Pan-galactic finals
Grandson did not win. Grandson came fourth in the vocal category. I wouldn’t have expected him to have stage nerves—he’s been in amateur and semi-professional gigs pretty much since he was old enough to toddle on by himself, and was eye-catching enough at one of the latter to have had the offer of a scholarship at one of the big flashy London performing-arts schools but decided for himself he didn’t want to be that single minded and that far away from home yet—but my guess is that there were some nerves in attendance. He’s a charismatic performer, and that was a little muted today.*
But it was a much more interesting show generally than either Peter or I was expecting, I think. The first thing that happened was a reprieve. The order of performance is done by lot, and his mum said that he always draws early, so we were going to have to be there for the first shot over the adjudicators’ bows. And then last thing last night, news—he was going to be in the second half, after the break. So we could drift in in an idle and well-rested manner at about 11 . . .
Except we didn’t. We didn’t leave that much later after all, had an easy soar down there** and only missed the first performer.*** And . . . what it was was a free concert with great seats. I’m not sure what I was expecting—these are the national finals after all, and the Pan-galactics are no slouch. But. Wow.
In the absence of pianists† I was far more interested in the singers, not only because we had our hero to cheer for (who was, just by the way, the only boy). But (as I emailed Nadia, because I had to talk to somebody who would understand) while before Blondel and Nadia I would have been able to pick out the bits these young singers haven’t quite nailed yet†† I wouldn’t have been so aware of how they were trying to do what they were doing—and of some of the pitfalls on the way they have successfully negotiated. I don’t think anyone who cares deeply about music and listens intensely is ever unaware of what a lot of work doing it well is, but there is definitely a difference in kind of your appreciation if you’re having a small stumbling whack at it yourself.
There were a few repertoire choices that I thought were a bit ill advised, but the slightly unsatisfactory deliveries may also have been nerves rather than that the singer was overfaced by her material. And there were a few real jaw-droppers. The girl who won looks about twelve. She came quietly out and announced her pieces with perfect self-possession but no particular panache . . . and then started to sing. Big major yeeeeep.††† Golly she was good. She was one of the first, and was instantly one to beat. And then as it happens the last song by the last performer was the other real jaw-dropper, Cherubino from the Marriage of Figaro raving about love. She sang it with exactly the right wildness for the adolescent male‡, but it was also the most fully realised complete performance: an ordinary teenage girl in a nice party dress suddenly transformed into a lust-maddened teenage boy. It was extraordinary. She came second. The girl who came first was probably the more polished performance but this last babe had passion.‡‡
And I got a lot of knitting done. I really am going to have a pair of leg warmers by next autumn.‡‡‡ Possibly conceivably just-believably even two pairs.§
* * *
* I admit I’ve never heard him in public before. But he knocks the back wall of the kitchen out when he sings here. His voice has got amazing over the last few years. I remember him as starting out a perfectly nice light tenor and he says he’s still a tenor but I’d call him a baritone. He’s got the baritone boooom at the bottom of his range, although he says it’s the top end that’s stretching. Well, I bet the bottom end will stretch too. Or maybe he’s just going to grow up to be one of the heldentenors of our time. Unfortunately he’s not the least interested in opera and unless he has a voice teacher at some point who wakes him up to the glories of the operatic repertoire I think we’ll lose him to the West End. Feh.
** My gods. The Jaguar. Yeep. I don’t ride in fancy cars all that often and I forget. The sensation of gliding rather than sitting in something with mere wheels. The way you are forced back into the leather upholstery if your driver decides to pass some mere vehicle.
Caligula
What sort of Jag was it?
I haven’t the faintest idea and they didn’t know. (It originally belonged to Saxon’s dad.) I did ask.^ Georgiana said that it’s a Sovereign, and I can tell you that it’s the xj type, but in the great hierarchy of Jags I haven’t the slightest.^^ I’d be surprised if it was more than about ten years old, but then Jags age well. But speaking of charisma. . . .
^ I said someone on the blog wanted to know. Most of the members of the immediate clan are aware of my curious nighttime activity.
^^ Slatey blue-grey with creamy leather insides. You want to have brushed hair and clean fingernails when you sit in it. Hellhounds need not apply.
*** Okay, here’s an oddity that perhaps some music teacher out there can explain. There was one cello and one violoncelle—I don’t even know what a violoncelle^ is and it’s the one person we missed—and everything else you blew into, and all but one were winds. The one blowing-into that wasn’t, was a euphonium, which I wouldn’t have been able to describe to you either, but I can tell you now it’s a bit like a big rectangular French horn and has similar big fat scary notes and I have no idea how he managed to get so many of them out of the thing so accurately. The rest were three flutes, a clarinet and a very snazzy recorder. No violinists? No pianists?
^ And the only on line definitions I can find are in French. Is it the French word for cello? There has to be some reason to call it a violoncelle rather than a cello?
† !!!!!!!!!!!!!
†† Someone sang Dove Sei. Snork. But the irony about her performance was that she didn’t take advantage of her opportunities to hit that note and hold the freller till your audience begs for mercy. You come in on a fermata: Doooooooooooooove sei, and there’s another one in the ‘vieni’ before your top G, which is as hair-raising as it gets in this innocent-seeming little aria^, but that little phrase is set up for you to go for it. Nadia, whose mission in my life is to loosen me up, has even said go for it, and that (if I need a light whip of vengeance to get my blood circulating) here is my opportunity to make Oisin follow me, because this is the Singer’s Big Moment. You even repeat the vieni-with-top-G phrase on the second go-through—and then run down the last few bars to the end. I can’t do it, but I do grasp that it’s rife with opportunity. And this little girl with the lovely sweet voice and the appealing manner went straight through all her hot chances without anything remotely resembling a fermata. This may, of course, have been her stage nerves, but I’d’ve said the accompanist was expecting it.
Speaking of the accompanist(s): most of the performers brought their own.^^ There was one fellow who appeared several times whom I had little trouble identifying as the one laid on locally, and I wasn’t too impressed. Till the introducer mentioned that he had in fact stepped in with about forty-eight hours’ warning when the fellow they had booked went down ill. Yowzah. Suddenly he’s a hero too.
^ Nadia keeps telling me it’s not that difficult a piece and I’m just reacting to the fact that it’s from an OPERA.
^^ Our hero’s accompanist is lovely.
††† She sang an aria from Cosi fan tutte, where Despina is chirpily and dancingly telling her mistresses (she’s their maid) how to catch a bloke, and then this moooooournful legaaaaaaato lied by Brahms.
‡ Yes. It’s a trouser role for a mezzo.
‡‡ Other standouts for me included one of those Italian arias from the notorious soprano student’s ARIE book that I sing: Se Tu M’ami. She did it a lot better. Surprise. Not. And ‘Batti batti’ from Don Giovanni was also charmingly and flirtatiously done—which is the only way to bring it off. Mozart is so frelling tuneful you can forget what complex personalities his characters are.
‡‡‡ Barring rogue yarn-bomber raids where masked individuals steal your projects to wrap around lampposts and bollards.
§ Well I need an assortment of COLOURS, don’t I?
New Thing, New Thing, nanny-nanny-boo-boo, tra la la New Thing
::dandles New Thing::
::dandle-dangle-dandle-twinkle-dingle-dangle::
::hums idly::
And, finally, bursts into loud roars of evil laughter. MWA HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA . . . . Sorry guys. Ordinarily I loathe and despise people who tease* other people but . . . but . . . well I’m having a good time with the New Thing. I think you will too** . . . or if you don’t I will crawl away into a corner and cry . . . but the thing thing is that the blog is such a lot of work. I’m increasingly aware that I can’t do this forever, even if there were enough people who wanted me to, but that while the obvious answer is to change the wretched thing somehow, I am hideously constrained by what I can do . . . which includes the limitations of the peculiar personality that does it. Just declaring ‘less often, fewer words and more other people’s books’ does not work.
I think . . . I think . . . I’ve found something that will work.
It’ll make better sense after I post the beggar. And then I’ll tell you more about it too. Meanwhile . . .
::dingle-dangle-glitter-flourish-swank::
Tomorrow? I might post it tomorrow. I might. Or maybe I’ll post it Wednesday. Or Thursday . . . or . . . decisions, decisions . . .
::twinkle::
Catlady
I have so far avoided getting a cell phone because the very idea that someone could call me at any time is so terrifying that I’d rather get stuck halfway home and have to walk my broken bicycle straight to the dentist than have the ability to call someone to come rescue me.
Um. Not that I wish to damage the perfect bloom of your paranoia—having a number of healthy, well-nurtured paranoias of my own—but you do know you can turn it off, don’t you? There are, so far as I’m aware, two options for the turning-off thing: you can either merely make it not make noise by setting it to ‘vibrate’ which means it will undulate embarrassingly against your leg—GADFRELLINGZOOKS I HAVE A RAT IN MY POCKET—oh, wait, it’s the phone. Or you can turn it off off, and then you’ll never know that you won that voucher for a free glass of champagne the next time you’re at Charlie’s, because of course you never check your messages.*** But this does at least mean that when you’re lying at the bottom of the muddy ravine you can ring someone with a rope ladder.†
BlueRose
Your comment about the phone lines always being bad . . . unless you have had fibre installed then your broadband is sent over your copper phone lines . . . if your standard phone line is crappy due to interference, then that has a direct affect on your broadband performance, it will likely manifest as random disconnects all over the place and sometimes trouble getting connected.
Also I recommend getting a powerfilter . . . it may spike badly enough over time to damage your router or anything else electrical plugged into it.
SIIIIIIIIIGH. . . . I thought I’d talked about this before. Well, I probably have, but given the several gazillion words that have passed over this opening page in the last few years. . . . Anyway. Yes, I know. This entire area sucks for landline service, and the wiring in my little cul de sac makes linemen burst out laughing and have to grab hastily at their poles before they fall off. This is probably sixty years old, one of them told me, wiping the tears of mirth off his face. There is not a thing I or any other mere citizen can do about it. It’s all owned by British Telecom and they don’t give a flying bugger. BT, just by the way, and I know I’ve told this story, informed me, when I tried to get Third House plugged back in a few years ago††, that there was no phone line to that house and I would have to pay several hundred pounds to have it installed. Pardon me. This is a 1930’s cottage in the centre of town and there is a phone jack in the kitchen. But that’s the kind of thoughtful, efficient mega-mono-incredible-o gigantic-o national corporation it is. There are regular rumours that we’re going to have our broadband area-wide upgraded—although meanwhile it’s getting worse because of all the new build and new people and more of them wanting broadband—but I’ll frelling believe it when I frelling see it, and even when it happens it’s not going to happen to my cul-de-sac till the very, very, very, very, very, very end. If they remember it at all. Grrrrr.
And I have a surge protector. I have several surge protectors. I even replace them.
Diane in MN
who uses a landline any more?
Well, I do.
Well . . . so do I. But don’t tell anyone. And my ways around my interference issues are of the tin-foil-hats-to-keep-the-alien-probes-out-of-my-brain level. I don’t care.
Despite the presence of multiple towers in our area, our cell phones are mostly non-functional at the house because we don’t get a signal. I assume we are in a hollow or something.
No. It’s the alien probes. (But don’t tell anyone.) It sodblastingly amazes me how often the old ‘we can’t get a signal’ is trotted out. Our horizons look like angry hedgehogs or secret military intelligence encampments with the numbers of phone masts and at this point most of the people I know—and I would include myself in this sad, misguided number—are addicted to their mobile phones and feel vulnerable and endangered (and cranky) when they can’t get a signal and check their Twitter feed regularly to see if @rhinestoneAllStars or @pinkcentifolia has answered their tweet yet. And it is a monthly wonderment to me—which is to say when the chirpy message about the bill comes in—what I pay for the privilege of . . . sometimes being able to pick up a signal. What is the deal here. And whatever it is I want to upgrade my package.
Ajlr
(We use Skype all the time at work, including holding 10-participant team meetings on it. Mostly, it’s fine.)
I CANNOT BEGIN TO IMAGINE A SKYPE MEETING INVOLVING TEN PEOPLE. I think I have to sit down. Oh, wait, I am sitting down. Maybe I’d better lie down.
Looking forward to hearing about The New Idea.
::Beams::
EMoon
If having us feel tortured with your Mystery Fun was the goal, then yes, I feel tortured. Silent but intense screams of agony are even now wafting across the land between here and the Atlantic and will soon be wafting across the ways, you-ward, to give you the satisfaction of knowing your torture plan was successful.
YAAAAAAAAY. Thank you, thank you, thank you. You cheer me immeasurably.
blondviolinist
::dies of curiosity::
::enters afterlife furious that premature death has prevented her from FINDING OUT WHAT ROBIN WAS TALKING ABOUT!!!::
There, there. Send me a forwarding address. In these digital, immaterial days I’m sure we can work something out.
serenityruler
As for the surprise, I’m intensely interested. Because the reader forum is detached from the blog itself, I’m not sure if the blog exists to create conversation or just to hear from Robin. It has to be her style and humour in the writing seeing as it isn’t excerpts from the books or exclusively book related subjects. Hmmmm….
The blog exists because my agent told me, five years ago, that all authors have blogs these days and I had to have one too. I am naïve. I thought this was more or less the literal truth. Feh. But it was too late by the time I found out she was exaggerating for effect . . . and it is certainly too late now. The blog is supposed to be a marketing tactic. It’s supposed to be getting Robin McKinley, Author, out there as a concept. It doesn’t (said my agent reassuringly) have to be literally marketing. Which is the good part. Unfortunately it—and you—are stuck with what I can do, as I keep saying. Days in the Life are what I can do.
However . . .
* * *
* Ask any of my friends. I Do Not Tease Well. Peter spent years being startled at having his head ripped off and handed back to him.^ I was teasing, he’d say. So? Your point would be? I would respond. Didn’t anyone ever teach you how to, you know, play? he’d say. I’m American, I’d say. Life is real! Life is earnest! Art is long, and Time is fleeting! And our hearts, though stout and brave! Still, like muffled drums, are beating! Funeral marches to the grave!^^ No messing around!
^ Remember we had spent exactly one weekend together when we decided to get married. There were lots of surprises.
^^ http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/a-psalm-of-life/ Maybe it’s just that I went to Bowdoin College. But Henry Wadsworth Longfellow is like this great informing spirit in my life. He’s not alone, mind you, but he’s sure as hell there. Great thundering humourless New England patriarchal Puritan thug. The Protestant frelling work ethic. Get me the Katahdin out of here.
Mind you, I do have time for Longfellow, possibly because (last I knew, maybe he’s come back), he is Not Fashionable. I am (almost) always willing to give a fellow unfashionable an extra break. Maybe it’s just that I went to Bowdoin. And am sort of from Maine. But Paul Revere? Hiawatha? Totally. I’m not at all sure that there’s much of Longfellow you can read for the first time as a grown-up without deciding you’d rather be weeding the cat or painting the dishwasher, but when I was a kid those stories with their fancy metrical shimmy were hot fudge sundaes with extra sprinkles.
** ::trembles and looks around anxiously::
*** Ask me how I know the never-checking-messages part.
† How I’m going to attach hellhounds to my body for the ascent I don’t know, but I’ll worry about that after the person with the rope ladder answers their phone.
†† It had stood empty long enough that the phone got turned off.
Roses
Milk Wine
I work at the Antique Rose Emporium in San Antonio, and Madame Alfred is one of my absolutely favorite roses. (: If people are looking for a fragrant climber, I always lead them to her, as long as they have the room. I put her on my parents’ front fence, and she blooms a treat.
The Antique Rose Emporium! Squeeeeee!
https://www.antiqueroseemporium.com/
The very last year I was in Maine, I . . . planted stuff. In a clearly prescient sort of way. Gardening had never really occurred to me, except as something that other people did.* I’ve said this (often) before: gardening in Maine, while other people certainly did do it, looked way too much like hard work. Gardening in Maine is the Xena Warrior Princess end, with evil gods and zombie unicorns and person-swallowing landscape and so on and I’m much more the Gabrielle before she started going to the gym end. If there are any zombie unicorns around I am definitely looking for somewhere to hide.
But I had a silly fit, and, that last summer, went around digging holes and putting things in them. Including three roses. Which actually, you know, grew, and produced flowers—I mean, roses, yipe. I have no idea where this might ultimately have led: my little lilac-enshrouded house was heavily shaded by not only the two ginormous lilac hedges but several boulders as tall as the house in the back, and a huge, gorgeous old maple tree in the front. I never was going to have a lot of opportunity to grow roses there—which is just as well, because the joke is that roses are annuals in Maine, and I’m pretty sure my three didn’t survive their first winter. But I might have learnt about the roses that will survive serious winter, and how to help them do it.
Instead I fell in love with an Englishman and moved to England and his two-acre garden where he spent hours every day eeeeeeeeep.** And after I got my breath back I started putting roses in left, right and centre, and learning the hard way about growing the beggars. To do this rigorously*** involved ordering catalogues—this was before the web began infiltrating us hoi polloi: I didn’t have a computer yet† let alone an internet connection—from every rose seller I could get the address of. This included several in the States. I don’t remember if The Antique Rose Emporium’s was one of the ones I had to draft in an enabling American friend to lay my hands on—quite reasonably a lot of plant sellers won’t send catalogues overseas when they won’t ship their plants overseas—but the whole ‘rose rustlers’ thing was very attractive††, and little old country cemeteries in England sometimes have drifts of ancient roses with great gnarly stems as big around as trees.
The Antique Rose Emporium is pretty much the only American rose nursery I pay attention to any more. If I want an American perspective on a rose, I look it up there first. And if I didn’t already have Mme Alfred, on the say-so of Emporium personnel, I’d be looking her up for details of her English performance record.
I originally bought her, back at the old house, by accident. Well, I was very young in terms of rose-growing, and Peter was no help, him and his frelling herbaceous borders.††† I think I’d actually ordered something else, and this thing arrived with a label saying ‘Mme Alfred Carriere’ and I thought, oh, fie, and heeled her in in a blank-ish spot, because I didn’t know what to do with her and I had a lot of other roses to plant, and I’d look her up and figure out what to do with her later. Only I never quite got around to it. And she rioted, as she will do, and took over a large swatch of that end of what had been the vegetable garden before my first rose-beds went in. I probably somewhere have photos of her pouncing over the trellis that several more modest climbers were dutifully scaling from the other side, and engaging Dortmund in mortal combat. Dortmund was another of my errors—I made a lot of errors—a single, cherry-red rose, white at the base of the petals, and not at all my sort of thing, except that I loved her. As I loved Mme Alfred. And her big double creamy flowers looked fabulous tumbling among Dortmund’s dazzling single red.
I totally had to have Mme Alfred even in my handkerchief-sized garden at the cottage.††† I put her in my first year there and her tallest stems started reaching above my neighbour’s two-storey-plus-attic roof a couple of years ago—and since I’m looking out my first-floor‡‡ office window, this is not a trick of perspective.‡‡‡ When she’s in flower I get gusts of her perfume through my office window. Yes. She’s one of the best.
Oh . . . and guess what I was doing today? Ordering roses. Remember I said I needed another climber? Just one climber . . . ?
* * *
* When I shared a house on Staten Island for a while, one of my housemates was a zealous, not to say fanatical, gardener. That back yard makes my tiny garden at the cottage look large in comparison but by golly it was INTENSIVELY PLANTED. It was impressive but somewhat intimidating—you could barely squeeze out the back door without being attacked by a radish.^ I felt I wouldn’t have the authority to boss so much plant life around and I was sure it knew it. I felt no impulse to try for myself.^^ And mostly I used the front door.
^ Or a banana-sized slug. Ewwww.
^^ Being assaulted by the occasional house plant was enough. I’ve had house plants catapulting off window sills most of my life.
** Speaking of zealous.
*** Is there another way? says the woman who is now waiting for her book on Japanese particles to arrive.
† shock horror
†† Even if the Emporium’s ‘our story’ about Mermaid as a rose that will withstand ‘droughts and blue northerns’ and thrive in the wilderness makes me feel like I’m living on another planet. I lose Mermaid. Repeatedly. She’s one of the crankiest madams ever to grace these mostly verdant shores. And I’m not the only one who thinks so: she has a bit of a rep around here. And then there are her thorns: which are long, curved and prehensile, the better to make you bleed. She’s very beautiful though. So we all keep frelling buying her when she conks out on us again.
††† The English cottage garden style has roses. Peter did have roses. He just didn’t have enough.
‡ I don’t have Dortmund now: she’s one of these great stiff angular things, about eight foot square.^ I do keep thinking about putting her in at Third House, but Third House’s garden is still small, it’s just bigger than the cottage’s.
^ She also has almost no scent. And you have to draw some lines somewhere. Sigh.
‡‡ Second floor in American English
‡‡‡ Although as I’ve said elsewhere, it’s surprising how many rather too large roses you can wedge into a rather too small garden if you’re stubborn enough. And don’t mind the sight of your own blood too much.
(Someone else’s) Puppy, con’t
So last Sunday Niall fixed me with a glittering eye* and suggested that I would Like. To. Ring. Handbells. Again. Next. Sunday. Of course. Of course I would. Of course.** I have so much free time. So Niall picked me up this evening and pressed the rocket-launcher button and we were in Helsinki almost before we’d finished our fascinating discussion of long-draught towers.***
Titus’ wife Andromache heard us coming† and opened the door with Haro†† under her arm. I came for the puppy, I said. I knew that, she said, and handed him to me. . . . a few hours later Niall picked me up off the floor and said, We’re here to ring handbells, you know.
Oh.
ARE WE TOO FRELLING CUTE FOR WORDS OR WHAT
Yes.
I am Fang. I am the Terror of Continents.
He's not biting me. I just happen to have a finger in his mouth.
One of the things I love about puppies is the way they don't have to be actually biting anything. They just like to hang out with their mouths open. Just in case.
AWWWWWWWWWWW. (Hey, nice ring.)
MORE AWWWWWWWWWW. As Andromache was prying us apart at the end of the evening she said, you can sure tell the dog people. --Oh?
The worst of it is that Jasper will be back next week so Titus and Niall won’t need me any more. Sob. †††
* * *
* I wonder if the Ancient Mariner rang methods on handbells? It could explain a lot.
** Of course I overslept this morning after the bells woke me up and I couldn’t get back to sleep. It’s not even a loud noise through two doors^ and a window. But it drags me out of sleep like the sound of a hellhound suffering urgencies does.
^ Although I keep forgetting and reopening my bedroom door. Since the room is only just big enough for my small double bed+ and a lot of bookshelves it is a trifle claustrophobic with the door closed.
+ Although the four-poster aspect adds loom#
# Which reminds me arrrrgh that I need mosquito netting by mid-April. If my bats were climbing out of their cosy little space under the roof into my part of the house in search of water last year . . . maybe I’d better have that netting by the end of March. If they’re thirsty they may come back early.
*** Nasty. Avoid long draught towers if at all possible.
† The retro-rockets need adjustment.
†† So I was cruising a Japanese boys’ names list because—because—why not, and the meaning of Haro caught my eye: wild boar’s first son. Oh my. I admit I haven’t found another list containing it to crosscheck with, but I still have to have it.
††† You know there’s only three regulars for Sunday nights with Titus. Maybe they’d like to ring major for a change? Which needs four?
I don’t even like little frelling terriers.
–Oh? Really? No one would ever know.
SHAAAAAAAAA. . .
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA AAAAAAAAAAAADOWS*.
AND IT’S THE 30TH OF JANUARY. NO. IT’S ALREADY THE 31ST. AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
AAAAAAAAAAA AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGGGGGHHHH.
* * *
* I did go to my voice lesson. I told you yesterday, I’m getting even stranger, bent over my computer twenty hours a day^, and I thought it might even be good for me to go get strung out in a different direction, even if SHADOWS is frelling due frelling tomorrow.^^ Also I only just started singing again last week and—I wanted to go. It’s been a slightly dubious week in terms of practise—there’s still crud in my throat and all this emotional-aspect stuff makes me kind of jumpy—if you manage to miss with the carving knife you go to A&E, get some stitches and a lecture, come home, mop up the blood, keep the bandage out of the bath, be a little careful of yourself till the stitches come out, and hey voila, there you are. Another interesting scar. But when you’re trying to patch yourself together from some kind of immaterial wound, where and how you put the stitches in, and what constitutes the kind of bath you should keep your damaged limb out of—and what exactly the limb is—is not so straightforward. So I’ve been singing sort of cautiously, and of course I’m wildly out of practise and I have no time.^^^ Also, my voice still keeps disappearing on me—less than it was doing before, but every time it does I’m convinced that this is The End and I’m too old to be reaching for this nonsense anyway.^^^^ Nadia waggled her eyebrows at me in that disbelieving-teacher way and said, now as I remember it we found out last week that the chief reason your voice was dropping out was because you were letting it get cut off from its air supply. Oh, I said. Um.
So she made me frelling breathe for a while, and connect, and all that really annoying stuff you shouldn’t NEED to be told over and over and over and over and over and OVER. But you do, because you’re a moron. And then she ran me up and down some scales and some exercises and kept reminding me to breathe and to connect, and I could actually feel the air sinking down and lying with this lovely rounded, grounded weightiness at the bottom of my pelvis, and every now and then I also remembered to let it out again, and carry my voice with it. I had already admitted that occasionally this week when I wasn’t convinced I still couldn’t sing and was therefore producing a self-fulfilling prophesy of squawks and silences, I’d made a few noises that were fuller and freer than what I’m used to . . . and with the teacher-magic she teased them out of me today, and convinced them to bring friends. I was singing back up at the top of my range again—which I haven’t even tried at home since before I was ill, because I have been too busy feeling fragile, convalescent and overworked—and I was loud—me! Old no-voice me!— the kind of loud your average local amateur choir would be happy to have yelling from its benches—loud the way I don’t sing, especially at the top end where my brain is busy saying, no, no, wait, we don’t do that. Nadia stopped me where she did not because my voice was failing, she said, but because my brain was closing me down.
But. There’s life in the old cow yet. Mooo. Yaay. And I came home again all exhilarated and threw myself into SHADOWS.
^ That leaves two for hurtling hounds and two for sleeping. Other crucial activities like eating chocolate can be performed coincidently while typing.
^^ Later today. Shut up.
^^^ And the twenty-fifth hour is for singing practise.
^^^^ I actually raised this with Nadia today. How big an embarrassing moron am I being, taking voice lessons at nearly-sixty? For some reason I’ve heard like half a dozen times this last week that sopranos lose their voices really early and it seems sort of fated to be hearing this over and over again when I’m convalescent from the throat infection that had stopped me singing altogether—and ten months off my sixtieth birthday.+ And she said, two things: there’s no reason you shouldn’t last a good while yet as a choir singer—it’s professional sopranos that fold predictably early because of the colossal demands they put on their voices—and you’re lucky—you’ve got all the alto notes too. If you need to slip down to sing alto, you can.
::Beams:: Good. On with the voice lessons, then.
+ And before you answer that, I added, let me say that while this is all contingent on you being willing to teach me, I’ve already figured out that I’m in it for the journey. Never mind that thirty years ago I’d’ve had no voice to train either, all this trying to bind yourself together in a seamless whole to produce a sound is fascinating, even if the resultant sound is nothing much.