Not a Good Day
I nearly came off Connie this morning.
The dentist kept me waiting forty minutes. . . .
. . . And charged me twenty five hundred pounds for the privilege.
And when my jaw and I tottered out for the final hellhound walk around town, we were set on by a lab mix and a corgi, and Darkness ducked out of his harness and bolted. Which was very sensible of him really, as I was busy fending the lab mix off Chaos and the corgi, thanks to its minimal leggage, had arrived at the affray a bit late and gone for Darkness as more available.
Who says people who stay home all the time don’t have adventures?
I’m going to go through the day’s events backwards which is their order of troublingness.
Have I mentioned how much I hate other people’s off lead, out of control, vicious bullying bloody dogs??? In this case the twit who was evidently responsible for the brutes sat on her bicycle and, after they’d already attacked my dogs–they’d shot from clear the other side of the rec ground, right past her, she could hardly have failed to see what was coming–said vaguely, Here, Fudge, here Something-or-other [I missed the corgi’s name somehow]. I, rather mysteriously, didn’t panic–that would have come later–but that’s partly because I couldn’t defend two dogs from two dogs and Darkness getting loose did even the odds. I have this strange dislike of watching my hellhounds being bitten. And Darkness did not, fortunately, light out for Cornwall; he just ran away from the damned corgi, who really did rush up snapping and snarling and launched himself on Darkness. With the twit sitting on her bicycle watching. Words are not precisely failing me, but words suitable for an all-ages blog sure are.
The lab cross was rather elderly from the look of it*, and the corgi admirably unfit, so they both gave up pretty quickly. Fortunately. [insert exclamatory utterance] This left me with one outraged, leashed hellhound and one bemused, unleashed one, presenting himself in a series of breathtaking heraldic poses which I was very sorry there wasn’t someone with a camera there to immortalise, especially because someone there could have hunted the corgi down and killed it while I recaptured my hellhound. This was, just by the way, all happening at the edge of a busy street–and in the bloody street: everybody but Chaos and I (and the twit on the bicycle) were in the street for quite a lot of it. It’s sheer luck there weren’t any cars passing at the time: it was slightly after the getting-home-from-work rush, but as I say, this is a busy street. The second time I called him, Darkness came, quietly, and I admit I grabbed him (while telling him what a goooood boy he is, to the extent that Chaos had to wedge himself between us, which is what Chaos always does) just in case the corgi got its second wind and came after us again. I then had the interesting experience of trying to keep hold of him while unfastening his harness–it’s one of the kind that comes to pieces before you can put it on–and wrapping it back round him again. (Plus a wiggly, demanding armful of Chaos. Yes, I could have made him sit and behave, but we were all feeling a trifle traumatised.) And yes, his harness is loose–both of their harnesses are loose–it’s loose because if it’s tight, it gives him blisters. They have thin skin and not a great deal of fur, especially places like behind the elbows, where the harness runs, and the standard sighthound anatomy is not best suited for harnessing anyway.
I came home even totterier than I went out. I feel that Darkness has come round to stare at me a few more times than usual this evening, but he does come round and stare, so I may be imagining it.
I also hate my arrogant male genital of a dentist, which will also come as no surprise to long-time readers of this blog. He is such a . . . male genital. I’m there for a two and a half hour session with him and his drills, and we start off with him being forty minutes late. No warning. No explanation. Minimal, which is to say no, apology. After twenty minutes I said something to the receptionist who said, oh, he’ll be here in a minute. After half an hour I said something again, and she started to go upstairs and then stopped and said, oh, I’ll write to him. Does this suggest anything to you as it does to me about the way he treats his staff? So she sat down at her computer and sent him a message. Then she says to me, he’ll be right here. And then she left. Cute.
And when he finally showed up in the full flower of his smarmy arrogance and I said grimly, forty minutes, this is really not good, he got all shirty. He’s always right, you know. We’ve been here before. He’s apparently the best specialist I’m going to get short of trekking up to London again, which I can’t face anyway, and several-times-over so now with food-allergic hellhounds, but I’m damned if I’m going to put up QUIETLY with this jerk’s overweening conviction that the sun shines out his rear end and nobody’s life or schedule matters but his own. Specialist doctors are exactly the same. We should be weeping with gratitude that they are deigning to address our piffling little concerns. We should hell. I’m weeping, all right, but I’m weeping at the size of the cheque I had to write to escape out the front door again. And I get to go back in a month and have the work finished. Only this particular job, mind you. I have a lot more mouth to bleed copiously at the wallet from. ARRRRRSODDINGRRRRRRRRRGGGGHHH.
So. I can end with Connie whom I only almost came off of, and other than that it was a good lesson and a good time, which time with a nice horse always is, and how have I been living these last few years without one or some or something? I’ve been remaking the acquaintance of Jenny’s old retired jumper star, let’s call him Drambuie**, he’s rather that colour, who is a sweetie on the ground–I was official horse-holder at a few shows, years ago, when I was at Jenny’s yard the first time–but rather a handful on top of. From front on you’d know him at once as thoroughbred, he has the TB head and neck, or anyway you’d know that he had TB ancestors that had given him that face. From behind you’d think he had something heavier in him: the boy has bone. But he sticks his nose out and says hello, and he’s right beside the tack room, so saying hello to Drambuie is part of the Connie-riding experience. It’s just so nice to be around horses again. I’ve been saying for as many years as I’ve been without, that I miss horses, not so much the riding. The riding is good, but the horses are what is necessary. But it’s frequently not that easy, as any of you who long for horses and live in a city, or have no money, or no time, or tiny children and no one to hand them over to for a couple of afternoons a week, or whose only commutable-to barns are run by evil creeps who think horses are a kind of four legged car*** know. I really don’t mean to sound like I’m gloating–I really do not feel that I’m gloating. I’m just so amazed. And happy.†
It was SHEETING again this morning.†† So we had to use the indoor school. Jenny’d had the sprinklers on to lay the dust and sprinklers are erratic little beasts so there were inevitably a few slithery spots. The lesson went fine, allowances made for the fact that Connie does what you tell her and I don’t always tell her right–the best flying change we had was not one I’d asked for–and gods’ blood but all that lateral work requires all your feet and fingers and seatbones and ears and elbows and napes of necks and things to be doing something unique each unto themselves and all of them simultaneously and then Jenny says things like ‘think in terms of a few steps of shoulder-in for the transition from canter to trot’: this because Connie has a habit of doing a bit of a superfluous bounce there. YES. AND FOR MY NEXT TRICK I WILL HANG OFF THE SIDE OF THE SADDLE AT THE GALLOP, AND PICK UP ROPES LYING ON THE [note: watered, and dust-free] GROUND IN MY TEETH.
For our last manoeuvre we were doing a series of three twenty-metre circle loops as we cantered down the long side of the school. The ceiling of the school is way overhead–high enough to jump quite big fences under with feet to spare for claustrophobics–but the door is only slightly over person-on-horseback head height. So there’s a big gap between the top of it and the roof. Birds, especially pigeons, like to perch there. And Connie is, after all, half thoroughbred, and, as Jenny says, does want to remind us occasionally she’s not braindead. So as Connie and I came out of our last loop and cantered past the door, some idiot pigeon burst out at us. I was myself startled, and Connie did a tremendous shy and slipped on a wet spot. I came out of the saddle in several different directions simultaneously while Connie was trying to drag her feet back under her again. She succeeded. I didn’t fall off. I might very well have: it was more a case of the horse being under me when I came down again. One of Connie’s many virtues is that she wouldn’t dream of trying to get you off, of using something like a shy and a slip to drop the old shoulder and finish the job: I’ve only known her a few weeks and I already know this. ††† Anyway, having found our way back to our normal relations of course we had to do that canter circle a few more times. The first time around I was shamelessly holding onto her mane, and she did shy again, but only half-heartedly, and then we went round a couple more times and were actually getting it together as well or better as we’d done all lesson so it was pretty much worth it although not necessarily on the terms provided.
Meanwhile the news of Jenny’s new Project is that he’d stood around in his field thinking to some purpose all day yesterday because this morning he’d come out and dropped his nose and rounded his neck out rather than inside-out and let her take a little feel on the bit, let her steady him a little. She even cantered him–but she’s a brave woman. I’d've expected him to fall down going around one of the short ends, and no pigeon needed.
* * *
* Pity it still had so many of its teeth.
** Word hasn’t heard of Drambuie. It offers as alternatives: Drawbore, Dreamboat, Drumbeat and Dayboy. All with init cap, please note, although this appears in the middle of a sentence. Drawbore? I thought Dayboy was quite weird enough, although Word’s dictionary claims that it is a boarding school kid who goes home at night, which in my life would be called a day boy. But drawbore? Word’s dictionary doesn’t even have it. So called ‘research options’ still draw a blank. However: http://www.woodworkingtips.com/etips/etip09.html
There are just basic definitions in some of the free dictionaries, but in the first place the ads make my head hurt (more) and in the second place this is more fun.
*** Or a lot of other things that horses aren’t. Let’s not go there. The things that people do to horses in the name of this or that are beyond appalling.
† Because I didn’t come off. . . .
†† I’m going to put the link to those Camelot lyrics in ‘about’ on this blog. Maybe I’ll learn to sing it. Well, I can’t sing much worse than Richard Burton.
††† I said as much to Jenny and she was horrified–well, Jenny doesn’t do horror, but you know what I mean–at the mere thought. Connie is a very, very, very nice horse. I should stop with the raving about her: when I finally manage to post some photos she’s going to come as rather a shock. She has a nice face and four nice straight legs, but she’s very short-coupled and has rather a grass belly on her, and she’s just going to look like a horse to you, not the saintly equine embodiment of an over-imaginative middle-aged woman’s prayer. All of her virtues are the quiet, amenable kind, which dazzle only more or less invisibly in the riding, and none of them are going to photograph; she’s got none of the charismatic flash of someone like Drambuie.
Life Enhancing Activities
I need fewer.
And don’t anyone say to me, for example, fencing*, knitting**, drawing*** or studying French†, all of which I’ve done and then let slip through my buttery fingers.
But I don’t want to give anything up! No, no, no, that is not the answer!
Maybe I should start keeping a list. Okay, today I . . . shot out of bed at 8 to hustle hellhounds out for their morning walk before I met Vicky on the top of the bell tower, her to take St George’s flag down†† and me to take advantage of her going up on the roof to take photos. Yes! Photos! Stay tuned! Then I ran home again to change into britches and hare off to my riding lesson, a day early this week because Jenny is playing a tennis tournament tomorrow. The riding lesson itself is only half an hour††† and Jenny’s yard is about five minutes away. Tell me why Connie always takes at least an hour and a half?‡
I had maybe two hours at my desk, one doing boring stuff and one doing homeopathy, and then I came down to the mews for lunch, bringing the paperback proofs of DRAGONHAVEN with me . . . and promptly spent an hour trying to figure out the best fingering for Song II . . . and I’m not even finished! I’m also still dubbing around with the introduction! Oisin, drat him, suggested that the ‘drumming’ chords would be better two-note rather than three-note, but that gives an entirely different rhythm (duh) and I keep changing my mind about how to fit it back into the rest.
Then I read far too few pages of proofs.
Then I went up to Third House, where, yaaaaaaay!, either Garden Man had finally been there or the elves had, and the great swathe of the long border‡‡ that was a malevolent jungle of ground elder and bindweed is all magically clear and beautiful.‡‡‡ So I whomped in three delphiniums which were exceedingly unhappy in their pots, despite the fact I had potted them on not that many weeks ago, waiting for Garden Man to get to me and Third House on his list.
At which point I had spent more than enough time in the healthy invigorating outdoors§ and I could barely totter after hellhounds for their final walk, although they, having spent my delphinium-planting time playing Tyrannosaurus Rex vs Godzilla, were uncharacteristically willing to totter with me.
Then I went back to the cottage and watered a lot of pots.§§
Then I came back down to the mews for supper, and I seem to be blogging. Now I am going to read proofs.
Although I bet you I go play the piano some more. . . .
* * *
* There’s a sign I drive by at least once a week that says Southern Fencing. I’ve lived in this area for eighteen years and I still, fractionally, startle, every time I see it, while my mind leaps delightedly to the wrong conclusion. Thank the gods it’s the wrong conclusion. See: I need fewer.
** I so get the yarn thing. I so get the yarn thing I don’t dare read, for example, http://www.yarnharlot.ca/blog/
http://www.yarnharlot.ca/blog/archives/2004/06/02/feet_treat.html
http://www.yarnharlot.ca/blog/archives/2007/08/01/kauni_questions.html (Note: eeeeek.)
http://www.yarnharlot.ca/blog/archives/2007/06/23/practically_a_cedar_closet.html
because there are all these photos and she writes so well and it’s about knitting. When I was first musing (if you call banging your head against a wall and screaming ‘musing’) on the possibility of starting a blog a knitting friend recommended yarnharlot as a really good example of what can be done with a blog, and it is. It’s just . . . knitting. If I had a second pair of hands I could knit while I blogged, but . . . hmm . . . Ah ha! The Moment for Voice Recognition Software! –Snork!
And even our own jmeadows is dangerous:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/69585952@N00/1436364422/in/set-72157603342951724/
(I have a pink thing)
http://jodimeadows.com/yarn_wordpress/
She has a yarn blog for pity’s sake. How . . . uh . . . committed is that.
Scroll down and look at her spindle. Oh gods! It’s not just knitting! You have to spin too! Now I want a spindle! It’s so pretty! I just barely learnt to use a drop spindle when I was writing SPINDLE’S END, to find out what you did with your hands, how it felt. What I thought I was going to use this for fell out of the finished book of course–almost all my so-called research always does, book after book, like all the bee reading I did for CHALICE. It’s all gone. Feh.
And speaking of thready handwork, I also used to embroider. I believe my first project may have been ‘Burt Lancaster’ in purple satin stitch on a pillow case. (I think I only did one. Memory, perhaps mercifully, fails to record what I did with its pair.) I was, uh, thirteen maybe? Everybody else I knew was mad for the Beatles. Ah well. But I have lately somehow managed to get on the mailing list of these people:
http://www.ehrmantapestry.com/
http://www.ehrmantapestry.com/detail.cfm?ID=933
Want! Want want want want want want!
http://www.ehrmantapestry.com/detail.cfm?ID=451
http://www.ehrmantapestry.com/detail.cfm?ID=156
These are even on sale!
(Oh . . . ratbags. I’ve just been trying these links, and they’re a little hinky. Once you’ve chosen your monetary unit you should be able to click through. Or the home page opens okay, if you’re interested, and the other three, if they don’t open for you directly, are Rosa Gallica, Illuminated Manuscript, and Renaissance Heart.)
*** I always thought it would be drawing I got back to, not music! I can’t sing, I can’t play the piano, and until about six months ago I was in happy ignorance of the fact that I would love composing, if I ever tried it! Also, drawing is quiet! I don’t have to worry about annoying the neighbours! And I can draw a little! Well, maybe sort of!
† I took years of French in school. Years and years. I started in junior high, laboured with it through high school, and took it as my foreign language distribution requirement in college. And I still cannot write, speak, or read it, although I can read it a little. I am embarrassed to be one of those ugly, up my own wazoo Americans who can only speak English because English is the only language anyone needs to bother with, and I also hate waste: all those classroom hours! All that hideous homework! I had to write papers in French! Once when Peter and I were in Paris, quite a few years ago, I bought four or half a dozen children’s books that I knew really really well–THE BLACK STALLION and A LITTLE PRINCESS among them–and settled grimly down back home with my French dictionary, to read them, which still seems to me a rather sensible way to go about it. . . . Um. I think I made them Go Away when we moved out of the old house. They may be lurking horribly in the attic of Third House, waiting to pounce. One of the ways I managed to bond with Jake, writing DRAGONHAVEN, is that neither of us is good at languages.
†† There’s a whole complex church calendar of when you fly whatever, mostly St George
††† A very intense half hour
‡ Have I told you that someone wants to buy Horse-for-sale? His vetting was last week. No it wasn’t. He came in from the field lame, and Jenny scowled at his feet and decided that one of his shoes had slipped. Ah, thoroughbred feet. So delightful. Show me a thoroughbred with good, big, sound, regular feet, and I’ll show you a crossbred. So the farrier came, Jenny put off the vetting, he has been perfectly square and sound the last several days, the buyer rang up and said the vetting was rescheduled for Thursday, and he promptly came in from the field a little ‘ouchy’ again. And there’s no nonsense about Jenny: if he fails he fails, and if he passes and then goes lame a fortnight later, she’ll take him back. I think she’s about to have a nice school horse. Heh heh heh heh heh. Because he’ll stay absolutely sound the minute he knows he’s not for sale.
‡‡ I have a Long Border too, just like the Royal Horticultural Society’s flagship garden, or Sissinghurst, or Great Dixter, or Famous Garden of Choice. Long is relative.
‡‡‡ Although it will be again, because you can’t get rid of either merely by digging. You can beat them back a little is all. And the situation is complicated by the fact that they’re both coming through in vast Gordian knots under the fence from next door’s garden. I took another bucketful of evil twisty roots out just in the process of digging three holes. The bindweed roots are especially evil: up near the surface they’re little wee things and break easily. A few inches down they turn into hawsers. And the hawsers will go on sending up bindweed till the sun goes nova.
§ How do farmers stand all that fresh air?
§§ It’s finally supposed to rain tomorrow night. We live in hope.
Water
It has not been one of my better days.
It began, as my days so often do, yesterday. Or very early this morning: 1:30, approximately, when I went to run a bath and discovered I had no water.
And that began about a fortnight ago now, when they started digging up the road east of here. But a fortnight ago they were still safely out of town, on the road to the next little village. But they immediately started jackhammering their way back toward us again, and they arrived last Friday, so all this week it has been a total fricking nightmare this end of town. I think I’ve done some ranting about the way people blithely park on the double yellow line* on our piece of the road, which is mostly residential. Our road is also narrower than it is once you reach the centre of town, which is to say our road is two lanes wide, full stop. The shoulders are the vertical banks previously referred to, which Wolfgang and I had to climb a few days ago to get out of the way of a rampaging SUV which thought I was trying to get away with something. I was, I was trying to turn up my little cul de sac from a single traffic lane, which is all we’ve got at the moment. Since extra-large vehicles–troop carriers, perhaps, or tanks, or ground helicopter transport, disguised as passenger cars and painted in this year’s fashion colours–commonly park, as I say, on our double yellow lines, I should be accustomed to negotiating the merciless turn in and out of my cul de sac** while unable to see a blind bit of what’s coming in either direction. But it’s a funny thing, I am not accustomed, and I object, and furthermore there’s been increasing amounts of Large Paraphernalia hither and thither in both directions occupying even more space than the (lengthening) stretch they’re digging up, which means the extent of the single lane is stretching and stretching too, and the whole situation is too migraineworthy for words. Especially the prospect of their coming back again next week, which, since they’ve left all their toys behind, obviously they are going to.
Yesterday I was blazing back to the cottage to drop hellhounds off on my way to my piano lesson . . . and discovered I had no water. I ambled gently and nonchalantly down to the foot of my street and observed that some of the bozos in current occupation were wearing Southern Water logos so I attack–I mean I addressed one politely and he said oh, yeah, they’d turned it off, they’d turn it back on again in a little while.*** I didn’t have time to stay and chat† so I accepted this and shot off for my piano lesson.†† Friday afternoons are always a blur, and Peter was not playing bridge, so I went down to the mews after bell ringing practise. So I didn’t get home till . . . when I usually get home. And shortly thereafter discovered I had no water.
There were words. Hellhounds opened their eyes to check it had nothing to do with them.††† I found an old water bill and phoned the effing 24-hour emergency service and spoke to a surprisingly alert-sounding woman who did not deny that Southern Water had been mucking about on my street but said mildly that there were no reported problems. There are now, I replied. She promised to send someone round at 9 o’clock which I accepted gracefully, but it didn’t do a lot for my bath.
I didn’t sleep very well last night, for some reason. Something about the adrenaline spike getting stuck, perhaps.
But the water engineer was here at 9:05 and promptly went down in a sea of hellhounds. Fighting his way to the surface again he asked where the stopcock was, a question that had already exercised me somewhat, especially after the surprisingly alert woman had suggested I turn it off and on again to dislodge anything that was blocking my pipe, and I couldn’t find it. He eventually did, but had to take everything out of my under-sink cupboard first‡, where it was discovered in the farthest diagonal rear corner, and furthermore down a hole, where he couldn’t get his spanner‡‡ in the beggar.
Time passed. Only the hellhounds were happy.
I’m not sure how he finally mastered the thing. A small, trained, obedient goblin, perhaps. But at least I have water. Although given the amount of crud still coming through, I’m going to emerge from my bath tonight cinnamon-coloured‡‡‡ and I have no idea when I’ll be able to wash the white sheets from Wednesday Friend’s bed. Obviously if I weren’t a lazy slut I’d've done it already.
And that was only the beginning. But I want to go to bed now and read more of The Graveyard Book. And try not to get blood on anything.
* * *
* Ie, no parking
** Which is itself barely one lane wide, with brick-and-flint walls bordering both sides, in the uncompromising and inelastic way of brick and flint. Delivery trucks get stuck up here occasionally, which is always exciting.
*** Just as a matter of carefree curiosity what happens to, say, your washing machine, if it’s running and the water is suddenly turned off? Does it burn any of its bits out or anything?
† Nor did I have time to do running mad with an axe properly. Starting with the fact that I only have a hatchet for breaking up kindling.^
^ Hmm. Maybe I’ll get an axe for Third House, where there’s space for a woodpile, and room to swing an axe. And then it would be available for situations like these.
†† Where my cunning plan to play Name That Tune, my arrangement being rather successful, was slightly foiled by Oisin’s never having heard of Gypsy Rover. Gods, the man has such effing refined taste. He probably doesn’t even know who Led Zeppelin is. Or Peter, Paul and Mary. The only folk songs he knows are ones that Benjamin Effing Britten set. And he got them from Beethoven. Or possibly Haydn. Feh.
††† Or wasn’t the start of a promising new game. The auditory cues were inhibiting but the leaping around was hopeful.
‡ You don’t want to know. But he seems to think I hoard plastic bags. But he liked the hellhounds, so I forgive him calumnies on my personal habits.
‡‡ wrench
‡‡‡ Hey! Great! I can never get a tan!
Ewwwwwwww
I had a bad night last night, worrying about driving my little collection of billets doux to the lab this morning. My vet, who also suffers from Doing Too Much Syndrome*, hadn’t sent me the directions, as he was supposed to, so I was going to be forked into Monday morning not having had a chance to accustom myself gently to the prospective adventure. I have never been to the town in question, it’s better than an hour from here on the south of England’s hell-and-damnation road**, and I’m one of those people with a negative sense of direction: guessing which way when I’m lost, I’m always more than fifty per cent wrong.***
Oh gods. Oh help. Oh dear.
And it was going to be hot. † I don’t like driving and I don’t like heat, and I especially don’t like performing the one in the presence of the other. Also I was developing that weird ME headache that says ‘your body, mind and will are about to be riven asunder to a greater or lesser degree for an arbitrary period of time, have fun’ which was not the best prospect for what-counts-in-my-life-as long distance driving. So I sprang lightly out of bed (crunch, thud), threw on the bare minimum of clothing appropriate to the meteorological circumstances, bundled hellhounds into the car††, and a certain styrofoam cool box into the boot†††, and at 8:30 am set out for my vet’s clinic. Before he’d come up with this clever plan about my driving the radioactive core to the lab myself, I was going to get it to him Monday morning, and he’d courier it on. He’s only about forty minutes from me, as well as being somewhere I can find.‡
And I did find it, despite a certain amount of input from the ME, and the weather. And Mark’s assistant and I were cheerfully labelling plastic bags when Mark reappeared from ringing the courier and said, no, no, it all has to come out of the bags and be put into pots, two pots, one per dog. I know he’d said jam jars, but I didn’t realise these were actual instructions. I didn’t have any jam jars I felt like losing forever. I stood there rigid with horror and Mark told his poor assistant to take the bags upstairs, open all the windows, and . . .
And I, like the candy-ass poltroon that I am, turned and fled. But I also sent her flowers the minute we got home.
* * *
* Who among us does not? Note, however, that he always returns clients’ phone calls. If you’re desperate, you ring his service, he rings back. Except he goes on holidays, the ratbag. What is this with holidays? I don’t take holidays, I don’t see why anyone else needs to. Especially long ones. The occasional three or four day weekend I would allow. He’s going to be gone two weeks. I could have run away and joined the circus by then.
** You can’t go east-west. You can only go north-south. Maine was like this. It’s one of the things I’m not nostalgic for. Although, of course, I don’t have to be, because it’s here too.
*** This is what I mean, but for mathematicians and purists, okay, I’m wrong more often than fifty percent of the time.
† True. It was hot today. The mercury in the big thermometer on my garden wall was beating its tiny fists against the top of the glass, crying, Let me out! Let me out!, except for the fact that this is a boring modern thermometer and there is no mercury involved. It’s still pretty sultry now, although the ambient temperature feels a lot better after an hour and a half locked up in a bell tower with seven other people, no fans and a window that doesn’t open. Gah. This is the tower that only holds practise once a month and is kept going by us visitors. Only one local ever comes, and she wasn’t there tonight. Our ringing master is a fearless young woman who likes to ring fast so she does what she calls ‘pushing it along a bit’. However we rang Stedman twice and I got to ring treble for Cambridge^ so I’m happy^^. Hot, but happy.
^ Cambridge is usually the first of the ‘surprise’ methods anyone learns. At least around here. + Surprise is the really complicated stuff. ++ The first step toward surprise is learning to treble bob. As with ordinary methods the treble in surprise also has the simplest line, but simple is relative. And treble bobbing requires a lot of . . . well, bobbing, or dodging, so you’re yanking your bell around faster or slower nearly every stroke, as well as counting places+++ like mad so you know which yank to be giving it. And I don’t get a chance to do this very often.
+ Wild Robert has a fondness for Kent, but that’s because it’s easier to hold together when only two of the six of you know what they’re doing.
++ Opinions differ, I believe, about whether Stedman belongs in this category. It’s not surprise, but it’s certainly complicated. One of these days I’m going to write out Stedman and post it here for your edification and dismay, but Stedman, like surprise methods, has lots of jiggy bits.
+++ Ie your place in the method, which changes every stroke
^^ The ME, having made the afternoon a non-event, said, okay, okay, go bell ringing, we don’t care.
†† Yes, I took them along. (a) I keep them with me whenever I can, because that’s what dogs are for; (b) because I drive as little as I can get away with, and because I won’t leave them in the car, they don’t have a lot of experience in car rides that last more than ten minutes and some day when All of This Is Past and Done, I am going have the occasional overnight in other good footpath country, and take them^ with me; (c) I would walk them, speaking of walking, on the way back, somewhere new and strange. To make up for the walk we didn’t have on the first hat-buying expedition. -And we did this, including walking through this fantastically beautiful ex-mill that’s been turned into its own little private estate–barring the fact that it has a public footpath running through it–with old mellow brick and yellow thatch and roses on the wall and the peacock on the lawn. . . . Darkness saw it before I did. He was behaving strangely even for a hellhound, and I was trying to drag him along and it was like what people tell me trying to put a cat in a carrier is like: they suddenly have eight limbs, all with spikes on the ends of them, which sink into the ground and then expand at the tips, like the nails they use for wallboard. It’s amazing how immobile a fifty-pound hellhound can be when he concentrates. And then an enormous peacock stalked across the drive behind us and I saw it too. Conceive, if you will, the thoughts of a bird-mad hellhound on sight of his first peacock.
^ And my laptop
††† Note that it was, in fact, still cool. Modern technology, as well as a mile-deep well that exhales cold, are wonderful things. I’m trying to decide if I can reuse any of this stuff, however, despite the number of innocent plastic bags I sacrificed to my diabolical purpose. I guess I’ll keep the well.
‡ The first two appointments I had there, with the previous canine generation, I dragged Peter along to navigate. Also the map on the clinic’s flyer bears no resemblance to the actual roads and local geography, which seems to me a trifle unkind. Maybe it’s some kind of test.
Peter speaks
[NOTE: I have cleaned up the typos. Sue me.]
I’m off to the depths of Illinois on Wednesday, for five days, and R and I are already worrying ourselves silly over each other’s inability to look after themselves*.
(Where was I?) In Robin’s case this takes the form of things like worrying about my tiresome tendency to leave the fridge door open. I don’t see that I’m likely to have much chance to leave fridge doors open in an hotel and conference centre in Bloomington.** My worries are on the solider ground of her apparent inability to give a moment’s thought to where her next meal is coming from, or when she’s going to eat it. She eats what’s there, when she feels like it, so for five days at least she’ll be free from guilty feelings about having promised me she’ll be here for supper by eight and then glancing up from whatever she’s doing — squashing lily beetles by hand, *** writing her blog — though she mostly does that here so a stranger seeing us at supper might think we were Trappists† from the amount of marital chitchat over our meals - and seeing it’s now half-past nine. She compensates for her unwillingness to plan her meals by buying batches of absolute essentials, such as butter, whenever she sees them, without reference to what she may already have in the freezer. If she runs out of freezer space she buys another house so she can put the overflow into its freezer.†† When I first visited her in Maine she had enough steak in her freezer to feed a passing regiment.††† Admittedly she more than makes up for her refusal to eat all other forms of dairy by dolloping butter onto every thing she eats.‡ My grandmother (a tiny, slight trouble-stirrer who relied on her charm to get herself out of the chaos she’d stirred, but decided in her eighties that people might stop being nice to her if she went on like that and transformed herself almost overnight into a sweet old dear) used to be the same about sugar. I once saw her shake the sifter over all four courses of a meal (a silver sifter, of course, and a maid-servant to bring her the various courses, and a cook to prepare them) soup, peas‡‡, dessert, and cream cheese. She lived to be a hundred and four.
But I genuinely am worried about leaving her to deal with the hell-hounds, who are not only a serious physical strain but also an emotional one, with their digestive problems, for five whole days with no back-up. We’re both wishing I’d never said yes to the invitation, but I don’t think I can back out now. She needs your support, friends. Rally round. ‡‡‡
* * *
*Let’s have no nonsense about this. The number-indeterminate “they” is correct in British English, sanctioned by centuries of usage among the best authors. The OED cites an egregious example from Lord Chesterfield. The contrary belief, rife among US sub-editors, arises from waves of immigration into the States by people who came from countries where there were strict grammatical rules, and demanded that English should be taught accordingly. A propos (at least vaguely) are the attempts to agglutinate the language, rife this time among military spokesmen, on the lines of German. I wrote a poem about this umpteen years ago:
“CORRESPONDING DE-ESCALATION”
Come, let us meditate upon
The language of the Pentagon.
It lacks both elegance and ease.
Its name, of course, is Pentaguese.
Each general, or pentagogue,
Lives in so strange a verbal fog
Only the trained pentologist
Can hope to penetrate the mist
And tell how near is the abysm,
The dreadful, final pentaclysm.
The optimists, pentiloquent,
Measure in pent and kilopent
How great a power for good such might is.
Maybe they’re suffering from pentitis.
The timid fear for hearth and home.
To them the world’s a pentadrome
Where our sole safety seems to be
Emergency pentectomy.
And who is right? We have seen plenty
Of foolish, costly pentimenti,
But human instinct still insists
That on the whole pentagonists
Mean well. So what is crazier
Than smothering in pentaphasia
Their honest purpose and intent?
Perhaps in time they will repent.
(If you have views about Vietnam
Send LBJ a pentagram.)
* * *
** Nonsense. You’ll have one of those tiny useless under-the-dressing-table refrigerators which will be full of warm wine and chilly peanuts. If you feel lonesome, you can leave it open and pretend I’m shouting at you.
*** I was just doing this today, up at Third House, where I have all my lilies sequestered and segregated, to make this revolting job easier. It’s still revolting. I will never buy another lily, but I can’t bring myself to murder the ones I’ve got. They’re so pretty. We didn’t have lily beetle at the old house for some reason, so this has all been a hideous new town-life shock.
† I’ve just spent some time wandering around the Catholic Answers Forum^ and apparently nobody takes what us hoi polloi think (nervously) of as a vow of silence, including the Trappists. But the Carthusians and the Benedictines are also seriously down on chat.
^ You google ‘vow of silence monks’ and all you get are cartoons.
†† VERY GOSHFLIPPINGDARN FUNNY
††† I have no memory of this. I’m sure he’s exaggerating.^
^ And he obviously wasn’t there right after one of my trips to New York to buy bagels at H&H on upper Broadway.
‡ One must compensate for intolerable deprivation
‡‡ But not the steak with the peas. I asked.
‡‡‡ I’ll be all right. I’ll be looking forward to the NICE PRESENT he brings back for me. Surely there must be suitable shopping opportunities in Bloomington. Jewellery is good. Small, light, easily transportable and always appropriate.
It interests me, just by the way, that he neglects to tell you what he’s going there for. He won the Phoenix Prize (again, I might add) for EVA.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoenix_Award
And . . . sigh . . . if it weren’t for the hellhounds’ digestion, I’d've gone with him, to check he keeps the fridge door closed. I have friends near Bloomington. We could have hung out while Peter does con things. However I’ve already obtained permission to post his speech here when he gets home.