Audience
Bronwen emailed me the end of last week that she was going to be in this area on Monday, and could she drop in? Sure, I emailed back. I have my voice lesson Monday afternoon, but we can go ringing with Colin in the evening, if you like. I can meet you at the cottage after my lesson, at 6:30 or so.
. . . I was hoping I might come to your lesson, she answered.
WHAT? ARE YOU FRELLING JOKING?
I was, in fact, so blitherblathered, nonplussed and gobsmacked by this insane and unexpected request that I couldn’t immediately think of what to say, other than NO. AND NEVER DARKEN MY DOOR AGAIN WHILE YOU’RE AT IT.* Since I’m fond of Bronwen I restrained this natural impulse and . . . emailed Nadia. Do you have a policy about people sitting in? I said. Do you . . . by any chance . . . FORBID it?**
This was happening last night at about two a.m.*** when I am perhaps not at my best anyway.† For some reason†† Nadia hadn’t answered by the time I crawled out of bed again (later) this morning . . . and meanwhile the hours were ticking by and Bronwen was climbing in her car and turning the key in the little hole††† and . . . and . . .
And when I went to warm up today with my piano at the mews I couldn’t sing at all. Here I had been comforting myself that at least yesterday’s indisposition (which has much lessened, thank you) had had nothing to do with my throat . . . and I still couldn’t sing. I was producing these nasty horrible thready little noises.‡ Ugggh.
Beginning to panic now I texted Nadia saying, perhaps you didn’t see my email (which I sent at about 3 a.m. and you’re probably feeding your kid her oatmeal before facing your first student of the day and haven’t checked your inbox) and thank the gods this time she answered, and in Best Professional Manner, that she did not have a policy about sitters-in and she did not object to teaching with an audience, but that she felt that unless this was a run up to an exam or a performance it was not helpful to the student and advised against. YAAAAAAY. I pretty well burnt my fingers racing to email Bronwen: NOOOOOOOOO.‡‡
Then we’d managed to get the lesson time crossgartered somehow so I was waiting‡‡‡ for half an hour before Nadia was ready for me which did not help my tension level any. § So when it was finally my turn I went in and, setting my knapsack down and removing my music as if I were an insufficiently tested beta model, squeaked that I had been ill yesterday and today I can’t sing at all. When I admitted upon questioning that it had been a Digestive Issue Nadia said, well, of course. The bottom half of your body isn’t speaking to the top half, so you’re not getting any of the support you need not to sound thin and reedy. Lie down on the floor and breathe.
So I lay down on the floor and breathed.§§
And, after that, the lesson went pretty well.§§§
At the end she said, your homework for the next fortnight is to go home and ENJOY singing all these songs you’ve been working so hard on. ENJOY. You know about ENJOY, right?
Oh. Kind of.
And then I came home# and finally met up with poor Bronwen. And we went ringing at Glaciation.## We came back to the mews for supper and then she knitted while I got on with SHADOWS. It’s very . . . shadowy. In a good way. I hope.
* * *
* And you can post that knitting book you borrowed back to me.
** Please. Please forbid it. Please.
*** Having spent an unhealthy amount of time bringing the jungle indoors again. No frost tonight. Yaaaaaaay.
† I’d also just found out that I’d been a thundering and inexcusable scoundrel to a harmless and inoffensive member of the human race and was reeling from the karmic backlash. This does not serve to focus the mind in a positive way.
†† I realise this will come as a shock to all of you, but not everyone lives by their email, their texts, their DMs, and their tweets. Fancy. And a substantial number of these non-virtual people have children still too young for email, texts, DMs, and Twitter. Very real, small children.
††† I spent SIXTY ONE QUID filling Wolfgang’s petrol tank today. SIXTY. ONE. QUID. Strongest argument for internet shopping that I know. The next time I fall afoul of one of these barking and berserk sites that demand four passwords that add up to the square root of 19^ and then tell you that according to numerology your birthday declares you to be an axe murderer and/or a bad financial risk and therefore they are rejecting you and the credit card you rode in on . . . I will whisper to myself ‘sixty one quid’ and persevere.
^ 4.358898943540674 http://www.math.com/students/calculators/source/square-root.htm
‡ It’s all relative. Nastier, horribler, threadier. And definitely littler, which in the circumstances is just as well.
‡‡ Under most ordinary conditions I have no problem saying No, and please fall in a large mud puddle on your way out.^ But I know that I am a neurotic wet^^ about singing and performing, and—I also understand being interested in the process. What happens in a voice lesson with a good teacher is just interesting, and never mind if the student sounds like a hamster someone just sat on.^^^ I ought to want to spread the voice-lesson joy around. Well, I do. Just not in a way that involves someone having to listen to me sing.
^ And may you be wearing drycleanable-only.
^^ Possibly a neurotic muddy. And my ego absolutely needs the delicate cycle.
^^^ Shrill and flat.
‡‡‡ Knitting. I’m producing a very nice series of hellhound squares in varying textures of knit and purl. This activity is interspersed with ripping out the first half-dozen rows of leg warmer again.
§ Possibly the small-child-amusing CD of small-child songs Stella was listening to in a rapt and pensive manner had something to do with this. When someone is trying to lisp breathlessly and, as you knit, wait for your voice lesson and try not to think about the half a page of SHADOWS you could have got through in this half hour, you are thinking (testily) that they are probably getting paid for the noise they’re making, and here you are paying for the privilege of trying to sound less like this.
Okay, I have never lisped. And I’m only breathless when I forget, uh, to breathe. Still.
§§ Her mother came in with a cup of tea for her while this was going on. Don’t worry, said Nadia, she’s used to my students lying on the floor.
§§§ I was probably just really grateful that it was only the two of us.^
^ And the cat.
# Muttering about sixty-one quid
## Where I was pretty much a disaster on all fronts SIIIIIIIGH. I haven’t really got enough brain for a voice lesson and a tower practise in the same day. Especially when there’s a little matter of a novel to finish in six weeks.
Lurchers and lurgies
Look, look! Blogmom has been CLEVER and put the auction/sale in a sidebar –>
So anyone who has been out saving the world or discovering faster-than-light travel or a cure for vampires* and hasn’t been round to Days in the Life recently **, please go check out the Preserve the New Arcadia Bells Sale/Auction! Please!
* * *
Hellhounds ate their supper last night too although Chaos had to skulk and slink and act like he wasn’t going to—and for all I know he was seriously weighing the alternatives and ultimately might not have, because he is, as we know, a fruit loop, and the fact that he is still demanding lunch and dinner EARLY, and this despite the fact that he has eaten supper two nights in a row now, has nothing to do with anything. And if you found that sentence hard to follow, welcome to the world of living with hellhounds. It’s just a good thing they’re cute.
I had a friend, let’s call her Luna, visiting today. This is someone I’ve known for about twenty years—which is to say more or less from the moment I moved over here. And she’s from Maine. Irony Alert. But we had friends in common and she has taught the odd McKinley novel*** and one thing led to another, even if the leading is made more complex by the 3000 or so additional miles my emigrating appended. Still. We have managed to meet up a few times.† I picked her up at the Mauncester train station today and then we drove to the edge of town for a walk by the river. And there, as hellhounds and I often do when we’re walking ways frequented by other human beings, we met a Hellhound Fanatic. First she spoke to the hellhounds, which was all good to them††, and then she spoke to Luna and me, telling us about the hellhound she had once been possessed by, and how friendly and charming and affectionate and beeeeeeeoooouuuuuutiful it was . . . and how hellhounds are among the most ancient of dog breeds and we know this because they show up on medieval tapestries and so on, no doubt because their beauty catches the eye of many artists.††† Yes. It is very nice talking to you, madam, and you clearly have the right idea about hellhounds, even if you seem to have forgotten that they are also nightmares in fur with enigmatic attitudes toward food and a perfection of obstinacy that Plato would admire. And I thought: if I ever find myself in the dreadful position of not having a hellhound of my own . . . I will be exactly like this, stopp(eth)ing one in three and holding them with a skinny hand.‡ I often imagine having more critters‡‡ but . . . I really don’t want to imagine the assembled multitude not including at least one gorgeous, long-legged tuck-bellied large-eyed hellhound. But ask me again the next time the current crew go comprehensively off their food.‡‡
* * *
The lurgy continues to ebb‡‡‡ although I am disgracefully hoarse as a result of catching up on about a decade’s conversation with Luna and I’m not sure singing tonight is on.§ I can feel the ME tapping its fingers thoughtfully but at the moment it’s not making any hostile moves.§§ CathyR tweeted me this a few days ago: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-14883651 : ‘Chronic Fatigue, Surrounded by Uncertainty’. Yep. That’s about it. I appreciate the low-key tone of the article—it’s a big improvement on most of the stuff that was circulating when I first went down with ME/CFS, shrieking and name-calling about wimps and yuppie flu—and I particularly appreciate the suggestion that ‘there is an emerging consensus that CFS/ME is not a single illness’. Don’t mind me, I’ve been saying that for over a decade.
But as long as that is the case, I think CFS/ME (or ME/CFS) is rather a good name for it: apple/banana like the man says, because at the moment we can’t be clearer about what we’re talking about. And I wish they would stop suggesting that a combination of cognitive behavioural therapy and graded exercise is good for everyone. It isn’t. I’d already had a lot of (psycho)therapy by the time I went down with ME, so the concept of as it were handling yourself rather than just living your life as if all your bits, physical, mental and emotional were reliable, was old news. Once I began accepting that I had ME and that I was going to have to learn to cope with it—and it was the acceptance that was the big bad deal—the learning to cope was grim, nasty and infuriating but relatively straightforward. I didn’t try cognitive therapy§§§ and I’m sure it can be very useful for someone who hasn’t before had to look at themselves as a Rube Goldberg contraption. But the graded exercise thing MAKES ME NUTS. And as a long-term and more-or-less public sufferer of ME I feel responsible for repeating that graded exercise presented as a treatment for ME makes me nuts. As a rule it is a frelling frelling bad idea. ME is all about learning NOT to drive yourself, for pity’s sake—it’s about listening to what your body wants, not what your intellect (or your boss, or your doctor) tells you you’re supposed to want. Cognitive therapy is about coping. Graded exercise is essentially about forcing. Do not go there. Or if you insist on going there . . . go very very cautiously, and the moment your body or your energy level says um, I’m not really liking this very much, LISTEN. NEVER MIND THE EXPERT OR THE CHART OR THE PROFILE OR THE WHATSIT. IT’S YOUR BODY. IT IS, FURTHERMORE, YOUR UNIQUE BODY.
Okay. Stopping now. And I’m going to go very delicately over to the piano, and if my still rather lurgy-ridden body says no I’ll go to bed early.
* * *
* This last could be taken a number of ways
** And for anyone who is new to this blog, that’s a muffin with fangs. You figure it out.
*** shock horror, yes, very odd
† Once at Dysart’s Truck Stop http://www.dysarts.com/ which is where I first encountered the concept of cinnamon rolls as big as your head.
†† Mostly I am glad they believe that All People Are Good People. Mostly.
††† And a few doodlers.
‡ There will certainly be a glittering eye. I hope to escape the long grey beard.
‡‡ No, no! Nooooooooo!
‡‡‡ Hey, you know, maybe they won’t. Maybe one of these times will be the last time. Maybe . . . maybe this was the last time!^
^ If you want to live with hellhounds, I recommend indestructible naïveté as a coping mechanism.+
+ See below. I’m good at coping mechanisms.
‡‡‡ http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/lurgy
§ I can still play Os Frelling Justi over on the piano a few hundred million times in preparation for Thursday. Not to mention that Nadia is expecting to sing it with me helpfully next Monday. I think I’ll run away to Spain. I want to see Gaudi’s Barcelona.
§§ It usually does boomerang after I get over something like flu or a head cold. This assault is often worse than the original ailment. Such fun.
§§§ Although I did go back in to straight psychotherapy to learn to ‘forgive’ myself for having ME. I have told you many, many times that self confidence is not one of my strong suits, and even while I knew the lazy whinger who can’t pull herself together view of ME was bollocks it was still dismayingly hard to resist.
Aspects of the Magnificence of Hellhounds
Hellhounds are such ridiculous creatures. But cute. Fortunately. When we were out on our morning hurtle today we met Penelope walking home with her Saturday shopping.* We began to discuss bell ringing personalities** and what it is to be a bell ringer and have a life. Penelope is better about the having-a-life than I am: she’s not an obsessive. She has perspective.*** She even made the shocking remark that while she likes ringing some of what she does is only to Support Niall.† She does not lie awake nights wondering why she can’t ring Stedman Triples yet.††
Anyway. There was so much to say about ringing and personalities that hellhounds and I accompanied her the rest of the way, and she invited us in for a cup of tea. Well, the hellhounds got water. I got tea.††† Niall was home so we all sat round drinking tea. I sat on the floor, the better to suppress hellhounds, who are not accustomed to the excitement of visiting other people’s houses, but they’re reasonably willing to collapse in heaps as long as I’m there too. And in fact I often do sit on the floor: as long as there’s a carpet between me and the cruel reality of floorboards or tile I may very well prefer sitting on the floor. It gives you a better excuse to fidget, and I’m a fidget.‡
But after we’d discussed ringing, books, film‡‡, opera, food, gardening, the state of the global economy and chickens‡‡‡, I needed a pee before hellhounds and I started home. This meant hellhounds had to stay where they were for the sixty seconds or so it would take me to bolt to the loo and back again.
They stayed. Although they were in their best Ancient Hellhound God Lying Down Posture when I reappeared, where nothing on this mere mortal earth can maintain the curve of their bellies, their long straight necks have disappeared into the sky, and their bright beaming eyes are in danger of making holes in the walls. They are so cute.§ Of course when I said what good dogs, they broke and threw themselves at me. But that’s okay. They’re my hellhounds.
* * *
* Er, wow. I’m willing to lug a certain amount in a backpack, but even aside from the fact that if I’m on foot I probably have leads in both hands I hate carrying shopping bags farther than to a nice, nearby car park.
** MMMPHRRRGGGLMMMMPH. The stories I could tell. . . . But I won’t.^
^ No. I’m going to tell one story because it presses my buttons. One of our teenage learners pretty much only shows up when he doesn’t have a better offer. This is disappointing but fairly standard, and kids are worth putting the time in on because if they come back to it later, when their kids are half grown and they start having the occasional free evening, they pick it up so much faster+—also, simply having ringing registered in their minds as something that is out there to do, so they might come back to it, is worth some effort.
Last night our, um, Bad Frederick appeared for the first time in months. He rang some perfectly respectable call changes and we were all telling him how glad we were to see him and how if he’d just keep coming we’d get him started again on plain hunt . . . and then he pulled out some papers he wanted Niall to fill out and sign for him. I didn’t register if it was school or scouting or the Duke of Edinburgh or what, but the point was that he’d shown up merely to get his certification from the ringing master that he does, in fact, ring bells. We all blinked a bit at the blatancy of it and Vicky said encouragingly, you should come on Sunday mornings, you’ll get more time on a rope because we always need ringers on Sunday mornings and it’s time on a rope you need to consolidate what you can do. (Bad Frederick is a walking-distance local, like Niall and Penelope and Vicky and me—and Monty, who is Bad Frederick’s age, but still manages to show up most Friday nights and Sunday mornings.).
Oh, I’m never awake that early, said Bad Frederick, and disappeared down the ladder.
Vicky knows Bad Frederick’s dad. In this particular case I jolly well hope the brat catches some heat.
+ Insert the grinding of teeth here of a 59-year-old woman whose early experience of ringing when she started again six years ago was from when she was 48.
*** You’ll notice that even my doodles are low on perspective.
† Penelope is also Niall’s not-so-secret weapon when he’s so desperate to scrape together another handbell evening at his house that he tries to put the persuaders on me. Penelope is making a cake, he says. I’ll be there, I reply.
†† Because we haven’t got the band. Next question.
††† And the winner of the free doodle is . . . blondviolinist, who clearly knows me better than I realised, for ‘where there is tea there is hope’. The funny thing is that Annagail’s guess, which is the very next one on the forum thread, was the followup: ‘Ever try. Ever fail. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.’ Annagail said: I’ve never been able to decide if that quote is depressing or inspiring. Or both. But it’s a good one for days when it just Ain’t Workin. Yes. Agree. Which is probably why ‘where there is tea’ won.^ But as words I do live by, ‘fail better’ are probably nearer the mark, I’m just not sure I want my iPad reminding me every time I pick it up to play Montezuma or Fingerzilla. Which is also why ‘I love deadlines, I love the whooshing sound . . .’ didn’t get chosen: I really don’t need that one reinforced every time I pick it^^ up to play Montezuma or Fingerzilla.
It’s funny about ‘fit’ because all your guesses were good ones.^^^ But I have an anxious enough relationship with my ability to write my stories down, I don’t want to bring going after things with clubs into it, although he’s right. And ‘people say life is the thing, but I prefer reading’ has been true all my, er, life, and is the personal entropy I have to resist.^^^^ Of course I wouldn’t put any quotes up that I don’t like, but you lot seem to have figured out which ones are close to my bone. Hmmmm. I wonder if I should worry . . .
Now then, blondviolinist, if you would be so kind as to tell me what doodle you would prefer? A knitting violin?^^^^^
^ Also, Raphael voted for ‘tea’. I was holding up ORDERING MY iPAD by my indecisiveness.
^^ She’ll need a name. But I’ll wait till she arrives.
^^^ I’m a little surprised no one suggested ‘On the internet no one knows you’re a dog.’
^^^^ There are weeks when entropy wins. Herein lies the magnificence of hellhounds. Peter understands the need to disappear out of reality. Hellhounds don’t. Hellhounds think that a few hours on the sofa are excellent and should happen more often. But they then want to get up and do something. Hurtle. Interact.+ Stare at the food in their bowls. Enough with the reading, say hellhounds.
+ An interaction: Seen coming toward us a black-and-white streak of border collie, head low and ready for business. I hate low-headed streaking border collies: they bite. They don’t bite hard, but they can nip hell out of your ankles and cause distress and consternation among hellhounds. FRELL, I said, and left the path, hoping she would decide that honour is satisfied and streak past. Forlorn hope: border collies are all about herding. Sheep substitutes that leave the path are all part of the day’s work. She shot up to us . . . and flung herself at the hellhounds’ feet, tail wagging furiously. Oh, her owner did eventually show up. Gah.
^^^^^ Caveat. If you want something outré, you have to let me post it first. Always Looking for Blog Material.
‡ This may be one of the reasons I like handbells. Organised fidgeting. I can sit in a chair if my hands get to twitch and wriggle. Handbell tea breaks at Niall’s house . . . I sit on the floor. Very nice carpet they have.
‡‡ Including Penelope’s new film society, which starts up this autumn. Stay tuned. She’s another one who has a little trouble with the ‘copious free time’ concept.
‡‡‡ Penelope has chickens. And one of them is sitting on eggs that are due to hatch in about a fortnight. Little cute fluffy yellow cheeping things with wings!^ Yaaaay!
^ Except for the yellow part, you might mistake them for bats.
§ Speaking of little, way too cute, and bats, abigailmm posted this: http://daannniix.tumblr.com/post/3466796413/baby-pipistrelle-bat Is it possible to be any cuter? Awwwwwww.
Thursday night is handbells
I have just put Alicia in a taxi.* It has been an eventful day.** You know about how I slept badly and thus overslept and have been rushing around to catch up, right? We can take that as read. As part of the rushing I was sweeping the kitchen floor again this morning and muttering. I sweep the kitchen floor at least once a day*** on account of all the creatures that live with me, which include not merely my exuberant brace of four-legged hair factories, but a lot of geraniums.† I love geraniums, they’re such triers, but crumbs are they messy.†† Whose stupid idea was it to have handbells at the cottage?†††
It has cooled off again so we had a more hurtle-like hurtle this morning, acknowledging the fact that it was also raining, so hellhounds were motivated to keep moving—the end of the rain must be just right up there—yes—no—okay, not quite here after all, then there . . . .
And then I was so dazzled by hellhounds eating their lunch as if there was no problem and had never been a problem‡ that we left a little late to pick Alicia up at her hotel‡‡ and had barely got back through the door of the cottage again when Niall showed up, eyes and teeth gleaming, with a large bag of handbells over his shoulder.
Alicia had posted to the forum:
Alicia, gods help me, is coming to visit this week . .
This is known as being between a rock and a hard place: if she doesn’t pick up those handbells, I’ll eat her.
Wow! There’s nothing like knowing that a friend a) is looking forward to one’s visit and b) has prepared a gentle and enjoyable addition to the visit, is there?!
. . . and I had carelessly not got round to answering: But Alicia, I’m so looking forward to torturing you with handbells!!
—And then we were a disaster.‡‡‡ Gemma’s only a beginner herself, and she arrived late, by which time Colin and Niall and I had proved that there was no hope for any of us, and Alicia is no doubt doing a general email right now to all of you saying, Pssst: it’s all a big hoax. These people can’t ring handbells at all.
We couldn’t, tonight.§ When the others left and I prepared to creep out in a humiliated sort of way to re-hurtle hounds, Alicia, having (for some inexplicable reason) declined to accompany us, declared her intention to explore my garden.
No, I said. Forbidden. You can pretend the glass has been blacked out, and a handbell-ringer-eating monster§§ lives out there.
Alicia looked at me. Give me some secateurs, and I’ll do some deadheading, she said.
DONE! I said, leaping to throw open the door.
It’s okay though. (I think.) Peter had roasted a very nice chicken for supper. And I did point out to her that she needs to tell her company to stop having meetings in Hampshire on Thursdays. Thursdays are handbells.
I’ll keep it in mind, said Alicia.
* * *
* I offered to stay sober and drive her back to her hotel! I did offer!^
^ Ah, what it is to have an expense account.
** Especially the part about the hellhounds eating. Especially especially the part about Chaos eating.
*** Not very well. But I do sweep it.
† Also begonias, although they are generally not quite so fiendish. But I do have a trailing one up at Third House which DESPITE weighing her pot down with several medium-sized boulders—there’s barely room for the begonia any more—will keep leaping off the porch shelf and prostrating herself on the floor. You know, trailing plants are supposed to trail. What exactly are garden-plant breeders thinking of when they breed a modest little something whose trailing flowers are the size and weight of watermelons? They’re like bulldogs that can’t breathe or basset hounds that keep treading on their own ears. Plants like this should at least come with a warning label ‘only put in a container you can nail down.’ And while you’re at it, you need to tie the frelling plant in place. I stopped having trailing begonias in hanging baskets when they started ripping themselves out of the compost to plunge to their doom. I have now roped the runaway begonia at Third House to the window latch, which usefully has a little hole to thread twine through.^
^ Remind me to tell you the adventures of my latest stephanotis. I sometimes think houseplants are as mad as hellhounds. It’s like bringing them indoors is the step of domestication too far. Not that my garden plants aren’t mostly possessed by demons.
†† One of their least appealing aspects is that all those tiny individual petals weigh nothing and therefore get caught up in all the spider webs^ so I have these eye-catching cascades of pink-embellished gossamer flowing down the corners and under the furniture.^^
And when I have both spiders and bug-eating bats, why do I still have clothes moths?? I haven’t found someone yet who speaks spider fluently enough, but I did think it was in the final contract with the bats.^^^
^ I told you I didn’t sweep well.
^^ Although if you’re down on your hands and knees peering under my furniture, you have a more serious problem than my housekeeping.
^^^ Speaking of bats, Diane in MN sent me this link: http://www.npr.org/player/v2/mediaPlayer.html?action=1&t=1&islist=false&id=138953002&m=138962547
It’s about vampire bats. It’s only three and a half minutes long and it’s pretty interesting, so do listen to it. You want to make it through to the end, where they’re talking about bat DNA. You remember, right?, because you read it right here, that bats are not flying rodents. They’re their own order, Chiroptera+. Well apparently they’re not even closely related to rodents: they’re nearer moles, cows and horses++, and so rather than flying mice you want to think of them as tiny flying horses. . . .
::falls down laughing::
+ A word that, six months ago, I could only half-remember and certainly couldn’t spell without looking up.
++ Moles, cows and horses seem to me a trifle strange as a group, but what do I know?
††† . . . Niall’s. Penelope is a little handbell-resistant. The unexpected drawbacks of having your own house separate from your husband’s.
‡ ‘Please sir/madam, I want some more.’
‡‡ Alicia looked perfectly calm and unperturbed as I pulled up, although she would be forgiven for a certain moderate anxiety. She’d sent me the details of her hotel, let’s call it Chatsworth, and I thought, what? I thought I knew all the hotels around here but I’ve never heard of that one. So I looked it up and discovered it was what I know as Chartwell, and they’d renamed it. So when I helpfully texted Alicia that I’d be at Chartwell at the arranged hour, she texted back . . . Chartwell—?
‡‡‡ Possibly very slightly in my defense my Damaged Forefinger started throbbing aggrievedly and I had to figure out a Strange Weird and Distracting way to hold the bell in that hand. And this typing with seven instead of eight fingers has got old.
§ Although the chocolate biscuits were rather good.
§§ Who would have been perfectly justified in eating us tonight, and thus keeping the handbell bloodlines pure.
In Which All Modes of Transportation Are Full of Gremlins
Fiona came today. She has a week off* so we had these insane plans of getting started on time. When she first suggested this I emailed back, what is on time? I don’t remember any more.
It didn’t matter, because we didn’t. It’s too HOT to sleep, and so neither of us did that either, and thus got up . . . rather late.** She arrived*** as I was about to take prospectively, poised-to-become-instantly hot and cranky hellhounds out into the furnace, and I left her doing . . . uh . . . never mind what she was doing . . . and hurtled down the front stairs. Agggh, said hellhounds, are you trying to KILL US? Where is that nice cool swamp you were talking about yesterday? We don’t mind things crawling down our shirts.†
We were about twenty minutes on our overheated way when Pooka started barking. I assumed it was Fiona, having failed to find something because I told her it was in/on/at x but that was at the old house and it’s now in/on/at y and I forget where y is. But it wasn’t Fiona. It was Peter. My bus hasn’t come! he said. And I have to make the connecting bus to get me to the dentist in Fantootlington! Where are you?
I’m out hurtling, I said, but I’m in town. I could get there in about ten minutes.
Oh, could you? he said in relief. Thanks.
. . . It was more like fifteen. But I threw hellhounds in the back of Wolfgang, told Fiona I was going to be another half an hour, and shot off to the bus stop.
Peter wasn’t there.
Aaaaaaugh.
So I wasted most of half an hour cruising all the other bus stops in town, thinking I might have the wrong one, and then went back to the mews, thinking he might have somehow ended up back there—and walked in on a Bruegel-the-Elder-scape, one of the really cheerful ones, of about 1,000,000 big fat flies buzzing round the kitchen. I think I’ve told you that in #1 The Mews he’s up against farmland, and farmland run not very well by a hobby farmer who can’t be bothered. Something has clearly died, and this is the result. So I was hammering flies and howling, and Pooka started barking again, and it was Peter, whose bus had come very late, but fortunately his connecting bus was also very late, and he was now on it. And he was sorry to have messed me around, but he hadn’t been able to get a phone signal, and . . . and it was a good thing that he was about twenty miles away at that point. . . .
So I went back to the cottage and Fiona, and collapsed. I’m still on the thin edge, and the adrenaline spike that would have got me (and Peter) to Mauncester and his bus drained away to no purpose, leaving a hellgoddess feeling more hellish than usual in a number of ways. I couldn’t think, I couldn’t finish hurtling hounds, and I couldn’t make decisions. . . .
So we did the sensible thing. We bagged our responsibilities and went to the art supplies store. Which is half across the country anyway—clearly people in Hampshire do not draw—and you can’t get there from here, especially with a SatNav that hasn’t had a crucial update.†† Fiona has Billy Connolly programmed to do the talking, so there were periods rife with Shut up, Billy. Shut up, Billy. EFF YOUR BLOODY GOB, BILLY. I know all the jokes about clueless morons blindly following their SatNav’s directions into bottomless lakes and so on . . . but it’s not quite like that, at least not if you’re directionally challenged anyway. The SatNav is not only supposed to be telling you (accurately) what to do, it’s one more frelling thing to keep track of. ††† If navigating takes all your attention at the best of times, you can’t obey the SatNav and look at a map intelligently. Also, we were talking, which meant there was perhaps the occasional lapse of focus leading to the missing of crucial turns etc. . . .
We got to the art supplies store (eventually). They had some very nice things to make marks with although no A6 sketch pads, arrrrgh‡. I was saying to the nice man behind the counter that I haven’t done any real drawing in what must be fifteen years, and I’m busy thinking I haven’t got time to add drawing to the LIST. . . .‡‡
Oh, we stopped at the yarn store again. It was almost on the way home.‡‡‡ Well, sort of. Shut UP, Billy.
* * *
* From her day job as forensic scientist with a speciality in the carbon dating of chocolate. I bet you didn’t know there was any chocolate 60,000 years old.^ But the archaeologists were utterly stymied by the conflicting clues about the age of the (astonishingly) ancient city of Gweep^^, which could not possibly be as old as the fossilised cement mixer found on site suggested. But the last queen buried before the glyptodon stampede flattened the city^^^ had a large bar of chocolate wrapped up in her grave clothes with her.^^^^ The archaeologists who made the discovery didn’t immediately know it was chocolate, but one of their number, a menopausal woman, reached out her hand, as if hypnotised, broke off a piece, and stuffed it in her mouth. Oh, they said. It must be chocolate. So they rang up Fiona.
There actually isn’t much call for carbon-dating chocolate for some reason. So Fiona moonlights as quality control checker in a yarn factory. They search her every night before she goes home . . . but this is only partly successful. The yarn addict is resourceful.
^ There wouldn’t be in this house. Ha ha. You saw that coming, right?
^^ Those Aztecs were such parvenus.
^^^ A glyptodon stampede just about could. http://dinosaurs.about.com/od/mesozoicmammals/p/glyptodon.htm
^^^^ I understand this.
** I used to wonder how I got along without email. Now I wonder how I got along before I acquired Pooka and learnt how to text.
*** Fiona came through the door with a brand new knitting project bag over her shoulder. It was black with pink roses. Oooooh! I said, seizing it before she finished coming in the door.^ Lust! Ow! Want!
What a good thing the shop had two of them, she said, with fully justified smugness, and pulled the second one out of the first one and handed it to me.
^ Leaving her more at the mercy of hellhounds. Usually I try to sort of beat them back, like the lion-tamer with a chair, when visitors arrive, but you can’t let me be distracted.
† No alligators please.
†† Fiona’s been having computer problems, and . . .
††† Using it—and then finally turning the freller off, take THAT, Billy—reminds me a bit of the awful moment when you stop reading your handbell lines off the bit of paper in your lap and go it alone. Reading the lines lets you do stuff you wouldn’t be able to do any other way—but they are also an excuse not to engage your brain if you’re not careful.
‡ So I thought, okay, fine, I’ll just order some on the WH Smith website. The WH Smith website doesn’t list them. I’m sitting here with a ‘WH Smith A6 Sketch Pad’ in my lap, and the website is saying ‘no matches’. I have wandered into a Max Ernst painting. Eeeeek.
‡‡ I’ll give you an update on the auction tomorrow. I don’t foresee well anyway, especially if whatever it is concerns logistics and organisation, and by taking into account what you lot are willing to spend money on some of my alternative plans rely on publishers getting back to me promptly which isn’t happening. But I have a New Compromise Plan, and if I don’t hear from any other publishers tomorrow, we’ll use this one.
‡‡‡ This one: http://www.lisswools.co.uk/
Which I wrote about here: http://robinmckinleysblog.com/2011/04/13/i-told-you-i-was-knitting/