Diana
John Burrow—Diana Wynne Jones’ lovely husband—rang me up about two months ago and said they were doing a memorial service for her, and would I speak at it? Only five minutes, he said, there would be several speakers. My first impulse was to say no—of course I wanted to come, but I wasn’t sure I could speak. I asked if I could think it over. And then rang him back and said yes.
It was today. It has been looming rather awfully in my mind this past week—especially after I found out it was going to take six earth spirits and a papal intervention to make the journey happen: British Rail shuts down on weekends. They put up a lot of ‘works’ signs and claim to be laying on buses to cover the suspended routes . . . but in fact they all go to Blackpool and eat ice-creams (in the summer) and play poker (in the winter) and standard rail disservice begins again Monday morning. The line I used to take when I was visiting Diana that last year wasn’t running at all and everything else seemed to be bristling with warnings and delays and dubious ‘status’.
But we got there. Cathy came along but spent the day being a tourist. (She had such a good time we may have to do it together on her next visit.) I spent about three hours listening to some of the people who loved Diana talk about her, and watching the slide show of her life that her family had put together for background. During the tea break when you went downstairs there was a gigantic circular tower made of copies of her books, and Photostats of handwritten manuscript pages, and the sight of her handwriting made my heart turn over.
It was very simple. There were about twenty of us who spoke, and in a group that large, you’re going to have one or two duds. We didn’t have any duds*. That in itself seems to me to say something pretty remarkable about the people Diana attracted. There were clips from the film of HOWL’S MOVING CASTLE** and from interviews with Diana. The composer of a ballet based on BLACK MARIA (AUNT MARIA in the States) played an excerpt. All three of her sons spoke.
I had to hare out of there and back to the train station almost as soon as it was over, because I wanted to make the long drive home in daylight. And I’m so shattered I may not get out of bed at all tomorrow.***
But I’m glad I went. And this is what I said:
* * *
Diana was my first real writer friend—or perhaps I remember her as first because she is such a blazing star in my memory. I shifted publishers between my first book and my second, and my new editor, Susan Hirschman at Greenwillow Books, asked me if I knew Diana Wynne Jones’ work. This was in the early ‘80s, and Diana wasn’t yet well known in America. Susan had brought out CHARMED LIFE a year or two before. She thrust a copy in my hands. ‘You will like this,’ she said.
That was an understatement. I was in the book’s thrall by the end of the first paragraph—and in Diana’s for life. I moved to New York City shortly after the mind-altering experience of my first Diana Wynne Jones book and Susan, bless her, invited me to meet Diana the next time she was in town. Diana wouldn’t have had to be half the charming and fascinating human being she was to knock me over. But she was that charming and fascinating—even goofy with jet lag and culture shock. She was manifestly a wizard of enormous powers.
I remember the first time toiling up the vertical slope to the house she, her husband and three sons lived in, here in Bristol, and thinking—dimly, through the roar of the blood in my ears—that it was of course suitable that a wizard of enormous powers lived on a mountain. (I also remember them taking me downhill to their local, and falling off my bar stool. Even the beer was stronger when Diana sat on the next stool.)
There were long hiatuses in our relationship because I was a better worshipper than I was a friend. But she was always there, wise and funny, intimidatingly well-read and terrifyingly intelligent—and there were the books, the wonderful, wonderful, wonderful books. I have a game I play with my favourite authors—I don’t read their newest book till the next one comes out. I won’t be able to play that game with Diana any more.
I live only about two hours away by train (except on Sundays, when it becomes three or four). I came here several times, the last year of Diana’s life, and she fed me lunch. I’m as tricky to feed as she was, and she catered to my oddities with kindness and aplomb. One of my favourite memories of those visits was the lemon meringue unpie: she found out I loved lemon meringue pie, but could no longer eat flour. And so the unpie was born: a glorious great tureen of lemon meringue, tactfully missing out the crust.
I think we may all be little children about the people we love. It is easy to say ‘I can’t believe she’s gone’, and the phrase is a cliché because it has been true so often, of so many much-loved people. I find myself thinking that if maybe I don’t read that last book, the one I can’t read till the next one comes out, maybe, somehow, she won’t be gone, because she’ll have to write that next book for me, for all of us.
* * *
One of Diana’s sisters read the first chapter of the book Diana left unfinished when she died. It’s amazing. It’s—it’s one of Diana’s opening chapters, that grab you and make the world go away because you’re wholly caught by the world on the page. We can’t not know what happens. . . .
* * *
- It began with the necklace. (And yes, I’m wearing a green rose in my hair.)
It began with the necklace, because Diana gave it to me.
* Okay, spare my blushes and all, but I can give a speech with embarrassing anyone. Probably.
** Which I still haven’t seen because it’s not the book.
*** I have to hurtle hounds, sing, and ring bells. Feh. Cathy has offered to wake me up by singing ‘Oh what a beautiful morning’ and I suggested that if she wants to live. . . .
How New Thing Happened, More or Less
KatydidNL
I don’t know if I can describe how much I am enjoying this [New Thing], so I won’t try. You’ll just have to imagine.
Oh good. ::Beams:: And LAVISH, PROFOUND AND HEARTFELT thanks to all the rest of you who have forumed, tweeted, Facebooked or emailed similar sentiments. I hope there are a fair number of you out there, because the plan is that the New Thing should go on a while. It is, in fact the New Thing. I was going to do a nice tidy well-laid out How the New Thing Came to Be post but . . . when have I ever been nice, tidy or well-laid out?* Anyway, I think I’ve already told you that I’ve been aware for a while that I needed to do something new or different about the blog. But as to why it arrived in this particular New Thing package. . . .
. . . Meanwhile (this is not a non sequitur: bear with me) I should be hoovering. I haven’t done any housework since . . . uh . . . approximately since Hannah was here. Well, she gave me flu. I’m allowed a little slack. But Cathy arrives tomorrow for a few days. And I really don’t want her to blink a couple of times at my sitting-room and run away.** And one of the things we’ll be doing while she’s here (if she doesn’t run away) is playing with New Thing.
Shock horror. Someone is appearing under their own name in Days in the Life. Yes. Cathy. Cathy as in Cathy Hamaker, our own Black Bear.
Some of you have already heard how Cathy and I met at Wiscon several yonks ago, didn’t quite manage to have a cup of tea/coffee together, but kept in vague touch, each privately under the impression that we’d probably hit it off if we ever concentrated on it for a few minutes. And then I started Days in the Life, and she started reading it. Clearly the woman spends too much time on line, because she found it almost at once.
One of the things Cathy does in her copious free time*** is run RPGs—role playing games—as gamesmaster.† She’s been sending me hilarious abstracts of some of these games for years. I keep saying oh gods what a waste these should be fiction. And we’ve had a running conversation, also for years, about how we might somehow create an RPG for the blog, using some McKinley world or other, possibly one I make up specifically for the purpose. . . . But we’ve never been able to figure out a way to do this that wouldn’t make the blog even more work for me, as well as a way that would not send Merrilee off in fits of the screaming abdabs about copyright.
Then, a few weeks ago, I went down with flu. I’ve told you, possibly smugly, which would explain the result, that I can (usually) keep writing no matter what is going on in the real world with me. I could have beriberi, cholera, or a major invasion of bats,†† and I could keep writing. Well. There’s one rather important exception. That’s when I’m at the very, very, very end of a book, and trying to do the final comb and shine, trying to make sure all the screws are not merely the right size, but have gone in straight and been puttied and then painted over so you can’t see the join. To do this properly you have to attain and maintain a kind of extreme squeaky alertness, which includes being able to hold the entire book in your mind all at once.†††
I can’t do this when I feel like dirty river froth and neither my eyes nor my brain will focus.
I HAD TO STOP WORKING ON SHADOWS WHEN I WAS NEARLY AT THE END.
Try to imagine how—or rather what—this contributed to my sanity and peace of mind.‡ Especially after various other literary setbacks in the last year.
So, I’m lying there, between writing blog posts that make everything sound better than it (*&^%$£”!!!!! is, thinking, what do I do? What can I do? I can’t work. I can’t even get on with all that backed-up doodling, because doodling also requires a certain level of committed attention, as well as a hand that doesn’t shake. People paid me money for those doodles—I have to do them the best that I am able. Which is not now.
EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE.
And thus, from fever and despair, was New Thing born. I’ve thought of story-telling on the blog before, but I couldn’t think of how to do that either, without bleeding off real-story energy and, once again, making the blog more work.‡‡ But I thought three things more or less simultaneously (thus the splintering effect of fever): I could do a parody. I could do a parody of me. I could do all kinds of stuff I wouldn’t dream of doing in a real book. My heroine could write fantasy series. She could write fantasy series with cliffhanger endings. She could write fantasy series one of which, for example, features a protagonist named Flowerhair, who fends off attack mushrooms with an enchanted sword named Doomblade. Hee hee hee hee hee, I muttered to myself, my eyes gleaming with fever. She’ll have to write a vampire series too. Let’s say . . . oh . . . let’s say Vampire Virago.
The second thing I thought was: the individual posts can be shorter, not only because they’re fiction, which from a fiction writer counts as value-added whether it is (ahem) literally or not, but also because if I run long I can just put the overrun into the next post. This is one of my more intractable problems with Days in the Life: stuff I cut for later almost never gets used, because, because, well, because it’s Days in the Life. Once a day is over, it’s over. Even irrelevant footnoted asides tend to go all floppy by next day. And then they’re WASTED.
The third thing I thought was: if Cathy’s sense of humour stretches that far, she can gamesmaster me. She can prod me on into adventures and with characters that would never have occurred to me. She’d just sent me another one of her goofy summaries from a game she’s running, and there was a specific bit in it‡‡‡ that I thought (in my feverish way) would be perfect for an on-line blog serial. Fine, she said. It’s yours. No, no, I said, I want active input—if I can get it. If it would amuse you. Fortunately Cathy amuses easily. Which got us talking about how we might do this.
As I write now, we’ve already done two stints on Skype IM with her typing things like: okay, there’s a funny noise, and me typing back, FUNNY NOISE? WHAT DO YOU MEAN FUNNY NOISE? I DON’T LIKE FUNNY NOISES. Cathy: It’s a sort of scrape-thump-thud noise. Me: NOOOOOOOOOO. —I should perhaps add here that we’ve played a two-person RPG a couple of times but I am hopeless because I spend all my time afraid to do anything because I’m sure I’m going to die. Characters do die in RPGs, you know. One of the things that is going to make Cathy’s augmentations possible is that I said: First rule. You can’t kill me.
So. Anyway. I haven’t got to Cathy’s first injection of storyline. It’s . . . um . . . several ep[isode]s off yet.§ I’m writing as fast as I can.§§ I’ll tell you when we get there. But after that you’ll just have to guess. The story is the story. The story is always the story, and I’m still writing it . . . even if there’s some extremely silly collaboration going on just out of sight.§§§
* * *
* OUT. I said OUT. I said well laid OUT.
** Colin and Niall were here for handbells yesterday. I had got home barely ahead of them and was still doing things like tearing harnesses off hellhounds when they arrived. Shall I pick this up? said Niall, referring to the green plastic garden sheet on the floor of the sitting-room which is where ALL MY BABY PLANTS COME INDOORS TO SLEEP EVERY FRELLING NIGHT. Sure, I said, but fold it up so the dirt all stays on the inside.
Pause.
Oops, said Niall.
*** HAHAHAHAHAHA. Copious free time. HAHAHAHAHAHA.
† She also plays for other gamesmasters, but I don’t hear about those.
†† Not yet.
††† Not to mention my bank balance which, regular readers will remember, is a problem right now.
‡ Or rather, this is how I’ve always done it. Which is why the idea of writing a three-volume story freaks me out so much.
‡‡ Remember, when I’m whining about how much work the blog is, two things: I enjoy it too. It’s just way too frelling much work. Which leads to the second thing, which is that I have limited range to change this. I’m an obsessive personality: I pretty much only do things I can be obsessive about. This includes the blog. Shifting to posting every other day or declaring I won’t write posts over 500 words will not work. I either do it obsessively or I won’t do it at all.
‡‡‡ Which I’m certainly not going to tell you about because we may yet use it.
§ Slightly after when you finally find out what my heroine’s name is.
§§ Which is never fast, even when I’m essentially ripping myself off.
§§§ Note that when Cathy originally booked her time over here, it was planned carefully for after SHADOWS was going to be finished . . . and well before New Thing was a flu-addled gleam in my deliquescing brain.
Jolly jolly jolly jolly Easter technology
So a friend and I have been trying to figure out something new and amusing to do for the blog. * It had got to the point by this week that we really needed to do a kind of run-through to see if it was going to work**, but I’ve been ill*** and she has, like, a job and a life† and scheduling has been a ratbag. But we finally decided we could do it this morning.
The first thing that happened is that I overslept. SO WHAT FRELLING ELSE IS NEW.†† So when I finally texted my friend (as prearranged) she had also overslept††† arrgh arrgh arrgh arrgh so we both stumbled around finding caffeine (and clothing) and feeding/hurtling domestic fauna and so on. As one does.
Articulateness was beginning to emerge from the enshrouding mists. Blah. Gar. We were tentatively going to do this by Skype instant messaging, but we were going to have a video-enabled chat about what we were trying to do first, in so far as I was capable of either speaking audibly‡ or hearing anyone speaking to me.‡‡
The first thing that happened was that we couldn’t get Skype to talk to us. . . . No, wait. The first thing that happened was that Pooka was doing one of her little, Message? Me? Message?, deals, so my friend had texted back and I’m wondering why she hadn’t because it wasn’t showing. Eventually I went hunting and there were like three new ones the last one being, Hey, where r u? ARRRRGH. It’s sort of the modern tech version of catching your roommate with the empty plate in her hands and the crumbs on her face: Chocolate cake? What chocolate cake?‡‡‡
Then, having re-established contact by text . . . Skype refused to connect. R u there? yes im here where r u . . . note that there are two iPhones, a Macbook and a desktop PC involved, and we are playing merry, merry musical gadgets . . . eventually Skype acknowledged both my and my friend’s existence at the same time on one machine each and a sort of connection was established . . . except she couldn’t hear me, I couldn’t see her, and I was getting a helpful pop-up message saying ‘your broadband is moving at a somewhat slower than measurable rate. Glaciers are faster. Liver flukes are evolving into diplodocuses while we wait for the signal from the historic maypole on your cul-de-sac. We don’t hold out a lot of hope for this conversation you’re trying to have.’
Eventually my friend and I gave up on the preparatory chat option. She was still trying to reassure me (we were still texting, mostly successfully) that Skype IM was really easy, nothing could go wrong. Yes. And I’m the queen of Sheba. My Skype kept claiming that my friend was off line. My friend kept claiming that her Skype was telling her I was off line. Shifting from one demonic piece of kit to another of course aggravates the situation. I could sit there watching Pooka and the desktop pointing fingers at each other and saying: She did it!§ I turned everything off and then turned it back on again. Skype was now claiming I was back on line, but I wasn’t allowed to change my status. I WAS GOING TO BE ON LINE FOREVER.§§
At this point I received another text from my friend. Ur still off line, it said. ARRRRRRRRRGH, I replied. R u near ur landline? she next inquired (crisply). I’m going to phone u.
Somebody tell me why I could hear her laughing through her texts.
Um, I texted back, yes. But I nvr use it because connection ALWAYS bad.
She phoned me while I was standing in the middle of the office floor at the cottage, watched with some interest by relaxed and half-asleep hellhounds, and swearing like an entire regiment of troopers from low backgrounds, trying to UNTANGLE the frelling WIRING between the phone and the message machine§§§ and between the machine and the wall, which, because I never use any of it, mats itself into plastic dreadlocks. HOW DOES IT DO THIS. IT SHOULD NOT BE POSSIBLE. PLASTIC FRELLING FLEX CANNOT FRELLING FELT ITSELF. Sure it can. It’s like how coathangers breed in empty closets. When the phone went BRIIIIIIIIIIING the way cheap landlines still do I was so startled I dropped the whole mess.
We had the conversation. She got me on Skype. She got me on Skype’s Instant Messaging, which was hiding. No, really. We had our run-through. Our idea works.
Mwa hahahahahahahahahaha. Oh, this is going to be fun.#
Stay tuned.
* * *
* This is a long story which I’m about to start torturing you with hints about. But for tonight, it’s just murky, inscrutable background.^
^ Mwa hahahahahaha
** Okay, maybe I’m starting to torture you now.
*** You may have noticed.
† She does stuff like hang out. There aren’t even any handbells involved. I really don’t understand why we’re friends. I suppose we each provide the other with variety in her social relationships.
†† I’m not sleeping through the alarm. It’s just I keep putting it back as I thrash and flounce and periodically notice that another hour has gone by and I’m still not asleep. I don’t like missing half the day this way, but I like even less not being able to use ANY of the day because I’m too tired. Conventionally the phrase ‘her blood ran like fire through her veins’ sounds exciting. She’s just caught sight of her true love—or possibly he/she has his/her tongue down our heroine’s throat and his/her hand, um, but I don’t usually write those stories—or her enemy on the battlefield. Something is going to happen. Something other than our stupid heroine being unable to find a comfortable position to sleep in her sodding unenchanted bed in her sodding unenchanted cottage in her sodding unenchanted little town. ARRRRRRGH. I will never feel the same about that phrase. Also, I need to be able to breathe.
††† She also has a lurgy. SHE’S FIVE THOUSAND MILES AWAY. I DIDN’T GIVE IT TO HER.
‡ See: Lurch. Or a really really bad recording of Paul Robeson.
‡‡ This didn’t stop me hearing my ex-bells this morning. Sigh.
‡‡‡ I shouldn’t say things like this. Next time Pooka will eat them.
§ Yes. They both had chocolate cake crumbs on their faces.
§§ Note that today’s friend is THE ONLY PERSON IN THE UNIVERSE I EVER SKYPE WITH BECAUSE SKYPE IS ONE THE MANY SO CALLED WONDERS OF MODERN SO CALLED TECHNOLOGY I DO NOT GET ALONG WITH. Hannah and I tried it once. She hated it as much as I did.^
^ Us old people have to stick together. Silver surfers, for godssake. I nearly took myself off the grid permanently when I heard that term for the first time, and went to live in a cabin in the woods with oil lamps and a fireplace.
§§§ Which I also never look at or play back because the connection is so bad I can’t hear what whoever it is is saying and I probably don’t want to anyway, who uses a landline any more?^
^ I give no one Pooka’s number. Peter has it. The archangels have it. Okay, Merrilee, Hannah, and today’s friend have it. Fiona has it. That’s about it.
I don’t like phones, okay? I’ve never liked phones.
# After all, we have Blogmom for the blog. Nobody messes with Blogmom.
Spring Sunday with a friend
I’ve been singing. I’ve been singing with Hannah and Peter in the same room. It does happen occasionally that I sing when Peter’s around—especially on Mondays when I have to warm up before I go to my lesson, and can’t afford to get too precious about circumstances—but I do not sing for other people.* I’m not sure if I should be embarrassed or not that it was kind of fun—especially the part with them shouting out suggestions.** I want to say something rude here about neither of them being musical*** but Hannah . . . for pity’s sake, Hannah goes to Broadway musicals. It’s not like she doesn’t know what proper singing voices sound like.† Hannah is a very good friend.
And, more to the point . . . she’s here. I left you last night in a Perils of Pauline situation, with our heroine(s) suspended on the brink of being Lost Forever in Darkest Hampshire. Or possibly not even Hampshire. Outer Mongolia. Aberdeen. Saturn.†† I was just driving back to the cottage in despair††† yesterday when Pooka started barking at me again. I managed not to run off the road—or more to the point did not run into either of the brick-and-flint walls that claustrophobically enclose the single lane of my steep little cul de sac—and further contrived to press ‘answer’ before the call was swallowed up by the entropic maw of the voice-mail system from which none escape unscathed, and . . . it was Hannah. The driver has decided maybe it isn’t the Egg and Custard, she said in Old High Manhattan Laconic, maybe it’s the Toast and Marmite. Or the Daffodil and Schnapps. Or the Militant Stepdaughter . . . More emphatic male quacking in the background. Here, you talk to him, she said.
But where is it, I said. Whatever its name is. There is no Caerphilly Road in Mauncester.
Yes there is, he said promptly. It runs north-south through the Doggleburies.
What? I said. The only road that runs north-south is the Hindu Kush Turnpike.
After a good deal of witty repartee on the order of “You mean Banded Dogglebury or Sod-all Dogglebury?” and “The giant chalk boulder that looks like the anti-matter Darth Vader is in Gerrymandering, it’s not in the Doggleburies at all,” the driver, who by this time I had decided had no business behind the wheel of a car that contained my best friend, capitulated and said, “I’ll meet you at the Ultimate Fishmonger.” “Great,” I said. “I can find the Ultimate Fishmonger, because it exists in this universe.” In fact he didn’t meet me—he dropped Hannah and ran, possibly in some fear of heavy reprisals from a local who knows all the pubs in Mauncester‡ But at least Hannah was there.
. . . And it’s been another beautiful day today and Hannah and I went to a National Gardens Scheme‡‡ garden as the sort of thing one does on a beautiful Sunday afternoon in spring in England, and were swarmed by daffodils and crown imperial fritilleries and alpaca, and suppressed our giggles at the extreme High Tory-ness of the owners‡‡‡ and I bought a plant.§
We also had two gorgeous hurtles with hellhounds over hill and dale and blowing white blossom in the hedgerows and blue, blue sky and general gloriousness and joy and the sap rising in the trees and the human morale . . . and bloody Chaos is celebrating the change of season by not eating.
* * *
* Although I have made a rod for my own back, in that April’s Visitor^ is here over a Monday and I’m taking her with me to my voice lesson.^^
^ I can’t remember what her blog name is, and since my dramatis personae file isn’t in any kind of alphabetical order and it’s gotten rather long over the years I can’t find it. I could always name her again. . . .
^^ She’s the kind of friend who makes it sound like she means it when she says, Yes! I’d love to! But then I specialise in insane friends. Regular readers of this blog may have some idea why.
** Stop laughing. Folk songs. I sing a lot of traditional folk songs. I can do a handful of the obvious ones on request. Supposing I’m singing with you in the room, which is not likely.
*** I can say something rude here about Peter not being musical. Peter is aggressively non-musical, although not, in fact as aggressively non-musical as he likes to pretend. Still. If you are going to take singing lessons and are pathological about singing in front of another human being because you genuinely don’t have much voice but (chiefly) because you are intensely neurotic, Peter is a very good person to be married to. Sometimes fate is kind. It was not on my list of husband requirements twenty years ago that he had to be able to put up with my singing.
† . . . At this point I might, as an opera snob, say something about Broadway musical voices . . . but I’m not going to.
†† Are there pubs on Saturn? Discuss.
††† And wondering how long it would take Wolfgang to start again once I’d turned him off. Since our little erratic fault thingy is continuing. Yes, I should be ringing up the mechanic and having a little discussion about the connection between the starter motor and the thing it starts, but I’ve fallen into the abyssal pit of ‘I’ll do it as soon as I get SHADOWS turned in’. The post-SHADOWS agenda is getting a trifle long. Headed, as it is, by doodles.
‡ By name! Only by name!
‡‡‡ Hannah got nailed as an American, but I escaped by mumbling. An immigrant with no gift for accents quickly develops an instinct for when mumbling is appropriate.
§ Surprise. You’re surprised, right?^
^ I’m waiting impatiently for my new roses. . . . You know, seven years ago when I moved in to the cottage, I’ve told you this, right?, the previous tenant was a terribly proper gardener and the garden was full of terribly proper and high-brow plants. And everyone said, oh, you’re going to rip everything out and plant roses, aren’t you? And I got very huffy and said certainly not, I am only going to pull out the boring things, I like lots of plants that aren’t roses . . . But seven years later I’m aware that pretty much every time anything dies I replace it with roses. . . .+
+ No, it was not a rose I bought today, it was a lychnis. It’s pink though.
Unnecessary excitements
So, last night, I had begun writing the blog*, and the frelling little Outlook pop-up box kept getting in my face and whining about not being connected. Oh, shut up and cope, I snarled—I mean I murmured softly. And then I went on line to check something—I forget what—and Internet Explorer declined to connect either. Fie.
So then I went through the whole stupid exasperating tarantella** of unplugging and replugging and closing down and restarting and hanging from the ceiling singing a merry song and making dents in the plaster when you throw chairs at the wall. ARRRRGH. And I remained disconnected. Hence the note from Blogmom last night that I was having Raging Technical Difficulties and would not be posting a blog. Yes, I could write a blog off line and . . . uh . . . figure out how to send it to Blogmom and ask her to post that. But writing a blog without internet back up is way too much like hard work. At least when you have a sieve-like memory.*** I was thinking about this last night, while I was (fruitlessly) waiting for the mews wifi to shake itself loose from the grip of the doldrums and refrellingconnect. My old hard copy Britannica is in Peter’s bedroom, and he’s asleep by the time I’m writing the blog . . . and the annual volumes, after Peter got cranky about the annual volumes,† now live at Third House. This is not deeply convenient for when you’re writing a blog entry right now. At my end of the kitchen table at the mews I have within easy reach: the 1977 edition of the Chambers [British-English] Dictionary which is fabulous††, the Penguin thesaurus, the Oxford Compendium of English lit, Brewer’s Phrase & Fable and 100,000 Names for Baby, which is an unbelievably bad and badly edited book, but it serves the purpose of stimulating me to come up with names like Zgruban.††† This still only gets you so far.
So I read back issues of the London Review of Books for a while . . . and nothing happened (‘the server is not available. If this condition persists, please contact your administrator, however, blunt instruments are not recommended and we take no responsibility for the damage you may do to your singing voice’). So I emailed Blogmom from Pooka, telling myself that it was time I got an all-options plug-in toggle for Astarte because the keyboard on an iPhone is suitable only for flower fairy fingers . . . and went back to the cottage‡.
Today . . . the plot thickens. It’s only the old mews laptop that won’t go on line.‡‡ Peter’s computer goes on line fine. Astarte goes on line. And my little knapsack computer, brought down to the mews for evidentiary purposes, goes on line. Waaaaaah. I just want stuff to work and leave me alone.
Meanwhile . . . in the first place, of course, having been glued to Pooka all morning, the moment I left her hung over the back of a chair so I could get on more freely with watering 1,000,000 potted plants‡‡‡ she started barking at me. Hannah has landed§ and will ring me again with a rendezvous point as soon as she meets up with her driver. I’ve said I can find anywhere in Mauncester, just tell me where.§§
. . . She rings back: the driver says he’s going to drop her at a pub, the Egg and Custard, on the Caerphilly Road. The Egg and Custard? I said, under the just-proven-erroneous impression that I’d at least heard of all the pubs in Mauncester, the Caerphilly Road?
Emphatic male quacking in the background. Egg and Custard, confirmed Hannah. On the Caerphilly Road.
Okay, I said dubiously. I can look it up.
One frantic, husband-involving search later: There is no Egg and Custard in Mauncester. The nearest Egg and Custard is in . . . I don’t know, Brittany, Alsace, Hokkaido, somewhere. Not Mauncester. It’s a long way to Hokkaido. Oh, and there’s no Caerphilly Road in Mauncester either.
And the mobile phone number I have for Hannah doesn’t work. . . .
TUNE IN THIS TIME TOMORROW FOR THE NEXT THRILLING INSTALLMENT.§§§
* * *
* And this is what I wrote (waste not, want not):
HANNAH IS COMING, HANNAH IS COMING, HANNAH HANNAH HANNAH HANNAH IS COMING. YAAAAAAAY.
. . . The consequent need to do housework. Unyaay. In fact, uuugggghhhh.
Mostly visitors do just fine up at Third House. Easier on everyone. Everyone can go to bed when they want to^ and get up when they want to and make their own breakfasts (when they want to), and not only when they want to but as they want to, with no resident gremlin saying, You can’t scramble eggs in that pan! You aren’t going to drink coffee out of that mug, are you? There is also an extra loo at Third House for those occasions when the person in the bath falls asleep. Third House has many advantages.
But there are a few people even in the life of a forty-eight-yesses-out-of-forty-six-questions-on-the-introvert-test introvert that one positively wants to have underfoot. In my life one of them is Hannah.^^ Therefore I need to ensure that the cottage is not so frightening a habitat that she decides she has urgent and permanent business in the Azores.
There are no mice nesting in the sofabed: check.
The coffee filter thingy is not wrist-deep in dust and dead beetles: check.
There is nothing living in the back of the refrigerator that bites: check.
The cobwebs at the top of the stairwell that I can’t quite reach, even with my telescoping dustbrush at its full extent, are staying at the top of the stairwell and have not descended to become over-friendly with stairway users: check.
The vanguard of the outdoor jungle has not penetrated round either the door or the kitchen window frame sufficiently to be a danger to the urban unwary: check.^^^
The hoover hasn’t exploded, and I can still use the freller . . . sigh. Check.^^^^
^ Hannah, sadly, is an early riser.
^^ I will still tell her which pan to scramble eggs in however. But she’s allowed to use any mug. Probably. I can’t be sure till I catch her using the wrong one.
^^^ This becomes more of a problem later in the season.
^^^^ I haaaaaaaate vacuuming. HAAAAAAAAAAATE.
** Spiders have a lot in common with computers when you stop to think about it. They both have too many legs (material or immaterial), a bad attitude (graphic), and a ghastly habit of rushing at you (literal or metaphoric) when you’re not expecting trouble. But really you can tell they don’t have your best interests at heart the moment you set eyes on one.
*** This would be a sieve that has also been used for target practise by the local rifle club.
† Which is cheek, you know, since he married me for my Britannica. I’ve told you this joke, haven’t I? He married me—twenty years ago, remember, before the internet was a resource for commoners and the technically challenged—for my Britannica. I married him for his membership in the London Library. Peter has dropped his membership in the library—which means I’m groaning under the extreme subscription price by myself—I haven’t pulled a Britannica volume off the shelf in years . . . and the annual volumes are accumulating at Third House.
†† It and the old American Heritage Dictionary of 1969 are my favourite dictionaries.^ The OED is . . . second. It’s a very good second, but it’s still second. And neither the new Chambers nor the new American Heritage is a patch on the classics.
^ The poor old AHD is in fairly rough shape as I spent several years sitting on it. I wrote HERO sitting on my old AHD. I’ve never had a proper desk with a proper desk chair, which means height adjustments must be made. The AHD was the perfect extra thickness for that particular chair, and conveniently butt-breadth.
††† And rather a lot of books on knitting and learning Japanese.
‡ Where, yes, I can get on line, but that’s not where I spend my evenings.
‡‡ It really wants to retire. Really really really.
‡‡‡ We’re going to have a hosepipe ban any minute: driest March in meteorologically recorded history, I think. Just so long as they don’t have a madperson-carrying-a-gazillion-cans ban.
§ . . . at the right airport. In England.
§§ I should know better than to say things like this.
§§§ Hey. You already know I’m a cow. And I’m a cow who needs to go to bed early because Hannah does^ AND BECAUSE THE SODBLASTED CLOCKS GO FORWARD TONIGHT.
^ Yes. She’s here. You can relax.