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.
Roses
Milk Wine
I work at the Antique Rose Emporium in San Antonio, and Madame Alfred is one of my absolutely favorite roses. (: If people are looking for a fragrant climber, I always lead them to her, as long as they have the room. I put her on my parents’ front fence, and she blooms a treat.
The Antique Rose Emporium! Squeeeeee!
https://www.antiqueroseemporium.com/
The very last year I was in Maine, I . . . planted stuff. In a clearly prescient sort of way. Gardening had never really occurred to me, except as something that other people did.* I’ve said this (often) before: gardening in Maine, while other people certainly did do it, looked way too much like hard work. Gardening in Maine is the Xena Warrior Princess end, with evil gods and zombie unicorns and person-swallowing landscape and so on and I’m much more the Gabrielle before she started going to the gym end. If there are any zombie unicorns around I am definitely looking for somewhere to hide.
But I had a silly fit, and, that last summer, went around digging holes and putting things in them. Including three roses. Which actually, you know, grew, and produced flowers—I mean, roses, yipe. I have no idea where this might ultimately have led: my little lilac-enshrouded house was heavily shaded by not only the two ginormous lilac hedges but several boulders as tall as the house in the back, and a huge, gorgeous old maple tree in the front. I never was going to have a lot of opportunity to grow roses there—which is just as well, because the joke is that roses are annuals in Maine, and I’m pretty sure my three didn’t survive their first winter. But I might have learnt about the roses that will survive serious winter, and how to help them do it.
Instead I fell in love with an Englishman and moved to England and his two-acre garden where he spent hours every day eeeeeeeeep.** And after I got my breath back I started putting roses in left, right and centre, and learning the hard way about growing the beggars. To do this rigorously*** involved ordering catalogues—this was before the web began infiltrating us hoi polloi: I didn’t have a computer yet† let alone an internet connection—from every rose seller I could get the address of. This included several in the States. I don’t remember if The Antique Rose Emporium’s was one of the ones I had to draft in an enabling American friend to lay my hands on—quite reasonably a lot of plant sellers won’t send catalogues overseas when they won’t ship their plants overseas—but the whole ‘rose rustlers’ thing was very attractive††, and little old country cemeteries in England sometimes have drifts of ancient roses with great gnarly stems as big around as trees.
The Antique Rose Emporium is pretty much the only American rose nursery I pay attention to any more. If I want an American perspective on a rose, I look it up there first. And if I didn’t already have Mme Alfred, on the say-so of Emporium personnel, I’d be looking her up for details of her English performance record.
I originally bought her, back at the old house, by accident. Well, I was very young in terms of rose-growing, and Peter was no help, him and his frelling herbaceous borders.††† I think I’d actually ordered something else, and this thing arrived with a label saying ‘Mme Alfred Carriere’ and I thought, oh, fie, and heeled her in in a blank-ish spot, because I didn’t know what to do with her and I had a lot of other roses to plant, and I’d look her up and figure out what to do with her later. Only I never quite got around to it. And she rioted, as she will do, and took over a large swatch of that end of what had been the vegetable garden before my first rose-beds went in. I probably somewhere have photos of her pouncing over the trellis that several more modest climbers were dutifully scaling from the other side, and engaging Dortmund in mortal combat. Dortmund was another of my errors—I made a lot of errors—a single, cherry-red rose, white at the base of the petals, and not at all my sort of thing, except that I loved her. As I loved Mme Alfred. And her big double creamy flowers looked fabulous tumbling among Dortmund’s dazzling single red.
I totally had to have Mme Alfred even in my handkerchief-sized garden at the cottage.††† I put her in my first year there and her tallest stems started reaching above my neighbour’s two-storey-plus-attic roof a couple of years ago—and since I’m looking out my first-floor‡‡ office window, this is not a trick of perspective.‡‡‡ When she’s in flower I get gusts of her perfume through my office window. Yes. She’s one of the best.
Oh . . . and guess what I was doing today? Ordering roses. Remember I said I needed another climber? Just one climber . . . ?
* * *
* When I shared a house on Staten Island for a while, one of my housemates was a zealous, not to say fanatical, gardener. That back yard makes my tiny garden at the cottage look large in comparison but by golly it was INTENSIVELY PLANTED. It was impressive but somewhat intimidating—you could barely squeeze out the back door without being attacked by a radish.^ I felt I wouldn’t have the authority to boss so much plant life around and I was sure it knew it. I felt no impulse to try for myself.^^ And mostly I used the front door.
^ Or a banana-sized slug. Ewwww.
^^ Being assaulted by the occasional house plant was enough. I’ve had house plants catapulting off window sills most of my life.
** Speaking of zealous.
*** Is there another way? says the woman who is now waiting for her book on Japanese particles to arrive.
† shock horror
†† Even if the Emporium’s ‘our story’ about Mermaid as a rose that will withstand ‘droughts and blue northerns’ and thrive in the wilderness makes me feel like I’m living on another planet. I lose Mermaid. Repeatedly. She’s one of the crankiest madams ever to grace these mostly verdant shores. And I’m not the only one who thinks so: she has a bit of a rep around here. And then there are her thorns: which are long, curved and prehensile, the better to make you bleed. She’s very beautiful though. So we all keep frelling buying her when she conks out on us again.
††† The English cottage garden style has roses. Peter did have roses. He just didn’t have enough.
‡ I don’t have Dortmund now: she’s one of these great stiff angular things, about eight foot square.^ I do keep thinking about putting her in at Third House, but Third House’s garden is still small, it’s just bigger than the cottage’s.
^ She also has almost no scent. And you have to draw some lines somewhere. Sigh.
‡‡ Second floor in American English
‡‡‡ Although as I’ve said elsewhere, it’s surprising how many rather too large roses you can wedge into a rather too small garden if you’re stubborn enough. And don’t mind the sight of your own blood too much.
Life goes on
We begin with a minute’s silence. I can’t call her a friend because I didn’t know her well enough, but she was in my crowd, to the extent that I as a nineteen-marks-out-of-twenty introvert have a crowd, and she was a good person—and had three half grown kids—and took piano lessons, and gave me Oisin’s name and phone number, six or so years ago. She’s been ill for a while, and at first it looked like she was gaining on it, but we’ve known for a while now that it was gaining on her. We knew it wasn’t long . . . but this was still soon, and sudden.
We begin with a minute’s silence.
* * *
Yesterday was a gorgeous day, a perfect gardening day, the sort of day you have to tie yourself to your chair to stop yourself from rushing outdoors but your neck keeps mutinously turning your face toward the window anyway and your eyes gaze longingly into the garden where there are little green leafbuds everywhere.* Why didn’t someone else cancel handbells? Niall is a monomaniac, of course,** but both Colin and Gemma have gardens. That was yesterday.
And today, when I could have wrested an hour or two free of other demanding activities, it was suddenly cold and grey and bone-achingly horrible again. That didn’t stop another (small) box of hopeful plant life arriving on my doorstep or me reading gardening magazines over what passes in my case for breakfast***. And I came emphatically home after my cup of tea with Oisin† and went out into the garden and damn the weather. This is partly because it’s Oisin who told me that—let’s call her Gloriana—had died. Spring is some comfort; or if not comfort, exactly, the sense of that new young energy dragging you with it—green leaves, warmer temperatures (sometimes), more daylight, lambs and calves in the fields—makes you keep moving, makes you notice you’re still alive.††
I went out and planted my acidanthera ††† and admired my increasing hyacinth forest, since I’ve fallen into the habit the last few years of planting out any of my indoor-forced hyacinth bulbs that still look healthy the next spring. The first daffs are out, and both my gardens are popping with little green noses of things I’ve lost the labels of—and I have a resident robin at the cottage again for the first time in several years. The blackbirds have become right thugs, and while there’s always a territorial robin in the background, I haven’t seen nearly enough of him. At the moment I even have a pair so maybe there will be a nest with little baby robins.
And there’s a human baby I know who’s due to pop into this world and start breathing for itself any minute now. Life goes on.
* * *
Maybe we’ll end with a moment of silence as well.
* * *
*Fortunately I’m a touch typist.
** He does garden, I believe, when Penelope hands him an implement and tells him to go hack that thing down or dig a hole there or something. But he’s not what you’d call self motivated.
*** Our somewhat-seasonal organic grocery delivery has just put grapes back on its list. It’s summer. Well, it’s summer for fifteen minutes in the morning while I eat a handful of grapes.
Out in the real world I’m watching the lilac bushes with obsessive attention. The funny little nobbles that will become lilac flowers start appearing not long after the leafbuds do, and we have leafbuds. I know every lilac in this town, I swear, and New Arcadia has a lot of lilacs, for some reason. Before I bought Third House I didn’t have any of my own and so I tracked down everyone else’s: we have the purple ones, the lavender ones, the magenta ones, the pink ones, the white ones, and the red-purple with white edges ones. We have the knock-you-down-at-a-hundred-paces scented ones and the bury-your-face-in-the-flowers-first scented ones, but they’re all good. Peter does not share my enthusiasm—he points out with some justice that they are not particularly attractive shrubs^ and they’re only in flower a few weeks of the year. He feels there are more generally rewarding plants. Well, maybe,^^ but they aren’t lilacs. Although I may just be marked by all those years in Maine: as I’ve said before, you certainly can garden in Maine, and people do, but it’s very, very hard graft, of a sort that makes the most back-breaking labour in southern England look like a Victorian gentlewoman with a sun-bonnet and a trug snipping a few blooms for a posy. Of the standard garden plants there aren’t that many that will thrive in Maine. Lilacs are one of them. And they are so necessary at the end of that frelling winter.
I have four lilacs at Third House and it’s not a big garden. Well, five: the fifth is a ‘patio syringa’. Beware of lilacs called by their Latin^^^ name: it tends to mean they aren’t lilacs, they’re just lumped into the genus by some frelling botanist. I had this one in a pot at the cottage, and I was not nice to it because it wasn’t a PROPER LILAC. I took pity on it and planted it (in a corner, where it wouldn’t bother me) at Third House and it is so happy, poor thing. I like it much better now when I don’t try to think of it as a lilac.
^ He keeps making this same irrelevant comment about roses.
^^ . . . roses
^^^ Or New Latin/Greek. WTF??
† Who was perhaps as near as I ever see him get to cranky when, as I was leaving, I admitted I had brought music with me and then hadn’t told him. Well, when I came in, he was playing something amazing on the organ^, Paul Hindemith’s first organ sonata, in fact, and fortunately I didn’t know it was Hindemith or I might have covered my ears and rushed back outside again. Oisin has been telling me for a while that I am slightly wrong about Hindemith. Anyway. It’s exactly my sort of thing and by the end I know this is stupid, okay? the idea of following it with my so-called singing was just not on. I was even singing what counts with me as pretty well this morning. Siiiiiiiiigh. I don’t actually know how to think about switching between professional performance and amateur; there isn’t any very useful parallel, it seems to me, between music, which does have to be performed, and professionally-written-down stories, which don’t. The amateur reader doesn’t need any help: she just reads the book. Caro Mio Ben or Dove Sei aren’t songs unless someone sings them. Arrgh.
^ I wonder if this works in England. Never mind. I’ll just buy a CD. http://www.classicalarchives.com/work/272545.html
†† I am of course flashbacking to Diana’s death—a year ago the end of this month. And I’ve got three big anniversaries of loss in April which is weird because now begins my favourite time of year, and it—you should forgive the term—snowballs through April when, in southern England, the lilacs come out. And the bluebells.
††† I am totally failing to find a good photo of them, possibly because part of their great charm is their scent. Here’s someone talking about how fabulous they are: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/gardening/howtogrow/3305281/How-to-grow-Gladiolus-callianthus.html
And here’s an uninspiring photo: http://www.crocus.co.uk/plants/_/bulbs/gladioli/gladiolus-murielae-/itemno.BU30001081/
Oh yes, and you’re not supposed to call them acidanthera any more. Piffle.
Twas spring, and the slithy toves . . . no, wait . . .
GRISELDA WAS AT MUDDLES PRACTISE TONIGHT. YAAAAAAY.
It’s been another blood-pressure-aggravating kind of day. Thursdays usually are, now that I’m back in the Muddles again, because of the straight sprint of handbells, final hellhound hurtle and two and a quarter hours of Muddlehampton Choir practise.* Today’s excitements began however by discovering a card put through the door that said ‘package by greenhouse’. Not one. Three. Three lovely, lovely, lovely boxes of PLANTS.*** And I was unpacking them in the garden when there was an eruption of hellhounds† and I discovered another delivery person with an epic parcel containing Peter’s itea ilicifolia††. It was a gorgeous day and I would much rather have stayed in the garden and planted things but I had hellhounds to hurtle††† and novels to write‡ and bells to ring ‡‡ etc.
And owls and pussycats to bludgeon to death mercilessly. Even Griselda said, hmm, interesting, when we got to the descant. This didn’t stop her singing it right off or anything but at least she had to pay attention. And it’s just as Nadia said (it usually is): having sung it through with Griselda a few times, I probably could sing it without her . . . but I don’t want to.
* * *
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2012/03/close-information.html#ixzz1pD5yT2s2
Oh . . . raging flapdoodle. Yes, I’m one of the mourners of the passing of the old regime, and if I had the money I’d probably buy one of the final edition‡‡‡, but has anyone who does research on the web not looked up and discovered it’s two hours later while they followed their noses from web site to web site having forgotten what they were looking up in the first place? The medium is different. The breathless sense of plunging into the unknown and the serendipitous is the same. And there are, in fact, serious advantages to the on line version of losing yourself in abstruse information about stuff you didn’t know existed, let alone that you wanted to know about: you can do it in bed on your iPad. If you’re going to stick to the alphabetical approach, you can certainly take one or two volumes of the Britannica to bed with you, but the entire thirty large tomes are a little unwieldy. Not to mention all those annual update volumes.
* * *
* Two and a quarter hours is a long time.^ That may be the combination of its being at the end of what has already been a long day, the fact that I still pretty much have no clue what I’m doing and therefore everything is stressful, and the frelling ME which means my stamina is derisory at best.^^ I don’t have either time or inclination to eat before practise^^^ but I find the last half hour very long indeed. We do get a quarter-hour break so I decided to take along a handful of cashews. If you want organic, you probably have to roast your own. It is not hard. I have done it many times.
Tonight I burnt them.
There’s always next week.^^^^
^ ‘Time is the most frequently used noun in English’. http://oed.com/public/newwords0312
I follow the OED on Twitter, and have already RTd—retweeted—this link, with the comment ‘‘histrionics’ only NOW? Where have you been?’+
+ Clearly not reading this blog.
^^ Also, after years of hour-and-a-half bell practises, ‘practise’ means an hour and a half.
^^^ I don’t eat before bell practise either: when my stomach knots itself up in a Sailmaker’s Whipping with extra frapping turns+ I want it empty. This has nothing to do with whether or not I’m looking forward to the event, whatever it is. Doing Things Visibly/Audibly in Public freaks me the hell out, I don’t care how often I’ve done them before or how voluntarily.++ You can perhaps (again) surmise how much I don’t miss touring. +++
+ I wouldn’t make this up http://www.animatedknots.com/terminology.php?LogoImage=LogoGrog.jpg&Website=www.animatedknots.com
++ I did say to Griselda tonight as we were all leaving ‘I remind myself I’m doing this for fun’
+++ http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2012/mar/13/why-the-world-needs-introverts Introverts seem to be copy at the moment: there’s a long and interesting if-a-trifle-obvious-for-those-of-us-who-are article in TIME a week or so ago too (entitled ‘The upside of being an introvert and why extroverts are overrated’) but you have to be a subscriber to read it on line.# But the GUARDIAN’s ‘Are You an Introvert’ quiz makes me laugh hysterically.## I rank about 19 out of 20.###
# The GUARDIAN is still giving it away. It must have a plan? It has to be losing money by the luxury-liner-full. I’d just as rather it didn’t sink like the Titanic.
## Or possibly histrionically. I’m supposed to be trying to attract attention on line.
### The one question I clearly fail is ‘People describe me as soft-spoken or mellow.’ Snork. I admit there are a few other debatable answers.
^^^^ When I will need shoring up even worse. Ravenel is back next week. In his absence we’ve had nice young Japheth. I don’t think he’s any less demanding, but he’s not as scary.
*** WE HAD ANOTHER FRELLING FROST LAST NIGHT. ARRRRRRRRRRGH.
† One of the good peculiarities of hellhounds is that when they’re still in their crate they do not react to knocks on the door. Go away, they say. We’re not on duty yet. We’re asleep. They don’t start trying to—er—protect me till I’ve let them out of their crate in the morning. Which may be rather, ahem, late.
†† And one or two little items for me
††† The Idiot Off Lead Dog problem gets so severe in good weather it goes a way toward making me depressed when it’s beautiful outdoors. Today we had two things the size of adolescent elephants come racing at us from around a corner. One of them decided that the hedgerow was much more interesting than we were, which was fine with me, but the other one . . . fortunately she wanted to be our new best friend, but you don’t necessarily know that till it’s too late if that’s not what incoming had on its small furry mind. What is the matter with people. I was bellowing^ CALL YOUR DOG while this young elephant was trying to submit to the hellhounds: even lying down she was nearly bigger than they are. But what if my dogs weren’t friendly? She doesn’t deserve to get mauled because she doesn’t know any better—she was clearly a puppy, even if her size was a trifle distracting—that’s her owner’s job.
^ Maybe I should start carrying a megaphone, to help protect the purity and sweetness of my singing voice. How I’m going to use the freller, in the thick of things, I’m not sure, but it must be worth a try.
‡ I’d be happy to finish one right about now
‡‡ Don’t tell Niall, but I actually did entertain a brief fantasy, as I stared at my beautiful new violas^, of cancelling handbells. But I realised I couldn’t do it.^^
^ Any British gardeners out there who don’t know: http://www.elizabethmacgregornursery.co.uk/
I recommend her/them. You get a human being on the phone—usually her husband—the plants are always well packed and in excellent shape when they arrive—and usually recently potted on, so if you don’t (ahem) get to them as soon as you should, this isn’t a disaster—and while all her plants are good, her viola list is to die for.
^^ The Muddles, feh, they’re after dark.
‡‡‡ In which case Peter might divorce me, so maybe it’s just as well I don’t have the money
Various. Hey, I’ve been working, I have no brain or ability to make connections
So I finally made it to bell practise at the abbey again tonight and . . . the less said about it the better.
Sigh.
I tell myself that it’s been a month since I was there last, that I already know I’m finding the learning curve with those particular bells steep*, and that tonight wasn’t as bad, say, as the first time I rang there.** Or the first time I rang there after quitting New Arcadia, being intimidated out of my tiny mind, and wondering if I had a future as a ringer anywhere.
But not very much better.
Siiigh.***
* * *
I wish to say that I am DELIGHTED at the forum comments about year round decorated not-just-for-Christmas trees.† I’ve actually thought of trying to do this, de- and re-ornamenting a tree†† or a tree-like object, but in the first place I’ve never got round to it, partly because in the second place as soon as you start thinking, okay, this can be anything I want it to be the possibilities unfurl into infinity . . . beginning with the fact that it wouldn’t have to be exactly a tree, although, come Christmas again that might be easier.†††
I am also delighted that several people have posted liking John Carter: the critic-flayed film. Excellent. Now all it has to do is come to Zigguraton or Mauncester. I admit I want the full theatre experience. ‡
Meanwhile, Diane in MN posted a link to this excellent article about Burroughs and the original novels:
And last but not least, also carrying on from last night’s link-post, my favourite story so far about recent rampant sexism:
Maren:
Only a little over ten years ago, when I was an undergrad exchange student inFrance, I received a telemarketing-type call on the separate line that my host family nicely provided in their exchange student room. The woman on the other end asked to speak to the man of the house. As I was somewhat flummoxed by actually hearing this question out of the 1950s, the first phrase my still-shaky French brain offered up was: “I don’t have one.”
* * *
* Not to mention the stairs. Which have definitely got steeper in the last month.
** I had a cup of tea with Penelope today at her house^ and was describing my difficulties at the abbey, including the business of not ringing in a circle, which is what most of us are used to and what our rather feeble ropesight can cope with, but a line. Not a line, said Penelope, who has rung there herself, a banana. She’s right. Unfortunately I thought of this image tonight and it did not help my concentration.
^ Not without difficulty. Her entire street is up, with ‘road closed’ signs at both ends and mobs of yellow-jacketed persons rushing up and down waving uninterpretable instruments of destruction, flanked by diggers and dump trucks in a wide range of sizes and numbers of teeth. Having tried both ends without success, I parked Wolfgang in a hedgerow and hiked in, leaping over abysses and bubbling pits, and fending off over-familiar bulldozers. I believe they were air-lifting Penelope out when she had to go to work.
*** Maybe I should focus on singing. I pulled Che Faro Senza Eurydice off the shelf today for the first time in a while, to have a go at being tragic.^ Um. I think I may have achieved whining. Perhaps I’d better not focus on singing.^^
^ This may be as far as I can get into opera, but I want to sing this properly.
^^ I did get Nadia to help me with the frelling Owl and frellinger Pussycat on Monday. With her at my elbow being crisp it all seems terribly doable. This has gone away again. Yes, I can now sing the descant alone, possibly even without the one-finger-on-the-piano to hold me steady. But as soon as the basses start up tomorrow evening I’ll be toast. Pleeeeeeease let Griselda be there.
† Goes nicely with ‘a dog is for life and not just for Christmas’
http://www.dogstrust.org.uk/az/a/adogisforlife/default.aspx
And this year, Marks and Spencer, not to be outdone in the responsible consumer and empathic small-footprint, we’re-all-just-visiting-this-planet stakes, brought out a holiday-red shopping bag that says ‘a bag is for life, not just for Christmas’. I have a second-hand one—it arrived in this household bearing Christmas presents—and it amuses me every time I need a red plastic shopping bag to put something in.
†† I am totally with the idea of a chocolate Easter egg decorated tree, for example.
††† In the third place, I think Peter might not be entirely thrilled with the idea. Hmm. I could start experimenting by decorating the geraniums^ on the windowsills at the cottage perhaps. But a year-round holiday tree would, in my dastardly hands, turn into another sort of shelving for little noodgy objects—I already have not only a full complement of the standard sorts of dustcatchers, but little dangly things on chains and ribbons suspended from curtain rails and the cottage’s gigantic overhead beams and so on.
The good part of a rolling-with-the-seasons decorated tree is that you do get the fun of decorating (as someone on the forum said is an important part of the tree thing) while the boringness of the taking-down part is somewhat ameliorated. But what I foresee is that I’d just end up with the seasonal decorated not-a-tree plus a frelling Christmas tree all over again.
^ I’ve been moving around the cottage garden the last three days muttering Empty space! Look at all this empty space! and frantically trying to remind myself that this happens every year, I’ve got stuff ordered, CALM DOWN. Today in my inbox I have about sixty-two ‘your order has been shipped’ from plant nurseries all over England. And Scotland. Wheeeee. There goes my plan to repot everything on the windowsills before Spring Frenzy starts however.+
+ ::says in a very small voice:: But I do need a climbing rose . . .
‡ Opera and cheezy SF&F: McKinley’s theatre-going priorities. Which reminds me. Last-month’s-but-I-missed-it big story was: http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2012/feb/02/van-halen-different-truth-review
Remember I told you that I finally got around to having my adolescence in my thirties? Yeah. Well, the David Lee Roth Van Halen was a major feature in this enterprise^ and I was totally with Bloom County when Michael J Binkley declared that the whole world has gone to hell in a handbasket since David Lee Roth left Van Halen.^^
Now . . . want to know how I finally found out about the new album? By following an opera singer on Twitter.
And am I going to buy the first David Lee Roth Van Halen album in almost thirty years? Hmmm. . . .
^ Although a friend who was there used to say that I didn’t have a disturbing and unhealthy crush on Roth, I wanted to be him. Well, yes. The wardrobe, you know, although I’ve kept more of my hair.
^^ I had the original cartoon taped to my wall in Maine, but I didn’t get it laminated fast enough and it disintegrated when I peeled it off to take to England. This may have been an omen, of course.
‡‡ Michael Dirda is fabulous. He is fabulous not least—as I was saying of Michael Chabon last night—because he takes genre seriously.