Continued caresses
I keep thinking today must be Sunday, because I had a bell rope in my hands early in the day. Of course I had a horse in my hands even earlier in the day, which is a proper Saturday thing.* Speaking of caresses. There’s nothing nicer than a silky horse (except possibly a silky hellhound**). And I’ve realized Connie positively likes having her ears mauled. I think she stands on her head secretly in the field at midnight*** so she can come in in the morning with disgraceful ears. But today I was scrubbing away and discovered that her head, eyelids and bottom lip were all drooping lower . . . and lower . . . I put her away with very clean ears.
Ringing a wedding at my Wednesday tower is weirdly hermetic. At my home tower we have, you know, windows. That you can see out of. And we have them on three sides of the tower, including one that looks inside the church, so you can see what the bride is wearing and whether she was into torturing her bridesmaids. This is very useful; we can see at once when we need to leap to our ropes.† At towers without convenient windows you have to post a scout. At my Wednesday tower the only window is ten feet overhead, which you don’t think about during evening practice, and the scout has rather a way to come, so we’re poised for the sound of feet thundering up the stair. I suppose the locals are used to it but it makes me nervous. I also miss seeing what everybody is wearing.††
However. Enough of the chat. Here’s what you all have been waiting for.††† Elspeth is wasted on the literature-chopping industry. If she has a holiday in England I hope I can at least meet her for a cup of tea so we can fulminate together. Peter can come along if he wants to, but he’s really too mild-mannered to fulminate properly. Maybe it’s an American gene.
Subj: “Caress”
From: Elspeth.Winkle@Pancake.com
To: FamousWriter@Thingummy.com
Mr. Dickinson,
Thank you for your kind email! Nothing would please me more than to have a list of no-no words. However, this is an unwritten list and very fickle to say the least.
Each State Department of Education assembles various committees (during the test development period) that will consist of various types of people, cutting across the layers of their populace. Various educational levels, variations in financial status, religion, color and creed. Every single member of the committees has the right to reject words (or complete stories) that are offensive to the individuals and the community which they represent. The final decisions do not always include all the craziness that is suggested, but it does get pretty “funny” some times. One wonders what kind of world these people live in, or have they been around children lately.
As far as the testing industry is concerned
children are never hungry,
they do not get lost or hurt,
they are not exposed to any abuse,
they never fight or are witness to any fights,
they love everyone and everyone loves them,
no one ever passes away,
or is very ill,
there are no floods,
hurricanes,
tornados
or fires…………….ever.
Children also will only be able to concentrate during specific word count numbers, or else.
I am most likely forgetting several other disasters that are not allowed, but I have to stop, because I am getting very depressed thinking of all this bad stuff. There are times where Alzheimer’s comes in handy.
Depending on the state, the passages may be found by teachers, contracted passage finders complying with specific state standards and grade levels, and also by the development team here and at the state level. Between what is available in the public library or can be found on the internet, the world is their oyster.
I hope that this will not prompt you to drink too much wine………or maybe it should. In any case, keep on writing.
Thank you for your understanding!
Best to you!
Elspeth
Elspeth Winkle
Permissions - Intellectual Properties
Pancake Publishing
* * *
* ‘Early’ is of course relative. I did not get to bed ‘early’ last night.
** Yes, yes, and silky cats, ferrets, rabbits–are birds silky? I wouldn’t really have characterized Angel as silky–and various other caressable creatures.
*** Since midnight is early evening to me, I should go have a stroll that way some time,^ and check.
^ Do not take hellhounds, they will see it as a precedent.
† Unless you are on one of the back bells and very gymnastic with it^ you can’t see out the window over the front door while you’re ringing but you can usually hear the tumult of a wedding ebbing away from you, even through the noise of the bells. We have at least one window open pretty much year round: eight people pulling briskly on ropes in a small room, it gets pretty sultry in there. And bell tower windows tend to be first cousins to arrow slits.
^ Which would not be I
†† Note there were a second pair of Converse All Stars ringing the wedding this afternoon.
††† And yes I did ask her if it was all right if I posted her email on my blog.
Water
It has not been one of my better days.
It began, as my days so often do, yesterday. Or very early this morning: 1:30, approximately, when I went to run a bath and discovered I had no water.
And that began about a fortnight ago now, when they started digging up the road east of here. But a fortnight ago they were still safely out of town, on the road to the next little village. But they immediately started jackhammering their way back toward us again, and they arrived last Friday, so all this week it has been a total fricking nightmare this end of town. I think I’ve done some ranting about the way people blithely park on the double yellow line* on our piece of the road, which is mostly residential. Our road is also narrower than it is once you reach the centre of town, which is to say our road is two lanes wide, full stop. The shoulders are the vertical banks previously referred to, which Wolfgang and I had to climb a few days ago to get out of the way of a rampaging SUV which thought I was trying to get away with something. I was, I was trying to turn up my little cul de sac from a single traffic lane, which is all we’ve got at the moment. Since extra-large vehicles–troop carriers, perhaps, or tanks, or ground helicopter transport, disguised as passenger cars and painted in this year’s fashion colours–commonly park, as I say, on our double yellow lines, I should be accustomed to negotiating the merciless turn in and out of my cul de sac** while unable to see a blind bit of what’s coming in either direction. But it’s a funny thing, I am not accustomed, and I object, and furthermore there’s been increasing amounts of Large Paraphernalia hither and thither in both directions occupying even more space than the (lengthening) stretch they’re digging up, which means the extent of the single lane is stretching and stretching too, and the whole situation is too migraineworthy for words. Especially the prospect of their coming back again next week, which, since they’ve left all their toys behind, obviously they are going to.
Yesterday I was blazing back to the cottage to drop hellhounds off on my way to my piano lesson . . . and discovered I had no water. I ambled gently and nonchalantly down to the foot of my street and observed that some of the bozos in current occupation were wearing Southern Water logos so I attack–I mean I addressed one politely and he said oh, yeah, they’d turned it off, they’d turn it back on again in a little while.*** I didn’t have time to stay and chat† so I accepted this and shot off for my piano lesson.†† Friday afternoons are always a blur, and Peter was not playing bridge, so I went down to the mews after bell ringing practise. So I didn’t get home till . . . when I usually get home. And shortly thereafter discovered I had no water.
There were words. Hellhounds opened their eyes to check it had nothing to do with them.††† I found an old water bill and phoned the effing 24-hour emergency service and spoke to a surprisingly alert-sounding woman who did not deny that Southern Water had been mucking about on my street but said mildly that there were no reported problems. There are now, I replied. She promised to send someone round at 9 o’clock which I accepted gracefully, but it didn’t do a lot for my bath.
I didn’t sleep very well last night, for some reason. Something about the adrenaline spike getting stuck, perhaps.
But the water engineer was here at 9:05 and promptly went down in a sea of hellhounds. Fighting his way to the surface again he asked where the stopcock was, a question that had already exercised me somewhat, especially after the surprisingly alert woman had suggested I turn it off and on again to dislodge anything that was blocking my pipe, and I couldn’t find it. He eventually did, but had to take everything out of my under-sink cupboard first‡, where it was discovered in the farthest diagonal rear corner, and furthermore down a hole, where he couldn’t get his spanner‡‡ in the beggar.
Time passed. Only the hellhounds were happy.
I’m not sure how he finally mastered the thing. A small, trained, obedient goblin, perhaps. But at least I have water. Although given the amount of crud still coming through, I’m going to emerge from my bath tonight cinnamon-coloured‡‡‡ and I have no idea when I’ll be able to wash the white sheets from Wednesday Friend’s bed. Obviously if I weren’t a lazy slut I’d've done it already.
And that was only the beginning. But I want to go to bed now and read more of The Graveyard Book. And try not to get blood on anything.
* * *
* Ie, no parking
** Which is itself barely one lane wide, with brick-and-flint walls bordering both sides, in the uncompromising and inelastic way of brick and flint. Delivery trucks get stuck up here occasionally, which is always exciting.
*** Just as a matter of carefree curiosity what happens to, say, your washing machine, if it’s running and the water is suddenly turned off? Does it burn any of its bits out or anything?
† Nor did I have time to do running mad with an axe properly. Starting with the fact that I only have a hatchet for breaking up kindling.^
^ Hmm. Maybe I’ll get an axe for Third House, where there’s space for a woodpile, and room to swing an axe. And then it would be available for situations like these.
†† Where my cunning plan to play Name That Tune, my arrangement being rather successful, was slightly foiled by Oisin’s never having heard of Gypsy Rover. Gods, the man has such effing refined taste. He probably doesn’t even know who Led Zeppelin is. Or Peter, Paul and Mary. The only folk songs he knows are ones that Benjamin Effing Britten set. And he got them from Beethoven. Or possibly Haydn. Feh.
††† Or wasn’t the start of a promising new game. The auditory cues were inhibiting but the leaping around was hopeful.
‡ You don’t want to know. But he seems to think I hoard plastic bags. But he liked the hellhounds, so I forgive him calumnies on my personal habits.
‡‡ wrench
‡‡‡ Hey! Great! I can never get a tan!
Off lead
Here in the States, all the websites with dog information insist that sight-hounds should NEVER be let off-leash ANYWHERE not securely bounded by seven-foot fences… I think this seems like cruel and unusual punishment for an animal whose nature is to run, and my impression of your dog-walking involves your dogs running around off-leash - am I right?
This is the source of almost daily head-clutching* and anguished moaning**. The same advice rules over here too, and the problem is that it’s good advice. Sighthounds can disappear in less time than it takes to finish blinking, and be in the next county by the time you’ve drawn breath to call them. And I have the sharp end even of the disappearing sighthound continuum: greyhounds are the fastest dogs on the planet, but whippets are only a few fractured seconds slower and, furthermore, they’re sprinters. This is very useful when the only space you have available where you can regularly let your four-winds-on-eight-legs off lead is a small town garden (as you’ve guessed, that’s Third House in the silly hellhound photos), because they hit their speed at about the second leap and can turn on pinheads, never mind big clumsy dimes. But it’s harrowing out in the wide world. I talk to other dog people about the danger of dogs running away, and yes, it’s a danger for everyone, and any half-young and half-fit dog, including three-legged Yorkshire terriers, can escape a mere human. And I also have other dog people say, oh yes, my dog is really fast too. Well . . . no. Fast enough to get away from you; fast enough to disappear if your mind wanders. Yes. Fast enough that it simply must come when it’s called–reliably; and dogs are mortal, and prone to error, just like their humans. And therefore every dog is a big scary problem let off lead. But if you don’t have a sighthound, you don’t know how big and scary that problem can be.
I also know people who say laconically, oh, yeah, he/she runs off occasionally but he/she always comes back. This makes my hair stand on end. Back in the Palaeolithic when all you had to worry about is being trodden on by a brontosaurus***, okay, maybe you could afford to let your dog run off occasionally and assume it would find its way home again. But there are at least two powerful forces militating against this laissez-faire method of dog management in our modern society: dog thieves and cars.
I don’t know what it’s like in the rest of the world, but in Britain sighthounds, longdogs and lurchers are still highly desirable to a small enthusiastic percentage of the population for their pot-filling abilities†. Most of this group are as honest as you or I†† but there are those that aren’t, and they’re one of the reasons why sighthounds are near the top of any dog thief’s list of eligibility. I had an encounter once, when my hellhounds were about a year old, with a sporting-looking gentleman who liked them rather too well, and I was so subarticulately vague about where we lived that I think he both grasped why I was vague, and also that I may be middle aged and female but I’m not entirely stupid. I think the latter annoyed him, but at least he went away. And some of the other purposes dog thieves sell to . . . let’s not go there at all.
But cars. . . . Okay, the south of England suffers from high population density with attendant transportation facilitation networks . . . but show me anywhere in the developed world that doesn’t have inconveniently placed roads from a dog-walking perspective. When I lived in the back woods of Maine you could get lost, sometimes literally, up in the old logging trails where, if you were so unlucky as to meet a vehicle at all, it would be going 10 mph max so as not to rip itself to pieces. You can get out of the way of 10 mph. There are no back woods in the south of England, and those little twisty one-lane-wide two-way††† roads have a speed limit of 60. Sixty. Miles per hour. On a one–okay, maybe one and a half–lane wide road with hedgerows on either side, so you can’t see in any direction. Also, because of the way olde Englande is laid out, with tiny crammed-together villages surrounded by great swathes of farmland, quite big main roads slash through what looks like away-from-it-all countryside, where there are people walking their dogs and riding their horses and watching birds through their binoculars and generally trying to pretend the roads (and the exhaust backdraughts) aren’t there too. The speed limit on an officially designated motorway is 70 mph, and I’m here to tell you that if you average 75, you’ll be regularly overtaken.
And then there’s livestock. There are a few signal failures in my current incarnation as a hellhound wrangler, and one of them is that I have thus far entirely failed to discourage their extreme interest in livestock. I wouldn’t have a dog–one of my dogs that is, of the pet companion rather than the serious working category–loose in a field of livestock anyway, but I get tired of calling my little maniacs off, even with the leash as enforcement strategy. I read this rather arcane weekly paper about ‘countrysports’ for the lurcher, hawk and ferret info–especially the lurcher articles, which are always making offhand references to the fact that you must ensure that your working lurcher is ‘safe to stock’ so it can chase rabbits in fields full of sheep and so on. But they never tell you how. It’s not crucial in our case; my guys are never going to have to earn a living grabbing rabbits. But it would be philosophically pleasing to have a clue how one went about such.
But livestock are yet one more reason why your opportunities to let your hellhound off lead are limited. And sighthounds go deaf the moment they spot something to chase. Chasing things is what they’ve been bred for for hundreds if not thousands of years–and in the case of Salukis and greyhounds, probably thousands.‡ You haven’t got a prayer of overriding all that history. You work like hell on your recall, you bond like crazy, you keep your paranoia honed to a razor-sharp edge . . . and you have your heart in your mouth a lot of the time.
So the short form is yes, I let my hellhounds off lead. Occasionally. Nothing like as often as I’d like to, but Life Is Compromise, and this is the best I can do. If you’ve ever seen a sighthound run, you know you simply have to let them. Running isn’t merely what they do, it’s what they are. Of our three whippets, Hazel was the one who had to run. Of my two 7/8ths whippet x 1/8th deerhound hellhounds, it’s Chaos. Darkness chiefly runs for purpose–which purpose is usually to nail Chaos–Chaos runs for sheerest joy. They both have that drop-down-a-gear-and-burn thing that running dogs all have, and sighthounds extraordinarily so, but in Chaos’ case it makes your heart and your breath stop, and your eyes tear up. Not only in fear that he’ll be having a deaf fit when you go to call him in.
And I really need the reissued SUNSHINE or the new CHALICE to be a best-seller because I want to buy an acre of good running land, and put a seven-foot fence around it.
* * *
* Or head-banging-with-large-heavy-plastic-drum-handle-of-long-extending-lead, which is what happens if you try to clutch your head while out walking with a brace of hellhounds.
** Which leads inevitably to this
*** Yes, I know, there’s about a 100 million years between the last brontosaurus and the Palaeolithic. It’s what we call in the trade a vivid image.
† Ie they catch things you can eat.
†† Well I don’t know about you
††† Yes, you read that right. Now that I have (sort of) figured out how to load photos, I want to have a Favourite Road Signs of Britain series. One of them is: ‘oncoming vehicles in middle of road’.
‡ Whippets are youngsters–a couple hundred years or so–but they’re only bred-down greyhounds, and greyhounds are thousands of years old. Greyhound-type dogs with and without feathering are painted on the walls of the pharoahs’ tombs. The folk mythology that I know says that Salukis as a breed and a specific lineage are even older than greyhounds, but I think that probably depends on who you read, and how your sense of romance takes you.
Life with ME
Yesterday the GUARDIAN ran a very good article on life with ME:
http://lifeandhealth.guardian.co.uk/health/story/0,,2278074,00.html#article_continue
He’s right about the unpredictability of it, and what that does to you–and what other people, especially the experts, can do to you by insisting that you do it their way.* I’m not much of a sleeper; what I do is go comatose. I’ll come back to myself and find that I’m doing nothing while staring blankly into space. Bach’s fugue states are much more fun. I’m surprised that the estimate is as low as 240,000 people in the UK with ME however: but then they’re still arguing about defining and measuring it.
So, next week is ME Awareness Week, who knew? Well, I’m not on any support lists so I don’t get the bulletins from the front. My interest is particularly snagged by his remarks toward the end of the article about trying to be healthy in an unhealthy society. There are no upsides to having a stupid illness; you’d much rather be well, and deal with what needs to be dealt with.** But if you’re forced to be hyper-vigilant about stuff that most people can let slide, well, you notice things, you can hardly help it. And maybe it’s hard sometimes not to rush up to the worn-looking mum in the shop who’s letting her toddler eat sweets to keep him quiet and give her a lecture on child nutrition and the appalling rise in child diabetes and ADHD, but it’s probably her boss who needs the lecture, and who has the shareholders on his neck and a small but expanding habit of driving under the influence because he ends every working day wired out of his gourd, or her husband, who’s taken a second job so they can afford to pay the fees for the decent rest home for his mum, who has Alzheimer’s and his dad can’t cope any more, and maybe they’ve got a special-needs kid or even a specially-talented kid who should have expensive lessons . . . and so it goes. It’s the way the world has gone, and sure you can buck it–and I imagine that most of the people who read the blogs of writers of fantasy are bucking it to a greater or lesser extent–bucking is hard. And while I’m ranting, let me add that I’m also one of those sad clueless ought-to-get-out-more prigs that think of course all the TV and film and video-game sex and violence has an effect on its audience and therefore society. This is no-brainer territory to me. But then I think all kinds of unfashionable things. I’m old, you know? This is how old people get. Grrrrr.
I don’t seem to be in a very good mood.*** Well, the ME is hanging on and hanging on and I’m bored with it. I don’t like having no brain, when you try and learn something and it just slides right off, like water over granite. You might manage to wear a channel in the granite after a few millennia, but it’s not an ideal system for little short-lived humans. The only thing I might cavil about the above article is that he sounds so calm and rational. He doesn’t talk about the rage, the frustration, the depression. Your moods may fluctuate like your energy level does.†
Like another of my favourite kitchen magnets says: No, life isn’t what I wanted. Haven’t you got something else?
* And that if you don’t, you’re a malingerer. Reminds me of the old test for witches: you throw them in the village pond. If they drown, they were innocent. If they swim, they’re witches, so you haul them out and stone them to death. I’ve probably already told you this story: that I stopped going to see my doctor when she said she ‘didn’t believe’ in ME. That was eight years ago, however, long before the NHS by a narrow margin voted ME into official existence. I haven’t been back to check her story however.
** Rant alert: I don’t believe those people who talk about their cancer or their stroke or their schizophrenia–or even their ME, which I realise is a minor contender in the ghastliness stakes–as the best thing that ever happened to them. There are some amazing and inspirational stories about people who transformed their lives enormously for the better, for the larger, for the more creative, for the more connected, as a result of some terrifying disease or condition, and who say that they wouldn’t have done it if it weren’t for the terrifying thing. Absolutely full points and tea with the queen to the people who do make lemonade out of a particularly sticky lot of lemons, but I flatly don’t believe that the only way to make lemonade is to fight your way single-handed through the hydra-headed ravening panthers that guard the one perfect lemon tree in the garden of the gods. There are other paths to enlightenment than pain and despair. If you want to be grateful that you were given any way at all to enlightenment, that’s fine, and I understand that. But that’s not quite the same thing. Feel free to come all over holy and glorious and argue with me about it but you won’t get anywhere. And anyone who wants me to think about what the gift in my ME is can meet me for pistols at dawn. Yes, the ME has been extremely educational, and I’m also grimly aware that it serves a purpose–since I don’t rein myself in very well, it does the reining for me, and as a result I’m not dead yet–but there is a better way. And possibly thanks to its tender ministrations I may even live long enough to find it. And then the ME can heave a vast sigh of relief and go pester some other poor stressed-out sod.
*** This may just be the result of our morning walk: we went out for a last pass of the season through my favourite bluebell woods before the bluebells go over, and couldn’t get anywhere near them, or much of anywhere else either, on account of the fields in seemingly all directions being full of farmers with vast tentacled machinery squirting toxic chemicals on the crops. So this evening I may either be suffering secondary wind-drift poisoning, or mere I-wanted-my-bluebells crankiness. I’ve often wondered how much I have to thank local agrochemical custom for my ME; at the old house we were surrounded by farmland. I also wonder how much of what sticks to the crops is absorbed through the pads of the hellhounds’ feet.
†Yes, it’s a full time job having ME. Ha. Ha.