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Slow Theatre*
I have a thing to say.
Birds are overrated.
They’re endangered, their habitat is being destroyed, the agrotoxins are mounting up in their blood, their eggshells are too thin to grow babies in, their populations are plummeting, they’re really unhappy.
Great. Bring on the gigantic oil slick. I have a birdbath I want to put it in.**
I am frelling knee deep in blackbird fledglings at the cottage, and they’re driving me nuts. Endangered? Feh. Give me a nice family of Ashy Storm Petrels or Asian crested ibis and I will totally behave myself. I’ll build a rice paddy for the ibis. I’ll raise krill in the pond.***
But BLACKBIRDS? Blackbirds are thugs. Blackbirds are hooligans. And smug with it. There’s nothing worse than a smug hooligan. Especially a smug hooligan the size of the palm of your hand.
I’m not sure how many of these adolescent ruffians† there are—seventeen, maybe. Well, two anyway. Maybe three. At least two, because there are ruckuses in the shrubbery while I’ve got Jesse James underfoot. And furthermore they’re so frelling TAME. Beat it, Buster, I say, or I’m going to dropkick you over the wall. There’s a cat on the other side of the wall.††
And the bloody thing sits there, cocks its head, looks at me, and goes chirp chirp.†††
And then it makes a beeline for my latest tray of freshly planted-on little green things AND STARTS YANKING THEM OUT AND THROWING THEM AROUND.
Don’t talk to me about ‘disturbed ground’ and ‘searching for earthworms’. I know vandalism when I see it. ‡
The slugs and I are already engaged in a war that makes Athens and Sparta look like a tea party.‡‡ Die! DIE! Squish.‡‡‡ And slugs are sneaky beggars. I use slugbait§ but I try not to use any more than I absolutely have to. So anything that seems not to be under savage munching attack I will leave unadorned. Which is, of course, the sign to target it one night and chomp it off to ground level. Arrrrrgh.
And now the sodding birds. Pigeons are rats with feathers.§§ If this country allowed air guns to the average householder I’d be out there going plink, plink. Blackbirds . . . §§§ Why can’t I have a nice crested ibis? Something I could respect. I’m sure their adolescents are much politer.#
Meanwhile . . . what’s a gardener to do? I’ve started snapping those green flower sticks and wooden kebab skewers in halves and thirds and sticking them into the ground around whatever I’ve been planting. In trays this tends to produce a peculiar wigwam effect since the compost isn’t deep enough to hold a spike in true tiger-pit erect readiness. It does appear to have a discouraging effect however. And with the bright blue slugbait . . . charming. Elegant, even. It does an ornamental-flower gardener’s heart good to look out on her afternoon’s work## and see a lot of listing and shell-shocked plants peering nervously out from behind their barriers of splinters and blue-jelly-bean fragments.
The blackbird theatre is pretty frelling rapid. In all the wrong ways. Chirp.
* * *
* I’ve told you Peter calls gardening very slow theatre, haven’t I?^ Days like today, when I’m (still) barely moving anyway, very slow is attractive. Of course, in my garden(s), where I have 1,000,000,000 little green things shouting to be potted on, ‘slow’ is an expletive.
^ Almost certainly. So Slow Theatre Revisited.
** Remember I told you that the Pond Man carefully sieved out a lot of tadpoles before he cleaned Third House’s neglected pond? The pond is now teeming with big fat tadpoles.
The minute they develop feathers, they’re outta there.
*** I may have to put in a second pond if they don’t get along with the tadpoles.
† And I did miss the cute they’re-still-in-the-nest phase. Which lasts about two blinks in the case of blackbirds. You can see mum and dad tipping them over the edge. Out! Out! I have every sympathy. But I wish it was happening in someone else’s garden.
†† There are cats everywhere around here, except where there are hellhounds. There are advantages to going to bed at mmrmph o’clock in the morning: the cat fights don’t wake you up.
††† They are amazingly noisy. The adults sing, of course, but the kids . . . chat. Yo, how’s it going, you great hulking monster? they say, clear as clear. You gonna plant some more stuff? Great. We’re bored.
‡ And I’m about to give up on my poor little magnolia. I’ve been hoping that Ghislaine de Feligonde would throw out enough thorny arms to protect it before the pigeons finish killing it by stripping every bud it produces, both leaf and flower. Well, she may yet. She’s certainly gotten over that far, and the magnolia is still trying. I’ve netted it the last couple of years but I can’t face this as an annual activity.^
^ Mind you, I probably will bubblewrap Souvenir de la Malmaison every year when her flowers are about to come out and we have rain for a fortnight. But bubblewrap is a significantly less maddening material than netting.
‡‡ With chocolate biscuits. And scones. And clotted cream.
‡‡‡ I hate stepping on them. One of the things I have against them is how much I hate stepping on them.
§ And yeah, it says ‘organic, harmless to pets, children and wildlife’ but I don’t let the hellhounds anywhere near it. And it clearly has no effect on blackbirds.
§§ Squirrels are rats with furry tails. Sue me.^
^ Of course some rats are cute. Penelope and Niall’s daughter’s Lesser Spotted Jeans-leg-pulling-pick-me-up-pick-me-up rats are adorable.
§§§ Where’s my robin? I barely see him, now the blackbirds have taken over. And they really have taken over. I keep finding frelling blackbird nests about the place. Today I was moving the pots on the shelves outside the kitchen window around and yeeep there’s another frelling blackbird nest tucked in among the back row.
# Neener neener neener say the blackbirds.
## Performed, allow me to add, in weather that has clearly escaped from either February or Antarctica. Or possibly both. We may have a frost tonight. I should be out there spreading fleece and bubble wrap over the wigwams. Siiiiiiigh.
More baby things
Too cute or what. 
And as anyone who has ever tried to photo the little frellers will know, they swim like the very devil, hurtling around in a manner that would not bring shame to a hellhound.
And in all directions at once, so you’re also lucky to get more than one of them in a shot. They leave wakes like powerboats, unlike the more sedate adults. I assume all this manic activity is a predator avoidance technique, but that plus growing, they must have to eat their own weight about once an hour. The tiny ones also have no neck yet, and with that and the speed at which those little legs churn the water, they plough along as if they’re going downhill.
These two photos were taken however at a plant nursery I . . . ahem . . . frequent. Ahem.
I left the ducklings behind but I came home with a rusty-red yarrow with a gold centre, and another iris. Only two? you’re saying. Well, I do still have 1,000,0000 dahlias to plant up.
Now find the hidden blackbird nest.
I had noticed that there was a male blackbird around an awful lot, but then there usually is. Blackbirds are cheeky, and the town ones seem to be born half tame, like robins.* Like robins, they are very interested in you when you’re messing in the dirt,** and if you turn around quickly there will probably be a sudden flurry of wings. I didn’t twig [sic] there was anything else going on till one day when I was potting on right under the apple tree, I saw the quick flash of black wings diving in among the whatever-it-is growing into the apple tree, an immediate chorus of memememememememe, give ME the worm! burst out, my head snapped up like Darkness sighting a pheasant, and I thought, Yah! Babies! –waited for Dad to depart on his business, and went questing.
I don’t know if there’s a system–like mum robin may start a new nest elsewhere while dad finishes off the old brood–but I seemed only to see the male before I discovered the nest, and the female since.
Mum giving me the hairy eyeball.
And let me tell you I sweated to get this photo. 
All that standing on a flagpole with a torch between your teeth***–the dratted camera refused to focus without a spotlight–and furthermore trying to do it at a bit of a distance so mum didn’t have apoplexy: as you see, the nestlings couldn’t care less. This is a few days ago, and you see they’re pretty much fully fledged: and we’re now into the Little Rustling Things in the Shrubbery phase. They still yell mememememe when mum flies in however, and the shrubbery briefly rustles violently. There is this to be said for a small garden: the Little Rustling Things in the Shrubbery phase is a lot more exciting. It’s too spread out to make good theatre in a big garden.
And hey. How about another lamb. Or two. (Or three.) Lambs are always good.
*No robin nest in the greenhouse this year. Sob. Maybe they’ll rediscover me later in the season. I’ve seen him–or her–around, but maybe the blackbird is the current chief garden administrator.
** Oh gods, she’s using that damn bagged stuff again. There’s never anything worth eating in a plastic bag!^
^ [irony alert]
*** Electric torch, ie flashlight. This is not a remake of SPARTACUS.
Carless
We have no car. At least till Wednesday.
And it’s all my own stupid fault.
And I’m supposed to be going to the opera in London on Tuesday.
No, this extreme state of affairs was caused by nothing so exciting as spinning vibrantly off the road and leaping exuberantly into the ditch or being commandeered into a high-speed chase after some rebel griffins that took us to Azerbaijan where Wolfgang is resting quietly till he feels up to the journey home.* Nothing like that.
The government sticker you wear on your windscreen that says ‘yes this car has paid** astonishing amounts of vehicle tax for another year and has been okayed by the test guys for a mere twice the astonishing amount of vehicle tax when it turned out the flrbgngak needed replacing***’ ran out the end of February and I didn’t notice. †
I had half-noticed an envelope from the DVLA†† come in . . . well I would have said a few days ago. Like, last week, when I’d've already been overdue. I could, however, be wrong about this. The post tends to shoot through the door and clatter onto the floor around the time I’m booting and spurring toward taking hellhounds out††† and I tend to scoop it up and toss it on one or another of the tall tottering piles of unopened post on my kitchen table‡ muttering abstractedly that I’ll look at it later.
Friday afternoon it finally occurred to me to look at that frelling sticker–didn’t renewing it come round something like every spring?‡‡ Friday afternoon I thought of this. Gah. And it said February.‡‡‡ Frell. So since I was having the nervous breakdown Peter rang the garage for me Saturday morning.§ Gabriel, who owns the garage, said with a kind gloomy relish–he has a lugubrious streak, our Gabriel–that if they caught me driving a car with an expired license they’d take it away from me and crush it. Crush Wolfgang! §§ And that he couldn’t get to it before Wednesday §§§ but that if I brought it in Sunday morning ¤ he’d get to it sooner if he had a cancellation.
So this morning after service ring hellhounds and I drove five miles to the garage, left Wolfgang with many backward glances, and walked home.¤¤ We stopped at the cottage for me to pick up my knapsack and then immediately set out again for the mews, and lunch. Hellhounds could not believe I was dragging them out again. Where’s the car? they said. We’ve had enough hurtling for one morning.
And I guess I’ll be taking the bus to the train station Tuesday afternoon. And a taxi home at midnight. Frell.
* * *
* Although the griffins have been returned to the Large Dangerous Imaginary Animal preserve, scolded, and sent to bed with only chicken wings and water for supper and no chocolate.
** Well it’s not actually the car that pays.
*** And we have a really good garage run by human beings, who have families and dogs and mortgages and warm circulating blood, instead of the vague rusty simulacra with the strange flat glinting eyes you find at a lot of garages. We still commute out to our old village so we can use them. But they don’t really fix anything any more, you know? They make mystic passes over all the sealed black boxes under your bonnet^ and if any of these go brrrr instead of cheep they order a new sealed black box and grommet it in. Like the flrbgngak. Mechanicry isn’t what it used to be, as isn’t so much else. These particular garage guys do the black box schtick to pay for the families and dogs and mortgages and dabble in old cars and a few stock car racers for fun. Which may explain why they’re still human.
^ Car bonnet. AKA hood. I don’t wear a bonnet, and if I did, what was under it would cause all mystic-pass wands to burst into showers of sparks while making small high pitched screaming noises.
† I’m also eating a bag of vegetable crisps that ran out at the end of February but I don’t think anybody is going to arrest me for it.
†† Department of Violent Licensing Activity
††† The fascinating thing is the way the earliness and lateness of this tends to adapt seamlessly to my personal aberrancy. I’m tying my shoes and the post arrives. The one time I can be fairly sure we’ll be seriously out is when the ME has been winning lately and I’m sleeping in.^ Then the package that has been due any time these last six weeks will be brought by a really helpful postperson who will knock on the door so they can gladsomely hand it to you instead of just leaving it on the stoop.^^
^ That should perhaps be ’sleeping’.
^^ The Official Parcel Man, who comes round in an Unmarked White Van, leaves things on the stoop.+ But he’s a bell ringer, so a higher order of being than the usual postal employee.
+ I just went on line to look up ’stoop’ and be sure that it’s not merely the strange slang spoken by my forebears that calls small front porches ’stoops’ and got a large flashing box saying YOU’RE THE MILLIONTH PERSON ON THIS SITE!!!! YOU HAVE WON A FREE LAPTOP!!!! CLICK HERE!!!!!!! I blinked at this briefly and decided that I didn’t need a free laptop. I wonder if the next person will get YOU ARE THE MILLION AND ONETH PERSON ON THIS SITE!!!! YOU HAVE JUST WON A FREE LAPTOP!!!! And if they clicked here they drowned instantly in the tsunami of spam and identity theft.
‡ I subscribe to a lot of magazines. I started a list once a while back because I thought it would make an amusing blog entry. It would make an amusing blog entry but I don’t think my nerves could take seeing it there all blunt and stark and everything.
‡‡ Or every other spring, or every third spring when the swallows come back early or every fourth spring if they’re late, with special free bonus months when the robins sing at 3 am. Which would be this month, which would solve the immediate problem. I know about robins singing early and late anyway and streetlights further confusing the issue^ . . . and my previous robin met a Traumatic End so this may be a new one determined to make an impression, but 3 am?
^ http://www.rspb.org.uk/advice/expert/previous/singingatnight.asp
‡‡‡ If the news was going to be good, I’d've thought of it Monday afternoon.
§ Peter is trying to make it out that this is his fault. Please. I’m the one drives Wolfgang. And neither of us ever knows what day it is and we may arrive at the month by a process of elimination. (Okay, has either of us had a birthday recently? What’s growing in the garden? How many blankets on the bed?)
§§ I believe he may have been indulging in a little theatrical exaggeration: they’ll crush your car if you have a habit of getting caught with an expired sticker.^ However I fear he was telling the sordid truth when I said that turning the wheel hard over produces a strangely lumpy sensation and he gave a little bark of laughter, like the wicked witch before she slams the oven door, and said, that sounds like the power steering belt slipping–you don’t want to go there, that’s seven or eight hundred quid.
^ And they didn’t catch me last year. Sigh. Actually noticing it’s expired in March is quite good going. Did I blog about this last year? In, say, June?
§§§ A garage that didn’t find us fun to watch could keep us waiting weeks. I’m not complaining. Well, I’m not complaining about them.
¤ Writers and garage owners both work on Sundays
¤¤ It’s less, walking cross country. We have to wiggle on the way home to get our mileage in.
Uh, summer?
I heard my first skylark today. Did I write about my first skylark last year? I can’t remember.* I usually do start hearing them some time in February and I’ve been reasonably sure I’ve heard one or two tuning up recently–but I think they’ve been saying to each other, nope, too cold–is that snow?–really bad for my throat, and I open next week at the Royal Opera as Manrico. Today–walking bemusedly in my shirtsleeves and Darkness positively panting–was the first proper full-strength cascade of birdsong. Sunlight and skylarks, does it get any better? I was thinking about this today: that two of my favourite sounds**, change-ringing bells and singing skylarks, I describe as a ‘waterfall’ noise.*** Neither of which I ever heard in Maine. Skylarks are European and Asian–although according to Wiki the eastern ones get blown off-course to Alaska occasionally–and you have to work at it to hear change ringing in America. In southern England you have to work to escape it. Have I mentioned recently that England is home, and never mind how I sound?†
So, we’re having summer in February. Wha’? Huh? I don’t know how to walk in shirtsleeves any more. My centre of gravity goes all peculiar. †† I start taking giant steps because I weigh so much less. When the temperature had reached 49°F by the time heat-prostrated hellhounds and I had got back from the morning hurtle I laughed maniacally and carried the jungle outdoors into the garden. Remember outdoors? A place not swathed in blue and green plastic nor equipped with an unidentifiable background mutter of I want my sitting room back?. . . Of course I brought it all in again after the evening hurtle . . . sigh . . . okay, I’m spared Geranium Wrapping Duty for the moment, but carting the jungle in and out actually takes more time. Not to mention cavorting hellhounds getting underfoot: which is part of why jungle-shifting takes more time.
But this is now the second day in a row I’ve got out into the garden, trowel and secateurs at the ready.††† It’s thrilling. It’s ridiculously thrilling really: it’s not like we were suddenly going to have winter forever.‡ But as I keep saying I–like a lot of other local residents–was caught completely off guard by this cold stuff and it’s all very well insisting I’ll be ready next year‡‡ but right at the moment it’s still this year.
Although every year at roughly this time I have a little spasm of fantasy that I might actually get ahead of gardeny things this year. I’ll have managed to chop down and clear out at least some of last summer’s excesses so there will be genuine bare earth showing, here and there, nothing too intimidating, and as all you other gardeners know, there’s a lovely plain disencumbered hopeful look about a just-pre-spring garden. All that possibility. And you haven’t done anything (new) wrong yet.
This time of year also is about the only time that there aren’t rows and pot-clusters and platterfuls‡‡‡ of plants waiting with dwindling patience for me to do something with them. I have been praising my little group of heucheras http://www.findmeplants.co.uk/heuchera-genus.aspx for gallantry in the face of grisly weather and not having got into decent-sized pots before the beginning of winter . . . and discovered that the reason why they haven’t minded is because they haven’t grown any roots. Hmmm. However, heucheras are modest creatures and don’t keep thrusting parsnip-sized tentacles through the drainage holes of their too-small pots and strangling their neighbours, so I hope they’ll be fine.
My main triumph of the day however was to repot my beloved rudbeckia Goldsturm http://www.hairypotplants.co.uk/rudbeckia-goldsturm-227-p.asp
http://www.whiteflowerfarm.com/37500-product.html (drat: I thought I had photos of my own Goldsturm, but I can’t find them) . . . Repotting a several-year-old herbaceous adult is of course the cue for any self-respecting plant to collapse and whinge and fan itself feebly for weeks while you beg it not to die. Goldsturm is, generally speaking, both tough and good natured, however, so we live in hope.
What we really live in hope of is that the threatened week of mild weather is no mere chimera of the forecasters’ imagination and I can get out into the garden again tomorrow, and the day after tomorrow, and . . .
* * *
* Regular readers with working memories will know this blog a lot better than I do.
** Although the list of favourite sounds is pretty long. A lot of opera. A lot of folk songs. A lot of Mozart. Also champagne corks popping, chocolate foil crinkling, and hellhounds telling me in detail how much they want to go out and what fun we’re going to have.
*** Far fewer clanks with skylarks.
† American.
†† And climbing through barbed wire fences becomes a lot hairier. I’m disinclined to patch myself with duct tape.
††† The cottage garden. Third House’s garden is way too scary while it has steel beams and cement mixers in the driveway, a trail of destruction like Sherman’s march to the sea running in from the kitchen door, and sounds^ as of holes being dug to China by creative use of chainsaws and backhoes emanating from within. At the moment I don’t want to know. They insisted on my viewing the scene of havoc and extirpation last Friday so I could tell them where I was going to want my electric sockets. Are you kidding? There are no walls! There is no floor! My vivid visual imagination runs to dragons, okay?
^ Unfavourite
‡ At least I hope not.
‡‡ HA HA HA HA HA. But at least some of it will happen because I’m siccing Atlas onto it.
‡‡‡ Literally. I bought half a dozen cheap plastic trays a few years ago and they’re always covered in pots of little things waiting to be potted on.
Do you have any pets?
I am still sweating away on the FAQ for the web site. Some of you may have noticed the site’s new opening page*; it also says the new site will be up by the end of this month. Blog/sitemom keeps saying patiently, just choose a few crucial bits and deal with those; the nice thing about a web site is that it’s never finished. But the FAQ is, to me, obsessive that I am, the FAQ. Must. Get. It. Done. Great swathes of it can remain pretty much the same; other swathes . . . cannot.**
Some of this you’ll have seen before (I have only the one life, and less than one memory; repetition is inevitable), but some of it you haven’t.
Q: Do you have any pets?
RMcK: Oh my. How life moves on, leaving tyre tracks over tender portions of your anatomy as it goes. After I sold my horse–because I couldn’t afford him: it had been a gamble, and I knew it, and I lost–which must be close to ten years ago, I updated the answer to that question like this:
Three whippets and a 1965 cream-coloured MGB convertible. The whippets lie around in graceful, anatomically incredible heaps and assist in the Doing of Literature. They know the system, and if we aren’t at our desks by 9 am they come round and stare at us accusingly. It’s astonishing, the force of accusation beaming from the eyes of a creature that barely comes up to your knee. I seem to have had to give up horses for the moment so the MG is my horse equivalent: exhilarating and temperamental. With your eyes half-closed — especially if you privately think the old classic MGs are the most beautiful cars ever made — she actually quite begins to resemble the perfect, cream-coloured ponies of your distant childhood fantasies, the ones who might secretly be unicorns.
Those three whippets–Holly, Hazel and Rowan, to whom DRAGONHAVEN is dedicated–have all gone on to that big squashy sofa in the Elysian Fields, and very happy they are there too because the silly rule that they can’t get on it till a human sits on it first and invites them has been dismissed forever. There isn’t a day that goes by, however, down here in mundane reality, that I don’t think of each of them in her turn; most of my favourite walks are ones I first discovered in their company; and the current canine generation often strikingly remind me of who has gone before–or strikingly remind me how different they are.
There are only two of them this time around, because I have only two arms for holding two long extending leads–I feel that leads are a necessity with sighthounds in this landscape, which is riddled with roads and barbed wire, when they can be over the county border after a rabbit before you’ve drawn breath to call them. (Whippets are, pound for pound, the fastest dog on the planet. Greyhounds are only a little bit faster, and a lot bigger.) And Peter at over 80 years old no longer feels like racing over the countryside the way the five of us used to.
Chaos and Darkness [there will be a link to hellhound photo gallery], AKA the hellhounds, are litter brothers, just two years old as I write this in August 08, seven-eighths whippet and one-eighth deerhound. Our whippets were all little–Hazel never quite made twenty pounds, the other two were a pound or two over: but they were long-legged and whipcord-muscled and you’d never mistake them for small dogs–so these boys at a pound or two over forty pounds (Darkness) and a pound or two under (Chaos) each seems enormous in comparison (especially when I have to heave them over dog-impassable stiles). I was also not prepared for dogs who can lay their heads on the kitchen table, or your desk. The whippets were all the right size for putting their heads on your knee and looking at you beseechingly about one thing or another, probably involving a lap or a sofa: when a hellhound wants a lap, he just throws his front half into yours, and when only the three of us want to watch TV together we need a camp bed in front of the sofa for extra leg room. (It’s an old horsehair sofa with a camber, and it’s remarkably easy to slide off of.) I find it very difficult to negotiate the concept of air space with a dog, although they’ve (mostly) learnt that objects on tables and desks are forbidden.
The main shock to the system about the hellhounds however is that they’re boys. I don’t do boys. (Male dogs pee all the time! Male dogs pee every five feet when they’re out on walks! And they pee on everything! I put them on short lead and frog march them past the antique shop, which usually has a few chairs out on the pavement, to lure in passersby.) The majority of the dogs I’ve ever had much to do with, with one notable exception, have been girls; even back in my house- and pet-sitting days the critters I bonded with tended to be girls. But when I saw the ad in the local paper for ‘whippet lurcher puppies’ it was a year since my last whippet had died, and the first local ad for any sort of sighthound that I’d seen. (Note that they aren’t really lurchers, they’re longdogs. Lurchers are any sighthound crossbred with anything that isn’t a sighthound; longdogs are any sighthound crossbred with any other sighthound. Whippets and deerhounds are both sighthounds. But people generally know the word lurcher, and generally don’t know longdog.) I had begun subscribing to a country-sports newspaper for the puppy ads in the back–I wanted a working dog family rather than a show dog one–but the whippets all seemed to be in Yorkshire or Wales, and I wanted to meet the little furry thing before I bought it. So I was instead in the process of deciding to adopt an ex-racing greyhound (or two), and had half an appointment–if one can have half an appointment–to visit a greyhound rescue not hugely far from here.
And then this ad. And I made a little hole in the floor getting to the phone fast enough. The woman sounded very nice, but after saying there were eight puppies and four were available, she asked cautiously if I was looking for a dog or a bitch? And I said, oh, a bitch (or two), I’ve only ever really had girls. And she said that there were only two bitches in the litter and they were both already spoken for. This stopped me about two thirds of a second–hey, I was seriously whippet-deprived by that time–and I said, fine, boys are fine, when can I come see the litter?
The rest is history. Much of it to be found in the blog. Although have I ever told the story of how I finally made up my mind to have two of them? Karma, it’s all karma.
But good karma for my MG has run out. She’s for sale. I don’t want to sell her, but I don’t really have a choice; I haven’t had her out of the garage now in two years–since I brought the hellhounds home. When it was undersized whippets, I was always going to figure out a way to put some kind of mesh roof over the slender fillet of space that passes for a back seat in an old MGB, because the whippets would have fit. The hellhounds won’t. And in my MG’s heyday I was using her to commute to ring bells–my home tower was twenty minutes away, and my most regular second weekly practise slightly farther yet. My home tower now is a two minute walk away (or a one minute bolt on Sunday mornings to not be late to ring service) and my second weekly practise is too far to walk but too close to recharge the battery.
She’s not only a car to me. I hope she goes to a good home.
I also want to mention my poor budgie. That was during the eighteen months I was really flattened by the first full onslaught of the ME. I wasn’t walking dogs; I couldn’t. I suppose I wanted something that would keep me company while Peter was out with the dogs and I was home alone with the several hundred rose bushes I was too feeble to take care of either, and the several thousand books I was too braindead to read. And I’d always rather fancied one of the small talking birds. Because of puppy farms I was chary of pet shops for any purpose; I found a (relatively) local breeder who had huge open aviaries and obviously adored their birds. They bred show birds, which appears to mean large bulgy feathery foreheads which look very strange to me, and they were happy to sell me a young bird who was insufficiently bulgy. I picked him out because he was so beautiful: I can’t remember now what you call the colour, but if you start with the standard budgie turquoise and take it down to something near opal, that was what Angel looked like. He was a young bird, but he was still past the age where he’d be easy to teach to talk, and I didn’t. He’d perch on my finger though–astonishingly warm, those tiny claws–and he made nice friendly bird noises.
He only lived a year. When he began growing listless I found a specialist bird vet who went off on a rant about overbred show birds: wild parakeets live thirty years, he said. You’re lucky if a show bird lasts five. He could do nothing; and one morning Angel glided down to the bottom of his cage . . . and stayed there.
I’m just not good about things dying. I was so traumatised by Angel’s early death that I haven’t tried again with a bird, although I still think about it. The specialist bird vet says that in the case of budgies, you’re better off with a pet shop bird. Those bulgy foreheads on show birds, by the way, are for some reason known as buffy. I named him Angel because I named him Angel, but it was Peter who said, ah ha! He’s Angel because he isn’t Buffy!
I do have a horse to ride again, although she’s not mine. (Calling a horse a pet is always a trifle ludicrous. But who with animals in their lives ever calls them pets? They’re the animals in your life. The word pet was devised by someone who didn’t have any: and my Oxford dictionary calls its derivation ‘unknown’.) I’ve had horses to ride several times since I sold Impi (registered name Impala II. His previous owner had called him Impy, ugggggh, and with a misspent childhood reading H Rider Haggard I had no trouble immediately changing it to Impi) but this is a particularly nice one. She’s even a pretty mare with a lovely face, although I have to say she’s grey, not cream, and I really doubt there are any unicorns very close in her ancestry. But I feel a great rise of spirits when I walk down the stable row toward her, especially when she puts her head over the door and whinnies.
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* Isn’t it pretty? Hint: if you don’t think so, don’t tell me about it.
** You know there are lots of people, even lots of people who write words for a living who, when faced with a question like ‘Do you have any pets?’ would say, yes, two hell- I mean, two whippet crosses, litter brothers, named Darkness and Chaos. Next question?’
