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In Which Our Heroine* Is Hysterical**
Computers are evil. Computers are death. Computers are bane and abomination. I HATE COMPUTERS. HATE. HATE. HATE.
You may possibly remember that last Friday I had semi-promised you the first part of the lullaby from PEGASUS this Friday—?
The day began badly. I was just strapping hellhounds in to the rocket launcher when the phone rang, and it was Peter saying, in a commendably calm tone, that if I get any emails from UPS, not to open them. Peter actually uses UPS, so it was plausible. . . .
Yes. Plausible but hostile. By the time hellhounds and I returned from pounding a little more Hampshire countryside back into place again*** the Trojan horse had burst like a piñata . . . all over the innards of Peter’s computer, which is, for the moment anyway, an ex-computer. One of Asmodeus’ minions is going to fetch it away on Monday and see if any of his incantations† can recall it from the land of the dead. Peter, poor man, has spent most of the day on the phone . . . first trying, under instruction, to limit the damage, which I gather was a bit like trying to claw the tide back from ebbing with a fork, and then trying to convince his laptop that it wasn’t just a typewriter with a screen, it could do computery things, like check email and ask Google questions. But it kept wringing its little memory modules and saying no, no, no! Beat me, spurn me, feed me to hellhounds††, but don’t make me go on line!
Meanwhile I had a piano lesson this afternoon. I’ve actually written the, or anyway some, music for the second and (so far as I know) final part of the lullaby this week, but I trust my own judgement even less than usual with the ME roaring in my ears, so I wanted to take both the corrected first part††† and the new second part to Oisin. He did print it out for me, and I should have just made the final adjustments with a pen, but you know, you have this fabulous, inbloodysanely complicated software for which your husband paid rather a bomb, you want to use it. . . and there was no going back after I’d written a phone number, a succinct shopping list, and the first bar and a half of a new piece across the top of Oisin’s print out.‡
My printer at the mews is one of the reasons I need an Asmodeus minion to pay a visit, and Peter’s ancient but reliable printer is so old that the pages it produces are really not good enough for scanning. So I brought the mews laptop—which is the one with Finale‡‡, my composing software, on it—back to the cottage tonight. And plugged it into the cottage printer, which is the good printer, except when it’s in a bad mood, fired up Finale, and prepared to print out.
Found new hardware, said my computer.
There was an error in gijjeebling with the new hardware, said my computer. New hardware may not work properly.
Then the Install New Hardware Wizard popped up. Go away, I said and closed it.
So I went into ‘printers’ and made sure that the correct printer was ticked. It was. Listen, I’d had Computer Men install the freller on all sixteen‡‡‡ of my computers; I knew it was there. It was there! It was theeeeere!
Went back to Finale. Opened lullaby, hit ‘print’.
Document failed to print, said my computer.
ARRRRGH, I said. I deleted the print queue.
It was now seven-fifteen, and I have to go bell ringing in fifteen minutes. I rebooted.
Found new hardware, said my computer. We don’t like this new hardware. We don’t like its shoes. We don’t like its haircut. The Install New Hardware Wizard popped up again. And cleared its throat meaningfully.
I closed it down again.
I tried to print the lullaby again.
Document failed to print, my computer said again. Gleefully.
The Install New Hardware Wizard leaped out of the shadows, waving exuberantly. Let me solve all your problems! I can go on line and download everything you could ever need!
I’m not in a very good mood about downloading stuff from the internet right now, I said. Let’s try something else.
Then give me the Mystic Install Printer Disk! said the wizard joyfully.
Yes. I found the Mystic Install Printer Disk. Now this is where you think that it’s all going to be all right after all, don’t you? You’d be wrong.
I put the Mystic Disk in the little drawer. It spun. It loaded . . . almost.
It was within a fingernail paring’s breadth of finishing when a Large Red Error Box with Lots of Red Xs in it exploded over the install box, saying, Some Crucial Windows XP Files Have Been Overwritten And You Are in Deep Dog Crap. Give Us Your First Born Child, No, Wait, You’re Too Old For That One, Give Us Your Windows XP Professional Install Disk And We May Save Your Ass. Or, Then Again, We May Not.
Meanwhile, the almost-loaded mystic printer disk is making small flailing motions and trying to boost itself up to peer over the edge of the Large Red Error box. Wait a minute! it says. I was here first! Let me finish!
We Are Windows. We Rule. Get Out of the Way Before We Step on You Like An Outdated Motherboard. Crunch.
I take the mystic printer disk out of the little drawer and put the Windows XP disk in.
Hey, says the New Hardware Wizard. That was bloody rude. Cancel these Windows yobos, whoever the hell they think they are. Put the mystic printer disk back in the drawer. Now.
Don’t Touch Anything, said the Large Red Error Box, or The World Will End in Fire and Peripherals.
Blow me, said the wizard. Let my mystic disk finish loading, or I’m going to crumdang the josselwidgers, and then you’ll be sorry.
You wouldn’t, said the Box.
I would, said the wizard.
At this point I have about eleventy hundred little ‘open’ boxes in hydra-headed heaps on the what-you’re-up-to bar at the bottom of the screen. None of them will close. And nothing else works either. I hit ctrl-alt-delete and the Programme Tyrant box stomps into view, cracking its whip.
Make them behave, I say.
The Programme Tyrant strives mightily for a minute or two but the wizard and the Box are locked in mortal combat. Ow! Dranglefab! WHAP! BLANG! THUMP!
So I turn the whole thing off. CRASH. I can frelling hear the components clanking together like badly rung bells.
And then I run/totter off to tower practise.
So the story thus far: I need Blogmom to load the sheet music to the lullaby on the blog. This means I have to print it out, scan it back in again, and tack it on as an attachment to an email, and send it to her. I have, thus far, done none of these things.
Tune in tomorrow for the next exciting episode.
* * *
* You may replace this with ‘matriarch’ if you prefer
** Yes, I do read too much Wondermark.^ http://wondermark.com/ Wait, is it possible to read too much Wondermark?
http://wondermark.com/601/ Ahem, says she who eats everything with chopsticks.
^ Does he do matriarchs? I don’t remember matriarchs
*** Landscape gets uppity if you don’t tramp on it regularly. See, you’re helping save the planet when you go for walks. It’s not just a question of your waistline.
† Asmodeus is expecting Peter to provide his own dragon’s blood, eyelash of salamander and powdered mandrake root. At the prices they charge, I feel these should be included.
†† Ha ha ha ha ha. Although you don’t know, they might have a taste for computer components.
††† And a good thing I did, since I’d managed to make one of the corrections backwards
‡ Like we aren’t frelling drowning in second sheets, from all those blank-backed galley proofs. We have scratch paper for the next million years.
‡‡ Having now had it, used it, and been slapped around by it for a year and a half or so, I like the name no more than I did in the beginning. It said, You’ve had it! You’re finished!, a year and a half ago, and it still says, You’ve had it! You’re finished! to me now.
‡‡‡ Well. Four. And one of ’em’s retired.
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.
Complete Sentences Optional
Majorly knackered here. Fridays are always a bit of a sprint because I have both piano lesson and home tower bell practise.* This week there has been the additional drain on resources of trying to relearn how to use Finale.** I am totally glad to have composing software and, since Finale is what Oisin uses, I’m very glad to have what he can bail me out of. But . . . oh . . . gods.*** I didn’t get nearly as much shoved and rammed into the computer as I meant to because I wasted so much time over the ‘make me’ arbitration.
But it is extremely pleasing to be composing again, even if perhaps only briefly, till the waters of PEG II close over my head.† And I had enough more of Frost and Fire and Ice to take in today for Oisin to complain more bitterly—last week he had the perfect excuse of failing to read my handwriting—and furthermore with this song the vocal line has become seriously detached from the piano accompaniment so trying to play all three at once is like trying to pat your head, rub your stomach and tie your shoelaces. Obviously one of us should sing. No.††
Oisin said, I don’t want to put you off or anything, but this is slightly more diatonic than sometimes with you.†††
It’s probably the voice lessons, I said, wincing as he pointed out a few of the rather dramatic leaps my vocalist must get round. I have this gruesome idea that if you give someone a rest, you can do anything to them after it, because they’ve had time to pull themselves together. Oisin suggested, smiling evilly, that I should practise singing it, that picking up those perilous notes after the rests will do wonders for my development of relative pitch. I forgive him, however, because he also said that it sounded a little like late Vaughan Williams, after he’d got the English-pastoral out of his system. Beam.‡
Then I had to come home and hurtle hellhounds before bell practise. Tired person. Fortunately going hand-over-hand up a ladder such as the one into our ringing chamber is considered normal, and a lot of people tend to slump in corners on Friday evenings anyway. But we had enough of a turn-out that I got to ring triples. Yaay. I even managed to claw enough still-semi-responsive brain cells together to remember to keep counting places‡‡ to seven (triples) rather than five (doubles) or six (minor). I can’t say that my Grandsire Triples were a delight to the ear, but I did get through . . . and then we rang Stedman Triples and there were actually two of us who weren’t quite sure what we were doing and we still got through it so this is Very Good.
Right at the moment we’ve got the holidays and weather from hell as an excuse for some fairly thin on the ground practise nights as well as the ones that have been outright cancelled, but I’m mournfully aware that I am now squarely into that murky midrange area where it’s no longer a given that simply turning up for practise regularly will get me much farther: the stuff I want to learn requires a good band, not just any old band—and I still only learn anything by grind. I do not want, five more years from now, still to be saying ‘well I managed to get through a plain course of Stedman Triples tonight, I wonder how long it’s been since the last time I had the opportunity?’
However. Tonight is tonight, I rang Stedman Triples and my piano teacher says he can hear some late Vaughan Williams in the piece I’m trying to write, and the snow is melting. ‡‡‡
And I wonder if I can stay awake long enough to walk back to the cottage.§
* * *
* Once upon a time I had my piano lesson on Thursday. Oisin moved me to Friday because it worked better for him^ and I always meant to negotiate about moving back . . . and then Thursday became handbell practise. Oops.
^ His most entertaining students for Friday afternoons?
** &^%$£”!!!!!!!!!†††+={@????<++*#~‡!!§§!!!!!!!!!! etc. Who designed the ugleblarging thing? Mad wombats?
*** And speaking of troubling deaf heaven^ with one’s bootless cries, Oisin has an almost unbearably thrilling new toy. He’s got a whole sound studio in his attic already but apparently organ software has recently taken a giant leap forward and he’s just bought the digitalised version of some prodigious French organ the size of two or three Lockheed C-141 StarLifter Heavy Transport planes.^^ Although a somewhat different shape, and with less crew and more keyboards. Anyway, never mind what the thing sounds like—he hasn’t loaded it yet so I can’t tell you—it’s beautiful. I want one. I just . . . want it.^^^ Want. I guarantee that I would find its company very inspirational.^^^^ Meanwhile . . . Oisin says he needs a new computer to run it properly. Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha. The old ‘new computer’ scam.
I did tell^^^^^ him (again, with feeling) that if in his travels he comes up with any better playback options than Finale’s basic, which furthermore do not involve taking an advanced degree in Musical Instrument Digital Interface Protocol, I would be grateful to be told. And I’ll worry about the inevitable ‘new computer’ wheeze later.
^ Ie the Finale help files
^^ I love google. http://www.aerospaceweb.org/aircraft/transport-m/c141/ And . . . ‘StarLifter’? Whose idea was that? I think some military mind had been reading too much space opera.
^^^ As previously observed, what I want is to be 13 years old and talented, and I’d be all over organ lessons.
^^^^ And it seems to me large gorgeous pipe organs are seriously underrepresented in fantasy literature.+
+ Phantom of the Opera does not count.
^^^^^ ‘Whimper’ might be more accurate
† I’m too tired to try to describe how composing is just like word-writing only different. Some day I want a chat with a professional, earns-a-living-at-it music composer who also writes occasional word-stories. I want to know how much of the apparent difference is only the result of what you’re used to.
†† It’s true. It’s for mezzo.
††† I like creeping around chromatically. What can I tell you.
‡ Mind you, I adore Vaughan Williams’ English pastoral. But I also remember, many years ago, when I was first making small tentative forays into classical music beyond Verdi, smacking into one of Vaughan Williams’ later symphonies. Whooa! Yeep! Bring me Greensleeves! Bring me more Larks Ascending! Yeep!
‡‡ Where I am in the row. Remember that every bell has to ring once before any bell can ring a second time. All x number of bells having rung once is a row.
‡‡‡ Although as I reported slightly hysterically on Twitter a few hours ago, we’re supposed to get gales, torrential rain and flash floods tomorrow. Maybe I’ll just sleep all day. If I let the hellhounds on the bed, they’d probably go for this.
§ Unless the torrential rain has started. Latter half of the night, they said. Which is . . . er . . .
Laundry. No, FRELLING laundry
I am sooo looking forward to stomping down the main street toward Peter’s washing machine carrying a large backpack full of dirty laundry.
Described it this morning on Twitter like this: Got home last night* to dead washing machine full of WATER & wet, soapy, dirty clothes. Joy. Fixer man cn’t cm till nxt Tues, MORE joy.
Last night I wasted most of an hour trying to persuade the wretched apparatus to finish what it had started. Failed.** It lay there making moaning noises and spasming feebly. And—just by the way—it’s a front loader, and the door locks when there’s water inside. This is a good thing, except for the watching through the window at my clothing developing long green beards of water weed. I eventually BAILED IT BY HAND. Very, very long-term readers of this blog may recollect a washing-machine rant long, long ago on lj, in which I imprecated the designers of washing machines who include a filter—oh, a filter, sounds good so far, you think?—which is protected, as Ladon the golden apples, by a special arcane vessel containing dirty water. I have no idea why the dirty water is necessary. But it means every time you want to clean the filter—of, perhaps, critter hair—you have to bleed off the dirty water first. This whole agglomeration lurks behind a small trap door about a palm’s-breadth up from the floor . . . which means the largest vessel you can use for dirty-water-catching purposes is only about three inches deep. A cereal bowl, say.***
I bailed out a full washing machine cereal bowlful by cereal bowlful last night.
It took a long time.
What’s going to be even more fun is walking down main street carrying a large backpack full of wet, soapy dirty laundry.
Meanwhile I spent way too long writing last night’s entry so I am going to be SHORT tonight. SHORT. SHORT: lasting or taking a small amount of time † ; relatively small in extent. But I thought you might like to see Rose of the Week. Do you remember that I raid the florist’s†† after bell ringing on Sunday? Cut flowers last so shockingly short††† a time I often take pictures of them because . . . because I am a nut case. I’m the only one who ever looks at the photos.‡ But there’s evanescent and then there’s, hey, I spent money for that thing I want to know it existed. ‡‡ Also, I was thinking, I need photos of flowers in January. And February. And March. . . . We may do this again. 
* * *
* Deeeeep dark secret I am about to REVEAL ON LINE because I am lame, silly and a narcissist. I am enjoying walking home at mmmph o’clock in the morning. And the hellhounds clearly do too.^ However it only works at mmmph o’clock in the morning; normal people are still walking their dogs at 11, and going home at midnight-thirty on a Saturday night because of frelling service ring Sunday morning the streets are like the blasted Riviera in July, and I think I’ve told you that the one dubious pub in this town ^^ is about eighty yards from my front door. ^^^
But a little bit later and it’s just you and the bats, and this time of year you don’t even have bats, and the night and the silence go on a very long way, and in that silence stories you weren’t expecting start whispering to you from the shadows. I get lazy about using Wolfgang to commute—for example if the snow had hit a few weeks ago, schlepping four hundred pages of manuscript hard copy back and forth in my knapsack would have got very old. And the sad creaky middle-aged truth is that even ten pounds of knapsack starts to make my vertebrae feel rather compressed after about twenty minutes, and, except at mmmph o’clock, hellhounds and I are usually going the long way. Some long way or other.^^^^
^ Ooooh! they say. To be abroad in the pit of darkness and, possibly, chaos! Oooooh! The only drawback is the hissing at them when we first saltate out the front door of the mews and commence to ricochet with excitement around the courtyard under everybody’s bedroom windows. All right, you can’t hiss No! and you can’t even hiss Ssssstop that! very effectively, but you know what I mean.
^^ I wonder how many of those heat-flushed drinkers this last Saturday woke up Sunday morning with exothermic head colds.
^^^ The cover versions of Smoke on the Water get really tedious by the end of a long hot summer. +
+ I’ve probably said this before, haven’t I? Consider it a mark of just how tedious.
^^^^ Two hours a day is a lot of walking. We need to take every opportunity to fill up our saltation card.
** Had an email from a friend that said, I’m in a crummy mood anyway, so it’s okay if I spend the evening folding laundry, right?
I one-upped the hell out of her.
*** Yes, I’ve tried bigger things—baking dishes and so on—but the slosh factor is rather diabolical.
† subheading: seeming to last less time than is the case; passing quickly
†† Another of my disturbingly ungreen habits, I’m afraid, like commuting in Wolfgang
††† Speaking of short
‡ Till now.
‡‡ For one brief shining moment. T H White was nowhere on roses, and neither were Lerner and Loewe. Feh on them.
More Winter
By the time hellhounds and I have walked home tonight I’ll have spent nearly three hours traipsing around in the snow and the skin-peeling cold.* Life as a pedestrian. Give me my howdah.** It hasn’t snowed any more, although both the meteorologists and the sky keep threatening otherwise. The latter keeps dropping the occasional snowflake just to watch whoever it lands on jump. Aaaugh. That cold fluffy white stuff—it’s happening again.
And I keep putting my coat back on and going outdoors and providing another moving target. First, last and always there are hellhounds to be hurtled. I’m getting increasingly creative about our local options and yaktrax*** permits this. Hells, there are even one or two local footpaths that are improved by being frozen solid after knee-deep mud in November.
Then there was my piano lesson. At least I had one. It’s been forever.† I miss my cups of tea with Oisin while I beat my forehead with the heels of my hands and howl about life, publishing and everything . . . I mean the close textual and interpretive study of Sorabji’s Opus Clavicembalisticum††. And I did have the beginnings of a setting of Robert Frost’s Fire and Ice to demonstrate that I haven’t entirely given up music for hard-selling yaktrax to total strangers for 0% net.†††
Then there was more hellhound hurtling.
Then there was tower practise. Yes, we managed to have tower practise this week‡: we had eight ringers, only two of which were beginners ‡‡ which meant we could actually ring something and in my case slam a couple of chocks under the wheels of my ringing competence, which otherwise has a strong native resemblance to a downhill runaway. I even got to ring a whole series of the Evil Three-Four Down Dodge Single in bob minor, which I haven’t rung in so long I’ve forgotten. Although I’d mentioned this at the beginning of practise and Edward got around to offering me the chance at the end of practise, when I was starting to think rather fixedly about supper.‡‡‡ Never mind. I cobbled together a few brain cells that didn’t get out of the way fast enough and ploughed through.§
And now we have to walk back to the cottage. And it’s about 20 degrees (F) out there. And dark. And crunchy. When is April again?
* * *
* I’m thinking about a ski mask in Hampshire. It’s like imagining the Hellmouth in a small town near Santa Barbara. Years ago I had a gorgeous black leather mad-bomber’s hat lined with rabbit fur.^ It was so totally insouciant Leslie Howard/Michael Redgrave. You could see the Spitfire out of your peripheral vision, slightly fuzzy as it was from the halo of rabbit fur. I gave it away. When was I ever going to need such a hat in Hampshire?
^ Yes. I wear cow skin and rabbit hair. If I’ll eat it—and it’s not endangered—I see no reason not to wear it. Waste not, want not.
** Well, Hannibal got his elephants over the frelling Alps. And I like the idea of underfloor elephant heating.
*** . . . have totally changed my life. I’m not quite to the stage of stopping one in three and holding them with my glittering eye^ as I rant on about yaktrax . . . but close. For the number of people who have written down ‘yaktrax.co.uk’ in my vicinity this week there should be a noticeable blip on yaktrax’ graph of sales in this area. About 80% of my serious-winter claustrophobia has evaporated by the simple expedient of being able to go outside and walk around.^^ This is a hilly little town and as previously observed clearing and sanding the pavements (or for that matter anything but the main roads^^^) is not a priority.^^^^ So I’ve gone from whining with fear as I unlock the front door of the cottage and prepare to essay forth with two fully-loaded hellhounds to nonchalantly shaking my fist at the snow-bellied sky.^^^^^
^ No albatrosses were killed or injured in the making of this blog entry.
^^ Doesn’t do much about the freezing my eyelashes off however.
^^^And don’t count on it there either. Penelope set out for the film society meeting in Mauncester two nights ago, main roads all the way, got as far as the first roundabout on the bypass, went all the way around, and came home again.
^^^^ We started out better after this latest blizzard. I don’t know if it was a council minion or an enraged householder or assortment thereof, but the two worst downtown hills were semi-cleared and semi-sanded. And then we ran out of sand. Which is apparently turning into a national crisis.
^^^^^ I could do this so much better in a mad bomber’s hat.
† There is also, I’m afraid, an aspect to this new year of Before Luke and After Luke.^ I’d had composing plans for the holiday break^^ which were derailed with everything else when the accident happened. And when I finally had a chance to sit down at the piano I found myself wanting to write something For Luke . . . but what came out was . . . well, probably pretty much unplayable, not in a good way, although Oisin has said that if I will run it through Finale so he can frelling read it, he’ll have a go.
^ No particular news. Continued tiny improvements, which are the most we can hope for. And we do hope for them. But that’s all. It’s the old throwing rose petals into the abyss thing, and hoping that in this case the abyss does have a bottom, and if we keep throwing rose petals in, it will eventually fill up again. You’re keeping those candles lit, yes? Thanks.
^^ Plus learning at least one more unassigned aria out of my mezzo book, or possibly another Finzi from the Garland that Fear No More comes from. Which hasn’t happened either.
†† Which is always in the running for ‘most difficult piano piece ever written’ which is approximately all I know about it.
††† I’m a terrible businesswoman, but even I can see this isn’t an intelligent choice.
‡ Although there is Catastrophic News: Edward is retiring as Ringing Master. This probably has something to do with the Blessed Event due next May which will give Louise a sibling. But it’s a disaster for the tower; that leaves only Vicky and Niall as our reliable good ringers. It also means Niall is likely to get shanghaied . . . I mean elected Ringing Master at the tower meeting in a fortnight.
‡‡ But of the remaining six, three of us were Penelope, Leo and me, who are the Wombly Ones, and Niall, Vicky and Edward holding us together . . . demonstrating just how acutely we’re going to miss Edward. Waaaaah.
‡‡‡ And the fact that I was going to have to walk back to the mews to get it.
§ Possibly (evilly) inspired by the fact that we’d rung Stedman a little earlier, with me on an unfamiliar bell because Penelope, who is more out of Stedman practise than I am, wanted the treble. We went wrong rather quickly and everyone looked at me. . . . And it was Edward. Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha.
This is not going to make us miss him any less.
