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Bleeeeerg etc
It has not been a good week, barring skylarks. You heard about Monday on Monday. Computer Men said they would return yesterday, bearing Peter’s computer and my printer, but they have decided they are coming tomorrow. They will, I hope, be able to return me to printability* here at the mews, but I have a Friday more Fridayish even than usual tomorrow, and so I will not be available to enable them to dedragon** the cottage desktop of its various little ways, like denying exit from the nuraddin address*** and refusing to open Windows all the way, so an open window scampers around the monitor like someone playing hopscotch. Nor can they investigate why the Walkperson refuses to take both CDs of an opera instead of merely overwriting the first with the second. Hey, it’s the same title, isn’t it? And the ‘disc 2’ probably gets lost after the repetition of the credits, containing as they usually do sixteen sopranos, a counterbassoonist, and the kookaburra for the mad scene at the end of the second act. I want my Gluck.†
Tuesday I bollixed my voice lesson. Whimper. I half knew I was going to; I was way too tired, I’d found two small but sordid inconsistencies in PEGASUS that I had to solve in exactly the same amount of space they were made in—your publisher will probably let you get away with resetting a very occasional line at the page proof stage, but that’s the limit—and the awful truth is that the five-star marketing plan is scaring me.†† So I went in there jumpy, distracted and underrehearsed, and sang like a person who was jumpy, distracted and underrehearsed, and it was pretty discouraging.†††
Wednesday I went to Ditherington bell practise for our first meeting on the sad new schedule of only second, fourth and fifth-if-any Wednesdays . . . except that it didn’t happen. Niall, Denis and I showed up . . . and spent an hour and a half ringing handbells—Niall never goes anywhere without his handbells—in a freezing cold transept because there was no one else there. I went home, emailed Marilyn and Wild Robert, saying, what happened?, and got a really annoyingly chirpy email back from Marilyn with a copy of the email she had sent all of us about the fact that there was only one Ditherington practise this month. Which Niall and I had both failed to write down.‡ Denis isn’t on Marilyn’s list; his honour remains unimpugned.
And I didn’t have a guest post.‡‡
Today because Colin cancelled and there were no handbells this evening‡‡‡ I decided to give myself a half day off from reading proofs and finish, or semi-finish, or get through draft 2B of, Frost and Fire and Ice to take to Oisin tomorrow: I will probably die of a broken heart if I frumple two music lessons in a row.
I’m a good girl: I hit ‘save’ a lot. I’d been working three hours or so, and was getting pretty tired, but I was also near the end of draft 2B and was feeling reasonably chirpy—ready for a hurtle, a cup of tea, and a return to page proofs. I was pretty sure when Oisin played it back to me tomorrow I’d go, yerp, what was I thinking of, at intervals, but that’s okay. I had something down to work with, and there were actual bits of it I liked. And I’d quite recently hit ‘save’ when I got an error message saying that Windows had a fit of the vapours coming on and was going to close Finale down. Yah boo sucks, I said, as it went KACHUNG off the corner of the piano, but, no big deal, I prodded it with a stick after a minute and woke it up again. And started resignedly putting the last few minutes’ work in again.
And noticed that there was kind of more missing than I was expecting . . .
It had eaten my entire afternoon’s work, despite the fact that I had ‘saved’ about ten minutes before the crash.§
I wasted about fifteen minutes trying to find a ‘contact us’ on the Finale web site that was a ‘contact us’ instead of a come on for lists of dealers and how you can follow them on Twitter and Facebook§§ or join their blog—GAAAAAAAAH—and then I emailed Oisin and a Wise American Friend, both of whom have suggestions for the possibility of ferreting the saved version from the bowels of the beast . . . but I still had to hurtle, read proofs, and write a blog entry, and I’m also a coward. A, furthermore, incompetent coward.
Maybe I’ll try their suggestions now.
Maybe I’ll just go to bed.§§§
* * *
* To the extent that I am ever ungleblarging printable
** Debug is nowhere near powerful enough
*** System Administrator says you’re a bad person and must not be allowed to run at large among the innocent populace
† I want my Gluck Orfeo with my Marilyn Horne and my other Gluck Orfeo with my Janet Baker—if the Walkperson can’t cope with 2 CDs of one opera it’s really going to have palpitations if I expect it to take on more than one recording of the same opera.
I can’t remember now when I watched the much-hyped Met production of Orfeo ed Eurydice on Sky. Recently. I do try to be colour/gender/poundage blind—if someone can sing and act I will avert my attention from the fact that they won’t see forty or a size twelve again, and are playing a tubercular seventeen-year-old. But the k d lang look wasn’t doing our short-Coke-machine-shaped Orfeo any favours, whose acting also had a strong Coke-machine flavour. However I would have encompassed all of this—since she did have a big, thick, rich—one might almost say chocolaty—voice . . . until we got to Che Faro Senza Eurydice^, an aria so familiar that even people who wouldn’t know an opera if it bit them on the leg^^ often recognise^^^, when she kumquatted the ending. What? —Yes, my reaction exactly. WHAT? You mess with Che Faro, I hunt you down and kill you. A Metropolitan Opera mezzo can’t possibly be unable to hit a top F, for pity’s sake??+ So what happened? Goblins in the TV crew?
^ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=brGYq97Of6w
^^ And often assume it wants to when it’s only trying to, you know, play . . .
^^^ What is that? —Wasn’t it that ad for drain cleaner?
+ Even I have a top F, although no one in their right mind would call my voice thick, rich or chocolaty. I’ve been trying to ignore questions of range because as soon as I’m aware of being above C-above-middle-C I start closing myself down from sheer funk. But Blondel pointed out this week that as soon as I have a reliable G I can sing Dido’s Lament. Oh. Okay. Goal. Goals are good. Meanwhile, speaking of goals and Gluck, I have a new one: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paride_ed_Elena
I am shamefully unfamiliar with all but about four of Gluck’s operas—the fact that he seems to have written almost as many as Handel is a trifle daunting—and I knew nothing about Paride ed Elena till Radio Three played one of Paride’s arias the other day which stopped me dead in my tracks. Want. To. Sing. That. It will be good if I can manage to find the frelling music; it’s not something that rolls to the top of your average search engine.
†† And then there’s stuff like the latest edition of SUNSHINE which I’ll show you as soon as I have a copy in my hot little hand. But due to Screw Ups By Persons Who Shall Remain Nameless^, this is having to be pushed through at the speed of a hellhound after a hellbunny, and I fall over too easily. This evening I got an email from my editor saying, hi, we need this cover text now. I sent it back to her in about an hour. But I’m still shaking like a leaf.
^Neither me, Merrilee, nor the editor in charge, which is all you need to know
††† And it may be just as bad next week, because I’ll only have just turned in the PEGASUS corrections on Monday, and will still be looking around trying to see where I left my life. I did tell Blondel that my so-called life has spells like this. But the week after that I’m planning to be brilliant. Um . . .
‡ We ring too many handbells. Really it’s bad for you.
‡‡ I have mentioned this on the forum, but just so no one gets the wrong idea, NO, even if no one sends me any guest posts between now and the 2nd of November, I am not going to keep printing bits of PEGASUS on Wednesdays and Saturdays.
‡‡‡ So last night was a good thing really.
§ And while this is not in the same category of meltdown, as I was typing that sentence, my email pinged. And when I went a few minutes later to look and see if anything cool was coming in^ I discovered that someone I have already put on my ‘blocked senders’ list has frelling come through again, as he/she has done several times already. What the bleeding (*&^%$£”!!!!!!
^ The Tyranny of the Ping
§§ Bite me
§§§ And furthermore Philip Langridge died. He actually died last Friday, but I didn’t hear about it till Monday and only caught up with the obituary yesterday.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2010/mar/07/philip-langridge-obituary
He was, speaking of acting singers, an actor. Last time I saw him he was scaring you silly as the witch [sic] in Hansel and Gretel: an opera I’ve never had much use for, partly because it’s usually played for a high smarm level. Not this one. More Bluebeard’s Castle than Goldilocks. I have him on CD singing Britten’s Peter Grimes and the weak, venal captain in Billy Budd . . . both of which are so brilliantly evoked I find them hard to listen to: I like the occasional speck of dawn in my unrelenting darkness. I love Britten, but he was maybe a little too good at the snake pit that is humanity.
I never met Langridge, nor know anything about him but what I heard in a few interviews, but I feel like I’ve lost a friend.
Grand Matriarch
You all think I’m just plain Robin McKinley, middle-aged, mild-mannered* blogster, hurtler of hellhounds, ringer of bells, plonker of piano and tormentor of songs**, wrestler of roses*** and slave of chocolate, black tea and champagne. Oh yes and I write stories for money.
But I’m not these mere and simple† things. I’m a Grand Matriarch of Fantasy.†† I know this because Putnams’ marketing plan says so. Snork.
I’m still being used as a football by the ME, sod its little cotton socks†††, so I don’t remember the chronology perfectly. But I think it was the end of last week when Mignon, my editor’s assistant, sent Merrilee and me jpgs of the jacket of the ARC ‡ just so we could see how nice it looked with the art all of you blog readers have already seen. And it does look very nice. Except there was a marketing plan plastered all over the back of it.
Wait, wait! Marketing plan? I thought we were still waiting to discuss the marketing plan! I don’t want to do my own skydiving, deploying winged banners at 12,000 feet! I don’t like heights! And I never promised to translate it into blank verse for the 2010 international bardic convention in Swindon!‡‡
If certain parties, like, perhaps—ahem!—the author, had got her frelling rear in gear and turned her frelling manuscript in on time, ample and relaxed discussion about a marketing plan might conceivably have occurred.‡‡‡ As it is, the marketing department is doing very well not to have said, huh?, when they were told that the ARC of PEGASUS was on its way down the conveyor belt.
But what’s on the back of the ARC is only a teaser. The real howler came later when they sent us the full shiny brushed-up marketing plan which leads off with the positioning of McKinley as Grand Matriarch of Fantasy. Hooooooo. After Grand Matriarch and Deputy Ringing Master§, what can be left in this world to attain?§§
* * *
* this translates as ‘wimp who shouts a lot’
** Including the odd^ new one, now and then. I think I’ve got the second and final part of the lullaby to take in to Oisin tomorrow.
^ Yes. Odd.
*** ow
† There is nothing mere and simple about ringing Cambridge
†† The queue for hem-of-garment kissing forms to the left.
††† Out staggering around after hellhounds today, I met Jenny on Connie. I didn’t quite burst into tears but it was a near thing. I asked after everyone—Roland’s been sold on and replaced by two young Irish mares—and inquired, pathetically, if I might drop round just for a cup of tea and some gossip some day and Jenny said absolutely that I must. I keep saying two things about horses: first, that of all the kicks to the head the ME has delivered, the one that apparently means giving up riding is the one that hurts the worst; and, second, that it’s not riding I miss so much as horses. Well, it’s not Jenny that’s keeping me away from her yard, it’s me. So maybe there is a semi-answer to this conundrum if I can develop a bit more flexibility of outlook.
‡ These are still bound galleys for all of me, but somewhere along the line when I wasn’t paying attention they started being called Advance Review Copies. They’re still bound galleys. When your manuscript is first typeset by a proper printer, the resulting pages are the page proofs or galleys. They look—or anyway they should look—like the pages of the finished book will look, but they’ll get proofed several times before the final pages start rolling off the press. Bound galleys or ARCs are when those early pages are bound and sent out to various people in the trade in the hopes of getting a buzz going before pub date. It’s nice when the bound galley pages have had at least one cursory proofing, but we’re running so late on PEGASUS thanks to the fecklessness of the author that these pages are going to be the rawest of the raw, so I hope there’s nothing too drastic wrong with them. I could tell you stories. . . .
‡‡ It may be Peoria this year. They’re a tough audience, those Illinoians, and they’ll heckle the iambs right out of you if your lines don’t scan.
‡‡‡ Of course it might not have too. People in publishing have no more available time than the international average, which is to say thirty-six hours are to be squeezed out of twenty four, and downtime^ is a philosophical construct, like quarks were originally invented to plug a hole in the visionary physics of itty bitty particles.
^ I found this article more interesting than I thought I was going to http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/mar/03/a-week-without-books?utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter
although I found her easy equivalence of ‘genre’ with ‘junk’ just a trifle frelling irritating: ‘ . . . if what you’re reading is mostly . . . well . . . pulp, then sometimes you end up feeling as if books are eating you up instead of the other way round. Sure, there’s a smattering of literature and high art-type stuff in there, but mostly it is whatever I have fished off the shelf at my nearest Oxfam that morning – detective stories, romances, horror, sci fi . . . any kind of fiction that I can gulp down in large enough, quick enough bites. . . .’
Excuse me? THE MOONSTONE? THE EUSTACE DIAMONDS? PRIDE AND PREJUDICE? JANE EYRE? CONFESSIONS OF A JUSTIFIED SINNER? FRANKENSTEIN? DR JEKYLL AND MR HYDE? RAPPACCINI’S DAUGHTER? GULLIVER’S TRAVELS? FAUST? THE TEMPEST? BRAVE NEW WORLD? 1984? . . . Almost anything by Dickens—many of whose are detective stories as well—and I think MOBY DICK is sf/f, but my prejudices may be showing.
Grrrrrrr.
But the question of when necessary downtime starts taking over what ought to be up time is interesting, and I think any compulsive reader will acknowledge that there’s a . . . well, a compulsive aspect. On the other hand I found this article http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/mar/04/evolutionary-psychologists-romantic-fiction?utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter totally irritating. Romance isn’t my chosen form of bathtub reading but everybody needs downtime. This scans to me like a thinly veiled attempt to equate women with their hormones again. This is the 21st century, isn’t it? We didn’t go backwards through the 20th and pop out in the 19th?
§ Handbells tonight. I am seriously brain challenged at the moment so we stuck to bob minor, but it could have been a lot worse. At the end as we were synchronising our diaries, which requires a lot of, no, I mean the 18th, no, that’s the 25th, what do you mean you’re gone on the 8th? Colin said, are either of you coming on Mandy’s outing for the May Bank Holiday? We both allowed that we had not heard of Mandy’s outing. Well, said Colin, we’re going to Herefordshire and Wales, and it was going to be Saturday-Sunday-Monday, but everybody is having outings and it’s too hard to get towers, so she’s moved it back to Thursday-Friday-Saturday. Oh, said Niall thoughtfully, that sounds interesting. I think I’d like to come. Not me, I said resignedly. I don’t go overnight anywhere.^ . . . And then what Colin had said finished sinking in. THURSDAY, FRIDAY, AND SATURDAY? I squeaked. Niall, you’re not allowed to be gone on a Friday evening between 7:30 and 9 o’clock!
Yes I am, replied Niall. I have a Deputy Ringing Master.
^ Yes. We’re having a little trouble with the ‘national author tour’ part of the marketing plan.
§§ Fabulous global best seller in eighty-seven languages including several unknown till they emerged from the shadows and negotiated for translation rights?
Unnnnh
Yesterday was a totally lost day. Uggh. From a sane, rational, grown up, mature standpoint that Cambridge at Friday tower practise which fried my eyeballs was a mistake. You push something like ME, it pushes back. Harder. But I’m not sane, rational or mature (just old), and I refuse to see it as a mistake. As I crawled around the house(s) yesterday in a grey fog of bleh I kept whispering to myself: I ring Cambridge.* The woman who didn’t go back to ringing a decade ago, after she got up off the sofa again after eighteen months horizontal with acute ME, because she was too stupid to learn to ring inside, is ringing Cambridge.** Life is funny. Leaving the old house nearly killed me, but the reason I started ringing again is because the cottage is two garden walls over from the church and its bell tower and I couldn’t frelling stand it. I swear they were ringing about three quarter peals a week that summer, and you can’t escape the sound of the bells at the cottage.*** I know I’ve told this story. Maybe someone else remembers how long I held out. Six weeks, maybe. And then I was on the phone to Vicky, asking if they would take on a recidivist beginner. A stupid recidivist beginner.
Well.
The other thing about choosing to be unwise on Friday is that we don’t get a Cambridge band around here that often; there are crack bands at some little distance but I scare easily and I haven’t got the nerve or the time.† And Anthea was going to be my minder. Anthea is armour. The Light Brigade would have come right out of that valley again if they’d had Anthea with them. What noise is this? Give me my longsword, ho! †† We ring Cambridge!††† But I’ve been whingeing in these virtual pages, I believe, not long ago, that one of the inevitable dilemmas about gaining competence in something obscure like bell ringing is that it becomes harder and harder to find the necessary band of adepts more competent than you to haul you on that next step, that next method, that next incomprehensible dimension.‡
So I’m not sorry.‡‡ But that didn’t make yesterday any more fun. And I clung, blearily, to the treble this morning for service ring: No! Mine! That didn’t stop Niall‡‡‡ from fishing a small bit of paper out of his pocket and handing it to me however (as I held onto the treble rope with the other hand). Did you see this in Ringing World? he said. I didn’t want you to miss it.
Handbells for sale, said the little piece of paper, and a phone number.
HANDBELLS FOR SALE? I DON’T NEED A SET OF HANDBELLS. I ONLY RING HANDBELLS AT ALL BECAUSE NIALL IS THE IRRESISTABLE FORCE, AND HE HAS HANDBELLS. HE HAS LOTS OF HANDBELLS.§
I took the little piece of paper home§§ and stared at it for a while, thinking, if I wait long enough, and this week’s issue arrived a couple of days ago, the bells’ll be already gone by the time I ring up about them. Yes.
Late this afternoon I rang up. I’m third on the list.
Pray for me. I don’t need a set of handbells.
* * *
* Almost.
** Almost.
*** This is why I’m such a fabulously reliable Sunday service ringer. Well, I’m fabulously reliable about being there.
† This is not entirely my fecklessness. Of the three local crack bands that I know exist, I have had direct experience of two of them, and you could cut their total indifference to anyone who isn’t as good as they are into large bricks and build an impregnable fortress with it. I believe one of them is nice to its own beginners if they’re clever enough—so I would have failed there too—the other one isn’t even nice to its own beginners, how the hell do they think they’re going to keep their bells ringing? Immortality? A really good zombie spell? The third one is supposed to be the friendliest, but they’re also the farthest away.
†† Give me my bell of burning gold and something something something something, till we have rung out over England’s green and pleasant land. With apologies to Mr Blake. And Mr Shakespeare. And Mr Lord Tennyson.
††† Almost.
‡ Speaking of incomprehensible. 
This is the line for Cambridge—which you saw louring from under YOU ARE MY SUNSHINE the other day. I’ve had it out because I’m supposed to be learning the frelling trebles—the one and the two—for handbells. Handbells you ring by counting frantically and watching the treble like it’s your last hope, which it is; there’s not a lot of physical skill in ringing handbells, although there is a right way to do it, and quite a few wrong ways. Tower ringing is far more physical because of the size of the bells, and while again you ring by counting you also engage individually with the other bells: you’re feverishly looking around for the bell you’re passing in seconds place, then the new bell you’re passing in thirds place, then the bell or bells you dodge with, which is where the line goes jagged. Tower ringing is inevitably slower although it doesn’t feel like it—I’ve told you before you have about a third of a second to ring in the right place: or of course the wrong one, always a too-attractive option—but you haven’t got time to look around when you’re ringing handbells.
On the extremely unlikely chance you’re interested, what the one (the real treble) is doing is treble-bobbing: treble bobbing is always that pattern; in a treble-bobbing method, that’s what the treble is doing, whatever kind of mayhem the other bells are getting up to. The red line is the mayhem that is particularly Cambridge. I was ringing the two on Friday and the four last Wednesday: all the bells (except the treble) ring the same pattern, they just start at different places. So I was starting at the beginning on the two, but I started at the top of the fourth column when I was ringing the four . . . and then I rang the fifth column to the end (ignore the knitting to the right of the fifth column: that’s one of the many superfluous forms of method notation I don’t begin to understand), then dropped off the edge of the universe and climbed back on again at the beginning. And no, the bells don’t necessarily arrange themselves in order: that would be way too easy. The six starts at the top of column two. Go figure.
But. Yeah. You have to have the entire line memorised to ring the freller. You learn it in bits, of course, and some of the bits, by the time you get this far in your method book, look familiar.
Even so.
‡‡ Although I’m going to be in a seriously bad mood tomorrow evening if I haven’t improved enough to go ring at Colin and Anthea’s home tower. Did I tell you that Ditherington on Wednesday is about to go onto a fortnightly schedule? So I have an excuse to go out an occasional extra evening a week. Peter just needs to find a Monday bridge club.
‡‡‡ I’ve finally figured it out. Nothing stops Niall.
§ He has about twenty. Most people who change ring (as opposed to ring tunes) on handbells have six or eight or maybe ten. Even twelve. Not twenty. Niall has twenty.
§§ Peter has been laughing like a drain. Even my own husband doesn’t take my agonies seriously.
Cambridge
I rang Cambridge last night.* My first surprise method, that holy of holies and scary of scaries.
Well. A little bit of Cambridge. But even that is a substantial miracle, like . . . managing to sing for Oisin tomorrow afternoon, supposing I do. It was also an excellent example of Wild Robert at his maddest. I think I wasn’t blogging yet when he pitched me into Stedman after I’d been ringing about a year and a half and could just about struggle through bob doubles on a good day. Stedman was like yanking the toddler off her tricycle and entering her in the Tour de France. Gah. However, the grind mechanism was engaged and I did, in fact, learn Stedman. Grind, grind, grind. Eventually.
Ditherington has been going through a bad patch for practise night ringers and Wild Robert clearly had a rush of blood to the head when there were more ringers than bells last night . . . and the fact that only three of them could ring Cambridge—himself, Niall, and Ditherington’s fearless tower captain Marilyn—he waved airily aside, and told Michelle and me to learn the line. Now. Right then. This moment. When we weren’t ringing little stuff for the learners, that is. GAH. Do you know how long learning a complex line takes?** Gerald, it must be said, should have been learning the line, but he is one of these people—all occupations have them***—who fancies himself a good deal more competent than he is, and I only mention it because his unique contribution makes our eventual semi-success that much more heroic. We got through about half of it, and since the standard means of learning surprise† is by individual lead, of which Cambridge minor has five, we obviously all get medals.
The other interesting†† thing that happened last night is that I had to call some bob doubles. You hardliners who actually read these posts when they’re about bell ringing may recall that Wild Robert informed me, like a clap on the ear, about a fortnight ago that I was to call a touch of Grandsire. I did this successfully, to everyone’s amazement††† . . . but I could do it because for this particular touch you the conductor, by the calls you make, are calling yourself through a very easy sub-pattern within the entire method. The other ringers are performing the sweaty bits. Last night Wild Robert, grinning maleficently as he snatched my diagram book out of my hands, open, as it was, to Cambridge, stated that for my next trick I would call a touch of bob doubles. Oh, I said warily. I’ve been reading up, you know‡, and I ventured a remark about having perhaps some clue about the bob doubles equivalent of that Grandsire touch the other week. No, no, said Wild Robert, grinning even more maleficently, Denis gets to ring that bell. You have to call it from an affected bell . . . in other words I would be ringing all the sweaty bits and trying to remember to shout BOB at the correct intervals. And learn Cambridge in my spare time.
I admit that my calling was not quite the clean victorious sweep that it was for the easier Grandsire touch. But we got through and I shouted BOB and . . . and I can learn this. I really can. I understood what I was supposed to be doing—I understood the concept. How did this happen? It’s a bit like realising a few months ago that I was, in fact, going to make it to ringing surprise—how did that happen? And while I have thought that I ought to learn to call something, I wasn’t looking forward to the prospect with any enthusiasm. So the second thing about the experience is that . . . calling is actually kind of cool. So, yeah, okay, I’d like to learn to call a few touches. . . .‡‡
I blasted out of bed this morning still slightly overheated (morally anyway) by last night’s unexpected manifestations of ability. Which doubtless explains why today has been one long downhill skid. Sigh. However it began at the beginning of the month with me remembering that Wolfgang’s annual road test is due in February and dutifully booking in at the garage . . . who couldn’t fit us in till tomorrow. Arrgh. ‡‡‡ And then Peter also wanted to go visit Luke § and there was some backing and forthing about this and it turned out to suit them if he went up for evening visiting hours today, and comes back tomorrow. Which left me dealing with Wolfgang. In the sluicing rain—usually I use either picking up or dropping off Wolfgang as an excuse to hurtle hellhounds in the other direction. And because I don’t wake up anything like early enough to get him out there tomorrow morning for 7:30§§ I was going to take him in tonight. Okay, I thought, we can hurtle back in time to let Colin and Niall into the cottage for handbells at five, handbells at 5 o’clock being my usual Thursday excitement . . . until I noticed that we were ringing at four and at Niall’s house, which is about a twenty-minute walk from here . . . and did I mention the rain?
And then we couldn’t ring anything. Toward the end of our two hours of self-immolation Niall looked at the other two of us and said, We aren’t usually this bad, are we? Noooooo. Sometimes we get through entire minutes without going, Crash! Frell! Sorry!
And have I told you we’re trying to learn Cambridge?
* * *
*Translation: I won the lottery. I was crowned Queen of England. They just gave me the Nobel Prize for Literature. I discovered the Elixir of Happy Creative Middle Age that Lasts Longer Than a Few Decades.^ I found the answer for world peace.^^
^ See previous blog posts for remarks about how old is better.
^^ It was behind the sofa.
** Hint: it took me months to learn Stedman. Although that was my first diabolical method, and nothing can be quite that diabolical again. It’s like learning to ring inside for the first time. You will never learn it and furthermore it is going to kill you. And then it doesn’t. Oh.
*** I find the level of self-delusion rather interesting. Lots of people think they’re, oh, say, better, ahem, writers than they are. But bad writing does not literally go CLANK.
† Which includes knowing in advance so you can have studied the line before you came to practise
†† I am so living in interesting times
††† And then Niall the Ratbag made me do it again at New Arcadia
‡ Steve Colman, The Bob Caller’s Companion, http://www.ringingbooks.co.uk/ No self-respecting Deputy Ringing Master would be without.
‡‡ WHAT DID I JUST SAY????
‡‡‡ Note to self: next year remember in January.
§ No real change. Please keep those candles burning.
§§ AAAAAAAUGH
Short* NASTY Monday
I got up what passes in my case for betimes today because I was having an early lunch with Penelope and wanted to have hellhounds well hurtled beforehand.
Except that it was raining. Not just raining: RAINING. Rain on a mission to dissolve planet Earth and leave a large muddy spreading splodge in the solar system.**
While I was waiting for either a break in the downpour or the void to open at my feet when both the road and the ground underneath were washed away*** I discovered that I had a dead phone. I had a dead phone because a hellhound had chewed through one of the wires.
Eighteen kinds of panic at this point. He’s eating WIRES???? I know who it is—Darkness, usually my better behaved, more mature hellhound. He does get into random acts of mastication occasionally.† He actually chewed the spines off a couple of books, and the fact that he’s still alive since I discovered this proves what a soft option I really am. I’d caught him having a go at the phone wire a few weeks ago, lectured him SEVERELY and, as I thought, tidied the wire out of reach. But tidied is not really a concept that applies to the cottage and obviously . . . it didn’t stay where it was put. Very like the hellhounds themselves.
BUT . . . HE’S EATING WIRES?!?
We finally got out on our walk. What with rain, wind and appropriate headgear I don’t hear too well and at one point we were slopping along a farm track and I whirled around, convinced that we were about to be run down by one of those tractors with tyres so tall the driver wouldn’t be able to see a woman and two hellhounds down at ground level, especially in this weather . . . and I dropped one of my pink suede gloves and TROD on it.††
It’s barely worth mentioning that the hellhounds shook themselves violently the moment we got indoors again.††† This is not really the best means by which to have your house plants misted.‡ One of the reasons the carpets don’t get hoovered often enough is because I spend so much time mopping the kitchen floor. And walls. And cabinet fronts. And snarling.‡‡
Lunch was a bright spot. Obviously I was under Penelope’s protective aegis for the duration.
And then back to RATPEGASUSBAG. Maybe I’ll just email everybody the ending. You don’t really need all the details, do you?
And because I haven’t had a good practise ring in long enough to feel my fragile grip on [name any method here] slipping I decided I was going to go to Colin’s tower practise tonight. And Niall was even going to come along quietly.‡‡ I was already standing out at the end of the long mews driveway wondering what was taking Niall so long when there was a small breathless voice behind me and Peter had come pelting down the same long driveway to tell me that Niall had just rung to say that Colin had just rung to say that they couldn’t start practise till eight.
So I frelling cancelled. EXTENSIVE AND CREATIVE RUDE GESTURES HERE. I know I don’t go to bed till most people are thinking about getting up, but most of that late time is spent doing stuff. RATPEG or blog or something torturous with the piano, and I don’t dare be out too late or my brain refuses to go back to work. It’s late! it says. I’m not supposed to have to work this late! I’ll have the union on you! Nyah nyah nyah nyah!
And speaking of something tortuous with the piano, I have a voice lesson tomorrow. I haven’t got Evening Hymn anything like learnt, I’ve been so busy trying to learn the wretched thing I’ve not got any further on It Was a Lover AND I committed the CARDINAL ERROR of taping myself singing last night. JEEEEEZUM. What the hell was I thinking of?
* * *
* FRELL FRELL FRELL FRELL FRELL I AM SPENDING WAAAAY TOO MUCH TIME ON THE BLOG STILL AGAIN ETERNALLY ETC ARRRRGH.
** In all the dystopian returning-to-a-changed-Earth-after-years/generations/centuries SF I’ve read I don’t recall anyone exploiting the large muddy spreading splodge denouement.
*** Hey! Stop that! I have roses to plant!
† Although it was Chaos—I’m sure I’ve told you this story, but it remains vividly etched in my mind—who bit through the cable plugging my electric keyboard into the wall at the cottage. UNGLEBLARG GLURP. Cheez. I was at my desk, and there was this funny sharp alarming noise, and . . . there was a half-grown hellpuppy smiling at me with the two halves of the severed cable lying over his paws. Why he didn’t electrocute himself I have no idea.
†† It’s actually not ruined. I think. It’s pretty handsomely waterproofed or I wouldn’t be wearing it in this weather in the first place, and the mud is cracking nicely, like Death Valley in August. I think it’s going to brush off. What is really miraculous however is that . . . this being a farm track and all . . . it seems to have fallen in honest mud rather than slurry.
Oh, and no, there was no tractor.
††† Raincoats have no effect on this behaviour. They still shake, and they still irrigate the vicinity.
‡ Maybe the reason I’ve still got a little of a certain three-week-old bouquet left is because it is regularly misted by hellhounds.
‡‡ Relatively quietly. He did tell me that Titus’ wife loves dogs and does not love handbells, that he had told her my flimsy excuse for declining Saturday morning handbells and her response was that if I wanted to bring the hellhounds some Saturday morning she would walk them while I rang bells. I asked Niall how large she is and if she has shoulders like a football player. I am not sure I was satisfied with his answer.
