Hellterrors never feel shattered
I am beginning to feel—irritably—that I am forgetting what it feels like not to feel shattered. I did go to my Bowen lady today* which always whacks me out and then went to Fustian open practise tonight siiiiiiiiiiigh. The problem with going even to the dummies add-on practise at Fustian—their real practise is about as far over my head as I am over Pav’s**—is that even the dummy advice is to a level and precision that I only aspire to when I imagine being someone else with a good sense of rhythm and fewer nerves. Arrrrgh. I was also the only beginner there tonight—which is another aspect of the problem—I am not a beginner—but compared to everyone else at Fustian I am. I’m not sure this isn’t more demoralising than inspiring—why am I BOTHERING??—and then just to finish the job of deciding that I’m going to devote myself single-mindedly to knitting for the rest of my life I made a complete compound hodgepodge botch of poor old Grandsire Triples which I should have developed some kind of auto-pilot for by now, for those days when you’ve recently been to your Bowen lady and are still feeling a trifle rubbery and glutinous about the brain cells. ARRRRRGH.*** Nobody threw me out of the tower window or laughed nastily or anything, and they still let me ring a touch—a touch!—of Stedman Triples† and a plain course of Cambridge Minor, neither of which I did perfectly but I didn’t do too badly either so I didn’t have to rush out to the car park afterward and order Wolfgang to run over me, in the absence of a sword to fall on. They’re even going to continue to let me come back. And I got some knitting done while they rang spliced Demmelhemmeldrigglefarthing Doodah.
* * *
* We. We went. I hurtle critters while Peter is on the table and then Peter gets tea while Tabitha goes after me.^ Just because he’s eighty-five years old he gets tea! And biscuits! However I’ve made the system work. Tabitha usually gives him two biscuits—beautiful crisp chewy homemade biscuits!—and he only wants one. I nail the second biscuit. Well, I need the strength to drive home, right? After all the hurtling and everything.
^ And critters, strenuously hurtled, flop in the car. I now feel guilty every month for pleating Pav up in that too-small travelling crate for that hour I’m on Tabitha’s table but she actually does curl up in it without looking like Alice after she follows the instructions on the cake to Eat Me. Although, speaking of eating, as long as there is foooooood involved, I’m pretty sure the hellterror would figure out a way to fold herself up like a handkerchief in a pocket, and she goes eagerly into that mingy crate in pursuit of the kibble I have thoughtfully thrown into the back—even if I have to kind of wedge the gate shut behind her.
Did I tell you she’s smaller than Southdowner’s two? They initially looked HUGE to me, but that may just be the effect of the Delighted Bullie’s Response to Getting Out of the Car—Pav tends to get larger under these circumstances also—and they can’t be that much bigger because I managed to lift each of them in turn+ and they are less svelte than Pav. Anyway. I think it is really very sweet and cooperative of Pav to stay small enough to fit in that thrice-blasted piece-of-junk crate—because it’s the biggest that will fit in the space available. Meanwhile she seems to be coming back out of her heat without having ever quite fully gone into it, which means I should probably re-experiment with the fasten-your-critter-to-the-seatbelt harness, except that that will be the moment when her hormones do a u-turn and she PLUNGES into her proper season . . . and there could be Terrible Things Done in the back seat before I frantically pull over to the side of the road and break it up.
Besides, she still chews on any harness I put on her. One of the reasons she’s still wearing her nasty little nylon collar is that she chews harnesses because she can reach them. She’ll shift over to a harness as soon as she either (a) sits quietly to have the beastly thing fastened on or (b) doesn’t CHEW the sucker. Southdowner was expressing the professional dog trainer and behaviourist’s horror at my admission that I allow Pav to take me for a walk occasionally by a pant leg.++ And I daresay I should be obliging her to sit quietly to have a harness put on (and taken off). But . . . puppies do calm down. Well, sort of. But the hellhounds used to eat pant legs and do airs above the ground while their harnesses were put on. They grew out of it. Choose your battles, I say, not being a professional dog trainer or behaviourist, and contain the battles you aren’t engaging with at the moment. I can live with slightly gnawed pant legs and a nasty little nylon collar for the fact that she lets me pry her jaws open. And I’m not doing everything wrong: she checks back pretty often when we’re out, and Southdowner says that checking back is not a big bullie trait. As I keep saying, Pavlova isn’t a bullie really, she just looks like one. . . .
+ It was DARK and I couldn’t SEE PROPERLY beyond that there was a very happy out-of-the-car bullie somewhere in my immediate vicinity and lifting seemed the better choice than falling down, even if it was rather like clutching the Large Hadron Collider only with legs and fur. Both Fruitcake and Scone are white which does make them glow in the dark rather#, but that only adds to the effect of size and several dozen titanium-piston legs and tails.
# Probably something to do with Particle Acceleration
++ There are disadvantages to a public blog. But I knew that.
** Farther. She boings quite a ways, straight up, on those steel-spring hind legs.^
^ And the hellhounds don’t even have to try. They can jump over me. Standing up. Ask me how I know this. I have the scars that are the result of lack of faith.
*** In hindsight I do kind of know why. I haven’t rung there in some time due to circumstances beyond my control, I was unnerved by being the only beginner and I was on the wrong bell. Still. The bottom line is still that I’m a moron.
† It’s a bit depressing ringing with a band who rings Stedman frelling Triples as an indulgence to the feeble. At a normal tower ringing Stedman (frelling) Triples is mostly kind of a big deal.
Weekend
It was a fair old flaming rubbish tip of a weekend. And it started off so well. I made it to Aloysius’ early Saturday morning silent prayer meeting. Did I tell you* that in response to my nagging about a silent prayer service at a more civilised hour than eight frelling a.m. on a Saturday** he’s begun, just for the duration of Lent, a Wednesday afternoon silent service before the daily Lenten (ordinary) prayer service . . . which I think chiefly gets me off his back for three (?) more weeks but hey, whatever works. I had told him about taking a blanket to sit in the monks’ chapel and he looked thoughtful and said that I’d probably want a blanket for St Margaret’s lady chapel. So I went along this Wednesday with my becoming-well-travelled blanket and YAAAAAAARG &^%$£”#@???**{~] COLD!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! St Margaret’s*** chapel makes the monks’ look tropical.† St Margaret’s is relatively new build, but the electric fire on the wall in the chapel I swear is older than I am. And I was sitting RIGHT NEXT TO IT on Wednesday afternoon and all that happened was that the right side of my face got rather warm. Saturday morning at 8:30—and who is at their best at 8:30 on a Saturday morning—I had to sit against the wall so as not to block ingress (and heat) to other worshippers—all of whom, bar Aloysius and me, got to sit in CHAIRS††. As it happens we were—ahem—thin on the ground on Saturday††† so during the five-minute break to thump some life back into frozen extremities I also shifted over to sit next to the heater again. This meant that for the second twenty-five minutes of life-sapping cold I had a little hot space between my shoulder blades. . . .
But the rest of the weekend was a trifle dire. Darkness started his double-ended geysering trick again on Friday . . . which I initially thought was a one-off but was nothing of the kind, and indeed has been much more severe than his having-bolted-a-sandwich-end-found-in-a-hedgerow-when-the-hellgoddess-wasn’t-looking usual and . . . I’m kind of worried. This is not only hard on my nerves (and my washing machine) but on Darkness, whose gut is already not of the strongest and most resilient. I will probably take him in for a chat with the vet, but I don’t want to put him on ConMed drugs unless I absolutely, absolutely see no alternative. His ‘picture’ has changed and I’ve changed his homeopathic remedy accordingly, so it’s possible that next time we’ll be back to getting through it faster. But . . . I’m worried. He’s six and a half years old, which means he’s in his mid-forties in people time, and wear and tear starts catching up with you. . . .
I missed my Saturday evening service—my favourite church service of the week—with the monks, because I didn’t want to leave Darkness that long, and my concentration wouldn’t have been up to much anyway.
And then Peter went down with one of his streeeeeeeeeeeeaming colds, I will leave it to your vivid imaginations, but he does stream like no one else and his colds tend to roar up on him like a charging lion.‡ And while it does seem only to be a head cold, still, when you’re eighty-five, it’s all a little precarious.
Oh yes and then my front door lock at the cottage jammed and WOULDN’T LET ME IN AND MY HELLCRITTERS, one of them in a somewhat parlous state, WERE ALL CLAMOURING ON THE OTHER SIDE OF THE DOOR AND WONDERING WHY I WASN’T COMING IN TO TELL THEM HOW WONDERFUL THEY ARE.‡‡
I had very little sleep Saturday night between worrying and lurching awake every time I thought I heard a hellhound change position downstairs, and very nearly bottled out of ringing on Sunday. I only dragged myself to New Arcadia because I knew Niall and Penelope were away and so they were very likely to be short-handed—and I was out of bed and dressed and everything, I was just brainless. There were exactly six of us, and I was the weak link—and I tend to get buoyed up a level if the rest of the band is good. So not only did we sound not bad but it was fun. I’m really not used to Sunday mornings at New Arcadia being fun.
Darkness seemed to be stable enough that I went off, with only a few languishing backward looks, to the abbey for the afternoon service ring . . . and that was not bad either despite quite a plethora of rogues. I appreciate that they want to shovel as many unsteady learners as possible into a touch to give as many (unsteady) learners as possible time on a rope but having the gorblimey treble going walkabout when I’m ringing inside on bob major, which I haven’t rung nearly enough to have any automatic pilot for and am still very dependent on the treble being in the RIGHT PLACE, was not friendly. And there were three of us with erratic wanderlust in the Grandsire triples plus a rogue conductor and . . . nobody died. I wasn’t brilliant, but I kept my line, even when some of our other variables were not keeping theirs.
It was a beautiful, very nearly spring day today . . . and Darkness has eaten both lunch and dinner with evidence of pleasure . . . and no unseemly results (I think). Maybe the week is going to improve. . . .
* * *
* I looked back in the blog and I don’t think I did
** Not that a freelancer cares that it’s a Saturday. But it’s the principle of the thing. Also, eight o’clock . . . no way. It’s almost cruel that they decided to move it to 8:30. Because then I did have a chance. Rats.
*** I seem to have named St Margaret’s of Scotland a little too well.
†Of course I’m not sitting on the frelling floor at the monks’, where there are definitely polar winds. Yet. I haven’t yet clawed my courage together to ask a monk if it would be acceptable for me to sit zazen—cross-legged on a cushion on the floor—so long as I pulled myself together and behaved once the service starts. They know Aloysius—and I’d be very surprised if they didn’t know something of the Zen Christian subset in the Christian contemplative tradition—so this won’t be entirely bonkers-sounding. I hope. Except for the polar winds of course. Maybe I’ll just not get around to asking till later in the season. Although I kind of suspect that while St Margaret’s chapel may warm up by June, the monks’ old stone sanctuary with the vaulted roof is going to stay brumal.
†† I know. I’ve just been saying I’m going to ask the monks if I can sit on their floor. I’ve never been sane, rational or consistent, why should turning Christian make me morph into someone else entirely? I will merely become a sort of heightened insane, irrational and inconsistent. Or maybe God will improve my circulation. He’s known to move in mysterious ways.
††† There’s a lot of flu going around. That’s a lot. What is it about March? Doesn’t this happen every year? It’s like all the bad evil germs and dormant viruses that have been lying around going la la la la all winter suddenly wake up and think, Hey! Spring! I was going to cause way more mayhem before spring! —And explode into unseemly activity.
‡ I guessed wrong about the homeopathic remedy for him too. The problem with Peter’s head colds is that they come on so fast you don’t have time to change your mind if the first thing didn’t work. It’s not this simple, of course, but it is this frustrating.
‡‡ I got in eventually. Atlas took the freller apart today and OILED THE CRAP OUT OF IT and at the moment it is working beautifully.
‡‡‡ Even if I did have to go to my voice lesson today without having practised properly first because Peter had A Guest and the cottage was full of Atlas.
Peter
Since Peter never writes me GUEST POSTS any more I decided to steal a link to some of the new things happening over on his shiny new website.
http://peterdickinson.com/old-stuff-revisted/
” . . . I opened a file titled “Preface” and found something I’d written when it was decided that some edition of the first volume of our Elemental Spirits series, Water, ought to have a preface. I don’t remember the ins and outs of it, nor why it isn’t in the edition on my bookshelf,* but we seem to have cannibalised our efforts and come up with a composite. You will find the remains of mine, In the Mermaid Tavern: The Sea Witch, in the Short Stories section. . .”
There now. More free fiction. And KES tomorrow night.
* * *
* Because it took 1,000,000 years for your wife to write two short stories for FIRE and Putnams decided to reissue WATER in a matching edition^ and to make it a little more interesting they asked us to write a little ‘new material’. They didn’t want a whole new story or stories–which, with my track record, is just as well^^–just a sort of teasery type of thing. Like a preface. Well, we couldn’t write a preface–the nearest we’ve ever been able to come to collaborating is this alternating short stories business^^^–so we did a very condensed sort of alternating-stories thing. I don’t remember any more and I can’t find our copies of the second edition of WATER which are SOMEWHERE in Third House’s attic, but presumably THE SEA WITCH didn’t make the final cut, probably because I was having trouble not writing more novels and Peter had written about twelve short stories in frustration. Maybe he’ll find a few more in some other file.
^ The original hardback illustration had been done by Trina Schart Hyman. Siiiiiigh. She’d really liked the idea of the ELEMENTALS series, and had done roughs for all four. But the other three were too rough to use and she isn’t around any more to finish them. Sometimes my being hopeless hurts more than other times.
^^ With SUNSHINE, DRAGONHAVEN, CHALICE and THE FRELLING PEGASUS TRILOGY, all of which began life as ELEMENTALS short stories, we could have had FLOWERHAIR AND THE WATER GOBLIN+ and HETTHAR, GELJDRETH AND THE EYE OF NEWT and . . . no, no, no, let’s not go there.
+ May I just say that neither Kes nor I would put up with Dvorak’s version of the story
^^^ And an unfinished novel written in emails between an English boy and an American girl. Guess who let the side down there too. SIIIIIIIGH.
I lead such an exciting life
I’m sitting here in a skirt.* Yes! A skirt! A real live skirt! And it’s not my birthday or Peter’s birthday or even a hellcritter’s birthday! We just randomly went out to dinner tonight!!!! It’s so exciting! **
Well, not quite randomly. It’s a 26th. I’ve told you that if we feel the need of a celebration creeping over us we’ll try to fend it off till the next 26th or 3rd, those being our two official monthly opportunities for festivities.***
So we were feeling festive. So we went to The Bard and Orpharion and ate duck leg confit and drank champagne (me) and Chilean merlot (Peter). And we took a pack of cards with us and dealt bridge hands and then Peter got all interested about how we would play them. Eeep. Did I tell you I did, in fact, survive my second bridge lesson last weekend? I mean with two other people so we were, like, pretending that I could play bridge? And I keep saying that I have the wrong shape of brain for bell ringing. Well, I do. But at least bell ringing doesn’t make you guess what the other ringers are going to do next and the winning and losing aspect is a little more tactfully obscured. Arrrgh.
* * *
* Furthermore I’m sitting here writing an evening blog post at the cottage. With my feet propped up on the front of the Aga and an acute and sublime awareness that I’ve already done the coming-home thing with three hellcritters and a ridiculous amount of kit^ and don’t have to do it again tonight.
^ A gigantic knapsack plus a bulgy canvas carryall briefcase thing.
** You mean . . . some people just go out to dinner? I’ve been living in a small town in Hampshire with too many hellcritters for too long and I’m losing track of modern cultural mores.^
^ And we won’t even discuss modern technological mores. My editor’s poor assistant wasted kind of a lot of perfectly good time and air space explaining some of SHADOWS’ copyeditor’s more arcane (and sometimes invisible) marks to me. Like the one that made it look like she’d spelled Haydée Haydé. (Maggie has read THE COUNT OF MONTE CRISTO.) ARRRRRRRRGH. Worrying about this sort of thing keeps authors awake at night. It’s your name on the book jacket. To publishing hopefuls still working toward their first sale of course this sounds like the MOST THRILLING THING EVER.+ To those of us it has happened to, while it’s still totally worthwhile and I don’t want any other job++, there is indubitably a mixed-blessing aspect. Like when people get really angry with you because pages 35-60 in their copy are repeated and 61-86 are missing and when you tell them that you’re sorry but it’s nothing to do with you, to take it up with your publisher, they think you’re blowing them off and become abusive. Or they want to know why you haven’t made movies of your books, don’t you know that’s where the money is? Um. Well, that’s where the money is for the few, not for the many, and very, very, very, very, VERY rarely for any writer involved . . . not to mention that this isn’t up to me either. But the proofreading mistakes? Totally yours. The thing is, they’re at least half right about that. Your publisher hires eagle-eyed professional proofreaders, but you see the final pages too. Occasionally some hideously embarrassing botch creeps through the gauntlet of all those searchlight eyes and appears in all its malign glory in the finished book+++. But usually it’s something that’s gone wrong in the process somewhere, like a full stop dropping out or quotation marks curling in the wrong direction or a half sentence disappearing at the bottom of a page. Even the missing full stop will haunt your dreams, once you’ve noticed it, or had it pointed out to you, AND YOU SHOULD HAVE CAUGHT IT IN PROOFREADING. BUT YOU DIDN’T BECAUSE YOU ARE A MORON.# AND IT IS ALL YOUR FAULT. It would have been a really good book if it weren’t for that missing full stop. As some reader, somewhere, will tell you.
I am not looking forward to proofreading SHADOWS. I will miss the quotation marks curling in the wrong direction and the use of ‘their’ when it should have been ‘there’. Which will be lacerating enough. But what will be worse is discovering THAT ENORMOUS FRELLING PLOT HOLE that it’s now way way way too late to do anything about.##
+ Even more thrilling than randomly going out to dinner.
++ Not least because I’m pretty sure I’m unemployable by any normal standard
+++ Regular readers of author blogs will know that there is a LAW OF THE UNVERSE that says that any author opening any first copy of any new book—I mean that author’s new book—must open it on a page with a proofreading error on it. I get around this by not reading my stuff once it’s published. I can’t read it anyway. It’s a sort of combination effect, like psychic eczema, migraine, and being trapped in a stuck lift/elevator with a bore. A pedantic bore. A smelly pedantic bore. And the smelly pedantic bore has a large smelly dog who doesn’t like me.
# You are a moron who, furthermore, has looked at these insanely annoying words in this beyond-insanely annoying order WAY too many times AND CAN’T LOOK AT THEM ANY MORE.
## You can make limited editorial changes at the proofreading stage, with an emphasis on the limited. If you go over a certain short sharp maximum your publisher will charge you for it. If you want to make real structural changes . . . I think they gag you and lock you in a closet till the book is safely out. I don’t know. I don’t want to know.
*** For new readers or old readers who have better things to remember: The Beginning was when I met this fellow Peter Dickinson, whom I knew slightly from book conventions and things, at the Bangor, Maine airport, to bring him back to Blue Hill for a weekend’s exposure to life in a small New England town. This was on 26 July, twenty-one and a half years ago. We got married the following 3rd of January. I’m not young and Peter is old, and when we decided to do this thing, Peter said that there weren’t enough years left for a sufficiency of anniversaries so we needed to celebrate some monthlies as well. So we do.
Dog days
One Slightly Used Puppy. Free to a Good Home. It doesn’t have to be a very good home. Just a reasonably good home. A moderately good home. A home.
WHOSE DEMIURGE-BLASTED IDEA WAS DOGS? IT’S A REALLY BAD IDEA. REALLY. BAD.
I woke up too early this morning when Pooka chirruped at me. It was my dog minder saying she had flu and couldn’t hurtle today. Arrgh. Too much input. Atlas was telling me that the reason Phineas’ gutters are coming off, and, in the process, ice-stalactiting my little hamamelis to death, is because of the roses. That’s the wall that Mme Alfred and Mme Gregoire riot up and over—well, you’ve seen the photos. Mme Alfred is, or rather, was, reaching about ten feet nearer heaven from the roof of Phineas’ three-storey house. Unfortunately she and Mme G are also prying the gutters free of their brackets. Pruning once-only flowering roses this time of year means I’ll probably have precious few flowers from either of them this summer, Mme G in particular, who is an early bloomer. Whimper. Atlas was also hauling my dead refrigerator off to the dump to make way for the shiny new (Lilliputian*) refrigerator due to arrive on Wednesday.** Atlas is easy to have around—it’s one of his major virtues—but it’s still another two feet in a small cottage that already contains fourteen of them.
Meanwhile Theodora’s Strong Young Men came back today and carted a skip’s worth of rubble away and I don’t like having lots of strangers in my face. And while it does look better it also makes the hole look bigger.
After extreme ditheration I decided to take my entire furry complement with me this afternoon. We could gambol on Drollbody’s green before going on to Nadia. The gambolling worked out reasonably well although there were far too many other gambollers to risk the troika. And then when we got to Nadia . . . I was trying to put a blanket over the lying-down hellhounds, especially Chaos, who really feels the cold, but every time I got out of the car they stood up again. All right have it your way it’s probably not that cold anyway. But when I got inside and looked out the window . . . there was frelling Chaos having stuffed most of his long-legged self onto the shelf behind the back seat where the dog bed lives, staring agonizedly through the rear window at me, two glass panes and a lot of cold air away. Feh.
The lesson itself went better than I expected: when I’d warmed up this morning my voice was about as rich and elastic and resonant as an underfed kitten squalling under an upended bucket. At the end of it Nadia said, you should take that one to Oisin. —Eeeep. This is Purcell’s Evening Hymn which I started work on with Blondel and have gone back to and I looooooove it. She said I should think about bringing my recording thingy again, that I might be pleasantly surprised. . . .
So possibly I was reeling from the shock of all this. I’d already told Colin that I wouldn’t come ringing tonight, on not enough sleep plus full double hurtling I was going to be trashed by bell practise time. And then I decided to go after all. The ringing was not too bad, largely, however, because we were drubbing our beginners and while I am capable of going entirely wrong on anything, I have a relatively sturdy autopilot for plain bob doubles even when the brain has closed for the day . . . and was positively enjoying, in a twitchy, ouchy, oh-dear-been-there-done-that-have-the-t-shirt way, the struggles of Reynold ringing his first plain courses inside.
I had brought Pavlova, of course, she can still just about fit in her travelling crate by judicious folding. And then on our way out IT ALL WENT HORRIBLY, HORRIBLY, HORRIBLY WRONG. It was dark, right? As we went through the churchyard toward the cars. And I belong to the get-it-away-from-them-first-and-find-out-what-it-is-second school of puppy management, my reflexes and my paranoia polished to diamond brilliance by the vicissitudes of dealing with hellhounds. So I already had my hand in her mouth . . . before . . . I . . . realised . . . what . . . I . . . now . . . had . . . a . . . handful . . . of. A large handful. There was struggling, and the substance got spread around rather liberally . . . and there was only the outside cold tap that people fill their watering-cans with . . . but you know I am not complaining, at least there was an available cold tap. And oh my hearts and flowers, was there ever language. Including the ‘I am LEAVING YOU BY THE SIDE OF THE ROAD’ variety.
We got home and I burst through the front door shouting for surgical spirit†, went straight to the sink and began maniacally washing my hands. Peter, having been dozing on the sofa, woke up enough to say, oh, hi, did it go okay? IT WENT FINE. I ALWAYS COME INDOORS SHOUTING FOR SURGICAL SPIRIT AND START DOING A LADY MACBETH WITH THE INDUSTRIAL DETERGENT. Then I went back out to Wolfgang AND WIPED DOWN EVERYTHING I HAD TOUCHED WITH SURGICAL SPIRIT. Pav, a trifle shaken by events, went straight into the bathtub and emerged smelling of lavender.††
So a nice clean slightly used puppy. Any takers?
* * *
* But Lilliputian is A LOT EASIER to lift over the puppy gate than a full-sized refrigerator would have been. A full-sized one might have been a Mike Mulligan’s steam shovel situation.
** Some time Wednesday. They’re going to ring me at SEVEN IN THE MORNING. SEVEN. IN THE MORNING. TO TELL ME WHICH FOUR HOUR SLOT IT WILL BE ARRIVING IN. SEVEN. IN THE MORNING. I’ve barely gone to bed.
They are at least delivering it, you know, at all. I am disgracefully and mortifyingly retro about manuscripts, and dealing with my editor’s electronic queries on SHADOWS made me CRAAAAAAZY . . . I make similar attempts to cope with modernity every book, and fail . . . and I eventually printed out. So my editor’s assistant, bless her, sent me hard copy to begin with of the copyedited object. I only have a fortnight to turn the thing around, although Zandria says all the queries are of the ‘do you want this comma here?’ variety . . . but someone obsessed with how punctuation affects the rhythm of the sentence or the paragraph^ can struggle a lot over a comma. Anyway. I have a fortnight.
And the mutton-brained UPS man^^ came on Friday when I was not there and took it away again. IT’S A MANUSCRIPT, YOU MORON. IT SAYS SO ON THE PACKAGE, ALONG WITH ‘DOES NOT NEED TO BE SIGNED FOR.’ IT IS WORTH ZERO FLOGGED ON THE BLACK MARKET. WTF, YOU OVERDONE PORK CHOP?
So this jerk has just stolen nearly four working days from me thanks ever so. It arrived today. But it arrived when Atlas was there to take receipt. I wouldn’t have been able to write a blog tonight if Mr Pond Slime had taken it away again, because I would have been busy hunting him down and KILLING HIM. And recovering my package before the bloodstains penetrated too far.
^ SOMEBODY TELL ME WHY MY EAR FOR THIS KIND OF THING IS SO FRELLING DEMANDING WHEN I CAN’T KEEP A RHYTHM BELL RINGING TO SAVE MY FREAKING LIFE.
^^ It always is a bloke. There are female mailpersons but I have yet to see a girl courier.
† Rubbing alcohol
†† Peter, who is a wonderful human being, cleaned the crate.