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Redux, various
I WANT MY WOLFGANG. WAAAAAAH.
The good news is that Peter got out of Scotland about thirty seconds before they closed the border.* He came home this afternoon and instantly began reorganising my life.** This included ringing up the garage which, to my amazement, seems to think we can have Wolfgang back tomorrow morning. Fourteen year old cars and MOT tests are not usually a happy merger and I’ve been bracing myself for the conversation about the new car again.*** Even if we manage to limbo under the government bar however and get our sticker I imagine there will be a little list.†
Meanwhile today would be the day that I started to get out of bed and the ME sighed and stretched luxuriously and said, are you sure that’s what you want to do? Oh. Frell. You again. Well, yes, I do want to get up. I have hellhounds to hurtle and a piano lesson this afternoon and bell tower practise this evening.†† And no car.
I know we did this trooping up and down main street thing during the snow, but I’m not in the mood when I’m trying to hold it together with the ME riding me like a bulldogger with spurs. I am also reminded of how forcefully I object to walking anywhere without the hellhounds in attendance—two hours a day of hurtling is enough of the shanks’ mare option. Hey! It’s ten minutes to walk to Oisin’s from the cottage and back . . . having been back and forth to the mews to pick up my music and have a bit of a go at the piano.
Anyone who is paying the wrong kind of attention will have ascertained by now that I’m not posting the lullaby to PEGASUS this Friday either. I finally managed to get the freller printed off so that Oisin could actually see what he was playing . . . and he made several Small But Excellent suggestions††† that I now want to incorporate and I still have to relearn how to make dynamic markings on dranglefabbing Finale and then I will finally post it here. No, really. It exists.‡ It even sounds reasonably lullaby-ish. In fact I like it well enough that I’m going to ask Peter if he wants to write another verse so I can compose some variations.
I felt fairly dire while I was with Oisin although as I said to him I was expecting to feel suddenly a great deal better as soon as I left and any danger of my having to sing was past till next week. Sigh. I sometimes think I got into composing as a way not to have to perform.‡‡
I had already had an email exchange with Niall about tomorrow‡‡‡ and had warned him that I was feeling like something that ought to be pickled in formaldehyde in a jar on a mad scientist’s shelf but that I’d probably just about make it to tower practise, since we’re usually short handed these days and I ought to be able to manage rounds and call changes for our beginners. And then we had a funny band—three beginners and six hot bananas.§ And me. I was helping hold up one of the walls in a semi-comatose state while one of the beginners wrestled with ringing rounds on four, five and six §§ bells and then Niall made one of his passes round the room as a good ringing master will do and when he got to me he said, Are you ready to ring Cambridge?
Am I frelling what? No I am frelling not frelling ready to frelling ring frelling Cambridge. Am I clear?
Okay, said Niall. You can have a few minutes to look at the line.
Ah, adrenaline. What would I do without it. You know that’s one of the working definitions of ME? Exhausted adrenals? Yes. Well. At this point—Niall having passed on to fresh victims—I could feel my eyeballs throbbing to my suddenly heightened blood pressure. So I got out my diagram book and began staring at Cambridge while it went all glmxxxxxx on the page. Anthea came over to be supportive—two of our hot bananas tonight were Colin and his wife Anthea, who is one of my favourite people. You look at her face and you know It’s Going to Be All Right. Possibly Even When It Includes Ringing Cambridge. She is also a completely brilliant minder, which is a significant gift. Just because you can ring something doesn’t mean you can boost somebody else through it—especially boost them in a way that they learn something rather than merely collapsing into blindly doing what they’re told, which is probably more demoralising than breaking down. Anthea got me through my first couple of goes at Kent and it’s a lot of thanks to her that it began making sense to me as soon as it did.
I really did think that Cambridge was a bridge too far however. You don’t ring your first surprise method after a couple of sudden unexpected ten-minute cramming sessions because your ringing master(s) is/are wholly effing mad and your adrenals aren’t quite exhausted. Roger on the five was complaining that he didn’t feel like ringing Cambridge tonight and I said, don’t worry, this won’t last long, and Colin on the three, next to me on the two said, oh, yes it will.
And it did. We got through an entire plain course of Cambridge. I do wish to emphasize that this is absolutely due to Anthea’s crack minding . . . but I’ve been here before, learning something with Anthea at my elbow. We got through it. And I knew what I was trying to do even when I wasn’t seeing the bells to do it with.
I can do this. I am going to learn Cambridge.
Maybe I’ll even sing for Oisin next Friday.§§
* * *
*Joke. But apparently it’s pretty vicious up there. Our lot still have electricity and can feel their way through the snowdrifts, but a lot of people don’t and can’t. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/politics/scotland/7325843/Wintry-weather-sweeps-Scotland.html
And then of course there’s New York. http://www.presstv.ir/detail.aspx?id=119564§ionid=3510203
And I was complaining earlier about being pummelled by a little hail. I’m such a wuss. But look what came in the post for me today from Hannah (in NYC):
I’m trying. Clearly my solar capacity isn’t quite up to 3500 miles.
(Yes. That’s what you think it is, underneath, on the table. I’ll give you a better view one of these days. I know, you can hardly wait.)
The thing that amuses me even more about this item however is the tag: 
Post consumer material???
** It’s shocking how much disorganization can creep up on you in a mere day and a half.
*** No. But I admit if we have two winters in a row like this one, this time next year I will be thinking hard about a new four-wheel drive car. With waterproof locks.
† Frushipergug rods and bistamudze belt need replacing. Gradundabble connections should be tightened. The whimmerwhammer needs realigning. And while you’re at it you need a new engine, four new tyres, and a CD player.
†† And a novel to write.
††† I asked him if he wanted credit and he said no, no, no, just keep writing the stuff.
‡ So do the little flute piece I promised Jodi and the truly tiny violin piece I promised violinknitter. I’m just . . . a horrible coward. And I keep thinking I want to twiddle them a little more. . . .
‡‡ I wonder if it would work with Blondel. . . . I am such a hopeless case. I’m afraid to sing for Oisin, and I’m afraid to take one of my songs to Blondel. What do I think is going to happen? The end of the world?
‡‡‡ The other reason the ME was kind enough to come back today, aside from not singing for Oisin, is being able to say no I am not going handbell ringing Saturday morning. Although . . . sigh. I would like to ring with Titus and Rupert.
§ So to speak.
§§ One of the reasons ringing seems, when you’re first learning, to be coming at you from all directions is that the eenie weenie difference in timing and rhythm between, say, four and six bells, which when you’re learning to handle you have no sense of, makes a drastic practical difference in keeping your place.
§§§ Or take one of my songs in to Blondel. Maybe I could get him to sing the lullaby.
Look at what arrived in the post today:
Another writer friend—let’s call her Rosalind—sent it, saying that I could take notes on PEG II in it, and included a bookmark with a teeny weeny pegasus on it.* And if you want such a notebook, you can get it here: http://longbarnbooks.com/ , where indeed it appears in a number of guises. Oooh. I may have to have the tea mug too.**
This is the same friend who gave me a tote bag*** with Erasmus’ deathless remark on it: ‘When I get a little money, I buy books. And if there is any left over, I buy food.’ † It’s good to have friends. After the previous few days and the immediate few days to come in the world of publishing††, friends are even more necessary than usual.†††
And I have to go to bed early so that I can be not merely awake but functional by 8:30 a.m. tomorrow. Sunday service ring isn’t till eight forty five.‡ Fedex’s delivery hours are any time from 8:30 to 6. Isn’t that lovely? Isn’t that charming? I don’t understand why we are swamped in terrible delivery services—there must be a dozen of the wretched things, all of them with oversized logo-besmirched vehicles clogging up our roads and polluting our atmosphere—when there is obviously a gigantic market niche for a good one. Eight thirty a.m. to six p.m.: this means, for example, that if you’re a private individual who maybe needs a pee occasionally, let alone has hellhounds with a high hurtling requirement, you can’t even get your friendly local health food store to take delivery for you‡‡ because ordinary shops are open something like 9 to 5:30. I may or may not get a cup of tea and a rant with Oisin tomorrow‡‡‡ at the end of the day—but if Fedex doesn’t arrive till 6:05 I’ll be hanging from the ceiling and eating the wallpaper.§ If it arrives at all, of course. Fedex: Sure We’ll Guarantee It. Ptttht. We Don’t Give A Damn, and We Don’t Care Who Knows It.
* * *
* I have, however, got the wind up badly about pegasus merchandise. I hadn’t thought about this—not that thinking has ever got me much of anywhere about the books I write—till Tasmin sent me about a dozen pegasus-decorated refrigerator magnets, each one more terrifyingly ugly than the last. Zowie. I was afraid to put them up because they might give the hellhounds nightmares.^ I disengaged with unicorns decades ago as a result of unicorn merchandise. ^^ Maybe I could write a novel about warthogs. Or threadworms. I think it would be hard to attract many corporate investors with threadworm kitchen magnets.
^ For those of you not over-acquainted with the floor plan at the cottage, I have a kitchen the size of a Smart Car. It contains a table, a tallboy, an Aga+, and a hellhound crate. With difficulty. And an assortment of dwarf appliances crammed under the stairs. The refrigerator is immediately opposite the hellhound crate. The crate door has just enough clearance to open past the refrigerator. Just. Sometimes it hooks a magnet or two in its sweep.
+ http://www.johnwraycountrystoves.co.uk/image20.html Theirs is a lot cleaner. Also you don’t get the same effect when it’s not WEDGED among its environs.
Mine came with the cottage. I like green, it’s okay. But I didn’t know they came in pink. http://www.aveccookers.co.uk/aga-cookers-choosing.htm Never mind. Pink would be really hard to keep clean.
^^ I have elsewhere mentioned my rage and despair when unicorns insisted on invading ROSE DAUGHTER. I keep telling you what happens in my stories is not up to me.
** I’d love to know the context; a hasty Google^ isn’t bringing up anything useful. But Louisa was a character—a single, income-earning, family-supporting woman who worked for women’s rights in an era when all of this was frowned on—she could be saying it in a story or out of it, and with almost any level of irony. Is anyone still reading her thrillers? BEHIND A MASK and so on? They’re dreadful. Really, really, really dreadful . . . but with a kind of intoxicating, page-turning, gothic fascination. They make Wilkie Collins’ THE WOMAN IN WHITE, say, seem positively inhibited.
^ I have to go back to work here in a minute. —Sleep? That would be what?
*** Or I’d probably be looking at the Alcott tote bag as well. I may be anyway. A woman can never have too many tote bags. The Erasmus is full of plant catalogues at the moment. I was ordering snowdrops yesterday to cheer myself up. And I’ve only just discovered that magnolia stellata comes in pink. http://www.hort.net/gallery/view/mag/magksjp/ Speaking of pink. As I often am.
† I’d give you a photo of it too only it and my camera flash don’t get along. I can’t find it on the web, although other editions of it exist. http://www.zazzle.co.uk/when_i_get_a_little_money_i_buy_books_bag-149606564280811630
Or how about this incarnation: http://www.cafepress.co.uk/brownbagdesigns.79598963
†† Mmmmngghthrmmph. Professional prudence—and a judicious fear of Merrilee’s wrath—keep me silent. Unfortunately. Mmmmmngghthrmmph.
††† I also made a dog’s dinner of ringing last night. Siiiiigh. Niall, who occasionally has pity on the feckless, did not mention my diabolical new status at our home tower to the assemblage at our usual Wednesday practise in Ditherington. He exercised no such restraint tonight at handbells with Colin: feh. And Colin is on the list of Top Ten Worst Teases in the Universe. Feh. However we were all going radically wrong tonight. That was you! No, that was you! No, that was all of us, plus hellhounds and the ghost.
‡ And I don’t have to sign my name Sunday mornings. Although with the new electronic berserker screens all the delivery services have now that you scrabble at with a plastic sylus, neither legible nor identifiable is an issue any more.
‡‡Our friendly local health food shop is happy to take delivery occasionally for good customers. Peter orders my Green & Black’s mint chocolate from them. By the box. You don’t need to know any more, do you?
‡‡‡ I’ve done a little work on my choral masterpiece A Pox Upon Their Heads this week, but not really enough to be worth showing.
§ The cottage doesn’t have wallpaper.
Bookshelves and reality
A few days ago this email conversation occurred with my friend Tasmin, who is another writer. Another somewhat (ahem) book- and space-challenged writer.* She’s spent a lot of time (and money) over the last year or so in turning the second parlour in her old farmhouse into a library**, and now, finally, with the shelves in, she is beginning to unpack.
I asked her if I could use her email and my reply as a blog entry because I felt that rather a lot of you would understand what happened next. Indeed, will have already predicted what happened next. She graciously agreed.
And so I began, in true sympathetic, supportive friendship mode:
I’m not laughing. I’m NOT laughing. I’m NOT LAUGHING! MMMMMRMMMMMRRRRMMPH
—–Original Message—–
From: Tasmin Hohenzollern
Sent: 18 January 2010 23:09
To: Robin
Subject: Bookshelves are INADEQUATE
I know that you will understand this.
I’ve just about got the library bookshelves crammed full, and I have books that are Not On Shelves. Boxes of them. Thirty or forty boxes of them. “Oh, quelle surprise!” I hear you cry.
That would be pretty much what I’m crying, yes. Mmmmmrmmmrrrmph.
This is going to make me cull and cull again. Unfortunately it’s a slow process, culling.
Yes. You suddenly realise you have a crick in your back, need a pee, and are dying for a fresh cup of tea/coffee . . . and it’s two hours later, and you’ve been reading a book you decided two hours ago to cull. Yes?
Why, just this morning I got rid of PAVILION OF WOMEN by Pearl S. Buck and two of the three (why? Who knows?) copies of JANE EYRE.
Uh . . . I have several copies of JANE EYRE. I often have several copies, particularly different editions, of favourite books (aside from the dozen or so different editions of LOTR), and JANE’s definitely a favourite. Why should a good friend have only one suit of clothes?
At this rate it will take me… um… mathematically challenged, remember?*** this may take a moment or two… YEARS to reconcile the books with the space available on the bookshelves.
Yep. I still probably have a couple of months before I get to play this game at Third House. Atlas is Building Shelves now.†
Unless I make a clean sweep of the more prolific authors – Edgar Rice Burroughs, say, or Lovecraft, or Fay Weldon -
Not Lovecraft! Not Lovecraft!!! –But if you stick to just him, it’s not so bad. You can get rid of all the Derleth etc.†† I cut Edgar††† back in Maine–and I never developed the Weldon habit.‡
there is going to be a major, MAJOR space shortage.
Yep. Reality. Don’t worry, it’s just reality. Happens to all of us. Like breathing. Shortage of bookshelves. Breathing.
There are Too Many Books (and mind you, I haven’t even touched the contents of my office upstairs, or the bookshelves in my room or the one in the guestroom or the ones on the landing. Sigh. THERE ARE TOO MANY BOOKS!
There are NEVER too many books. THAT’S the problem. Shortage of bookshelves and breathing is just the way life works, badly planned and built as it is.
And that’s not even counting the many boxes of my own books – something I’ve always been religiously opposed to keeping around the house, but when you buy up the copies before they’re remaindered, well, damn, there they are, first they cost you money and then they’re right in your way in the form of a stack of boxes. Eek.
Oh, well, I DO keep backlist in boxes. You weren’t fantasizing wasting shelf space on BACKLIST were you?!? Are you feeling quite well??
Perhaps you should plan to come and spend a week or two helping me cull. It’s always much easier to cull other people’s books (and then you can take lots of them home with you, heheheheh).‡‡
Yes, THAT’s why it’s easier to cull other people’s books! I KNOW that scam!!!!
Doesn’t that sound like a lovely holiday? And just think how you would enjoy convincing me that I don’t actually NEED twenty different editions of specific books… only, of course, I DO.
Well, I think twenty might be the upper limit. Except for LOTR. And possibly JANE EYRE.‡‡‡
[Here ends the amusing bit of the email. The rest of it trails away into mutual inquiries about the behaviour of respective domestic fauna, meteorlogical insults, the inexplicable behaviour of publishers, etc.]
* * *
* Is there another kind? Well, Peter might be another kind, only he married me.
** Which is to say she too went through the Weight-Bearing Floor follies. She, however, was only dealing with the ground floor. No fabulously expensive additional staircases were demanded of her. No perfectly respectable second bedrooms were turned into cupboards with stairs running through them.
*** He has also begun building the brick planter in front of the cottage. So that the next time some moron in an SUV swings grandly out of the driveway across the road^ and slams into my pots, it’s going to hurt him a lot more than it hurts me. For a change.
^ Note that these are not my neighbours themselves, but they hang out with some overvehicled riffraff. The thing that totally gets up my nose is that for the four big, heavy pots I’ve lost . . . not one person has ever knocked on my door and said, Er, I’m really sorry but . . . And no, there is no way they can’t have noticed. These are—were—big heavy pots. Grrrrrr.
† Yes. Tasmin and I have a lot in common.
†† I can be cruel and decisive when there’s no longer space for . . . a bed^, say, and a kettle to boil water for tea.
^ In extreme circumstances, hellhounds could sleep on the bed.
††† Cruel! Cruel! Cruel! Especially toward writers who write by the yard. I got rid of my 1,000,000 E Phillips Oppenheim at the same time.
‡ I’m a cow, remember? Moooooo.
‡‡ Yes, I know. This is what happened the last time I visited Tasmin.
‡‡‡ And . . .
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 Day After the Night Before
First a few leftovers from last night.*
First: cutest birthday present.** 
The music stand is obviously
more crucial to my development as an artist*** but a girl also needs cute.
Second: Dog Sculpture. You cannot, even if you look at it in close up, see how very peculiar Chaos’ posture is in the first photo of all of us on the sofa. This is his what I call Dog Sculpture because of the way he glues his head to his shoulder, like those graceful but anatomically incorrect sculptures of curled-up creatures made out of natural materials like a lump of rock or a piece of tree, when the sculptor is paying attention to the grain of the original. Alternatively hellhound as large netsuke. It doesn’t look the least bit comfortable but he will nap off like this. This photo doesn’t do justice to the pretzel he can bend himself into if he’s in the mood. But it does show off the elegance of his neck nicely.
Third: to put to rest speculation on the subject of the tie Peter was wearing last night: 
Jousting knights. Yup. And the waistcoat is red, black and gold and doesn’t go at all. He should have been wearing his unicorn tie with that waistcoat. Hmm. Possible future lo-text Monday: a Tour of Peter’s Ties. He’s also got a dragon one. And a kangaroo one. As a native of the northern hemisphere I find kangaroos every bit as mythic as dragons and unicorns.
* * *
I got to my voice lesson late today. Trauma. They’re resurfacing the drive at the mews and I managed to half-forget that I had to walk back to the cottage to pick up the car. So I spilled across Blondel’s threshold gasping which is not a good beginning. I then squarely put my foot on my own neck† by saying that I was taking the week off from work and that this therefore would be a good time to give me something new to learn. Whereupon Blondel wandered thoughtfully around his studio with his brow furrowed with concentration and eventually produced Gerald Finzi’s Let Garlands Bring, five Shakespeare songs for voice and piano, which he opened with a flourish to ‘Fear no more the heat o’ the sun’ which has a really pretty tune†† and a killer-in-a-good-way last page which is like Gregorian chant only not really, however is one of these killer-in-a-bad-way situations where you and the piano have very frelling little to do with one another, except in a kind of exciting adversarial stand-off with the piano trying to scare you to death. It was all right today with Blondel singing with me, but it’s going to be interesting next week when he’ll be expecting me to do it alone.
Then I bludgeoned poor old Gluck some more. It makes me nuts that I can, at this point, with some degree of regularity, hit that not-a-big-ungleblarging-deal-get-a-grip-McKinley F at the end, at home. Singing it for Blondel . . . not only does it come at the end, it’s important, you know? You don’t just slip up to it, give it a tap on the shoulder and slip away again, it’s your moment. No! No! I don’t want any moments! I want to hide behind a curtain and let someone else have moments! So as I’m singing the rest of it I know it’s coming and by the time I get there . . . eeep. It’s like the other week when I’d warmed up pretty well at home and went in there ready to sing . . . and by the time Blondel had got to the end of the second line of the intro to He Was Despised I’d completely shut down and came in on a fractured squeak. AAAAAAAUGH.
I also told him that I thought I was practising wrong, and did he have any advice, and he said what did I mean, wrong? And I said that I felt as if I came home every week and instantly forgot everything he’d told me and reverted to establishing all my bad habits further. And he said, what bad habits? And I said, well, breathing, and support, and voice placement—and I think I may have done a small rant here about the mystery and unreliability of the human body, to wit, mine. And he said, the fact that you’re aware of all this suggests to me that this is not what’s happening. And, he said, your breath control and sound quality have improved a lot.
Oh.
Actually, he’s right.††† But I would like to stop with the fractured squeaking thing.
* * *
* I wish. The foie gras^ was to die for and the scallops were . . . divine, to develop a theme. Peter had scallops for starters and went on to duck breast. He said the duck was also spectacular but I feel I won by having more scallops than he did.
^ I am a foie gras fiend. Relatively speaking. We go out to dinner at a serious restaurant maybe twice a year+ and if there’s foie gras on the menu, I eat it. It could probably be said that restaurants we develop anything like a habit of returning to have foie gras on the menu.++
+ When PEGASUS is on the best seller list for 943 weeks we’ll go out more often. Well, maybe. Even foie gras probably isn’t worth only eating anything at all once a week as a regular thing.~ You want major calories? Foie gras. You can feel your waistband getting tighter before the fork reaches your mouth.
~ Get away from me with that lettuce leaf. Don’t you realise it has at least .05 calories?
++ Please don’t all rush to the forum to post how much you hate foie gras, okay? I know it’s not everyone’s idea of joy. Occasionally this works out to my advantage. I once had an extremely fancy publishing lunch with Hannah—she paid: she was celebrating some terrifying business thing or other, I forget what—where they just brought you a tiny pre-starter starter: foie gras.~ Hannah didn’t want hers. That moment alone almost balanced thirty years of friendship.~~
~ Very fancy lunch. As I say.
~~ Not quite.#
# Yes. Hannah reads this blog.
** From Peter. He had a little help choosing. Even so.
*** COUGH COUGH COUGH SNARK SNARK
† Speaking of contortionist postures
†† Genuine earnest serious committed voice students I’m sure don’t say tune
††† You still do not want to hear me sing. We’re in ‘that only a voice teacher could love’ territory.
