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SHORT DRANGLEFABBING MONDAY*, OKAY?
What is the matter with me? I keep saying I need to spend less time on the blog, I need to learn to write shorter, and if I can’t write shorter . . . I’m going to have to disappear, and will be discovered thirty years from now on an atoll with my sixty-seven hellhounds and 1,893,712 rosebushes (very good drainage on atolls, and lots of fish mulch) happy and content and having forgotten how to type.**
Oh . . . well . . . I guess I have to finish PEGASUS II first.***
So let’s try again with Short Mondays.
It is really really really dumb that here I am a writer who is also a compulsive reader who almost never mentions or recommends books. There are two reasons for this. One of them you know: that I am an evil cow. For every ten books I read, eight of them I throw against the wall.† One of them gets a ‘meh’. One of them I like. But over time that’s still a lot of liked books.
Which brings up the second reason. Which is that books matter and in my well-known when-I’m-not-being-an-evil-cow-I’m-a-little-damp-pudding-of-self-doubt way, I quail at the notion of doing it wrong. Of not doing it right enough. Of writing a bad book report of a book I really liked. A great big sticky reason why this blog is days in the life is because if I mess me up . . . only I will care. And I can cope with me in a bad mood. I do it all the time.
So let’s try to start a new trend. With a book that Peter gave me for Christmas. He found it all by himself. I read book reviews so erratically any more I never know what’s going on, even when it’s hot, so I didn’t know to ask for it. Peter saw ‘Gothic’, ‘velvety purple cover’ and ‘HP Lovecraft’ and knew I had to have it.
http://www.walker.co.uk/Salem-Brownstone-All-Along-the-Watchtowers-9781406320527.aspx
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pz8cgCDvskc
(Whoever wrote the opening blurb either hasn’t read the book, or has already read the rest of the series. Never mind. Look at the pictures.)
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/nov/28/salem-brownstone-john-dunning-review
I don’t know from graphic novels, but I liked this one a lot.†† There’s heaps of stuff out there on the net about it—the three links here should be enough to tell you if you want to hunt it down or not.
I’m looking forward to the next one.
* * *
* Yes, I went ringing at Colin and Anthea’s home tower tonight. Yes, I went with Niall. Yes, I rang Cambridge. I rang Cambridge without a minder. But I am SPARING you the details (like that I didn’t do it very well, and that it took two tries. BUT WE GOT THROUGH TO THE END ON THE SECOND GO).
** There’s a bell tower out back^ and a piano on the veranda.
^ I have been selectively breeding hellhounds for bell ringing ability
*** And trying to get back into it after three days^ of mostly being unable to make my eyes focus on anything smaller than a hellhound has been like trying to get into a pair of jeans two sizes too small. A pair of wet jeans two sizes too small. Backwards. And one leg has been sewed shut.
^ I am much better today . . . and trying not to race around at 200 mph and give myself a relapse. Um . . .
† As Dorothy Parker memorably said, This is not a novel to be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown with great force.
†† And this may be too obvious for proper graphic novel readers but one of my favourite bits of throwaway humour is that while our hero is having a conversation with Cassandra hanging upside down in a tree, her speech-bubbles are printed upside down. Maybe I amuse easily.
In which learning is not a curve
It’s a zigzag, a squiggle, a wriggle, a looping of the loop (and a biting of one’s own tail).
Last Wednesday—last Wednesday week, not two days ago—I told you I managed to call a really vicious ratbag of a pattern of call changes, thank you Wild Robert, thank you very much—I mean I succeeded in calling it. And at Sunday service I got through (and on no sleep) a touch of Grandsire triples ringing inside which was a bit like winning the Grand Prix formula one in my 14-year-old VW Golf.
Monday I made a mess of calling a much simpler course of call changes at Old Eden, as well as just generally ringing like a neurologically damaged axolotl.* This Wednesday at Ditherington we had a somewhat challenging band in that there were only five of us and only Wild Robert knew what he was doing. But he rises to occasions like this and at the end of an evening of call changes and plain courses in which I got to pretend to be a jaded old veteran who had seen it all, Wild Robert turned on me with a gleam in his eye and said, and now, Robin, you can call a touch of Grandsire doubles. —MEEP. You’re joking . . . you’re not joking.
And guess what? I did it**. I withdrew from my wounded axolotl aspect and reinhabited my half knows what she’s doing some of the time aspect. This is not a reliable transformation. It was especially impressive in this case because we had beginners on both the treble and the tenor who tended to wander rather. Even Wild Robert—who had been busy with the treble and the tenor and ringing two bells himself and therefore perforce left me to my own devices—was surprised.*** Have you done this before? he said to me. No.
I then made the ghastly mistake of mentioning my triumph to Niall and Colin last night during handbells—this partly because I had confessed to Colin a few weeks ago that this Deputy Ringing Master thing was unhinging my sense of self-preservation and that I had decided that I had to learn to call something, and he’d said in his jolly chirp-chirp manner, which is a great deal more appealing than Niall’s evil mwa ha ha ha ha manner, that there were a couple of dead easy touches that I could absolutely learn. Unfortunately Niall was there too, when I was telling Colin, and Niall said, predictably, mwa ha ha ha ha, you can call Grandsire tomorrow at New Arcadia practise.
And I did. I braced myself when I saw Niall coming and I did it. I called my little touch again.† Which begins to suggest that it—this tiny simple-minded touch—will become something I can, in fact, do.†† Notch on the butt of my gold-handled cane. If I had a gold-handled cane. I would, however, like to get to the point of not trembling so hard I can barely tie my rope up at the end, after I’ve said ‘stand’ and the bells fall silent.
Of course—back to the learning zigzag again—I then made an unlovely glurdge of ringing Grandsire triples inside . . . sigh . . . but I had help. Someone who shouldn’t be making glurdges made a glurdge, and I’m still only barely holding my line when everyone else is perfect. The joke came when I went humbly round to Edward, who had been calling it, while Niall was torturing one of our beginners, and asked if Edward would tell me what he’d been calling so I could at least figure out what I should have been doing.
I then made the really awful mistake of asking Edward how he kept track of a long touch and he started telling me. Numbers! Aaaaaugh! Numbers! The problem with these bell ringer chappies is that they loove their bell ringing so much that they can’t stop, even when their audience clearly wants to run away and hide . . . why are you looking at me like that?
* * *
* With a little help from the bells. I tell myself this is good both for my handling—a Truly Useful Ringer Can Ring Any Bell Accurately—and for my character. It’s good to fail. It keeps you humble. It also keeps you awake at night obsessively replaying being a dork in your mind’s eye.
** I’ve been trying to decide if I want to risk your sanity, not to mention your patience, by trying to explain what calling a touch means. Um. You’ve got it that method ringing involves patterns, right? You start out ringing rounds, which is the bells in order from lightest (treble) to heaviest (tenor), 1 2 3 4 5 6 (or however many: if you’re ringing doubles, you’re ringing a pattern involving five bells with the tenor always ringing last: every bell must ring once before any bell can ring again). Then the conductor yells Go [name of method]!, and the next ‘row’ of six bells will have begun swapping places, so—for the beginning of Grandsire for example—the three stays in third place for one more ‘blow’ before moving toward the front, seconds place, then lead, while the treble moves from second place to third place and the second bell spends two blows in lead before following the treble toward the back. These patterns are set. You learn them as such. Grandsire ALWAYS begins as I’ve just described, and each bell proceeds in a prescribed order through the series of swaps and zigzags (speaking of zigzags) which is that method’s individual hallmark. And yes, if you are not good at patterns or at Things That Involve Numbers, learning your first change-ringing patterns will crush your brain like a bug.
But this was not enough for those pesky method creators (who clearly were good at patterns and Things That Involve Numbers). They invented a further-mixing-up-the-bells system which is called a touch. A plain course is just the basic pattern where all the bells run through all the pieces of ‘work’ till they each get back to the point in the pattern where each individually started. A touch is when the conductor shouts Bob!, or Single!, before they get there, the purpose of which is to mix the bells up further and prevent them from coming back into ‘rounds’ as soon as they would in a plain course. Depending on where you are in the pattern, and whether a bob or a single is called, what you do next varies: but in the course of learning to ring a method, you have to learn this too, so you can ring a touch of the thing, whatever it is. Only sissies stop at plain courses.
However only total frelling madpersons ever take it a step further to conducting. The sad sweating conductor has to know when and what to call and where that then leaves everybody because said sad sweating conductor has to get them out of wherever that is again so that the band eventually do come back into rounds and can stop. Or be ringing forever like a kind of campanological Flying Dutchman^. . . .
I never wanted to be a conductor. I have had no aspirations whatsoever to being a conductor. And then they made me frelling Deputy Ringing Master. And suddenly . . . cheez. I’m scary when I’m aroused. Lock up your sharp objects.
^ This is actually mathematical nonsense. There’s a limited number of mixes you can make out of only five items, in this case bells. But there are a lot of other rules involved in change ringing. Which you will be delighted to hear I am not going to get into. Not tonight anyway.
*** I probably shouldn’t try to explain why I could do it, should I? It’s okay, if you have a headache you can skip this bit.
I’ve told you that in a plain course all the inside bells do all the bits of ‘work’ that comprise the pattern, following each other in what’s known as coursing order. As soon as you start throwing calls into the muddle, all kinds of untoward things can happen, including that one bell or another can get stuck doing the same piece of work over and over. The particular touch Wild Robert taught me involves the bell you-the-conductor is on cycling through only two pieces of work . . . and every time you get to the second one again you call. Then you just have to remember (a) whether you’re calling a bob or a single (b) what you called last time which helps with (a) and (c) how many times you’ve called either of the above so you know when you’re about to get back to rounds and can escape.
The reason I could do it is because the pattern is: single bob bob, single bob bob, and you don’t really need to use numbers. You can get away with: one thing. The other thing. The other thing again which means the first thing next time. Then the other thing and the other thing again and then it’s over. See? No numbers. I’ve broken down a lot of my (ahem) method ringing into these sub-number bits which is a lot of how I’ve contrived to learn change ringing at all. And yes, you could call it binary if you were feeling deeply unkind, but I wish you wouldn’t.
† But see previous footnote. I can do it for very specific reasons of not having to count anything. This does not pertain to conducting generally.
†† Vicky, who doesn’t go for the mwa ha ha ha ha thing much, said crisply, well done. And, somewhat dryly, added: We need more people who can call in this band. —Vicky doesn’t do disingenuous either, or I might accuse her of it. You can pretty much assume that barring St Paul’s and York Minster, all change ringing bands need more people who can call. Change ringing itself is awful enough. Conducting change ringing means you’re probably a danger to society. I’m sure MI5 keeps files on it.
Not One of My Better Sundays
In the first place, despite the parlous state of my internal economy* the world is (surprisingly) not utterly cold, barren and friendless.** While I was clearing off the kitchen table *** I re-unearthed the latest catalogue from the company that had sold me the infamous Melting Vacuum Cleaner. In large brazen print the catalogue declares, Our phone lines are open 24 hours every day! So I rang them up at 3 o’clock on a Sunday afternoon, and said, I bought a vacuum cleaner from you several months ago, and it melted.
Why that’s terrible, she said. We’ll send you a new one.
Blah. You what?
And you can use the new box to send us the old one back, she continued, so we can pass it along to the factory. That’s a very good vacuum cleaner, we sell a lot of them, and the factory should know about a defective one. Er, she added (I could hear her typing busily), would you mind describing what you mean by melted?
Maybe the Easter Bunny is real too.†
Although speaking of friendless, Niall hung around after service ring this morning to snigger. My unwholesome new position is all your fault, I said, looking at him without favour.
It’s not! he said, aggrieved. Vicky said your name first!
And I suppose you’re going to expect me to learn to conduct, I said, unmollified.†† I do not want to learn to conduct, I said. I have never wanted to learn to conduct. Conducting as an aspiration passed me by, slick as an unyaktraxed person on ice. I would like to sing like Marilyn Horne†††. I would like to compose like Benjamin Britten.‡ I would like to write novels like me which outsell Edward Sparklyface and Harry Potter together. But I have no desire to learn to conduct touches of method ringing. I said.
Steve Coleman is really good on learning to conduct, said Niall.
Steve Coleman. Yes. Steve ratbagging Coleman would be good on frelling learning to frelling conduct. Steve Coleman is a Ringing God. To those of us over-identified and over-involved with words on a page he’s probably the ringing god. http://www.ringingbooks.co.uk/ I have had his other three books almost from my first lesson in rope-handling because of course I was going to need them all eventually.‡‡ I did not order the fourth. The one which is about conducting. I did not order it because I did not want to learn to conduct.
I ordered it this afternoon. This may explain why I then had to spend several hours lying down.
* * *
* This Living (some of) Your Life on the Internet is a complex business. Okay, for you guys who don’t follow me on Twitter, I’ve spent a lot of today horizontal on the sofa under a thick blanket of delighted hellhounds, I feeling somewhat urpish. Hellhounds, meanwhile, are improving, but they have taken the long route to this destination. Friday night after I signed off the blog, Darkness followed Chaos into . . . well, into darkness and chaos. They will cry to go out if their bowels are troubling them, but they throw up in silence. This is perhaps partly because vomiting is not covered adequately in the standard housetraining module, but also, I assume, because it happens too fast. Granted it’s also nowhere near as nasty as the more comprehensively processed effluvia . . . but it’s still not a joyous way to start your morning. They did not in fact howl in the night—although they went out smartish when I stumbled downstairs very late in the morning at last—but that didn’t stop me waking up every quarter hour thinking they had. Sigh. That made three nights in a row I hadn’t had enough sleep—and I never get enough sleep Saturday night because of frelling^ service ring.^^
Peter is in Elsewhereshire visiting throngs and clusters of family^^^ this weekend.~ I had had this notion, before events caught up with me, that I was going to burn through the hip-high pile(s) of Ancient Magazines~~ at the mews while he was gone and thereby delight his eyes upon his return.~~~ I didn’t get too far, but I did quest down through a few geologic strata and took an armful of the result to the sofa with me. There were a couple from 2005. There was one from 2003. That magazine has been through two house moves. I’d better frame it.
^ As Deputy Ringing Master calling it ‘frelling’ is probably illegal.
^^ Possibly today’s stomach-ache therefore has nothing to do with cross-contamination+ but is my body saying lie down or we’ll make you. So what was that unscheduled two-hour nap yesterday then? Oh, don’t talk to me about sleep debt.
+ And I’ve been so CAREFUL. I’m always washing my hands. Because I’m always absent-mindedly petting hellhounds.
^^^I’ve told you about the Dickinson clan. As the grains of sand upon the shore.
~ Not a one of whom has thrown up on the carpet. Fancy.
~~ My ancient magazines. Peter has his own (smaller) piles of ancient magazines.
~~~ Feh. He won’t notice. At least not until he’s caught up on the blog.
** I told you that Peter has deserted me.
*** Ahem
† I’ll take the Easter Bunny over Santa Claus. The Easter Bunny is categorically welded to manifestation of chocolate. Santa Claus might get it wrong and give you Lego or something.
†† He agreed, didn’t he?
††† Or Maddy Prior
‡ . . . Or Maddy Prior.
‡‡ And when the ME closed me down and I stopped ringing, and when, a few years after that, I was doing major weeding and culling and clearing out for the move into town, I did not get rid of them, even though it had been five years since I’d touched a bell rope.
Reformation (sort of. Maybe)
I am sitting here surrounded by huge tottering piles of old newspapers and magazines. And it’s all Fiona’s fault. This catalyst thing can go too far.
Those of you with disgracefully tenacious memories* may remember that I went to the Steeleye Span concert** back in November with a friend named Fiona. Fiona runs a folk-music club*** and sings for a little local band who might well be wealthy and famous if they weren’t all cripplingly shy and polite.† Which is to say that Fiona is another of these starving artist people.††
So I had a brainstorm a couple of months ago one evening at the cottage, fighting my way through the accumulation on the stairs, on the ladder to the attic, in the hall space behind the ladder to the attic, on both sides of my desk, between, on and behind the two small tables behind my desk, stacked up against the wall in my bedroom†††, on and under the kitchen table downstairs, and let’s not discuss the attic at all‡. I thought, I wonder if Fiona is silly enough to let me hire her for an occasional day of accumulation-bashing?
She was.
Today was her first day.‡‡
She got started on alphabetising my rose photos from the old house.‡‡‡ She has gone some considerable way toward alphabetising the fiction/lit at the mews. She may have taught me how to load music § onto my little non-iPod§§. I’ll know tomorrow.§§§
And she packed up and took 1,000,000,000,000 parcels to the Post Office.# I have a Post Office phobia. It’s very sad. Maybe the next time she’s here we’ll catch up as far as last year’s Christmas presents.
And speaking of Christmas presents . . . in an excess of hectic enthusiasm I’ve already tweeted this but it bears repeating . . . I TOOK ALL THE ORNAMENTS OFF THE CHRISTMAS TREE TODAY AND PACKED THEM UP!! And it’s not even the end of January yet!!!## See, Fiona was a GOOD idea! Not only does she not have a Post Office phobia, she is such a good INFLUENCE! You can’t have someone alphabetising your books while you sit slumped over your computer trying to make PEGASUS II magically emerge from the screen-mist. Or maybe I should say, if PEGASUS II is not going to emerge magically from the screen-mist you might as well be doing something useful like taking down the Christmas tree, rather than clicking on all the links that all the people you follow on Twitter are posting.### Which is why, unfortunately, I’m now surrounded by large tottering piles of ancient magazines. You also can’t have your books halfway to being beautifully alphabetised and let those cobwebby heaps of newsprint remain unchallenged. After she left I shot back to the mews and started pulling out three-year-old Guardian REVIEW sections. Stop! Stop!
Although that was a little later than you might think because Thursday is handbells and I made her stay to be tortured . . . I mean to have her first exciting experience of the glory that is method ringing on handbells with Niall and Colin. Hey, she was ringing plain hunt on eight before the end of the evening, never having seen a handbell in her life before. Niall and Colin and I, who are used to ringing on six, were having trouble counting that high, but she tried her best to keep us in order.
And she still agreed to come back. She really is 35,000 feet over the North Sea on a no-return ticket, isn’t she?
* * *
* You also remember^ I hate you, right?
^ What? What are we talking about?
** http://robinmckinleysblog.com/2009/11/20/fangirl/
*** I think she should write a guest blog about this, don’t you?
† Think Nell Gwynn! Think Benjamin Disraeli! Think Freya Stark! Think David Tennant! You don’t have to be cripplingly polite even if you are British!^
^ Think Beau Brummell (1778-1840), who, when cut by the Prince of Wales, turned to his companion and said, Who’s your fat friend?
†† Literally, I sometimes think. She would certainly far rather buy a front-row ticket for a Steeleye Span concert than eat.
††† There’s no room under the bed, you know, because of the boxes of books. Oh, and shopping bags of vitamin pills. You want to know how I maintain my ridiculous level of activity with ME? Vitamin pills and homeopathy. But homeopathic pills take up a lot less space.^
^ The frelling shelves of homeopathy books take up a lot more.
‡ And no I don’t want merely to haul it all down the road and stuff it wholesale into Third House’s attic. No. Noooo.
‡‡ And before she left she agreed to come again. Although I don’t know that her email just now saying she’d got home okay^ was necessarily sent from home. She may have been sending from 35,000 feet over the North Sea. Wireless is getting pretty amazing these days.
^ Having had a rather unnecessarily Amusing Time getting here this morning
‡‡‡ Sic. Next time she’s going to scan some in so perhaps on some particularly gruesome February day with the banshees howling through the gutters and the hammering rain crushing hellhounds and hellgoddess to the sodden earth, I can post some rose photos to cheer myself up.
I’ve actually got plenty of rose photos from the last few years in town, it’s just I have this really bad habit of not marking the ones I’ve already used here . . . yes, this is the same mindset^ that has produced brilliant ideas like buying third houses and converting their attics to contain eighty (heavy) boxes of backlist.
^ All right, let’s take a moment and consider the words ‘mind’ and ‘set’.
§ Starting with Steeleye Span. Naturally.
§§ Okay, what is the non-BlackBerry RaspBerry version of a non-iPod? The oMoya?
§§§ Mmm. Not necessarily. She didn’t tell me how to make it play back.
# Including one that’s been lying (mostly) on the attic stairs^ since July. Yes. That one. You Know Who You Are.
^ I moved it around occasionally so it didn’t get too bored
## Peter takes the tree itself down. It’s a rather plausible fake one, but the problem with it is that most of the branches are supposed to come out so you have to detach them all carefully and wrap them up in tiers so you can figure them out again next year, but he would have done it weeks ago if he weren’t waiting for me. . . .
### GAAAAAAAAH. I’ve never been so current evented in my life. GAAAAAAAAAAH. I’m not even sure I want to know that Obama’s approval rating is .007% and dropping fast.
The Washing Machine Man Cometh
And he couldn’t find ANYTHING WRONG. The beastly machine behaved PERFECTLY while he was there. Do you know what washing-machine call-outs COST? Besides the fact that hanging around waiting for an elderly*, semi-green** washing machine to FUNCTION or, of course, not function, takes forever, which may have some influence on call-out cost, but it means you’re standing there wasting time and money.***
Siiiiiigh. So he went away again saying in a kind and gentle voice suitable for addressing the goggle-eyed and franticly disbelieving, to use the wretched thing a few times and if it breaks down again he’ll come out again and remonstrate. So even now, here, as we speak, or anyway as I write, at the mews’ kitchen table, the washing machine at the cottage is busy churning away on the first load of a week’s backlog of laundry. Or, perhaps, not.
And I haven’t got round to telling you about my computer(s) deciding not to send all my emails. Just some of them. Or that my organic box scheme†† has run out of the no-cal corn thins that I eat when I have to eat something but can’t afford to eat any, you know, food. I will go mad without my corn thins. Or that the soles fell off one of my pairs of All Stars. I think they’re even beyond duct tape. I think I’m going to have to throw them out. Or that we’ve had Alarming Encounters with off-lead dogs two days in a row after a (comparative) lull. Yesterday’s is still giving me flashbacks of looking eyeball to eyeball with something with fangs as long as my fingers. ‘Oh, he won’t hurt you, he’s a gentle giant,’ said his useless owner, laughing nervously. In that case why is he holding his head in that weird way (possibly he is lowering it the better to look me straight in the eye) and growling? I found it rather suggestive that the hellhounds for once were not straining at their harnesses to go play with the Tyrann–I mean the gentle giant, but showed some tendency to hide behind me. There isn’t room for two hellhounds to hide behind me.
Or that the copyedited PEGASUS is due home again in six days. Or that PEG II is driving me . . .
The washing machine had better be washing.
* * *
* This is the first time he’s been to the cottage and not only is it a very small kitchen but it’s full of hellhounds. And hellhound crate. So I thought the look of bemusement he initially bent on his patient had to do with, you know, circumstances. But after a moment he said, Is this a very old machine?
Beats the heck out of me. It was already somebody else’s cast-off when we put it in the second kitchen [sic] at the old house for visitor use. I just brought it along when we left. I was going to need a washing machine, and our buyers were about to start the marble-Jacuzzi-with-gold-taps transformation and they certainly weren’t going to want it.
Washing-machine man is a stalwart specimen of British Reserve but I definitely saw him smile when I said that while the machine and I were not the best of friends I’d rather keep it than try to change it since I have no idea how I’d get it out the door now with the dog gate screwed into the wall. Or its replacement in. Even in the absence of any large appliances, gaining entrance to the cottage is something of an obstacle course. I not infrequently manage to jam the bottom half of the stable door into the leading edge of the dog gate at which point they do a dovetail-join thing and will not come apart again. In the process of trying to trick them into separating I can be relied on to crack my head against the top half of the stable door, which will have rebounded against the bunker-sized mound of (muddy) coats hanging opposite. And if you struggle over the threshold despite all these impediments you will promptly fall over the forty-two pairs of (muddy) All Stars. And some hellhounds.
I do this several times a day. I have the scars to prove it. I do try not to use too much language in deference to the neighbours. But I find that there’s an additional frisson to the process at mmmph o’clock in the morning. No matter how many times we get home at this hour and no matter how gallantly hellhounds are defending my back while I wrestle with keys, doors, curtains—I forgot to tell you about the curtain—gates and attendant paraphernalia, there is something out there at mmmph o’clock and we need to get indoors before it arrives. This sense reaches its crescendo just as we do get indoors and I whirl around to slam the door in its face. I’ve never yet heard it carom off the outside of the door but I still shut the door pretty smartly. When the curtain doesn’t get in the way. Or the gate. Or some shoes.
** Speaking of green. http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1953692,00.html
I was reading this this afternoon, waiting for the thrice-damned washing machine to do something. I’m a relatively unapologetic meat-eater: in the first place, due to some malfunction or other, my metabolism shuts down if it doesn’t get meat, red meat, pretty frequently. This was true even before the ME; it’s now just a lot more critical and immediate. In the second place, humans are built to be omnivores, and—perhaps this is third place—I have an automatic distrust of extreme salvation, and global vegetarianism is my idea of extreme. Fourth place would be that what this article is saying makes sense and, oh, fifth place, Peter and I eat grass-fed organic critters.
But I’d be glad if this theory gained some headway. The main drawback I see is the cost of the finished product: it’s true, Peter and I can afford to eat grass-fed organic. But local farmers’ markets and box schemes and things can be astonishingly cheap; I would have said that the biggest problem to shifting over to more sustainable foodways is wrenching your mindset in the right direction, and bracing yourself for the extra faffing around that raw stuff requires. There are advantages to modest little cases of ME like mine—I am not talking about the crippling kind of ME or any other ailment or disability—I don’t eat fast food or super-processed whatever because it makes me sick, and I can almost pretend to be a normal person if I stick to the pure and holy. It helps that I like to cook and have a cooperative husband.
*** While we were hanging around I showed him my melted vacuum cleaner which I still haven’t done anything about, like, write to the catalogue company I bought it from so they can say, oh, really? [yawn]. And he said he had a colleague who specialised in vacuum cleaners and he’ll ask him if it’s worth fixing.
I have this gripping mental image of Appliance Person Conventions where they meet and attend seminars on semi-tubular and Pineapple friction-lock rivets and non-volatile memory chips in self-mobilising hellhound-hair control units, and exchange phone numbers so as to be in a position to impress the glurp out of device-and-gizmo-challenged clients at such moments as clients are most vulnerable to such impressing.
†† Speaking of organic box schemes
