Poor overwhelmed exhausted lurgified person
My dog minder didn’t show up today.
Ordinarily I don’t absolutely need a dog walker to give hellhounds their second long sprint of the day Monday or any other day. But I found out the hard way that if you don’t get your dog minder on retainer, so to speak, she’s less likely to find time for you when you really need her for the exciting one-offs of life*. So I have her every Monday, and then I can come home and have a nice cup of tea after my voice lesson and before I have to go ringing.**
We had a traumatic morning*** when I bundled hellhounds into Wolfgang and went out to Warm Upford for fuel. It is insane that there are no petrol stations within about five miles of New Arcadia† but that’s the way it is. New Arcadia has several thousand residents and Warm Upford has several hundred, but it’s Warm Upford with the petrol station. It took sixty one quid to fill Wolfgang’s tank. I nearly had heart failure.†† Granted the tank was unusually empty, thanks to the petrol-strike panic-buying nonsense which I wanted to give a miss if at all possible (and there was no sign of it today), but for sixty-one quid in the current economic climate I could buy a perfectly serviceable, low-maintenance pony.†††
We did still have an excellent hurtle—it’s the beginning of April, the progress of the bluebells must be closely monitored from here on.‡ And this is the beginning of my favourite time of year: from the daffs and forsythia and the first little bluebell florets and the swelling lilac buds through to the great midsummer hurrah of my roses: everything is rushing out at increasing speed and your mission, Ms Briggs, should you decide to accept it, is to try and frelling keep up. I squeezed nearly an hour in the garden out of a schedule that had time for no such foolishness in it‡‡ and I did think, as I pelted off to Wolfgang‡‡‡ and Nadia, that it was odd my dog minder hadn’t come yet.
Nadia was teaching in a new place—and fortunately I met her previous student leaving or I might never have found it, hidden away as it is behind some trompe d’oeil hedges. It’s a nice if fairly ordinary looking bungalow and then you get inside and . . . golly. Serious music room. Yeep. Intimidating. But it was still Nadia. And it was Nadia who had told me during my last lurgy§ that often enough to be hopeful about it, you can sing through a lot of head, throat and upper respiratory malfeasances, and this is (so far) one of those. It’s positively bizarre, to sing as well as you ever do§§ and then as soon as you stop, to be sneezing and talking in a hoarse, scratchy voice. And I have not one but two new songs to learn over the Easter break§§§.
I then came back to the cottage, feeling a trifle worn, wanting only to pick up well-hurtled hellhounds and sweep down to the mews to have a nice cup of tea and perhaps some extravagance like an apple before ringing . . . and my dog minder hadn’t come. Weep. Weep.
I hurtled hounds—perhaps a little slower than usual, and with more pauses for nose-blowing. I rang Niall to ask if he was going ringing tonight. He answered the phone sounding like me. I will if you will, he croaked. So we went, trying to breathe shallowly, although a bunch of ringers is not so unlike a classroom of virusy children, and you all know how that works out.# It was a particular ratbag to be tottery and brainless too because my old ringing master, from the veriest deeps of time before ME and the turn of the century, was there, and he can ring anything. He does, however, need the band to ring any/everything, and . . .
I am so going to bed early.##
* * *
* Or possibly the opera-season-offs.
** I like that have to go ringing. Well, I do. Ringing is necessary to my life. Which is a good reason for living in England, which still has the highest density of change-ringing bell towers anywhere on the planet.^
^ Not to mention the beginner handbell education seminar tomorrow. Did I tell you about this? Niall got me into it. Of course.
*** Aside from the ‘getting up’ part. Lurgies share with ME the delightful business of making you need more sleep and allowing you to get less. La la la la la la la. Well, my TBR pile has lowered noticeably, although I may be throwing the rejects against the wall sooner than usual.
† I suppose one positive side effect of all the new-build we’re going to get whether we like it or not, or whether we sign petitions till we’re blue and purple in the face or not, or whether we attend town meetings twice a day for the next sixty years or not, is that we may finally get our own petrol station. I guess that’s positive. . . .
†† I nearly bit the attendant, who was way too jolly and perky. I could probably have claimed it was an uncontrollable spasm.
††† I tweeted the £61 and had a few tweets and emails in reply that I should stick to walking, biking, buses and trains. In a perfect world. Nadia is twelve or twenty-plus miles away. When she’s twelve miles away the bus service between here and there exists, but it would take me all day, and I could probably knit cardigans for all of you in the time I spent waiting around for my next connection. When she’s twenty-plus miles away . . . I don’t think you can get there from here.
I will not bike on Hampshire roads. People certainly do and they shouldn’t. They’re a danger to themselves and to fossil-fuel-powered traffic. The little country roads are mostly barely two lanes wide—at least when they’re one lane wide you jolly well ought to be driving carefully—and usually close-bordered by hedgerows, but most of those tiny roads nonetheless have a 60 mph speed limit, which most cars are eager to take advantage of. And then you hove around a blind corner and find a bicyclist pedalling slowly down the middle of the road, either because he is a careless moron, or because he’s read or been told that it’s safer to occupy your lane and make cars slow down than to hug the edge and encourage them to blast past whether they’ve got room or not. I don’t know why we don’t have gruesome bicycle fatalities a lot more often. I personally slow down on blind corners, but then I’m a wuss.
And local trains are a species of fiction out of P G Wodehouse or Dornford Yates.
The pony-trap could at least carry my music. But it would still be a long jog to Nadia on Monday afternoons.
‡ Yes, gods willin’ and the crick don’t rise, there will be the Ritual Sea of Bluebells Photos in a few weeks.
‡‡ The robin is still sitting on the nest. Yaaaay. The first time I saw her she was sitting high and proud but as the days pass she seems to be sinking lower and lower. I wonder if the fault in three-dimensional space on that shelf is likely to spread. I could use some hidden space for empty plant pots, which breed like mosquitoes in a marsh, but only if I can get them back out again at need.
‡‡‡ I half-expect his fuel tank to Glow with an Unearthly Light
§ Generally speaking I rarely get this kind of dumb short-term bug. I resent being ill AGAIN.
§§ Poised under the ceiling dormer with the glass sun roof, where the acoustics are a bit friendlier
§§§ And a third if I’m feeling silly. I do need to be kept away from Una Voce Poco Fa for another . . . decade.
# The seminar tomorrow may sound like the ear, nose, throat and pulmonary ward.
## EARLY! EARLY! EARLY!
No Sleep Monday
I put Hannah on the train this morning. Waaaaaaah.
I put Hannah on the train way too early this morning in an absolute sense aside from the losing-Hannah aspect. I haven’t been out of bed that early since I stopped service ringing. . . . and we just lost our frelling spring-forward hour this weekend. I am seriously not of this planet right now. But (being awake for) millions of hours of daylight is, I admit, rather jolly, and the weather goes on being spectacular* if spectacularly dry.**
So I put Hannah on the train and, sobbing brokenly, parked Wolfgang under a tree near the station and took hellhounds for a hurtle. Of course I brought them with me. Doesn’t everyone with companion canines take advantage of every possible excuse for hurtling?
Mrs Redboots
I love the way you stress that you know every pub in Mauncester by name only. . . . I have to admit I’d been wondering. . . .
Well, there are critter-friendly pubs, but we’re generally not going inside even when we can. We’re hurtling. But Mauncester is a good walking town, I’ve lived in this area for twenty (and a half) years, and ferreting around in the twisty back bits is fun. I don’t remember when I crossed the line where I (mostly) stop worrying about getting lost because I know enough of Mauncester that I won’t stay lost very long, but at this point I seek out the bits (especially twisty back bits) I don’t know. During the foot-and-mouth crisis when the entire countryside was closed we hurtled that generation of resident four-legs in Mauncester and Prinkle-on-Weald.*** Prinkle-on-Weald is now pretty much too far away for anything but an adventure, but Mauncester is closer than it was from the old house. I also have a very minor fantasy about living in Mauncester—where you can be walking distance of a library†, a cinema and a train station, as well as some very nice English countryside. It’s not going to happen, but it makes an agreeable directional fantasy: okay, do I want to live in this neighbourhood? How does the pub look?
After this we went back to the mews where I alternately poured cold water over my head and guzzled hot caffeine in a (mostly futile) attempt to wake up. But I still managed to pretend to sing a little, and went off to my voice lesson. You are probably aware by other standards that life is full of ratbaggishness? Over the weekend I’d sung less well than I can, because I was busy being nerrrrrrvous about singing for someone. While, perversely and simultaneously, I found myself able to ham it up more than I can for Nadia or Oisin—because my audience was a relaxed, friendly and nonprofessional one††. Nadia, of course, heard what I was (or wasn’t) doing almost immediately, sorted me out with rather embarrassing swiftness††† and then threw me into Dove Sei, which I had cornballed up in a shocking manner for Peter and Hannah. And of course I stiffened up and sang it like a funerary urn, if funerary urns sang—and this despite the fact that I was making a better quality of noise, if you follow me. ARRRRRGH. That’s fine, said Nadia, that’s a very nice tone, now sing it like you’re ENJOYING it.
Sigh.
Diane in MN
. . . as an opera fan, I tend to cringe when opera singers decide to make crossover albums. South Pacific may have worked for Ezio Pinza, but Placido Domingo as Tony in West Side Story was not a good idea. And there is a cruel recording of Jose Carreras singing Jingle Bells. . . .
JINGLE BELLS? Oh my . . . gods. Oh. Eeeep. Did Domingo do a West Side Story? OUCH. I lose all respect, etc. Kiri te Kanawa and Jose Carreras—poor old Jose is listening to the wrong advice, clearly—were bad enough: I agree that crossover is mostly dire.‡ But I’d gladly—gladly—forfeit all possibility of singing Maria plausibly‡‡ in exchange for sounding like te Kanawa.‡‡‡
* * *
* Anthea tonight on the treble commented on the excellence of the view: where you stand to ring the treble at Glaciation^ is opposite one of those little high arched church windows, and in this case you could see a shiny crescent moon and some glittering planet or other through it. I had been ringing the treble before her, but I had been staring at the floor in an agony of concentration. If I’d noticed the moon I would merely have instantly gone wrong.
^^ I’m still in two wool jumpers to ring there, although it’s shirtsleeve weather in daytime sun. You wander down the path to the church in your t shirt with your bulging knapsack over one shoulder. You walk through the vestibule and shiver. You enter the main part of the church and pull out your first jumper and put it on. Then you walk into the ringing chamber, hastily don your second jumper, and race to plug in the two electric fires.
** I was out watering in the cottage garden this afternoon^ and thinking I ought to have a built in irrigation system with All the Plumbing in Hampshire running under my tiny plot of land: I ought to be able to drill a few tactful little holes, attach those leaky-hose things, and bob’s your uncle. Pipes should have a nice colour-code system like electric wires, so you know you’re drilling in the right pipe. . . .
^ And swearing. Later in the year when I shift from my PINK wellies to my (brown) clogs because it’s too hot to be in rubber to your knees, I become resigned to slopping water in my shoes. It takes skill and dedication to pour water down the inside of your pink wellies.
*** I missed telling you yesterday that the garden Hannah and I went to was in Chappington Fritworthy. It’s not like I get to mention it very often.
† New Arcadia does have a library, but it’s the two shelves and a plastic chair, open alternate Thursdays from 2:45-3 pm and every third Friday from 7-7:17 pm variety. Mauncester has a proper library.
†† Not to say clueless. Clueless would be good.
††† It’s so obvious after the fact. Sometimes it’s obvious before the fact too, but that doesn’t necessarily mean you can DO anything about it. I was aware that my throat was only about half open, the roof of my mouth and my ‘mask’ were pretty well as bright and light as an anvil, and my abdominal support had decamped for Toulouse.
‡ In both directions. I HAAAAAAAATED Sting singing Purcell and Dowland. HAAAAAAAAATED.
‡‡ heeheeheeheeheeheeheeheeheeheehee
‡‡‡ Or Deborah Voigt or Janet Baker or Marilyn Horne or Joyce diDonato or Beverly Sills or Tatiana Troyanos or Cecilia Bartoli or . . . see really I’m easy to please.
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.
Caveats and clarifications
Ravenel is leaving the Muddlehampton Choir (in the lurch)!*
He’s retired, for pity’s sake, but like a lot of other old people who are only old chronologically**, he’s a consultant, and they love him in Bandar Seri Begawan. He’s been out there several times and that was supposed to be the end of his contract—but they’ve just offered him a longer-term one and he’s TAKING it, the ratbag.
I was all ready to be devastated . . . and then he started us on a new song*** last thing tonight which is so unutterably loathsome I found myself unable to pry my tongue from the roof of my mouth and sing it. Arrgh. People have frelling quit choirs for less. (It’s supposed to be funny. It isn’t. And the music is BORING.) So maybe I’ll like having Ravenel in Bandar Seri Begawan better than I expected. Meanwhile . . . the post of director/conductor is open† and to some extent the structure of the choir with it. NOW IS THE TIME FOR OISIN TO START THE NEW ARCADIA SINGERS. AND WE WILL SING NO LOATHSOME SONGS.††
* * *
The problem with writing the blog on fumes is that you tend not to say what you mean to say, or you leave stuff out, or you fail to express yourself clearly enough, or you don’t make all the caveats you should make. Caveat number one: I know I’ve said much of what I said last night before. But the doodles remain undone, and I owe you an update occasionally. Blogmom also needs to be able to say something useful to understandably plaintive non-blog-readers about what’s going on.
Catlady
Well, I am the one who originally suggested 2017 as a possible mailing date for the doodles,
Yes, I remember you ’17ers. I like you a lot.
and I’m sticking to that, so by my count, you’ve got five and a half years (if we’re counting to the Christmas season in 2017, so that we can, if we desire, give doodles as gifts. To ourselves.).
I’m also a strong believer in self-selected gifts. Who needs surprise when you can have exactly what you want?†††
And I am quite looking forward to Shadows, and am glad that it’s taking the time that the doodles would take. The motto I’ve been trying to live by recently is: there are always important things I’m neglecting in favor of the important things I’m doing, but that doesn’t mean what I’m doing is wrong.
Yes. I’m with you all the way on this one. Prioritizing, and all those clever punchy annoying business-speak words, only work so far. We’re still waiting for our thirty-six hour day. With the brain stamina to go with it.‡
katinseattle
Robin, stop whacking yourself over the head.
Huh? Um. How am I whacking myself over the head? I’m fairly cranky at fate, but then I am often cranky at fate. And I might have handled last year better, but that would mean going back to about this time last year and realising expeditiously that PEG II had a serious and insoluble from the then-current approach problem,‡‡ and when one’s critical errors start fading into the mists of time . . . maybe it’s just my short attention span, but I’m much more interested in coping with now. And it’s more what catlady said: I may be screwing up, but that doesn’t mean what I am doing is wrong. I’ve prioritised: SHADOWS must come first. This isn’t getting the doodles done. And I’m sorry about that—as I should be. That’s not whacking myself over the head. That’s being fate’s hellhounds’ chew-toy.
We’re here because we like and admire you.
Thank you! But some of the people who ordered books and doodles last autumn just wanted their merchandise.
Personally, I’m sorry for your sake that Shadows is taking longer than you wanted, but I’d much rather have quality McKinley than earlier McKinley.
Well, so would I . . . but it’s also not really my choice. The Story is the Story, as I keep saying. I can only do what it lets me do. And if it doesn’t like the quality of the blood flow it’ll make me find another vein. Ow.
lorelibrarian
As for the doodles, well, I’ve forgotten I sent off the money now, so it will feel like I’m getting a free amazing gift from the universe whenever it does arrive.
I love this.‡‡‡
* * *
* jmeadows
She doesn’t knit because nothing happens fast enough? Hee. Someone is clearly not a process knitter. I like the way knitting feels! I’m perfectly happy to wait for something to happen. (Though I don’t like waiting TOO long. I’m not made of patience, you know.)
This would be me too. Especially given that I’m still doing the knitting equivalent of moving my lips when I read, if I were into product I would be in big trouble. Certainly at my level—squares, and Very Basic Ribbing, knitting is meditative, and I can use all the calming options I can get. And wasting time winds me up something vicious, so it serves a dual purpose: the knitting itself is soothing, and the not wasting time is sort of soothing-plus. And I was casting off The World’s Longest Leg Warmer during break tonight. Because I’m not made of patience either^ and I would like to wear these things, that’s things, plural, as in TWO of them, next winter. . . .
^ Shock horror. Film at eleven.
** . . . Ahem.
*** Remember I said that nobody knows the playlist for the summer concert?
†Nice young Japheth is going to a new job inYorkshire or somewhere equally extreme at the end of the year, so he’s not a candidate. But we may have him through the summer concert if Ravenel slopes off early.
†† I will be sure to be on the board, and the first rule we will pass is that all items on the musical programme must be okayed by the board.^
^ The Muddles are looking for more board members . . . NOOOOOOOOOOOOO.+
+ Not unless we can pass this one little new rule. . . .
††† And some people want vampire muffins.
‡ Last night as I lay sleepless in my icy cold bed^ I was thinking about kinds of energy: creative, which overlaps with but is not the same as intellectual; emotional, which also overlaps with and adds resonance to creative, but is definitely not the same as, and which is in a constant running fire-fight with intellectual which is inconvenient, wasteful and stupid; and physical energy, which is a crucial support for all the rest, as well as necessary for hurtling, gardening, and singing exercises at your computer.^^ I no longer remember what it’s like to be juggling all this as a normal, un-ME’d^^^ person, but with ME you also have the spoons issue.^^^^ Different kinds of energy also demand different numbers of spoons. And I’m terrible at maths.
^ My electric blanket went phut the moment the temperature dropped back to gelid again. Thanks so much. Maybe there will be a nice sale on electric blankets in April.
^^ There’s at least one more but I’m not sure what to call it. Moral energy, possibly, which is a kind of immaterial resilience or fortitude.
^^^ And possibly younger. Something else I’ve said here before, I’d rather blame the ME for being stupid and feeble, than just that I’m getting old.
This link is also in the ‘about’ section of this blog. I have a very mild case, as ME—and lupus, and fibro, and a lot of other auto-immune things that lead with tiredness and pain and general offness—goes.
‡‡ And, you know, there’s a first time for everything. I could do expeditious one of these years. I could.
‡‡ This is also the argument for, for example, pre-ordering books. You can forget they’re coming. And then . . . what’s nicer than a desirable new book to read??
Roses. And Singing.
I would be very grateful if the dranglefabbing weather gods would (a) STOP SENDING US HARD FRELLING FROSTS and (b) stop ONLY giving us good gardening weather on days I’m rushing around doing other things. Like today. Yesterday was a damp grey unfriendly day that felt colder than it was—but I was out there in the afternoon anyway, planting, ahem, roses*, and looking around nervously for places to put the friends of the one, single, solitary climber I ordered yesterday. There was an evil little wind and just enough rain falling at unpredictable intervals to make you wet if you were out in it** but nothing like enough to do the landscape any good.***
Roses are, at least, hardy†. But we’ve had below freezing temperatures the last two nights—and I had started planting gladiolas. Which are not hardy. But they’re all (I think) up against house walls so they should be okay. Arrrrgh. I’ve got dahlias and begonias and chocolate cosmos all lined up waiting eagerly to go outside. The ones already in pots I am now schlepping back indoors again at night—and meanwhile Hannah is coming this weekend which means the Winter Table has to come down†† whether I’m ready to lose it or not, because we want to be able to get the dropped leaf on the proper kitchen table up so that two of us can sit at it at the same time.††† Tea in the sitting-room is fine. Breakfast, not so much.
Today was a glorious day. It was still cold when I got up so I pottered‡ around drinking tea before I ferried the chocolate cosmos, the dahlias, the begonias, the kalanchoes‡‡ and the geraniums back outdoors again. Then hellhounds and I had a magnificent hurtle . . . and then there was the usual mad Monday scramble of trying to get some work done and some lunch eaten and some warm-up singing accomplished before my voice lesson. . . . I planted one pansy in the brief gap between taking hellhounds back to the cottage for the dog minder to pick them up for their weekly adventure and leaving for my rendezvous with Nadia.
I went in there still brooding about how to think about the performance issue, because while from my perspective an awful lot of where music comes from is where writing comes from, stories don’t need to be performed. The book goes into the reader’s hands and the reader reads it. Yaay. Simple. Music has to be performed, and this usually involves human input in some particular. I’m a professional writer, and I think the genre/literature, grown-up/kiddie face-off is bogus, so I don’t worry much about what rung of the great ladder of immortality I’m on.‡‡‡ But to me there’s this vast chasm between what for want of better terms we’ll call amateur and professional—not that there aren’t great amateurs and calamitous professionals—and I am nowhere on the great ladder of musical immortality. Why shouldn’t I not be able to face performing my pathetic little attempts at singing right after Oisin’s been playing an organ sonata that feels like something I should have been listening to and being evolved into a higher form of life by for the last fifty years? That’s my music, that sonata. Mine. My singing, however, is the dandelion at the foot of the giant sequoia. The lopsided dandelion.
Nadia gets this patient expression on her face when I go in with stuff like this.§ And the thing that’s really embarrassing is that she instantly dropped me in the teacher place. She knows that I’ve taught creative writing a bit—not a lot; little enough that I can forget when it suits me—and never more than a short seminar. I doubt that I’d be anyone’s Nadia§§ over the long term. But I do know a few things about being a teacher: that you cut your student slack for being there and wanting to learn stuff.§§§ That you’re glad to see them there wanting to learn stuff. That you give them huge credit for trying. That you look for the good stuff, so you can say, here, this is good, work from here, expand here,# think about what you were doing here, try to find that space again. You don’t say, you are crap, you don’t know it all yet and you are therefore a lesser mortal, you don’t say, you aren’t good enough. She said, how would you feel, if you were a teacher, and one of your students came in one day and had a cup of tea and a chat and as she was leaving mentioned that she’d brought a story—but she wasn’t going to let you see it? Would you be cross?##
Oh. Yeah.
Nadia said, You know, Robin, it’s not lack of talent that’s holding you back at the moment. It’s lack of confidence.
Sigh.
I sang . . . not too badly. I’m kind of getting somewhere with the emotional expressiveness thing. Kind of. And even I can tell that the quality of the noise I’m making has improved.### That positive feedback loop that Nadia talks about is definitely there, and getting stronger, which means that practise at home is less frustrating and more fun.
But . . . well. . . .
* * *
* I seem to have a few left over from last year. Ah. Hmm. The old I’ll-put-you-here-and-deal-with-you-later flimflam referred to yesterday. I had a lot more excuse for not getting around to and/or forgetting things when I had two acres and hundreds of roses. Now my only resort is blaming Menopause Brain. This year my negligence included the discovery of three roses heeled in in Peter’s garden. Oops.
** And to annoy hellhounds, if they were out in it with you
*** And, speaking of the things that the gods could do IF THEY’D STOP PLAYING POKER AND ATTEND TO BUSINESS: please let those odd little scritchy, flappy noises not be even-earlier-this-year-returning thirsty bats seeking redress from drought. Atlas is coming tomorrow to look for any holes he might have missed last year.^ And I’d maybe better fire up the extra-large plant saucers I had dotted about the place for any livestock that wants a drink. More sodblasted things to WATER.
^ And yes, I have ordered the mosquito netting to drape over my bed. Just in case. Except that it isn’t mosquito netting. It’s the stuff you put over your strawberries to keep the birds off. I don’t think the bats will care. It’s the right size, the right mesh, the right price, and it’s sold by a genuine gardening site. Mosquito netting doesn’t seem to bring out the better class of vendor, although I admit I’m a bit fascinated by the sheik-of-Araby romantic fantasy approach.
† Even if I agree with Diane in MN that my eyes got a little wide at what Antique Rose Emporium was offering as ‘extra hardy’. I’m at the wrong house but I’ll have a stroll through my rose book shelves some day soon. If I didn’t divest myself of them when we moved out of the old house^ I have at least two about rose-gardening in major-bloody-winter areas.
^ Yes I even got rid of some ROSE books
†† That which stands over the hellhound crate during the winter, with a green plastic garden sheet over it, to give me somewhere to put the indoor jungle. When winter gets serious, Atlas and I haul most of it up to the green/summerhouse/shed-with-a-grow-light at Third House. But winter never really got serious this year, until about a month ago, so there’s been a lot of bringing-stuff-indoors-at-night, taking-it-out-again-next-morning, and swearing,^ the last few weeks.
^ Gently. So as not to damage my throat.
††† I do keep telling you the living space at the cottage is small.
‡ I should be doing housework. Fortunately Hannah is not easily shocked. And she’s known me for over thirty years.^
^ Bats may be a bridge too far. But we don’t have bats.+
+ Yet.
‡‡ http://houseplants.about.com/od/succulentsandcacti/p/Kalanchoe.htm I didn’t discover these till a year or two ago. But they’re wildly tender.
‡‡‡ This is aside from Never Writing the Story as Well as the Story Deserves, but I’m not getting into that tonight or none of us will get any sleep.
§ Have I mentioned (recently) that Nadia isn’t thirty yet? Gods. I’m being mentored by a child.
§§ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nadia_Boulanger
§§§ I am very very very bad at students who are wasting my time because they don’t want to learn stuff.
# Not necessarily literally. Contrary to popular McKinley belief, some short stories should stay short.
## Might it even hurt your feelings?
### I’m not ready for the Travelling Tiddybumps Opera Troupe^ tryouts yet however.
^ Home made brownies at intermission. It’s why anyone comes. Not for the singing.