Extreme Brain Death, etc
Blah erg eh gah erfft groan snivel. I’m pretty sure I’ve used this title before, although the ‘etc’ may confuse the ’bot waiting to title it ‘extreme-brain-death-1407’ when I turn it into a shortcut to hang as a thread in the forum.* There get to be a lot of extreme brain death days toward the end of writing a novel, especially when the deadline is beetling down on you and you’re not done yet. What I haven’t been telling you, because there’s no point, is that I ran aground on SHADOWS with a horrible grinding noise about a week ago.** This is why I try not to write novels in a hurry, because forcing them along at a pace they don’t want to maintain tends to lead to this kind of thing. This is what I originally thought had happened with PEG II: I knew it was going to be long (ahem) and I thought it was just demanding a more leisurely pace, and I could wait it out. Politely. ***
You can miss signposts if you’re going too fast. I’ve been going pretty fast on SHADOWS, but mostly it’s been doing the mettlesome-steed thing and galloping along willingly. With the result that I was pretty far down the wrong byway when I realised that the landscape was going all peculiar. You may not know the difference between Piddling-on-Slepton and Greater Hatchflummery—they both have village greens and duck ponds—but you can make a good guess about whether you’re in a rainforest or the Riiser-Larsen ice shelf.† And furthermore while the story is delivered by the Story Council, some slack, not to say grace, is given to the scribe for rootling for vivid details, and I have a fertile little mind.†† I can not only have gone extremely wrong, I can have plucked all kinds of seemed-like-a-good-idea-at-the-time-details out of the surrounding dramatic dazzle by the time I realise it should be parrots, not penguins. Oops. And of course the blizzard has eradicated my tracks. . . .
So, not to flog a poor innocent metaphor to death or anything, I’ve been kind of crouched in my tent, pushing earlier details around like checkers on a small travelling checkerboard, and waiting for the wind to die down so I can get my compass out and figure out where I went wrong. It’s a TOTAL FRELLING BITCH, waiting. It’s even a total frelling bitch when you’re not staring at a deadline. But there’s not a lot I can do until the blizzard subsides/the dust settles/the story forgives me for being a dork. Last few days I haven’t been listening to quantum physics while hurtling†††, I’ve been trying to, as you might say, deplot myself. Today I finally heard the parrots. . . .
So let’s have an Ask Robin to celebrate.
So I’ve been wondering this one for years, and I think I’ve checked everywhere else for the answer. In Hero, after Aerin defeats Agsded, she falls asleep and dreams three different scenes. One is of Hetta from Water and one is Harry, I thought. But the last one is of three men, one of whom we hear is called Tommy and one called Leo. Is that a story that is published somewhere and I missed it, or is it a story not yet written, or is it in a drawer somewhere?
I would totally swear that I have answered this one, but one of the new tenets of the rejuvenated Ask Robin, a bit like the rather inescapably evolved basic tenet of this blog, is that stuff inevitably comes round more than once.
No, that is not Hetta from POOL IN THE DESERT. Good grief. Check it out, people, I hear this a little too often. Even if you can get ‘the white walls around her were so high there seemed to be clouds resting on their heads’ out of a tatty little suburban garden, Hetta’s pool is specifically described as being surrounded by crazy paving, which is not ‘the flat earth around the pool was covered with squares of white stone.’‡ This wouldn’t matter, at least not till I finish writing the story about the girl in the other garden (Hetta doesn’t have long black hair either, but I don’t think that’s mentioned one way or another, since I’m mostly allergic to physical descriptions of my characters), whereupon everyone who’s assumed it’s Hetta is going to be confused. And I read stuff wrong in other people’s books all the time, and you can’t focus your best brain power on everything‡‡, and I write (and mean to write) curled-up-on-the-sofa, downtime kinds of books. But I do suggest you check this kind of thing if you’re going to write to the author, you know?
And yes, that is Harry.
Leo and Tommy and their companion are from the very first story I started writing about Damar . . . the one I lay aside because I realised it was too big and complicated and probably several books’ worth and I couldn’t cope . . . and wrote BEAUTY instead. Then when I went back to Damar I decided to start at what you might call an angle, with SWORD, and HERO was always going to follow immediately after SWORD (yes! It’s a prequel! I wrote it that way deliberately!). So Leo and Tommy are now one of the umpty-jillion Third Damar Novels still waiting in a series of beat up paper files and spiral notebooks.‡‡‡ If I live long enough. . . .
* * *
* Alternatively I could wait till a mod hung the thread for me, and then I wouldn’t have to notice.
** This is not wholly a bad thing, as it gave me a kind of break in concentration to get my bell tower resignation letter polished up and sent, which had to be done more or less right then. For all I know bits of my subconscious had been holding high level consultations about this. Including the bit that was holding my throat hostage and getting increasingly frustrated that I was ignoring the ransom notes. I feel this situation could have been arranged better but then I would think that, wouldn’t I? And by the way, about 75% of what Nadia did to me yesterday is still working—I was singing out hurtling today^ for the first time in weeks—and I may even practise tonight before I crash.
^ I wasn’t singing, however, when I frelling slipped in the frelling mud and fell frelling down squish. ARRRRRRRGH. At least I was wearing my raincoat which is old and falling to ruin anyway and I don’t have to worry about how it’s going to wash. (It probably isn’t. It is probably going to take this excuse to fall apart.) My jeans however brought half the frelling landscape home with them. Hellhounds were bemused. Usually they like me at their level but not so much when I’m screaming and floundering.
*** Convulsive shudder. Not infrequently in the last five months when I’ve been getting mental whiplash at the pace I am trying to make^ I’ve thought that having a story that WANTS TO BE WRITTEN even if it doesn’t want to be written quite this fast is ENTIRELY to be preferred to a story that . . . well, all right, it wasn’t PEG II’s fault I was refusing to listen to the whole ‘another two more books’ business. Still. I kind of feel it could have just let me write to the end of II and then stare into the abyss when I got there.
^ I know, I know, there are lots of authors who write two books a year, and some of them are even good books. I am not one of those authors. This is totally trampolining my tiny intellect.+
+ OH FOR PITY’S SAKE. Listening to Late Junction on Radio 3. Some intellectual# has taken AC/DC’s Hell’s Bells and turned it into a thoughtful piece of drooling ambient nonsense. Who are you trying to fool here. Those lyrics are not up to being whispered resonantly into a microphone too close to your mouth. GAAAAAAAH.##
# ‘An intellectual is a person who has discovered something more interesting than sex.’ —Aldous Huxley
## Note that BACK IN BLACK is one of my all time favourite albums. Right up there with the Beverly Sills LA TRAVIATA. And equally patriarchal tripe in their different ways.
† Oh, look, there’s a penguin. Probably not a rainforest then.
†† Not much intellect. But lots of imagination.
††† SINGING is very good for encouraging brisk blood flow through the brain.
‡ One of the reasons I specified the crazy paving was that I thought I was preventing people from assuming it’s the pool—and the girl—from Aerin’s dream. Oh well.
‡‡ I think about this every time I go horribly wrong on a bell method I know perfectly well, possibly because I’ve been working too hard and have No Brain.
‡‡‡ There are some dead floppies^ involved in a few of the Third Damar Novels too, but I print everything out, so it doesn’t matter; if I picked any of them up now, I’d start a new draft on page one.
^ Floppy discs. Remember floppy discs?
But SHADOWS is still going
Well I feel like death on toast. Old, decrepit death on burnt, spongy toast that was nasty chemical-laden mattress bread in its heyday. I also have laryngitis. Well, half laryngitis. I can croak, but it hurts. There will be a cough later. Joy.
Yes, I missed service ring this morning.
No voice lesson tomorrow.
No second-Monday at Old Eden tomorrow.*
Not in a good mood.
I did, however, meet Colin and Anthea while I was out hurtling hellhounds in slo-mo this morning.** Colin has the lurgy as well so they were also moving in slo-mo.*** Oh, you sound much worse than he does, said Anthea admiringly. Thanks, I rasped.
Clearly more bad jokes are needed. All of you who read the forum will have seen (almost all of) these. And if you’re feeling healthy and sharp and brainy you are permitted to skip. The rest of you will enjoy seeing them again.
blondviolinist:
A piece of string walks into a bar, and asks for a beer. The bartender looks him up and down and says “We don’t serve your kind in here.” The string walks back outside, stomps around, and ties himself all up. He then walks back into the bar, and asks for a beer. The bartender says “Aren’t you the piece of string that was just in here a moment ago?” “Nope,” the string replies. “I’m a frayed knot.”
Us old married women are allowed to laugh and laugh at the following. The rest of you have to pretend to be stern and poker-faced. Mrrrnghmph.
LRK:
“Mrs Svensson, why did you shoot your husband with a bow and arrow?”
“Because I didn’t want to wake the children.”
Or another:
“My husband is a sailor – he’s only home one month a year.”
“That’s awful! I’d never stand for that!”
“Oh, I don’t know… a month passes so quickly…” †
And here’s a joke from me. I can’t remember where it comes from, except that I picked it up somewhere in the last few months of cramming physics and maths, probably several times:
“We don’t serve your kind here,” said the bartender.
A neutrino walks into a bar.††
* * *
* This, I admit, may be as much blessing as curse. Not my favourite bells in the universe, especially not in January when even nice bells may be dyspeptic. But having not rung tower bells in seven days I’m starting to twitch.
** You have dogs, they have to go out. If you’re incapacitated, you stuff a broomstick down your spine, tie the leads to your hands, and go out anyway. (My dog minder, bless her, took them out yesterday.) Next time, I’m adopting an elderly, three-legged Chihuahua. Or maybe I’ll go the amphibians in tanks route. No, probably not. I think the wingless fruit flies in the refrigerator would creep me out. I have enough trouble with the mealworms for the robins.
Ajlr
Oh, Robin, that ring… *haz a envy*
It’s good, isn’t it? ::Preens:: It provides a little cheering-up in the present dark days uggggh. I tell myself that winter is the logical time to have flu: flu in the summer feels really unjust. But I’m ready to notice that the days are literally getting longer. Any time now guys, Apollo, Helios, Surya, whoever.
My fabulous ring has one fairly fabulous drawback however, as some of you with jewellery fetishes will have already twigged, which is that it’s a ratbag to keep clean—all that surface area, those big flat facets—and the backs are worse, as they always are, because you have to fight your way through the setting, but if you don’t clean the backs the fronts look dull. I’ve been doing the job with one of those soft mini toothbrushes that I can poke into the back, but it’s a fiddly business. Do any of you have any personal experience and/or recommendations about the ultrasonic jewellery cleaners? I know they get mixed reviews, but I’ve been the noxious chemicals route and I really don’t want to do that again.
. . . but what else is there that sings in the middle of the frelling night? They can’t all be robins.
I’m not sure if you have street lights anywhere near you, but it’s quite common for some birds – blackbirds, particularly – to sit near the lights at night and sing. And as blackbirds are also among the first to nest each year, so they’re pairing-up now, that may well be a male blackbird starting to proclaim his territory that you’re hearing in the early hours.
Blackbirds. Thank you. That’s it. I even thought it sounded rather like blackbirds, but I can just about tell an eagle from a dodo on a good day^ and blackbirds at night? But there is a streetlight at the end of my little cul de sac^^ as well as several down on the main road.^^^
Mrs Redboots
I envy you your husband in his lovely choices of presents. Mine has to be told what to buy me (but then, to be fair, he does!). A lovely ring.
Thank you! Peter takes direction very well. In this case he didn’t have to—he had the idea and then it was the jeweller’s problem. But it was Peter who found this jeweller-who-listens twenty years ago, so the points are still all his.
And I would assume a blackbird – we are having them here in London, too.
I want to say, good for them, and I suppose I do still mean good for them. But the critters that manage most successfully to colonise human towns tend to be the thugs—blackbirds, foxes. Rats. Cockroaches. Doesn’t speak well of us, although we knew that. At least blackbirds have a pretty song. But I barely see my robin any more because the blackbirds have taken over. I’d rather have my robin.
But the other night I was staying with my parents, in Sussex, and I heard an owl. I was almost sure it was an owl . . . I haven’t heard one there since my childhood . . . But when we went out to the car to come home to London, the owl swooped overhead.
What kind of owl? Little owls are dead common around here, and we have tawny owls pretty much by the yard as well. Occasionally if you’re very very good you’ll see a barn owl at twilight, if you’re out wandering the countryside. Absolute magic. No mere Harry Potter snowy owls need apply. They’re also amazingly huge—you have that adrenaline rush at first sight which is both the thrill of it and a faint atavistic memory of pterosaurs or something when you think it might be coming for you. Or at least a hellhound. One of the things I’m not going to get around to, this life, is keeping a bird of prey.
I’m currently having a fantasy about quail, though. A tall thin tiered cage so they can fly and perch. Nice little eggs. This comes of faithfully reading COUNTRY SMALLHOLDING http://www.countrysmallholding.co.uk/ I should get out more.
^ If it’s alive, it’s probably an eagle. Unless we’re in a Thursday Next novel.
^^ Which is approximately the only way in which I’ve done better than my semi-detached neighbour, who has a cellar, despite being farther up the hill than I am, as well as an attic, four bedrooms, a dining room and two sitting rooms, a larger garden, room to park three or four cars and a chunk out of my tiny sitting room and equally tiny office to run his frelling plumbing. But he has the streetlight.
Of course I have the hyperactive security light belonging to Mr Military and family immediately across the road from me, which is apparently carefully aimed to dazzle into my windows and make sure I’m not trading world secrets with Martians or anything.+ Yes, there are very likely hellhounds on the bed/sofa. Sue me.
+ No, just handbell ringers.
^^^ I’ve never caught him at it, but I swear there’s one that sits on the wall six feet from my bedroom window and serenades the security light.
^^^^ I rescued a small fluffy baby owl something a few years ago, sitting in the main road at the end of the mews’ drive, waiting for something to happen. What happened was that I got out of Wolfgang and moved it. What I remember is blogging that I’d pulled my sleeves down over my hands to pick it up and someone who knows more than I do posted to the forum that its mum wouldn’t have minded human smell on her offspring the way us mostly-clueless vague tree-hugging nature-lovers would expect.
*** I don’t know what their excuse is. They have cats. They can’t possibly subscribe to the fallacy about fresh air being good for you? In an English winter when you have the lurgy?
† Negotiating acceptable comic rudeness is always a ratbag. There’s something in the rule of thumb that says you’re only allowed to be gratuitously horrible about something you have personal experience of, so LRK and I can be rude about husbands. It’s not the only rule of thumb, but it’s somewhere to start. As I’ve told you before I was gobsmacked when I first started going out into the world as a published writer—a single published writer—and was accused of being a man-hater. What? Yes. I have uppity heroines. Siiiiigh. I still get mail to this effect. Hey, some of my best friends, etc, aside from being married to one. For twenty years.
I think these jokes are funny. But I also think ‘I’m a natural blonde, please speak slowly’ is funny. And I’ve only ever seen it on women’s t shirts, not men’s. I was also a natural blonde through my twenties.
†† http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faster-than-light_neutrino_anomaly
You see it both ways—my way, and ‘we don’t serve faster than light neutrinos here’ said the bartender. I realise my way requires that your auditor has been cramming on maths and physics lately too, but this way spoils the joke, I think. I’d rather undergo the humiliation of having it explained.
Grumble grumble mutter mutter
Fate, sometimes, having got you round the ankle, enjoys shaking you up and down like a yoyo for a while. I had been supposed to go to a concert with Fiona last night, in reward for our labours, and then at more or less the last minute I found myself in one of the typical communication crosswirings of the long married, which is that Peter arranged to play bridge last night as well, which would leave no one at (either) home to keep an eye on and, critically, feed hellhounds. Dog lady not available on no notice*, it’s never a good idea to play too fast and loose with hellhound eating schedules anyway and I’m still metaphorically leaping at small noises about Darkness. So I had to stay home. Sigh.** Then I thought, okay, maybe I’ll go bell-ringing at Forza, that’s only about two hours away rather than four, and hellhounds are used to supper after bell practise.
Then I remembered that I had just enough petrol left to get me to a petrol station to tank up. Which was not going to happen at 7 pm.*** So I really was staying home.
Okay, I had photos for the blog, so that meant a short(er) post. I could spend a little longer on SHADOWS and still get to bed early.† Whereupon I became hideously embroiled in an argy-bargy with thrice-damned and quadrupally-frelling WordPress, that rat’s-ass of a programme, which didn’t want to let me use Blogmom’s photo-post template, which she created for me so I didn’t have to get into argy-bargies with WordPress about PHOTOS.
I did not get to bed early.††
Today hellhounds and I drove out to Warm Upford to our old petrol station and mechanic, and when Blaze came out to pump diesel I asked him about Wolfgang’s Erratic Fault, which is that he occasionally . . . doesn’t start. This is not allowed. And I can’t even think about buying a new, or even a new-er, car right now††† so some detente must be reached. Erratic Faults are, of course, the quadrupally-frelling ratbags of all technology, and Wolfgang’s symptoms are not helpful: I have to have recently turned him off—just time enough, for example, to park, bring out the latest specially-ordered gigantic bags of dog kibble from the pet shop, sling them in the boot, and try, and fail, to drive away—so it’s not about being cold; and his butt has to be lower than his front end—so parked on a slope, but uphill. Blaze looked puzzled. And then he spoke the phrase: you’ll have to wait till the symptoms get worse, so we can try to reproduce them here. . . . ‡
Peter’s daughter is staying at the mews for a couple of nights, so I hit the piano early, while she’s still at work. It’s taking me longer to sing myself ‘in’ and produce anything even remotely resembling a singing timbre—and simply to fill in the time, because exercises, without Nadia there to say ‘do a little bit of this, now do a little bit of that’, get boring and frustrating pretty soon because I don’t know how to make them better, I’ve gone back to some old songs and am fascinated to discover that I’m singing them differently. I’m going to hope this is progress. I may test this theory by taking them to Nadia next week. But the point today was to get me cranked up into singing mode, so I could go to Muddlehampton practise tonight.
I didn’t go (again). I’m hoarse. What the bleeding frangledab is going on? At this rate I’m going to die of old age before my throat recovers from its megrims. It wasn’t even a serious head/upper respiratory cold. But it won’t frelling go away.
Meanwhile . . . this afternoon’s handbells got cancelled yesterday. Colin is on holiday, and Gemma pulled out at the last minute,‡‡ which only left Niall and me. But that wasn’t quite utterly tragic because Niall had invited me to ring at his house on Tuesday with a bob major band. So I was going to have a second shot at learning to ring touches of bob major.‡‡‡ I was pretty excited.
Niall rang me back this evening to say that next Tuesday’s conductor has decided he wants to ring a full peal of minor with Niall and Caitlin. Which means I’ve just been de-invited.
Whimper.
I think I’ll go doodle something.
* * *
* The woman has a life. Who does she think she is?
** Fiona says it was a lovely concert. Sigh.
*** I don’t know what it is about the English and their petrol stations. They close at 5, 5:30 pm, like dentists or accountants. And even dentists usually have the occasional late evening. It used to fascinate me, twenty years ago^, that even in London you couldn’t find a chemist or ironmonger’s^^ open in the evening—there’d be an emergency chemist, probably on the opposite side of London, if your doctor wanted to prescribe something to get you through the night, but in terms of walking down your local high street? Forget it.
By the time we stopped going regularly to London this had begun to change. Not in quaint old-fashioned village Hampshire however.
^ I have now lived in England for twenty years. The anniversary went past without my even noticing, a few days before Halloween—I’ve even forgotten what day it was, although I could look it up.+
+ Well, sort of I could look it up. It would involve looking in boxes of old paper files.
^^ drugstore. Hardware store.
† HAHAHAHAHAHA. Why do I ever think these outrageous things?
†† And even after I went to bed, I had to play through several soothing levels of Rosecliff, which is one of these hidden objects games http://www.bigfishgames.com/download-games/5217/escape-rosecliff-island/index.html and doesn’t require as much swearing as Montezuma.^
^ Yes, I’ve completed it. Yes, I’m playing it again. Your point would be?
††† And have I mentioned that my workhorse laptop is dying and I am going to have to buy a new one? It would be nice if this would have some positive impact on my connectivity problems, but I’m sure that’s much too easy.
‡ Hellhounds and I did have a very pleasant hurtle at this point. Due to various exigencies we haven’t been on a proper country hurtle in over a week, and since our favourite field near New Arcadia has had its footpath fenced off from the rest of the space, hellhounds haven’t had a sensible off-lead careen in that long. Today they promptly took off . . . straight over the horizon. GAAAAAAH. Usually they do laps, roughly speaking around me, which is a little easier to oversee. They were persuaded, with some difficulty, to recall to mind that they’re supposed to wait at all hedgerows and gates—the idea being that I go through first and make sure we aren’t about to hurtle straight into the local hunt pretending to follow a drag trail, or Lady Featheringstonehaugh out walking her twenty-three long-haired Chihuahuas. Hellhounds were off-lead for about twenty minutes (till we came to a road), and I was exhausted.
‡‡ Sigh. I am not feeling sanguine about Gemma’s future as a handbell ringer. You have to be kind of a geek, and I think she may be too normal and well-adjusted. She has sensible priorities, you know? This doesn’t work if you want to learn to ring, especially handbells.
‡‡‡ And the Mean Man is not a part of Niall’s peripatetic Tuesday evening group, so he would not be there.
Intelligibility not guaranteed
Due to the continuing unpropitiousness of hellhounds I got . . . three, maybe three and a half hours of sleep last night*. And I think we will pass over service ring in tactful silence.** My vocabulary is down to about 500 words*** which I am allowing to give me an excuse to be slightly short tonight. I apologise for my inability to do anything about either content or coherence.†
* * *
* This is aggravated by the fact that I get so wound up by hellhound delinquency that when I am finally in bed I can’t sleep. I had books on animal health, behaviour and insanity all over the bed last night^ and I now have Astarte which means I can google.^^ Plus that her slim pink-embellished self contains a slowly but steadily increasing number of ebooks.^^^
^ A fresh top layer, you understand. There’s a good deep sedimentary book layer there already.
^^ Of course she goes to bed with Pooka and me. On a bad night I need a round of Montezuma to calm my nerves. Erm. Or something like that.+
+ At the rate I seem to be trudging on I may even finish this game. This has never happened before in the history of my world. What do you when you finish a computer game? Start over? NOOOOOO. Download Part Two? NOOOOOO.~ Find another game? NOOOOOO. —There’s an echo in here, and whoever she is, she isn’t happy.
~ I don’t suppose there’s any chance there won’t be a Part Two? That would be too easy.
^^^ All of them thus far but the ritual first download of LOTR are nonfiction. If I’m going to read for enjoyment at home where the weight of my knapsack isn’t an issue, I want a real book, which is to say covers that open and pages that turn, and if I want to make a note in a margin+ I need an old-fashioned Writing Implement and not a tap on a screen. But engaging in a cool intellectual fashion with crisp factual words in shiny pixels works fine. I’ll worry about what I’m going to read on the train next time I’m going to be on a train. It does seem to me that an iPad is an ultimate in the dignified disguise of embarrassing fiction, and it’s a pity to waste it.
Which reminds me to remark that I’m a trifle nonplussed at some of the reactions to my struggle to bend the concept, not to mention the intangible reality, of audiobooks to my will.++ If you don’t like audiobooks I don’t think it’s a requisite for forum membership to listen at least two hours a day.+++ It’s only horses for courses. My bottom line, as above, is if all things are equal, I’d always rather a proper book with pages in my hands. But the last few months, when the ME seems to be more often more bad than less bad, I still have two hours of daily hurtle to get through, and when I’m already tired I’m less up for risking Hound of the Baskervilles adventures in the wilderness, and walking in or near town is mostly pretty boring. Hence having a stab/shamble/whatsit at audiobooks.++++ Worth a try. I agree that being read aloud to is an entirely different experience, and sometimes it’s pleasant and sometimes it’s not so pleasant and sometimes it’s deleting-digital-is-nowhere-NEAR-as-satisfying-as-throwing-a-book-across-the-room. But I think audiobooks might have a place in my life. If I can figure out how to run the frelling programmes.
+ I know. We’ve had this conversation. I’m a book-defacer. It has to be my book, and generally again it’s nonfiction, and it can’t be a really elegant edition . . . but yes. Quite a few of the books I own have notes in the margins. And I’m glad.
++ At the moment the audiobooks are winning. Why does the audible download manager keep shouldering into the bottom open-programme bar? And refusing to close? Whimper.
+++ If it is, I’m disqualified.
++++ I also want to try knitting and listening—violinknitter among others talks about doing this. And it’s going to be a long time before I can knit and watch TV. But I’ll be interested to see if what I want to listen to indoors and sitting down and not worrying about what the hellhounds are going to see two-thirds of a second before I do—a hellhound can cover a lot of ground in two-thirds of a second—is any different from what I want to listen to when I’m outdoors seeking not to have adventures.
It’s not like you’re safe in town either. We were walking down a little alley we often walk down—and I was just noticing a Very Large Man on one of those electric mobility carts taking up most of the path ahead of us—when a Very Large Dog nearly came through the chainlink fence at us. KERRANG. The Very Large Man was getting up off his mobility cart and I was involuntarily noticing that the only thing he was wearing—just by the way it’s a chilly day: I’m in layers—was a pair of sweatpants whose drawstring had been insufficiently curtailed around the top. As he stood up, the sweatpants were subsiding . . . He saw us and said, Don’t come any closer while the gate’s open! —while dog and sweatpants were penetrating in an awful, confused fashion into my stupefied brain. Hellhounds and I turned and fled. I could hear him calling after me—You can come on now! No! I don’t think so! We may never walk down that alley again!
** There were seven ringers this morning. How annoying is that?^ If I’d known I could have turned over and put the pillow over my head.
^ You want six or eight. I don’t know if it’s just needs must, but while we among many other strapped-for-numbers bands frequently ring doubles on five without the tenor behind, if there are seven ringers, rather than ringing triples without a cover, usually someone sits out. Although Niall has a bizarre and possibly unhealthy habit, in these situations, of making us ring minor (six bells) plus a tenor-behind. You don’t ring minor with a tenor behind. And it’s surprisingly confusing, at least to those of us who are rhythm-challenged anyway. And possibly very short of sleep.
*** There’s a word for unpropitiousness. I just can’t think of what it is.
† You’ve thought I’ve abused footnotes before? I think tonight I win some kind of award.
The Ghastly Prospect of a Service Quarter
I had just got hellhounds back on their leads again when I saw someone climbing over the stile we were headed for. Oh good. Hellhounds are very friendly. Chaos being fixated on me doesn’t stop him being eager to make acquaintance with the rest of the world.* Darkness is usually slightly more subtle in his affections—unless he feels Chaos is getting more than his fair share of the attention.** So—especially when the chappie turned around, came into focus and was revealed as a chinos-Ascot-and-boater wearer—I was very glad I had my elegant-looking but mayhem-minded hounds under control.***
But the get-up was tooo fabulous, even for the back of beyond in High Tory Hampshire. Yeep. I knew I would have to hail him for the pleasure that my rich American accent would give him. Not.
And then he hailed me. Oh, P G Wodehouse, my man. Hast thou an empress of pigs awaiting thee at the family pile? I was longing for him to say What, what?† But this joy was not vouchsafed me. He did, however, ask me the way to the Wooster Arms.†† . . . And this was the original point of this gone-off-the-rails††† story. I know perfectly well where the Wooster‡ Arms is. We pass it frequently: it’s one of those six-hanging-baskets-per-square-inch pubs, which are very popular in this area. There must have been a scientific study that I missed that proves that scarlet begonias, blindingly blue lobelias and orange bedding dahlias cause acute thirst.
But the Wooster Arms was not on this walk. And—thus the menopausal brain, perhaps especially when the pre-menopausal brain hadn’t been very good at sticking bits of reality together either—for a moment I couldn’t tell him. I was standing there with the synaptic version of the yellow-alert whoop whoop whoop going off in my inner ear while my data screen was flashing NOT ON THIS WALK! NOT ON THIS WALK! Fortunately I covered my inadequacy with chat about the hellhounds‡‡ while frantically whirring through my mental maps till I got to the one with the Wooster Arms on it and figured out which edge of it went against which edge of the one I was on. Then I gave him very good directions, including where the footpath appears to disappear across someone’s garden‡‡‡. He thanked me and said, You’re not from around here. I said, no, but I’ve lived here twenty years and two generations of hounds, and I know all the footpaths. I did not describe my sorting and aligning problems.
I hope he tipped the bar maid.
I worked all afternoon and, having re-hurtled hounds adequately I had a few minutes before tower practise began, and made the mistake of taking a stab at Cambridge Minor on Pooka. LIMITED MENTAL RESOURCES, MCKINLEY! LIMITED MENTAL RESOURCES! GAAAAAH! The problem is that Gemma’s away next Thursday, so it’s just the three of us§ and I know the other two are going to expect to ring Cambridge. So I was already in a sad state of neural depletion when I showed up for tower practise. Vicky, who has been worrying about me, stopped me ringing up one of the big bells§§—we got up all eight tonight although there were only six of us, because we have a wedding to ring tomorrow, and not merely Sunday service but that wretched quarter peal Sunday evening§§§. I tend to be Pavlovian about these things: Niall says ‘fill in for . . .’ and I’m groping for the nearest bell rope.
So we were standing around with six ringers and eight bells up and Niall said ‘fill in for bob doubles,’ which was going to give Monty, our first-timer, a little extra time on the tenor, which is what he’ll be ringing on Sunday evening.
And then the touch went on. And on. And on. And on. I was planning on going back to work tonight. And on. I thought, if he’s trying for a quarter now, I am going to kill him.
He wasn’t. We stopped after a mere . . . twenty-five minutes. I DON’T WANT TO RING FRELLING TWENTY-FIVE MINUTE FRELLING TOUCHES ON FRELLING FRIDAY NIGHT. ESPECIALLY A FRIDAY NIGHT I WAS PLANNING ON GOING BACK TO WORK AFTER.
It has been all downhill from there.
I think I’ll go to bed early (again) and sleep another nine or ten hours. I have a quarter peal to ring . . . uh, tomorrow, since it’s now after midnight. AAAAAAAUGH.
* * *
* He clearly has not absorbed my attitude.
** And if we meet the dogminder away from home, and they see her before I do, she needs armour.
*** So to speak.
† Maybe I’ve got my derivation wrong. Maybe he was tracking the Questing Beast. He didn’t offer to show me any fewmets though.
†† Maybe it was the Pellinore Arms.
††† I am very tired. My usual excuse.
‡ Or Pellinore. Okay, I’ll stop now.
‡‡ I forgave him the Ascot when he told me the hellhounds were beautiful.
‡‡‡ Gigantic pet peeve: people whose first move on buying a property is to try and close down the footpath that runs across it. This is, of course, illegal, but it doesn’t stop them ‘losing’ the footpath markers, wiring or padlocking the access gates shut, ‘forgetting’ to keep the way passable and/or letting their six Rottweilers run free. I love Rottweilers, but I do not love them when they think they’re guarding their territory.
This is the same gigantic pet peeve I have about people who buy a house next to a 500-year-old church and then immediately start trying to shut down the 200-year-old ring of bells in its tower.
§ In thunder, lightning, or in . . . rain. And the hurly-burly starts here.^
^ I don’t think there are any handbells in Shakespeare. I might like him better if there were.
§§ And Roger, that . . . that . . . creep said, that’s right, Robin, you want to save yourself for Sunday afternoon. —That’s the frelling quarter peal he frelling bullied me into. I DON’T RING SERVICE QUARTERS. THIS IS A SERVICE QUARTER. I’ve wasted a certain amount of time this week trying to convince myself to drop out, but two things stop me: the fact that Vicky would kill. me. because she’d be the one expected to find the replacement and it’s August and all bell ringers retire to towerless atolls for the month of August. And the fact that I would never hear the end of it from Roger.^
^ I don’t think he fully realises the risk he’s running. . . .
§§§ Groan.