Cough
I am a walking cough; a cough on two legs; cough made flesh. Cough. Talking is a mistake.* Eating is perilous.** I think the arrival of the cough is supposed to indicate you’re improving.*** I’m too tired from coughing to tell. Cough.
But SHADOWS is still going.†
I am however cranky†† about the bad news about ultrasonic jewellery cleaners. I had thought part of the point of the ultrasonic gadgets is that they’re gentle on jewellery, possibly to the point of being so gentle they don’t really clean anything. (I do know that you can’t do anything to pearls except smile at them and wear them against cashmere.) I also didn’t know, or had forgotten, since I’ve barely worn my tourmaline ring in twenty years, that tourmalines are fragile. Feh. And yes, of course I can ask our nice local jeweller for advice about cleaning, but he will feel obliged to go all professional on me and I was hoping some of you guys might have the answer without the official hedging.††† Ah well. More little brushes and washing-up liquid in my future then. I guess I can bear it.
And before I bore you all to death . . . I am loitering frivolously with the thought of going ringing at Forza tomorrow. This is a really bad idea. I don’t have the time, I don’t have the energy, I have a novel to finish—the bells there are tricky sods, I already know Gemma is not going to be there, and I might find myself the only mediocre ringer present, with my usual additional burden of not being able to handle those particular bells and the supernumerary burden of the lurgy.
Maybe I’ll just stay home, and post a recipe. And cough.
* * *
* Why do hellhounds insist on waiting till I say something? Isn’t the mad waving of hands containing harnesses enough to tell them they should sit?
** Eating is always perilous. Ask Darkness and Chaos. AAAAAUGH. Having given the impression that he was on the mend last night, Chaos barely made it outdoors this morning to start the diabolical double-ended geysering all over again. AAAAAAAUGH.
*** http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2012/jan/09/new-year-health-regime-last The headline in the paper version is more eye-catching to me in my present state: ‘Dr Luisa Dillner Says Switch Off the TV, Stop Snacking and Start Exercising to Ensure You Feel Good Beyond January.’ I haven’t watched TV in YEARS,^ I am post-menopausal and my daily energy allowance is 3.5 calories and I NEVER snack, and I walk an hour and forty five minutes to two hours EVERY DAY. WHY DO I HAVE THE LURGY WHEN I AM A PARAGON OF VIRTUE?^^
^ I talked to Hannah today. “Hi,” I said. Cough. “Wow,” she said. She still hasn’t read CHAOS. After she does we’re going to read either JANE AUSTEN or CHARLES DICKENS by Claire Tomalin. Or both, because we have so much time to read. She was telling me about the TV programmes her daughters are watching and I’ve never heard of any of them. I haven’t been deeply involved in a TV show since BUFFY. No, really. ANGEL? Too gruesome. FIREFLY? Eh. It had its moments, but it never entered my heart and mind the way BUFFY did.+ It’s probably safe to say that I wouldn’t be writing my first high school novel at fifty-nine if I hadn’t watched BUFFY at an embarrassingly advanced age which was nonetheless more impressionable than it should have been. Which may or may not be a good thing.
Oh, and the mysterious non-cooperation affliction of our de-cabled TV? We changed the batteries in the remote and it still refused to climb away from BBC 1. So there was a knock on the door one afternoon and there was the Nice Man who had installed our freeview box who wanted to ask if one of us would read his CHILDREN’S BOOK MANUSCRIPT. Fortunately Peter answered the door and dragged him into the sitting room and thrust the remote at him. There are too many buttons on the wretched thing. And Peter is reading his manuscript. I had my mouth all open to do my rant on this subject which is that ASIDE from the fact that I am a cranky cow, what I think about an unpublished manuscript has no more to do with its chances of getting published than what Chaos or Darkness thinks of it.++ Go start researching AGENTS. What you need is an AGENT who likes your work. But I was forestalled by Peter’s old-fashioned gentlemanliness AKA the man is nuts.
+ And I’m the only person on the planet who didn’t/doesn’t like THE SOPRANOS or David Tennant.
++ Er—you aren’t expecting us to eat it, are you?
^^ Of course they also tell you to get seven to eight hours of sleep every night. They must be joking.
† And my email seems to have settled down . . . for the moment. Sort of. Or, possibly, not, and I just don’t know it. It was even weirder than I told you yesterday, as I eventually found out when I stopped abusing my damaged larynx with screams for vengeance and had a look for the easily findable stuff that had reappeared. When I got back to the mews and turned the old laptop on—which is the one I’ve been using the last several flu-demented days of filing and deleting—I was braced for what I’d just seen on the cottage machines. But what had come back was NOT what I’d deleted that morning. It was some OTHER stuff. Whimper.
So . . . I basically have no idea. GIBBERGIBBERGIBBERGIBBER. Right. Enough of that. I have a novel to finish.
As to why I still use Outlook . . . I forget. I will ask Raphael to remind me. I think it’s to do with my apparently somewhat unusual requirements combined with my total lack of patience, interest in, or skill in understanding anything to do with computers. I think it’s what they’re willing to support me with. The bright spot, such as it is, is that the shiny new laptop with the vibrantly hated Win 7 on it did in fact discharge its battery by 50% overnight despite being turned off. YAAAAY. For once something goes wrong even when there is an archangel present.
However, those of you hopefully offering advice about the hellhounds: I think you’re probably late to the party. Long-time readers have heard all this before. My hellhounds are five and a half years old and I spent the first two of their years of life on this planet trying to find out why they had diarrhea all the time. The answer is, as I eventually figured out with absolutely NO help from any of the fantastic and expensive panoply of vets, specialist vets, and specialist vets’ laboratories and techno-gizmo whatsits that I consulted, that they are allergic to all cereal grains. (Pancreatitis, as someone mentioned on the forum but I can’t find it now, is one of the things they were temporarily diagnosed for.) I’d tried an elimination diet nearly first thing, but I took them off brown rice while continuing to use barley and oats, and then swapped. It took me a long time to think of all cereals. But two years of eating something they were wildly and violently allergic to has left them with some permanent damage.
And the only time they won’t eat when I’m nearby is when they’re already looking for an excuse not to eat, and me being an ogre will do. (I think this has more to do with the fact that they know I want them to eat and I’ll be testy if they don’t.) I’m actually not very fond of the alpha theory. Why would a good leader want his/her colleagues not to eat? The alpha business as the great comprehensive answer to everything is less popular than it was, for which I am grateful. When it first came crashing out it was The Solution, and I thought, since it clearly didn’t apply all that well to my experience, that I just had weird dogs. Well, I do have weird dogs, but the alpha theory has also lost centre stage. I am, however, a great fan of what works. If something makes you and your dog(s) happy and healthy and comfortable and satisfied, then it’s the answer for you.
†† Cough
††† Note to self: The Answer never exists.
I can’t very well ask the fellow who bought the stones for us. That was twenty years ago in Maine and I have more or less deliberately^ forgotten everything about him except that he was a self-absorbed twit.
^ Ie making a virtue of Middle Aged Brain
The Tourmaline Ring
So it’s twenty and a half years ago. Peter and I have decided to get married.* All the important stuff has already been decided, like that I’m going to emigrate.** But that means we have to get married: the fiancée’s visa only lasts for six months. That’s not a problem: we’re both old-fashioned: we want to get married, and I’m the kind of old-fashioned that furthermore wants a proper ring to go with the deal. Hey. I like jewellery.
I’d originally assumed we’d find one suitably old and hoary and glamorous and possibly mad in an antique shop somewhere for an engagement ring; wedding rings to be practical need to be plain and could be dealt with separately when we knew what the flashy one looked like. We spent some time in this pursuit*** but we were finding nothing nearly unique and fabulous enough, I had to finish DEERSKIN and we wanted to get on with the moving and the new life and so on.
I can’t now remember who recommended this jewellery designer to us. But we went to see him and explained we wanted something definitively Maine for me to wear in England. He suggested Maine tourmalines—I think I didn’t know about Maine tourmalines at that point—and we eventually agreed that he’d design and make not only an engagement ring with the tourmalines, but wedding rings that would all fit together as part of the same design. Peter felt this was mostly my show† and I did try to tell the bloke the sort of thing I liked: flowing lines, mainly, swirly or woven or floral. Maybe sort of art nouveau. I liked the stuff in his shop. And I liked the idea of the Maine designer working with the Maine tourmalines.
We went back to see the stones when they arrived. I don’t know if the designer bloke asked for triangular, or if that was what he could get. Okay. This would make it unusual. And pink and green are excellent.
We never saw any designs. We saw the rings themselves when they’d already been cast (if cast is what I mean) and although they weren’t finished yet it wasn’t like we could go backward and say, uh, no, I meant Charles Rennie Macintosh, not Cecil Balmond.†† The wedding rings had these little hooks in the middle like the two ends of a twist tie bent together—and with the squared-off ends sticking out up and down your finger. Can you say CATCHES THE FRELL ON EVERYTHING? My tourmaline engagement ring fit down over the top ensnaring bend of my wedding ring, but that still left the sharp bottom edge to cause havoc and mayhem. They were certainly . . . different. But they were not sensible, and while many of the details of that whole era of the beginning of my life with Peter are blurry with exhilaration and terror, I do remember Peter telling the bloke that he works with his hands a lot, he spends hours every day in the garden, doing carpentry and cooking and he needs a ring that won’t get in the way.
The man smiled and nodded. These creative types. They’re so in their own little world.†††
But part of the swoop and breathtakingness of a runaway romance like ours is that you do kind of want it to glide as far as it can before it founders on some ineluctable aspect of ratbagging reality. The wife in the attic. The outstanding warrant. The gerbil fetish. The chocolate addiction . . . And I don’t think the designer bloke was cheating us in any overt way: I think we paid an honest amount for his time and his materials. He just didn’t listen.
Almost the first thing we did after the wedding was over was . . . run to the nearest ordinary jeweller and buy two utterly plain smooth gold rings and wear them. The barbed designer versions came out for fancy occasions and the rest of the time lived in my jewellery drawer. Sigh. This had not been the plan . . . and while the plain gold ones worked fine as wedding rings‡ I was rather wistful about my Maine tourmalines wasting their glory in a drawer.
I think it was around our tenth anniversary that Peter said, for our twentieth, we’ll have the tourmalines reset.
So that’s what we did. And this time we went to a jeweller we’ve been going to for . . . twenty years. He listens. He made my fabulous silver whippet belt buckle.‡‡ And we saw designs. We saw several designs. I wanted my new ring to look like it fit next to the plaited-gold-with-tiny-diamond-chips ring that was my fiftieth birthday present‡‡‡ and which I now wear as my wedding ring. And it does, doesn’t it?
This time it worked.
Mmmmmm. ::Beams::
* * *
* And our friends and family are all going, what? Well, it was a somewhat precipitate decision. We’d known each other maybe sixty hours in total.^
^ I’ve told you how we met, haven’t I? I was on a Literary Tour of England and he was one of the speakers.
** Somebody had to. Peter originally suggested we divide our time, but I knew—and I’m sure I was right—we’d both hate it. And Peter had lived in this area of Hampshire over forty years at that point, had four kids, the first two grandchildren, three brothers and their families, eight first cousins and . . . I had a whippet, and a background as a peripatetic military brat.
*** This was the occasion of one of our most important Bonding Moments. THELMA AND LOUISE had been bigger than god, Spacelab and Boris Yeltzin for months, and it was playing at a theatre in Portland, Maine, where we’d gone to cruise antique jewellery shops. I’ve told you this too, haven’t I? We walked out. We walked right after the dumb one spends the night with Brad Pitt the robber on the lam AND THE MONEY IN THE FRELLING DRAWER while the smart (!!?!??) one goes off to have a deep, sensitive evening with her supportive boyfriend.
† He’s got a much better eye for jewellery than he thinks he does—see: silver whippet belt buckle, below—but it’s true that this was my Big Symbolic Thing about leaving Maine to live in England with him.
†† http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-14027083 Okay, I don’t know what Balmond was doing twenty years ago. Designing engagement rings, possibly.
††† I do wonder if Designer Bloke already had this idea in his mind and he wanted to use it, whether the triangular stones inspired it, or what. But he sure wasn’t too interested in the interface with his clients.
‡ Anybody aware of the standard behaviour about such things of English gentlemen of Peter’s vintage will be gobsmacked that Peter wears a wedding ring at all. Well. Yes. I don’t think it ever occurred to me that he wouldn’t—I wanted us both to wear them—and that’s what happened. It wasn’t till later that I realised that Peter was humouring me about this too.^
^ I tell myself that if I have to choose I’d rather he wore a wedding ring than remembered to shut the door behind him.+ I perhaps tell myself this rather often. But romance over practicality? Sure. Why do I have sixty rose-bushes in a garden the size of a large ping-pong table?
+ This includes refrigerator doors. Just by the way.
‡‡ I hope I’ve told you this story. I told Peter I wanted something significant and wearable for my fortieth birthday.
‡‡‡ Also bought in Maine. Hmm. My sixtieth is next year . . .
The Middle of the Night Again
It is already the middle of the night* and I have barely considered the blog. I’m also tired, and this is only going to get worse as the days plod relentlessly on to the end of the month.** I always do start dreaming my books as the writing and the coming-together accelerates toward being finished, but it’s a crazier than usual process this time. Also, since this is a Things Are Coming to Get You story*** and Maggie spends a lot of the book wired out of her tiny mind†, the dreams are more YAAAAAAAAAAH than, you know, exciting in the standard having-adventures mode. And I still have no idea where I’m going to be by the end of January. I still need a miracle. But the main thing—which is what I keep telling myself when I’ve managed to get to bed before dawn but not asleep before dawn—is that the book is going. It’s a book. It will be a book. It’s there and it’s GOING. Yaay. A lot of last year with PEG II was pretty gruesome.
Anyway. Last night I told you there would be photos of the event.†† But I seem to have done my waffling-on about nothing in particular enough for one night, so I will leave you merely with this:
I love presents. I love SPARKLY presents.
And I’ll tell you the story of the three Maine tourmalines in my twentieth-anniversary ring tomorrow. Unless, of course, I get distracted again.
* * *
* Or, more accurately, past the middle of the night. But approaching what even I consider to be the middle of my night.
It occurs to me that it’s a good thing that the epic super-hurtle of SHADOWS is happening in the deeps of winter when you kind of want to stay indoors anyway^ and the nights are long enough that dawn isn’t awfully importunate. If this were June I’d be getting to bed well past dawn. Of course this also means that by the time I get up I have about two and a half hours of daylight before sunset, but hey, that gives the three of us long enough for a good hellhound sprint. And I know robins—ahem!—are known to sing after dark, but what else is there that sings in the middle of the frelling night? They can’t all be robins. And you don’t get nightingales in town. But I’ve got the Wee Hours Chorus going like gangbusters back at the cottage every night as we arrive home at increasingly insane hours.
^ Even if you’d rather be curled up with hellhounds and someone else’s good book rather than writing your own.
** Meanwhile in the Additional Blergs I Don’t Need Right Now department . . . I got asked to do a short thing for someone else’s book last summer and originally I said yes. Then the whole PEG II disaster crashed and burned, and in August, when the Short Thing was due I was frantically starting SHADOWS.
They’re nice people. They gave me an extension. Never give me an extension. I am a fiend from hell. When I miss your deadline say, nice knowing you, I’ll get someone else. They gave me another extension. Merrilee finally said, look, you have enough going on. Just tell them no: it’s okay. So I told them no. Through Merrilee, because I am craven slime, and this is why craven slime have agents.
That was about a month ago.
Today Merrilee said, Remember those people you were supposed to do the Short Thing for? This is not your fault, but somehow the message didn’t get through, and you’re still scheduled and they’re really hoping you might . . . although of course they need it yesterday. . . .
NOOOOOOOOOOOOOO.
Under other circumstances I would gladly tell them to kiss my ancient laptop, but the thing is, I have not behaved well. I should have said no back in August—or anyway September when my editor said, a new novel called SHADOWS? Great. I need it the end of January. —But I’d already said yes to the Short Thing, and . . .
NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO.
PS: I’d actually done about half of it. But because I was feeling like such a jerk about the whole thing after Merrilee said ‘no’ for me last month I deleted that file. So I didn’t have it sitting around staring at me reproachfully. Altogether now:
NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO.
*** Arguably all my stories—or all stories—are Things Coming to Get You stories. It’s called ‘plot tension’. And without it you’re either dead boring or mmrrglglrrrp. . . . I was going to make an unkind remark about the genre known as literary, of which there is an unnecessarily large subgenre of Life Is Miserable So Why Bother stories where the whole point is that nothing happens. I don’t read them, however, and I sure as Things Coming to Get You don’t write them.
† For some reason I find this aspect of her character very easy to get alongside. Long-time readers will remember my saying that my way in with Jake, my first male narrator, was when I found out he was a worrier.
†† And thank you for all the encouragement to continue^ with WOLF GHOSTS ANNIVERSARY MOON. Please do remember that it’s a kind of fictional blog entry though, you know? It’s not supposed to be fabulous.^^ It’s supposed to be a bit of fun of a sort I don’t usually run here. It’s maybe a branching-out from what I said the other night about reviving Ask Robin: It’s dumb that I’m a writer and I never talk about writing.^^^
^ Jabenami
I thought story ideas all came from the Electroplasmic hydrocephalic genre fiction generator 2000?
http://wondermark.com/554/
THANK YOU. I tried to find this link last night, but I was by then ninety percent asleep and more than a trifle sloshed+, and failed. I was going to have another look today . . . but I don’t have to because you’ve already done it.
Yes. Absolutely. 100% of universal literature is to be found here. It’s just a question of pulling the right levers.
+ Please note that I am not hung over today. Three litres of water and twelve pots of peppermint tea will do the job, not to mention the superfluous brisk bracing mini-hurtle from cottage to mews and back again. Although the crucial thing really is the getting out of bed for another pee every twenty minutes. This keeps the blood moving expeditiously and the liver and kidneys awake to keep processing.
^^Although Hannah thinks Merrilee is still going to have my ass on a plate when she reads it.
^^^ It’s also a way of getting a guest blog out of my husband who hasn’t written me one in YEARS.
Anniversary
IT’S PETER’S AND MY TWENTIETH WEDDING ANNIVERSARY TODAY.*
We went out to dinner. I took my knapsack computer, and when its battery died** Peter hit up reception for some, you know, paper, and we kept going.
We’re writing a story. This was my idea. Usually we do crossword puzzles. But this is our TWENTIETH WEDDING ANNIVERSARY. So let’s do something else. I know! Let’s . . . write a story.
We got off to a slightly rough start. Peter’s title was Wolf Moon and the first sentence was: ‘The child looked up at the big shiny moon and said, “There ought to be wolves.”’ My title was Anniversary Ghosts and my first sentence was, ‘“Oh, thank you,” I said, showing all of my teeth in a smile.’
We compromised.***
* * *
Ellie looked up at the moon and said, “There ought to be wolves.”
Outside the window half a mile away on the other side of the park the lights of the M6 traffic made a swirly, dancing sort of pattern under the bright moon. I couldn’t decide if the headlamp beams seemed to be plaiting and unplaiting themselves, or merely changing partners in some long, elaborate line dance. But the pattern began to change, slowing . . . and slowing . . . and slowing. I watched it, confused. Not that this was the first slightly odd thing that had happened in the last few days.
And then the lights ceased to move altogether.
Even through the glass I could hear the police sirens. Blue lights flashed.
“Accident?” I said. But wouldn’t the lights have come to an abrupt halt, rather than gradually slowing, like machinery winding down? Wouldn’t there have been some noise, however faint?
The duke went to the window and threw up the sash.
Something howled. “That isn’t a siren,” the duke said.
“No,” said Ellie. “That’s one of my wolves.”
I tried not to sigh. Ellie was rather a trial. I reminded myself (again) that children of previous marriages were always a trial and what my sister Manfreda put up with was far worse. But then Erntgard had been married three times before he married Manfreda and his children might be forgiven for being a little unsettled. Garren had only been married the once before me, and Ellie was no worse than dreamy. But wolves, for pity’s sake!
“Wolves?” said the duke. “What about my deer?”
He sounded perfectly serious. And there were deer in the park: you saw them if you went out walking or riding.
“Oh, they’ll be all right,” said Ellie. “It’s only people.”
“Only people what?” said Garren.
“Who’ve got to watch out for them,” said Ellie.
“Well, that’s all right then,” said the duke, and shut the window.
“What about the solstice carollers?” I asked, trying to make a joke.
Ellie thought about it. Her earnest little face became pinched with the effort of so much concentration. “I think the carollers will be all right,” she said. “I think the moon will protect them. As long as they know to stay in the open, where the moon can see them.”
The child had no sense of humour. Perhaps it is inevitable that you lose your sense of humour if your mother runs off with an under-gardener before you are quite four years old. I glanced out the window. The sky was clear and the moon was near full, and reflected dazzlingly off the snow. Ellie was right that the carollers would be able to see any wolves coming at any rate. I frowned. The M6 seemed still to be paralysed; it must be quite an accident. The sirens had died away but . . . there was that howl again. The duke was right—whatever it was, it wasn’t a siren.
“You’d better stop them, Ellie,” said the duke.
Stop them? I thought. Ellie?
Two sets of blue lights came bashing up the drive and braked, scattering the gravel in front of the door.
The duke seemed to be listening to something other than the police running up the steps and Fulsome the butler answering the door. “Good,” said the duke. “That should do it. Well done, Ellie. I’ll cope with this.” He left the room, shutting the door behind him.
I looked at Ellie. She looked at the floor.
The rest of us waited in silence, the silence growing more and more awkward as the minutes crept by. The huge old clock in the corner going tick tock made it worse. It seemed to me that everyone was deliberately not looking at me. What have I done wrong now? I thought.
The duke returned just in time to stop me from blurting out something regrettable. “Apparently there’s been an accident on the slip road onto the M6,” said the duke. “No one hurt, but a truck taking animals to Cheswell Zoo skidded and ran off the road and some wolves got loose. They’re not letting anyone into the park till they’ve got it sorted out. So your carollers should be all right, Hedda; they aren’t due here for at least another hour, and the police are stopping everyone at the gate.”
Everyone made a rather counterproductive effort to relax. I looked out the window again and blinked. The M6 was moving normally. Of course I’d imagined there was anything odd about what had happened before; it had been the result of a perfectly straightforward traffic accident, and fortunately the only damage was a few escaped wolves. The police would catch them quickly. We’d probably even have our carollers on time.
“I’m sorry, my darling,” said Garren. “This has rather ruined the moment. Happy anniversary,” and he pulled a small box out of his pocket and offered it to me.
“Thank you,” I said, smiling determinedly. I opened the box. In the background I heard my father-in-law pulling the cork on the champagne. At least there would be champagne.
The box itself looked hundreds of years old. It was made of leather, but it was so rubbed and gouged it was almost difficult to tell. I stifled a sigh. This was what life in this family was like; everything was old, and frequently rather peculiar. My first anniversary gift was no exception. It was a ring—that much I could identify—but both the metal and the stone were very dark. I didn’t know what to say. It was not your traditional sparkly trinket. “It’s—er—old,” I said hesitantly. “It’s been in the family a long time?” I paused but no one said anything. Casting around for something else nonjudgmental to say I asked, “What is the stone?”
“Call it a good-luck charm,” said my husband.
Rather doubtfully I slid it on my finger. It was unexpectedly the right size. It felt surprisingly comfortable, as if it belonged there. “Thank you,” I said. I waited, not very hopefully, for him to tell me something about it, but he didn’t.
There was a knock and a policeman put his head round the door. “We’re all set,” he said. “The driver said he was missing four wolves, and we’ve caught four wolves. Funny,” he added. “They seemed happy to be caught.”
“Indeed,” said the duke. “Thank you.” The policeman nodded around to the rest of us—of course I was imagining that his gaze lingered a moment on me, the stranger—and withdrew.
The duke moved back to the table and poured the champagne. He offered me the first glass, and bowed, I thought, somewhat sardonically. I risked a glance at him. His eyes were as dark as the mystery stone in my ring. I looked at my husband. He was looking at me worriedly. He had been looking at me worriedly since we’d arrived at his father’s altogether too large and too grand house three days ago. Didn’t most couples have a quiet romantic dinner for two on their first anniversary? But then most couples weren’t the Duke of Blitheringdale’s second son and his hapless second wife.
TO BE CONTINUED
* * *
* Slight sense of whew, made it.
** I think I have a Laptop Battery gremlin. All three of my laptops presently have duff batteries.
*** Please remember this is what might kindly be called first draft. There was champagne. There was claret. There was Muscat.^ And after the taxi dropped me off at the cottage so I could fetch poor starving hellhounds, I figured we’d better walk back to the mews.
^ There was chocolate. Details tomorrow.
Boxing Day
In which we take all the boxes, the bags, the ribbons, the wrapping paper, the already-broken bits, the totally unidentifiable shreds of whatever and the stuff that should go straight to Oxfam and bundle it up somehow and start making vague plans to have a Major Dump Run in the near future.
I think I’m suffering Caloric Hangover. Or that’s my excuse and I’m sticking to it.* I started ABSOLUTELY SMALL on Pooka on the morning hurtle** and it’s like . . . what?*** Oh, gods, frelling science again.† I thought it was going to be the last lost volume of THE BORROWERS.
I’m also still listening to Christmas carols while hellhounds and I lie on the sofa admiring the view††† and reading about roses and maths.‡ This year’s favourite album is an old Maddy Prior and the Carnival Band one: Gold Frankincense & Myrrh‡‡ which I slap back into the player every time Peter is out of the room for a bit.‡‡‡ The lyrics are included. Maybe I could try singing along. . . .
* * *
* Mmmm. Christmas pudding with brandy butter. Mmmm.
** The drawback to frelling holidays is that TOTALLY FRAUDULENT sense that you HAVE MORE TIME TO DO STUFF. Of course in the present situation what I haven’t got is more time, but there are only so many hours a day I can spend on SHADOWS without a total systems crash, and trying to defibrillate wetware can be tricky. So I spent some quality time this morning, while I was testing the amount of caffeine required to get us on line, putting 1,000,000,000 pairs of All Stars back on their shelves^ and hoovering up the ankle-deep shed geranium petals in the cottage attic. And in consequence found myself eating lunch at 3 pm again. Drat.
^ Yes. I have All Star shelves.
*** I’m also having some trouble with the narrator, who I think in an attempt to sound properly serious and scientific instead sounds like your old chemistry teacher who really wanted to fail you.
† Although I suspect Fayer of having forgotten, or rather of never having known in the first place, what it’s like being an ordinary dumb^ non-science person. In my day one of the few things I ‘learnt’ about the scientific method was that it was lofty and detached and had no contact either with individual subjective humanness^^ or with whatever was being studied. The scientist stood at the correct distance with his (or occasionally her) clipboard and took cool objective notes.^^^ Then they discovered that inconvenient business about how the simple fact of observing certain things—teeny subatomic particles, say—changed them, and what do we all do now? In this 2010 book Fayer mentions in passing at the beginning that ‘of course we interact with what we observe’ . . . and then keeps going to make his real point about the ‘absolute’ difference between small and large.~ WAIT A MINUTE. EVERY SCIENCE TEACHER I EVER HAD~~ IS STANDING IN THE BACK OF THE ROOM AND GIBBERING.
And if that’s not bad enough, he starts with Schrodinger’s damn cat. But @juliagertrud posted the perfect answer to all things Schrodinger’s cat on Twitter a few days ago: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=itQVDA6_TME&feature=g-user-u&context=G2ac07aeUCGXQYbcTJ33bJuwRQr7QRamAJkMSiCooYTc_y_vBnibw
And I’m delighted to hear that Schrodinger himself called it ‘burlesque’.
^ I’m still going to get back to you on the not-calling-myself-dumb thing. But not tonight.
^^ ‘I ate too much Christmas pudding last night.’ ‘Is that really cute lab tech trying to catch my eye?’ ‘If I don’t pick up my dry cleaning soon they’re going to give it to Oxfam.’
^^^ This is, just by the way, one of the reasons I bailed on the scientific method. There is no such thing as objectivity. Except in a pure, philosophical, Plato’s-cave sort of way, which is of limited use down here on the ground.
~ Which seems to be—but I haven’t got my hard copy of the paper book here to check, and this is probably another one I’ll have to listen to twice—that ‘absolutely small’ means that you can’t set up an experiment that won’t disturb it to a disruptive degree. ‘Large’ means that you can set up an experiment that will not be derailed by the fact that you’re observing it. I think this is deeply cool (supposing I’ve got it right). It’s like you grew up with north, south, east and west and if you ever said well what about in or out or Middle Earth you were given detention. And someone is now telling you no, it’s vortex, gron, megabat, dibbleworthy and trout, and it’s more like Middle Earth than it is like north and south. Oh. Okay. Give me a minute. I think I’ll like this. If maybe you could just give me a bucket of ice water for my head.
~~ This would be up to fifty years ago, remember. Fifty years ago we were still hunting mammoths with spears.
†† Diane in MN wrote:
May your computer come to the miracle step of its flowchart and return to normal function.
How I love Sidney Harris, who decades before xkcd^ was telling us science was funny: http://www.leasingnews.org/Sidney_Harris/probability.gif
http://two.leasingnews.org/cartoons/RUSTY-(5).jpg
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. . . And who clearly also has dogs.
But we will not discuss my computers the day after Christmas.^^
^^ The fact that there is a blog post is all you need to know on the day after Christmas.
††† Didn’t get any tinsel up today however. Hoovering the attic was enough. But Georgiana did come for tea and trained Peter and me rigorously in Kindle use. I had to go download a couple of new things onto Astarte afterward just so I didn’t feel all hopeless and retro. I wonder if I can convince Peter that his Kindle needs a name?
‡ Now there is a combination to fry the eyeballs and turn the brain into pancake batter.
‡‡ Which I bought that year, 2001, when we saw them live at South Bank . . . and I was too chickenlivered to ask for an autograph. Yes. Really.
‡‡‡ When I was first over here we had to negotiate how long and how intensely I was allowed to play my Christmas music. Generally speaking I play it nonstop from Peter’s birthday through New Year’s and stop, and Peter promises not to kill me. Although we do get the MESSIAH all year.
Susan in Melbourne wrote:
To which I offer http://www.youtube.com:80/watch?v=ZCFCeJTEzNU, but you’ll have to watch, not just listen.
My favourite is this, and I can’t remember how I first saw it, but it may well have been someone on the forum:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SXh7JR9oKVE
Which you also have to watch as well as listen. One of the things that makes me catch my breath every time is that very first woman standing up and singing. In the circumstances where does she get the nerve?