August 24, 2010

Gloom

 

I have (mild) stomach flu.  (I think it’s stomach flu.)

            I definitely have ME.  In the ‘hello darkness my old friend/ I’ve come to talk with you again’ sense.*  Glurb.  Unggh.**  It comes back with knobs and brass knuckles on whenever there’s anything else wrong with me.

            And Blondel has left forever.  Well, Thursday.  He’s leaving forever.  On Thursday.  His house is full of large bulging cardboard boxes covered in heavy plastic tape.  And his mum.  I was thinking about hurling myself at his feet and weeping into his shoes, but not after I saw his mum.  I wouldn’t want to embarrass him or anything.  Under more ordinary circumstances I would have cut my voice lesson today since I can barely breathe let alone make an attempt at that wrestling-with-several-alligators business of organising your disorganised body to produce pleasant melodic noises.  But today was THE LAST.  LAST, LAST, LAST.

            Waaaaaaaaah.

            There are, furthermore, supernumerary reasons why this is a Personal Disaster of Epic Proportions.  In the first place, I’ve already created the cherub, Blondel’s nearly frelling underage replacement***, in my mind as humourless, demanding and mean.†  In the second place . . . Blondel is married, so the cathedral gave him a house.  The only person whose life I’ve made a misery in a year of Tuesdays is the neighbour on Blondel’s music room’s side of his terraced house who has a strange compulsion to hang around in his garden in the afternoon.  Well, Tuesday afternoon anyway.  The cherub is not married, so he’s going into shared accommodation . . . and he’s going to be sharing with not merely another cathedral singer with similarly erratic hours, but a cathedral singer with similarly erratic hours whose mostly-live-in girlfriend is a soprano of some national standing.  AAAAAAAUGH.  Okay, so, fine, he’s not going to be teaching at home.  Where is he going to be teaching?††  One of the cathedral’s rehearsal rooms?  (Which I know from Blondel exist and are available.)  AAAAAAAAAAAAUGH.  I’d be hyperventilating if I had the energy.†††

            Blondel did sing for me today:  some of Schubert’s Winterreisse, which was divine, and Whither must I Wander? from Ralph Vaughan Williams’ Songs of Travel, which would have made me weak in the knees if I hadn’t already been lying more or less full-length on the chair in his music room (good job they hadn’t packed that yet).  I’d bought Songs of Travel for me a while back, when I was starting to get into the (ahem!) baritone repertoire—when I was having such a good time [sic] with Finzi’s Garland.  I’d brought it along today to ask Blondel if I might try having a bash at something while I waited for the cherub to arrive—he doesn’t, till September—and he suggested The Vagabond (right answer) and Whither (also an excellent answer) and then stood there staring at the latter a few seconds and said, I’ll sing it, and scampered back to the piano.  Golly.  I admit that singing some of this stuff that I know quite so well on CD is kind of a mixed, uh, curse, because even if you don’t know what you really sound like you do know you don’t sound anything like Bryn Terfel.  I know Bryn Terfel singing Finzi’s Garland and Vaughan Williams’ Songs of Travel as well as I know the first page of THE FELLOWSHIP OF THE RING.‡  Bryn is a hard act to follow.  Blondel can do it.  And he’s going away forever.

            I think I need to go lie down now and draw some comforting hellhounds up to my chin. 

* * *

* I am so old I remember when that song came out.  

** You can imagine Paul Simon standing on my flimsy, supine body at this point, wearing big black Doc Martens and looking threatening.  Okay, maybe it better be Simon and Garfunkel.  Neither of them is really large and threatening-looking enough to sub for the ME Monster.  The ME Monster also has extra limbs and a migraine-inducing red shift.  And it drools. 

            Actually as I think about it it looks a lot like this:  http://www.goodshowsir.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/Continuum-2.jpg

(Thank you, Jodi Meadows, for the inestimable favour of directing me to http://www.goodshowsir.co.uk/ ) 

*** It’s been bad enough taking voice lessons from someone who isn’t thirty yet.  The cherub is barely into his twenties.  And according to Blondel he’s very talented—well, likely he is, or he wouldn’t have got the job.  But the thought does loom that very talented young people tend to be rotten teachers because they haven’t got a clue what to do with the untalented, let alone the old. 

 † Because I’m a twit.  Next question. 

†† The one thing we do know is that he is actively seeking to take on Blondel’s betrayed and abandoned students.  This might be a good sign, except it probably just means he’s broke.  He probably has student loans to pay off. 

††† It did occur to me, as I crept along in the slow lane of the bypass to Mauncester—ordinarily I’m a hot smokin’ fast lane pedal to the metal driver—that as the frelling years pass, I don’t know if the edges of the ME get blunted or whether I’m just learning focus.  But driving a car is one of my measuring sticks for how bad the ME is.  I don’t drive much any more—to Papua New Guinea to look at a garden is about the limit, even on good days—but there have been many days when getting behind the wheel of a car was not an option.  I don’t have those much any more.  It never occurred to me today that I was going to have to cancel:  only that I was going to have to allow a little more journey time, because I was going to be in the slow lane, and focussing.  

‡ ‘When Mr Bilbo Baggins of Bag End announced that he would shortly be celebrating his eleventy-first birthday with a party of special magnificence, there was much talk and excitement in Hobbiton. 

            ‘Bilbo was very rich and very peculiar . . .’

August 24, 2010 | Filed Under bleak, music, ugh | Leave a Comment 

Post quarter

 

Yes, we got it—the quarter.  The quarter peal that I’ve been obsessing about all this last week, the quarter peal to Daniel’s memory*, the quarter peal that Vicky managed to end-run me into organising.  Forty-five minutes of Grandsire Triples with Colin conducting.  Yes, we got it.

            But it was not a thing of beauty, and that, I fear, was my fault.  I was only ringing the treble, so straight out to the back and straight down to the front again with no scary zigzags, and no even more scary changes of the pattern when Colin makes a call.  But I could not find my rhythm.  Could.  Not.  Find.

            Sigh.  When success is not victory.

            It wasn’t dreadful, and I didn’t get yelled at or anything;  I didn’t go wrong, exactly, I just wasn’t particularly right, and as a result the band never settled down and the Grandsire was more of a stagger than a song.  SIIIIIGH.

            I phoned Niall later on to moan, poor man, and I could hear him trying to figure out ways to be tactful.  Insofar as he had any advice, regular blog readers will be able to chorus the answer:  Ring more quarters. 

            Which leaves me in an interesting quandary.  In pure, absolute terms, he’s right. The best way to ring good quarters is to ring lots of quarters.  Works like a charm.   But I don’t ring quarters because of the ME;**  I don’t do anything that I can’t suddenly sit down in the middle of.  It doesn’t happen often out on hurtles, but it happens, and hellhounds just flop down too and wait for me to reintegrate my component parts.  I haven’t had to pull Wolfgang over and wait for the glitter-fairies to stop dancing on the windscreen so I can see the frelling road in a long time—but it has happened and it could happen again. 

            Quarter peals are scary because they’re planned and organised and scheduled, and you’re letting down the rest of your band if you splinter one.  If you go wrong during a touch during practise or even service ring, the band just stops, and either tries again or does something else.  It can be very exasperating, but you haven’t wrecked anyone’s day.   And because quarters are planned and organised and scheduled, and you will be the Jerk That Blew It if you blow it***, I can’t help obsessing about it.  Almost everything annoys the ME, but obsessing annoys it more than most things.

            The only way to obsess less is to ring more quarters.  You see the problem.  But . . . another but . . . the forty-five-minutes part is perhaps less of an issue than I’ve made it.  Yes, it’s a risk, especially because I go in there terrified of the forty-five minutes, and terror is tiring.  But I’ve rung pretty frelling nearly nonstop at thinly-attended practises at all my regular towers—and practise lasts an hour and a half.  I was surprised when I heard the bells come back into rounds this evening and Colin say ‘that’s all’.  I didn’t think we were anywhere near the end yet.  So I may have a bit more slack about this than I think.

            Hmmmm. . . .

            Meanwhile, however valid or invalid the cause, I’m shattered.††  And then there was a little trouble about the champagne.  Well, of course there was going to be champagne, right?  Did any of you doubt it?   Peter fished one of the bottles I’d bought on sale at Tesco’s††† a while ago out from the cupboard under the stairs.‡  It had come in a box.  He opened the box and discovered . . . the bottle is wearing one of those big plastic tamper-proof stopper thingies over its cork, so we can’t actually open it.‡‡  Fortunately we are not a one-bottle household:  Peter went back under the stairs and found another bottle of champagne.  And he’s offered to ring up Tesco’s tomorrow and try to find someone to reason with.  No of course we don’t have the receipt from several months ago.

            Daniel rang in my very first quarter, eleven years ago, when the rest of the band carried me through trebling to plain bob doubles.  I haven’t come as far as I might like, but I am a ringer.  Thanks, Daniel.   One slightly wonky quarter of Grandsire Triples and a champagne toast to you.

* * *

* One of several.  Colin’s already run one at South Desuetude and Rupert, my old ringing master from over ten years ago, has organised one after the funeral at East Persnickety, my old tower and Daniel’s home tower.  Those are only the ones I know about;  I bet there are others. 

** I was having a bleak moment, as one does after one has not lived up to one’s own standards, and wondering if I should be ringing at all.  There are of course two answers to that:  yes and no.   And even I admit that ‘no’ looks a bit like ‘if you can’t do it PERFECTLY then NEVER MIND,’ and we just had a lecture about that in Black Bear’s guest post last night, which a lot of forum members seem to be agreeing with.  And ‘yes’ includes not only that RINGING NEEDS RINGERS but that I have the first, crucial virtue, which is that I keep showing up.  

*** The correct ringing term is ‘fire out’.  You lose a quarter, you fire out.  A quarter that fires out in the final few minutes ruins everyone’s day big time.  

† I called a tiny harmless touch of plain bob doubles at service ring this morning and it went on forever because being the conductor makes even tiny harmless touches go on forever, partly because with every successful call my terror level cranks up a notch:  Oh gods I’ve got this far. . . . 

†† I’m also half-sick with adrenaline aftermath—no, nothing to do with bell ringing.  I took hellhounds out for their final perambulation^ after the quarter, and was doddering along behind them when I heard someone using a loud dog-commanding voice:  the kind of loud dog-commanding voice that tells you immediately that the owner of the voice is not in control.  And I dragged my weary eyes up and there was a frelling off lead Rottweiler standing there looking at us.

            We have more or less unpleasant encounters with aggressive off lead domestic fauna^^ rather too often, as you know.  But most of the time as I’m bracing myself for grappling hooks and hostile boarders, I’m thinking, okay, it’s a spaniel, it’s a (small) terrier—it’s usually a frelling terrier—it’s a frelling-frelling Lab—we’re probably not going to die.  I do not feel this way about certain breeds:  Alsatians.  Staffies.  Bullies.^^^ Rottweilers. 

            I crank my guys in and we stand dead still.   The woman with the loud voice follows her four-legged killing machine as it walks slowly toward us.  I’m looking at those jaws . . . and she gets a lead around it.  GAAAH.  ARRRRGH.  SERIOUSLY RUDE RELIEF-EXPRESSING LANGUAGE.  But it is, furthermore, worse than that.  The mews is set well back from the main road, tucked away behind the Big Pink Blot which still looks like the local big house but is now condominiums.  The wall around its parkland is still there, as is the avenue of trees.  There’s a nice wide swathe of grass between the wall and the trees, then the pavement/sidewalk and the road.  The busy main road.  No one with the sense the gods gave a quahog would let their dog off lead along this stretch.  And yet several of my ugliest encounters have been here.   As today.  My stomach hurts just thinking about it.  Quarter peals are nothing to the fight-or-flight hormone surge caused by being in the company of your friendly goofball hellhounds and seeing something like this coming your way.  One of the additional points is that if you meet death on legs out in the middle of nowhere you always have the final resort of letting your guys off lead:  nothing is ever going to catch hellhounds.  But you can’t do that with a busy road right there. 

^ They probably wanted a hurtle, but I wasn’t up to it. 

^^ Actually this does include cats.  But that’s a rant for another day. 

^^^ I love bullies.+  I love Staffies.+  I love Alsatians.  I love Dobes and Rotties.  But they scare the crap out of me sauntering stiff-legged and off-lead toward me. 

+ And yes, I know they’re terriers too.  But you rarely die of being bitten by a Jack Russell. 

††† The moral to this story is, support your local independent grocer and wine shop. 

‡ The mews has a cupboard under the stairs.  Unlike some people’s cottages.  

‡‡ Just by the way, what is the point?  If you’re the kind of person who pinches bottles of champagne, you’re probably the kind of person who will just break the neck of the freller.  The big plastic dealies on clothing make more sense;  you can’t get them off without damaging the fabric.

July 18, 2010 | Filed Under bell ringing, critters, real world | Leave a Comment 

Limitations

I apologise for ‘stay home or buy a second seat’ at the end of Opera and Handbells the other night.  It was unnecessarily inflammatory—and tactless.

But that’s as far as my apology goes.  The underlying protest remains the same:  It is not okay that the woman sitting next to me ruined my evening because she couldn’t help being too large for her seat and therefore was also sitting on mine.

One of my mods wrote me a heads up that ‘stay home or buy a second seat’ was going to get me some flak.  I said that if there were at least three complaints on the forum, I’d respond with another blog entry.  There have now been three.

The third protest includes this line:  ‘The argument that people who can’t fit into one seat should buy a second would effectively keep me from travelling, attending any function where seats were limited, or otherwise doing anything that might impinge on others because it would cost me twice as much, and I don’t have that kind of money.’  Can’t travel?  Don’t have that kind of money?  Really?  Tell me about it.  I have ME.  [Blogmom explains: ME stands for myalgic encephalomyelitis, the British term used in preference to the American usage Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (CFS)]

I haven’t been back to the States since the SUNSHINE tour—because of the ME.  I haven’t been on a book tour since SUNSHINE—which is a bad thing for my career, you know, the thing that earns me the money to live.  I’ve missed seeing Hannah’s kids grow up because I can’t travel.  All my old friends are three and four thousand miles away, and I can’t travel.  Problems with hellhound minders (and worry about my 82 year old husband) are contributing factors to my staying at home.  But the bottom line is:  I have ME.  I can’t even drive more than about half an hour because the stress of that split-second attention you must have behind the wheel does me in.   I haven’t been to see Luke because it would involve two long days on a train, and I can’t do that either.  If I could afford first-class, maybe I could do it.  I don’t know.  I don’t know because I don’t have the money.  I don’t go to social events because I’m a cranky, cross-grained cow—but also because social events are way too expensive in terms of energy.  My digestive troubles at this point are so extreme as to be (almost) funny;  but as a result we almost never go out for a meal any more because it’s just so much frelling effort—unnecessary effort being the thing someone with ME most wants to avoid.  And then there are all the other allergies, intolerances and sensitivities that tend to be a part of the ME package.

I don’t ring quarter peals (forty-five minutes without a break on the end of a bell rope) any more because I can’t.  I’ve given up riding because of the ME—my favourite animals my entire life have been horses, and I had to quit riding when, for the very first time I had a lovely horse at a price I could afford, a lovely place to ride her, and a lovely instructor.*   This sucks very big time.

That third forum commenter also says:  ‘But I do think that someone here ought to have some Green and Black’s and calm down’.

‘Buy a second seat’ may be a hot button for fat people.  ‘Calm down’ is a hot button for this ME sufferer.  I imagine that ‘if you would only calm down’ sounds a lot like ‘if you would only eat less’.  If it were only that easy.   Do I believe I’m implicated in the fact that I have ME?  Yes.  I’m a wired, intense, overrreactive, anxious person.  Not every wired, intense, overreactive anxious person has ME, but I would guess it’s a risk factor, like high blood pressure is a risk factor for heart trouble.  I don’t know what the risk factors for fatness are—aside from an inconvenient metabolism rate—but I doubt that very many of them are under anyone’s conscious control, any more than ‘calming down’ is under mine.**

Life’s a bugger.  Given.  But the stuff you didn’t have (much) choice about, you have to deal with, as best you can.  I have to deal with the ME.  I miss a lot of stuff I would like to do.  I do manage to do a lot, but in the first place it’s carefully chosen not to press too hard on my weak places.  In the second place, as I’ve often said, as ME goes I have a mild case.  And in the third place . . . for the purposes of this blog, I lie by omission a lot.  You have no frelling idea.  You’re seeing the swan, not the frantically paddling little legs under the surface of the water.***

Yes, I am thin—and yes I am proud of being thin because I do have to work at it—but I’m thin because it’s something I can do.†  There are many things I can’t do—like calm down—and I am not pointing any fingers.   You don’t necessarily get the choices you want.  You can only make choices about the stuff that you’ve been given.

I’m not pointing any fingers until someone behaves in a way I consider irresponsible.  I object to SUVs bulldozing down the middle of the road.  I object to aggressive off lead dogs.  And I object to being sat on at the opera.

Did I react extra fiercely to my opera evening being wrecked because of the other restrictions of my life?  Possibly.  But the fact remains that I believe my neighbour behaved selfishly and irresponsibly. The way she behaved is not okay and it is not okay that she ruined my (expensive, much-looked-forward-to) evening.

And this discussion is now closed.  I’ve asked a mod to close the forum thread to Opera and Handbells, and there will be no thread to this post.

* * *

* Not too long ago there was a big kerfuffle in the British Horse Society about fat riders—that no one over x weight should be allowed to ride a horse.  Interestingly it seemed to target women, or maybe it was only women who were willing to speak up about it, or maybe it was only the women’s letters to the BHS journal that caught my eye.  My reaction was, What?  As a blanket veto this did seem to me sheer anti-fat prejudice.  If you have a horse up to your weight, then why not?  And yes, the essential, crucial thing is the suitable horse, but I’ve seen absolutely gigantic men out on the hunting field, with absolutely gigantic horses, cannon bones so big I can’t get my hands around them, as I had cause to discover once or twice when I was putting tendon boots on them.  I don’t feel the horse is the real issue.  And if you can handle your own weight safely around and on your weight-carrying horse, then why ever not?  There’s also the well-known fact that sheer avoirdupois is a somewhat mutable thing from the horse’s point of view:  there are good heavyweight riders and bad lightweight riders.  I’m also aware that gravity is increasingly not your friend as you get bigger, and falling off is never a good time, but I would have said that is your choice:  to ride and take that risk.

** And yes, I pray/meditate/attempt to plug into the higher power, whatever it is.  Somehow I don’t stay calm very well when I reinterface with the real world.

*** Very, very, very small tasteless joke:  at least fat is clearly real. Nobody tells you it’s all in your head and you just need to stop malingering.

† And, it seems to me, as a thin person who has to work at it, this society is so set up to make you fat if it possibly can—and then to make you feel bad if you are fat.  As a thin-end-of-normal person I think I’m in a good position to say that fetishizing the anorexic-eleven-year-old look is weird and unhealthy—as is the automatic condemnation of the fat for being fat.  Now can we just be practical for a minute?  There are a lot of fat people.  Wouldn’t it be more sensible to cope with that? Like more extra-wide whatevers?  I’d much rather my tax dollars/quid were spent on bigger bus—and theatre—seats than on bombs.

But that’s a long complicated rant for another evening.

June 15, 2010 | Filed Under bleak, comments, real world | Leave a Comment 

Respite

 

It appears to be midnight.  Bing!*  Bing!  Bing!  Bing! Bing!  —all right all right, I get it.

            I am very tired.

            The ME is being a total frelling ratbag bastard.

            . . . And I went ringing tonight.  And . . . er . . . last night also.** 

            I was talking to Merrilee this afternoon and she said, your ME is biting you and you did what?  You’re going to do what?

            It’s a tricky call, as anyone with an auto-immune complaint—or, I imagine, any chronic pain in the lifestyle—can tell you.  If you push it, it will push back—harder.  At the same time, the longer you lie there thinking about all the things you don’t dare try to do the worse you feel.  There’s a in-some-circles-well-thought-of treatment plan for ME that involves doing x amount more today than you did yesterday, however rough you’re feeling.  This may be great for some people but to my mind and my experience it’s insane.  I’d be in an iron lung if I’d tried that.  At the same time—and again, this is only my experience and I’m not espousing it for anyone but me—when the ME is actively trying to ruin my life, as opposed to louring threateningly in the background, any energy I find myself in possession of I have to use, or it goes away again, and sulks.  Holiday?  Day off?  Urge to stop struggling and just lounge around reading trashy novels and watching BUFFY reruns?  . . . the middle of the night?***  No.  Irrelevant.  I have a little flare of energy, I had better get up and use it or I will be sorry.  And not to forget the importance of morale.  When your world seems to end at the end of your nose, you are likely to find yourself a prey to morbid fancies.†

            So you do stuff like say ‘yes’ when Niall rings you up and suggests a course of restorative bells at Colin’s home tower.††  You may even say yes again when he says (brightly) that Penelope is away for a few days and he’s going to grab a tower the next night—that would be tonight—and would I like to come along and grab it too?†††

            Tonight was worse‡ . . . I went to the pub after.  One half pint of 4% cider later and I’m a drooling loony.  But a cheerful drooling loony, which is where we came in.‡‡  And it’s a very nice tower with six shiny brand-new bells that don’t have anything wrong with them, which is quite a shock to those of us accustomed to the old, the cranky, and the odd-struck.‡‡‡  I suppose we might even go again some week I need cheering up, Peter is playing bridge on a Tuesday, and Penelope is in Caracas.  

* * *

 * Small pretty mantelpiece clock.^  They go ‘bing’.  Church tower clocks^^ and Big Ben go ‘bong’. 

^ I told you this story way long ago, the very first blog of all back on lj.  Peter bought me a CHIMING clock when we first moved into this two-houses situation, in the hopes that it might mean I was on time for supper occasionally.  No.  It reminds me of the passage of time all too well.  But it hasn’t actually altered my behaviour all that much.  But she’s very pretty!  Old!  French!  Has slender pink marble-y inserts!  I like her a lot!  I think perhaps she’s a little fixated on time+ but she probably can’t help it!++ 

+ Rather like my husband 

++ Rather like my husband 

^^ Which are usually striking off a bell.   In a non-change-ringing tower, this is no big deal.  The bell hangs there, the hammer biffs it once an hour, or once a half hour, or once a quarter hour, and someone comes in and winds up the works once a week or so.  In a change-ringing tower the FIRST rule is pull the clock hammer off the bell before you do ANYTHING else.  Bells have died, huge irreplaceable antique clocks have been destroyed, and the walls of Jericho have come tumbling down when change ringing has been attempted with a clock hammer in the way.  A big reason I dislike being left in charge—letting a visiting band into the tower for a prearranged ring, for example—is that that means I’m responsible for making sure that hammer is pulled off.  I have nightmares about ringing with the clock hammer still in place. 

** Peter and I also went to a garden yesterday in a cautious convalescent manner. http://www.ngs.org.uk/gardens/local-to-you/south-east/visit-ngs-open-gardens-in-hampshire.aspx   It was very cool in a jaw-dropping sort of way.^  It’s three-quarters of an acre but it’s planted to the inch.  It’s a bit like what I’m doing at the cottage, only better organised and better pruned.^^  And I cannot begin to imagine doing it on a three-quarters-of-an-acre scale. 

 ^ In more ways than one.  It’s bloody FREEZING out there.  It’s the 4th of May+ and I’ve turned the central heating on.  There was frost on Wolfgang’s roof when we drove back to the cottage last night.  And I keep putting off taking down the ginormous table crouched over the hellhound crate because I keep needing to put plants on it overnight.  

+ No, actually, that was midnight, it’s the 5th 

^^ Their roses—of which there are way too few—each has her own ornamental frame to climb over or be tactfully supported by.  You can positively get out the kitchen door—and down all the paths—without blood loss.  Where’s the fun of that? 

*** Yes.  Ahem. 

† If I sit here too long, Souvenir de la Malmaison will send out long green thorny tendrils murmuring mwa ha ha ha ha ha and wrap me up like Boris Karloff in The Mummy. 

†† Or you may inform your husband you’re taking him to a nice garden opening for the furtherance of his convalescence.  

††† Tower grabbing is a hallowed ringing tradition.  It merely means ringing at a tower you’ve never rung at before.  Ringing is rather awfully prone to geekery and complex holiday itineraries for the other side of the country may be drawn up around towers one wishes to grab.  Niall and Colin’s absence the end of last week was due to a ringing holiday . . . chiefly organised around some tower geography Colin wished to grab.  And then there are the arguments about whether you can count it as a new tower, and therefore a new grab, if the bells have been rehung or augmented (which means adding bells:  a six-bell tower becomes eight, for example).  Geeky.  Very geeky. 

‡ Last night was bad enough.  I staggered up the 4,576,321 steps to the ringing chamber and fell through the door moaning about how tired and out of practise I am.  And Colin handed me a rope and said, Right.  Touch of Stedman doubles.  GAH.  I’m sure the man boils bunnies in his spare time.  But the really annoying thing is that I sailed magnificently through the dranglefabbing coathanger singles—which follow a line a lot like Souvenir de la Malmaison creeping up on a victim—and frelled the easy cat’s-ears ones, which are just two points with a short straight bit in the middle, like a cat’s ears and the top of its skull.  GAAAAH.

            And we will draw the veil of discretion over my Cambridge.  I was surprised I got as far as I did.  But Colin is a stubborn man.  I was only very slightly bruised by being dragged the rest of the way.

 ‡‡ Yes, I should have had a voice lesson today.  I don’t have either the energy or the brain.  The thing about choosing bells as my escape route or my safety valve is that I have a working autopilot for tower bell ringing.  It’s not wonderfully reliable but it exists.  I haven’t one for either playing the piano or singing—and composing is story writing energy, plain and simple, and I can only afford it when I have enough. 

‡‡‡ Colin’s bells are a trifle notorious this way.  Old Eden’s are worse.  Madhatterington’s are worse than that.  No, Old Eden’s are worse because they’re heavier.  You can argue with Madhatterington’s bells.  The five and the six at Old Eden are ‘don’t make me laugh you little soft human’ bells.  And the rest of them are possessed by demons.

May 5, 2010 | Filed Under bell ringing, real world, ugh | Comments Off 

Dental Anaesthesia, Deathlike States and Really Good Reads

 

I knew it was coming, of course.  I heard the thwack, thwack of big horny feet and felt the hot breath of the panting pursuant predator.  Occasionally I am not laid out afterward by dental anaesthesia.  But not very often.  And after the fortnight leading up to last Friday it’s not exactly surprising that this was not one of those times.

            It usually takes about twenty-four hours for the full pumped up roaring force of the thing to arrive.  Which means that I at least got through ringing handbells with Titus.  Finally.  I’ve told you about Titus:  he had a stroke fifteen or something years ago and while he can just about get around with a cane, he has only one usable hand.  He’s also a lifelong demon tower ringer.  At my old tower—which is where I met him—he used to take the four or the five, which were closest to the wall, so he could brace himself against it, loop the rope over his good wrist, and ring.  Terrifying.*

            I don’t know when he started handbell ringing again;  I only know that a few months ago Niall started trying to hook me into being one of the Titus ringers.  But I lead a complicated life** and I keep having these frelling collapses.***  They also tend to meet Saturday morning and the idea of compelling my brain to think about method ringing on handbells in the morning is fairly dire.†  I’ve agreed to it before and cancelled at the last minute—yes, I’m a cow.  But even cows eventually get embarrassed, and yesterday there were only going to be three of us, so if I cancelled again Niall†† and Titus wouldn’t get to ring at all.

            I cannot begin to tell you how CONFUSING it is ringing change methods on handbells with someone who holds both his bells in ONE hand.  CANNOT.  BEGIN.†††

            Niall had warned me.  He had warned me in the light, shifty way he has when he doesn’t want to scare you off.  But I know Niall.  I know what that light, shifty way means.  I was glad to see Titus again, and I’m not sorry, even if the experience did tap out the last glinting driblets of mental energy left on the bare floor of my skull, because the predatory beast was going to take me down anyway but . . .

            . . . Since yesterday morning I’ve been in Getting Hellhounds Semi-Hurtled:  the Ultimate Challenge mode, subheading:  Oh No, What Can I Get a Blog Post Out of?

            Sunday mornings at noon there’s a programme on Radio Three called Private Passions.‡   Michael Berkeley (pronounced BARKly) interviews famous people about the music they listen to.‡‡  I listen to it when I’m near a radio.  By noon today I knew I was facing another trashed desert of a day, so when the interviewee turned out to be Joanne Harris‡‡‡, I thought, Joanne Harris!  Runemarks!

            Runemarks in hindsight is probably the reason I stopped doing book reports on the blog.  Remember I said that the problem with blogging about books is that books matter?  If I frell up my own life on line, hey, it’s my life.  If I’m going to talk about a book I totally adored, I want to get it right.  Getting it right . . . is too hard for a daily blog.  Well, for this daily blog.

            I adored Runemarks.  Runemarks is very, very, very, very, very, very good.  There’s never been any doubt Harris can use the language—I had no idea she was this good.  Individual sentences are both sharp and funny, the plot is both irresistible and eye-crossingly intricate, and the characters–!  Maddy is a magnificent heroine, confused and clever and brave.   All the gods and murky supernatural beings out of the old Norse tales that you half remember (well, that I half remembered) are both strange and familiar, human and superhuman.  And—just by the way—I have always hated Loki.  I have read a lot of Lokis by a lot of writers who obviously have a soft spot for the eternal bad-boy troublemaker, and I have found all of them loathsome and incomprehensible–why does he get away with being such a bastard?  I liked Runemarks’ Loki.  He’s just as treacherous and self-absorbed as ever but . . . somehow Harris makes him work as a character and not merely a deadly pain in the ass to keep things stirred up. 

            Runemarks is what happened a long time after Ragnarok. §  And to give you a flavour of its style, this is how it begins:

            “Seven o’clock on a Monday morning, five hundred years after the End of the World, and goblins had been at the cellar again.  Mrs Scattergood—the landlady at the Seven Sleepers Inn—swore it was rats, but Maddy Smith knew better.  Only goblins could have burrowed into the brick-lined floor;  and besides, so far as she knew, rats didn’t drink ale.”

            Maddy is fourteen years old, and, as in the best quest tales, an outsider in the strait-laced and fearful village she lives in, because of the runemark—called a ruinmark—on her hand.  The villagers all know it means she’s a witch, although few of them will say it to her face.  Fortunately she has one good friend who encourages her talent for magic—a disreputable old vagrant who goes by the name One-Eye. . . .

            In my present state of mental health I’m not even going to try to summarize the plot for you.§§  Besides, you don’t need a plot summary.  It’s a wonderful, wonderful—and underrated§§§—book.  Go read it and spread the word.  Here’s one last prompt from me:  this is from about two-thirds of the way through, when Loki and Maddy are on their way to Hel.  If this doesn’t intrigue you to the point that you have to get your hands on it, well, you’re not the reader of brilliant fantasy that I thought you were.           

“Many roads lead to Hel.  In fact it could be argued that all roads lead eventually to Hel, the frictionless pivot between Order and Chaos, where neither holds sway, and nothing—and no one—ever changes.

            “True Chaos, like Perfect Order, is mostly uninhabited.  The many creatures that exist within its influence—demons, monsters and the like—are simply satellites, basking in Chaos as the earth basks in the warmth of the sun, knowing full well the dangers of over-familiarity.  Even Dream—which has its laws, though they are not necessarily the laws of elsewhere—is far too near Chaos for comfort, which is why so few dare stay there long.  And as for Netherworld—you’d have to be mad to even think about it.

            “Loki had been pondering this with increasing unease as he and Maddy followed the long, well-travelled road to Hel.  Not a difficult road, for obvious reasons, though less worn than you might have expected.  The dead leave fewer tracks than the living. . . .”

 . . . Which is reassuring, because at present I’m leaving more tracks than the living:  the deep, dragging, shambling tracks of someone being hurtled against her will . . .  

* * *

 *I think I’ve also told you about the block and tackle the boys created to haul him up and down the ladder into the ringing chamber.  More terrifying.  But it’s also an intimation of how loyal bell ringers are to their own.

** !!!!!!! 

*** I have not yet failed to get the glass to my lips, even at my collapsiest.  You really cannot drink champagne through a straw. 

† I have enough trouble Sunday morning service on tower bells.  Today, for example, was profoundly not one of my better service rings. 

†† LIKE NIALL NEEDS TO RING MORE HANDBELLS 

††† The fact that (most of) you know (almost) nothing about change ringing is not the defining feature.  If you were here in the mews kitchen with me I’d start waving my hands around and attempting to demonstrate with wine glasses.  Because visual cues are important . . . and six-note rows^ that (occasionally) have seven or eight notes in them ARE VERY DISTURBING. 

^ One for each bell, right?  In change ringing every bell must ring once before any bell rings the next time. 

‡ http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b006tnv3 

‡‡ Yes, it’s usually overwhelmingly classical.  You do get a few surprises, but I have yet to hear either Steeleye Span or Led Zeppelin.  

‡‡‡   Who has a new book out.  http://www.express.co.uk/entertainment/view/168063/Review-Blueeyedboy

Brrrrrrr.  I think I’ll stick to rereading Dickens and Diana Wynne Jones.  I scare too easily.  But I admire Harris, aside from a passionate liking for Runemarks:  she’s a best-selling author who risks doing different things.  Indeed she bridled when Berkeley said that blueeyedboy was a ‘departure’, replied, oh, you’ve used the d-word, and that she liked to think in terms of career ‘trajectory’.  Yes.  I get that.  And may she go on doing different things.  The only other big best seller I can think of who keeps doing different things is Neil Gaiman. 

            It also perhaps behoves me, speaking of reasons why she’s on my radar, to mention that she gave SUNSHINE a really good quote when it came out over here.

 § You remember Ragnarok.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ragnar%C3%B6k

 §§ But if you want to read a couple of proper reviewers:  http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/books/children/article2307684.ece

http://www.powells.com/review/2008_02_23.html

 §§§ I don’t understand why it wasn’t the Next Big Thing.  Why isn’t it Harry Potter, His Dark Materials, and Runemarks?

April 25, 2010 | Filed Under Books, bell ringing, wow | Comments Off 

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I'm convinced that a high anxiety level is the novelist's normal condition. -- Julian Barnes