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Skylarks
The Skylark
by John Clare
The rolls and harrows lie at rest beside
The battered road; and spreading far and wide
Above the russet clods, the corn is seen
Sprouting its spiry points of tender green,
Where squats the hare, to terrors wide awake,
Like some brown clod the harrows failed to break.
Opening their golden caskets to the sun,
The buttercups make schoolboys eager run,
To see who shall be first to pluck the prize—
Up from their hurry, see, the skylark flies,
And o’er her half-formed nest, with happy wings
Winnows the air, till in the cloud she sings,
Then hangs a dust-spot in the sunny skies,
And drops, and drops, till in her nest she lies,
Which they unheeded passed—not dreaming then
That birds which flew so high would drop agen
To nests upon the ground, which anything
May come at to destroy. Had they the wing
Like such a bird, themselves would be too proud,
And build on nothing but a passing cloud!
As free from danger as the heavens are free
From pain and toil, there would they build and be,
And sail about the world to scenes unheard
Of and unseen—Oh, were they but a bird!
So think they, while they listen to its song,
And smile and fancy and so pass along;
While its low nest, moist with the dews of morn,
Lies safely, with the leveret, in the corn.
This is the third year in early spring that I’ve said to myself, the day I hear my first skylark I’m going to hang Clare’s* poem on the blog.** And then I forget. It’s a long time from morning hurtle—when we’re out somewhere we might hear skylarks—to the middle of the night when I’m squeezing the last remnants of semi-coherent thought out of my brain for a blog entry. I’m remembering this year, finally, perhaps because it’s so late—usually I start hearing skylarks in February. Apparently they haven’t liked this winter any better than us humans and hellhounds. I hope the extravagant cold has merely stopped them singing and that the local countryside is not dotted this spring with unmarked skylark graves. Skylarks are endangered, but not around here; we’re teeming with the things. I hope we’re still teeming with the things. I love them. Love, love, love, love, love. I can be in the blackest, bleakest mood, stomping grimly after hellhounds because hellhounds must be hurtled, and . . . for the duration of a skylark’s song I am the world’s greatest living writer, the Dalai Lama, the Archangel Michaela, and the inventor of Green & Black’s mint dark chocolate, all rolled up into one. It’s a thrilling sensation. It’s a thrilling song.
There are plenty of recordings of skylarks on the web, but I’m not even bothering with a link. They don’t sound like much, recorded. Oh, you can tell it’s probably an exciting noise—but it isn’t exciting when it’s tinging out of a computer at you. It’s like the difference between a poster of [insert name of chosen iconic heartthrob here***] and Zaphod Beeblebrox† himself. WOW.†† I like to say, grandly, that I’ll take skylarks over nightingales any day . . . but I’ve never heard a nightingale live.††† And I’m happy with my skylarks.
And I’m glad finally to have heard one this year. Except when I’m complaining about the weather I like the middle of March, because the days are suddenly as if impelled by rocket launchers getting longer—it’s about this time of year I always really notice that they’re getting longer. We had sunlight this morning too so hellhounds and I had a delicious hurtle, accompanied by a skylark who is apparently ready at last to set up housekeeping.
I had read very little John Clare before I moved over here; he’s one of those slightly obscure English English writers who [cheesy generalisation alert] while you may have admired them in a semi-engaged sort of way‡ suddenly make profound and exhilarating sense when you’re standing on English ground viewing English landscape. And, if you’re very lucky, listening to English skylarks. There’s a solidity, a reality, to Clare’s skylark that appeals to me—the song is the thing, but what produces it is a little brown dust-spot with ‘happy wings’—I like the happy wings. I also like the hare ‘like some brown clod the harrows failed to break’—which nests on the ground among those clods. None of the aerial high jinks of swallows, say; any metaphor you want to hang on a skylark has to include the low nest in the corn.
And my low nest among the corn at present is the frelling proofs of PEGASUS.‡‡ See you tomorrow.
* * *
* No, not frelling Shelley and frelling Shelley’s very famous skylark. http://www.poetsgraves.co.uk/Classic%20Poems/Shelley/ode_to_a_skylark.htm
I think frelling Shelley is a big washy self-regarding pain in the behind. Sure he was talented. He wasn’t as talented as he thought he was and gods does he go on.^ He’d’ve been scary if he’d lived in the computer age, when everyone goes on too much.^^
^ HAVE YOU EVER READ ADONAIS? CHEEZUM ZORK.+ GAH. ETC.
+ Here speaketh the Phi Beta Kappa English lit major.
^^ Ahem.
** There are, I’m sure, plenty of copies of it on the web, but I’ve typed this one in so it’s here.
*** No, I’m not being coy. I don’t seem to get crushes on photogenic celebrities any more.^
^ I keep telling you old is better. Although maybe you enjoy your overheated fantasies more than I ever did. This may be a downside to having this vivid an imagination: coming back to ordinary reality always felt like waking up to discover I was a liver fluke. The better I’ve got at channelling this stuff into stories the happier I’ve become.
Although this does bring up a sensitive topic. I don’t like graphic on the page—I have a number of rants inappropriate for these (mostly) clean family pages on the subject of Bad Silly Literary Sex—and I’m damned if I’m going to write it. I think the best steam is produced in pressure cookers with the lids on.
† Oh come on you Windows programmers. You’re giving me a jagged red underline for Zaphod Beeblebrox?
†† Although in Zaphod’s case, probably not a good wow.
††† Peter says we ought to have nightingales around here, that it’s the right habitat. They don’t think so.
‡ For at least having the decency not to be William Wordsworth^
^ Yes. Another of my unspeakable prejudices. The English department at Bowdoin College and I really did not get on at all well. Even Peter has trouble with my attitude toward Wordsworth. Another of these fatuous spoilt self-regarding blokes who thinks that golden daffodils shine out of his backside.
‡‡ Not feeling too archangelish at the moment.
In Which Our Heroine* Is Hysterical**
Computers are evil. Computers are death. Computers are bane and abomination. I HATE COMPUTERS. HATE. HATE. HATE.
You may possibly remember that last Friday I had semi-promised you the first part of the lullaby from PEGASUS this Friday—?
The day began badly. I was just strapping hellhounds in to the rocket launcher when the phone rang, and it was Peter saying, in a commendably calm tone, that if I get any emails from UPS, not to open them. Peter actually uses UPS, so it was plausible. . . .
Yes. Plausible but hostile. By the time hellhounds and I returned from pounding a little more Hampshire countryside back into place again*** the Trojan horse had burst like a piñata . . . all over the innards of Peter’s computer, which is, for the moment anyway, an ex-computer. One of Asmodeus’ minions is going to fetch it away on Monday and see if any of his incantations† can recall it from the land of the dead. Peter, poor man, has spent most of the day on the phone . . . first trying, under instruction, to limit the damage, which I gather was a bit like trying to claw the tide back from ebbing with a fork, and then trying to convince his laptop that it wasn’t just a typewriter with a screen, it could do computery things, like check email and ask Google questions. But it kept wringing its little memory modules and saying no, no, no! Beat me, spurn me, feed me to hellhounds††, but don’t make me go on line!
Meanwhile I had a piano lesson this afternoon. I’ve actually written the, or anyway some, music for the second and (so far as I know) final part of the lullaby this week, but I trust my own judgement even less than usual with the ME roaring in my ears, so I wanted to take both the corrected first part††† and the new second part to Oisin. He did print it out for me, and I should have just made the final adjustments with a pen, but you know, you have this fabulous, inbloodysanely complicated software for which your husband paid rather a bomb, you want to use it. . . and there was no going back after I’d written a phone number, a succinct shopping list, and the first bar and a half of a new piece across the top of Oisin’s print out.‡
My printer at the mews is one of the reasons I need an Asmodeus minion to pay a visit, and Peter’s ancient but reliable printer is so old that the pages it produces are really not good enough for scanning. So I brought the mews laptop—which is the one with Finale‡‡, my composing software, on it—back to the cottage tonight. And plugged it into the cottage printer, which is the good printer, except when it’s in a bad mood, fired up Finale, and prepared to print out.
Found new hardware, said my computer.
There was an error in gijjeebling with the new hardware, said my computer. New hardware may not work properly.
Then the Install New Hardware Wizard popped up. Go away, I said and closed it.
So I went into ‘printers’ and made sure that the correct printer was ticked. It was. Listen, I’d had Computer Men install the freller on all sixteen‡‡‡ of my computers; I knew it was there. It was there! It was theeeeere!
Went back to Finale. Opened lullaby, hit ‘print’.
Document failed to print, said my computer.
ARRRRGH, I said. I deleted the print queue.
It was now seven-fifteen, and I have to go bell ringing in fifteen minutes. I rebooted.
Found new hardware, said my computer. We don’t like this new hardware. We don’t like its shoes. We don’t like its haircut. The Install New Hardware Wizard popped up again. And cleared its throat meaningfully.
I closed it down again.
I tried to print the lullaby again.
Document failed to print, my computer said again. Gleefully.
The Install New Hardware Wizard leaped out of the shadows, waving exuberantly. Let me solve all your problems! I can go on line and download everything you could ever need!
I’m not in a very good mood about downloading stuff from the internet right now, I said. Let’s try something else.
Then give me the Mystic Install Printer Disk! said the wizard joyfully.
Yes. I found the Mystic Install Printer Disk. Now this is where you think that it’s all going to be all right after all, don’t you? You’d be wrong.
I put the Mystic Disk in the little drawer. It spun. It loaded . . . almost.
It was within a fingernail paring’s breadth of finishing when a Large Red Error Box with Lots of Red Xs in it exploded over the install box, saying, Some Crucial Windows XP Files Have Been Overwritten And You Are in Deep Dog Crap. Give Us Your First Born Child, No, Wait, You’re Too Old For That One, Give Us Your Windows XP Professional Install Disk And We May Save Your Ass. Or, Then Again, We May Not.
Meanwhile, the almost-loaded mystic printer disk is making small flailing motions and trying to boost itself up to peer over the edge of the Large Red Error box. Wait a minute! it says. I was here first! Let me finish!
We Are Windows. We Rule. Get Out of the Way Before We Step on You Like An Outdated Motherboard. Crunch.
I take the mystic printer disk out of the little drawer and put the Windows XP disk in.
Hey, says the New Hardware Wizard. That was bloody rude. Cancel these Windows yobos, whoever the hell they think they are. Put the mystic printer disk back in the drawer. Now.
Don’t Touch Anything, said the Large Red Error Box, or The World Will End in Fire and Peripherals.
Blow me, said the wizard. Let my mystic disk finish loading, or I’m going to crumdang the josselwidgers, and then you’ll be sorry.
You wouldn’t, said the Box.
I would, said the wizard.
At this point I have about eleventy hundred little ‘open’ boxes in hydra-headed heaps on the what-you’re-up-to bar at the bottom of the screen. None of them will close. And nothing else works either. I hit ctrl-alt-delete and the Programme Tyrant box stomps into view, cracking its whip.
Make them behave, I say.
The Programme Tyrant strives mightily for a minute or two but the wizard and the Box are locked in mortal combat. Ow! Dranglefab! WHAP! BLANG! THUMP!
So I turn the whole thing off. CRASH. I can frelling hear the components clanking together like badly rung bells.
And then I run/totter off to tower practise.
So the story thus far: I need Blogmom to load the sheet music to the lullaby on the blog. This means I have to print it out, scan it back in again, and tack it on as an attachment to an email, and send it to her. I have, thus far, done none of these things.
Tune in tomorrow for the next exciting episode.
* * *
* You may replace this with ‘matriarch’ if you prefer
** Yes, I do read too much Wondermark.^ http://wondermark.com/ Wait, is it possible to read too much Wondermark?
http://wondermark.com/601/ Ahem, says she who eats everything with chopsticks.
^ Does he do matriarchs? I don’t remember matriarchs
*** Landscape gets uppity if you don’t tramp on it regularly. See, you’re helping save the planet when you go for walks. It’s not just a question of your waistline.
† Asmodeus is expecting Peter to provide his own dragon’s blood, eyelash of salamander and powdered mandrake root. At the prices they charge, I feel these should be included.
†† Ha ha ha ha ha. Although you don’t know, they might have a taste for computer components.
††† And a good thing I did, since I’d managed to make one of the corrections backwards
‡ Like we aren’t frelling drowning in second sheets, from all those blank-backed galley proofs. We have scratch paper for the next million years.
‡‡ Having now had it, used it, and been slapped around by it for a year and a half or so, I like the name no more than I did in the beginning. It said, You’ve had it! You’re finished!, a year and a half ago, and it still says, You’ve had it! You’re finished! to me now.
‡‡‡ Well. Four. And one of ’em’s retired.
Valentine’s Day
Peter met me at the bell tower door this morning with five yellow roses.* Not quite, perhaps, as in the picture that this statement is creating in your minds. Peter and five yellow roses met me at the tower door. The roses, unfortunately, were in Peter’s knapsack** and in the process of getting them out he busted the heads off two of them.
Sigh.
But we are resourceful. I bought two more yellow roses at the florist’s—and some tulips—and I now have seven yellow roses. 
Variously arranged.***
Sunday morning, meanwhile, has morphed into the time I spend pretending to have a conservatory, when in fact what I have is some very crowded windowsills at the cottage.
Never come between a hyacinth and its destiny. And its destiny is to tip over. 
I suppose I could try nailing them to the windowsill. But pulling the nails out will leave marks. And there are always more hyacinths.
And you will remember that I had cleverly propped the primrose one up on a pile of magazines? This happened in a day, hippeastrum stems grow so fast when they really get going.
So. More magazines.
I’m not making any of this up, you know.****
And this is the hippeastrum you keep seeing the stems of. It really is this amazing dark red colour. Which is also to say pretty well impossible to get a good photo of. 
. . . So, today, when I finally got down to the mews and turned the computer on, I rushed to my inbox to open (finally) an email Peter had sent me a few days ago and then (laconically) suggested that I might want to wait till Valentine’s Day to read it. I assumed, of course, it was from Peter. This is what it said:
Though shoulder-socket tearing
And licking each ensnaring
Foulness as we’re wayfaring
Provoke volcanic swearing,
We still get sofa-sharing.
Dear Goddess, thanks for caring
Your Dark Chaotic pairing
Send you their love unsparing.
Awwwwwwww. Yes, we had extra sofa time today. While Peter made dinner. . . .
* * *
* I assume because he feels there’s enough pink^ in my life still. (I did finally cut out the lily stamens when lily pollen was starting to turn hellhounds orange. I know this is cheating. It’s a small kitchen.) 
^ Want. Want. Must have. http://www.rhsplants.co.uk/product/_/ClassID.2000006935/
THIRTY FIVE FRELLING QUID FOR A WATERING CAN? Never mind. It’s pink. Hot-blasted rocket-proof enamelled pink from Hephaestus’ own forge. And my £2.99 plastic ones are finding this weather a trial and I’m not sure either of them holds water any more.
** It entirely escapes me why he put them in his knapsack. It’s like fifteen seconds from the church to the florist.
*** One of the charities I subscribe to is sponsor-a-seeing-eye-puppy. You get a free calendar for your efforts. 
You get a free calendar that arrives in the middle of February. ^
^ Much better organised is Dogs Trust where I sponsor (you will not be amazed to hear) a lurcher.+ You get a valentine from your dog. This year it’s a refrigerator magnet. Too frelling cute.
+ Everybody know what a lurcher is? It’s a common term over here but not so much, I think, in the States (dunno about the rest of the English speaking globe). Lurcher = sighthound x something that isn’t a sighthound. Purists insist the something has to be a working dog. Purists also insist that sighthound x sighthound crosses, like my hellhounds, are longdogs, but mostly all sighthound crosses end up being called lurchers.
****And just think, if I had a proper conservatory I could have lots and lots of plants being perverse. And foolish.
Done. For a little while.
A very little while. The copyeditor, who is obviously a Higher Being, with titanium nerves and an All Night Brain, is going to have it back to my editor on the 25th, and . . . I’ll have a week to turn it around. A week! A WEEK! –Remember I was saying that one of my resolutions for 2010* was to spend less time on the blog? I think it will be safe to predict that I will be remarkably–even unrecognisably terse that week.
Meanwhile I am making hay while the sun shines.** Or anyway drinking champagne on an evening I don’t have to stay sober.*** Did I tell you about the Great Place Mat Quest? Peter is impossible to buy presents for, right? Well, he/we badly needed new place mats. They lead a hard life with us somehow. † . . . So, have you ever tried to find a set of waterproof cork-backed place mats with a different picture on each? Different pictures you want to look at anyway. I failed. But at least these are roses. I can pretty much stand to look at the same pink roses kind of a lot. And Peter . . . well . . . they’re waterproof and cork-backed and he’s not quite as preoccupied with things like domestic decorative bliss as I am. And I’d've been happy to buy a set of waterproof cork-backed clematis place mats if I’d seen any.††
Just in case you want a better look at the flowers behind the champagne bottle. Roses. How unexpected. Pink. How unexpected. Well, at least I’m spreading it around a little. And that rotting apple in the fruit bowl isn’t. It’s just a funny colour.
And the object itself. With chapter breaks.
Four hundred and sixteen pages. About 130,000 words. A mere bagatelle to Samuel Richardson or Marcel Proust ††† but long enough.
Long frelling enough. Now all I have to do is (a) survive the week following the 25th of January and (b) discover what I’ve done with the rest of what was still all one book before I chopped it in half last spring.
* * *
* Which the AP stylebook^ says we’re pronouncing ‘Twenty ten’. Which is a bit of a relief. I mean, how else were we going to pronounce it? All year denotations have gone to hell since the turn of the millenium really, and I’m not looking forward to mumbling ‘twenty eleven’ for a year.
^ You do know the AP stylebook, don’t you? http://twitter.com/APStylebook or if you’re still resisting Twitter+ http://www.apstylebook.com/
+ You have my complete sympathy. It eats your brain. Like so much else on the web.
** I wish. It’s going to snow again tonight. Waaaah. However on the recommendation of some Midwestern friends I finally bought some yaktrax http://www.yaktrax.co.uk/ for both Peter and me with the intention of surviving this winter intact.^ Next I need chains for Wolfgang, unless someone at the city offices has figured out where maintenance left the sand.
^ Peter keeps telling me, as I spill through the door at the mews with my latest meteorological complaints on my frozen lips, that when his kids were growing up they ice-skated at the local ponds every winter. I don’t care. This is not my southern England. I want my southern England back.
*** I have a piano lesson on Friday! I have a voice lesson next week! For that matter I have a terrifying assortment of bell ringing opportunities beginning tomorrow. Get thee behind me, Sa–I mean Niall.
† It wouldn’t have anything to do with chocolate. Or tea.
†† Actually I did. I found one set of waterproof cork-backed place mats with a variety of flowery things on them, including one clematis.^ I was thrilled. I ordered it immediately.
They had run out.
^ And no roses. I admit a qualm, but I was going to be strong.
††† Or JRR Tolkien
New Year’s Eve
We were halfway through supper—cabbage and baked squash*—when I realised Peter was drinking beer. It’s New Year’s Eve! I said. And you’re drinking beer!
I’ll be asleep by midnight, Peter said. But there’s a quarter bottle of champagne in the fridge.
The man who thinks of everything.**
I have of course continued hammering and hacking . . . no, no, I mean daintily and gracefully adding the occasional faint brushstroke to the 99.99999% finished PEGASUS today. Deadlines have no concept of holidays. And it’s probably a result of the peculiar stresses of a 4 January*** deadline—ewwwww—that is producing in me a strange desire to make New Year’s resolutions.†
- Reverse global warming.††
- Find a cure for cancer †††
- Pass a law that anyone responsible for an off lead dog who does not immediately come when called and/or stop harassing whoever they’re harassing will be sent permanently to that first experimental colony on Mars.‡ The dog can stay here. The human miscreant’s assets will be sold to pay for the dog’s rehabilitation and rehoming.
And. Ahem.
- Write PEGASUS II.
Which, I fear, leads us to. . . .
- Do something serious about spending less time on this blog.
I know, I say this several times a year. If I knew what to do, I’d be doing it already. Maybe PEG II will inspire me. And possibly the practise being short on Twitter and Facebook.
Meanwhile . . . Mmmm. Champagne. Mmmmm. Happy New Year.
* * *
* Stop that. I like cabbage and baked squash.
** I have been longing for an excuse to show you this, speaking of the man who thinks of everything. Just in case any of you might have derived the erroneous notion that because Peter is a gentleman of the old school, with the BBC costume-drama accent to go with it, he has no concept of tacky.^
It’s a tea towel. It was under the Christmas tree last week.
^ You are permitted the obvious remark: He married me. And I am proud of my participation in and involvement with the tacky.
*** Our wedding anniversary is 3 January.^ We’re putting it off. If I’m recognisably alive and breathing on the evening of the 4th, we’ll have it on the 4th. If I’m standing in a corner of the room muttering, But now I have to do it all over again, and moaning like a hellhound wearing a raincoat, we may delay it further. April, perhaps. Like perhaps . . . April 2012.
^ Yes, the opportunities for champagne this time of year in this family are remorseless: Peter’s birthday, Christmas, New Year’s, our anniversary—and one of Peter’s sons has a birthday on 28 December. Back at the old house we had a few memorable birthday parties for him too, where the bubbly poured like . . . well, like bubbly.
† I tweeted about this: I may be trembling on the brink of having a New Year’s resolutions list this year for the 1st time in DECADES. Yeep. Am I someone else? And our Black Bear, who disguises herself ineffectively as waxlion88 on Twitter, voted for me to be Angelina Jolie, who must have some interesting resolutions.
Angelina Jolie? For a few minutes I was thrilled. Gain a quarter-century and several extremely buff inches, and get to majorly kick butt?^ Okay, where do I sign? —And then I decided to find out exactly how many extremely buff inches I was going to gain and . . . she’s 5’8”! Five-eight! I’m 5’8”! Frell!^^
Let me think about this.
^ Am I the only person on the planet to admit to enjoying the first Lara Croft? Sure, it was utter and complete trash. And your point would be? It earned sixty-seven gazsquillion dollars in its first weekend and Jolie is serious eye candy. I still don’t know anybody else who liked it.
^^ I follow fashion the way I follow sports, which is to say I don’t. Rugby? Is that anything like balayage? But I do know who Kate Moss is, and The Week http://www.the.week.magazine.co.uk/ recently in its famous people saying amusing things column quoted Kate Moss saying ‘nothing tastes as good as skinny feels’ and some of the outcry this has caused, that she’s encouraging anorexia, etc. Uh. Why is she encouraging anorexia? Slightly depends on what you want your body for, and I don’t just mean high-fashion modelling. Rugby, possibly, or balayage. Now I agree emphatically that the whole fixation on subskeletal is unhealthy, and for that matter nobody needs to be skinny, and the ‘oh I just need to lose 5/10/25 pounds’ thing wastes a lot of time and heartache. But at the other end of that spectrum there are a lot of very-not-skinny unhappy people who put stuff in their mouths as a way of swallowing down their misery. It would be a great thing if they could learn ‘nothing tastes as good as skinny feels’ as an option. I stay skinny, for example, first because I don’t want to have to buy a whole new wardrobe and second because I want to keep hurtling, and these knees won’t hold much more than what they’re carrying now. I agree with Kate, and I’m not encouraging anorexia.+
+ And ask me in ten years, when post-menopause I have to eat twenty hard-boiled eggs~ a day and a gallon of tea for the jitter factor and nothing else. Maybe I’ll have found good knee braces by then.
~ You remember the old dieter’s chestnut# that hard-boiled eggs cost more calories to digest than they’re worth?
# No, no! Not a chestnut! Chestnuts are fattening!
†† But only a little. No ice ages.
††† I’m working on it. But it seems to include a lot of broccoli.
‡ It’s going to be a big colony.
