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Gloom
I have (mild) stomach flu. (I think it’s stomach flu.)
I definitely have ME. In the ‘hello darkness my old friend/ I’ve come to talk with you again’ sense.* Glurb. Unggh.** It comes back with knobs and brass knuckles on whenever there’s anything else wrong with me.
And Blondel has left forever. Well, Thursday. He’s leaving forever. On Thursday. His house is full of large bulging cardboard boxes covered in heavy plastic tape. And his mum. I was thinking about hurling myself at his feet and weeping into his shoes, but not after I saw his mum. I wouldn’t want to embarrass him or anything. Under more ordinary circumstances I would have cut my voice lesson today since I can barely breathe let alone make an attempt at that wrestling-with-several-alligators business of organising your disorganised body to produce pleasant melodic noises. But today was THE LAST. LAST, LAST, LAST.
Waaaaaaaaah.
There are, furthermore, supernumerary reasons why this is a Personal Disaster of Epic Proportions. In the first place, I’ve already created the cherub, Blondel’s nearly frelling underage replacement***, in my mind as humourless, demanding and mean.† In the second place . . . Blondel is married, so the cathedral gave him a house. The only person whose life I’ve made a misery in a year of Tuesdays is the neighbour on Blondel’s music room’s side of his terraced house who has a strange compulsion to hang around in his garden in the afternoon. Well, Tuesday afternoon anyway. The cherub is not married, so he’s going into shared accommodation . . . and he’s going to be sharing with not merely another cathedral singer with similarly erratic hours, but a cathedral singer with similarly erratic hours whose mostly-live-in girlfriend is a soprano of some national standing. AAAAAAAUGH. Okay, so, fine, he’s not going to be teaching at home. Where is he going to be teaching?†† One of the cathedral’s rehearsal rooms? (Which I know from Blondel exist and are available.) AAAAAAAAAAAAUGH. I’d be hyperventilating if I had the energy.†††
Blondel did sing for me today: some of Schubert’s Winterreisse, which was divine, and Whither must I Wander? from Ralph Vaughan Williams’ Songs of Travel, which would have made me weak in the knees if I hadn’t already been lying more or less full-length on the chair in his music room (good job they hadn’t packed that yet). I’d bought Songs of Travel for me a while back, when I was starting to get into the (ahem!) baritone repertoire—when I was having such a good time [sic] with Finzi’s Garland. I’d brought it along today to ask Blondel if I might try having a bash at something while I waited for the cherub to arrive—he doesn’t, till September—and he suggested The Vagabond (right answer) and Whither (also an excellent answer) and then stood there staring at the latter a few seconds and said, I’ll sing it, and scampered back to the piano. Golly. I admit that singing some of this stuff that I know quite so well on CD is kind of a mixed, uh, curse, because even if you don’t know what you really sound like you do know you don’t sound anything like Bryn Terfel. I know Bryn Terfel singing Finzi’s Garland and Vaughan Williams’ Songs of Travel as well as I know the first page of THE FELLOWSHIP OF THE RING.‡ Bryn is a hard act to follow. Blondel can do it. And he’s going away forever.
I think I need to go lie down now and draw some comforting hellhounds up to my chin.
* * *
* I am so old I remember when that song came out.
** You can imagine Paul Simon standing on my flimsy, supine body at this point, wearing big black Doc Martens and looking threatening. Okay, maybe it better be Simon and Garfunkel. Neither of them is really large and threatening-looking enough to sub for the ME Monster. The ME Monster also has extra limbs and a migraine-inducing red shift. And it drools.
Actually as I think about it it looks a lot like this: http://www.goodshowsir.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/Continuum-2.jpg
(Thank you, Jodi Meadows, for the inestimable favour of directing me to http://www.goodshowsir.co.uk/ )
*** It’s been bad enough taking voice lessons from someone who isn’t thirty yet. The cherub is barely into his twenties. And according to Blondel he’s very talented—well, likely he is, or he wouldn’t have got the job. But the thought does loom that very talented young people tend to be rotten teachers because they haven’t got a clue what to do with the untalented, let alone the old.
† Because I’m a twit. Next question.
†† The one thing we do know is that he is actively seeking to take on Blondel’s betrayed and abandoned students. This might be a good sign, except it probably just means he’s broke. He probably has student loans to pay off.
††† It did occur to me, as I crept along in the slow lane of the bypass to Mauncester—ordinarily I’m a hot smokin’ fast lane pedal to the metal driver—that as the frelling years pass, I don’t know if the edges of the ME get blunted or whether I’m just learning focus. But driving a car is one of my measuring sticks for how bad the ME is. I don’t drive much any more—to Papua New Guinea to look at a garden is about the limit, even on good days—but there have been many days when getting behind the wheel of a car was not an option. I don’t have those much any more. It never occurred to me today that I was going to have to cancel: only that I was going to have to allow a little more journey time, because I was going to be in the slow lane, and focussing.
‡ ‘When Mr Bilbo Baggins of Bag End announced that he would shortly be celebrating his eleventy-first birthday with a party of special magnificence, there was much talk and excitement in Hobbiton.
‘Bilbo was very rich and very peculiar . . .’
Life with the Apocalypse
The problem with going to bed with a small pink hellhound* is that you lay her down on her shelf next to your glasses, you turn the light off, you roll over and snuggle down in your pillows, and all in the same motion you continue rolling till you’re facing the frelling shelf again and utterly without motive force or direction your hand reaches out, plucks her small pinkness neatly out from under your glasses and—because by this time your other arm is free too—you flick the nice pink case open and push the slider over and . . . you’re in business. All while your Higher Self and your Superego are yelling, No! No! No! No! It’s already past mmph o’clock because you were reading in the bath again and you have to get up tomorrow** before Niall and Colin show up for handbells*** because you have a novel to write!† Meanwhile my Lower Self and my Underego are arguing about whether we’re going to play a game or cruise the web†† . . . The situation is aggravated by the fact that not only is Apocalypse’s††† screen beautifully lit, of course, but most of the default settings of itty-itty-bitty are more easily read without glasses than with. I’m already blowing up enemy aliens‡ before my responsible adult synapses have had a chance to marshal their arguments. Have you noticed the way your flighty, impetuous side keeps the response times of a six-year-old while the sober, conscientious side that earns your living and puts chicken in the mouths of your hellhounds gets all elderly and creaky as the years pass?‡‡
The iPhone. Whose idea was an iPhone? Okay, where do I start? With Raphael and Gabriel. My own Computer Men.‡‡‡ I’m going to have to downgrade them to demons again.§ It all really began several months ago with that half hour on Raphael’s mere paltry iPhone3 and Angry Birds.§§ And while I didn’t get around to buying my own Angry Birds till after not only Fingerzilla but the Chambers Dictionary and Thesaurus and the Oxford Medical Dictionary, I nonetheless did buy it§§§. And I sailed through the first four or five levels of the first set and then started . . . slowing . . . down, because the truth is I’m an old retro fogey and all this hand-eye coordination stuff is kind of beyond me. I stuck on level ten for about three days, and then last night, HURRAH!, I did it! I flattened the sucker! Pigs and timbers everywhere! Yaaaay! . . .
And I still got level failed!! What do you mean, level failed, you . . . contraption? FAILED? If that was a failure, I’m a . . . well, angry robin is perhaps a phrase that oozes to mind. . . . So, having scorned Raphael’s suggestion a few days ago that I CHEAT and google angry birds walkthroughs, tonight, when I find myself mysteriously clutching Apocalypse after I’ve turned the light out and taken my glasses off, I’m going to zap on google and . . .
* * *
* Aside from making the original hellhounds JEALOUS, but fortunately they don’t recognise Apocalypse as a member of their clan. They haven’t heard her bark yet however.
** Er—today
*** At 5 pm. Ha ha ha ha ha ha. Wait a minute, aren’t authors supposed to keep strange hours? Raphael rang me at nine thirty yesterday morning. Nine thirty! What does he think I am, a butcher, a baker of cinnamon rolls As Big As Your Head, a candlestick maker? No, but I am a bell ringer, and I have considered just staying up through service ring on Sunday morning and going to bed after. But that would make Sundays when we ring again in the afternoon somewhat challenging. And it would probably confuse the hellhounds.
† And hellhounds to hurtle. I’m trying to decide which would shorten my life faster: ignoring hellhounds or ignoring Story in Progress. There would probably be a tiny inverse pop^ and hellhounds, SinP and I would all disappear, and a microscopic sucking void would materialise, if materialise is quite the word I mean . . . and it would all become very Lovecraftian, or possibly Ripley’s Believe It or Not.^^
^ Sort of a . . . opo
^^ Did anyone else have the crap scared out of them by Ripley’s, passed around the playground at recess or the park after school? When I was a kid they were both in the Sunday papers and in horrible cheesy nightmare-inducing paperback books. When you’re nine years old your grasp of what constitutes ‘scientific method’ and/or ‘reliable witness’ may be a little wobbly. Fairy tales already gave me the whimwhams because they contributed too much range and detail to the things you knew lived under the bed and in the closet+, but at least you could tell yourself they were fiction.++ But Ripley’s was science fact!! It said so! And Ripley’s monsters were notoriously resistant to the standard repertoire of garlic, silver, buckets of water, etc. People disappeared a lot in Ripley’s too.
+ It occurs to me this may be where my habit of keeping the spaces under furniture tightly wedged with All Stars and boxes of books originated. Monsters, like the rest of us, prefer to be comfortable. Any sensible monster would look elsewhere than under any of my furniture. And I’ve already told you about the lack of closets in English houses.
++ Even if the best ones were hundreds or thousands of years old, and retold and retold and retold all that time, and where there’s smoke there’s fire. And yes, when I was nine, I still believed in monsters. I’d wised up to Santa Claus when I was four, and I never did believe in the tooth fairy, although money is always good. But monsters: I totally believed in monsters. Sigh. Life is not fair.
†† Or check frelling Twitter. Why did I load Twitter? GEEZUM. I can spend hours clicking through to other accounts, seeing who other people are following, checking out their web sites, reading excerpts, reading blogs, lengthening my wish lists for the next time I just happen to be on a book-selling site, and generally wasting time—while feeling as if I’m expanding my professional knowledge and savoir faire. It’s totally the 140-character limit that makes it so dangerous. You can skim forever, and . . .
††† AKA Pooka. Sometimes screaming APOCALYPSE, while it has an excellent way of clearing the road before you of superfluous dweebs bumbling about their unnecessary business, is just too many syllables. http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/pooka http://www.irelandseye.com/paddy3/preview2.htm , http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Pooka
I prefer the benign but mischievous version myself, and something that might at any moment turn itself into a prancing steed of course is very popular with me.
‡ Earth Defender. Not really satisfactory. I bought it because the customer reviews all said it was too easy, and I thought, Great! That’s for me! Unfortunately it is too easy. And if I just want to blow stuff up, well, Fingerzilla is my shining paragon. Although . . . I think I posted here that I’d bought an add-on that was going to give me six new levels and new stuff to blow up. So last night—having tortured myself for a couple of abstemious days with pleasurable anticipation—I barged (Roar! Stomp! Crunch!) through the (apparent) hooking up of the six new levels, with various headlines witnessing my success appearing between games and urging me on to ever greater feats of destruction and depravity and . . . I got to the end, was congratulated for being a monster of monsters^ and . . . nothing has changed. No new stuff to blow up. No new cities. It’s enough to make a genocidal leviathan cry. I suppose I will have to email the proprietors and ask them what they’re doing with my 59p.
^ Ripley’s hasn’t contacted me yet. I can’t imagine why.
‡‡ Wasn’t I just saying something about unfair?
‡‡‡ It’s not like I bought her from them! Noooooo! They ensorcelled me from pure disinterested wickedness!
I am proud to say that I am passing the contagion on however. Fiona showed up this week with her apocalypse, I mean iPhone4, named Tilly, for PesTILential Device. Fiona, however, says she had to give up Fingerzilla because it was giving her repetitive strain injury. Oops.
What she needs is to take up bell ringing to strengthen her hands.
§ Exposing an innocent to the iTunes store alone is worth a Dantean circle or two. GAAH.
§§ http://www.rovio.com/index.php?page=angry-birds
§§§ Also the Screetch, Earth Defend, Plants vs. Zombies, and Osmos. If you’re counting.
)](**&^%$£”+={:@?#}[!!!!!!!!!!
And I was in such a good mood when I got up this morning.* I was going to get my iPhone set up today! Tra la! Traloo tralay! Happy happy happy!
GAAAAAH.
The first thing that went wrong was that I was sitting at the cottage reading back issues of The Ringing World surrounded by one cool pristine virgin iPhone4 and various pieces of sulky middle-aged malfunctioning technology while Gabriel was down at the mews wondering where I was.** Once he was installed at the cottage*** however the havoc fairies exploded out of the walls and got to work.
I don’t think I can bear to go through it all again point by point, even supposing I could remember the order of events, which I probably can’t, having burst quite a number of blood vessels over the course of the day†. The short form is:
At present I have no working mobile phone. You may remember that my sudden, slippery descent into the 21st century began with needing a RELIABLE mobile phone which would be turned on 24/7 and never leave my side††, because I’ve been feeling seriously freaky about Peter since he was so ill in the spring, and his mobile is now loaded to speed dial both the cottage and my mobile.††† Furthermore he came off his bicycle yesterday and has been limping around today complaining about his knee, and I’m having what-if visions of it suddenly giving out on him while he’s coming downstairs and . . . and I’m really looking forward to his saying to me disgustedly tomorrow, having read the blog: I’m fine. I have never been close to falling downstairs. I’m fine. ‡
The SIM card from the RaspBerry‡‡, with my old phone number, transferred beautifully under Gabriel’s masterful handling. There’s just one little problem: no signal. No. Signal. Yes, okay, this is an iPhone4, the one noted for signal problems—but there’s no signal when it’s lying on the desk, either, with no hot sweaty human in any kind of contact—except the steely-gaze kind of contact. The steely-work-you-freller-gaze kind. Now, New Arcadia is the Bermuda Triangle of southern England, but that’s why Orange: Orange works around here. Usually. And I’ve never failed to get a signal on the RaspBerry. It may take some waving and swearing, but eventually the little bars appear, like small goblin teeth, and I’m on. Oh, and have I mentioned that the iPhone4 case hasn’t arrived? The case which, according to both Apple and the sellers of iPhone4 cases, will solve the signal problem. Five working days, the case-selling web site said. That would be today. Nope. No case. I went out and fossicked around behind the water butt, where things get left‡‡‡, to make sure there wasn’t a small iPhone case sized package hiding among the half-used bags of compost, but no. Still no.
Gabriel talked to Orange while I got on with the new holes in the walls and the screaming. Gabriel eventually went away, stooped and careworn, with promises to return tomorrow with fresh artillery and Raphael in a vibrant new set of shining armour.
Meanwhile . . . no phone. No phone. And, obviously, no internet. No lovely fascinating iPhone cruising—the poor RaspBerry is hopeless about the web—no binging and biffing from hither to yon on my shiny black cutting-edge tech. No.§
The one thing that has worked is . . . setting up my account with the iPhone store. The thing may not work but it can still be a time-waster§§ and money-sink.
I got to level six of Fingerzilla in about an hour. I’m not sure how many levels there are, but I was feeling a trifle motivated by the shrieks of the dying. You do want to get to level six, however, because that’s when you get to start crushing San Francisco’s Victorian houses§§§ which offers a nice change from factories and glass skyscrapers. I spent a good deal of the afternoon honing my technique# while various iPhone aps downloaded incredibly slowly: the Chambers English Dictionary took thirty-five minutes, for pity’s sake. And slowed my computer down to early-Amstrad speed.
Somebody, please, tell me this wasn’t a horrible, gruesomely expensive mistake. . . .
* * *
* It was even raining! Yaaaay! I don’t have to do any watering! More time to play with my iPhone! Hellhounds, of course, not having any deep interest in the iPhone, failed to share my enthusiasm for the weather.
**However he contrived to give Peter’s spam filter a boot up the backside, so time was not wasted. Yet. At this point.
*** Having run an extremely thorough gauntlet of hellhounds. Gabriel’s problem is that he likes them and encouraging them only makes them clone at a terrifying rate. Twenty-four hammering tails! Thirty-six cold wet rootling noses! One thousand six hundred and forty-eight gambolling limbs!^ A mere archangel hasn’t a chance against them!
^ Reminds me a little of something that happens toward the end of a book called SPINDLE’S END
† Making new holes in the walls of a three-hundred-year-old cottage with your head is surprisingly difficult. Not to mention painful, but in a situation like this, you desire pain.
†† Except in the bath, or when I forget
††† Of course the one time I can remember receiving an important call on it, to wit, Cathy, to say she’d arrived and was en route to Hampshire, I hit the wrong button in a panic and hung up instead of answering. And I was even expecting the call. Very slightly in my defense, tangling with machinery was made somewhat complex at that moment, as I was several miles from civilisation, surrounded by sheep, and in the company of two hellhounds who were expressing their dissatisfaction with my attitude toward things that would run away if chased.
‡ Peter doesn’t really do emphatic the way I do emphatic.
‡‡ Somebody tell me why, when the RaspBerry lost the SIM card, it kept the contacts list but banished all the telephone numbers. I am not joking. I wanted to ring Gabriel about some damn thing or other after he’d left for the day^ and automatically reached for the RaspBerry. There Gabriel’s name was and . . . that’s all. Phone number is gone. Warily picked up iPhone and clicked on Gabriel. Yep. Phone number. Next thing that happens is that I discover all the email addresses have disappeared from my old paper Filofax. Don’t ever try to tell me that technology isn’t self-aware and isn’t out to get us. The Borg are so out there.
^ He can run away. Just like a sheep.
‡‡‡ By delivery persons who bother to read the instructions. I’m always glad to see another box left on my front stoop bearing in large letters the directive: leave beside house behind gate and water butt.
§ And does it have a fabulous, breathtakingly sharp and vivid screen, as you scroll through the icons of stuff you can’t use because you can’t get on the web? I don’t know. I haven’t noticed.
§§ There are some really astonishingly icky aps available out there.
§§§ My favourite newspaper headline—you get the headlines at the end of each game—is: Mayor Feared Eaten
# I’m still having trouble nailing those pesky helicopters.
Howling, various
Today has NOT been one of my better days. Let’s start over. It’s 3 am and I’m already asleep.
Blondel had a wedding in London to sing today and it had occurred to me after we’d already made our plan of a second voice lesson Thursday afternoon that, in my experience of weddings, he might be being a little optimistic about timing. So I had a plan for an alternate afternoon in Mauncester. What a pity I didn’t use it. It would have had to have been more successful than the one I lived through. Blondel was in fact a little late, but more to the point he arrived tired and ruffled—having managed to get lost finding his way back out of some London labyrinth*—so we ran a little later yet while he had a glass of water** and de-ruffled.***
And then . . . oh gods . . . the lesson itself was a disaster. Dido? Dido is spinning in her grave. And Janet Baker probably has an unimaginably ghastly stomachache of metaphysical, not to say necromantic, origin.† I was then so freaked out by the destruction I was wreaking that when Blondel suggested we try something else I couldn’t get through Fear No More. I can sing Fear No More.†† But not today. AAAAAAAUGH.†††
There were two brief moments when I wasn’t looking around for a sword to impale myself on. One of them was that Blondel has given me a goofy new exercise that I very nearly have to learn like a new song—but it’s amusing. Kind of a lot of your warm-up exercises are a snore, they’re just excercises for the purpose of waking your voice up and telling it has to work for a living.††† It’s not a big deal; I like scales. But this one’s fun.
The second not-nearly-long-enough moment was . . . Blondel sang Fear No More—upon request, and I suspect he only agreed because he too wanted to end the Hour That Should Not Have Been Born(e) on a better note than any of them thus far—so I’ve finally heard him sing. Ooooooh. My.‡ Maybe I should revert to the impaling scenario. Siiiiiiiigh.
It was now a good deal later than I realised. And I had handbells at 5 pm. Well, I was supposed to have handbells at 5 pm. I rang Penelope and asked her to please tell Niall I was going to be late. Half past latest, I said. But I was still in Mauncester at that point.‡‡ And you may have noticed the way they joyfully rip up the roads in high tourist season.‡‡‡ So by the time I got home I had written several sharp letters to the Hampshire County Council in my head and I was flatlining in both energy and morale—and I had to give poor sad patient hellhounds at least a token hurtle before I went off and left them again. But my presence for handbells wasn’t crucial, because Titus was coming—which was why it was at Niall’s house instead of my cottage, he of the big enough and relatively tidy sitting-room—so he and Colin and Titus could get on with minor (six bells: three people) while I sat down for five minutes and ate a nectarine. And I hadn’t looked at the bob major (eight bells: four people) enough anyway, so—especially after the voice lesson I’d just had—I wasn’t minding the idea of putting off the revelation of my handbell deficiencies a little longer still.
So it was more like 5:45 when I arrived . . . to find Niall and Titus sitting alone in silence. Because Colin was not there. Which I should have known, but I’d forgotten, and I hadn’t written it down. OH. GODS. And the only reason they didn’t kill me is because they’re British. Also, I suppose, because they still wanted to ring handbells. Which was what we were there for after all. Some of us sooner than others.
Handbells, once begun, were relatively successful. I’ve told you about Titus: he’s the one had the stroke fifteen or so years back and only has proper use of one hand—so he rings both bells in one hand, and I cannot BEGIN to tell you how confusing this is, not to mention the inevitability of rather a lot of rows that have seven or eight dings in them instead of the statutory six. But I stayed late enough that we could stop when Titus’ hand started getting tired, by which time people were even smiling at me again. Although Niall, who has no conscience whatsoever, while I was still in grovelling and whimpering mode, whipped out his diary with an evil gleam in his eye, and booked me in for handbells in Frellingham with one of his demon ringers on a Wednesday they haven’t got a third ringer. He’s been trying to get me to Frellingham for months, and I keep weaselling out of it, but this has got harder since I don’t have Wednesday Ditherington practise as a permanent shield and defense any more. GAAAAH. I think I’m nailed on this one.
And now I have a little dog to finish. The way this day is going . . . well. I’ve already decided I want to put my lament through my friend’s door on my way back from my piano lesson tomorrow.§ It won’t be finished, but the friend is, as I’ve said, musical, and if he doesn’t just throw something large and heavy at me the next time he sees me, he might have some editorial input. Also I want to have made the gesture some time before the new puppy he brings home in six months or so reaches its second birthday.
Okay. Onward. And I’m hoping for upward.
* * *
* My immediate reaction was, you drove? When you’ve got a train station in your back garden? I’ve got the American’s view of the British train system too—it may make you frelling crazy, and it often does, but it exists. After almost twenty years here I am still blown away by the sheer fact of the public footpath system, and of the national rail network. Even if the reason I finally broke down and bought my first mobile phone is so that I could make ‘I’m sitting in a train a hundred yards^ outside Waterloo and have been for the last twenty minutes, and I’m going to be late for lunch’ phone calls. Which I suppose is the answer to why he didn’t take the train. The day you’re late to perform for a wedding is the day the wedding will run on time.
^ Or metres, if you prefer
** Normal people would have a cup of tea or a double scotch. Singers are always thinking about their throats.
*** And we compared notes on the weird stuff some people lay on for the euphonious exaltation of their weddings. I am forced to conclude that the average level of musical education among the general populace is even worse than the boffins say.
† Okay, Janet Baker does not have a stomachache of unknown origin today, because if she had a stomachache every time some voice student—even the slightly smaller category of voice students who think she walks on water—mangled something she is famous for singing heartbreakingly superbly, she’d be too weak to get out of bed in the morning, and I’d prefer to think she is still enjoying her retirement.
†† I didn’t say well, okay?
††† Note to self: Do not agree to a second voice lesson in a week. Not even if you’re planning on spending all night at the piano and beating that frelling G into submission (while Peter is safely elsewhere playing bridge). Clearly the pressure is Too Great for a spindly amateur.
‡ Think Keystone Kops.
‡ Golly gosh wowie zowie eeep. Geezum. Gazinklebats. Bryn Terfel had better look to his crown. Although one of the things about Terfel is the size of his voice. He could fill Heathrow. Tear out all those ugly terminals and put in some bleachers. And Blondel says that his own voice is not that large. You couldn’t prove it by me: he was pasting me to the back wall of his studio clearly without trying. I can see/hear why people keep giving him jobs. Although I kinda wish he’d been having an off day when he applied for the job he’s going to the end of August.
‡‡ Sort of the backwards version of the ‘I’m sitting 100 yards outside of Waterloo’ mobile-phone call.
‡‡‡ This makes some sense in Maine, where the temperature may drop below freezing and snow begin falling any time, you just get to complain if it happens in June. In southern Hampshire. . . .
§ My voice lesson today was the little dog’s fault. I may have spent most of last night at the piano, but quite a bit of it was about a lament for a little dog, not for a queen of Carthage.
Another day, another drama
I’ve only barely reunited Bronwen with her vehicle* and set her back on the motorway to weave and o’erleap 1,000,000 roadworks on her way home**, and it seems to be nearly one in the morning and I have a blog entry to write. Oops.
It’s not all Bronwen’s fault. The day probably went irrecoverably off the rails early on, when I overslept by an hour***. Hellhounds and I then had to blast out on our hurtle† to get me home in time for my make-up appointment with the osteopath.†† Have I mentioned that it has finally deigned to rain? Yes. We had a useful bit overnight, which was lovely, and meant, on this epic day, I did not have to water the garden, but I would have been grateful if the black, black clouds seen rolling and thundering and chasing each other at speed to the north hadn’t taken a hard right and come streaking back to dump a lot of rampant wetness on an already-cranky woman and her two rain-allergic hellhounds. Hellhounds, among the sweetest††† of creatures under most circumstances, grow sullen when wet.‡ I think they actually absorb water, like sponges, which is why they get so ungleblarging heavy, dragging at the furthest ends of their leads and glowering. Feh. Bah.‡‡
With the result that we got back to the cottage late and I looked wildly at the clock and decided that I didn’t have time to change my sodden jeans because I was not going to risk Rajan thinking for even thirty seconds that I was going to miss another appointment. I sprinted down the street and through his door and . . . he emerged from his inner sanctum to say that he was running about a quarter-hour late. I should have gone back to the cottage and changed my jeans. I did actually turn back in that direction . . . but was instead drawn inexorably through the door of a new dress shop that said sale in its front windows, the way dress shops will, where I was much entertained by the other clientele and absent-mindedly fell in love with an adorable little denim jacket which I—gleep—bought.
It was a good twenty minutes before I got back to Rajan’s and . . . he wasn’t running fifteen minutes late. He was running nearly an hour late.‡‡‡
At which point the day had definitely gone off the rails. §
So I wasn’t surprised at all when I got off the phone with a very good friend having a very lousy time §§ and the phone rang again instantly and it was Bronwen saying that she was in her 674th roadworks queue and was going to be about half an hour late. I may have said something soothing like ‘of course you are’. I then rang Niall to warn him that our replacement third for handbells, Colin being disloyally on his way to Wales, was going to be half an hour late . . . to be informed by Penelope that Niall had told her that handbells had been cancelled tonight. GAH. ARRRGH.
Bronwen was not, in fact, half an hour late—she too was an hour late. Niall (having been mercilessly tracked down to where he was hiding§§§ and dragged relentlessly to the cottage with his handbells) and I had solved most of the problems of the world# by the time she arrived, and had a cup of tea and begun disposing of the cake. We still got a few touches of bob minor in before Bronwen and I had to hare off to tower practise at Crabbiton, Bronwen having declared when she first planned this repeat southern madness that she wanted the complete bell experience this time. Bronwen has never met Wild Robert, who teaches at Crabbiton on Thursdays, and this seemed like a good opportunity given that she was driving down from Orkney to ring bells at all—and as I’m missing Wild Robert pretty badly myself since Wednesday Ditherington practise is no more, I was somehow susceptible to being talked into this double bell whammy.
And therefore it is perfectly logical that Wild Robert was not at Crabbiton this evening. . . . Never mind, said Bronwen. I’ll come back again. Although probably not next week.##
Hey, it’s tomorrow. Yesterday is over. And maybe today will be better.
* * *
* She is White Van Woman. Be afraid.
** Wait a minute. Fiona was only here yesterday. I’m not becoming . . . social, am I?^
^ See next footnote, on the subject of the sure signs of reincarnation.
***. . . Oh I’ll just lie here a minute listening to the nice radio. Have you read about how leaping out of bed as if shot^ when the alarm goes off is bad for you? No, you’re supposed to lie there and gently regain consciousness over the course of several minutes. Which is, or would be, all very well, if that’s what happened. I’ve looked at those imitation-dawn lamp-clock things that brighten over the course of like fifteen minutes so you wake up naturally. In the first place they are Very Expensive. In the second place they are Very Ugly. In the third place, if I ever believed that I was waking up on account of the increasing light of dawn on my face I would know I had died and been reincarnated as someone else, and I’m sure that’s even worse for you than leaping out of bed as if shot when the (old-fashioned) alarm goes off.
^ Or gnawed in a friendly fashion by a hellhound.
† Wait—wait—clothing. Glasses. Shoes. Humans are so feeble. Hellhounds are ready for combat and excitement from the moment the crate door opens.
†† He needs a name. Let’s call him Rajan.
††† If a trifle intemperate
‡ And, speaking of cranky, I will also remark that I am tired of guaranteed waterproof Goretex shoes that leak. I might as well wear All Stars. Which are cheaper.
‡‡ Also it’s been so dry for so long that the water doesn’t soak into the ground. It bounces, and then waits at its leisure, swinging back and forth in the various grass- and leaf-pockets and the elbows of trees and hedgerows^, ready to dump itself generously down the backs of hellhounds and the jeans-legs and un-waterproof Goretex shoes of cranky women.
^ I think it also floats, in little wet bubbles like invisible water balloons, but I have thus far failed to accumulate sufficient evidence to support this theory.
‡‡‡ Not that the time was wasted. I read a very interesting article on pruning.
§ However having, as it proved, totally crippled myself watching my bat roost empty on Monday—this body does not stand still with its head raised at a sharp angle for half an hour at all graciously—there was no question that I was going to stomp off in a huff. For one thing stomping is beyond me at the moment. Although I can still do the huff.
§§ Is frelling Mercury in frelling retrograde or anything? There are too many people having unusually lousy times right now. The count stands at two sudden deaths and a terminal illness and the week’s not even over yet.
§§§ People who don’t want to be found really need to learn to turn their mobile phones off. However it would have been very embarrassing if Bronwen had got here and there had been no handbells—have I mentioned that she lives in, like, Orkney, so when she pops down here for a spot of handbells we’re talking hours on the road? Even barring roadworks—so I’m glad Niall’s phone was still on. And that he wasn’t on his way to Wales. With or without roadworks.
# At least those involving bells
## And it’s not like Crabbiton wasn’t glad to see us. They were thrilled. We made the fifth and sixth pairs of hands, so they could actually ring something. But it wasn’t quite the transcendent experience ringing for Wild Robert usually is.
