Doodah doodah
We rang a quarter peal tonight.
Huh? Yes, my reaction exactly.
Handbells are in some slight disarray at present, chiefly on account of Gemma being so inconvenient as to change surgeries/clinics and therefore change her Thursday evening schedule. At the moment Niall and I are double-booked for Thursdays with Colin and Fridays with Gemma, and I have said, in a squeaky, high-pitched voice that I can’t do two handbell evenings a week*, but people’s lives keep getting in the way** so what is getting rung (or wrung) from week to week mostly isn’t two evenings on handbells anyway.
Today has been somewhat overshadowed by yesterday’s extreme excitements and I got moving [sic] late even for me. I had also promised to take Peter to the garden centre this afternoon, this afternoon being the only time even remotely available for the foreseeable future, and if I didn’t do it quickly, this being the time of year when you really don’t want holes in your borders, and anything you plant will, if you’re lucky, riot and burgeon***, Peter might do something drastic like buy a garden gnome at the farmer’s market.†
I’m broke and my garden is already full of Little Things Waiting to Be Potted On (Again)†† and the only thing I wanted was pink snapdragons††† so I’d brought the hellhounds because while Peter was cruising I took them for a hurtle. The only problem with this diversion tactic is that the footpath possibilities around this particular garden centre are unusually excellent, so the temptation is to come back for a nice hellhound hurtle and while I’m in the area . . . ‡
So we zapped home again and I’d repotted the horrifyingly rootbound viola, which will probably reel and stagger a little and then come on again famously, when Colin showed up early. Niall usually is early. So we sat down and Niall started unveiling handbells and said, What do you want to ring? And I said, well, due to circumstances more or less beyond my control I have No Brain so it had better be undemanding.
I know! said Colin brightly. We should ring a quarter (of bob minor)! Just to prove we can! Since it’s just the three of us again!
What?
I think I agreed‡‡‡ because it was going to be less awful than trying to struggle through plain courses of frelling Cambridge, which, now that Thursdays are the three of us again, is going to make my life a misery.
And it was less awful. It was even (whisper it) kind of fun.
* * *
* Which doesn’t take into account the occasional evening at Curlyewe. Curlyewe tower practise is Monday, so Niall has begun tentatively trying to get over there one Monday a month, they ring handbells before tower practise, and then he stays on—and Curlyewe, like pretty much everywhere else in this area, is hurting for ringers, so they’re glad to have a visitor, especially a good ringer like Niall. I’d quite like to ‘grab’ Curlyewe^ and supposing there’s nothing particularly strange about the tower or its bells I’m a good-enough mediocre ringer I can probably contribute something to the practise. Probably.
Except for the little fact that Monday is my voice lesson, and Curlyewe is well on the wrong side of Mauncester. Niall leaves New Arcadia at six . . . and I usually get home five or ten past. Niall suggested helpfully that I could just come straight on from my voice lesson, which would probably make up the time . . . uh huh. It’s twice as far as any of Colin’s towers, there’s handbells as well as tower bells and no break anywhere. . . and I’m shattered on a Monday that I have to drive myself to Colin’s practise and I’ve had a cup of tea and a sit-down between voice lesson and bell practise. I don’t think so.
And so, because I am deranged and Niall is my bad angel, I’m going to try to blast back from voice lesson on Monday, pick up an apple and a cup of tea with a lid on it^^, and be flattened into the passenger seat of Niall’s car^^^ as he stamps on the ‘go’ pedal a few minutes later than usual.
^ Grabbing a tower is going somewhere to ring where you’ve never rung before, specifically to say that you have. Quite a few good ringers do this in a low-key way because they’re good ringers and like to travel around ringing in different towers and that’s fine. Obsessive tower grabbing is kind of frowned on, but ringing somewhere you haven’t rung before because the opportunity arises is normal, in so far as bell ringing and bell ringers can ever be considered normal.
^^ Whoever suggested knitting a slightly oversized egg cozy for a tea mug cozy—thank you. I’m going to try that. Supposing I can figure out how. And whoever said that the steam from the cup is going to soggify the cosy past usefulness, well, I won’t know till I’ve tried it. I drink my cups of tea pretty fast+ but not quite fast enough, and I like it hot. Maybe I should knit several, and then I can string up a little tiny washing-line where I peg them out to dry . . . .
+ If I drank them SLOWER I would drink FEWER.
^^^ which is only a few years younger than Wolfgang, and has more miles on it
** Although, life . . . in Niall’s case this probably means that he’s had an offer to ring a handbell full peal of Snarkalepsy Draggleharrow and is cutting us.
*** Did I tell you WE HAD ANOTHER (*&^%$£”!!!!!!!!!! FROST A FEW NIGHTS AGO? THE MIDDLE OF UNGLEDAGBLAGUNDERING MAY IN THE SOUTH OF ENGLAND AND WE HAD A FROST? I’m assuming it was not severe and the stuff still underground is fine. That’s FINE.
† Which attracts some pretty disturbing riffraff. I haven’t seen any garden gnomes yet but then I’m usually hellhounded, and we don’t linger.
I could always knit the gnome something . . . inappropriate. Although ‘wire’ and ‘garrotte’ are the words that come first to mind, which, in relation to garden gnomes, are highly appropriate.
. . . Although I’ve always kind of wanted a flamingo . . .
†† And at least one juvvie robin. Yaaaay. Bumptious little so and so. There may be more than one, but so far I’m only seeing one at a time, and he’s so breathtakingly foolhardy—as far as he’s concerned, I’m the Mealworm Lady, and there are no ifs, ands or buts—I’m assuming the one I’m seeing is the same one, although I’m still hoping there may be a slightly more sensible, reserved one or two still lurking in the shrubbery. But he, and siblings if any, are clearly flying.
I’ve also clearly got two adults . . . where are you nesting this time? I’m not going to supply mealworms to ungrateful robins that go nest in other people’s gardens. Mum’ll be disappearing any minute now, I assume, to sit on the new eggs. Whiiiiiine.
††† I did very well. I somehow picked up a variegated-leaf so-called hardy fuchsia, which they never are with me, but if I keep ’em warm they usually do very well, and a fabulous rusty-orange osteospermum AND THEY HAD PINK SNAPDRAGONS YAAAAAAY^ so I dumped these three modest acquisitions in Peter’s cart and ran out the door.
^ I’d bought yellow and white elsewhere, but they were all out of pink which will not do.
‡ We got back to find Peter unloading his cart into the boot and I picked up the gorgeous black-leaved cimicifuga and said oh gods, I almost bought this, I love black leaves, and Peter said, helpfully, I can go back and get you one, I remember exactly where they are. Oh . . . all right, I said, folding instantly, and then, while he was off finding me a black cimicifuga, I was finishing unloading his cart and oh gods, they have dierama, I adore dierama, they just frelling keep dying on me . . . and I COULDN’T STAND IT so I locked the car (with hellhounds and my knapsack in it, and all the rubbish from the boot on the roof waiting to be restowed) and raced off to find Peter and the cimicifuga to ask where he found the dierama^, and then on the way back from the dierama I fell over a table of (horribly rootbound, just by the way) violas and HAD TO HAVE ALL OF THEM (I also adore pansies and that entire family) but pulled myself together and only bought one . . .
So, having gone for one plant^^, I came home with six. Which is really VERY GOOD.
^ WORD YOU RATBAG WILL YOU FRELLING STOP AUTOCORRECTING DIERAMA TO DIORAMA? IF I MEANT DIORAMA I WOULD HAVE WRITTEN DIORAMA
^^ Well, one tray of plants. Snapdragons are plebeian annual bedding plants. You buy them in trays. Six snapdragons counts as ONE PLANT. Yes it does.
‡‡ And I was fine with Ascension Day as soon as I was sure it was about Jesus and not the queen.
Peter Story, continued
I’ve got the ratbagging lurgy again. Arrrrgh. Although I admit it’s a bit of a relief that there was more going on on Thursday than sorrow, loss and existential dread—it seemed to me I was overreacting a bit even for me. But if there were germs involved. . . .
So what possible better excuse than to give you the rest of Peter’s story?
The Third Dormouse, part two
The boat didn’t look nearly big enough from the outside, but inside there seemed to be room for everyone, and what’s more in one place it was cool enough for the polar bears and in another place it was hot enough for the salamanders. Strange.
Then the rain began. Rain like no one had ever seen before. Rain like buckets being emptied, like baths being emptied, like swimming-pools being emptied, like ponds and lakes and seas being emptied out of the sky. Soon Grandad’s boat was floating. Soon the water was over the tree-tops, soon it was over the fields and over the hills, soon there was nothing but water as far as Anna could see. The waves bellowed and the wind howled and the thunder roared and the lighting flashed and flashed again.
Anna was scared by the lightning, and wondered if she hadn’t better throw Perhaps over the side after all, but it didn’t seem fair, and besides the lightning kept missing Grandad’s boat, and she felt quite well and she couldn’t see any sea-beasts, so she went off to look after the rodentia instead.
The animals didn’t seem to mind about the storm. They ate and slept and dirtied their cages as if they’d lived on Grandad’s boat all their lives. It was a lot of work feeding them and cleaning the cages.
That was the great thing about Possibly and Maybe (and Perhaps). They didn’t need any feeding or cleaning. They just slept.
Then the rain stopped and the clouds blew away and the sun came out and the wind died and the sea stopped surging around and everything was calm and still, as if winter was over, and at that point the animals started getting interested in each other.
The elks got very interested in each other and the mandrills got very interested in each other and the sloths got slightly interested in each other and the hedgehogs got very interested in each other and the giraffes got very interested in each other. . . .
“Don’t look,” said Grandma, on her way round checking the cages. “I must say Him up There isn’t wasting much time about starting over. . . .”
“The dormice aren’t,” said Anna. “They’ve woken up, but they’re just sitting in their corners yickering at each other.”
“Waiting for a bit of privacy, I expect,” said Grandma.
“You don’t think they’re both boys?” said Anna. “Or both girls?”
“Nonsense,” said Grandma. “Him up There wouldn’t get a thing like that wrong. It’s probably just something dormice do before they get started.”
She checked the rest of the rodentia and hurried on to the artiodactyla.
When she went back to her cabin Anna heard a scratching and squeaking coming from her knapsack. She realised that Perhaps must have woken up, but she wasn’t qick enough when she opened the pocket. Out popped Perhaps, dropped to the floor and scuttled out of the door. Dormice aren’t sleepy when they’re awake. This one was really nippy. Anna tried to catch it, but there was a lot of clutter in the corridor and it kept slipping behind things and darting away. Anna chased it all along the corridor and down a flight of stairs and into the animal quarters. At least its hurt leg looked to be all right now.
It seemed to know just where it was going, and scuttled and darted among the cages until it reached the rodentia, where it climbed up the bars of the red squirrel’s cage and started yickering at Possibly and Maybe. They got wildly excited, so Anna grabbed Perhaps, opened the door and popped it in.
The first thing that happened was that Possibly and Maybe started fighting each other. They really went at it. Perhaps just sat and watched, but Anna was afraid one of the others might get hurt, so she grabbed the nearest one—she didn’t know which it was, maybe Possibly, possibly Maybe, but it wasn’t at all happy about it—and shut it in an empty box which had pine nuts in it for the squirrels.
By the time she got back to the cage, Perhaps and the other one were very interested in each other. Perhaps was the female, it turned out. That’s nice, thought Anna. I shan’t have to call her “it” any more.
She went on to clean a few more cages, but the next time she came past she heard an amazing racket coming from the pine-nut box.
It didn’t seem at all fair, so Anna just swapped the males over. Perhaps didn’t seem to mind, nor did the one in the cage with her. They were still very interested in each other. But the one in the box set up a terrible scratching and squeaking.
Grandma will be sure to notice, thought Anna. I’ve got to get it to go to sleep somehow. So she took it along to the polar bears’ cage and hid it in the coldest place she could find. The dormouse in the box decided it must be winter again and went to sleep. Anna asked her cousin Josh, who looked after the ursidae, not to touch it, but she didn’t tell him what was in the box.
So the voyage went on. From time to time, trying to be fair, Anna swapped the males over. Perhaps was perfectly happy with either of them, and there were always just two dormice in the cage when Grandma checked them. Soon it was easy to tell which was the female, because Perhaps started getting fatter.
“Told you so,” said Grandma.
Then there was a lot of business with Grandpa sending ravens out to look for land, and them not finding any. And then it was a dove, and it came back with a bit of twig in its beak so they knew there had to be land somewhere, and then they came to an island and the humans all landed. And the water went down and down, and they saw that the island had to be just the top of a mountain, and Grandad said it was time to let the animals go.
So he and his sons lowered the gangplank and Anna and her cousins went through the boat opening the cages one by one so that there wasn’t a mad scrum. When they did the polar bears Anna took the box with the dormouse in it and put him back in the cage. Perhaps was really pregnant by now, so the other two weren’t interested in her any more and didn’t start fighting. Anna left them to the end before she let them go.
When she got to the entrance Grandma was busy checking the animals, but everybody else was staring at the sky. Anna looked, and saw a wonderful rainbow arching right across from one horizon to the other.
“Look, Grandma!” said Anna.
Grandma looked up, and the three dormice went scuttling out.
“What does it mean?” said Anna.
“It’s Him up There,” said Grandad. “I’ve just heard him say that’s it. He’s not going to try this washing out and starting over stuff again.”
“I heard him too,” said Anna’s cousin Sara.
“Me too,” said everyone, except Grandma and Anna.
Grandma was looking at her lists.
“I seem to have missed the dormice,” she said. “Did anyone see the dormice go?”
“I did,” said Anna.
“How many were there?” said Grandma. “Just the two?”
“Probably,” said Anna’s mother, not thinking.
Now Anna thought she heard something. It might have been distant thunder, or it might have been somebody laughing at a private joke.
She watched Perhaps, very fat and pregnant, with Possibly and Maybe yickering beside her, scuttle down the slope and disappear into the clean new world.
A Peter Story
Peter found this in a drawer a few days ago. He wrote it yonks and yonks ago*, for a magazine, and neither of us (!) can remember (!!) seeing it in any less ephemeral form, so he said yes, I could have it for the blog, since he hasn’t written me a guest blog in, like, years. Even if you’ve read it before, you probably haven’t read it in yonks either, and I like it, and it’s my blog.
And I badly need a night off, so tonight’s the night (as they say). I’ll tell you tomorrow about ringing at my old tower.**
The Third Dormouse
Anna lived on a farm with her father and mother and three brothers. One day soldiers came. They said they were soldiers, but really they were just robbers. They drove all the farm animals away while Anna and her family hid in the desert beyond the fields.
When they had gone Anna’s family went back to the farm and worked in the fields, which were full of melons and corn.
“At least you can’t drive melons and corn away,” said Anna’s father.
The melons grew and the corn grew and they harvested them and brought their crops into the barns for the winter. While they were harvesting the corn Anna found a dormouse with a hurt leg.
“Can I keep it until its leg’s well?” she asked.
“Perhaps,” said her mother, not thinking.
“Will it go to sleep for the winter?” said Anna.
“Perhaps,” said her mother, not thinking.
“Is it a boy or a girl?” said Anna.
“Perhaps,” said her mother, still not thinking.
So Anna took it home and called it Perhaps. When it started to get sleepy she made it a nest in a pocket of her knapsack, which her mother had told her to keep packed with anything she wanted in case the soldiers came again.
They did. They were different ones, but still just robbers. This time they took all the stores they could carry and burnt the rest. They burnt the barns and the house too. Hiding in the desert Anna and her family watched the flames.
That night they slept in a cave. In the middle of the night Anna had an odd sort of dream. It was just a voice saying in her head “Go to your Grandad’s.”
When they woke up next morning Anna’s mother said “I heard a voice in the night, telling us to go to Grandad’s.”
“So did I,” said all the others.
“It must be Him up There telling us,” said her mother.
“It will be a dangerous journey,” said her father, “because of the soldiers.”
But Him up There had told them, so they set out, carrying their knapsacks. The soldiers were everywhere, fighting each other and burning and stealing and murdering, but they didn’t seem to notice Anna’s family trudging quietly along. It was very strange.
At last they came to the valley where Grandad lived. The soldiers didn’t seem to have noticed him either. He was busy building a big boat.
“Ah, you’ve come,” mumbled Grandad with his mouth full of nails. “High time too. The others will be here any moment.”
“What’s going on?” said Anna’s father.
Grandad took the nails out of his mouth.
“It’s Him up There,” he said. “He’s sick of all this murdering and robbery and stuff, so he wants to wash the whole lot out and start over. But we’ve never gone in for any of that in our family, so he’s letting us stay on and help him. That’s what the boat’s for. The grown-ups can give me a hand with that, and the kids will have to look after the animals. Grandma will tell you what to do, kids.”
“Can I look after the dormice?” said Anna.
“It’ll be more than just dormice,” said Grandma.
Next day Anna’s two uncles and her two aunts and her nine cousins arrived, and the day after that the animals started streaming in. Tigers and bats and mongeese and lizards and wombats and rattle-snakes and tree-frogs and sheep and moles and porcupines and warthogs and . . .
Anyway there was a list, and Grandma checked them off as they came. Two of everything.
Yes, two dormice. They were very yawny and cross because they’d been woken out of their winter sleep.
“What would happen if there were three of something?” said Anna. “I mean, if you took an extra warthog aboard because you were sorry for it?”
“Him up There wouldn’t like it,” said Grandma. “He was very definite. Two of everything he said. One male, one female. No more, no less.”
“But what would he do?” said Anna.
“Strike us with lightning, I shouldn’t wonder,” said Grandma. “Or plague. Or send a sea-beast to gobble us up. You can’t tell with Him up There. Mysterious ways are what he moves in, and no mistake. Anyway, you’re doing the rodentia, so you’ll be too busy to ask any more questions.”
And that was true. The rodentia were the agoutis and the bamboo rats and the bandicoot rats and the beavers and the birch mice and the cane rats and the capybaras and the cavies and the chinchillas and the chipmunks . . . all the way through to the viscachas and the voles and the white-footed mice and the wood rats.
And, yes, the dormice. They weren’t any trouble. They curled up in opposite corners of their cage and went straight back to sleep. Anna couldn’t tell which was the male and which was the female, so she called them Possibly and Maybe. She didn’t tell anyone about Perhaps, in case they made her leave it behind. It was still asleep in the pocket of her knapsack, so she just hoped it didn’t count.
The sky darkened, thunder rolled round the hills, Grandpa banged the last nail in and everyone went aboard. Grandma stood by the gangplank and checked the animals off as they passed. The only one she missed was Perhaps, asleep in Anna’s knapsack.
TO BE CONTINUED***
* * *
* On a typewriter. Remember typescript? Which is bumpy under your fingers, and the ‘d’ or the ‘a’ or something is a slightly crooked, and the quote marks are straight up and down and there’s only caps and underlining, no bold and no italic? And you make corrections by painting over them, or by cutting and pasting pieces of actual paper? Nostalgia.
** Nobody died.
***I know. Famous last words. But this story exists.
Spring Sunday with a friend
I’ve been singing. I’ve been singing with Hannah and Peter in the same room. It does happen occasionally that I sing when Peter’s around—especially on Mondays when I have to warm up before I go to my lesson, and can’t afford to get too precious about circumstances—but I do not sing for other people.* I’m not sure if I should be embarrassed or not that it was kind of fun—especially the part with them shouting out suggestions.** I want to say something rude here about neither of them being musical*** but Hannah . . . for pity’s sake, Hannah goes to Broadway musicals. It’s not like she doesn’t know what proper singing voices sound like.† Hannah is a very good friend.
And, more to the point . . . she’s here. I left you last night in a Perils of Pauline situation, with our heroine(s) suspended on the brink of being Lost Forever in Darkest Hampshire. Or possibly not even Hampshire. Outer Mongolia. Aberdeen. Saturn.†† I was just driving back to the cottage in despair††† yesterday when Pooka started barking at me again. I managed not to run off the road—or more to the point did not run into either of the brick-and-flint walls that claustrophobically enclose the single lane of my steep little cul de sac—and further contrived to press ‘answer’ before the call was swallowed up by the entropic maw of the voice-mail system from which none escape unscathed, and . . . it was Hannah. The driver has decided maybe it isn’t the Egg and Custard, she said in Old High Manhattan Laconic, maybe it’s the Toast and Marmite. Or the Daffodil and Schnapps. Or the Militant Stepdaughter . . . More emphatic male quacking in the background. Here, you talk to him, she said.
But where is it, I said. Whatever its name is. There is no Caerphilly Road in Mauncester.
Yes there is, he said promptly. It runs north-south through the Doggleburies.
What? I said. The only road that runs north-south is the Hindu Kush Turnpike.
After a good deal of witty repartee on the order of “You mean Banded Dogglebury or Sod-all Dogglebury?” and “The giant chalk boulder that looks like the anti-matter Darth Vader is in Gerrymandering, it’s not in the Doggleburies at all,” the driver, who by this time I had decided had no business behind the wheel of a car that contained my best friend, capitulated and said, “I’ll meet you at the Ultimate Fishmonger.” “Great,” I said. “I can find the Ultimate Fishmonger, because it exists in this universe.” In fact he didn’t meet me—he dropped Hannah and ran, possibly in some fear of heavy reprisals from a local who knows all the pubs in Mauncester‡ But at least Hannah was there.
. . . And it’s been another beautiful day today and Hannah and I went to a National Gardens Scheme‡‡ garden as the sort of thing one does on a beautiful Sunday afternoon in spring in England, and were swarmed by daffodils and crown imperial fritilleries and alpaca, and suppressed our giggles at the extreme High Tory-ness of the owners‡‡‡ and I bought a plant.§
We also had two gorgeous hurtles with hellhounds over hill and dale and blowing white blossom in the hedgerows and blue, blue sky and general gloriousness and joy and the sap rising in the trees and the human morale . . . and bloody Chaos is celebrating the change of season by not eating.
* * *
* Although I have made a rod for my own back, in that April’s Visitor^ is here over a Monday and I’m taking her with me to my voice lesson.^^
^ I can’t remember what her blog name is, and since my dramatis personae file isn’t in any kind of alphabetical order and it’s gotten rather long over the years I can’t find it. I could always name her again. . . .
^^ She’s the kind of friend who makes it sound like she means it when she says, Yes! I’d love to! But then I specialise in insane friends. Regular readers of this blog may have some idea why.
** Stop laughing. Folk songs. I sing a lot of traditional folk songs. I can do a handful of the obvious ones on request. Supposing I’m singing with you in the room, which is not likely.
*** I can say something rude here about Peter not being musical. Peter is aggressively non-musical, although not, in fact as aggressively non-musical as he likes to pretend. Still. If you are going to take singing lessons and are pathological about singing in front of another human being because you genuinely don’t have much voice but (chiefly) because you are intensely neurotic, Peter is a very good person to be married to. Sometimes fate is kind. It was not on my list of husband requirements twenty years ago that he had to be able to put up with my singing.
† . . . At this point I might, as an opera snob, say something about Broadway musical voices . . . but I’m not going to.
†† Are there pubs on Saturn? Discuss.
††† And wondering how long it would take Wolfgang to start again once I’d turned him off. Since our little erratic fault thingy is continuing. Yes, I should be ringing up the mechanic and having a little discussion about the connection between the starter motor and the thing it starts, but I’ve fallen into the abyssal pit of ‘I’ll do it as soon as I get SHADOWS turned in’. The post-SHADOWS agenda is getting a trifle long. Headed, as it is, by doodles.
‡ By name! Only by name!
‡‡‡ Hannah got nailed as an American, but I escaped by mumbling. An immigrant with no gift for accents quickly develops an instinct for when mumbling is appropriate.
§ Surprise. You’re surprised, right?^
^ I’m waiting impatiently for my new roses. . . . You know, seven years ago when I moved in to the cottage, I’ve told you this, right?, the previous tenant was a terribly proper gardener and the garden was full of terribly proper and high-brow plants. And everyone said, oh, you’re going to rip everything out and plant roses, aren’t you? And I got very huffy and said certainly not, I am only going to pull out the boring things, I like lots of plants that aren’t roses . . . But seven years later I’m aware that pretty much every time anything dies I replace it with roses. . . .+
+ No, it was not a rose I bought today, it was a lychnis. It’s pink though.
Big Fat Throbbing Ratbags
Andraste and Luke were supposed to be here today. But they weren’t.
I was up late last night* taking down the Christmas tree** in their honour. And then I was up early this morning*** to get hellhounds comprehensively hurtled before they were due to arrive for what-in-my-universe-is-early lunch. I was standing in a field† surrounded by bemused hellhounds when Pooka started barking at me. It was Andraste saying that their Specially Adapted Car was making a funny noise and they were returning to base till the RAC could come and sort it for them: when one of you is tetraplegic your acceptable-risk level is pretty low. And it took the RAC forever to get to them, of course, because that’s the way it is. The problem turned out to be pretty much one mouse hair and half a sesame seed, but they didn’t know that till the RAC mechanic told them. All they knew was that it was a funny noise. So they didn’t come, and we don’t know when they might be in this area again and . . .
Snivel.
It was, however, a gorgeous day—Spring! Hurrah! Please don’t go away again!—so hellhounds and I went back to the cottage and I played†† in the garden for a bit to cheer myself up, although the cheeringness factor was a bit mixed. I lost a lot in that I-hope-final malevolent cold spell when we had hard frosts every night for most of a week—stuff that had come through this mostly mild winter and thought it had nothing more to worry about and might as well get going on the spring thing. So I was hauling stuff out and looking at all this empty space and trying to remind myself that I do this every year, every year I think I have all this EMPTY SPACE to fill up and . . .
* * *
*Shock! Horror! Film at 3 a.m.!
** Stop that giggling. Fiona, when she was here in February, seemed to think it was very funny we still had our Christmas tree up. Hmmph. It’s still before Easter. I don’t see what your problem is. For one thing ours didn’t go up till Christmas Eve, as I’m sure I reported here at the time, and you want to enjoy it a little, don’t you? Especially the new-last-year baubles with the roses made out of glitter stencilled on them. Also, this is a small, civilised fake tree, so it’s not like it’s dying horribly and dropping needles everywhere. I’m sure it enjoys being out of the box it spends the rest of the year in a little longer than the standard . . . uh . . . what is the standard for Christmas trees? Fortnight? A month? Feh. Mingy.
Also, while it is little—about four foot—it is well furnished. Which means there’s a lot to look at, you know? You don’t want to rush the process of artistic appreciation. Not to mention the fact that it is kind of a lot of work to set up and even more to take down.^
But Andraste is one of these organised people. Your birthday present always arrives exactly 2.5 days before your birthday^^ and I’m sure her Christmas tree comes down on the thirteenth day of Christmas. I decided it wouldn’t be all that much fun watching her trying to think of something to say about our Christmas tree in March. ^^^ But the sitting room at the mews looks all kind of hollow without it. Sigh. Maybe I could start a new fashion? You just move your Christmas tree back against the wall the other eleven months of the year? And turn it occasionally so you see all the ornaments?#
Meanwhile . . . I have four boxes of Christmas decorations wedged into the front passenger seat of Wolfgang. I feel it is reasonable that I haven’t quite got them up to Third House yet, but why aren’t they in the boot? Um. Well, the boot is still full of bagged manure and compost because I still have this little starting problem with Wolfgang, I don’t dare park him next to the cottage so I can unload and I can’t quite face schlepping it all down from his parking space at the top of the hill. The steep gruesome stair from road level up to my garden gate is bad enough. I realise I will have to face all this some day . . . but not today.
^ Including the fact that the boxes and the bubble wrap you have been using every year for yonks morph strangely between the time you took everything out and the time you try to pack everything away again. Somebody tell me why I have a twelve-hole box for my set of basic red baubles . . . and fourteen baubles. I realise the answer is that I originally had two identical boxes and twenty-four red baubles,+ but I feel that even I would have noticed breaking ten of them. Or perhaps that was the year that Peter met me at the door, one day late in December, wild-eyed and panting, and as I think about it he may have had a broom in his hand, saying no, don’t come in, there’s just been a bulletin on the radio, there’s an outbreak of wyverns in Ditherington, and they need every pair of hands they can get! And so of course I went to Ditherington where in fact they were rather surprised to see me as the report on the radio had not included an appeal for ordinary members of the public. But when I explained that I’d helped to deal with wyverns in Maine a few times (although the New World wyvern is rather different from its European cousin) they gave me a flak suit and a multi-zorm stick and were glad to have me. By the time I got home again I was too tired to ask Peter . . .
+ Remember that at the old house we had two-storey trees in the elbow of the stairs. Two-storey trees require frightening numbers of ornaments before they stop looking green and start looking decorated. I used to buy baubles by the parsec.
^^ The Royal Mail wouldn’t dare mess with Andraste.
I had a card through the door yesterday saying that a package I had to sign for had been returned to the post office and that I could pick it up ‘tomorrow’. I couldn’t find the special Sunday-opening button though so I’m going to have to wait till Monday.
^^^ It’s not Easter yet.
# This would also solve the Untangling Problem. We gave up lights several years ago, but there are still a lot of long tinselly and bannery things which tend to pound themselves into dreadlocks over the course of the year. Never mind that they are wrapped LIGHTLY and GENTLY and laid on the TOP of the boxes.
*** Well, comparatively
† Make that hiding. Some evil little terrier was dragged past us, snapping and snarling in the standard evil-little-terrier way, while various of us had stopped for calls of nature. When I was done picking up same I looked ahead and saw that they’d let the sodding little villain OFF HIS LEAD. And I may have mentioned recently that we move faster than pretty much anyone else we meet while we’re out hurtling. So we went and hid in a neighbouring field for a while.
†† Slowly. The ME has its feet up on the furniture but it’s not running me too ragged fetching it peeled grapes and cups of tea etc.