’d call him a baritone.  He’s got the baritone boooom at the bottom of his range, although he says it’s the top end that’s stretching.  Well, I bet the bottom end will stretch too.  Or maybe he’s just going to grow up to be one of the heldentenors of our time.  Unfortunately he’s not the least interested in opera and unless he has a voice teacher at some point who wakes him up to the glories of the operatic repertoire I think we’ll lose him to the West End.  Feh.  

** My gods.  The Jaguar.  Yeep.  I don’t ride in fancy cars all that often and I forget.  The sensation of gliding rather than sitting in something with mere wheels.  The way you are forced back into the leather upholstery if your driver decides to pass some mere vehicle.   

Caligula

What sort of Jag was it?  

I haven’t the faintest idea and they didn’t know. (It originally belonged to Saxon’s dad.)  I did ask.^  Georgiana said that it’s a Sovereign, and I can tell you that it’s the xj type, but in the great hierarchy of Jags I haven’t the slightest.^^  I’d be surprised if it was more than about ten years old, but then Jags age well.  But speaking of charisma. . . . 

^ I said someone on the blog wanted to know.  Most of the members of the immediate clan are aware of my curious nighttime activity. 

^^ Slatey blue-grey with creamy leather insides.  You want to have brushed hair and clean fingernails when you sit in it.  Hellhounds need not apply. 

*** Okay, here’s an oddity that perhaps some music teacher out there can explain.  There was one cello and one violoncelle—I don’t even know what a violoncelle^ is and it’s the one person we missed—and everything else you blew into, and all but one were winds.  The one blowing-into that wasn’t, was a euphonium, which I wouldn’t have been able to describe to you either, but I can tell you now it’s a bit like a big rectangular French horn and has similar big fat scary notes and I have no idea how he managed to get so many of them out of the thing so accurately.  The rest were three flutes, a clarinet and a very snazzy recorder.  No violinists?  No pianists?  

^ And the only on line definitions I can find are in French.  Is it the French word for cello?  There has to be some reason to call it a violoncelle rather than a cello? 

†  !!!!!!!!!!!!!  

††  Someone sang Dove Sei.  Snork.  But the irony about her performance was that she didn’t take advantage of her opportunities to hit that note and hold the freller till your audience begs for mercy.  You come in on a fermata:  Doooooooooooooove sei, and there’s another one in the ‘vieni’ before your top G, which is as hair-raising as it gets in this innocent-seeming little aria^, but that little phrase is set up for you to go for it.  Nadia, whose mission in my life is to loosen me up, has even said go for it, and that (if I need a light whip of vengeance to get my blood circulating) here is my opportunity to make Oisin follow me, because this is the Singer’s Big Moment.  You even repeat the vieni-with-top-G phrase on the second go-through—and then run down the last few bars to the end.  I can’t do it, but I do grasp that it’s rife with opportunity.  And this little girl with the lovely sweet voice and the appealing manner went straight through all her hot chances without anything remotely resembling a fermata.  This may, of course, have been her stage nerves, but I’d’ve said the accompanist was expecting it.  

            Speaking of the accompanist(s):  most of the performers brought their own.^^  There was one fellow who appeared several times whom I had little trouble identifying as the one laid on locally, and I wasn’t too impressed.  Till the introducer mentioned that he had in fact stepped in with about forty-eight hours’ warning when the fellow they had booked went down ill.  Yowzah.  Suddenly he’s a hero too. 

^ Nadia keeps telling me it’s not that difficult a piece and I’m just reacting to the fact that it’s from an OPERA. 

^^ Our hero’s accompanist is lovely.  

††† She sang an aria from Cosi fan tutte, where Despina is chirpily and dancingly telling her mistresses (she’s their maid) how to catch a bloke, and then this moooooournful legaaaaaaato lied by Brahms. 

‡  Yes.  It’s a trouser role for a mezzo. 

‡‡ Other standouts for me included one of those Italian arias from the notorious soprano student’s ARIE book that I sing:  Se Tu M’ami.  She did it a lot better.  Surprise.  Not.  And ‘Batti batti’ from Don Giovanni was also charmingly and flirtatiously done—which is the only way to bring it off.  Mozart is so frelling tuneful you can forget what complex personalities his characters are. 

‡‡‡ Barring rogue yarn-bomber raids where masked individuals steal your projects to wrap around lampposts and bollards.  

§ Well I need an assortment of COLOURS, don’t I?

Milk Wine 

I work at the Antique Rose Emporium in San Antonio, and Madame Alfred is one of my absolutely favorite roses. (: If people are looking for a fragrant climber, I always lead them to her, as long as they have the room. I put her on my parents’ front fence, and she blooms a treat. 

The Antique Rose Emporium!  Squeeeeee! 

https://www.antiqueroseemporium.com/ 

The very last year I was in Maine, I . . . planted stuff.  In a clearly prescient sort of way.  Gardening had never really occurred to me, except as something that other people did.*  I’ve said this (often) before:  gardening in Maine, while other people certainly did do it, looked way too much like hard work.  Gardening in Maine is the Xena Warrior Princess end, with evil gods and zombie unicorns and person-swallowing landscape and so on and I’m much more the Gabrielle before she started going to the gym end.  If there are any zombie unicorns around I am definitely looking for somewhere to hide. 

            But I had a silly fit, and, that last summer, went around digging holes and putting things in them.  Including three roses.  Which actually, you know, grew, and produced flowers—I mean, roses, yipe.  I have no idea where this might ultimately have led:  my little lilac-enshrouded house was heavily shaded by not only the two ginormous lilac hedges but several boulders as tall as the house in the back, and a huge, gorgeous old maple tree in the front.  I never was going to have a lot of opportunity to grow roses there—which is just as well, because the joke is that roses are annuals in Maine, and I’m pretty sure my three didn’t survive their first winter.  But I might have learnt about the roses that will survive serious winter, and how to help them do it.

            Instead I fell in love with an Englishman and moved to England and his two-acre garden where he spent hours every day eeeeeeeeep.**  And after I got my breath back I started putting roses in left, right and centre, and learning the hard way about growing the beggars.  To do this rigorously*** involved ordering catalogues—this was before the web began infiltrating us hoi polloi:  I didn’t have a computer yet† let alone an internet connection—from every rose seller I could get the address of.  This included several in the States.  I don’t remember if The Antique Rose Emporium’s was one of the ones I had to draft in an enabling American friend to lay my hands on—quite reasonably a lot of plant sellers won’t send catalogues overseas when they won’t ship their plants overseas—but the whole ‘rose rustlers’ thing was very attractive††, and little old country cemeteries in England sometimes have drifts of ancient roses with great gnarly stems as big around as trees.    

            The Antique Rose Emporium is pretty much the only American rose nursery I pay attention to any more.  If I want an American perspective on a rose, I look it up there first.  And if I didn’t already have Mme Alfred, on the say-so of Emporium personnel, I’d be looking her up for details of her English performance record. 

            I originally bought her, back at the old house, by accident.  Well, I was very young in terms of rose-growing, and Peter was no help, him and his frelling herbaceous borders.†††  I think I’d actually ordered something else, and this thing arrived with a label saying ‘Mme Alfred Carriere’ and I thought, oh, fie, and heeled her in in a blank-ish spot, because I didn’t know what to do with her and I had a lot of other roses to plant, and I’d look her up and figure out what to do with her later.  Only I never quite got around to it.  And she rioted, as she will do, and took over a large swatch of that end of what had been the vegetable garden before my first rose-beds went in.  I probably somewhere have photos of her pouncing over the trellis that several more modest climbers were dutifully scaling from the other side, and engaging Dortmund in mortal combat.  Dortmund was another of my errors—I made a lot of errors—a single, cherry-red rose, white at the base of the petals, and not at all my sort of thing, except that I loved her.  As I loved Mme Alfred.  And her big double creamy flowers looked fabulous tumbling among Dortmund’s dazzling single red. 

            I totally had to have Mme Alfred even in my handkerchief-sized garden at the cottage.†††  I put her in my first year there and her tallest stems started  reaching above my neighbour’s two-storey-plus-attic roof a couple of years ago—and since I’m looking out my first-floor‡‡ office window, this is not a trick of perspective.‡‡‡   When she’s in flower I get gusts of her perfume through my office window.  Yes.  She’s one of the best.

            Oh . . . and guess what I was doing today?  Ordering roses.  Remember I said I needed another climber?  Just one climber . . . ?

 * * *

* When I shared a house on Staten Island for a while, one of my housemates was a zealous, not to say fanatical, gardener.  That back yard makes my tiny garden at the cottage look large in comparison but by golly it was INTENSIVELY PLANTED.  It was impressive but somewhat intimidating—you could barely squeeze out the back door without being attacked by a radish.^  I felt I wouldn’t have the authority to boss so much plant life around and I was sure it knew it.  I felt no impulse to try for myself.^^  And mostly I used the front door.  

^ Or a banana-sized slug.  Ewwww.  

^^ Being assaulted by the occasional house plant was enough.  I’ve had house plants catapulting off window sills most of my life.  

** Speaking of zealous. 

*** Is there another way? says the woman who is now waiting for her book on Japanese particles to arrive. 

† shock horror 

†† Even if the Emporium’s ‘our story’ about Mermaid as a rose that will withstand ‘droughts and blue northerns’ and thrive in the wilderness makes me feel like I’m living on another planet.  I lose Mermaid.  Repeatedly.  She’s one of the crankiest madams ever to grace these mostly verdant shores.  And I’m not the only one who thinks so:  she has a bit of a rep around here.  And then there are her thorns:  which are long, curved and prehensile, the better to make you bleed.  She’s very beautiful though.  So we all keep frelling buying her when she conks out on us again. 

††† The English cottage garden style has roses.  Peter did have roses.  He just didn’t have enough. 

‡ I don’t have Dortmund now:  she’s one of these great stiff angular things, about eight foot square.^  I do keep thinking about putting her in at Third House, but Third House’s garden is still small, it’s just bigger than the cottage’s.  

^ She also has almost no scent.  And you have to draw some lines somewhere.  Sigh.

‡‡ Second floor in American English 

‡‡‡ Although as I’ve said elsewhere, it’s surprising how many rather too large roses you can wedge into a rather too small garden if you’re stubborn enough.  And don’t mind the sight of your own blood too much.

ERNANI may be the dumbest opera ever to approach becoming standard repertoire.  The fact that it doesn’t approach it any closer, despite a good deal of ravishing Verdi music, is probably because it is so dumb.  Gods, heavens, demons, miscellaneous spirits, and anything else floating around—IT IS SO DUMB.  I have it on CD, of course, I have pretty much everything Verdi ever wrote on CD, but I’ve never seen this one staged before.*  I’m not sure this was a virginity worth losing.  I am not the first person to point this out, but possibly its chief purpose in the Verdi compendium is to make the insane plot of IL TROVATORE look sensible and well put together.

            Also, the tenor/hero in TROVATORE is a twit, but he’s not such a whinerpants.  Ernani spends the entire opera moaning about what a hard life he’s had and begging people to kill him.  Come on, de Silva, you old brute, do it now at the end of act one and get it over with.  How did the wet, whinging Ernani, supposedly the brave daring leader of a brave daring band of bandits, meet the globally irresistible Elvira in the first place, let alone long enough for them to fall in love with each other (not that this usually takes more than an aria to accomplish in any opera)?

            Anyway.  Elvira is, for reasons unspecified, mewed up in de Silva’s castle, where he’s going to marry her by force.  De Silva is old and he comes on and sings this self-pitying aria about how he wishes that the ardour of youth did not beat in his aged breast . . . but it does, so he’s going to marry this girl even though she wants no part of him.  If this is the choice maybe I’ll take the whinerpants after all.

            But there’s a third entrant to the Elvira stakes:  Don Carlo, the frelling king of frelling Spain. Played by Dmitri Hvorostovksy mmmmmmmmm okay, did you say there are two other male principals?  I seem to forget.  But the king sneaks into de Silva’s castle—he what?  The king what?—to try to persuade Elvira to run away with him** and at the point where things may be about to go badly wrong for Elvira because the king is not a graceful taker of the answer ‘no’ both the other blokes show up and start shouting at one another.  Because this is all so plausible and well thought out.

            But the really cute bit is the deal with the horn.  In Act Two Elvira has decided, for more unspecified reasons, that Ernani is dead and has agreed to marry de Silva after all.***  Ernani then randomly shows up dressed as a pilgrim and asks for shelter.  Guests are sacred to the de Silvas! says de Silva, and then finds out who it is.  Cue gnashing of teeth.  Then the frelling king shows up, demanding that brave daring bandit Ernani.  Nothing to do with me, says de Silva.  I shall search your castle, because I know he is here! says the king.  A de Silva’s word, once given, even to a lying sneak of a fraudulent pilgrim, must be kept, says de Silva.  Then I will TORTURE EVERYBODY, because I am the king, and a really bad loser! says the king.  Go for it, says de Silva.

            At this point Elvira rushes in and says no, no, no, Mr King, please don’t do that, all this testosterone is giving me a headache!

            For you, anything, says the king.  Come away, come away, you pretty thing, I am going to wrap you up in flowers and ::drools::  I am taking your fiancée hostage, okay? he says to de Silva.  Whatever, says de Silva.  Exeunt everyone but de Silva, who is standing around looking oppressed, and then Ernani bursts out from the hidden priest-hole equivalent and says, you mean you let the king take her AWAY?  Don’t you know he is our RIVAL?

            WHAT? says de Silva.  —Yo, elderly moron guy, that would be why he was going on about how he was going to make her happy, you know?  And all the pleasure that awaits her at his . . . ahem . . . court.  Yes, that would be it:  his court.  Jeez.  Maybe you’re a little hard of hearing?  And a little forgetful?  You were cross when you caught him in her bedroom in act one . . .

            So now we have to form a brotherhood to kill the evil female-plot-device-stealing king! says Ernani.  How do I know I can trust you? says de Silva.  A little late to be thinking about that now, isn’t it?  When you’ve just made the violent and unstable king really mad at you by defending me?†  But listen, goes on Ernani, I’ll tell you what.    You can trust me because I’m giving you my hunting horn.  The moment I hear you blow it I will KILL MYSELF.††

            We will pause here for you operatically inexperienced blog readers to absorb this concept.

            You know how it ends.  But it still takes a few avalanches of credibility to get there.  Carlo—this is Charles V in the history books:  it’s not a nice likeness—is hoping to get elected Holy Roman Emperor.  He may or may not have been a very good king, but the startlingly large band of assassins de Silva and Ernani have brought together still seem to be founded on the idea that he stole someone’s girlfriend.  It’s not any more doolally than the hunting horn business in the previous act.  And then Carlo is elected emperor, by a council of evidently seriously underinformed Electors, and promptly does the miser-leans-against-wall-and-becomes-generous thing, pardons the entire band of assassins, and as they’re standing around gaping at one another, he pulls Elvira out of the scenery somewhere and hands her over to Ernani.

            Um.  I realise that in the context of what’s about to happen in the next scene, where Ernani is, of course, going to hear the damn horn, Carlo is supposedly giving Ernani and Elvira their happy ending and until de Silva does his Al Hirt thing it’s chirping birds and rose petals all the way.  But we all saw the king in the first act.  Is this a man who is going to have been coming round for a cup of tea in the afternoons and meekly continuing to put his suit forward?  I don’t think so.  I think he’s just got tired of Elvira a little sooner than anticipated. . . .

            Anyway.  It’s Ernani and Elvira’s wedding day.   Chirping birds.  Rose petals.  And the distant sound of a hunting horn.  And then de Silva comes around and gloats.  And . . .  after some final moaning about what a hard life he’s had (although in the circumstances I suppose you finally can’t blame him) Ernani kills himself.†††  Usually Elvira merely faints.  In this staging she snatches the knife away from her brand-new (dead) husband and offs herself as well.  And in what I can’t help but think is an acknowledgement of the outstanding gobsmackingness of the whole shebang . . . there’s no blood.  They die (singing) utterly unbesmirched by stage blood or believability.

            PS:  It is fabulously sung.  And a lot of the music is finest kind.  Ignore what the hell is going on and just suck it in.  Anyone who had the sense to stay home and listen on the radio will have had a terrific time with it.  Angela Meade.  My new heroine.  My golly can that woman sing.  Big Verdi soprano voice:  wow.  And she’s got those soft floating high notes too, as well as all the power to knock you over.  Dmitri, well, we know about me and Dmitri.  The square-mouthed Marcello Giordani has the classic Verdi dramatic tenor voice—but he’s not enough of an actor to bring off the flaying absurdity that goes with all the gorgeous notes.  Ferruccio Furlanetto as de Silva has an easier time:  he’s got the voice, and his character is a total creepfest:  all he has to do is slouch around looking grumpy, vain and evil, and sing.  And the staging is fine:  nothing too meretriciously in your face in the name of art and excitement.  But oh, the plot. . . . 

* * *

*First breathtakingly anti-relevant footnote:  I’ve told you I’ve been prodding a couple of beginner books of Japanese kanji in a dubious and lightly hysterical manner.  One of the first characters they all seem to give you is a blank square, which is the kanji for ‘mouth’.  I think of mouths—I assume we’re talking about human mouths—as being more oval.  This is known as falling at the first fence.^    

             ERNANI begins with a rousing chorus, while our hero, the tenor^^, broods backstage on an artfully ruined bit of masonry.  At the end of the chorus he turns towards the audience and opens his mouth to sing . . . and his mouth is perfectly square.  It’s about the squarest thing I’ve ever seen. 

^ Although ‘sun’ is worse.  It’s a rectangle with a line through it.  Yes.  That so looks like the sun to me.  Not.   And kanji started as pictographs?  Sure they did.  Drawn by aliens from another universe.  Where the sun is rectangular and has a line through it and the females of the pictograph-writing species look like folding TV tray tables.  

^^ The hero is always a tenor.  Or anyway if there’s a tenor he’s the hero.  And if several blokes all rush onstage and down to the front together then the short one is the tenor hero.  

** I want to believe that the translation leaves something to be desired but I’m afraid it’s probably pitiably excellent.  So Don Carlo is apparently offering Elvira either to marry her or to install her as his ‘favourite’ and I’m (again) thinking, what?  Not that he doesn’t look like the worst husband material ever, but like yeah get set up as his mistress so he can throw you over after he gets bored with you six months from now.  What a good idea.

            Although six months of Dmitri . . . hmmm . . . But then I’m self-supporting.  And I’m sure I could get a story out of it.  But Hvorostovsky is alarmingly good at playing horny villains.  He was the Count in TROVATORE. 

*** Take the king.  

† Boy ideas of honour.  Spare me. 

†† Boy ideas of honour.  SPARE ME.   

††† BOY IDEAS OF HONOUR.  FRELLING SPARE ME.

I SHOULD BE CLIMBING INTO A HOT BATH* RIGHT THIS MINUTE.  Barring a few good pages of SHADOWS it’s been a stupid day.  I was out this morning bashing on with some I-should-have-done-this-last-autumn tidying of the cottage garden and noticing with dismay that this last really cold spell has taken out a good deal of stuff I wouldn’t have expected to lose—including at least one species-type rose that I wouldn’t have thought could be killed by mere weather.  I’ll cut her back hard a little later in the year and see if she comes back.  But I was reminded that I have never quite got my spring plant orders in and decided, in breaks for SHADOWS-related thought to flow back into numb brain channels like getting up and stamping around when your leg has gone to sleep from sitting on it for too long**, to try and finish these off.  I find I have to do my plant-ordering in as few giant clumps (so to speak) as possible, so I can at least half-remember what I’ve already ordered and where, without endlessly having to look it all up again.  Of the five web sites I tried to order from . . . one of them ate my order.  One of them refused to accept my order, demanding further credit-card identification numbers that don’t exist.  One of them crashed off the air halfway through the check-out process—and my order had disappeared when I yanked it out of the darkness again.  One of them has a bizarre system of postage that was going to charge me more for shipping than the order was worth.  (Um.  No.)   I managed to order from one. . . .  And it’s pretty much the least crucial.  Of course.

            So I thought I’d leave you with a couple of BELLRINGING links.  The first one is via Ajlr and CathyR and you’ll have to forgive the roundaboutness of it, Facebook and I are not the best of friends, and I can’t figure out how to do it more efficiently. 

http://www.facebook.com/pages/Robin-McKinley/149327572983#!/photo.php?fbid=10150587106108087&set=a.10150587106103087.376566.144515158086&type=3&theater  

. . . Although the first photo reminds me, there’s a newspaper article I pulled out a while back that I was going to complain about because it’s some idiot celebrity claiming that she used to like to ring bells when she was a kid, because the danger of it appealed to her:  you know you can get DRAGGED UP TO THE CEILING AND BREAK YOUR NECK.  You’re a lot likelier to be hit by a meteor simultaneously with being killed by a terrorist*** than dragged to the ceiling of a ringing chamber and breaking your neck.  Has anyone ever broken their neck this way?  If the stay breaks and the bell tips off its balance point backwards, yes, if you’re holding the rope, it will pull you off your feet and you will find yourself on your way to the ceiling.  I should know, I’ve done this (once).†  And you know what?  You let go of the rope. 

Southdowner sent me this one: 

http://smgcbr.heralded.org.uk/?q=node/194 

YES.  WHAT HE SAID.  ALL OF IT.  And he’s still left a few things out:  the odd struck bell, for example, which doesn’t sound at the point in the rhythm of pulling that you’d expect it to.  Which you then have to adjust to by ringing one or the other stroke (since bells are generally not evenly odd struck on both strokes:  that would be way too easy) either sooner or later, so the bong SOUNDS in the right place in the row.  Bells are highly individual:  it is not that unlikely that a good ringer will be unconsciously adjusting very slightly FOR EVERY STROKE because every bell in the tower is very slightly odd struck.   This is the sort of thing that makes us mediocre ringers cry in our beer.  (Beer is very important in bell ringing.  See previous link.) 

            And then there’s weather.  Quite well-mannered bells may become possessed by demons in very wet or very cold conditions, and the ones that are less than well-mannered to begin with may become . . . indescribable in inclement weather.

            But you get the idea.

            Now I have to go take my bath.  I was supposed to go to bed early tonight because I seem to have agreed to ring handbells tomorrow evening and I need to get my stint of SHADOWS in first.  And maybe a little Japanese.  And maybe even a little entanglement.†† 

* * *

* With a good book.  Hey, did you know that in Japanese, the word for book, ‘hon’, is the same word as for real, genuine:  ‘hon’.  It’s the same kanji too—the same not-Roman-alphabet character.  Or at least it looks like it.  Japanese is bung full of traps for the unwary, both because any other language(s) than the one(s) you know is and because this one has such a different cultural base—plus that you’d be expected to learn 1945 characters [sic] if you wanted to read the newspaper.  Fortunately I don’t.  But the characters, except for the brain-blasting aspect, are fabulously cool.  I’m beginning to feel about Japanese the way I feel about Oisin and the pipe organ:  if I were thirteen and talented I’d be learning both.^

            But ‘hon’ of course makes me think both of ‘hon’ as in The Hon Mrs Peter Dickinson and ‘hon’ as in short for ‘honey’.  I can totally call favourite books ‘hon’ as I pull them off the shelf, and ‘honourable’ is always good, except when it’s a bogus title you have no, ahem, genuine claim to.   But here’s one of those what? things about another culture’s approach to language.  I’ve seen/heard it in several books/web sites/podcasts now that you mostly try to avoid both ‘iie’, no, and ‘anata’, you, because these are both too direct for the Japanese concept of politeness.  But ‘anata’ also means honey, sweetheart.  So you call your beloved something that is too blunt for either strangers or friends—and which parallel behaviour here in the West, where we use ‘you’ freely, you’d probably get punched out by an offended beloved for.  Wowzah.  Who needs aliens and feys when pure human nature can come up with such delicious variables? 

^ I was thirteen when we left Japan and I’ve never been back.  It is strange in a lot of ways to be cough-cough studying Japanese almost fifty years later, even at this slippery superficial level, the stuff it throws up about who I was when I was a kid, and how much I’ve changed, or haven’t.  One of the things that hits me hardest is that I genuinely believed (which might be hon shinjimashita but I wouldn’t count on it) I was too stupid to learn Japanese and therefore let most of it flow past me without trying to catch  it.  Sigh.  Being a kid is rough.  

** I’ve told you before that I’m almost incapable of sitting in a chair the way you’re supposed to sit in a chair, with your butt on the seat and your feet on the floor.  I tend to sit on an assortment of pillows . . . and an assortment of my own limbs.  Which periodically go OW OW OW OW OW.  I have no idea how I survived all those years in school.  It’s possible that one of the reasons I found education more trying than educational was the effort it took to sit straight on all those chairs.  

*** Some of you will remember the ‘women past 40 are more likely to be killed by terrorists than get married’ study:  http://www.salon.com/2006/05/24/newsweek_marriage/

It took a surprising time to get debunked however, while all of us late-30s single women were looking at each other, raising our eyebrows, and muttering about fish and bicycles.^ 

^  http://www.answers.com/topic/a-woman-without-a-man-is-like-a-fish-without-a-bicycle 

†  Yes, it’s like knitting and riding.  You have to break a stay . . . but in the ringing world you’re only supposed to break a stay ONCE.  Once is PLENTY.  Stays are expensive and a major ratbag to replace.  Not that pulling out a lot of rows of knitting is something you want to do often. . . .^

            . . . AND IT WASN’T MY FAULT when I had my little ride to the ceiling.  I was still a beginner, and someone else’s beginner had been hammering that bell, and had cracked the stay. 

^ When I told Fiona I’d had to rip out eight rows she heartlessly said ‘Be glad it wasn’t twenty’.  

†† http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_entanglement  Speaking of OW OW OW OW OW.

. . .  is fabulous.  FABULOUS.** 

            When I was signing up for this season’s Live from the Met operas I ordered a ticket for this one automatically when I read the cast list and it included Joyce DiDonato, but I wasn’t very happy about it.  It’s a pastiche, or a mash-up if you want to be groovy***, with the storyline bodged together from THE TEMPEST and MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S DREAM and music stolen freely from all over the Baroque (I believe):  Handel, Rameau and Vivaldi (I think†) are the chief sources.  And there are Baroque costumes.  And Baroque sets.  I’d seen some stills and . . . ewww.  However, I had the ticket, and there was going to be Joyce DiDonato.

            I loved it.  And the production, which is way, way, WAY over the frelling top, is one of the best things about it—and therefore proves that not merely low-key or tactful things but positively reckless, attention-grabbing and silly things can be done successfully on the opera stage.††  Yesss.

            The singing is delicious, and even if I am prone to DiDonato worship, Danielle de Niese nearly steals the show.   The story:  Prospero, countertenor David Daniels, is sulking on his island.  This is one of the interesting choices ‘writer and deviser’ Jeremy Sams made:  this Prospero is a jerk.  I’ve never liked Prospero—all right, all right, I’ve never liked Shakespeare, but I’ve thought that the whole mage thing was over-emphasized:  he’s a self-pitying bully with some (fading) magic powers.  Which is exactly what comes through here.   Daniels does it very well:  I had no problem with his voice on that stage, and he has authority which Prospero must have.  He sends Ariel, played and sung with enormous charm and humour by de Niese, to shipwreck Ferdinand and then do the Puck trick with the potion to make sure he and Prospero’s daughter Miranda fall in love with each other.  But Caliban††† has stolen Prospero’s dragon’s blood so that his mother, Sycorax, can reclaim her powers, which Prospero, that fine upstanding gentleman, stole when he stole the island from her.  Without dragon’s blood the spell goes wrong, and Ariel instead wrecks a ship containing two honeymoon couples:  Helena and Demetrius, Hermia and Lysander.  Add Miranda and Caliban and there’s lots and lots of inappropriate pairings-off.  Ariel, in a panic, with Prospero having tantrums and threatening to lock her‡ back up in her holly tree, asks Neptune for help.   Neptune finds Ferdinand and gives him a shove in the right direction, the lovers are sorted, Prospero frees Ariel, Sycorax regains youth as well as power‡‡ (and her island), and all ends with general rejoicing except for poor Caliban who liked having a girlfriend and doesn’t have one any more.

            There isn’t enough of Sycorax.  Her first aria is amazing.  DiDonato goes from being a crippled hag to being a powerful woman in the prime of life over the course of the opera‡‡‡ but that first aria when she gimps out and yowls about what has happened to her—DiDonato makes some genuinely ugly noises, snarling below her range, and it’s riveting.  ISLAND is such an ensemble piece nobody gets a lot of solo time . . . but I still wanted more of Sycorax.  One of the dumb reviews that I’m refusing to link to says that ISLAND is all fluffy and throwaway—um, Sycorax is not fluffy.  And Caliban really is the one who isn’t saved.  He’s sung with dignity and pathos by Luca Pisaroni, who I had some caveats about as a rather too twitchy Leporello, but he’s excellent here.  He’s not a particularly nice monster, but he still has his feelings and his dreams, and he’s the only principal at the end who hasn’t got what he wanted.§  

            . . . I can’t frelling believe that the Met is so cheap and/or careless not to produce a complete cast list, but I’m failing to find it, and the synopsis they give you at the door of the theatre does not include the four MIDSUMMER NIGHT lovers.  How totally crap is that?   Miranda and Ferdinand are present, however;  poor Miranda, Lisette Oropesa, has one of the most thankless roles I’ve ever seen.  She comes on at the beginning singing, oh, dad, I Yearn For Something I Know Not What, and then wanders around falling for a new bloke every time Ariel makes another mistake with the fairy dust, till at the end she falls for Ferdinand.  It is done for laughs but I found it still a bit cringe-making.  I thought Ferdinand, Anthony Roth Costanzo, was one of their few real mistakes.  He’s another countertenor, but of the exquisite variety which does not do well on the opera stage, and furthermore he’s a willowy young man and they dress him in gold, white and peach.  Ick. 

            I’m trying to think how to tell you about the ridiculously glorious staging.  It’s—well, it’s Baroque.  There’s too much of everything, and it’s all curlicued and then super-curlicued.  But it’s also gorgeous and appealing, and the special effects, of the island and the high seas, are terrific—when the MIDSUMMER lovers’ boat is drowned it’s genuinely scary.  But the best—the best—is Neptune’s court.   Ariel comes on stage wearing a diving helmet so you know you’re supposed to be underwater, and there are mermaids floating overhead to reinforce this idea.§§  And the chorus breaks into ‘Zadok the Priest’ and everyone in the audience breaks up:  Neptune is played by Placido Domingo.§§§  But his court . . . well, there are all these ladies in semi-transparent leotards with scallop shells over their boobs, making wafty hand gestures, and behind them most of the chorus is standing behind, with only their heads showing, this gigantic series of painted props of naked people getting it on both with each other and with a variety of Things with Tentacles.  I loved it.  And Domingo is a cranky Neptune:  at one point he says, I’ll listen to you but I may be too old and tired and irritable to help you.  Here’s a god I could get along with.

            It was a splendid evening out.  I would guess ISLAND is still a work in progress;  it seems to me there’s stuff they haven’t quite figured out yet—the duet between Sycorax and Caliban at the beginning of the second act, for example, to my sensibility, isn’t quite there yet.  But it seems to me very much the best of Baroque:  the lovely music without all the sing, sing with twiddles, sing something slightly different, sing the slightly different with twiddles, then do it all over again several times, that tends to weary the uninitiated.  I was dismayed to hear the two women behind me not liking it and saying, well, why?  What is it for?, and that they wouldn’t see it again.  I’d see it again like a shot.  I want to see how it goes on evolving, and wholly in love with DiDonato (and now de Niese) as I am I’d also love to see what other singers might do with those roles.

              Yaay.  Five stars. 

* * *

* http://www.metoperafamily.org//opera/the-enchanted-island-tickets.aspx?icamp=Enchint&iloc=hpbucket

** Also, I knitted a fresh eight rows of my LEG WARMERS during intermission which I think I’m not going to have to rip out.  Which would be a first.  This is also my first attempt after having shifted to easier yarn—this is just basic, uh, pink, cheap, acrylic, 6mm.  Hellhound-blanket yarn in fact.  No variable threads, no confusing heathery colour notes. I can see what I’m doing and I’m not forever getting hung up in weird little fuzzy artistic filaments.  I’VE BEEN KNITTING FOR A YEAR AND I HAVEN’T FINISHED ANYTHING YET. 

*** Feh. 

† I could look all this stuff up, yes.  But I wasted way too much time trying to find a sensible review to link to and failed, and even if I don’t have to get up for service ring tomorrow morning^ I would like to get to bed some time.  

^ Waaaaaaah.  I was thinking, on my way to the theatre tonight, that it is a small kindness I have an opera on the night before my first official Sunday morning non-ring.  Sunday mornings after an opera, and especially after blogging about an opera, are—were—especially gruesome.  

††Moron from FAUST, take note. 

††† Somebody tell me why Microsoft Word has Prospero and Ariel in its dictionary but not Caliban. 

‡  Her?  Him?  There are plenty of trouser roles in opera, so that de Niese is a girl is not definitive.  But Prospero calls Ariel ‘son’ and ‘boy’ in the first few minutes so I thought, okay, boy.  But at the end, when Prospero has done the miser-leans-against-wall-and-becomes-generous thing and gives Sycorax back her island, Caliban says he wants a queen, and Ariel looks nervous and steps backward into the shadows.  What?  Since Caliban had spent a happy scene or two as Helena’s lover, I don’t think we’re supposed to be second-guessing Caliban’s gender preferences. 

‡‡ Where can I buy some dragon’s blood?  Is it good for writing novels? 

‡‡‡ And oh how I want her dress from the beginning of the second act.  Not the bright upbeat one at the end, which is too cheerful, although it’s a very nice cape.  I want the dark cranky one with the sparkles. 

§ In this version Prospero and Sycorax got it on before Prospero cast her aside like an old shoe and stole her island, her son, and her sprite.  Such a nice guy.  I believe his apology at the end about as much as I believe the Count’s at the end of FIGARO.  Get out fast, Ariel, before he changes his mind (again), and Sycorax, keep your flying piranhas handy, and don’t be afraid to use them.  But because I have a low mind^ I’m thinking this may cast an interesting light on the father of Caliban and the mother of Miranda.  I totally see Prospero’s character coming through in his son. 

^ So what do fanged muffins get up to when no one is around? 

§§ Although the mermaids come back in the last scene, which is supposed to be on dry land.  Never mind. 

§§§ Maybe this is an in joke.  Never mind . . .

Okay, that’s not your average mixture.  Let’s have the good news first: 

http://www.jodimeadows.com/?p=525  

YAAAAAAAAAAAY.  It’s alive! 

* * *

. . . We are now, I fear, about to plunge down a steep slope.  I was feeling a little odd last night but in my current state of whatever it’s always easy to put oddness down to a surfeit of quantum physics.*  Unfortunately not so in this case.  I nearly didn’t get out of bed this morning, except that there are hellhounds.  And SHADOWS.  Which is still due the end of the month.  I can’t frelling believe I’m ILL again.  I was ill in October, for pity’s sake**.  I’m not sure yet whether this is merely (!!!!) a sick cold or whether it’s going to insist on the full panoply of flu.  At the moment the jury is still out.  But I feel like stale death on toast.  AND CRANKY. 

            So I got out of bed at about . . . noon.  I barely fell down at all.  There are hardly any bruises from caroming off the four-poster on the way to the bathroom, which had mysteriously moved to a new location overnight.

            I got dressed.  I don’t guarantee that my tee shirt is on the right way around (who cares?  It’s covered up by six woolly jumpers) but I got the shoes on the right feet.***  I hurtled hounds.  Yes.  I did.†  Twice.†† 

            And I worked on SHADOWS.  I did. 

            . . . And this is as much blog entry as I can hold myself together for.†††  Good night.  May you sleep better than I’m likely to. 

* * *

*  Brief, according to my present state of non-brain, update on ABSOLUTELY SMALL:  It’s all maths.  I don’t know how even a crazed mathematician/physicist can have had the effrontery to look Average Reader in the face in the introduction and claim that understanding quantum mechanics does not require mathematics.  You are so lying, Professor Award-Winning Scientist Bloke.  It’s all maths.^ 

            What is true is something else he said in the introduction however:  that in most physics books the author says something like, blah blah blah blah, and here are the equations to prove it.  And you’re supposed to read the equations.  What’s different about ABSOLUTELY SMALL is that he then tells you the equations over in words.  The equations are still there.  You still have to deal with equations.  They may not look like a lot of equations to Mr/Ms Science Brain but they are totally equations.  But once he gets away from those poor cats waiting trembling in boxes for the Killing Look, he explains stuff pretty well.^^ 

            If you’re up for it . . . it’s pretty fascinating.  It’s so insane.  It’s so not Newtonian.^^^  I also just love that most of it you can’t know exactly.  HA HA HA HA ALL YOU CREEPY OVERBEARING SCIENCE BRAINS WHEN I WAS IN HIGH SCHOOL.  HA HA HA HA HA.  Granted I still don’t get it, but I’m a lot happier with the concept of a world that cannot be known/measured exactly—can’t be nailed down.  This sounds a lot more plausible to me—more like my experience of the daily life this book is supposed to let me fit quantum theory into. ^^^^   And as he says, approximate doesn’t mean wrong:  it means . . . approximate. 

            Anyway.  It’s fascinating.  But it’s probably not a book you want to strain to your bosom when you stagger off to lie on the sofa with hellhounds and minister to your brain-destroying illness. 

^ Now that I’m committed, which is to say I’ve bought the thing, twice, audio and hard copy,+ I notice with a jaundiced eye that the three encomiums on the back cover about how This Is The Book We’ve Been Waiting for to Explain Quantum Mechanics in Daily Life are all by hard liners.  There are two scientists and a lawyer.  I’m sure he’s a very hard-line lawyer.  And probably the author’s best friend since childhood.  I want a hat check girl/boy or a brewer or ballroom dancing coach to tell me it changed their concept of life. 

+ I cannot believe that anyone would survive the experience by audio only.  If audio helps you focus, as it does help me, then the audio is worthwhile, and audible’s reader gets a medal.  But you’re still going to have to have the hard copy.  For the equations.  If it takes the reader too long to say one of the frellers, you’ll have forgotten the beginning by the time he gets to the end.  Lambda squared of the hypotenuse of the lobotomy . . . um. . . . 

^^ I do wish he’d stay away from real-world examples.  Even I know that a baseball is not a free particle, even when it’s left the field and is busy arcing over the stands.  Speaking of the physics of gliding, however, is anyone playing Tiny Wings?  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x6pT_2E5xI0   I don’t know what I think of the game, but I love the graphics. 

^^^ I have a new theory about why Newton was such an ugly piece of work as a human being.  It’s because in his secret heart he knew he was wrong.  

^^^^ Look at human nature.  Look at hellhound nature. 

** I think it was October.  Autumn anyway.  A few months ago.  And my stupid throat hasn’t recovered from the last assault which is why the Muddlehamptons are forgetting my name.  ARRRRRRRGH.  And here I am again with an inflamed throat, a throbbing head, and that interesting kind of fever that makes you feel like you’re made of boiling aluminium.  I RARELY GET THESE MALADIES.  RARELY.  Except lately ARRRRRRRRRGH. 

*** One right foot.  One left foot. 

† I also deserve a medal.  But so do they.  At the ripe old age of five and a half, although generally speaking the advent of maturity is a little thin on the ground, they are very good about waiting till I get my crap together, even when I seem to be having unreasonably more trouble than usual with said crap, and of hurtling slowly, with pauses, once we get outside.  I know the location of every public dustbin in this town . . . I also know the location of every bench, not that kerbs won’t do in a pinch.  They probably just think I’m having a bad ME day.  Multi-application hellhound training. 

†† And the dog minder is going to take them out tomorrow.  Another medal. 

††† I told an American friend that what I really needed, Peter having made some excellent turkey stock for the bodily nutrition side, was someone to tell me Really Bad American Jokes.  So she’s taken it upon herself to send me Really Bad American Jokes all day at intervals—for the support of my suffering soul.  Here’s my favourite: 

It’s the old west, and a newcomer to town sees there’s a big crowd gathered in the town square.  So he spots the local newspaperman, and asks him what’s going on.
          ”It’s a hanging,” says the newsman.  “They’re hanging Brown Paper Pete today.” 
          “Brown Paper Pete?  Why do they call him that?” asks the visitor. 
          “Because he always wears brown paper pants, a brown paper shirt, a brown paper hat, and carries a brown paper satchel,” says the newsman.
           “Wow,” says the visitor, “What are they hanging him for?” 
           “Rustling.” 

She’s just sent me this one, but she says that I’m sick enough to worry her if I think these are funny. 

Guy walks into a bar, sits down and orders a beer.  While he’s drinking, he hears a tiny voice say, “Hey mister!  I like your tie!”  He looks around, but doesn’t see anybody.  A few minutes later, the same tiny voice says, “Hey mister! Nice shirt!”  Again, he looks around, but there’s no one around except him and the bartender.  A little while later, the voice says, “Hey mister! You look like you’ve lost some weight!”  So the guy calls the bartender over and asks him what’s going on.  The bartender says, “Oh, that’s the peanuts.  They’re complimentary.”

So it’s twenty and a half years ago.  Peter and I have decided to get married.*  All the important stuff has already been decided, like that I’m going to emigrate.**  But that means we have to get married:  the fiancée’s visa only lasts for six months.  That’s not a problem:  we’re both old-fashioned:  we want to get married, and I’m the kind of old-fashioned that furthermore wants a proper ring to go with the deal.  Hey.  I like jewellery. 

            I’d originally assumed we’d find one suitably old and hoary and glamorous and possibly mad in an antique shop somewhere for an engagement ring;  wedding rings to be practical need to be plain and could be dealt with separately when we knew what the flashy one looked like.  We spent some time in this pursuit*** but we were finding nothing nearly unique and fabulous enough, I had to finish DEERSKIN and we wanted to get on with the moving and the new life and so on. 

            I can’t now remember who recommended this jewellery designer to us.  But we went to see him and explained we wanted something definitively Maine for me to wear in England.  He suggested Maine tourmalines—I think I didn’t know about Maine tourmalines at that point—and we eventually agreed that he’d design and make not only an engagement ring with the tourmalines, but wedding rings that would all fit together as part of the same design.  Peter felt this was mostly my show† and I did try to tell the bloke the sort of thing I liked:  flowing lines, mainly, swirly or woven or floral.  Maybe sort of art nouveau.  I liked the stuff in his shop.  And I liked the idea of the Maine designer working with the Maine tourmalines.

            We went back to see the stones when they arrived.  I don’t know if the designer bloke asked for triangular, or if that was what he could get.  Okay.  This would make it unusual.  And pink and green are excellent.

            We never saw any designs.  We saw the rings themselves when they’d already been cast (if cast is what I mean) and although they weren’t finished yet it wasn’t like we could go backward and say, uh, no, I meant Charles Rennie Macintosh, not Cecil Balmond.††   The wedding rings had these little hooks in the middle like the two ends of a twist tie bent together—and with the squared-off ends sticking out up and down your finger.  Can you say CATCHES THE FRELL ON EVERYTHING?  My tourmaline engagement ring fit down over the top ensnaring bend of my wedding ring, but that still left the sharp bottom edge to cause havoc and mayhem.  They were certainly . . . different.  But they were not sensible, and while many of the details of that whole era of the beginning of my life with Peter are blurry with exhilaration and terror, I do remember Peter telling the bloke that he works with his hands a lot, he spends hours every day in the garden, doing carpentry and cooking and he needs a ring that won’t get in the way.

            The man smiled and nodded.  These creative types.  They’re so in their own little world.†††

            But part of the swoop and breathtakingness of a runaway romance like ours is that you do kind of want it to glide as far as it can before it founders on some ineluctable aspect of ratbagging reality.  The wife in the attic.  The outstanding warrant.  The gerbil fetish.  The chocolate addiction . . .  And I don’t think the designer bloke was cheating us in any overt way:  I think we paid an honest amount for his time and his materials.  He just didn’t listen. 

            Almost the first thing we did after the wedding was over was . . . run to the nearest ordinary jeweller and buy two utterly plain smooth gold rings and wear them.  The barbed designer versions came out for fancy occasions and the rest of the time lived in my jewellery drawer.  Sigh.  This had not been the plan . . . and while the plain gold ones worked fine as wedding rings‡ I was rather wistful about my Maine tourmalines wasting their glory in a drawer.

            I think it was around our tenth anniversary that Peter said, for our twentieth, we’ll have the tourmalines reset.

            So that’s what we did.  And this time we went to a jeweller we’ve been going to for . . . twenty years.  He listens.  He made my fabulous silver whippet belt buckle.‡‡  And we saw designs.  We saw several designs.  I wanted my new ring to look like it fit next to the plaited-gold-with-tiny-diamond-chips ring that was my fiftieth birthday present‡‡‡ and which I now wear as my wedding ring.  And it does, doesn’t it?

            This time it worked. 

Mmmmmm. ::Beams::

* * *

* And our friends and family are all going, what?  Well, it was a somewhat precipitate decision.  We’d known each other maybe sixty hours in total.^   

^ I’ve told you how we met, haven’t I?  I was on a Literary Tour of England and he was one of the speakers. 

** Somebody had to.  Peter originally suggested we divide our time, but I knew—and I’m sure I was right—we’d both hate it.  And Peter had lived in this area of Hampshire over forty years at that point, had four kids, the first two grandchildren, three brothers and their families, eight first cousins and . . . I had a whippet, and a background as a peripatetic military brat. 

*** This was the occasion of one of our most important Bonding Moments.  THELMA AND LOUISE had been bigger than god, Spacelab and Boris Yeltzin for months, and it was playing at a theatre in Portland, Maine, where we’d gone to cruise antique jewellery shops.  I’ve told you this too, haven’t I?  We walked out.  We walked right after the dumb one spends the night with Brad Pitt the robber on the lam AND THE MONEY IN THE FRELLING DRAWER while the smart (!!?!??) one goes off to have a deep, sensitive evening with her supportive boyfriend.  

† He’s got a much better eye for jewellery than he thinks he does—see:  silver whippet belt buckle, below—but it’s true that this was my Big Symbolic Thing about leaving Maine to live in England with him. 

†† http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-14027083   Okay, I don’t know what Balmond was doing twenty years ago.  Designing engagement rings, possibly. 

††† I do wonder if Designer Bloke already had this idea in his mind and he wanted to use it, whether the triangular stones inspired it, or what.  But he sure wasn’t too interested in the interface with his clients. 

‡ Anybody aware of the standard behaviour about such things of English gentlemen of Peter’s vintage will be gobsmacked that Peter wears a wedding ring at all.  Well.  Yes.  I don’t think it ever occurred to me that he wouldn’t—I wanted us both to wear them—and that’s what happened.  It wasn’t till later that I realised that Peter was humouring me about this too.^

            ^ I tell myself that if I have to choose I’d rather he wore a wedding ring than remembered to shut the door behind him.+  I perhaps tell myself this rather often.  But romance over practicality?  Sure.  Why do I have sixty rose-bushes in a garden the size of a large ping-pong table? 

+ This includes refrigerator doors.  Just by the way.

 ‡‡ I hope I’ve told you this story.  I told Peter I wanted something significant and wearable for my fortieth birthday. 

‡‡‡ Also bought in Maine.  Hmm.  My sixtieth is next year . . .

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

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

Tree. You will note Large Box to the right.

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

Another view of Large.

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

::LOUD RUSTLING AND RIPPING NOISES::

Highlights:

Gasp!

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

Oooh! Roses!

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hee hee hee hee hee hee

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

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

It's a bin.

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

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

Hope yours was merry.

* * *

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

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

And all its flower buds immediately fell off.  ARRRRRRGH.

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

Stop press! A Christmas cactus blooming on CHRISTMAS!

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

*** ‘I don’t need a wreath.’  

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

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

No.  And besides, Astarte has Montezuma too.

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

They sang COLD HAILY WINDY NIGHT.  Steeleye Span, that is.  Tonight.  At the concert Fiona got me by the hair, forced** me into her car as I moaned feebly:  I have to work!  I have to work!***, and made me come to with her.†  I could be happy just looking at Maddy Prior’s clothing. ††

            I had brought my leg warmers.  That is, I brought a remarkably-crinkly-at-one-end skein of bitchy, tantrum-prone††† yarn, a pair of needles‡, and an increasingly battered-looking pattern, including the crib sheet Fiona wrote out for me MONTHS ago.  We had allowed lots of time to get lost in which we then didn’t need‡‡ so I had a good half hour to get started again.‡‡‡  Aaaaugh.  Counting.  Aaaaaugh.  And Fiona would keep trying to talk to me.  What do you think this is, a social occasion?  Just because she can knit an incredibly frelling complicated frelling sock pattern on forty-seven double-ended needles and look around at the crowd and chat to her neighbour, who is laboriously going, one, two, three, purl, one, two, three, knit, DOESN’T MEAN EVERYONE CAN.

            And just by the way, some of what Peter Knight does on that fiddle isn’t possible.§

            At the end Fiona said, so, are you glad you came?  There must be more Steeleye sheet music out there, I said, having had trouble not joining Rick Kemp for COLD HAILY.§§  I even asked Maddy herself about sheet music on the way out and she looked puzzled and suggested I write to Park Records. §§§

            And then we went back out to the car park, got in Fiona’s car and drove merrily away in the wrong direction because she had decided we didn’t need the satnav. . . . 

* * *

* It was a near thing.  Blogmom had sent along a last sale/auction order file which I had assumed was a few final sweepings-up, no big deal, and hadn’t even bothered to open it—Fiona could do it when she came.  AND THEN IT TURNED OUT TO BE GINORMOUS.  Gaaaaaah.  WAAAAAAAAH.  I knew I was not, in fact, going to get everything out before Christmas^ but I did think we were totally heading downhill for the final assault.  No.  Wrong.  So the first thing Fiona had to do, having been obliged to reveal the awful truth, was prevent me from murdering myself messily in an assortment of creative and unpleasant ways. 

^ Once again, grovelling apologies.  There Is Too Much Going On.  And I really do have to finish SHADOWS before I can no longer afford to keep the hellhounds in a manner to which they have become accustomed. 

** I would make three of Fiona.  Well, two and a half anyway.  But she’s very persuasive.  Especially when she shakes out a length of yarn in this sort of garrotte and clamps sharpened knitting needles between her teeth. 

*** And I have an opera tomorrow.  COGNITIVE DISSONANCE ALERT.^ 

^ I would like to say I’m going to a Metallica concert the night after that, but . . . no.  And the truth is I don’t think I have the—er—mettle to go to a heavy metal concert any more.  I don’t know what the audience at a Metallica concert is like these days, but back in my misspent youth+ I went to several fairly scary concerts where I was glad that my companion was a six and a half foot bloke, who, while soft-spoken and mild-mannered, looked like Mess With Me and Die.     

+ Remember that I misspent most of my youth in my thirties, so we’re talking about the eighties. 

† You realise it’s Friday.  Sacred Home Tower Bell Practise.  Only Steeleye Span could drag me away from my responsibilities.^ 

^ . . . But make me an offer.  A stroll across the Kalahari?  Sunbathing in Antarctica?  A new diving bell attempt to reach the bottom of the Marianas Trench?  Sure.  After all, Niall left me to cope last Friday.  

†† I am forcibly reminded, pretty much every time I go to a concert—or, for that matter, watch a clip on YouTube—that the one great thing about performing is the costumes.  It’s pretty much the only thing I miss about being a travelling, live-appearance author:  the opportunity to dress up. ^  And Maddy’s clothes are prime.  I was thinking about this tonight—while I sang along to All Around My Hat^^—that this is the one flaw in my choir-joining plan^^^:  choir members don’t get to dress up.  I like a long black velvet skirt as well as the next woman but Maddy’s flounced blue satin is waaaay to be preferred.  Unfortunately being a soloist involves . . . soloing.  I don’t see a way around this.  Unless that’s in a chapter in CHAOS I haven’t got to/figured out yet. 

^ As demonstrated at Forbidden Planet a few months ago.  

^^ Maddy came to the front of the stage, thrust her microphone in our direction+ and dared us to be louder than Margate. 

+ Literally.  Fiona and I were in the front row.~ 

~ Fiona orders the tickets.  I just go where I’m told.  Chiefly into the passenger seat of her car. 

^^^ Supposing my incredibly tiresome throat stops being a frail heroine and lets me return to two-and-a-half-hour practises with the Muddlehamptons.

††† Yes I am thinking about simply buying a couple more skeins of hellhound-blanket yarn^ and using that.  Wait . . . did I just say BUY MORE YARN?^^ 

^ The pink option, of course. 

^^ I was reading Yarn Harlot the other night+ about stash, one of her favourite topics, and how the fact that you have more yarn than an infinity of monkeys could knit into bobble hats while waiting for that other batch of monkeys to produce King Lear++ doesn’t necessarily mean you have anything to knit with.  Yes.  Her ratiocinations on this subject will not be mine, but in my case all my nice yarn is Waiting for Me to Learn What I’m Doing.  I can’t just carelessly pluck a couple of skeins out of some tote bag and start on leg warmers.  Horrors.  

+ In the bath, of course.  Paperback editions of Yarn Harlot are ideal for the task.  

++ Macbeth would do.  And it’s shorter. 

‡ Yes in the right size.  Please.  

‡‡ We will come to the topic of the drive home again in a minute. 

‡‡‡ The lights went down mid-row, of course.  Oh, now I’m in trouble, I said, and the woman on my other side . . . laughed.  So during the interval I said to her, do you knit?  I used to, she said.  I keep thinking I should start again.  Don’t let me put you off, I said.  I’m a beginner, and this yarn is possessed by demons.  We parted amicably at the end:  next time bring your knitting, I said.

            Postscript:  I knitted five rows.  And then I ripped them all out again.  Sigh.  However, it more nearly resembled ribbing than my previous efforts.  It just wasn’t ribbing. 

§ This is clearly stated in chapter mrrmngph of CHAOS.^ 

^ I’m reading/listening to it AGAIN, okay?  This is challenging stuff for someone whose idea of higher maths is a touch of St Clements minor on handbells. 

§§ He may be a great bassist.  He is not a great singer.  I admit that my crossover tendencies may not always stand me in good stead when judging folk singers, but I mostly feel that to be a lead singer of anything you either have to sound great, like Maddy^, or at least have a characterful voice, like Dick Gaughan—or Tom Waits or Leonard Cohen.  

^ Although she’s still singing when a classical singer would have had to give up. 

§§§ http://www.parkrecords.com/  In case you’re interested.  I mean, yes, I could figure out the tunes, and most of the lyrics are on line somewhere, but what am I going to give Oisin?  . . . Had I but world enough and time, I might write my own accompaniments, of course, but they would be a little non-standard.

But we had eight ringers this morning.  EIGHT.  I’m trying to remember the last time we had eight ringers for our eight bells.  After a howling gale with rain hammering on the windows at 7:45 am when the frelling alarm went off, and me lurching swollen-eyed around the cottage saying, I don’t want to go out in this, I don’t WANT to go out in this . . . at 8:45 it suddenly cleared off and became blue and dazzling and glorious.  And all the bells rang out. . . .

            Another day passes as a seventeen-year-old named Maggie.**  I envy her the amount she can still eat, but other than that I’m okay to stick with the elderly decrepit me.  She’s also a lot better constructed*** to cope with the intrusive magic besieging her landscape than I am.  I was thinking about this again after posting about how unsettling I found Aeon Flux the other night at the cinema:  I’m what you might call professionally off balance, I’d really rather not fall down the rest of the way, I might hurt myself†.  So if a dragon†† flew into the courtyard at the mews††† tomorrow would I be more or less likely than the average bystanding human to say, oh, hey, cool, that’s a dragon, or run screaming?

            Blither blither blither blither.  It’s been another good day as a seventeen-year-old named Maggie and as a result (a) I have no brain and (b) I’m having some trouble climbing back out of the vocabulary of an alternate-reality teenager.  I was also thinking‡ about the way I think of SHADOWS as my first ‘genuine’ teenage high school novel, which probably ought to be DRAGONHAVEN.  Except that Jake’s a grown up by the end with a kid of his own‡‡ . . . and more crucially, since a lot of my protagonists start out teenagers, he doesn’t go to high school.  Maggie goes to high school.  Yeep.  She takes algebra.  Double yeep.  With reference to my saying on these virtual pages some time recently that my hard sciences/maths phobia is probably largely due to very bad teaching . . . it’s probably taken me these forty-plus years also to come to a point where I can face going with a character back through the doors of an average suburban high school.  Well, maybe not quite average, but . . . ‡‡‡

            Meanwhile, speaking of hard science, I’m about to download§ James Gleick’s CHAOS.  www.Audible.co.uk, that ratbag, is having another 25% off sale for members so I was cruising for more tasty hard(ish) science.  As I’ve told you before I tend to avoid customer reviews of fiction—what ordinary readers want out of fiction is just too, um, various—but I usually do read reviews of nonfiction because there I am a very ordinary reader and may learn something from the same.  Not infrequently you see some aggrieved and outraged person saying, you’re going to have to buy the hard copy too!  You’re not going to be able to make sense of the maths from the audio!  Snork.  I wouldn’t frelling dream of trying to cope with any of this stuff without having the underlinable-paper copy also at hand.  Self-improvement is expensive.§§

            Having said that, I got out of step with BRIEFER HISTORY OF TIME and, having finished the audiobook a couple of days ago, the paper version finally fell through my door yesterday.  And . . . um . . . well, there are no equations§§§ but the illustrations make it worse.  Electron interference (p 98)?  Feynman diagram of Virtual Particle/Antiparticle Pair (p 123)?  What?  If I’d picked it up in a shop, instead of on Audible, I’d’ve put it down again.

            Meanwhile . . . Hannah is going to read CHAOS too.  We’re going to have a book club of two.  And if anyone had told me thirty years ago that Hannah and I were going to agree to read a book describing The Third Great 20^th Century Revolution in the Physical Sciences (after relativity and quantum mechanics) at all, let alone over the Christmas holidays for light distraction from the figgy pudding, I’d have probably made myself sick laughing.

            Menopause Brain Rules. 

* * *

 * I was distracted from the passage of time by reading UNDER MILKWOOD.  Haven’t read it since college, I think.  Golly.  I may have to blog about this.  I read Dylan Thomas in my teens, of course, As One Does, or at least As One Did if one fancied oneself a sensitive literary intellectual in the 1960s (adolescence, I believe, optional).  But . . . GOLLY.  Also WOW. 

** Over-identification with fictional characters?  What you say?

 *** You should forgive the term 

† Also being elderly, decrepit etc. 

†† Although there aren’t any dragons in SHADOWS.  I don’t think.  Er. 

††† And good luck to it:  parking is already an ordeal and a torment. 

‡ Which is generally considered to be a function limited to those in possession of brains 

‡‡ This is not my idea of a spoiler, but if it is any of yours, apologies.  

‡‡‡ It’s not as if all my teachers were dire.  I had a lovely algebra teacher—I’ve told you about her.  We left Japan, and the algebra teacher who told me I was the stupidest child she’d ever taught, mid-school-year, and when we got back to America two months later the principal at my new school laughed a lot and tried to put me back a grade.  I could cope with the catch-up everywhere but algebra—and they would have put me back a grade if it hadn’t been for Penelope Windsor Curry.  If you’re out there anywhere, and have taken to reading fantasy writers’ blogs in your retirement, thank you very much. 

§ I hope I’m about to download . . . insert a few practise screams of rage and frustration here.    

§§ And it’s not, it seems to me, as if they’ve got all the bugs out of the electronic delivery system yet either.  An iPhone is a finite entity.^  After I’ve listened to something I delete it, of course:  if I want to listen to it again I can always re-download it^^ from my Audible ‘library’.   But—as the little iPhone warning box tells you—if you delete it you will lose all your notes and bookmarks.  Gee.  Thanks guys.  That’s really foresightful programming. 

^ Speaking of finite, as in computer memory, I had an email from Raphael, Computer Archangel, on Friday, and he says what a good thing I went for the ridiculously huge hard drive, that he’d been doing the sums, and . . .

            I should have my new laptop next week. 

^^ . . . theoretically 

§§§ As I recall this was one of the red herrings about the previous one—there were no equations, how hard can it be?  Um. . . .