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Blondel
NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO! BLONDEL HAS APPLIED FOR A JOB IN CANTERBURY/YORK/WESTMINSTER/THE OTHER FRELLING SIDE OF THE FRELLING WORLD! HIS WIFE AND I BOTH HOPE HE DOESN’T GET IT! *
The shock was apparently good for me in the immediate present however**. I actually produced one or two notes that were not totally embarrassing, which is nearly a first.*** Of course Blondel’s exercises merely get sillier: to assist me in not collapsing he had me doing that pigtails-and-dirndls thing of making connected loops out of your two thumbs touching your two forefingers. You then hold your linked hands down at lower belly level where your support is, and your elbows out to the sides† and you’re so busy feeling like a twit it stiffens your spine wonderfully.†† I was expecting this week’s lesson to be as discouraging as last because I haven’t had enough time to practise but apparently this was one of those weeks where Secret Invisible Physical Things are happening. One of you real singers out there posted to the forum some months ago something to the effect that pretty well every human being has enough voice that with training it can be made worth listening to††† and that you doubted that I was one of the exceptions to this rule. You may be right after all.‡
I was so disturbed by the possibility of losing Blondel however that I rushed to the local farm store‡‡ and bought large bags of compost, fertilizer, perlite, grit and gravel‡‡‡ etc. Which at least gave me the excuse FINALLY TO GET OUT INTO THE GARDEN IN THIS BEAUTIFUL WEATHER WE’VE BEEN HAVING SINCE SATURDAY. And which is due to go away again . . . tomorrow. I guess I’ll just have to stay indoors and practise my Purcell and my Finzi.§ I am also suffering a faint teasing notion about a song for a bass-baritone. If I write him songs, do you suppose Blondel will stay?§§
* * *
* He’s already made it through the first round and has been called back for a second interview. Intersing. Whatever. Maybe he could have a nice little six-hour attack of laryngitis? Hit the first flat note of his entire career? Maybe he could decide he doesn’t want to live in a cathedral/minster/abbey close where the mean density of tourists is approximately forty-nine per square foot in high summer? This last is a consideration, he says, because the vicars choral^ or whatever his title would be there, live in the close, which is madly Elizabethan or Jacobean or something and a total foreign-geek-with-loud-voice-and-camera magnet and, he further says, there were already too many tourists milling around when he went up for his intersing and it’s only March. Yes. New Arcadia^^ is only a small Hampshire village stuck out in the middle of a lot of farmland but even we have tourists, and way too many of them stroll up my cul de sac because this is the oldest part of the town and we’re so obviously quaint.^^^ Come a little nearer and I’ll give you quaint with my large pointy garden fork. And closes are a trifle claustrophobic by definition. Peter’s younger brother was dean of Salisbury+ which has a very famous—and very beautiful—close, but visiting them gave me palpitations: you had to knock the trippers out of the way with a stick, even in November or February. Although front row seats for the Three Choirs Festival++ went some distance toward mollifying me, I wouldn’t want to live there. Where Blondel is now is a nice little back terrace on the edge of Mauncester where he can pretend to be a banker or a barkeep or a bouncer or anything he likes when he’s off duty. They wouldn’t have a garden in the close. I’m counting on his wife’s floral ambitions.
I need a nice elderly voice teacher who is just sort of keeping his/her hand in taking the occasional absurdly talent-free student who will never need him to compose a letter of recommendation to the Royal College of Music, and whose highest aspiration is winning the Biggest Pumpkin/Dahlia/Sheep Contest at the local fete, instead of one of these damned young ambitious creatures.
^ I’ve just been checking what google is going to tell you about this and there’s kind of a variety. What Blondel is however is the professional adult singer type of vicar choral, aka lay clerk: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lay_clerk I think ‘vicar choral’ sounds much more impressive.
^^ And have I mentioned that New Arcadia is old and Old Eden is new? Thus the British spirit of anarchy and confusion.
^^^ The Big Pink Blot is a little way out of the centre of town and has a long driveway so Peter’s mews is mostly spared the tourist invasion. What the mews does get however is a lot of the Lost, the At Sea and the Miserable. The estate that the Big Pink Blot once held sway over went on quite a distance, and there are lots of Discriminating Developments of barns, mews, labourers’ cottages, dungeons, nymphs’ grottoes etc, and visitors are always turning down the wrong small tasteful unfrellingmarked lane.
+ Yes, I’m afraid so. This makes his title The Very Reverend. Hee hee hee hee hee hee. If you’re a bishop you’re The Right Reverend. Archdeacons are The Venerable, or The Ven. Snork. Sorry. But who needs fantasy when you have the Anglican hierarchy?~
~ Honourable mention to the Orders of the British Empire.
++ Which appears to have been renamed the Southern Cathedrals Festival when I wasn’t looking
** Or maybe it’s the shouting. Due to the stress level of page proofs there has been, possibly, more yelling lately. Husbands, hellhounds, computers^, branches-invisible-in-the-twilight-lashing-one-across-the-face^^, pairs of All Stars which have mysteriously migrated to the middle of the floor^^^, they are all pressed into stress-release service.
^ especially computers
^^ Hope there weren’t any sensitive, impressionable children or frail little old people in earshot
^^^ No, Blondie is safe in her box sitting . . . er . . . next to the piano, mixed up with the sheet music.
*** I’m still aiming for back row of the chorus in some local amateur something some day, just to have done it.^
^ Fantasy? I have lots of those. I think the most reliable is the a cappella early music group. It’s not going to happen, which is fine, I don’t have the time. Just as well I don’t have a voice really.
† I am Maria Von Trapp. I am Julie Andrews. I am a meatloaf.
†† If he’s trying to make me believe that it would be a relief to stop these ridiculous voice lessons IT ISN’T WORKING.
††† In some cases this necessitates burial in the back row of a chorus
‡ But don’t hold your breath about the YouTube debut.
‡‡ Where you can buy most of your basic garden-centre stuff like compost and fertiliser for half to two-thirds of the price of the same stuff at a garden centre.
‡‡‡ As I hoisted the frellers up the steep half-flight of stairs to the garden at the cottage I found myself wondering in a carefully detached sort of way just how many years I’m going to be able to keep doing this. At the moment it’s just a nuisance. But one of the bags of ‘organic farmyard fertilizer’, which is to say sterilised sh*t, had got wet, and out of curiosity I weighed the sucker. 59.8 pounds. Under fifty and I can still heave them around without too much trouble—that last ten pounds is kind of a scoundrel.
§ Dowland next week.
§§ I think this might have the opposite effect. . . .
Thoughts on some Future or other
I forgot it’s the second Monday tomorrow. AAAAUGH. Old Eden monthly tower practise tomorrow. AAAAAUGH.
I hobbled up the bell tower ladder this morning feeling fragile . . . as your head comes through the trap door in the floor you are confronted by the blackboard. Today it said Old Eden practise 12 October 7:30 ALL WELCOME. Vicky doesn’t go in for roundabout methods—tower secretaries don’t have time for subtlety*—but it did cross my mind to wonder if this was, as well as a general announcement, a friendly cue to the person who usually phones round the second Sunday afternoon** reminding potential ringers of the treat available for their delectation the next day. I am presently barely speaking in complete sentences, and I don’t do well with phone machines even when I’m at my most articulate. . . . And I think Vicky was braced for me to say I was Too Tired.*** But . . . naaah. I have merely left an assortment of phone machine messages so bizarre that their recipients will not only not come tomorrow, they will decide that Old Eden and that mad American woman are best avoided.†
The good news is that handbells with Titus isn’t till Monday week . . . not tomorrow, but the Monday after. Except that I’d salved my conscience on this one saying to myself that Monday-tomorrow is a holiday in New York, I can give myself one more day of long restorative†† weekend. By next Monday I will be hipdeep in PEGASUS again.
I am heavily preoccupied with what my editor is going to say. Well, of course I’m heavily preoccupied with what my editor is going to say. I’m at least as weird as your average author. But usually Waiting to Hear is fairly straightforward—you want her to say, Yes! I love it! Here’s your money! ††† But in this case . . . if she says Yes! I love it as it is! We’re going to push it through for autumn ’10! . . . I am back at the rockface I was only pried off of and lowered to ground level from last Thursday, because there is still work to be done. Whatever happens next, I’m not done, capiche?‡ What I don’t know is only how much work there is. Whatever my editor says, I’m picking it up again next week. So if she says, no, sorry, there’s more work left than you can do in a few weeks‡‡, we’ll let it slip a season and see how you’re getting on . . . at least I can slow down.
But what I don’t get is paid.‡‡‡
But it’s worse than that. If that were all I’d clearly be hoping that she did say that they were going to have it out there next autumn. I can survive a few more weeks like the last few weeks. (I think.) But . . . if we cram PEG I through for autumn ’10 . . . I will feel morally obliged to have a crack at getting PEG II in for autumn ’11—which was the plan, you know, six months ago when I chopped it into two books. Which would mean having that manuscript in . . . the end of next summer, which would (undoubtedly) have to be extended (again . . . all this madness began with cramming a late DRAGONHAVEN through for the following autumn, how many centuries ago was that?) to some time around now . . . and I’m already exhausted§, not to mention not even done yet with PEG I.
Which means not only won’t I get PEG II done in time, but I also get to be a failure. §§
I think I’ll retrain as a florist.
* * *
* I am not joking. I told you about Friday’s wedding, for which we had something like eight days’ warning that bells were desired. And ringers are notoriously a cat-herding situation.
** Ask me why I know ringers present a cat-herding situation.
*** I missed tower practise. I am clearly at death’s door.
† Poor Vicky. Her tower must be really ailing.
†† . . . I’m still waiting
††† This never happens. When you’re lucky they say, Yes! I love it! —And then your hard-working agent, who, after all, earns her living on her percentage of you, starts badgering the finance department, who are always in Tortuga playing canasta and not returning their phone calls.
‡ And unfortunately the Total Loss of Faith from last Wednesday night is still hanging around in an ugly and vengeful manner.^ Do I need to tell you again that you really don’t want to be a free lance Creative Person? Keep the day job. We FLCPs do moderation so badly. Although I admit I may be an extreme case.
^ I’m used to this. It happens with every book.+ It’s still not a fun time.
+ Yes! Even with [insert name of favourite McKinley book here]!
‡‡ Remember that it takes a year to get a book through the publishing process, some of it because people are stupid and machinery breaks down and software is possessed by demons . . . but also because a lot of stuff really does need grotesque amounts of lead-in: the sales force is chatted up now on what they’re going to be selling next spring for bookstores to be ordered for next autumn. It sounds insane but given the size of the operation it’s not surprising. ^ Stupidity, breakdowns and demons are the minor end.
Mind you, I won’t be surprised if in another fifteen or fifty years publishing has changed so much this system is no longer recognisable^^. A lot of the lead time at present has to do with the physical facts of creating the objects that are books, for example. I happen to be one of those^^^ who thinks That Books As We Know Them are not going to be expunged from our lives and overflowing bookshelves. I know quite young people who like to read in the bath. But book production is on to be revolutionised. ^^^^
^ How fast would you want to swot up on, oh, say, forty books, well enough to sell each individually to everyone on your client list?
^^ We used to do what?
^^^ . . . old fogies on our way out
^^^^ I’m actually surprised it is taking so long. But then I’m probably fantasising of a day when, for example, you sign off on something and no nice helpful person decides to change something to House Standard because . . . it’s House Standard. I even know this is a fantasy. It’ll just become some machine that does it instead.
And when there is some last-minute change BECAUSE NO ONE HAS BEEN PAYING ATTENTION and there’s a nice mindless gadget which can tirelessly examine every word. . . .That’s the moment the machinery breaks down.
‡‡‡ If it weren’t for Third House this would be less critical than you might assume. Due to menopause and having no metabolism left, I don’t eat^, and the hellhounds would prefer not to. That just leaves taxes, All Stars, and rosebushes.
^ Chocolate isn’t food. It appears in one of those confusing blank spaces in the periodic table that turn out to be full of quasars and other imaginary equation-balancers. It’s right next to champagne.
§ And have 1,000,000 bulbs and thirty rosebushes to plant.
§§ See second footnote, about keeping the day job and being an extreme case. I know the world would not end if PEG I came out autumn ’10 and PEG II did not come out in autumn ’11. I would still wear a scarlet ‘F’ on my shirtfront.
8 October
NO DAYS.
Okay; it’s done*. It went in. About 6 pm my time . . . while everyone is at lunch in Manhattan. Instantly got an ‘out of office’ robot email from my editor, so I wrote to her assistant saying, she knows it’s coming so presumably she’ll be checking her email, but would you be kind enough to LET ME KNOW WHEN IT ARRIVES? Supposing it does, and the out-of-office isn’t some kind of warding programme.**
Two and a half hours pass. I fidget. I stare into space. I walk hellhounds.*** Surely people are coming back from lunch/meetings/their secret lives as intelligence agents and alligator wrestlers†/walking their three-headed dogs. I’m watching the clock and twitching, as it’s starting to get kind of late in Manhattan too, and today was the deadline. So I had just started writing an email to Merrilee’s assistant saying, is everybody playing hopscotch or Snakes and Ladders†† or talking to their nanny†††, please ACKNOWLEDGE, if I need to resend, I want to KNOW. And then, email ping! And again, ping!
The Large Flying Creature Has Landed.
And . . . thank you all. I’m sure all those thought waves swept PEGASUS and me on at a speed we were incapable of attaining on our own. But I do feel compelled to warn you, aside from my standard fit of ‘oh, it’s rubbish, it’s rubbish, it’s RUBBISH’ . . . I really don’t know how I managed to cram it through in the last three weeks, and it is unfortunately quite possible that I didn’t cram enough of it through, and that it needs more work than I can give it in (say) the short breathing spell between now and when it would have to go to copyediting, if it were going to copyediting for publication next autumn. Working this fast and this hard is not the way to do your best work—my best work anyway: I’m not a deadline junkie—I’ll know for myself after I start working on it again how much there is to do, but my poor editor is going to have to read the whole thing through at quintuple speed so she can decide whether or not to put it on the schedule. So chances are we’ll all know next week some time, even if I’m still sailing through some of the good bits and wondering if I’ve got away with it.
I’m concentrating at present on the idea that even if the news is bad, PEGASUS is still salvageable. The story is there. I may just not have done enough with my plastic teaspoon on that rockface yet.
Stay tuned.
And thanks again.
* * *
* Well, it’s not done. But that’s another story for next week. It went in in its Present Condition, which includes a time line in part two that resembles a cross between Spaghetti Junction and overused Silly Putty.
** This has happened to me. You send something, you get the robot ‘out of office’ so you figure okay, fine, at least it arrived, they’ll get back to me when they get back. And then they don’t. Because they never got it. Out-of-office was playing goalie with a ray gun and a three-headed dog for extra shielding. Caroooooooom goes my small hapless email into the outer reaches of the galaxy.
*** The standard afternoon hurtle the last few weeks of PEGASUS-fixation has been walking the loop down along the river to the cottage and then back to the mews via a variety of playing fields. When I’m not beating myself to death with a keyboard I pause at the cottage to do a little gardening but that hasn’t been happening recently. But it does mean I can check my phone machine for more frantic last-minute pleas for wedding ringers^ and my front stoop for packages bearing large labels that say LEAVE BESIDE HOUSE BEHIND GATE BEHIND WATER BUTT where, among other things, there’s a little roof so that when it rains I don’t come home to cardboard pulp on my front stoop. Snarl. Anyway. There was a package today.^^
I refer occasionally to the fact that I love clothes. And that while certain concessions are made to the facts that I work at home in the company of two large^^^ hairy hellhounds with whom I go for long muddy brambly walks every day and that I can’t stop buying rosebushes, which need planting and feeding and weeding and pruning, still, some of my favourite light reading is clothing catalogues. Big emblazoned SALE banners and I start drooling like Pavlov’s dog. Last spring a catalogue I like had a hoodie that called my name in a loud and unmistakable manner. Hoodies are like All Stars: I’ve been wearing them since before today’s hoodie- and All-Star-wearing fashion icons were born. I was wearing hoodies when they were even less cool than All Stars at their nadir: and that is uncool.
Anyway. There was no way I was going to pay full price for this thing but I liked it in the colour I was pretty sure was going to be unpopular, so I decided to keep an eye on it. And, lo, it went on sale a couple of months ago. But it didn’t go on sale enough. And it was still available in even the good colours, so I figured I could wait some more. I said to myself, if it gets below £x, I’ll order it.
Weeks pass. With email you get nearly daily updates on all your favourite catalogues; I have half a dozen I actually open and look at. Us writers need small idiot excitements like this to keep us in touch with life and three dimensions.^^^^ And then one day, lo! My hoodie has fallen below £x. By one pound. Never mind. And in my size only my unpopular colour is still available. So I stick it in my virtual shopping basket, have a cruise through the rest of the offerings for anything to keep it company—yes: brown velvet jacket with brown velvet roses on it, fabulously on sale, it never occurred to me it would come down to my price range—and then leave it for twenty four hours, which is what I do to make sure I really mean it. I’m a little dangerous with on-sale clothing catalogues. And I have a weight-bearing attic floor to pay off.
Decide I really mean it. Go back to virtual shopping basket. My hoodie has sold out. Frell. All right, all is not lost, continue to keep an eye on the situation; they may have returns. Another fortnight or so passes. Double frell. Oh well. I didn’t really need another hoodie. . . .
They’ve had some returns. It’s back again in my size. So I order it—and the brown velvet jacket—fast, before they change their minds, or their stock-taking.
The brown velvet jacket arrives . . . alone. (And it’s delicious. So that’s okay.) On the invoice it says of the hoodie ‘cannot supply’. What the (*&^%$£”!!!! does that mean? It probably means ‘we didn’t really have any returns, somebody hit the wrong key in the warehouse’. ARRRGH. Okay . . . I didn’t really need another hoodie.
About five days ago I got an email saying ‘your goods have been shipped’. WHAT? YES! They found a hoodie in my size! Lying under a forklift truck somewhere! And they’ve dusted it off and are sending it to me!
I’ve spent the last five days wondering what’s going to happen next—it’ll arrive in the wrong size, the wrong colour, the wrong item, the person who hit the wrong key in the warehouse has hit another wrong key, this time telling me I’ve got something coming . . .
Nope. It’s here. They sent it. It’s in the right size and the right colour. It was lying on my front stoop (in a cardboard box with a large label that says PLEASE LEAVE BESIDE HOUSE . . . ) this afternoon. And it’s cute too. But then I like hoodies.
Life. Three dimensions. Yes.
^ We have one tomorrow that we had our first request for last Thursday. One wants to know if they left the wedding to the last minute, or just the idea of having bells.
^^ It’s been a beautiful day. Just the sort of day you would like to be out in the garden planting bulbs. Sigh. It’s supposed to rain again tomorrow . . . but this is a good thing. I haven’t done any housework in like the last month and I have a friend I don’t see very often coming on Saturday. The sort of friend I kind of want to protect from reality.
^^^ They’re large in terms of hair production.
^^^^ Yes. It is that bad. See? You don’t want to be a writer.
† http://urbanlegends.about.com/od/alligators/a/sewer_gators.htm
This was my favourite urban legend back in the days before ‘urban legends’ were a commonplace.
†† very suitable for publishing
††† What do you mean you’re in Houston/a traffic jam in the Lincoln Tunnel/jail? My kids get out of school in twenty minutes!
Another day, another crisis
So, there was a backlash to all the adrenaline yesterday, of course. Got out of bed this morning wearing full body armour . . . invisible full body armour, but it weighed like two broadswords and a Shire horse. Daisy dropped round after I was more or less upright and dressed, giving me an excuse not to go hurtling for another half an hour while we exchanged dog news: Mike is reconstructing her garden in a new* dazzlingly stark and austere style to look like the surface of Mars. Very striking. Daisy is expecting the Innovative Garden Design Award in the post any day now. She looked out the kitchen window at my plant-pot garrison and said, awed, that’s a lot of work.
Hmm. Well . . . yes. I’m just not very good at doing things the easy way.** I even remember looking at this tiny garden after I’d fallen inappropriately in love with the cottage–originally my office-cottage was supposed to be farther out of town–and thinking, never mind, I’ll just have to get heavily into alpines: ie teeny weeny things requiring endless amounts of fuss. Instead I’m doing original research in pot garrisonry. I’m sure if I ever found myself in a flat with no garden and no balcony*** I’d manage to create labour-intensive window boxes. As well as hanging a grow light in the sitting room and turning it into a jungle.†
Don’t your dogs jump over that little fence? said Daisy.
No, I said.
Why not? said the latest recipient of the Innovative Garden Design Award.
Um . . . because I used to nail their little paws to the floor when they were puppies? Daisy’s problem is that she has a family. She actually leaves Mike to amuse himself now and then. I spent a lot of time during the hellhounds’ first six or eight months of tenure peeling them off the stakes-and-netting fence that Atlas put in first. By the time I’d given up my fantasy of simply training them not to trash the garden and asked him to put in the little picket fence, I figured I could however afford to make it sturdy but symbolic, which is to say I can step over it carrying a (large) pot with a plant in it†† although hellhounds can jump twice that high. Easily. Especially after, for example, fleeing pheasants.†††
And so, speaking of jumping. . . .
After Daisy left I had no more excuse, so we went out and hurtled. And I felt odder and odder . . . and odder . . . this isn’t just‡ ME any more . . . and came back to the cottage and even black tea did not assuage me.‡‡ And eventually I gave up work and lunch and life and so on as a bad job and went and lay down. It doesn’t take long for the patter of little feet and the little pointed faces with the little bright eyes peering at me to follow. So I made room and . . . er . . . lay at attention to grab them as they arrived, because it’s not merely a very high bed but there’s no good launch-space either. About an hour later the phone rang. I don’t know why I decided to answer it‡‡‡ but hellhounds, as hellhounds will, followed me, so we had to go through the whole rocketship thing again.
And this time, as Darkness came up, he screamed.
I’ve been worrying about Darkness for a while. For a long time it has seemed to me that he jumps into the car rather cautiously, and he also holds himself more . . . intensely. I don’t want to say ‘tense’ because if you weren’t already worrying I think it would just look like his style: he’s not the loose-limbed looby that Chaos is; and while Chaos in full flight drops down a gear and goes into red shift, Darkness is the true sprinter, so it’s not surprising Darkness is the more heavily muscled. But he’s squeaked a few times going upstairs this last week, he was slightly lame for the duration of one hurtle a few days ago, he has strangely restless fits as if he can’t get comfortable . . . and I’ve been poised for some clear indication that it’s not just a pulled muscle§ and I should take him and my chequebook to the vet. I am of course terrified that it’s a hernia or an ulcer or something to do with two and a half years of chronic diarrhea: although I’ve felt him all over (top and bottom) and he says Hey! Attention! Yes! Rub my tummy while you’re at it!, and haven’t been able to find any sore spots. And the funny thing is that he’d had one of his restless fits the first time he jumped up on the bed–but after the second he flopped down instantly and didn’t move again.§§
So a little before the evening surgery at the vets’§§§ I dragged myself out of bed, took them for their final hurtle–during which Darkness appeared entirely normal–and tottered off to consult the experts.
And the vet said no, his gut is soft and he doesn’t mind me prodding him . . . but he does not want his hind legs stretched out, I think it’s back trouble.
So I’ve come home with a name and a flyer, and I’m about to enter the wonderful world of animal physiotherapy. Stay tuned.
Oh, and I’m a little better too.¤
* * *
* One might almost say ground-breaking.
** Yes, yes, I know. But Superman has ME, you know. You don’t really believe all that guff about Kryptonite, do you?
*** Perish forfend
† Twenty years ago–pre Peter–gardening was something other people did.
†† Which is a good thing, since I managed to choose the wrong places for the two gates to be put in.
††† Oh, gods, Darkness caught another rabbit the other day. I should really try to find someone to teach me to dispatch only half killed rabbits. Escaped is fine. Dead is fine. In between is . . . so extremely not fine.
‡ Just she says! JUST!
‡‡I’m sure I’ve said this before, but it is perverse that the three best stomach-settlers I know are strong black tea, champagne and dark chocolate. Possibly not all at once.
‡‡‡ Computer Man, to see how the RaspBerry and I are getting on. Ask me tomorrow, I said.
§ Possibly since the recent rabbit
§§ Since my nerves are now completely shattered I keep checking to make sure he’s still breathing.
§§§ Yes, again the vets who were going to send me to a fancy GI specialist in London rather than suggest I try hellhounds on a no-cereal kibble. I’ve agonised about this endlessly, of course, even after I took Chaos in a few weeks ago because he was bleeding from the anus,^ but I’ve more or less come to the conclusion that this is Life. You’re ultimately responsible. Experts are only experts. And you’re all mortal, and things fall through the cracks. And these are the guys who pay house calls so you can have your beloved friend put to sleep at home, even if it’s a Sunday afternoon, if she reaches the end of the road on a Sunday afternoon.
And today, furthermore, I managed to say something about the two and a half years of chronic diarrhea during which no vet ever said to me ‘try taking them off all cereal grains’ and felt that I was heard, so maybe I can stop needing to take a deep breath before I cross their threshold again, and the vet who told me to put them back on chicken and rice till he could set up an appointment with the GI specialist can stop avoiding me in the street.
^ Remind me again why I wanted dogs? Certainly not because they’re a huge amount of expense, worry, and trouble.
¤ I’m immediately better because it probably isn’t a hernia or an ulcer. Also Peter applied champagne to the problem. Champagne appears to have succeeded where black tea failed earlier. I’m about to see if dark chocolate can finish the job.
In which I foil and am foiled
It’s the fourth of March and here in southern England its’s supposed to snow tonight.
What? I shouted at the radio. WHAT? It’s March! It’s the south of England! I have stuff to plant!*
So I planted yesterday’s peony**, grumbling. This involved hacking out drainage holes*** in the bottom of one of the big plastic pots I bought yesterday and cursing plastic-pot manufacturers who don’t at least provide punch-out holes† and that if I’d thought of it in time yesterday Atlas could have sliced them out with one of his magical whirling/whizzing/buzzing tools and now I’ll have to wait till next week and I might have planted a couple of roses†† but I don’t think I can face a lot more of this self-help perforation.
Meanwhile another conundrum was occupying my mental faculties. It’s like one of those horrible word problems in maths: If Suzy has six apples and Mary has forty-seven teapots, how fast was the train going when it ran over Angie’s Hyundai?††† And what was Frank doing with that lawn mower? My problem looks like this: There’s going to be snow tonight. Therefore I have to bring the jungle indoors again. Peter is playing bridge, therefore I will also be eating supper at the cottage.‡ This means I have to be able to eat supper at the cottage, which means impenetrable jungle in the kitchen is not ideal. Furthermore I am also bell ringing tonight and the temperature is already dropping like a stone so I will have to bring the jungle indoors before I go in case it’s too late by the time I get back. Hellhounds are loose in the kitchen while I’m out.‡‡ Hellhounds are (mostly) remarkably good about leaving plants alone, but they might understandably feel aggrieved about having said plants following them indoors onto their territory, especially when territory is so limited. ‡‡‡ If I can’t fill up the kitchen with jungle, I will have to fill up the sitting-room with jungle, but if I get smelly water all over my fitted§ carpet I will kill myself.
What do I do?
Simple really. I drop two roses and two fruit trees into large plastic pots that have not had the holes drilled in their bottoms yet. Not having realised that this was going to be an issue, I planted Tipsy in a square pot. So I folded a gardening sheet in quarters and tied it up around her like a diaper with string. I am taking no chances with the smelly water thing.§
Oh yes, and the peony is covered in tiny pink shoots and I suddenly thought of her having been sitting around in the heated indoors of a garden centre . . . and freaked. So I put some bubble wrap over her and tied another garden sheet over that. Nothing else is coming indoors.
* * *
* I had a ginormous package of frelling bare-root roses arrive this afternoon. Aaaaugh. I’d forgotten that I’d fallen prey to Peter Beales’ special offer. I’m pawning three of them off on Peter but that still leaves me with seven. The previous rose hedge was only four! And I’ve only just got them planted! In time for FROST AND SNOW so they can COME INDOORS and LEAK SMELLY WATER ALL OVER MY HOUSE! The new rose hedge, in its too-familiar but larger brown paper parcel, has gone firmly out into the greenhouse–the greenhouse that on evidence appears to be colder than the surrounding garden–insulated it with bags of compost, and it will be fine. It should be too because these are all the Tough Old Things end of roses. Well, mostly. And I will have to open the bag and let them have some sunlight within a day or two . . . which is where all the trouble began last time . . . but it’s March! –Yes, it is, and even in the south of England you can go on having frosts up through May. Which is why both wisteria and magnolias are a crap shoot around here. Roses generally aren’t, but . . .
** Sarah Bernhardt http://www.crocus.co.uk/plants/_/perennials/other-perennials/prices-that-have-been-pruned/classid.3313/ One of the commonest–every garden centre will have her–but to my eye they don’t get any prettier. My last one didn’t like where I put her and died to underline her displeasure.
*** With an exacto knife. Yes, I still have all my fingers. Impressed?
† Which with a screwdriver and a mallet will eventually, in fact, punch out. Probably.
†† Which would not need to come indoors and leak smelly water all over my house because they’re all Tough Old Things and are being kept IN THE GREENHOUSE till they’re planted out.
††† It’s okay, she and the twins and the six Komodo Dragons and the week’s groceries got out in time.
‡ I could perfectly well eat supper at the mews. But I won’t. It’s cheating somehow. I may sneak in for a little piano-playing but that’s all.
‡‡ And yes, I could shut them in the crate, but that would really be cheating.
‡‡‡ Stop that extravagent breathing! There isn’t room!
§ wall to wall
§§I still don’t know what Frank was doing with the lawn mower though.
