Shut up, Billy
IT’S HALF PAST MIDNIGHT, I’M FINALLY EATING DINNER* AND I STILL HAVE TO WRITE THE BOONDOGGLING BLOG.**
Fiona had booked tickets for the Gigspanner*** concert months and months ago. And months. I think she booked them slightly before the tour had been confirmed or the dates settled on.† This is also before the doodle situation broke down under the strain of trying to write a novel in five months††. Our previous set up has been when there’s a concert in view she takes the day off her real job††† and comes down for a few hours during the day and terrifies some corner of my office/files/desk/attic into behaving itself, and then we frolic in the evening. But while I still have many, not to say numberless other corners of my life that could use Fiona’s services, with 1,000,000,000 doodles‡ hanging over my head like 1,000,000,000 Damoclesian swords I can’t frelling face my office, let alone sort out something for Fiona to do in/with it.‡‡
But it’s a long frelling way for Fiona to come for a concert—even longer when it involves better than an hour of surplus driving to come and fetch me.‡‡‡ And then another one to take me home. So I was casting about for something to make the day more value-added . . . and devised the cunning plan that we could go see AVENGERS ASSEMBLE in twoD at a theatre that involves the Greater Footling Triangle, a lesser known but statistically more savage area of geophysical mayhem than the better known Bermuda. The attraction of this theatre (aside from the straightforward appeal of 2D) is that, if it weren’t for the geophysical mayhem part, where you turn right and find yourself on Mars, it would be my best option for some of the other live-streaming opera broadcasts that are becoming increasingly popular.
Fiona, who is agreeably broad-minded, agreed to this plan. And then the frelling theatre changed the times on us. And we were no longer going to have time to scamper from the cinema to the concert several towns over before Roger started beating up Peter’s fiddle.§ A mad flurry of emails ensued.
We compromised. We decided to go to a new yarn store.
But the yarn store happens to be in pretty much the same area as the cinema, so Fiona offered to take us past the cinema first, so we could find it—who knows, we might even go to a film there some day—before we went on to the yarn store.§§ So she fired up her satnav and . . .
I think possibly I have been rude about her satnav before? Shut up, Billy. Shut up, Billy. You get various choices for your voice. Fiona has Billy Connolly. The Scottish accent, when he’s saying sensible things, is pleasing. He rather too frequently deviates from the path of virtue however. Clearly satnav tech is not proof against the Greater Footling Triangle. Or the Greater Footling Multidimensional Roundabout, where, whichever exit you take, it’s the wrong one, and Billy will be telling you to turn around in a minute.
HE EVENTUALLY TOOK US TO A SEWAGE STATION AND THEN CLAIMED WE’D ARRIVED AT OUR DESTINATION. I know most modern films are rubbish but . . . §§§
We finally saw the theatre—on the wrong side of the dual carriageway [four lane highway] of course—on our way back, retracing our steps to find the yarn store.
The yarn store was extremely satisfactory. Extremely.# Oh dear. And as soon as I get this posted I am going to race upstairs and discover that . . . I haven’t got enough of the yarn I want to use for the new pattern I just bought## with the idea of it being my first cardigan.###
And the concert was fabulous.~ It was also long, which is why it was half past midnight before I even looked at my computer, but it was the kind of long that when you finally look at a clock you think, it can’t be that late. That second set was short, I know it was. Live music is just . . . necessary. Technology these days is so amazing (sometimes even for good) that it’s easy to sit at home with your 1,000,000 favourite CDs and think that’s all you need. It isn’t. You need it live sometimes too: you need to see the musicians doing it and hear it as they do it. You need to pick up the electricity of what they do together—which is not recordable. Oh, yes, certainly, some performers can put over that fresh vibe to be caught for the ages by the latest equipment. ~~ But it’s not the same. And these guys really connect, with each other, with you the audience. Love love love. Why aren’t they famous?
* * *
* Well, we had a dinner-like meal at about 6. But I don’t eat dinner at 6.
** Yes, I did think of holding New Thing 10 one more day because I knew I’d be back late tonight. But I didn’t think I’d be this late . . . and I also knew it would be a day rife with blog material. I possibly didn’t know how rife. . . .
*** http://www.gigspanner.com/
† What? She hired a good prognosticator. How do you think?
†† Which I also have signally failed to do. Siiiiiiiigh. It has not been one of my great years.
††† What? Oh, she makes jgrrmgles. To order. There’s a long waiting list. She’s the best jgrrmgle maker in Britain, and possibly the world.
‡ And a few other random items
‡‡ Hellhounds and I occupy a narrow strip near the door. The rest is . . . AAAAAAAUGH.
‡‡‡ See: I don’t drive much. Especially to anywhere I don’t already know. Yes, this means that anywhere I hadn’t already learnt the route to by the winter of 2000, when I went down with acute ME, I probably won’t drive to now. And don’t I hate it when they change the road layout.
§ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c2Rx2KSW3-c&feature=youtube_gdata
Blondviolinist, avert your eyes.
§§ Film and yarn possible in the same expedition. Hmmmmm.
§§§ Which was being renovated or expanded or something. We sat there while the giant thing with caterpillar tread trundled around moving heaps of rock in an aimless manner and Fiona fired up her iPhone—Pooka, I might add, was refusing to connect: the signal was fine but she was sitting there going Can’t! Won’t! And you can’t make me!—and ascertained that the post code on the cinema web site was wrong. Oh. That’s helpful.
# Ask Fiona.
## Yes, I know you don’t knit from stash. Stash is stash. If you want to knit something you have to go out and buy yarn. But I find that—um—sometimes you do want to knit up some of your yarn. That sometimes you bought yarn not merely because it was gorgeous and was clinging round your leg and refusing to get back on its shelf and what can you do when it knows your name?, but because you want to wear it or throw it over the back of your sofa or something. That you bought it sure that the pattern it yearns to become is out there somewhere, just possibly not in this shop and besides you’ve already been here six hours fondling yarn and your hellhounds need walking and your husband wants to know where you are and if you’re ever coming home^. But you want to, you know, knit this yarn up, even if maybe it will have a sort of interregnum period of looking like stash. Um—does this mean I’m not a real knitter?
^ And when, bringing your purchases into the house, if you will fit through the door.
## Hint: open front. No buttons. No buttonholes. And with only a few changes. Like about six inches shorter^ and the sleeves will be STRAIGHT not belled. Ugh^^. The sleeves will probably also be longer to accommodate my gorilla-length arms. Sigh. I am looking FORWARD to sleeves that are LONG ENOUGH.^^^
^ Maybe I’ll have enough yarn after all.
^^ Maybe it makes a pretty line. All I can see is ‘gets into your tea, your soup, the mouth of the dog you’re petting’ etc. It’s like Fiona was wearing lady shoes today and then complaining about the stairs. You’re wearing lady shoes.
^^^ And for anyone with a memory so good you ought to be ashamed of yourself, yes, I have at least one other First Cardigan, and I even bought the yarn for that one at the same time I bought the pattern. The problem with it is that it pretty much trumpets EASY KNIT FIRST CARDIGAN, which kind of puts me off because I’m like that. I still like it and still plan to make it (!!!) but . . . I think I’d like to make something that isn’t quite so obviously holding my hand and saying ‘there, there’ first.+
+ Says the woman who is about a third of the way through her third leg warmer having still not sewn up the first two. But I started sewing up last night and . . . it’s working. Sewing up was my downfall last time—my squares looked reasonably okay individually, but as soon as I started sticking them together their jolly little eccentricities became serious vice and corruption. Sigh. Some day I will have the world’s largest knitted hellhound blanket. Also the most irregular knitted hellhound blanket of any size.
~ And I have a crush on the drummer. Just by the way. And none of the youtube clips do him justice, so don’t give me that ‘ewwww’.
~~ Gigspanner has two excellent albums out themselves^ . . . but it’s still not the same.
^ Although they’d better record their Tom o’ Bedlam soon or I shall grow rude and violent
Yarny
Someone on the forum asked for recommendations for New York City yarn shops. We are so all over this.
Hannah had her first lesson in knitting and purling today. She sent me some photos, and I’d post one if I could figure out how. She’s making a scarf* out of this gorgeous amber-butterscotch yarn that I would kill for. And I tried once, as southdowner and b_twin_1 can attest.** I dunno . . . no, no, I’m still better off practising on CHEAP yarn and leg warmers and hellhound blankets for a while longer. Better. Off. BETTER.***
Hannah’s new mentor, who is a mega-demon knitter with faultless qualifications, upon inquiry, suggests the following Manhattan yarneries. Annotations are your editor’s own:
http://www.schoolproductsyarns.com/
The Oldest Yarn Store in Manhattan, and there’s a BLOKE on the opening page.
. . . which is also owned by the woman responsible for:
http://www.karabellayarns.com/default.aspx
Dyed and gone to heaven yarn
http://www.karabellayarns.com/yarndetail.aspx?yarnID=79
Kill meeeeeeeee. I adore merino. And look at all those COLOURS.
Broadway in the low 80s, upstairs: ‘you don’t see the store from the street but I think it’s right next door to that Laytner’s’
Coup de Coeur by Zabeth, in Stoplight
Sigh. Well, I’m not hurrying. I couldn’t knit the freller anyway.
http://www.purlsoho.com/purl . . .
http://www.purlsoho.com/purl/products/item/7962-Susan-Bates-Crystallite-Knitting-Needles-US-8-to-105
Oh whimper. WANT.
I’m not asking if any of these people ship overseas. Am. Not.
. . . But what do you suppose this is like to knit? . . . Arrgh. Wait a minute. It doesn’t have its own page. Click on ‘yarns’, and then on ‘artyarns’, and then on ‘artyarns pearled and beaded’. Want. But how does it knit?
http://www.thewoolgathering.com/
Okay, finally, a web site that you can’t browse and make yourself miserable. Yaaay. Sniff.
Hannah also her own self went to:
http://www.knittycity.com/blog/home
. . . http://www.knittycity.com/store/index.php?route=product/product&product_id=388 More artyarn. This one glitters. Okay, I wonder if artyarns has a UK outlet . . . back, back, thou tempter! Back, I say!
http://www.knittycity.com/store/index.php?route=product/product&product_id=361 The individual colours don’t seem to have their own pages, but it doesn’t matter. I want all of them.
http://www.tangled-yarn.co.uk/brand/malabrigo/arroyo/malabrigo-arroyo-850-archangel/prod_921.html . . . damn.
Apparently I have to go to France for artyarn. And not the near end of France either. Oh, wait . . .
http://www.yarnbox.co.uk/cgi-bin/trolleyed_public.cgi?action=showprod_BMSH1S Rats. Well, I’m broke. What a very good thing I’m broke.
ANYWAY. Hannah says Knitty City were very nice to her and even though the shop was full—including a men’s class—someone took time to help her pick out her (unnecessarily beautiful) yarn.
. . . OH GODS I’M SO HOMESICK I COULD DIE. No, no, I can get into plenty of woolly trouble in the UK. And have. And will continue to do so. But I love New York—you will have observed that I plonked New Thing’s heroine there, and even if I did instantly snatch her out again, still, she’s a native New Yorker and that won’t go away. †
It’s not touring SHADOWS or PEG II (or III) that’s going to get me back on an airplane, it’s the prospect of cruising Manhattan yarn shops with Hannah. Now all I need is an Extreme Dog Minder. Meanwhile . . .
- LEG WARMERS
Only a few rows to go. And fewer than that too, because I’ve knitted about four more waiting for stuff to load tonight. The old mews laptop has been in a bad mood ever since Word took it down with violence the other night. One of the best things about knitting is the low technology requirement.
* * *
*Please tell me someone else out there started with something that wasn’t a scarf. Clearly I don’t get it about scarves.
** Southdowner had just better not wear that jumper anywhere in my vicinity.
*** Just until I don’t have to make my leg warmers double-length any more. Because I need them to squunch down excessively around my ankles to hide all the errors.
† And if anyone is wondering if I’m forgetting my roots, I don’t really have roots: the curse of the military brat. I call myself from Maine because I spent more years there than anywhere else^. But my best friend lives in New York. As well as my publisher. And my agent. And the Nur ad Din room at the Metropolitan Museum. And the Metropolitan Opera.
^ Although Hampshire, England has now surpassed this record. I realise this with a shock.
YESSSSSSSSSSS.
I have brought Hannah over to the DARK SIDE. She is going to LEARN TO KNIT. —Well, relearn. She, like so many of you—my family of origin seems to have been a knitting-free zone—was originally taught by her grandmother. But when she and I were festive, swinging, cutting-edge young things, knitting was antiquated, déclassé, extinct. Your grandmother still did it, but nobody else did.* And then other things like career, family, and the need for at least three and a half hours of sleep per night, get in the way of rediscovering your handcrafty roots: How to knit, how to sew a fine seam, how to make nightgaunts out of pipe cleaners. And then one day you look up from your desk and think, I can make publishing CEOs on the other side of the city/planet** tremble but I’ve never (re)learnt to knit.***
Or possibly you’ve been moaning on the phone to your best friend about how you spend too much time on airplanes.† And how when things go well you can read or watch a film†† or even get some work done, but things so often don’t go well, and you’re sitting in the gate area and the PA system is telling you every five minutes that you will be loading momentarily, and then when you finally do get on the frelling plane you have a really annoying seatmate who is afraid of flying, freaked out by whatever was holding up loading, and needs to chat. And the requisite screaming baby is in the seat behind you.††† And then, because the plane loaded late, you’ve lost your place in the take-off queue, and you’re going to be frelling around here on the ground for quite some time and I hope there isn’t a connecting flight at the other end and . . .
At which point your friend may say smugly, You should learn to knit.
Which is what I said to Hannah tonight. And there was a long pause on the other end of the phone, and then she said, You’re right. That’s exactly what I should do. . . . So then we both spent some time looking up knitting shops in New York City‡ and she’s totally going to do this thing.
YESSSSSSSSSSSSS.
I am glad today has had a chance to go out on a high.‡‡ High moments in the last fourteen hours have been somewhat thin on the ground. To begin with it’s been a gorgeous day . . . the first non-dire day we’ve had in about a fortnight. I COULD GET SOME GARDENING DONE. I COULD POT UP THE MILLION LITTLE GREEN THINGS WAITING TO BE POTTED UP.
Except I can’t. Mondays are voice lesson and ringing at Colin’s. I haven’t got time for more extracurriculars. Tomorrow it’s going to rain again. Indeed it’s warming up to raining again tomorrow right now.‡‡‡ I did slam in a few sweet peas this afternoon in the little gap of time between getting hellhounds back to the cottage for the dog minder to sweep them away and when I need to leave for my singing lesson, but ‘slam’ is the operating word here and remember I said they needed to be potted on? Yes. They’ve got a good quarter-inch of white root showing around the bottom of the porous plant-in-situ pots I put them in weeks and weeks ago.
And . . . I think I told you that I had gone to Oisin’s on Friday positively charged with tragedy, and was going to amaze him with my profound aural empathy with Orfeo mourning his lost Eurydice. Ha. Frelling ha ha ha. About 95% of all that rich, blossoming cornballery went away the moment Oisin raised his hands over his keyboard.§ GODS FRELL IT. I knew some of it would go away as soon as there was Someone Else Listening but I was pretty depressed that nearly all of it did. This demoralised me sufficiently that I never really got it back over the weekend, and the Che Faro I took to Nadia today was a poor thin shadow of its last-week self.
It was not all bad. In the first place, Nadia knows. She’s a singer, and when she says ‘you’re your own worst enemy, Robin,’ she says it sympathetically. In the second place she’s a girl. (This was pretty funny. She was saying ‘I’m a girl’ simultaneously as I was saying ‘he’s a bloke’.) In the third place . . . she was serious about letting me work on it with her.§§ And in the fourth place . . . I went in saying, you know, even at my cornball best last week when I really was ( . . . I think . . . ) producing some vague, uncertain drama about the whole thing, that top F is an utter ratbag . . . and F isn’t high enough to inspire this amount of angst and perturbation. And she said immediately, it’s on ‘ben’, isn’t it? (Yes.) That’s a really bad vowel sound for singing. —So at least I wasn’t just being hopeless. And she gave me some stuff to do. And I love my voice lessons, even when they’re on THE ONLY GOOD DAY WE’RE GOING TO HAVE ALL MONTH, and when I’m singing like a slightly defective robot.
And then tonight’s ‘tower’ ring was in Colin’s garage, with his inverted flower-pots. I am so useless with those ridiculous bells.§§§ But tonight uselessness was general. We all went home healthier than we came because laughter as we all know is the best medicine. But in terms of ringing. . . .
OH GODS IT’S SHEETING OUT THERE.
But at least Hannah is learning to knit.
* * *
* And the things your grandmother knitted for you—I had friends with knitting machines for grandmothers—made you cringe in fashion horror, as you drew up your leopardskin spandex with the roses and skulls,^ and snicked on your stud bracelets.^^ A lot of white rats and guinea pigs belonging to dashing, contemporary young things with knitting machines for grandmothers slept extremely well in those days.
^ I had a pair of jeans-equivalent in this fabric until fairly recently.
^^ I still have most of these. I amuse easily.
** http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Steinberg_New_Yorker_Cover.png
. . . Whew. Read the caveats at the bottom of the page. Art is harder. You can’t excerpt 200 words from art. If you just drew a square with ‘Kansas City’ written in it it wouldn’t have the same effect.
*** Or how to make nightgaunts out of pipe cleaners. Your grandmother probably didn’t teach you that one.
† Uh-huh. There was that convention in Hawaii you went to several times. There was that other convention in San Francisco that gave you enough free time to go on a wine-tasting tour of the Napa Valley. I’m pretty sure that last trip to Paris—when you came home with the fabulous dress—was work-related. My heart frelling bleeds.
†† On your iPad. In hindsight I realise that I should have known that when both Hannah and Merrilee not only bought iPads but adored them, that I might as well embrace my doom. I don’t think either of them plays computer games though. And I’m afraid to ask. I think they might yell at me.
††† Or the requisite screaming baby is being held in a parental lap behind your really annoying seatmate so that the requisite marked-for-death toddler with legs just long enough to kick the back of the chair ahead of it every time its parents are looking the other way can be behind you.
‡ Oh gods look at that gorgeous yarn. Thank the gods it’s three thousand miles away.^
^ No! I don’t want to know if they ship overseas! Nor do I want to know the brand so I can see if anyone over here sells it! NO!
‡‡ I say nothing about the night. Which is young and full of dreadful promise.
‡‡‡ All right, all right, it’s after midnight, it is tomorrow. The frelling rain doesn’t have to be so sharp off the flapdoodling blocks.
§ Or keyboards, in this case: he suggested he try the organ. The accompaniment sounded really nice on the organ. What we’re doing here is giving a miss to the main event, which would be me.
§§ YAAAAAAAAAY. Sorry. But . . . YAAAAAAAAAAAAY.
§§§ From the sublime to the ridiculous or what. Colin’s entire garage would fit inside the mouth of the abbey’s biggest bell.
Meteorological Mayhem
Hellhounds and I put Cathy on the train in Mauncester this morning.* Hellhounds and I then headed farther out, to Warm Upford, to check on the bluebell situation. And the heavens opened. Sweet bleeding demiurges, I thought it had been raining before. This was the solid wall of water variety, coming down so hard you not only can’t see out of your windscreen, but you wonder uneasily if it’s going to dent your roof and rip your windscreen wipers off. You’re going at 20 mph because you can’t see . . . and then you fall into the Mississippi River, SPLASH, and here you thought you were in southern England and what the frell happened to the frelling levees?** Fortunately Wolfgang is equipped with an amphibian button from his secret life as a stunt car for James Bond, and so we swam to shore and continued on our way, which had become brown and given to whirlpools. We were the second car behind a monster lorry, and when it hit a road-flood I swear the bow-wave was taller than Wolfgang. This kind of downpour doesn’t last, I told myself, clinging valiantly to the steering wheel, and indeed it didn’t, it slacked off to mere sheeting between onslaughts of cannonball rain. We got out to Warm Upford and turned around despondently to come back by another route and . . . there was suddenly and unexpectedly this astonishing manifestation called ‘blue sky’.*** I pulled Wolfgang over at the first opportunity and hellhounds and I got out for a sprint. A wet sprint. A very wet sprint. A very, very wet sprint. A very, very, very wet sprint. A . . . .†
I had a concert to go to tonight. In Frellingham. Arrrgh. Frellingham is about forty-five minutes from here. Nina lives there now, and she emailed me a while ago about the schedule at the little concert venue a few blocks from her and her bloke’s new house. We had agreed that tonight’s visitation looked amusing: a ragtag collection of old folk-hippie musicians who have (apparently) banded together against the encroachment of electro-techno alternative art prog dance-punk-metal experimental grungehorror cyberthrash, and gone on tour. Nina had bought tickets. Hellhounds and I got back from our wet sprint, and having used up sixteen towels getting half dry, I emailed poor Nina in a bit of a panic saying I’m not driving to Frellingham in this.
It cleared off. Sort of. Comparatively.††† Hellhounds and I only got semi-wet on the afternoon hurtle, and the wind wasn’t blowing more than 80 mph except for the occasional gust, so I slid a few extra lead weights into the special James Bond slots under Wolfgang’s chassis†† and we went.
The concert was . . . amusing.‡ Sometimes it is a good thing to be reminded that your youth is something you get to grow out of. And I only got slightly lost on my way to Nina and Ignatius’ new house—I’ve only been there once before and which way you go on the unmarked roundabout(s) may take a little while to lodge in the memory.
Tomorrow . . . reality bites. And SHADOWS reign.‡‡
* * *
* Waaaaaah. But . . . pretty much everything about the timing of this visit sucked dead (you should forgive the term) bears. She was supposed to be coming after I had finished and handed in SHADOWS.^ She was supposed to be coming after I was caught up to Hamaker New Thing Monkeywrench #s 1 and 2.^^ She was also supposed to be coming here to have long walks through the countryside and, it being bluebell season, she would not only see bluebells, but we might possibly get a hellgoddess and hellhounds surrounded by bluebells photo.^^^
No. None of the above. But she did see baby robins. And we lay on the folded-out sofa at the cottage with a plethora of hellhounds# and watched WONDERFALLS## on the Shiny Two-Ton No Longer New Entirely Rebuilt Ex-Lemon### Laptop, thus proving it can do something right.~ Also, that bartender is hot.~~ And the rain drummed on.
^ And was far enough along on the doodle backlog that you could actually get into my office again. Not, I suppose, that she needed to get into my office, but it’s easier to browse my F&SF shelves, which are what live (mostly+) in my office, from within arm’s length than . . . not within arm’s length.
+ There’s a wall of homeopathy too. Which is why SF&F spills into the bedroom.
^^ When in fact I’m writing ep 12 and it’ll be another one or two before we get to HNTM one. We started #3 while she was here anyway.
^^^ Instead she drank a lot of tea out of my bluebell mug+, since that was as close as she was going to get. Well, there are a few bluebells in my garden, but given the, ahem, lushness of the planting out there, you’d get just as soaked going to look at them as if you went and found some wild ones.
+ http://www.emmabridgewater.co.uk/flowers/bluebell-12-pint-mug/invt/ngbb002/
Hmph. It’s got more expensive since I bought mine.
# They expand to fill available space. I’ve noticed this before.
## http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wonderfalls
### She says with dramatic emphasis.
~Including, evidently, playing a region 1 DVD. I am so clueless about all of this.
~~ So is Beth.
** Ask George W. Bush.
*** It was still raining, of course. This is southern England^. It rains out of blue sky all the time. But it doesn’t usually rain the pummelling you all over your body kind of rain out of blue sky. Usually.
^ Unless it’s the Mississippi delta.
† And I’m afraid the rumours that it’s a bad year for bluebells appear to be true. There aren’t as many flower stalks at all, it seems to me, and the ones there are have four or six little bells per, and usually you get twelve or fifteen. Aside from the tricky questions about taking photos in the rain, if I can’t find a better forest floor of them, there won’t be bluebell photos this year. I have a couple more places to try, but I’m not too hopeful. That was my best bluebell sea today.
†† Very bad for mileage, but they do keep you on the road.
††† I’ve just had a frelling email from frelling Cathy saying it was beautiful and clear all day where she was on the south coast. WELL ISN’T THAT SPECIAL.
‡ There wasn’t a single person there under forty. There was also way too much khaki hemp^ and Birkenstocks, but I lowered the level as much as I could in a salmon-coloured turtleneck and All Stars and a watermelon-coloured pullover. My frameless glasses are against me though.
^ No, no, not that kind of hemp.
‡‡ And New Thing gets a nice padded footstool.
Wet wet wet
It’s okay. I can write a blog tonight. Darkness ate dinner. *&^%$£@#~}+!!!!!!!!!!! Cathy, on the other side of the table, is breathing a deep sigh of relief. She’d made the perilous, not to say fatal, offer to write another guest blog if I found myself incapable on account of the extreme reprehensibleness of hellhounds and the resultant need to wail and rail incessantly all evening.* Which is to say, Darkness stopped eating. Yesterday.
I know, I know (and you regular readers know, you know). Normal dogs—well, normal sighthounds—miss meals occasionally. It’s not a big deal. It’s a big deal with these guys because of their history. And it’s a big deal to me because I’m the human supposedly in charge of managing they survive their history. And they are a lot better, about food, about eating food, and about stopping eating (food) and about looking like they’re at death’s door after about twenty-four hours of not eating. And I may have an ever so slight tendency to hit red alert before it’s absolutely necessary. But. . . .
If you graphed hellhound appetites and the amount of food I actually manage to get in them, the lines would swing up and down wildly anyway, like the surface of Lake Superior just before the Edmund Fitzgerald went down. I’m used to this. I don’t frelling like it, but I’m used to it. Occasionally, however, one or both hellhounds ship a really big wave and head for the bottom. If I hadn’t been distracted by having fun with Cathy—because I am an irresponsible dog owner and a horrible selfish thoughtless human being—I might have noticed that the current oh-well-maybe-I-will-and-maybe-I-won’t food mood was hardening into something more drastic. It had crossed my mind that the current lack of enthusiasm phase was going on a little long.
AND THEN . . .
It has not been a good day. Today was our last chance to get out into the country and look at bluebells. And it rained. Again. It’s been raining all week. It was raining when I picked Cathy up at the train station.** It was raining as we both arrived at and left the abbey.*** It was raining most of Sunday in both Hampshire and Bristol, although Cathy managed to find a little sunlight and follow it around for a few hours. It rained on my voice lesson.† It rained on our going to Glaciation to ring with Colin. It rained on our trip to Mauncester yesterday.†† IT’S BEEN RAINING FOREVER. IT IS GOING TO RAIN FOREVER.††† It is just about hip deep around town and squelching out over the countryside when Cathy only has two pairs of shoes with her is not really a credible option.
AND THEN DARKNESS STOPPED EATING. AAAAAAAAAAAAAAUGH.
It has not been a good day.
But Darkness ate dinner. Enthusiastically. So I can revert to being all wet and soppy and droopy and soggy, not about the rain, but about the fact that Cathy is leaving tomorrow. . . .
* * *
* The deep sigh of relief may have been as much to do with the lack of incessant wailing and railing as the fearful prospect of coming up with another 1000+ words that could pass for a coherent synthesis of some damn thing or other only two days after the previous guest blog.
** It had only just started raining (again), fortunately, since I was late. Of course I was late. I’m always late. And then we had to hare off at extreme speed for the Reification of the Overgoddess at Forza. I have rung my first service at Forza del Destino.^ Eeep. This blood-freezing adventure began last Wednesday, when Ulrich said at practise that it was an all-hands-to-the-pumps situation Saturday afternoon for the reification. I looked away and shuffled my feet because I am not, after all, an abbey ringer, but Gemma said, oh, go on, I’m going to. So I checked with Cathy about train times and then, in fear and grovelling, although it’s difficult to get grovelling across in an email, I wrote to Ulrich, asking if they still needed extra hands for the reification, and he wrote back pretty much by return electron saying they’d be happy to see me. Oops. Now I’m for it.
In fact they didn’t need all of us shmo-level ringers, but they were nice enough to pile us all on for rounds on forty-eight. And Og came by with his clipboard and said to me, smiling in what I’m sure he was under the impression was a friendly manner, You are now on my LIST.
I may have a bell tower again. That is, I admit, may. I’m still expecting them to pull themselves together and bounce schmos like me.+++ And I wish it weren’t a gigantic, ancient, tourist-magnet, one hundred and twelve bell frelling ABBEY. However, I’ll take what I can get. And they’re still, with an irony so shiny and sharp it needs a scabbard++++, my best practical choice for a new tower. Hahahahahahahaha. Ouch, that hurts.
^ I’m feeling just a trifle creeped out by my having long ago carelessly blognamed+ it The Force of Destiny.++
+ I invent a verb. I feel it could have wider application however.
++ It could be a lot worse. I could have named it La Traviata or Aida.
+++ Or I could revert to not being able to ring anything. Anything. But we are not considering this possibility. We reject it.
++++ And its name may be Doomblade.
*** With a spectacular escort of guards. Yeep. We never had guards at New Arcadia, but then we didn’t rededicate goddesses either. But Cathy and I crossed three different cordons, getting in—I’m a bell ringer! I kept squeaking, feeling a complete fraud—and two getting back out again. Our favourite was the nice German lady (in the scary guard uniform) who wanted to know about bell ringing.
† Yes. I took Cathy to my voice lesson. And if she tries to write a guest blog about that I will destroy her.^
It was pretty interesting though. I hadn’t thought about this when I asked Nadia if I could bring a friend that Monday, but it was the day after Diana’s memorial and I was going to be another jigsaw for Nadia to put back together, as well as in (fractured) avert mode because There Was Someone Else Listening. It was not my most brilliant lesson—but it was not, in fact, my most embarrassing either. Nadia says sometimes your worst practises and your worst lessons are the most educational—and this one taught me some stuff. Nadia spent some time talking about channelling emotion into your singing. The impulse—my impulse anyway—is to stomp all that slithery, squishy stuff down, and the stomping process is a lot of what breaks you up into jigsaw pieces. Feh. I’ve told you about the frelling chasm between what I can do at home when no one is listening, but where I don’t have all of Nadia’s tricks for getting a better quality of sound out of me, and what I can do for Nadia, whom I want to please and therefore am afraid to get stuff wrong for—I mentioned that I’d torn the heart out of Che Faro over the washing-up and Nadia said briskly, I look forward to hearing it next week. EEEEEEP. This is pretty much the same kind of exciting and same kind of terrifying as the prospect of maybe having a bell tower again. I would LOVE to work on Che Faro with Nadia, but I’ve assumed that was seriously down the line from where I am now. And it probably is, you know? I’ll take it in to her and . . .
^ No, wait, I can’t destroy her, she’s helping me with New Thing.+
+ And in answer to some forum question or other, yes, it will get a title, at least of sorts, as soon as you learn the protagonist’s name, which is in ep nine or so.
†† More *&^%$£”+=}]~#@!!!!!! Our trip was supposed to produce a certain outcome which was going to produce a particular blog post. And we were FOILED by . . . well, never mind what we were foiled by. I’ll get there in the end. And then I’ll write a blog post about it. Grrrrrrrrrr.
††† I tell myself, rain is good. We’re in a drought. We need this rain. I AM SURE I AM GROWING MOULD ALL OVER MY BODY.