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Bleeeeerg etc
It has not been a good week, barring skylarks. You heard about Monday on Monday. Computer Men said they would return yesterday, bearing Peter’s computer and my printer, but they have decided they are coming tomorrow. They will, I hope, be able to return me to printability* here at the mews, but I have a Friday more Fridayish even than usual tomorrow, and so I will not be available to enable them to dedragon** the cottage desktop of its various little ways, like denying exit from the nuraddin address*** and refusing to open Windows all the way, so an open window scampers around the monitor like someone playing hopscotch. Nor can they investigate why the Walkperson refuses to take both CDs of an opera instead of merely overwriting the first with the second. Hey, it’s the same title, isn’t it? And the ‘disc 2’ probably gets lost after the repetition of the credits, containing as they usually do sixteen sopranos, a counterbassoonist, and the kookaburra for the mad scene at the end of the second act. I want my Gluck.†
Tuesday I bollixed my voice lesson. Whimper. I half knew I was going to; I was way too tired, I’d found two small but sordid inconsistencies in PEGASUS that I had to solve in exactly the same amount of space they were made in—your publisher will probably let you get away with resetting a very occasional line at the page proof stage, but that’s the limit—and the awful truth is that the five-star marketing plan is scaring me.†† So I went in there jumpy, distracted and underrehearsed, and sang like a person who was jumpy, distracted and underrehearsed, and it was pretty discouraging.†††
Wednesday I went to Ditherington bell practise for our first meeting on the sad new schedule of only second, fourth and fifth-if-any Wednesdays . . . except that it didn’t happen. Niall, Denis and I showed up . . . and spent an hour and a half ringing handbells—Niall never goes anywhere without his handbells—in a freezing cold transept because there was no one else there. I went home, emailed Marilyn and Wild Robert, saying, what happened?, and got a really annoyingly chirpy email back from Marilyn with a copy of the email she had sent all of us about the fact that there was only one Ditherington practise this month. Which Niall and I had both failed to write down.‡ Denis isn’t on Marilyn’s list; his honour remains unimpugned.
And I didn’t have a guest post.‡‡
Today because Colin cancelled and there were no handbells this evening‡‡‡ I decided to give myself a half day off from reading proofs and finish, or semi-finish, or get through draft 2B of, Frost and Fire and Ice to take to Oisin tomorrow: I will probably die of a broken heart if I frumple two music lessons in a row.
I’m a good girl: I hit ‘save’ a lot. I’d been working three hours or so, and was getting pretty tired, but I was also near the end of draft 2B and was feeling reasonably chirpy—ready for a hurtle, a cup of tea, and a return to page proofs. I was pretty sure when Oisin played it back to me tomorrow I’d go, yerp, what was I thinking of, at intervals, but that’s okay. I had something down to work with, and there were actual bits of it I liked. And I’d quite recently hit ‘save’ when I got an error message saying that Windows had a fit of the vapours coming on and was going to close Finale down. Yah boo sucks, I said, as it went KACHUNG off the corner of the piano, but, no big deal, I prodded it with a stick after a minute and woke it up again. And started resignedly putting the last few minutes’ work in again.
And noticed that there was kind of more missing than I was expecting . . .
It had eaten my entire afternoon’s work, despite the fact that I had ‘saved’ about ten minutes before the crash.§
I wasted about fifteen minutes trying to find a ‘contact us’ on the Finale web site that was a ‘contact us’ instead of a come on for lists of dealers and how you can follow them on Twitter and Facebook§§ or join their blog—GAAAAAAAAH—and then I emailed Oisin and a Wise American Friend, both of whom have suggestions for the possibility of ferreting the saved version from the bowels of the beast . . . but I still had to hurtle, read proofs, and write a blog entry, and I’m also a coward. A, furthermore, incompetent coward.
Maybe I’ll try their suggestions now.
Maybe I’ll just go to bed.§§§
* * *
* To the extent that I am ever ungleblarging printable
** Debug is nowhere near powerful enough
*** System Administrator says you’re a bad person and must not be allowed to run at large among the innocent populace
† I want my Gluck Orfeo with my Marilyn Horne and my other Gluck Orfeo with my Janet Baker—if the Walkperson can’t cope with 2 CDs of one opera it’s really going to have palpitations if I expect it to take on more than one recording of the same opera.
I can’t remember now when I watched the much-hyped Met production of Orfeo ed Eurydice on Sky. Recently. I do try to be colour/gender/poundage blind—if someone can sing and act I will avert my attention from the fact that they won’t see forty or a size twelve again, and are playing a tubercular seventeen-year-old. But the k d lang look wasn’t doing our short-Coke-machine-shaped Orfeo any favours, whose acting also had a strong Coke-machine flavour. However I would have encompassed all of this—since she did have a big, thick, rich—one might almost say chocolaty—voice . . . until we got to Che Faro Senza Eurydice^, an aria so familiar that even people who wouldn’t know an opera if it bit them on the leg^^ often recognise^^^, when she kumquatted the ending. What? —Yes, my reaction exactly. WHAT? You mess with Che Faro, I hunt you down and kill you. A Metropolitan Opera mezzo can’t possibly be unable to hit a top F, for pity’s sake??+ So what happened? Goblins in the TV crew?
^ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=brGYq97Of6w
^^ And often assume it wants to when it’s only trying to, you know, play . . .
^^^ What is that? —Wasn’t it that ad for drain cleaner?
+ Even I have a top F, although no one in their right mind would call my voice thick, rich or chocolaty. I’ve been trying to ignore questions of range because as soon as I’m aware of being above C-above-middle-C I start closing myself down from sheer funk. But Blondel pointed out this week that as soon as I have a reliable G I can sing Dido’s Lament. Oh. Okay. Goal. Goals are good. Meanwhile, speaking of goals and Gluck, I have a new one: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paride_ed_Elena
I am shamefully unfamiliar with all but about four of Gluck’s operas—the fact that he seems to have written almost as many as Handel is a trifle daunting—and I knew nothing about Paride ed Elena till Radio Three played one of Paride’s arias the other day which stopped me dead in my tracks. Want. To. Sing. That. It will be good if I can manage to find the frelling music; it’s not something that rolls to the top of your average search engine.
†† And then there’s stuff like the latest edition of SUNSHINE which I’ll show you as soon as I have a copy in my hot little hand. But due to Screw Ups By Persons Who Shall Remain Nameless^, this is having to be pushed through at the speed of a hellhound after a hellbunny, and I fall over too easily. This evening I got an email from my editor saying, hi, we need this cover text now. I sent it back to her in about an hour. But I’m still shaking like a leaf.
^Neither me, Merrilee, nor the editor in charge, which is all you need to know
††† And it may be just as bad next week, because I’ll only have just turned in the PEGASUS corrections on Monday, and will still be looking around trying to see where I left my life. I did tell Blondel that my so-called life has spells like this. But the week after that I’m planning to be brilliant. Um . . .
‡ We ring too many handbells. Really it’s bad for you.
‡‡ I have mentioned this on the forum, but just so no one gets the wrong idea, NO, even if no one sends me any guest posts between now and the 2nd of November, I am not going to keep printing bits of PEGASUS on Wednesdays and Saturdays.
‡‡‡ So last night was a good thing really.
§ And while this is not in the same category of meltdown, as I was typing that sentence, my email pinged. And when I went a few minutes later to look and see if anything cool was coming in^ I discovered that someone I have already put on my ‘blocked senders’ list has frelling come through again, as he/she has done several times already. What the bleeding (*&^%$£”!!!!!!
^ The Tyranny of the Ping
§§ Bite me
§§§ And furthermore Philip Langridge died. He actually died last Friday, but I didn’t hear about it till Monday and only caught up with the obituary yesterday.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2010/mar/07/philip-langridge-obituary
He was, speaking of acting singers, an actor. Last time I saw him he was scaring you silly as the witch [sic] in Hansel and Gretel: an opera I’ve never had much use for, partly because it’s usually played for a high smarm level. Not this one. More Bluebeard’s Castle than Goldilocks. I have him on CD singing Britten’s Peter Grimes and the weak, venal captain in Billy Budd . . . both of which are so brilliantly evoked I find them hard to listen to: I like the occasional speck of dawn in my unrelenting darkness. I love Britten, but he was maybe a little too good at the snake pit that is humanity.
I never met Langridge, nor know anything about him but what I heard in a few interviews, but I feel like I’ve lost a friend.
Another day like today
I can so do without days like today and furthermore I have frelling proofs to read. It started with getting out of bed later than I wanted to, but this happens a lot when the ME is using me as the birdie in a game of killer badminton, so it’s a kind of groan-where-are-my-glasses-groan-clothing-groan-greet-hellhounds-EEEEK*. I’m usually a lot more awake after the greeting-hellhounds ritual.**
So this morning I was in the middle period where I’ve got some clothes on and the curtains open and am wondering if I’m feeling strong enough yet to face sorting through the 5,637 catalogues that have come in the post, when I heard the beep-beep-beep of a commercial vehicle backing up the cul de sac.
Among my many pet hates are included delivery companies. The Royal Mail is dying because its ineptitude beggars belief*** and nine million delivery companies have sprung up like third cousins twice removed around an elderly emperor without a designated heir, and equally in it only for the money. The thing I like best about these malevolent tapeworms is the way they will give you no indication of when they might arrive—used to be they’d say morning or afternoon, which is at least dealable-with when you’re not a frelling office with a receptionist and you have hellhounds to hurtle, although even without hellhounds staying in for twelve hours for a sodding delivery would drive me bonkers.
The thing I like second best about these jokers is the way they say, oh, you can designate a safe location, we only need your signature in blood† and a small token as hostage—say the deeds of your house. But in the ensuing negotiations†† you discover that they don’t like your designated safe location. Never mind that you’re already signing their bloody triplicate form agreeing that you take responsibility for what happens to your parcel if it is so left . . . no, no, no, they couldn’t possibly, it needs at least six padlocks and a major in the SAS with an extra badge in martial arts on guard. FRELL.
I had just reached this stage with this latest gang of rice-krispie-brains when the weekend happened. And now here is a truck with their logo backing up my cul de sac. I may not have to kill anyone††† this week after all.
Among other distractions throughout this latest engagement with the enemy has been wondering what the hell this object is that it needs its own SAS major. Malevolent tapeworms with rice krispies for brains won’t tell you, which is always one of the most extraordinary aspects of these cases. They’ll deliver the thing—if you finally force them to the wall—but they won’t tell you what it is.
So I signed for it, exchanged pleasantries with the driver‡, took this incredibly large box into my (incredibly) small kitchen, and stood staring at it for a moment. No clue. No frelling clue. It didn’t weigh much for its size either.
I opened it.
Within, swathed in festoons of bubble wrap, was . . . a £15 knapsack I’d bought on sale. Fifteen. Pounds. Small nylon knapsack. And have I mentioned that this particular delivery company, for a mere additional ten pounds, will allow you to designate a specific delivery time?
The day has been kind of downhill from there. Computer Men were here for about two hours . . . but they have to come back.‡‡ I spent an hour and a half talking to Merrilee about the Marketing Plan.‡‡‡
And I went bell ringing. Tonight was the monthly Old Eden practise—the one when I phone round the day before stimulating people to come—and I don’t know if my touch was off or what but I managed to extract fewer high-pitched squeals of agreement than usual. Niall gave me a ride over tonight and I said nervously that I hoped we had an extra bloke or two show up or as second-in-command and, furthermore, not a mere wisp of a thing, as are our two beginners and Old Eden’s tower captain§, I’d find myself round the back end and while the tenor is not wholly lost to virtue the five is possessed by a remarkable assortment of demons. All of Old Eden’s bells are possessed by demons, but if you have to argue with your bell anyway and you’re not the world’s cleverest ringer, you’d rather have a lighter bell. Fortunately the gods, deciding that they’d had enough fun with me today, were kind, and not only Roger§§ but Colin§§§—and Anthea—were there. This responsibility thing is a pain.# But I do like being one of the ringers who ‘catches hold’ when some beginner needs bringing on. And we did zorple through a plain course of Stedman.
All right, all right. Must read proofs.
* * *
* Hellhounds are always very glad to see me in the morning. Hurtle now? they say. Hurtle? Put that apple/pear/grapefruit down, you’re always saying menopause means a higher plane of existence in which food is unnecessary^, which indeed we understand very well^^, we be of one blood, thou and I, even if you’re a funny shape and really slow, let’s hurtle.^^^
^Nobody asked me if I wanted to move to a higher plane of existence
^^ No you do not! I never saw two less menopausal creatures in my life! And all your ribs stick out!
^^^You have arranged about the weather, haven’t you? We feel you are not fulfilling this important duty of dog ownership quite adequately lately.
** Hair standing on end optional. No, wait, maybe I just forgot to comb it.
*** And I have no idea who’s at fault, and I don’t know enough about it to speculate. I only know there are some very nice posties out there, as well as some utter frelling ratbags . . . and an administration clearly made of mouldy string and old carburettors.
† And be sure to press hard, it’s a triplicate form.
†† You can have the paper clip off the deeds to my house, okay?
††† Snap! Crackle! SQUASH!
‡ Most of the drivers for these frelling delivery companies are nice.^ It’s just one more way the admin likes to mess with your head. —Is she crazy enough yet? Is she ready to commit disembowelment on sight? Great! Send her Smilin’ Joe with his fuzzy puppy photos!
^ Except the occasional really scary serial murderer one.
‡‡ Of course. Computer Men always have to come back.
‡‡‡ This conversation degenerated, as they usually do, to me moaning about how it’s the books that matter, promote the frelling books, the whole author as live entertainment thing is all wrong. I’ve decided that it was actually my good fairy who arranged for volatile, overreactive, digestively catastrophic hellhounds. They’re the best excuse for not touring I’ve ever had. Even if it does make me look like one of those pathetic old ladies whose every waking thought is in adoring response to her pet whatever(s). Well. Um . . .
§ Who is tower captain only because she’s our only local, she doesn’t ring much, and weighs maybe seventy-five pounds dripping wet. Wearing full scuba gear with air tank.
§§ Who said that he was responding to a frantic phone call. Hey, I said. Urgent, maybe. Not frantic.
§§§ And Colin turned to me after my stumble through conducting a touch of bob doubles, with a frown on his face—and I cowered, even though Colin is a sweetie and wouldn’t dream of scowling at you merely because you’re a hopeless imbecile—and said, these bells are a lot of work, aren’t they?
# And Vicky will expect a complete report when she gets back from Timbuktu this week.
In Which Our Heroine* Is Hysterical**
Computers are evil. Computers are death. Computers are bane and abomination. I HATE COMPUTERS. HATE. HATE. HATE.
You may possibly remember that last Friday I had semi-promised you the first part of the lullaby from PEGASUS this Friday—?
The day began badly. I was just strapping hellhounds in to the rocket launcher when the phone rang, and it was Peter saying, in a commendably calm tone, that if I get any emails from UPS, not to open them. Peter actually uses UPS, so it was plausible. . . .
Yes. Plausible but hostile. By the time hellhounds and I returned from pounding a little more Hampshire countryside back into place again*** the Trojan horse had burst like a piñata . . . all over the innards of Peter’s computer, which is, for the moment anyway, an ex-computer. One of Asmodeus’ minions is going to fetch it away on Monday and see if any of his incantations† can recall it from the land of the dead. Peter, poor man, has spent most of the day on the phone . . . first trying, under instruction, to limit the damage, which I gather was a bit like trying to claw the tide back from ebbing with a fork, and then trying to convince his laptop that it wasn’t just a typewriter with a screen, it could do computery things, like check email and ask Google questions. But it kept wringing its little memory modules and saying no, no, no! Beat me, spurn me, feed me to hellhounds††, but don’t make me go on line!
Meanwhile I had a piano lesson this afternoon. I’ve actually written the, or anyway some, music for the second and (so far as I know) final part of the lullaby this week, but I trust my own judgement even less than usual with the ME roaring in my ears, so I wanted to take both the corrected first part††† and the new second part to Oisin. He did print it out for me, and I should have just made the final adjustments with a pen, but you know, you have this fabulous, inbloodysanely complicated software for which your husband paid rather a bomb, you want to use it. . . and there was no going back after I’d written a phone number, a succinct shopping list, and the first bar and a half of a new piece across the top of Oisin’s print out.‡
My printer at the mews is one of the reasons I need an Asmodeus minion to pay a visit, and Peter’s ancient but reliable printer is so old that the pages it produces are really not good enough for scanning. So I brought the mews laptop—which is the one with Finale‡‡, my composing software, on it—back to the cottage tonight. And plugged it into the cottage printer, which is the good printer, except when it’s in a bad mood, fired up Finale, and prepared to print out.
Found new hardware, said my computer.
There was an error in gijjeebling with the new hardware, said my computer. New hardware may not work properly.
Then the Install New Hardware Wizard popped up. Go away, I said and closed it.
So I went into ‘printers’ and made sure that the correct printer was ticked. It was. Listen, I’d had Computer Men install the freller on all sixteen‡‡‡ of my computers; I knew it was there. It was there! It was theeeeere!
Went back to Finale. Opened lullaby, hit ‘print’.
Document failed to print, said my computer.
ARRRRGH, I said. I deleted the print queue.
It was now seven-fifteen, and I have to go bell ringing in fifteen minutes. I rebooted.
Found new hardware, said my computer. We don’t like this new hardware. We don’t like its shoes. We don’t like its haircut. The Install New Hardware Wizard popped up again. And cleared its throat meaningfully.
I closed it down again.
I tried to print the lullaby again.
Document failed to print, my computer said again. Gleefully.
The Install New Hardware Wizard leaped out of the shadows, waving exuberantly. Let me solve all your problems! I can go on line and download everything you could ever need!
I’m not in a very good mood about downloading stuff from the internet right now, I said. Let’s try something else.
Then give me the Mystic Install Printer Disk! said the wizard joyfully.
Yes. I found the Mystic Install Printer Disk. Now this is where you think that it’s all going to be all right after all, don’t you? You’d be wrong.
I put the Mystic Disk in the little drawer. It spun. It loaded . . . almost.
It was within a fingernail paring’s breadth of finishing when a Large Red Error Box with Lots of Red Xs in it exploded over the install box, saying, Some Crucial Windows XP Files Have Been Overwritten And You Are in Deep Dog Crap. Give Us Your First Born Child, No, Wait, You’re Too Old For That One, Give Us Your Windows XP Professional Install Disk And We May Save Your Ass. Or, Then Again, We May Not.
Meanwhile, the almost-loaded mystic printer disk is making small flailing motions and trying to boost itself up to peer over the edge of the Large Red Error box. Wait a minute! it says. I was here first! Let me finish!
We Are Windows. We Rule. Get Out of the Way Before We Step on You Like An Outdated Motherboard. Crunch.
I take the mystic printer disk out of the little drawer and put the Windows XP disk in.
Hey, says the New Hardware Wizard. That was bloody rude. Cancel these Windows yobos, whoever the hell they think they are. Put the mystic printer disk back in the drawer. Now.
Don’t Touch Anything, said the Large Red Error Box, or The World Will End in Fire and Peripherals.
Blow me, said the wizard. Let my mystic disk finish loading, or I’m going to crumdang the josselwidgers, and then you’ll be sorry.
You wouldn’t, said the Box.
I would, said the wizard.
At this point I have about eleventy hundred little ‘open’ boxes in hydra-headed heaps on the what-you’re-up-to bar at the bottom of the screen. None of them will close. And nothing else works either. I hit ctrl-alt-delete and the Programme Tyrant box stomps into view, cracking its whip.
Make them behave, I say.
The Programme Tyrant strives mightily for a minute or two but the wizard and the Box are locked in mortal combat. Ow! Dranglefab! WHAP! BLANG! THUMP!
So I turn the whole thing off. CRASH. I can frelling hear the components clanking together like badly rung bells.
And then I run/totter off to tower practise.
So the story thus far: I need Blogmom to load the sheet music to the lullaby on the blog. This means I have to print it out, scan it back in again, and tack it on as an attachment to an email, and send it to her. I have, thus far, done none of these things.
Tune in tomorrow for the next exciting episode.
* * *
* You may replace this with ‘matriarch’ if you prefer
** Yes, I do read too much Wondermark.^ http://wondermark.com/ Wait, is it possible to read too much Wondermark?
http://wondermark.com/601/ Ahem, says she who eats everything with chopsticks.
^ Does he do matriarchs? I don’t remember matriarchs
*** Landscape gets uppity if you don’t tramp on it regularly. See, you’re helping save the planet when you go for walks. It’s not just a question of your waistline.
† Asmodeus is expecting Peter to provide his own dragon’s blood, eyelash of salamander and powdered mandrake root. At the prices they charge, I feel these should be included.
†† Ha ha ha ha ha. Although you don’t know, they might have a taste for computer components.
††† And a good thing I did, since I’d managed to make one of the corrections backwards
‡ Like we aren’t frelling drowning in second sheets, from all those blank-backed galley proofs. We have scratch paper for the next million years.
‡‡ Having now had it, used it, and been slapped around by it for a year and a half or so, I like the name no more than I did in the beginning. It said, You’ve had it! You’re finished!, a year and a half ago, and it still says, You’ve had it! You’re finished! to me now.
‡‡‡ Well. Four. And one of ’em’s retired.
Midnight
That was frelling midnight that just struck . . . oh GODS no that was midnight HALF AN HOUR AGO, that was midnight thirty that just struck, I was going to stop and hit the blog half an hour ago . . . and I’m still sitting here in a daze of PEGASUS. Oh, ungleblarg, midnight . . . and that means one less/fewer* day left before The Eighth of October. Absolute Final Do-or-Die Due Date. Aaaaugh. Aaaaugh.
Colin last night and Vicky tonight both asked me if I’d finished the proofs. Proofs? What proofs? Proofs? Oh—those proofs. The ones that I had my head very far down over this time last week—so far down that I was doing things like reading them at weddings I’d be ringing handbells at in another few minutes and tower practises whenever somebody hadn’t said my name. Oh yes, I said airily, I got them in on Monday, which is when they were due, because I’m just so professional.**
NOW ALL I HAVE TO DO IS FINISH THE NEW NOVEL.
I can’t decide whether things like music lessons*** and bell practises† serve to maintain some tenuous grasp on life outside novel-finishing†† or whether they’re just trying to force me to recognise that the Eighth of October is coming too soon and I should be reading the want ads for grocery cart corral attendants.
Stay tuned for future bulletins on this compelling subject. . . .
* * *
* I can usually do less/fewer, but not at midnight-thirty when I’m still working . . . although the fact I can’t is probably an indication that it is a good thing I have now stopped working.
** I love that word. Professional. It has such a shining veneer of snappy sharp briefcases containing snappier sharper laptops and squared-up tidy inboxes each and every page of whose contents is known and in process by the person responsible. You send your proof corrections in on time and no one has to know that you nearly have to pole vault to get to your desk on account of the Open Plan Inbox which tends to accumulate around it, or that your idea of a sharp briefcase is an elderly canvas tote bag that says Blue Hill Books on it, which will no longer come white again even when it’s washed, and you’re afraid to push this issue for fear of obliterating the logo, whereupon it would become a dirty white cotton tote bag with a hill-shaped smudge on one side.
And, speaking of laptops . . . about thirty seconds before I had to rip out of here to go to my piano/mutable music lesson Azmodeus^ showed up with my laptop, and in a state of considerable suppressed glee, the glee being Azmodeus’, that is, not the laptop’s, although the laptop was probably expressing a certain amount of silent solid-state relief. So, guess why my laptop has been growing increasingly erratic the last few weeks? Because the keyboard base was full of crumbs. And Azmodeus and his minions have replaced the frelling keyboard.
I was at this point, I believe, supposed to collapse in embarrassment and shame. Crumbs in the keyboard!^^ Tsk tsk tsk! I looked at Azmodeus blankly. You can’t clean it? I said. No, he said, there’s no way in through the membrane. You have to replace the keyboard because I eat while I work? I said. How stupid a system is that? How many computer users out there also eat at their computers? If I didn’t eat at my computer I’d have to give up eating, because I am a very slow eater^^^ and if I’m not working/eating^^^^ I’m probably pulling on a bell rope or hurtling hellhounds or something. ARRRRRGH. And I’m going to have to replace the keyboard again every six months or something because there is a staggering design fault in this laptop? Next time I want a keyboard you can clean, I said.
^ Have I told you that Azmodeus isn’t best pleased at being named after a demon? Hey. This is the blog of the hellgoddess. Pull yourself together.
^^ How . . . unprofessional.
^^^And I’m not exactly breaking land speed records at work either
^^^^ Besides, I think chewing stimulates blood circulation in the head area.
*** I’d baled last week because I had the handbell wedding Friday afternoon and rescheduling was too complicated. Then this week has Not Been Good for concentration outside novel-finishing and the piece I’d been working on—before Azmodeus took my laptop and Finale away from me—wasn’t ravishing me with its original brilliance so I don’t think Oisin is missing much and I’d had this idea that while brain was in short supply maybe I could do a little more with fingers but it turns out that fingers need slightly more direction than tired preoccupied brain felt like giving them^ so that hasn’t worked out too well either. But there had to be something Oisin could do with me so I went anyway. I have the uneasy memory nine hours later that I may have spent most of my time ranting about one thing or another.^^
I had, however, in my brain-scattered haste, because I’d been working on the frelling novel before Azmodeus interrupted my flight out the door, snatched up the wrong music, and arrived with Caro and Panis and He Was Despised. Oisin was playing for a funeral and got back late^^^ and discovered me picking out He Was Despised on the piano with one finger and looking worried. I’ve been saying this for a fortnight or so in the blog, that Any Minute Now the real work begins with Blondel, and I think it just has, with He Was Despised. It’s been nice, these first few weeks, especially with finishing the novel going on in the foreground, that just doing my exercises and trying to learn a few tunes has been enough. Unfortunately I have a very acute memory of saying to Oisin this afternoon that when I’ve been singing a bit longer I’ll come in with the wrong music deliberately some day and make him play accompaniment. I’ll hold you to that, Oisin said, way too promptly. Music teachers. They’re all sadists. ^^^^
^ I Vant to Be Alone+
+ It’s just a little Mozart!
^^ Publishers, publishing schedules, time, lack of time, novels that need finishing, weather—which is being gorgeous and I’d rather be outside planting bulbs—lack of brain, etc
^^^ He organs for a lot of funerals, as you might expect. He says you discover the most extraordinary things about the ordinary people you’ve been saying hello to on the street for the last x years. He played the organ for the funeral of a man recently who when he was a young man had been a POW in Italy during WWII, escaped, and walked home. Across occupied France. And casually caught a fishing boat across the Channel. And Oisin had known him only as a nice random little old man. . . .
^^^^ Very like obsessive handbell ringers
† Between finishing the novel and some erratic attendance by other people at practises recently I have been slipping under the radar. But Colin^ came to our tower practise tonight, looked at the assembled, which with him and Anthea there were an assembled, looked at me, smiled a smile with too many teeth, and said ‘Kent’. I dove for my methods books and sat out the first touches. Kent Minor (six bells) when it came was a little ragged but I did get through it, and Grandsire Triples too, although triples—all eight of our bells ringing, but only seven of them in the pattern with the tenor always ringing last in each row—still feels like such alien territory to me because I so rarely ring on eight bells, and I only learn anything by mega-grind. Whereupon Niall suggested Little Bob Major. Major is all eight bells in the method—the tenor rings ‘inside’ with the rest, so when you’re ringing you count to eight, not to seven, as you do with triples. I can ring treble to major—treble being the easy, straightforward, no wiggly bits bell in most standard methods—but Penelope had already declared she was tired and was going to ring the treble. Whereupon Edward turned to me with the too-many-teeth smile and explained what a nice easy pattern Little Bob Major is. Um. Well . . . I did get through it, although it is a very good thing that it ended when it did, as I was about to go seriously off the rails. So I can now say—with a slightly bemused look—that I have rung inside to major.
^ Speaking of sadistic music teachers, and I’ve already said that change ringing is music
†† I originally wrote ‘on reality’ but I think that’s over-hopeful.
Technology is hell
IMPORTANT ANNOUNCEMENT.
My guest blog folder has DISAPPEARED.
I have no idea, except that I assume it’s all a part of the recent ruckus with Outlook. Outlook has been stealthily eating my address book since our rebarbative association began; apparently the mere disappearance of a few contacts—which furthermore I probably have hardcopy of*–has become insufficiently infuriating. My blood pressure doesn’t go up more than a point or two when I discover someone else has vanished. Since—see below—I am likely to be visited by Computer Men some day very soon I will ask if my guest blogs can be retrieved from whatever ether-eal hell they have been inadvertently consigned to. But, because I am a well-tutored pessimist about all things computery, would every/anyone who has sent me a guest post which hasn’t appeared yet please send it to me again.* And this time, believe me, I will keep a back up copy on a memory stick.
Frelling frell frelling. FRELLING. FRELL.
And if that wasn’t quite enough . . . I’m off line again. I assume I’m going to be able to plug in either to Peter’s desktop connection or back at the cottage to post tonight but here on the mews laptop where I write probably five out of seven blog entries—which occupation requires constant application to Google and other there-are-certain-kinds-of-embarrassment-I-would-like-to-avoid fact-checking sites** not to mention the possibility of the insertion of fascinating links*** —I am dead in the virtual water. Arrrrrgh.
We also rang this morning like a bunch of one-armed dipsomaniacs the morning after tying a particularly rich one on. There were six of us, all of us theoretically method ringers, but we couldn’t get through anything without clanks, crashes, and frantic shouts of rounds! STAND! from the beleaguered conductor. Some Sunday mornings are like that. Are bells technology? Well, smelting metal usually counts as one of those basic technological-enabling skills so for the purposes of hellishness, bells are today honorary technology.†
When I snuck out of the tower—days like today you don’t want anyone to see you climbing down the ladder from the bell chamber—there was no Peter waiting for me. There is supposed to be a Peter waiting for me Sunday mornings after ringing unless the weather is completely filthy. Which it is not. †† I hung around long enough to start feeling faintly worried ††† and then started back down the hill . . . at last to see Peter toiling up toward me.
He had been having his own collision with technology. He’d had his shower and was getting dressed in his bedroom when both his smoke alarms went off. I’m sure that in the middle of the night when it’s saving your life a smoke alarm is a wonderful thing, but the problem is that smoke alarms are frellingly proof against any kind of tampering, in case it’s an electrical fire, so if they go wrong they go wrong with great stamina and determination.
Peter guessed that the steam from his shower must have set them off‡, so he opened all the doors and windows and got a terrific through draught . . . and the alarms kept on. He crawled into the crawl spaces and stuck his head in the attic in case it was an electrical fire, but there was nothing . . . except the alarms going on and on. He went next door to reassure his neighbours, and they came round and made helpful suggestions, none of which worked. I’ve had problems with those ‘reset buttons’ myself: you lean on one and the technology goes DON’T YOU TAMPER WITH ME! WHOOP WHOOP WHOOP! By this time the next neighbour in the row had turned up and made more useless helpful suggestions. The reset buttons had of course been pressed and prodded any number of times and each infernal machine would shut up briefly and then start yelling again.
Finally, as much by accident as anything, Peter pressed the reset button on the one upstairs while one of the neighbours was pressing the reset button on the one downstairs‡‡ . . . and silence fell. At last. And so, Peter says, the conclusion seems to be that you have to press both reset buttons simultaneously . . . which is difficult for a person living alone.
There are going to be a whole assortment of urgent phone calls going out at 9 am sharp tomorrow morning to professional technology-bashers from the McKinley-Dickinson ménage.
* * *
* When I can find them. And of course every time I update the RaspBerry whatever Outlook has been up to gets transferred too, so back up becomes de-back up, or front down, or something.
* Whimper. And please the gods you’ve kept copies.
** Including on-line dictionaries and a thesaurus or two, since my Oxford reference shelf, never the most stable of delicate artistic souls, has lately taken to responding ‘iFinger did not find anything matching blah’ when blah is a perfectly good word like assythment or gorcrow or archfiend^ or piepowder. This is very undermining to the middle-aged brain, which is getting pretty gappy anyway. iFinger is also an absolutist: you either get an answer or you get ‘did not find’. The on-liners tend to offer alternatives from which you may be able to grope your way toward what you were looking for.
^ Just to be sure I wasn’t being unfair, I looked up ‘fiend’. It said, among other things,+ ‘see table at devil’. So I looked up the table at devil+ and found listed Arch-fiend. Okay, I said, and typed in ‘Arch-fiend’. iFinger did not find anything matching . . .
+ Synonyms included hellhound
++ Good book title: The Table at Devil. It’ll be scary. I don’t want to read it.
*** For example there’s an article today in the Observer Magazine called Sleepless? Stressed? Anxious? Exhausted? by William Leith, which is about the fact that this is increasingly the norm in the first world. Some of us go on to develop ME/CFS or some similar label-able but un-pin-down-able disturbance, and some of us are just tired. One of the key ingredients in the modern developed-world overload is its 24-hour-a-day-ness: and first in that list is the 24/7 internet. And before several dozen passionate web bunnies write in berating me for demonising^ the web, I’m not. I’m a web bunny too, in my cranky, middle-aged, Facebook- and Twitter-less, uncool way. But I’m also someone with no ‘off’ switch—which is why I’ve got ME. The web is like the biggest toy box you ever dreamed of when you were four—it’s not just the shopping, it’s the everything—but Mum doesn’t make you put your toys away and go to bed at 7 pm any more.
But the small personal irony here is severalfold: in the first place, I probably wouldn’t have read the article if I weren’t banned from on line. I spent last night—my Saturday night off—doing autumn plant orders, and I was hoping to finish^^ this afternoon. On line, of course. In the second place, I thought, blog. And wanted to go on line and find a link to the article for you. And in the third place, William Leith has written a book: ‘It’s about what it’s like to be middle-aged and exhausted. It’s called Bits of Me Are Falling Apart.’ I thought: okay, I’m there. And wanted to go on line and look it up, see if it’s out yet, and if there are any reviews.
Sigh.
. . . Okay, that was implausibly easy: http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2009/jul/12/chronic-fatigue-stress-modern-life
Oh dear: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2008/aug/09/philosophy.society
But take your pick: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/jun/14/william-leith-falling-apart
http://www.spectator.co.uk/books/902746/part_2/really-not-happy-at-all.thtml
^ or archfiending
^^ Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha. I do try to do the majority of my plant ordering in two huge, terrifying wodges, summer and winter, for autumn and spring, so that aside from the lists that I fanatically keep+ I have some sort of sense of what and how much I’ve already ordered.++
+ keeping does not necessarily mean being able to lay hands on when desired
++ Too much! Too frelling much!
† Although strictly speaking it wasn’t the bells. Hey! It wasn’t me boss! Not this time!
†† Or only in random outbursts. We’ve been having random-outburst weather the last couple of days.
††† Peter is 81 and a half, and I worry easily
‡ The fire brigade—who was applied to at some point this morning—concurs that humidity can set the frellers off. But they had no magic for deaf and hostile reset buttons.
‡‡ The tall neighbour. The second smoke alarm requires a ladder to get at for ordinary humans, which is bizarre, not least because the previous tenant was seriously short. Maybe he had excellent aim with a broomstick.
