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Hellhound birthday!!!!
[Note: four exclamation marks because they're four years old.]
The humans are having champagne.*
I had been foolishly and light-headedly planning to post a photo of hellhounds eating, as a dramatic contrast to their birthday last year. They do now mostly eat, most of the time, and we seem to be in a goodish** patch right now. I was aware that I was being imprudent, not to say positively rash, to assume that this scheme could be brought off successfully.
And then it looked like I had just got lucky. Hellhounds have developed the charming, normal-canine-like habit of coming out and cruising for dropped scraps while I’m chopping up the roast chicken that gets mixed into the dog food *** to encourage them to EAT IT. I’m so totally thrilled at the idea of their contracting an 
interest in food (much better late than never) that I push bits of chicken off the counter deliberately. Usually they mill for a bit and then slouch back to their bed so I have to call them out when I actually put the food down.† Tonight Darkness came out of his own accord and stood there looking alert and hungry. So if Darkness was being all forward and everything, Chaos decided he could do it too.
So I had two hellhounds standing up and eating in the middle of the kitchen floor—PERFECT for a photo. . . .
In the time it took me to get my camera out, Darkness had suddenly realised that he was eating in the middle of the kitchen floor!!!!, had recoiled with suitable emphasis, and had gone and wedged himself back in his corner by the refrigerator, where he usually goes, weary in every limb and generally deeply depressed of demeanour, when I call them out for a meal. 
Chaos, who, while generally the nutsier of the two, does have normal moments, looked around, noticed that Darkness had left him all alone in the middle of the kitchen floor, paused (I held my breath)—wavered—and decided that was Darkness’ business, went back to his supper, and finished the lot.
Darkness was still lying in his corner, staring at me. I was supposed to bring him his dish, you see. I have mostly learnt only to put it down by the refrigerator so he can’t do this to me, but tonight I got all excited and lost my head.
Chaos looked around for his treats. They get two little bits of neat chicken for afters. So with Darkness’ eyes boring into me, Chaos got his treats and went (smugly) back to the dog bed.
Fortunately at this point Darkness broke—the truth is that if we were in a bad eating patch I would have brought him his dish—rushed over to his dinner and hoovered it up with remarkable speed. And then smacked his butt down on the floor and looked around for me again—because he wanted his treats.
I am a sap, of course. Chaos got seconds. He came shooting out of the dog bed when he saw Darkness getting his, and hellhound memories are short. Fine. Whatever. They ate their dinner. I get to sleep tonight. Maybe.
But we can still have a few other photos celebrating the beauty, grace and elegance of hellhounds.††
* * *
* I need the champagne. I’m just back from another long evening of handbells. I got suckered into it this time because last week’s quarter of bob minor sounded so pretty and went so well I’ve got all pensive and yearning about learning bob major^, which requires a fourth person with a fourth pair of hands. We were two fours tonight—positively a heaving mob. And I did get to ring major, with Niall and James, but our fourth was Titus. Didn’t I say a fourth pair of hands? Ringing with Titus^^ is exciting enough when you know the method.
It took us two tries, but we did get through a plain course. At the end of which James turned to me, beaming, and said, you’ll be ringing a quarter of bob major soon.
As I say, I need the champagne.
^ Bob major specifically because you’re two-thirds or so already there by knowing bob minor. Any other method you’re starting all over from scratch. Starting from scratch in handbells is like growing your own wheat and milling your own flour and catching your own wild yeast when you want a slice of toast.
^^ Who has to ring both his bells in one hand. He holds them crossed, at ninety degrees, and shakes them up and down to make one ring and sideways to make the other ring. This does work, after a fashion, but there are kind of a lot of rows with too many or too few pings in them, which is disconcerting since you ring handbells largely by counting, and since he usually rings the trebles—because they weigh the least—you haven’t a prayer of seeing when the treble is leading, which is kind of crucial.
** So long as I don’t alarm them by toxic superfluities like leftover lamb mince, etc.
*** Yes, I know about BARF^. We had a couple of traumatic skirmishes with raw chicken wings and once with sheep bones—I think it was sheep: something large, anyway—and I retired from the field in confusion and dismay.
^ Bones and Raw Food
† No, of course they don’t just come out on their own. These are hellhounds.^
^ Hmm. I wonder if they’d do any better on raw goblin.
†† And last but not least, on the subject of eating and not eating, I love this: 
English speakers are dumber. You have to tell them louder.
More Ask Robins (also more bell ringing)
I’m just back from ringing at South Desuetude. I seem to be ringing six times this week—having warmed up for this Iditarod by ringing twice yesterday. Hmm. I’m not sure how this happened.* Despite the fact that I’m now being egged on by the likes of Southdowner and B_twin and Ajlr, I try to keep it down to three times a week. Four at the outside. Oh, well, arithmetic was never my strong point, and six is really a lot like three, right? It has a lot in common with three. They’re like soulmates. So it’s okay really.
Meanwhile I have both Fiona and Computer Men coming tomorrow and am feeling a trifle stressed at the prospect of all that adroit, laudable productivity, so I thought I’d organise my wandering mind this evening over a few Ask Robins.
Now that we know what mik-bars taste like, how about malak? As it is milky with spices, I’ve always imagined it to be something like chai, but I may be off-base.
I hesitate to reveal the truth. I have been debating how best to describe it so that not everyone but a few hippie-drippies and food despots who think that carob is an acceptable replacement for chocolate will run away screaming.
Malak tastes like what grain coffee would taste like if grain coffee tasted good. Except that it certainly has caffeine** in it, which is maybe why it tastes good. But it has that deep dark bitter—good bitter—quality that both tea and coffee do in their different ways. And you can make it strong or less strong—like tea, coffee, and grain coffee—and you can put milk and sugar or honey and spices in it if you want to, like tea and coffee and grain coffee. I, of course, prefer it terrifyingly strong. There are also different kinds—like tea and coffee, etc.
I’ve meant to find out more about how and where it’s produced, but I haven’t got round to it yet. Have I told you that Perlith isn’t dead? He didn’t die in the battle in front of the city***. Aerin finds him some years later, working on a farm in the Hills, having lost his memory as a result of the fever from the Northern poison in the wounds he received in that battle. Anyway, he may be working on a malak plantation.
I’ve just finished “Fire”. Very nice, all of it.
Thank you!
Are there plans for novel based on “First Flight”, she asked wistfully?
Sigh. I wish. I badly want to know Ralas’ history, as well as what happens to Ern and Dag and Hereyta and Sippy and the rest. But I don’t do plans. I write what comes. I always know a lot more about a story than what gets written down, but in First Flight’s case while I can feel that it has a future, I don’t know much about it.
I do know another short-story’s worth of what happens to Miri and Flame. I hope I get a chance to write it down.† Meanwhile however I’m a trifle preoccupied by the fact that I still don’t know how PEG II ends. I keep reminding myself that I often don’t know how my books are going to end—and that drastic stuff may change right up through the final draft. But it’s a lot scarier somehow when book one is already out there. I’m just hoping all these frelling road markers saying, This way! This way, you moron!, know what they’re talking about.
But this more or less leads me to:
So since “there is no sequel for Sunshine”, would you tell us a bit more from what you know about Mel. Is he a sorcerer? Where and why did he get his tattoos? How does he feel about the lack of communication between himself and Sunshine. How much has he guessed of what Sunshine is not telling him. Is there any chance he and Sunshine could start talking to each other? If they really started talking to each other, would he be able to help Sunshine with her magic?
Um. No, I’m not going to answer any of this. These sorts of queries always make me scratch my head. I’ve said—often—that I’d love to write a sequel to SUNSHINE. If one ever arrives††. Why would I give away the good story material I am in possession of, when I may yet need it for a good story?
But yeah. I want to know more about Mel’s history too. I do know the answer to the sorcerer question, and about his tattoos, but no I’m not going to tell you. Which is actually your best hope that there might be another book with him in it some day, because Mel in my story-mind has that warm, live, twisty feeling of something there. Something that needs storytelling.
What are your feelings on the literary device of one story being told in separate books, each book written from the point of view of different characters within the story? Does the possibility exist for a Constantine novel–his backstory with or without his point of view of the events of Sunshine?
The literary device doesn’t appeal to me much. I’m pretty simple-minded at heart, and I’m interested in the story and the people in the story as something that feels whole, however much of it may be missing or left out. And I mostly want the telling of it to feel transparent—while I’m a big fan of style, and nothing throws me out of a story faster than sheer awful writing, as soon as the style starts calling attention to itself, the story loses me. Beautiful writing only remains beautiful so long as it doesn’t demand the reader stop and say, wow! What an amazing paragraph/scene/chapter! In hindsight I may want to reread something because it is ravishingly written, but when I’m reading a story I want the story, and I don’t want anything in the way. My idea of real style is when the story grows up all around you and you see and hear and smell it, and you’re no longer sitting in a chair (or lying in a hot bath) with a book in your hands.
Breaking it up into a bunch of different characters’ versions, in sections or separate volumes, is usually way too calculatedly look-at-me! for this reader. I haven’t read many of these books because I know my attitude is bad. One that got a huge amount of critical and popular success a few years ago bored me to tears because it was so in love with its own cleverness. Which is another thing I don’t like about them, when it’s all about the unreliable narrator. Unreliable narrators when they’re a genuine part of the story—and arguably every book told in first person is partly about its unreliable narrator, and this would definitely include SUNSHINE if you’re choosing to look at it that way—are fine, and you-the-reader get to have opinions about both the character and the story she tells. But I don’t want to keep doing this over and over. What am I, a judge? Just tell me the story and go away, okay?
Mind you, this is just me.††† But no, I don’t much like multiple tellings. And while as a writer whose stories often like playing games with my head‡ I try not to make categorical statements that I will be made to eat later on, I think it’s highly unlikely I’d find myself writing a story from Con’s point of view.
Oh, gods, what is that cackling noise. A sort of goblin-laughter kind of noise. . . .
* * *
* Although Niall was involved. Well, of course. I knew last Wednesday would give him ideas. And one of his ideas is more handbells tomorrow at his house. I said yes partly because it will help take my mind off no voice lesson for the second week in a row—and the miserable prospect of my last-ever lesson with Blondel next Tuesday. I still have the cherub’s phone number in my hip-pocket paper notebook^ but I haven’t tried ringing it yet.
^ No, not in Apocalypse. That would make it serious, if I put his number in Apocalypse.
** Or equivalent. I’ll have to ask someone. It’s the sort of thing Jack Dedham might know.
*** At the end of THE HERO AND THE CROWN, for those of you who haven’t read it, and are floundering.
† She gets a boyfriend.
†† And I still startle at the sort of whistling noise that might be the sound of a large paper packet^ popping into existence in this world and zooming for my door. Mind you, most of its contents are all the rules and conditions in pages and pages of tiny print and subclauses and you still have to write the story. But it means you can. And the Story Council are total ratbags. I’ve taken delivery on both the new short story about Miri and a totally rogue one about a beat-up middle-aged army commander who narrowly escapes an assassination attempt—her king thinks she and her rag-bag regiment are both too popular and too loyal to each other—which she knew was coming, and, having escaped by unexpected means, has to figure out what to do with the rest of her frelling life. One of these days the whistling noise could still be the sequel to SUNSHINE. Damar, at this point, just has to get in the queue.
^ The Story Council is so retro
††† I’m not even hugely fond of different narrators telling a single story once, although there are plenty of good ones out there. Hey, DRACULA, for example.
‡ See: still don’t know how PEG II ends
New and Old Toys
Well, it’s all about the iPhone. Oh, and handbells.
Let me see. Where was I? I’ve tweeted and/or forummed* some of this. About twelve hours after Gabriel retired from the field in defeat on Tuesday, I happened to glance down** and saw . . . that my latest small enigmatic black box was registering a phone signal. And, since then, it has—mostly—continued to fly a few tiny bars in the upper left-hand corner. It’s worst indoors, but that’s what landlines were created for, right? To back up your mobile? I managed to ring Peter this morning, waiting for it to cut out the minute he picked up, but—it didn’t. And the speaker-phone option works surprisingly well. Okay, I was surprised. But if I’m not expected to clamp it to my skull so I can listen to my brains frying, I might actually, you know, use it, like, as a phone.***
Raphael and Gabriel did come back yesterday and negotiate with management for better working conditions.† I didn’t want to know the details. But I did demand that they try loading a 2-CD opera before they left me to girn and greet alone.†† So we tried Gluck’s Orfeo, which was the vanguard last time that alerted us to the Walkperson’s treachery. And it . . . promptly loaded three discs of a two disc opera. Which is at least an interesting new approach.††† AAAAAAAUGH.
So let’s talk about handbells for a minute.
Some of you may recall that a fortnight ago I inadvertently stood up poor Titus—and not-so-poor, ratbag, advantage-taking Niall, when I’d thought that Colin was coming to ring handbells, which would mean there were still three of them before I got there. Only Colin wasn’t, so my absence meant that nobody was ringing anything till I finally arrived.‡ Whereupon I was overcome by guilt and shame and Niall immediately whipped out his diary and forced me, in my shocked and weakened state, to agree to ring handbells with one of his Demon Handbell Friends, who happens to live in Frellingham, which is too far away, as I keep saying, when I have said no thanks to repeated applications on the subject.
So last night was the night. And while we had not discussed it I was not entirely surprised when, in the car on our way over, Niall said brightly, okay, we’ll ring a quarter peal first, and then you can get some practise in on other stuff.
A quarter. Of course. Of course we were going to ring a quarter.
And . . . we did. The Demon Handbell Friend—let’s call him James—is actually one of these extremely nice, easy-going, laid-back ringers who just happens to be able to ring anything.‡‡ And while I won’t say I exactly relaxed and enjoyed it,‡‡‡ I will admit that it was a very pretty noise, which isn’t usually the case when Niall and Colin and I are hacking away together: Niall’s a good handbeller, but Colin and I outnumber him. Last night the good ringers outnumbered me. And the truly awful thing is that the experience has made me rather wistful about, oh, learning bob major§ or something. Which would mean coming to one of Niall’s other handbell practises. . . .
No, no, no, no. I have a novel to write and an iPhone to fill up with apps.
* * *
* So, what do you think? Does forummed have one ‘m’ or two? I vote for two, because then Microsoft’s dranglefabbing autocorrect doesn’t change it to ‘formed’.
** Probably from my hunched and heavy-breathing posture over the iTunes Store. Good Golly Miss Molly, a kid in a candy shop doesn’t begin to suggest the instant oversatiation and crazy-mad craving which assaults the new iPhone owner when entering the unhallowed portals of the iTunes Store for the first time. Or even the second or third. Or fourth.^ And we’re not even talking all the other stuff, the you-need-never-do-anything-again-but-keep-your-incredibly-battery-hungry-iPhone-topped-up-who-needs-to-eat stuff. We’re only talking apps. And the big problem with apps is that far too many of them are far too cheap, which provides you no useful barrier against which to brace yourself against the storm-tide of desire.
It all started with Fingerzilla, of course. If I ever go for the digital Olympics, Fingerzilla is my honey. I’m even getting better at the helicopters. I—or possibly Cathy—told you that I was particularly taken by the fact that the little people, when you eat them, scream. Some of them have labels. Some of them are just little tiny people and they run away and you stomp after them, roaring.^^ But sometimes you get a teeny pop-up banner: lawyer, it says. Or banker. Or tax collector. Or stockbroker. I would go for one that says irresponsible dog owner. Or queue barger. Or voter for prop 8. Roarrrrr.
But one can’t stop there.^^^ And Raphael had kept me quiet for a good half an hour months ago, before Peter got ill or the RaspBerry started misbehaving, with a lunatic exercise called Angry Birds.+ This is the dumbest thing I ever saw, I said, eyes riveted to the screen and finger stretching the virtual elastic on the next autodestruct bird-bomb yet again. This is so dumb. It even has dumb sound effects.
I downloaded it right after Fingerzilla. Or rather Gabriel did it for me, because at that point we were still in the early screaming++ stage of iPhone integration. But he was trying to be, I don’t know, adult or something+++, and only downloaded the lite version. It only has three levels!! I had to go back and download the full rich massive 59p version myself later.~
Okay, now, somebody tell me why there are never any instructions~~ to any of these games? We’re all telepathic now? Or maybe everybody but me already has that usb slot in the backs of their necks? Take The Screetch, for example, which is very pretty and rather hypnotic in a Tetris-on-hallucinogens sort of way. And if you read the info page in the iTunes shop carefully, you will learn that you’re supposed to line up three swirly spheres of the same colour and they will explode, and if you explode enough of them you win, and go on to the next level. But . . . but . . . or am I looking for logic where there is none? Shut up, McKinley. Turn on, tune in and drop some spheres.
^ You know I’m strangely short of sleep. . . .
^^ The roars are almost as good as the screams. The roars could be louder though. Hey, this is Fingerzilla, crusher of continents.
^^^ No, really. It’s in the fine print. Read your contract.
+ Raphael said, my two-year-old loves it.
++ Speaking of screaming. I needed to play Fingerzilla.
+++ He really should know me better by now.
~ There’s a cheat app for Angry Birds. In fact there are several. Dear gods. Now I’m getting frightened. Hey, guys, it’s a game.
~~ Except for Plants vs. Zombies. There is a truly excellent ‘help’ screen which reads in its entirety: When the Zombies show up, just sit there and don’t do anything. You win the game when the Zombies get to your houze. –This help section brought to you by the Zombies.
*** Except I hate phones. Okay, scratch that idea.
† One of management’s apparent requirements is WiFi. Sigh. I’ve kept putting off getting the cottage wired, because I sleep there. All those wandering waves are implicated in ME. But it’s increasingly the case that there’s so much of it around that you’re swimming in it anyway—it’s like I wonder how much my initial savage acute phase of ME was aggravated by the fact that at the old house we were surrounded by agrochemicalled farmers’ fields. So having prospectively yielded to the inevitable, last night back at the cottage I turned on the iPhone’s WiFi search . . . and was offered a choice of five networks. Soon it will be six. But I’m going to have a password on mine.
†† The Walkperson not only declined to load more than one CD of any given opera—we tried three, just in case it was a production glitch—without merely overwriting what went before, I also later discovered that it was harbouring nine copies of Beethoven’s ninth symphony.
††† It was, for reasons which escaped all of us, objecting to Che Faro, which is the famous aria that every mezzo-soprano in the universe sings, even me. It decided that this aria was just so special it should have a disc all of its own.
It did, however, agree to load all nine of Beethoven’s symphonies.^
^Well, I think. I admit I haven’t tried playing any of them back yet. . . .
‡ I don’t know why nobody seems to ring minimus—four bells—on handbells. But apparently nobody does.
‡‡ They’re a different species. Homo campana. I’m sure I have more genes in common with chimpanzees.
‡‡‡ You enjoyed that, didn’t you, Niall said firmly, on the way home in the car. Erm, I said. And any of you out there keeping track, yes, Thursday is our usual handbell evening and yes, we rang handbells tonight too. I think I’m probably chiming gently when I move. No, wait, that’s the iPhone.
§ Which is roughly speaking the same pattern as bob minor, but on eight bells. Which means some extra twiddles.
Howling, various
Today has NOT been one of my better days. Let’s start over. It’s 3 am and I’m already asleep.
Blondel had a wedding in London to sing today and it had occurred to me after we’d already made our plan of a second voice lesson Thursday afternoon that, in my experience of weddings, he might be being a little optimistic about timing. So I had a plan for an alternate afternoon in Mauncester. What a pity I didn’t use it. It would have had to have been more successful than the one I lived through. Blondel was in fact a little late, but more to the point he arrived tired and ruffled—having managed to get lost finding his way back out of some London labyrinth*—so we ran a little later yet while he had a glass of water** and de-ruffled.***
And then . . . oh gods . . . the lesson itself was a disaster. Dido? Dido is spinning in her grave. And Janet Baker probably has an unimaginably ghastly stomachache of metaphysical, not to say necromantic, origin.† I was then so freaked out by the destruction I was wreaking that when Blondel suggested we try something else I couldn’t get through Fear No More. I can sing Fear No More.†† But not today. AAAAAAAUGH.†††
There were two brief moments when I wasn’t looking around for a sword to impale myself on. One of them was that Blondel has given me a goofy new exercise that I very nearly have to learn like a new song—but it’s amusing. Kind of a lot of your warm-up exercises are a snore, they’re just excercises for the purpose of waking your voice up and telling it has to work for a living.††† It’s not a big deal; I like scales. But this one’s fun.
The second not-nearly-long-enough moment was . . . Blondel sang Fear No More—upon request, and I suspect he only agreed because he too wanted to end the Hour That Should Not Have Been Born(e) on a better note than any of them thus far—so I’ve finally heard him sing. Ooooooh. My.‡ Maybe I should revert to the impaling scenario. Siiiiiiiigh.
It was now a good deal later than I realised. And I had handbells at 5 pm. Well, I was supposed to have handbells at 5 pm. I rang Penelope and asked her to please tell Niall I was going to be late. Half past latest, I said. But I was still in Mauncester at that point.‡‡ And you may have noticed the way they joyfully rip up the roads in high tourist season.‡‡‡ So by the time I got home I had written several sharp letters to the Hampshire County Council in my head and I was flatlining in both energy and morale—and I had to give poor sad patient hellhounds at least a token hurtle before I went off and left them again. But my presence for handbells wasn’t crucial, because Titus was coming—which was why it was at Niall’s house instead of my cottage, he of the big enough and relatively tidy sitting-room—so he and Colin and Titus could get on with minor (six bells: three people) while I sat down for five minutes and ate a nectarine. And I hadn’t looked at the bob major (eight bells: four people) enough anyway, so—especially after the voice lesson I’d just had—I wasn’t minding the idea of putting off the revelation of my handbell deficiencies a little longer still.
So it was more like 5:45 when I arrived . . . to find Niall and Titus sitting alone in silence. Because Colin was not there. Which I should have known, but I’d forgotten, and I hadn’t written it down. OH. GODS. And the only reason they didn’t kill me is because they’re British. Also, I suppose, because they still wanted to ring handbells. Which was what we were there for after all. Some of us sooner than others.
Handbells, once begun, were relatively successful. I’ve told you about Titus: he’s the one had the stroke fifteen or so years back and only has proper use of one hand—so he rings both bells in one hand, and I cannot BEGIN to tell you how confusing this is, not to mention the inevitability of rather a lot of rows that have seven or eight dings in them instead of the statutory six. But I stayed late enough that we could stop when Titus’ hand started getting tired, by which time people were even smiling at me again. Although Niall, who has no conscience whatsoever, while I was still in grovelling and whimpering mode, whipped out his diary with an evil gleam in his eye, and booked me in for handbells in Frellingham with one of his demon ringers on a Wednesday they haven’t got a third ringer. He’s been trying to get me to Frellingham for months, and I keep weaselling out of it, but this has got harder since I don’t have Wednesday Ditherington practise as a permanent shield and defense any more. GAAAAH. I think I’m nailed on this one.
And now I have a little dog to finish. The way this day is going . . . well. I’ve already decided I want to put my lament through my friend’s door on my way back from my piano lesson tomorrow.§ It won’t be finished, but the friend is, as I’ve said, musical, and if he doesn’t just throw something large and heavy at me the next time he sees me, he might have some editorial input. Also I want to have made the gesture some time before the new puppy he brings home in six months or so reaches its second birthday.
Okay. Onward. And I’m hoping for upward.
* * *
* My immediate reaction was, you drove? When you’ve got a train station in your back garden? I’ve got the American’s view of the British train system too—it may make you frelling crazy, and it often does, but it exists. After almost twenty years here I am still blown away by the sheer fact of the public footpath system, and of the national rail network. Even if the reason I finally broke down and bought my first mobile phone is so that I could make ‘I’m sitting in a train a hundred yards^ outside Waterloo and have been for the last twenty minutes, and I’m going to be late for lunch’ phone calls. Which I suppose is the answer to why he didn’t take the train. The day you’re late to perform for a wedding is the day the wedding will run on time.
^ Or metres, if you prefer
** Normal people would have a cup of tea or a double scotch. Singers are always thinking about their throats.
*** And we compared notes on the weird stuff some people lay on for the euphonious exaltation of their weddings. I am forced to conclude that the average level of musical education among the general populace is even worse than the boffins say.
† Okay, Janet Baker does not have a stomachache of unknown origin today, because if she had a stomachache every time some voice student—even the slightly smaller category of voice students who think she walks on water—mangled something she is famous for singing heartbreakingly superbly, she’d be too weak to get out of bed in the morning, and I’d prefer to think she is still enjoying her retirement.
†† I didn’t say well, okay?
††† Note to self: Do not agree to a second voice lesson in a week. Not even if you’re planning on spending all night at the piano and beating that frelling G into submission (while Peter is safely elsewhere playing bridge). Clearly the pressure is Too Great for a spindly amateur.
‡ Think Keystone Kops.
‡ Golly gosh wowie zowie eeep. Geezum. Gazinklebats. Bryn Terfel had better look to his crown. Although one of the things about Terfel is the size of his voice. He could fill Heathrow. Tear out all those ugly terminals and put in some bleachers. And Blondel says that his own voice is not that large. You couldn’t prove it by me: he was pasting me to the back wall of his studio clearly without trying. I can see/hear why people keep giving him jobs. Although I kinda wish he’d been having an off day when he applied for the job he’s going to the end of August.
‡‡ Sort of the backwards version of the ‘I’m sitting 100 yards outside of Waterloo’ mobile-phone call.
‡‡‡ This makes some sense in Maine, where the temperature may drop below freezing and snow begin falling any time, you just get to complain if it happens in June. In southern Hampshire. . . .
§ My voice lesson today was the little dog’s fault. I may have spent most of last night at the piano, but quite a bit of it was about a lament for a little dog, not for a queen of Carthage.
Three glasses of champagne
I am exsheedingly drunk. Three glashes of champagne on an empty shtomach will do that to you. Well, there washn’t anything on the menu that I could eat.
It began innocently enough with handbells. No, no, handbells are never innocent. It is a crucial part of the definition of handbells that they are evil. That they drive quiet, law-abiding human beings to drink. *
All right, I’m too drunk to work this out. ** I think it all began a few weeks ago when Alicia emailed me that she was going to be in this area overnight. I haven’t seen her in forever; she’s been perversely hanging around Yorkshire or somewhere. There are bell towers up there, I believe, but apparently a total dearth of handbells.***. Alicia, partially under my malign influence, has finally begun learning to ring† in the tower, but of course that is only the beginning of one’s tintinabulant moral destruction, and I have been extremely frustrated by her remaining tantalisingly out of reach of further corruption. When she said she was going to be here on a Thursday, Niall, Colin and my handbell evening, her fate was sealed. †† I told Bronwen, who does get here occasionally for handbells, although not often enough, that Alicia was coming, whereupon Bronwen said, Hey! Great! I’ll come too!
This turned out to be a very good thing when Alicia and I embarked on interdimensional awryery. ††† Her meeting got out late, she caught a later train . . . and I turned up to fetch her at her hotel and when I didn’t see her in the lobby had to wait a quarter hour in the check-in queue because there wasn’t a concierge type person‡ to ask.‡‡ When I got to the head of the queue . . . they had never heard of Alicia. There are a variety of ways of spelling her last name. They didn’t have her listed under any of them.
Oh good.
So I went back outdoors again and endeavoured not to be run over by cars trying to get into the car park while I grappled with the RaspBerry. I almost hadn’t bothered to ask for Alicia’s mobile number: what could go wrong? What could go wrong is trying to locate a frelling signal around here . . . When I finally reached Alicia she said, Didn’t you get my email saying yes, please, pick me up at the train station?
By this time we were well into rush hour.
And by the time we got to Niall’s, Bronwen’s blood pressure was up by seventeen points and her eyes were beginning to bulge. We all turned as one to the fresh sacrifice, Alicia . . . whereupon Niall and Colin sauntered off to have a nice cuppa or read this week’s Ringing World or some damn thing‡‡‡ leaving me to try to explain the mysteries of plain hunt while Bronwen held down the third pair of bells. I made the most awful hash of it, of course, and eventually Niall rescued me, or, more to the point, Alicia, from my total ineptitude.§ And the really interesting thing is that by the end of the evening we were ringing plain hunt on ten. Ordinarily you don’t really talk about ringing plain hunt ‘inside’ (ie more sodding difficult) because the pattern is so basic everybody is ringing exactly the same thing, merely starting at different points of the circle. When you’re ringing bloody handbells it counts as inside. And tonight is in fact the first time I’ve ever successfully rung plain hunt on ten on one of those horrible inside pairs that split up and move through the pattern in all kinds of hideous asymmetrical ways. Or that Alicia had ever rung on ten at all. And it was all Bronwen’s fault. She kept saying, oh, come on, let’s do it on ten.§§
So clearly Bronwen, Alicia and I had to go off to the pub after and celebrate.§§§
And if this post seems choppier and more disconnected than usual, it may, of course, be the fumes of alcohol, but it may also be the getting up for a pee every ten minutes on account of the vast quantities of water I am drinking to flush the fumes away.
* * *
*Although I don’t require a great deal of driving when it’s champagne.
** This may be a short entry. That would be novel. Hmmmmmmm. No, no, no, I do not want to encourage three-glass champagne nights. Never mind the brain cell destruction, think of the money.^
^ And it isn’t short after all. Whew.
*** Apologies to any handbell-ringing Yorkshirepersons reading this. Alicia may just hang out with the wrong crowd.
† And that bell-ringing charm I slipped into her handbag the last time she was here cost. Speaking of money. Blowing a ringing is irresistible rune stencil lightly on the backs of their necks is cheaper and works better, but her hair is too short, and you don’t want other people noticing and possibly alerting the victim.
†† It is proof that the charm is working that she didn’t suddenly remember a previous engagement in Latvia, and how she wasn’t coming to Hampshire at all.
††† A situation that is awry. That should be perfectly clear.
‡ This is a brand-new glossy hotel in a chain striving to go up market. And by the time I got to the lobby it was already on my hit list: there is no way for pedestrians to get from the car park to the front door of the hotel except by straggling, hoisting or pulling any attendant luggage, down the car lanes. This means that to get into the car park you have to dodge a lot of people and their suitcases, and then once you’ve parked, you have to dodge a lot of cars to get back to reception. Hotel FAIL.
‡‡ Of course I arrived with a large cluster of businesspersons, all trying to outdazzle each other with their shiny designer scurliches and dires and talking in loud braying voices about their important dendoblans and glerks. I took a particularly virulent dislike to the fellow two ahead of me in the queue who had a very carrying voice, way too many way too white teeth^, hair like Bill Clinton’s, and wearing a pink gingham shirt with the label of a very fancy shirt maker on it—I know because I get their catalogues: if I found myself wanting to pay £200 for a shirt, I’d know I’d been taken over by an alien intelligence. Well, maybe not intelligence exactly—and carrying a garment bag emblazoned with the name of a fancy bespoke Savile Row tailor. Spare me. As he moved up to the desk for check in the fellow he was with murmured something and brushed a hand across Pink Gingham’s shoulder. Pink Gingham looked around and then down . . . and there was a little scuttling spider running for cover. I, of course, expected a look of outrage and/or horror and Death of a Spider on the bottom of a designer shoe. Pink Gingham picked one foot up and put it down very carefully and then turned round again so he was once again facing the desk, and, the spider having changed direction, moved his other foot . . . so he was now standing awkwardly splay-legged at the desk while he filled in his form, looking like a jerk . . . so a spider could make her escape. I decided maybe having white teeth and Bill Clinton’s hair was not a hanging offense after all.
There was actually kind of a lot of wildlife around this evening.^^ I got a moth down my shirt during handbells, requiring me to leap to my feet with a strangled yelp and rush off to the bathroom so I could rip my shirt off. Gah. Colin thought this was hilarious. Colin’s mother wears army boots.
^ Although the state of my own teeth may have a little to do with my aversion.
^^ Possibly something to do with the weather. We’ve now had an inch of rain in twenty-four hours. Yaay. Yaay except for superfluous wildlife streaming indoors.
‡‡‡ Oh, all right, Colin was mulling over a quarter peal pattern for Sunday. But he didn’t have to be doing it then.
§ I don’t want to learn to teach! Like I don’t want to learn to conduct! Like I don’t want to organise any quarter peals! Or be Deputy Ringing Master!
§§ Next time she can ring a hideous middle pair.
§§§ Alicia also has a glamorous new Android phone which Bronwen and I were both deeply interested in. But it doesn’t have Fingerzilla! How can I love a phone without a Fingerzilla app! I guess I’ll just have to wait for the iPhone. . . .
Oh, and Alicia wielded her booking confirmation number over the phone at the hotel, and they decided they had heard of her after all.
