Auction
So, about this auction.
New Arcadia’s bells need £10,000* worth of restoration work. We’ve raised about £1800** so far.
We need money. We need a lot more money. We have a couple of small grants coming, and at least one more promised; and a few ideas about how to squeeze some more change out of the locals; and one promise of a splashy charity do.*** But we need money. This is not polishing-up-the-brasswork restoration: this is crucial, necessary keeping the bells ringing work. We’re ringing on borrowed time now.
So Days in the Life is having an auction.
I’ve been meaning to get this auction off the ground for . . . um . . . months. But it takes, you know, DECISIONS, as well as the sheer frelling nuisance of finding copies of books I want to have in it.† As well as the courage to fess up to the sillier items.
So here is a rough guide to most of what’s going to be in it—there will be a surprise or two in the finished list—so you can sharpen your expectations and your bank balances†† and then I have to get the photos and the list together to send to Blogmom, and she’s going to create the actual machinery to do the thing.
* * *
First a few of Peter’s books. These are all OP in these editions and the sad truth is that most of them are OP generally, although you can (mostly) find them on Abebooks and so on. All books—mine and Peter’s—will be signed. Of course.
UK hardback of THE ROPEMAKER and its sequel ANGEL ISLE, as one item. This is Peter’s, ahem, epic fantasy. (ROPEMAKER is dedicated to MEEEEEEEEEE.)
American hardback of CHUCK AND DANIELLE, which is about a whippet who is scared of everything. It’s based on our smallest whippet—AKA wimpet—of the previous generation of hellish sighthounds. It’s adorable. Trust me.
UK hardback of TULKU, which might be my favourite of Peter’s books. Might. But it is the one I’d just read and been totally bowled over by when I met him for the first time. ::Swoon::
THE KIN, the big gorgeous American hardback single-volume edition of the four short books. The introduction begins: ‘It is Africa, about two hundred thousand years ago.’ And the numbers of homo sapiens sapiens are increasing, and they need to find more places to live. (And between chapters of the adventure there are the Oldtales, which are the stories the Kin tell each other about where they came from and why things happen the way they do.)
The UK hardback of TIME AND THE CLOCKMICE ETCETERA. Possibly Peter’s most criminally underknown, undersold and neglected book. (Grrrrr.) Illustrated by Emma Chichester-Clark and funny and clever and charming and very Peter, and Emma’s illustrations are perfect. Lovelovelovelove.
The UK Paper Tiger reprint of THE FLIGHT OF DRAGONS. A cult book and, as is almost the definition of cult books, drifts frustratingly in and out of print. Illustrated by Wayne Anderson.
* * *
And now mine. These are all American editions; most of them didn’t have British eds:
One hardback of THE DOOR IN THE HEDGE and one original paperback ed of the same. That first paperback cover—black, with some of the Twelve Dancing Princesses’ boats visible on their way to the ominous-looking castle in the middle of the lake—is still my favourite of its incarnations.
One hardback of IMAGINARY LANDS and again one paperback of the same. (The paperback’s cover art is by Thomas Canty, for any collectors out there.) This was the anthology I edited and I enjoyed the writing-letters-to-authors part but I am a rotten businesswoman. It’s probably just as well it never earned out. I’d’ve had to figure out how to pay everyone royalties. (It contains a story by Peter Dickinson. It also won the World Fantasy Award for best anthology that year, and I’m pretty sure James Blaylock won for best short story.)
One each of my two picture books, MY FATHER IS IN THE NAVY and ROWAN. While my father was in the Navy, the story is not autobiographical. ROWAN, as I’m fond of saying, is the only true piece of autobiography I’ve ever written†††. Except for the fact that it all happened when I was in my thirties and not when I was a little girl, it’s exactly how I bought my first whippet, Rowan.
A pre-Newbery first edition, first printing of THE HERO AND THE CROWN. (If you want an ordinary hardback reading copy of HERO, it’s still in print.)
And a first edition, first printing of the original hardback of SUNSHINE. With the dark-red background and the chandelier, and the embossed gold type. Still my favourite art.
* * *
A few non-auction, simply-for-sale items: Peter will donate to the bell fund any money from sales of THE WEIR, his book of poetry, made during the course of the auction. The limited edition hardback is £40 [US$63.33]; the paperback is £8 [US$12.66].
I have a small hoard of the original, long version of the ROSE DAUGHTER afterword; Greenwillow printed them off as booklets with the hardback cover art. The text is still on my website, but I’ll sell a few copies of the booklet if anyone would like them.
I’m also thinking that for anyone who would like to contribute to my and New Arcadia’s continued campanological happiness but doesn’t really have the disposable cash to get into bidding for a book, I’ll offer a small cartoon of a bell, and best wishes from the bells and the signature of the famous author/hellgoddess/artist manqué Robin McKinley. I’ll draw one of these and post a photo . . . when I get around to posting photos . . . so you can see what absurdity I’m talking about. But I can draw/write as many of these as anyone wants.
* * *
And, speaking of silly things . . . it gets sillier from here on. If this were Peter, he’d be writing snippets of poetry. But it’s not. I can’t write poetry to order—except bad haiku, which is going to be a contest some day, but not today—but I can draw, if you’re not too exacting about the definition of draw. I think I’ve told you that I thought the non-writing art form I’d get back into some day was drawing, not music.‡ So I’m thinking I might offer slightly—very slightly—illustrated copies of, say, one each DRAGONHAVEN, CHALICE and PEGASUS, which usefully feature a critter each suitable for mad rendering. These would, I can assure you, be unique.
Now we’re into the territory of stuff that I’m going to put discouraging bottom bid limits on because I’m half hoping no one will bid. First: a more elaborate sketch of a critter or critters, and while I will to a limited extent Take a Request from whoever pays the top bid, if you’re going to be too hard on me I’ll revert to the hellhounds. So, offered for your bidding: one cartoon of hellhounds/sundry critters.
Second: knitting. One square/potholder/faceflannel/washcloth with a ROSE in bas relief. What-you-call-it in knitting.
One square/potholder/faceflannel/washcloth with a PAWPRINT in it as above. I’ve downloaded patterns for both these from Ravelry, and I’ll post links when I put the photos up. The only remaining question is if I can follow simple directions without stabbing myself to death with my own needles.
And. third, the ultimate silliness: I’ll write you a piece of music. Details somewhat negotiable. I’ll write you a canon http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canon_(music) or fugue http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fugue starting with your name, for example—again, somewhat depending on how strict you are about your musical definitions—or I’ll set a couple of lines of poetry, or if you play an instrument I might conceivably have a teeny tiny clue about, I’ll write something for you and it. The bottom bid limit on this one is going to be extreme, because it would be a lot of work—even though I’d enjoy the flapdoodle out of having the excuse. But there’s nothing stopping several of you getting together and . . .
* * *
* Call it $16,000 American.
** About $2850 American.
*** Which we are going to be expected to sell tickets to. We’ve already had one pep talk, not to say exhortation, from Vicky about this. Since I can think of few things I could be worse at than hustling ticket sales, I suspect that everybody on my Christmas list is going to get charity revue tickets. You don’t want to know me this year.
† You may remember that Fiona was a heroine in this arena last time she was here.
†† We’re probably doing this by PayPal as the least harrowing for me.
††† . . . as fiction. The blog doesn’t count here.
‡ Life’s a freller. We knew that.
The Story thus Far
No, no! The other story!*
The one on the rose needle is TWENTY TWO rows long because I got INTENSE during a phone call again. So I shunted it off onto a not-in-use needle. Fiona is also going to teach me to UNKNIT next time. I had a look at the problem myself and thought . . . nooooooo.
Okay. It’s true. I like knitting. I just . . . like it. I like picking up my needles when my frelling computer is taking forever to load—or when I’ve just been put on hold. Arrrrgh. Even with knitting I hate being put on hold. Four years ago, or whatever horrifying number it has become, when I was beginning to gear up for starting a blog, I remember a publishing friend, Miranda, who knits, sending me to Yarn Harlot’s blog as an example of a blog with a Strong Voice (I having been bleating about not really getting it about blogging**) and I was flipping through and laughing somewhat nervously—since I did not knit—but I was briefly paralysed by an entry that began, as I recall ‘I don’t know what other people do when they’re put on hold’ next to a photo of some hideously complex and adorable knitted object. And I thought, I hate being on hold. Hmmmmm.
But I didn’t get any farther with that thought. Well, I hadn’t started the blog yet. I hadn’t cracked under the strain of all those knitters out there. I hadn’t foolishly asked a Crazed Yarn Fiend to be one of my mods.*** I hadn’t met Fiona. I admit that once I had met Fiona, I noticed—one could hardly not notice—that there tended to be a lot of knitting where Fiona was. But I didn’t really register this.
The Mobile Knitting Unit. Manifestly made for the task. It's an evening bag. Someone gave it to me because it has ROSES on it. I have used it like maybe once. It is now a crucial addition to my complex daily multi-house commute.
How times change.
* * *
* PEG II is positively pouring, streaming, cascading on at the moment, although this lovely if spectacularly draining phase won’t last. More’s the pity, mostly. If it kept on like this I might even make my original deadline, about which I’ve been making rude noises since last summer . . . but which would probably also kill me, about which see yesterday’s entry on the counterproductivity of offing me. So when it tapers off to a steady trickle all will be well and I will not be crumbling to a few little bits of water-smoothed bone, and will probably live to write ALBION.^ Today was one of the important scenes I haven’t been able to get on with because of that little plot difficulty I referred to. I thought I knew what happened . . . and wow, was I wrong. Well, the result was the same, but getting there was like . . . uh, pegasus rather than pogo stick. Or the world ending in fire rather than ice. Drat. What do I do with all these parkas?
And then I had to close down and go ring handbells. Handbells?! What the freaking frell are handbells and why am I supposed to care? Poor Fernanda was suffering an anaesthesia hangover and I was still out there in la-la-la land^^ so we got off to a somewhat uncertain start^^^ but plain bob major was eventually had by all.
The grey one is the first item produced by the Mobile Knitting Unit. Although I had to rip out the first half dozen rows during another intense phone conversation. I need to do something about my phone technique.
For my next trick I have to decide if I’m going to bring some stuff to sing with me when I go to take a cup of tea off Oisin tomorrow. I told you Nadia told me to keep working on Che Faro but to prepare a folk song too, for variety?# I’ve been vacillating between The Miller of Dee and The Minstrel Boy, but I’m probably better off with The Minstrel Boy, which is not only a full step lower, but less manic.## And if the plug’s been pulled out of the writing wellspring, I can risk composing again. That’s actually been there when the story-writing wasn’t, but I’m still new to composing and I’m not quite sure what goes on in the murky depths of my subconscious and I didn’t want to disturb the creative end that pays the bills. But there’s a little piano piece that keeps bursting out a bar at a time if Oisin isn’t there when I arrive—in which case I rush to his piano and pull out my sheet of manuscript paper—and did I tell you I’d started to write a piece for bass-baritone and organ with soprano accompaniment? Equal time, you know: sopranos get all the fancy stuff. It was originally for bass and organ only but I began to worry that you wouldn’t be able to hear it, except through the bottoms of your feet. I could always do two versions. . . .
^ Which I’m looking forward to. Even if ONE OF THE DAMAR NOVELS is the one making the most noise at the moment. No, no, this is normal for me—the stronger and wilder story-in-progress is, the more I need some other story prancing around like a hellhound with a stick and saying Play with me! Play with me! Which is also one of the supernumerary blecch-nesses of dead zones like the last couple of months: the other stories that I know are out there mostly stay out there. Even if I manage to engage with one, it doesn’t really mean it. It would rather go back to the story-bed and curl up and go to sleep.
Sigh.
^^ Or Balsinland. Note that none of my three Brits knew what ‘space cadet’ meant. Is it a significant cultural marker that Americans say ‘space cadet’ and Brits say ‘away with the fairies’?
^^^ No, no, no, you hold the little leather strap and shake the bell
# I told a friend this and she said, Oh? This Land Is Your Land? Buffalo Gals? No, I said quellingly. Beethoven. Haydn. Vaughan Williams. Britten. Get some couth, woman.
I ALSO NOW KNIT WHILE I'M WAITING FOR FRELLING WORDPRESS TO LOAD PHOTOS. Good shoes, huh.
## I keep forgetting to show you the shoes I wore to my first voice lesson. I wanted to omen^ this as well as I was able to.
^ Well it should be a verb. Clearly.
** Hey. It was a long time ago, okay?
*** And I was too naïve to realise that all of blondviolinist’s chirping about Bach was a ploy. That really it was all about knitting.
A Double Arrgh Day
No, triple arrgh.
But first. 16 November is retreating fast into the twilight of history. And I know at least one person is going to come
after me with a harpoon if I don’t tell you what was in those fancy parcels. Allow me a digression first however.* I’ve been doing the daily blog thing now for three and a bit years. I’m mostly used to the weirdness of yakking away about my life on line and in public and I haven’t (yet) woken up sweating at 3 am and thought Why did I tell them that?** But every now and then the extremeness of the weird clonks me one. It was one of those clonk moments when I realised that while I will blither on about my presents, because blithering is what I do, there’s no need to explain any of them, because regular readers will recognise them all instantly as familiar manifestations of McKinley’s personality.*** Starting with the posy of white roses sitting beside my computer.†
And moving on briskly to the revelation of contents. The only thing even faintly in need of elucidation is ASHES TO DUST . . . but it’s a book, isn’t it?††
For the rest, eh. The one Peter called a mistake is the pink one. Is the man mad? But, he said feebly, you already have a pink jumper. What does that have to do with anything? I replied.
The black cardigan with the banner of flowers thrown diagonally across its front is one of the divineliest pretty things I have ever seen. When Peter said he needed something to give me for my birthday I handed him the catalogue immediately. This one, I said. I’ve wasted a lot of digital whatever trying to get a good close-up of it; the flowers are embroidered, so they’re tactile as well as . . . pink. But the black background is that really shiny pima yarn which reflects like anything so my photos keep coming out with a grey haze over them.††† This one isn’t too bad.
And then . . . Stephen Sondheim. I’ve been mooning tragically over the complete score to SWEENEY TODD for 
years, for no good reason. Complete scores are grotesquely expensive but I could have afforded one. ‡ I think I thought it would be cheek in an odd sort of way: I like to include, say, Messiaen and Benjamin Britten in my composing influences, but that’s manifestly absurd and therefore harmless. Sondheim, for better or worse, is pretty much hands-on literally an influence, and getting my hands on a Sondheim score would be too much like taking myself seriously. But Sondheim turned 80 this year and is all over the place being feted and celebed‡‡—and has published FINISHING THE HAT‡‡‡, which has the delightfully explanatory subtitle: Collected lyrics (1954-1981), with attendant Comments, Principles, Heresies, Grudges, Whines and Anecdotes.§ For that I would want to read it even if I didn’t want to read it.§§ Peter asked me if I’d like HAT for my birthday and I said yes, and then I inhaled sharply and added: WouldyouliketobuymethecompletescoretoSWEENEYTODDtoo?
Which has had totally the expected effect§§§ of making me pull out some of my Finale [music software] files and start making terrible noises.# Which brings me to my triple-arrgh day.
Arrgh No. 1: Frelling Niall rang me this morning## and somehow managed to convince me to ring handbells tomorrow morning with Titus. Arrrrrgh. He’s pumping this ‘all my regular ringers are in Lapland chasing reindeer/ Somalia chasing gerenuk’ pretty dranglefabbing hard. He could have got Theophrastus together with Titus, it seems to me. Hmmph. Anyway. He is a bad man and I have no will power (which was the gist of my reply). This will be the third time I’ve rung handbells this week.
Arrgh No. 2: We were suddenly, unexpectedly, and somewhat dismayingly awash with good ringers tonight at tower practise . . . and it’s been months since I had a chance to ring Grandsire Triples and I totally frelled the freller. Totally. Frelled. Kill me now. Arrrrrgh. The second try was slightly better. A little. I also screwed up calling my siimple-minded touch of bob doubles. ARRRRRRRGH. But I was probably a little distracted tonight, because . . .
Arrgh No. 3: I took one of my longer and knottier terrible noises, washed, brushed and revised to make it more fearful, to Oisin today and he screamed a lot as he tried to play it.### He then fixed me with a large, glittering, Ancient-Mariner sort of eye~ and said, This needs to be orchestrated, you know. No! I didn’t know! I don’t know anything of the kind! Orchestrated! AAAAAAARRGH.
* * *
* You will allow me a digression, won’t you?
** That ‘waking up at 3 am’ is an oxymoron is beside the point.
*** And how weird is it to be hanging photos of your birthday presents on line at all?
† Well, why not white? We’ll get to something pink soon enough.
†† I used to read armsful of murder mysteries; not so much any more.^ But I like the ordinary-people-rising-to-extraordinary-circumstances thing, right? I’ve been talking about it in various of the recent spate of interviews. Which to my eye all mysteries are, pretty much by definition, even police procedurals (which I like, especially when the crack detective is a single mum with three kids or similar). And this book has had some very flashy reviews. We’ll see.
^ A digression for another evening.
††† Okay, a four arrgh day
‡ If I simply didn’t buy any books for a few months I’d recoup.
‡‡ Should that be ‘celebbed’ do you think?
‡‡‡ Which is a line from his SUNDAY IN THE PARK WITH GEORGE, George being George Seurat, the Impressionist painter. I will leave you to draw your own conclusions. Or you can read about it here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunday_in_the_Park_with_George
§ Another big gloppy Sondheim fan reviews it here: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/11/19/AR2010111903355.html
§§ And here’s an eyecatcher from a first browse. He’s talking about the song Anyone Can Whistle, which includes the lyric: What’s hard is simple,/ What’s natural comes hard./ Maybe you could show me/How to let go,/ Lower my guard . . . and he writes: ‘ . . . musical-theater rhapsodists have appropriated it as my personal statement. . . . To believe that “Anyone Can Whistle” is my credo is to believe that I’m the prototypical Repressed Intellectual and that explains everything about me. Perhaps being tagged with a cliché shouldn’t bother me, but it does, and to my chagrin I realize it means that I care more about how I’m perceived than I wish I did. . . .’ Yep. I know about this. And he gets a lot of points in my account-book for saying so.
§§§ No, not practising my Angela Lansbury as Mrs Lovett imitation in the mirror
# Almost as terrible as my Angela Lansbury imitation
## Almost late enough. I wasn’t very asleep.
### I only do it to annoy because I know it teases. Actually, I don’t, but I do enjoy the screaming.
~ Unhand me, greybeard loon!
Frelled Out of My Own Mouth
I tweeted this a few hours ago:
I AM SO FRELLED. (I’m just back from piano lesson w Oisin. & we made a DEAL. It was HIS idea. I cld hv said NOOOO. If I had any SENSE. . .)
It’s all the Computer Men’s fault really.* I’ve got all expansive and unbalanced by having Finale back.** It makes me foolish. It makes me feel as if I’m musical. It makes me not notice tiger pits till I’ve already fallen into them. Quite early on in the conversation this afternoon Oisin asked if I’d managed to get hold of the Cherub.*** Yes! I said, all bouncing and gleeful. Yes! Yes! He sounds nice! He sounds much more sensible and clued-in to things like elderly talent-free women who have strange ideas of fun than any grotesquely over-talented twelve-and-half-year-old ought to! —I was busy setting up my laptop on one of the slightly-less-teetering piles of sheet music† on the corner of Oisin’s Steinway as I said this.
In all truth I haven’t got very far in splatting Vague Noodly Piano Thing onto Gotterdammerung, but that’s partly because I’ve managed to forget a lot of Finale’s little ways in the several weeks since I’ve been able to use it. The Only Thing Worse Than Finale Is Having No Finale. Sigh. I had, with great pain and difficulty, managed to switch myself about three-quarters back to manuscript paper again††—and it’s not like I never use it: I pretty much always start on manuscript paper so I don’t have to know before I begin what key and time signature I’m in, which Finale demands as part of the votive sacrifice to deliver the supplicant to the manuscript-paper screen. And now here I am, staring at the blindingly annoying Finale opening screen††† with a little flutter of expectation again. The flutter is trying to remind me that I will spend at least two-thirds of my time using my composing software trying to find what I need in the help files, and screaming. . . .
Anyway. I had a bit of Vague Noodly to show Oisin today: enough to demonstrate I’m trying.‡ It always makes such a difference to hear a live person play something: this live person anyway. ‡‡ So when he asked how much of it I thought was down on paper/screen I said with self-astonishing firmness, about a third. If you’d asked me that question before I heard Oisin play it I would have said: Unh. Some.
Excellent, said Oisin. Then I won’t ask you any questions now. But I’ll have lots of questions when you bring me the rest.‡‡‡
Still thinking about this ominous ‘lots of questions’ thing I follow Oisin into the kitchen for the ritual cup of Friday-afternoon tea. And am immediately distracted by the box of Octopus and Chandelier libretti sitting on the counter. Ooh. Shiny. I admit to having very mixed feelings about the Octopus and the Chandelier: I’m sure the experience is going to be very good for my character. And . . . think of the blog material. I should have a shoo-in post every (rehearsal) Sunday for four months. This is not to be scorned. However there is still this little Singing in Public impediment to my perfect enjoyment: the footlights may occasionally reach even to the back row of the chorus, don’t you think? It worries me. And I am going to sing. I am not going to do the old moving-lips-no-sound-comes-out ruse. Well. Not deliberately.
This concatenation of concepts probably explains why I was insane enough, when Oisin said, I’ll make you a deal: you sing for me and I’ll write you a blog entry, I said you’re on. You’re what? He’s what?§ I WHAT?
I’m trying to tell myself this is a good thing. I spent most of my year with Blondel whining about how if I weren’t such a coward I’d take advantage of having an experienced professional accompanist available every Friday afternoon for something besides cups of tea. Gah. And I’m still whining about it. It’s a good thing I’ve had my hand forced. It is. But if you don’t hear from me next Friday, it’s because I’ve run away to Goa.
PS: Niall made it to tower practise tonight. Therefore I’m letting him live.
* * *
* Archangels are very untrustworthy on this corporeal plane. They have secret super-righteous agendas concerning the perfectibility of the human animal which any mortal knows is tosh. But it can be very uncomfortable to be caught in some piece of heavenly apparatus.^ OW. LEGGO. DOESN’T FIT.
^ I love the idea that angels and computers have a connection. But then I have a sick, twisted sense of humour.
** Gotterdammerung is, at present, working so beautifully I hardly know where to put my crankiness.^ She opens. She closes. She moves briskly from one programme to another. She does not hang. She does not crash. She does not produce pop up boxes describing anatomically impossible events and berating me for failing to have my cheezfammers aligned with my gortamflurds. Don’t I know that there are always compatibility problems with Cheezfammer 2.1 and the entire Gortamflurd empire? There is, of course, a bug fix for Cheezfammer 2.1, but your internet security Rottweiler-wolverine programme will have kittens if you try to download it.
At the moment Gotterdammerung even has Outlook cowed^^, but this happy condition probably can’t last.
^ Don’t worry. I’m sure I’ll find something.
^^ Or possibly axolotled.
*** Note that Oisin actually calls him the Cherub. Poor Cherub. I’m going to have to find a fierce manly name for him. Attila. Vlad. Cuchulainn.
† I’m always delighted when Oisin’s phone rings while I’m there. I immediately start rootling shamelessly in the nearest pile.
†† Oisin sniggered when I said this. I could see he was trying not to. But he did.
††† I don’t care who he is. He’s not Mozart. Why don’t we get to choose our opening screen shot? At Finale’s prices, we ought to get a free butler with every order, to bring us cups of freshly made hot tea while we slave over our virtual manuscript paper, discovering that we guessed wrong about the time signature and the home key. The butler could carry a hip flask as standard.
‡ I’m now in a quandary about Ring a Ring of Roses. I couldn’t cope with four voices (SATB) and organ stark and alone on paper, so I had this dazzling flash of creative imprudence and started writing it for four voices and percussion. Whack, thwap, thud. I may have told you that, did I? But now . . . here is Finale again. I could do two different versions. The dull thud version and the trying-to-make-my-organist-piano-teacher-crazy version. Like Verdi reusing one of the best bits of Otello in his staggeringly fabulous Requiem. Well, maybe not quite like that.
‡‡ He phrases by ear. How does he do that?? But it means that what has been blundering around in my skull looking for the exit and whimpering, suddenly looks all solid and purposeful and sounds like its existence has meaning and a future.
‡‡‡ Is this a good thing or a bad thing for your music teacher to say to you? No, no, don’t tell me, I don’t want to know.
§ He immediately started caveatting at me that he wouldn’t necessarily write me a guest blog immediately. Ah, but there he’s on my ground. I’ll get him.
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.