October in August
It’s another cold wet October day . . . except for the fact that it’s August.* And a day or three ago we were sweltering and I was whingeing about being tired of watering. You have more potted plants in a dry spell, it’s one of those laws of the universe, like bread falling buttered side down. Especially you have more little pots, especially little, porous terra cotta ones that dry out again in about two hours. As soon as it starts raining, all seven hundred and forty-four of these morph into half a dozen large plastic or fibreglass pots. If** the weather dries out again, the half dozen large plastic or fibreglass pots start producing small terra cotta pots, like gladiola bulbs developing bulblets, and just as prolific. It’s rained so much in the last two or three days that my some-people’s-houses-are-smaller-than-this ecologically correct renewable timber water butt at Third House is full again, despite the fact that Third House’s gutters are mostly blocked.
When I was riding Connie yesterday I couldn’t see through my glasses. Fortunately she’s very capable of minding her own feet. And I could still see Large Pale Blurs that were the fences, I mean the kind that you jump over. The risk there is that Connie likes jumping, so when you’re working her around fences she’s always hoping you’ll ask her to change direction slightly and pop over one. Or two. Have I said this before? She started her career as an open jumper, so she has all these neat clever habits that a good show jumper needs, like being able to clear a fence from almost any angle, including the ridiculous. I was working her around the in-and-out*** a few weeks ago when I was still getting used to the idea that I had a really good horse to ride, and coming between the two fences like we were drawing the diagonal line in the middle of a capital letter ‘N’ and Connie was still waiting alertly for me to say ‘Yes, now’ and hook a left over the fence. A horse like this, when your glasses are running with rain, you want to squint really hard to make sure you’re directing her toward the empty side of the uprights.
I was distracted from meteorological effects yesterday by the presence of a friend, here just for the day† but today it’s back to business. Plink plonk splash. Here’s a controversial subject. And I hate it when nasty clichés appear to be true. We’ve had a group of ‘travellers’ as they’re called here–itinerants who live in trailers and mobile homes and occasionally proper gypsy carts, although real gypsies are rare. They’re allowed to camp on verges and common land and on footpaths when there’s room. This particular group have been around off and on most of this year. I’ve gotten to kind of know quite a few of them–all male and mostly young–because they like my hellhounds. Travellers and lurchers are another cliché–lurchers were ‘the poacher’s dog’ originally. I avoid travellers’ encampments on principle because of the likelihood of unfriendly loose dogs and . . . I’m a little bit twitchy about being a not very large or intimidating middle aged woman wandering around in the (comparative) middle of nowhere with no more protection than two spectacularly over-friendly 50-pound hellhounds (and perhaps a minor turn of speed). Most of the mythology about travellers is the scary kind. But I see these guys in town and the truth is that I’ll talk to anyone who likes my hellhounds. And furthermore . . . I like them. They make me laugh. They talk to me as if I am one of them, because I have longdogs. They are such hustlers, and the ones I talk to are very open and good natured about it–with that faint edge of defensiveness that the young and on the make often have anyway, especially the male of the species, but in this case heightened by their obvious awareness that they are officially personae non grata. A couple of them, their faces positively light up when I recognise them and say hi. This would automatically make me defend them.
But . . . the farmer that owns the land adjoining the bit of verge that has been their favourite encampment goes round with his fork lift after they’ve gone, to clear up after them. The last time he did this he took two farm-size trailerloads of rubbish away. The honour-system farm shop has been ripped off so often they’re thinking about closing down. Other things have disappeared. A woman who rides out from Jenny’s yard swears they tried to steal the whippet who accompanies her and there’s a rumour she left the yard because of it. There’s quite a bit of more of this kind of thing that I can’t personally vouch for . . . but this is enough. Meanwhile they’ve moved again, from the edge of my standard hellhound-hurtling and hacking out on Connie range to right bang in the middle of it. Everybody is warning everybody else not to walk that way, and kids with ponies are being forbidden to go out without at least one grown up. I walked that way this morning–but hellhounds and I stayed on the top of the ridge and didn’t turn down our usual path.
I’m middle-aged and middle-class and the only time I ever lived on anything remotely resembling an edge it was more or less my choice.†† And I know culture collision can be harrowing. I want to defend their right to live in a way that doesn’t appeal to me in the least, and I’ll even go with the idea that they have a right to live in a way that middle-aged middle-class folk find annoying. But I can’t condone stealing–that farm shop is a little object like a very large nest box by the side of the road because the family who runs it doesn’t have the money or the staff to run a full size one–or trashing the landscape. When I thought they were doing their own cleaning up–and I saw (from the relative safety of my car) what their campsite looked like when they were living in it: two farm trailers of rubbish is about right, and it would still have to be a large trailer–I could think, oh, well, at least they tried. But the land is bald where they were, as if it’s been sowed with salt. And now they’re stripping another piece of our beautiful landscape, as well as wrecking their involuntary neighbours’ peace of mind. I even wonder if their carbon footprint is smaller than the average middle class working stiff with a house and a gas boiler. And in my middle-class way I feel that I get to say ‘this is wrong’ about a culture one of whose tenets is explicit disrespect of the cultures it lives among. I know the my tribe/your tribe thing has been a human problem since we first climbed down out of the trees/walked up out of the ocean, but we’re into the globalisation era and if we’re going to survive we have got to learn to get along.
It’s all so depressing.
* * *
* I’m just back from ringing handbells^ with Niall and Clio. Clio was wearing shorts. It’s August, she said grimly.
^ For anyone late to the party, we ring methods–change ringing–on our handbells, like in the tower only quadruply horrible because you’ve got two bells to keep track of, and it’s an exponential kind of thing. In fact, what’s after ‘exponential’? Clio fell down and broke her elbow ice skating two months ago+ so handbells have languished rather till Clio got out of plaster again. Niall travels for his handbell fix, but Clio and I are out of practise. Poor Clio, who is the least experienced of us, said darkly, as we lurched through bob minor, I remember now why I broke my elbow.
+Yo, Blackbear, should we let her into the Spaz Club?
** I say if
*** which is, as you might expect, two fences quite close together. In my cough cough cough open jumper days, which were a very long time ago, the standard in and out had one stride between; you can also have two or even three–or a ‘bounce’ where you haven’t got a stride at all.
† I was late meeting her train because of riding Connie^ and late getting her back to her train because of a late-running wedding for which I was ringing.^^ Hmm. I was very glad to see her. I hope she comes again.
^ In spite of getting out of bed tragically early so I could both hurtle hellhounds and ride Connie first
^^ She said bell ringing looks daunting. Oh good. I’m always afraid it looks rather stately and simple-minded till you actually get on a bell rope.
†† Although this kind of thing does tend to develop a dangerous momentum
Water
It has not been one of my better days.
It began, as my days so often do, yesterday. Or very early this morning: 1:30, approximately, when I went to run a bath and discovered I had no water.
And that began about a fortnight ago now, when they started digging up the road east of here. But a fortnight ago they were still safely out of town, on the road to the next little village. But they immediately started jackhammering their way back toward us again, and they arrived last Friday, so all this week it has been a total fricking nightmare this end of town. I think I’ve done some ranting about the way people blithely park on the double yellow line* on our piece of the road, which is mostly residential. Our road is also narrower than it is once you reach the centre of town, which is to say our road is two lanes wide, full stop. The shoulders are the vertical banks previously referred to, which Wolfgang and I had to climb a few days ago to get out of the way of a rampaging SUV which thought I was trying to get away with something. I was, I was trying to turn up my little cul de sac from a single traffic lane, which is all we’ve got at the moment. Since extra-large vehicles–troop carriers, perhaps, or tanks, or ground helicopter transport, disguised as passenger cars and painted in this year’s fashion colours–commonly park, as I say, on our double yellow lines, I should be accustomed to negotiating the merciless turn in and out of my cul de sac** while unable to see a blind bit of what’s coming in either direction. But it’s a funny thing, I am not accustomed, and I object, and furthermore there’s been increasing amounts of Large Paraphernalia hither and thither in both directions occupying even more space than the (lengthening) stretch they’re digging up, which means the extent of the single lane is stretching and stretching too, and the whole situation is too migraineworthy for words. Especially the prospect of their coming back again next week, which, since they’ve left all their toys behind, obviously they are going to.
Yesterday I was blazing back to the cottage to drop hellhounds off on my way to my piano lesson . . . and discovered I had no water. I ambled gently and nonchalantly down to the foot of my street and observed that some of the bozos in current occupation were wearing Southern Water logos so I attack–I mean I addressed one politely and he said oh, yeah, they’d turned it off, they’d turn it back on again in a little while.*** I didn’t have time to stay and chat† so I accepted this and shot off for my piano lesson.†† Friday afternoons are always a blur, and Peter was not playing bridge, so I went down to the mews after bell ringing practise. So I didn’t get home till . . . when I usually get home. And shortly thereafter discovered I had no water.
There were words. Hellhounds opened their eyes to check it had nothing to do with them.††† I found an old water bill and phoned the effing 24-hour emergency service and spoke to a surprisingly alert-sounding woman who did not deny that Southern Water had been mucking about on my street but said mildly that there were no reported problems. There are now, I replied. She promised to send someone round at 9 o’clock which I accepted gracefully, but it didn’t do a lot for my bath.
I didn’t sleep very well last night, for some reason. Something about the adrenaline spike getting stuck, perhaps.
But the water engineer was here at 9:05 and promptly went down in a sea of hellhounds. Fighting his way to the surface again he asked where the stopcock was, a question that had already exercised me somewhat, especially after the surprisingly alert woman had suggested I turn it off and on again to dislodge anything that was blocking my pipe, and I couldn’t find it. He eventually did, but had to take everything out of my under-sink cupboard first‡, where it was discovered in the farthest diagonal rear corner, and furthermore down a hole, where he couldn’t get his spanner‡‡ in the beggar.
Time passed. Only the hellhounds were happy.
I’m not sure how he finally mastered the thing. A small, trained, obedient goblin, perhaps. But at least I have water. Although given the amount of crud still coming through, I’m going to emerge from my bath tonight cinnamon-coloured‡‡‡ and I have no idea when I’ll be able to wash the white sheets from Wednesday Friend’s bed. Obviously if I weren’t a lazy slut I’d've done it already.
And that was only the beginning. But I want to go to bed now and read more of The Graveyard Book. And try not to get blood on anything.
* * *
* Ie, no parking
** Which is itself barely one lane wide, with brick-and-flint walls bordering both sides, in the uncompromising and inelastic way of brick and flint. Delivery trucks get stuck up here occasionally, which is always exciting.
*** Just as a matter of carefree curiosity what happens to, say, your washing machine, if it’s running and the water is suddenly turned off? Does it burn any of its bits out or anything?
† Nor did I have time to do running mad with an axe properly. Starting with the fact that I only have a hatchet for breaking up kindling.^
^ Hmm. Maybe I’ll get an axe for Third House, where there’s space for a woodpile, and room to swing an axe. And then it would be available for situations like these.
†† Where my cunning plan to play Name That Tune, my arrangement being rather successful, was slightly foiled by Oisin’s never having heard of Gypsy Rover. Gods, the man has such effing refined taste. He probably doesn’t even know who Led Zeppelin is. Or Peter, Paul and Mary. The only folk songs he knows are ones that Benjamin Effing Britten set. And he got them from Beethoven. Or possibly Haydn. Feh.
††† Or wasn’t the start of a promising new game. The auditory cues were inhibiting but the leaping around was hopeful.
‡ You don’t want to know. But he seems to think I hoard plastic bags. But he liked the hellhounds, so I forgive him calumnies on my personal habits.
‡‡ wrench
‡‡‡ Hey! Great! I can never get a tan!
Silly hellhounds, editorial muted shrieks
So, is everyone seeing them side by side with the right-hand text column bang through the right-hand one? I loaded them to follow each other, and when I tried to move them around just now, nothing happens back here at the edit window, but when I click back through to what’s showing on the blog of course they’ve climbed on top of each other. So I dragged them back. I hope. Whimper. Blogmom, help. . . . There has got to be a way, but the $64K question is can I learn it?
Saving the planet
We eat as organic as we can. There is some dispute on the definition of ‘as we can’. Peter likes supermarket organic because it’s cheaper; I like the little guys because I think the big guys are bogus. I assume the big guys adhere to the letter of the law, but the planet-saving spirit does not enter into their profit calculations. Some of the little guys are getting pretty big and glossy, but they can still tell you where their stuff comes from and if you want to, you can go visit it on site. Some of them you don’t even have to wait for official open days.* I want to believe this still means something: that it’s not all hocus-pocus designed to dupe the gullible and mysterious-auto-immune afflicted.
In practise this means Peter goes to the supermarket and I go on line.** We have a regular organic veg box delivery, but it’s one of these they send you what’s coming off their fields, not what you want, and I do not possess the bottomless craving for potatoes that burdens the British.*** Furthermore I like my broccoli frequently and in liberal proportions. So there’s always shopping to be done.† I have several suppliers I use but I’m still searching for the grail of the perfect holy organic food source.
One of the glossiest of the candidates has only recently started delivering in this area. Their advertising has been delivering locally for some time. I ordered from them a little while ago and okay, fine, but they’re not perfect so I drifted away on my fretful quest and have lately drifted back again. Meanwhile they’ve had a major web site redesign which while a good thing has some fairly major glitches hiding in the corners waiting to spring–repeatedly–out upon the unwary. Which is to say that creating your shopping list reminds me far too compellingly of livejournal’s comment managing, which long term readers will recall was not a favourite with me.
So I was already not in a good mood when I came to the check-out. They want you to become a regular customer so to facilitate this happy state of affairs there’s a column on your check-out list labelled ‘frequency’ and they’ve helpfully pre-filled in all the little individual boxes ‘weekly’. Anything you don’t want weekly you have to change . . . and, again like lj, there’s an up-to-several-seconds wait†† between clicks . . . and every one makes your screen give a convulsive jerk, and throws you to the top of the list again.
I had struggled to the end of my list, laying about me with the flat of my virtual sword. There was one item described as SOLD OUT so I . . . why, why? . . . went back to remove it–‘remove’ is another column of option boxes–just to be tidy I suppose, clicked, the item dutifully removed itself . . .
. . . and the entire rest of the list reverted to weekly.†††
I gobbled for a minute or two and then I phoned them. And because I’m a nice person really‡ I did not immediately rip the head off the polite young woman I spoke to. We went through my list again, over the phone, item by item, and she put it all in on the home computer where presumably it would get into less trouble. She said she had no idea what had happened, she was very sorry, and she would write a message for the site designers.‡‡ I rang off, feeling somewhat calmer. Their web site may be possessed by demons but they have agreeable staff.
Half an hour or so later I took a pass by my email inbox. With the absence of the email I was looking for there was the order confirmation from my struggle to purchase a single delivery of a number of items of organic food. The name of the polite young woman appeared at the bottom of the list.
And the list itself had again reverted to weekly.‡‡‡
* * *
* Hellhounds and I often walk past a particular farm which sells eggs roadside and opens to the public two or three times a year. I’ve never gone to an open day; I’ve mucked out way too many stalls to find farming romantic. They’ve diversified into ducks this year–or they’ve only just started using the field beside the footpath for poultry so I’ve only just noticed them. I’ve been watching the water in the tiny kids’ plastic wading pool in the duck pen get dirtier and dirtier–and the white ducks develop brown streaks. They all still seemed lively and alert, and they always commented, in the muttery duck way, on our passing by, or I might have started wondering if I should report them to somebody. But ducks need clean water. Ducks need ponds. Ducks are confoundedly messy^; if you’re going to take them on you need more space than you think you do, and this is also a small pen.
This past week the ducks have been moved to a new stretch of clean grass. The farm’s first open day was this past weekend. Sure, I sweep the floor when I’ve got a friend coming^^ but I only develop brown streaks when I’ve been out in the garden^^^ and then I have clean water to wash them off.
^^ I sweep the floor anyway. I am always sweeping the floor. I have hair factories disguised as hellhounds.
^^^ And the hellhounds are shiny and gorgeous at all times, but that’s a hellhound for you and has precious little to do with me. Hellhounds would be shiny and gorgeous if they lived in a neglected duck pen.
** Peter is also the one who actually gets his butt in gear and goes to the local farmers’ markets. In my defence the big Sunday one is while I’m ringing bells.
*** And lately, since the ghosts of all the falls off all the horses in my life have come back to haunt me in rheumatic form, I no longer have even a bottomless tolerance for potatoes.
† Another of those universal truths: There Is Always Shopping to Be Done. Nice cashmere catalogue through the door today, their summer sale catalogue. . . .
†† Which since I’ve performed these various functions on various computers with various link ups I don’t think can all be down to connection speed
††† See! I knew it! Tidy is a VICE! Tidy is a SIN! Tidy is a MISTAKE!
‡ Now about that bridge I keep trying to sell you. . . .
‡‡ Hers probably did not say quite what mine would have done.
‡‡‡ So I decided just a little stroll through the cashmere sale site wouldn’t hurt. Of course it did hurt, and when I got to the check-out they wanted me to log in. I appeared to have been there before, because when prompted for my email address as a user name it accepted this as familiar. I had no idea what my password was, so I asked them to send it to me. They did so.^ And it was clearly my password. I guarantee no one else buying cashmere has that particular private joke. So I went back to the site and plugged it in . . . and they denied my existence. But they wouldn’t let me sign up as a new customer because I was stealing another customer’s user name. I had a strange reluctance to start over with another email address, so eventually I gave up. It was at this point in a charming day^^ that I discovered the email list brightly informing me they’re going to be sending me a litre of ecological washing up liquid every week.
^ Note that the organic food list had not come through at this point.
^^ Note that it is the 2nd of June and 56 degrees. Oh, and raining.
AAAAAAAAUGH
It’s sheeting out there. It’s coming down in ruddy great buckets. And I didn’t get Souvenir’s raincoat back on in time. . . . Kill me. Kill me now.*
I admit I’d begun to wonder if I was going to succeed after all. There’s a point where the atmosphere becomes so sodden that the raincoat is superfluous, which is to say spurious–that’s what’s happened in the ‘when things go horribly wrong’ photo: that particular flower was underneath the first epic tornado-proof cover, but I noticed when I took the cover off that that particular little tenty bit was fairly sauna-like on the inside** too. But if at that point the weather had cleared the heck off and we’d had some proper sunlight I would definitely have had a glorious crop of Souvenirs; as the rain and the re-raincoating has continued the likelihood of ultimate success has begun slipping, like Converse All Stars on a muddy downhill slope with hellhounds towing. There was one day when I had to leave the raincoat on all day, which is Not Good.
But this morning when I took her raincoat off again*** and was looking at this particular top cluster I was thinking, okay, we’re still okay, this is still going to work . . . because the forecast is that by the weekend we’re going to have SUMMER again:† you know, SUNLIGHT, blue skies, warmth. And having got Souvenir to the critical half-open stage she’d then come out beautifully.
And this morning the weather said chance of rain in the afternoon, and my windowsill predictor had its wiggly sun icon showing, and it was all blue and sunshiny†† till lunchtime so we went down to the mews all bright and jolly and . . . suddenly it clouded over†††, and then the rain started. I even came tearing back to the cottage, but it was already too late.
Waaaaaaaaaaaah.
Postscript: Peter has been trying for several days to take me out to dinner. I keep saying absently, yes, all right, not tonight, maybe tomorrow. This morning he said, HOW ABOUT DINNER OUT TONIGHT? Dinner out, I said. Oh. No! Wait! I can’t go out to dinner! When will I blog?‡ And then I thought–cheerfully–oh, I’ll do my Souvenir-thus-far series. . . .
PPS: And if anyone dares say anything to me about next year I will abolish them forever. I will declare them spam and dispatch them to outer darkness.
* * *
* Or I’ll be forced to drown myself in one of our unsatisfactory-for-the-purpose ponds. Oh, hey, who needs a pond? I can just lie, face up or face down, anywhere at all on the local landscape right now, and drown very adequately.
** Then there’s the dreadful question of air holes and wind vents. You don’t want to create a sauna, and if you’re too clever with your clothes pegs the wind will just lift the whole little tenty structure right off.
*** And I didn’t take this photo then, I thought, oh, she’s coming out really well now, I’ll wait till this afternoon AFTER A DAY OF SUNLIGHT, so the comparison will be nice and dramatic. So I was out there just now instead in the teeming rain, taking a last sacrificial farewell portrait. Anguish. Anguish.
† Whereupon the hellhounds will go all limp and fretful. How You Can’t Ever Win.
†† And so the hellhounds went all limp and fretful on our morning walk.
††† Okay, ‘suddenly’ may be a bit of an exaggeration. I was working, and the Sticky Bit Continues, and I may have lost an hour somewhere.
‡ I will have to investigate the possibility of local restaurants with tables near power points.^ When I was still going to London regularly I had a pet café with lots of power points.^^ Since Peter and I see so much of each other we tend to do a crossword puzzle together when we go out to restaurants–one person is across and one person is down–because we haven’t got anything to talk about. This has been known to cause comment at neighbouring tables. [In loud stage whisper]: I don’t think that couple has said a word to each other all evening. This is a gross exaggeration. We will have exchanged a few words about the quality of the clues. But if mere crosswords cause consternation, wait till we show up with duelling laptops. At least with crossword puzzles we are paying attention, you know, to the same thing, and indirectly therefore to each other.
^ Wasn’t I just saying something recently about the blog eating my life?
^^ Well, all right, even my laptop battery will probably take me through dinner. When I was going up to London a lot, the battery did not survive two train journeys and lunch.