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Skylarks
The Skylark
by John Clare
The rolls and harrows lie at rest beside
The battered road; and spreading far and wide
Above the russet clods, the corn is seen
Sprouting its spiry points of tender green,
Where squats the hare, to terrors wide awake,
Like some brown clod the harrows failed to break.
Opening their golden caskets to the sun,
The buttercups make schoolboys eager run,
To see who shall be first to pluck the prize—
Up from their hurry, see, the skylark flies,
And o’er her half-formed nest, with happy wings
Winnows the air, till in the cloud she sings,
Then hangs a dust-spot in the sunny skies,
And drops, and drops, till in her nest she lies,
Which they unheeded passed—not dreaming then
That birds which flew so high would drop agen
To nests upon the ground, which anything
May come at to destroy. Had they the wing
Like such a bird, themselves would be too proud,
And build on nothing but a passing cloud!
As free from danger as the heavens are free
From pain and toil, there would they build and be,
And sail about the world to scenes unheard
Of and unseen—Oh, were they but a bird!
So think they, while they listen to its song,
And smile and fancy and so pass along;
While its low nest, moist with the dews of morn,
Lies safely, with the leveret, in the corn.
This is the third year in early spring that I’ve said to myself, the day I hear my first skylark I’m going to hang Clare’s* poem on the blog.** And then I forget. It’s a long time from morning hurtle—when we’re out somewhere we might hear skylarks—to the middle of the night when I’m squeezing the last remnants of semi-coherent thought out of my brain for a blog entry. I’m remembering this year, finally, perhaps because it’s so late—usually I start hearing skylarks in February. Apparently they haven’t liked this winter any better than us humans and hellhounds. I hope the extravagant cold has merely stopped them singing and that the local countryside is not dotted this spring with unmarked skylark graves. Skylarks are endangered, but not around here; we’re teeming with the things. I hope we’re still teeming with the things. I love them. Love, love, love, love, love. I can be in the blackest, bleakest mood, stomping grimly after hellhounds because hellhounds must be hurtled, and . . . for the duration of a skylark’s song I am the world’s greatest living writer, the Dalai Lama, the Archangel Michaela, and the inventor of Green & Black’s mint dark chocolate, all rolled up into one. It’s a thrilling sensation. It’s a thrilling song.
There are plenty of recordings of skylarks on the web, but I’m not even bothering with a link. They don’t sound like much, recorded. Oh, you can tell it’s probably an exciting noise—but it isn’t exciting when it’s tinging out of a computer at you. It’s like the difference between a poster of [insert name of chosen iconic heartthrob here***] and Zaphod Beeblebrox† himself. WOW.†† I like to say, grandly, that I’ll take skylarks over nightingales any day . . . but I’ve never heard a nightingale live.††† And I’m happy with my skylarks.
And I’m glad finally to have heard one this year. Except when I’m complaining about the weather I like the middle of March, because the days are suddenly as if impelled by rocket launchers getting longer—it’s about this time of year I always really notice that they’re getting longer. We had sunlight this morning too so hellhounds and I had a delicious hurtle, accompanied by a skylark who is apparently ready at last to set up housekeeping.
I had read very little John Clare before I moved over here; he’s one of those slightly obscure English English writers who [cheesy generalisation alert] while you may have admired them in a semi-engaged sort of way‡ suddenly make profound and exhilarating sense when you’re standing on English ground viewing English landscape. And, if you’re very lucky, listening to English skylarks. There’s a solidity, a reality, to Clare’s skylark that appeals to me—the song is the thing, but what produces it is a little brown dust-spot with ‘happy wings’—I like the happy wings. I also like the hare ‘like some brown clod the harrows failed to break’—which nests on the ground among those clods. None of the aerial high jinks of swallows, say; any metaphor you want to hang on a skylark has to include the low nest in the corn.
And my low nest among the corn at present is the frelling proofs of PEGASUS.‡‡ See you tomorrow.
* * *
* No, not frelling Shelley and frelling Shelley’s very famous skylark. http://www.poetsgraves.co.uk/Classic%20Poems/Shelley/ode_to_a_skylark.htm
I think frelling Shelley is a big washy self-regarding pain in the behind. Sure he was talented. He wasn’t as talented as he thought he was and gods does he go on.^ He’d’ve been scary if he’d lived in the computer age, when everyone goes on too much.^^
^ HAVE YOU EVER READ ADONAIS? CHEEZUM ZORK.+ GAH. ETC.
+ Here speaketh the Phi Beta Kappa English lit major.
^^ Ahem.
** There are, I’m sure, plenty of copies of it on the web, but I’ve typed this one in so it’s here.
*** No, I’m not being coy. I don’t seem to get crushes on photogenic celebrities any more.^
^ I keep telling you old is better. Although maybe you enjoy your overheated fantasies more than I ever did. This may be a downside to having this vivid an imagination: coming back to ordinary reality always felt like waking up to discover I was a liver fluke. The better I’ve got at channelling this stuff into stories the happier I’ve become.
Although this does bring up a sensitive topic. I don’t like graphic on the page—I have a number of rants inappropriate for these (mostly) clean family pages on the subject of Bad Silly Literary Sex—and I’m damned if I’m going to write it. I think the best steam is produced in pressure cookers with the lids on.
† Oh come on you Windows programmers. You’re giving me a jagged red underline for Zaphod Beeblebrox?
†† Although in Zaphod’s case, probably not a good wow.
††† Peter says we ought to have nightingales around here, that it’s the right habitat. They don’t think so.
‡ For at least having the decency not to be William Wordsworth^
^ Yes. Another of my unspeakable prejudices. The English department at Bowdoin College and I really did not get on at all well. Even Peter has trouble with my attitude toward Wordsworth. Another of these fatuous spoilt self-regarding blokes who thinks that golden daffodils shine out of his backside.
‡‡ Not feeling too archangelish at the moment.
Short* NASTY Monday
I got up what passes in my case for betimes today because I was having an early lunch with Penelope and wanted to have hellhounds well hurtled beforehand.
Except that it was raining. Not just raining: RAINING. Rain on a mission to dissolve planet Earth and leave a large muddy spreading splodge in the solar system.**
While I was waiting for either a break in the downpour or the void to open at my feet when both the road and the ground underneath were washed away*** I discovered that I had a dead phone. I had a dead phone because a hellhound had chewed through one of the wires.
Eighteen kinds of panic at this point. He’s eating WIRES???? I know who it is—Darkness, usually my better behaved, more mature hellhound. He does get into random acts of mastication occasionally.† He actually chewed the spines off a couple of books, and the fact that he’s still alive since I discovered this proves what a soft option I really am. I’d caught him having a go at the phone wire a few weeks ago, lectured him SEVERELY and, as I thought, tidied the wire out of reach. But tidied is not really a concept that applies to the cottage and obviously . . . it didn’t stay where it was put. Very like the hellhounds themselves.
BUT . . . HE’S EATING WIRES?!?
We finally got out on our walk. What with rain, wind and appropriate headgear I don’t hear too well and at one point we were slopping along a farm track and I whirled around, convinced that we were about to be run down by one of those tractors with tyres so tall the driver wouldn’t be able to see a woman and two hellhounds down at ground level, especially in this weather . . . and I dropped one of my pink suede gloves and TROD on it.††
It’s barely worth mentioning that the hellhounds shook themselves violently the moment we got indoors again.††† This is not really the best means by which to have your house plants misted.‡ One of the reasons the carpets don’t get hoovered often enough is because I spend so much time mopping the kitchen floor. And walls. And cabinet fronts. And snarling.‡‡
Lunch was a bright spot. Obviously I was under Penelope’s protective aegis for the duration.
And then back to RATPEGASUSBAG. Maybe I’ll just email everybody the ending. You don’t really need all the details, do you?
And because I haven’t had a good practise ring in long enough to feel my fragile grip on [name any method here] slipping I decided I was going to go to Colin’s tower practise tonight. And Niall was even going to come along quietly.‡‡ I was already standing out at the end of the long mews driveway wondering what was taking Niall so long when there was a small breathless voice behind me and Peter had come pelting down the same long driveway to tell me that Niall had just rung to say that Colin had just rung to say that they couldn’t start practise till eight.
So I frelling cancelled. EXTENSIVE AND CREATIVE RUDE GESTURES HERE. I know I don’t go to bed till most people are thinking about getting up, but most of that late time is spent doing stuff. RATPEG or blog or something torturous with the piano, and I don’t dare be out too late or my brain refuses to go back to work. It’s late! it says. I’m not supposed to have to work this late! I’ll have the union on you! Nyah nyah nyah nyah!
And speaking of something tortuous with the piano, I have a voice lesson tomorrow. I haven’t got Evening Hymn anything like learnt, I’ve been so busy trying to learn the wretched thing I’ve not got any further on It Was a Lover AND I committed the CARDINAL ERROR of taping myself singing last night. JEEEEEZUM. What the hell was I thinking of?
* * *
* FRELL FRELL FRELL FRELL FRELL I AM SPENDING WAAAAY TOO MUCH TIME ON THE BLOG STILL AGAIN ETERNALLY ETC ARRRRGH.
** In all the dystopian returning-to-a-changed-Earth-after-years/generations/centuries SF I’ve read I don’t recall anyone exploiting the large muddy spreading splodge denouement.
*** Hey! Stop that! I have roses to plant!
† Although it was Chaos—I’m sure I’ve told you this story, but it remains vividly etched in my mind—who bit through the cable plugging my electric keyboard into the wall at the cottage. UNGLEBLARG GLURP. Cheez. I was at my desk, and there was this funny sharp alarming noise, and . . . there was a half-grown hellpuppy smiling at me with the two halves of the severed cable lying over his paws. Why he didn’t electrocute himself I have no idea.
†† It’s actually not ruined. I think. It’s pretty handsomely waterproofed or I wouldn’t be wearing it in this weather in the first place, and the mud is cracking nicely, like Death Valley in August. I think it’s going to brush off. What is really miraculous however is that . . . this being a farm track and all . . . it seems to have fallen in honest mud rather than slurry.
Oh, and no, there was no tractor.
††† Raincoats have no effect on this behaviour. They still shake, and they still irrigate the vicinity.
‡ Maybe the reason I’ve still got a little of a certain three-week-old bouquet left is because it is regularly misted by hellhounds.
‡‡ Relatively quietly. He did tell me that Titus’ wife loves dogs and does not love handbells, that he had told her my flimsy excuse for declining Saturday morning handbells and her response was that if I wanted to bring the hellhounds some Saturday morning she would walk them while I rang bells. I asked Niall how large she is and if she has shoulders like a football player. I am not sure I was satisfied with his answer.
Stickiness*
It’s cold again.** It is cold enough that it took me several matches, a lightly singed glove and a lot of shouting this morning to get into Wolfgang because I had been terminally stupid enough to have absent-mindedly locked up last night on the way indoors because locking the car used to be standard op.
This evening, however, when I took Wolfgang to tower practise, upon arrival I couldn’t get out the driver’s door. It hadn’t wanted to open in the first place (although at least I hadn’t LOCKED IT) so I could get in and drive anywhere, and I had been very surprised when it shut, since as soon as the temperature drops below freezing the lock on the driver’s door retracts all its little bendy and twirly parts deeper into the alternate dimension where Everything to Do with Cars lives, and stays there till the weather warms up again. I believe I have previously referred to driving home very slowly at mmmph o’clock in the morning when fortunately there’s nobody else on the road, because the driver’s door only looks shut. I keep meaning to locate a bungie cord for driving in traffic.
Lately the passenger door has not always been perfectly behaved, and there was one thrilling night when, unaware of its mutinous agenda, I had just turned right up my steep little hill—remember the cottage hill, where the brick-and-flint house walls encroach so closely upon the road that you can’t get opposite car doors open at the same time?—and the passenger door, which is, you remember, on the left in England, flew open, clearly aiming for the approaching wall. . . .
So, it’s 7:30, I’m supposed to be in a tower pulling on a bell rope and I can’t get out my car door. Eventually I climbed over the stick shift and threw myself out the passenger door . . . which didn’t actually want to open either, but it was not quite as fixed in its determination as the driver’s side.*** Got the driver’s door open again from the outside . . . couldn’t get it open again from the inside. I am not looking forward to the day when I have to writhe through the gap between the two front seats and try to get out through one of the back doors. This experience will be much enhanced if there happen to be hellhounds in the back seat at the time.
Sixty-six hours till PEGASUS is due. Or some too-small number like that.
* * *
* And unstickiness. I don’t know what the hell Levi has done to their 501 straight leg button fly jeans but I don’t approve. I’m still wearing Levis, which I know earns me an awful lot of evil corporate planet-bashing points, but I get tired of trying on jeans, especially jeans that don’t fit. Or anyway fit even less well than Levi’s 501s. And I frelling dream of a straight-leg jean with a waistline where the waistline on a human being is, and a zip fly. I have a bladder the size of a kumquat and I drink a lot of tea and frelling fly buttons. . . .
Today was another damnably beautiful day, which meant that the world and his wife, and his dog, and his wife’s dog, and his dog’s wife, and his dog’s wife’s six cousins, were all out having a nice countryside walk in the jolly sunshine. And I need a pee because I always need a pee. I think I’ve mentioned here before that I know every suitable hedgerow in a five mile radius of New Arcadia.^ On a heavy popular footpath usage day I try to be careful to select only the very best hedgerows.
The problem with my two new pairs of 501’s is that as soon as you drop them . . . everything in the back pockets fall out. ARRRRGH. This is a big enough nuisance at home with a toilet—and I’m not in the habit of needing to pay attention when I go for yet another pee—out in the countryside with a pair of hellhounds on constant alert for things to greet, chase, and make merry with, it can be epic.
As today, when at precisely the everything-falling-out-of-the-back-pockets stage there was a sudden thunder of feet and a crashing of undergrowth and a very large off lead Labrador entered our enchanted glen. . . .
^ And my expertise in this matter is not to be despised out to about ten miles.
** I am not complaining. See me not complain. There is no snow. The pavements and the roads are clear. But it is COLD.
*** And then only three of us showed up for practise. What kind of a bunch of slackers and layabouts are our members who don’t come to bell practise on the first day of the year? New Year’s Eve was last night and you’ve had all day to sober up.^ So Niall bullied Vicky into ringing handbells^^ for something to do while we waited for latecomers, and then we all went home. Another forty-five minutes for PEGASUS.
^ Quarter bottle: I told you. Also, I have a novel to finish. Have I mentioned recently that I HAVE A NOVEL TO FINISH??
^^ Which rare occasions I always enjoy a great deal because Vicky is so deliciously hopeless. Actually she’s not hopeless—she’s too good a tower ringer to be hopeless; she just hasn’t ever got her head around the two-bells-at-a-time thing and, more to the point, doesn’t want to—but it’s perfectly true that watching our super-competent notorious-in-seven-counties tower captain come to pieces with two harmless little bells in her hands is highly gratifying. Although I’m one to talk. Neither Colin nor I could so much as count to six at our handbell practise Wednesday night, leading to the memorable remark from Niall when, upon being told that the five rang first and I raised the six, he said, No, the other five. I had never realised how dyslexic I was till I started trying to learn handbells.
Environmentally Correct Scrooge
A few hours ago I posted this on Twitter:
I need more sleep.* Moan. There’s always so much to fit in during, erm, holidays.
This is true, but it suggests a very misleading image. The only party I’ve been to lately was Peter’s OBE.** I have for the umpteenth day in a row forgotten to RSVP Edward and Alex’s Christmas party, which is now the day after tomorrow. The invite has been lying on the kitchen counter for weeks.*** Penelope, this morning at service ring, was asking me if I were going, since Niall, in typical trainspotter . . . I mean handbell ringer fashion has other things to do, and Peter feels about parties the way I feel about reading my amazon reviews†, as she knows, so she and I could go together. Yes. We could. We did this once a couple of years ago. Penelope, as I recall, mingled, and had interesting, invigorating conversations both with other known local bell ringers†† and also with utter strangers who happen to know Edward and Alex from some other source than the New Arcadia bell tower.†††
I lurked. No lurker was ever more lurky than myself at a . . . party. I hid round the corner of the fireplace at this particular party and drank too much punch, in that way that you do when you’re nervous and need something to do with your hands and it tastes good. But as is the way with holiday—ahem—punches, it was stronger than it looked/tasted with the result that I was frelling legless by the time Penelope was ready to leave. Why does she want to go with me again? Maybe the fact I missed last year‡ has softened the sharp edges of her memory, even if it hasn’t done a lot for mine. And meanwhile I didn’t get back to either her or Edward and Alex today about going to the party which will soon be tomorrow. . . . But on the other hand, who needs to talk with that punch around . . . ?
But I’ve nonetheless been busy.‡‡ I’ve been ordering crucial things. First I thought I’d be clever and hit a few Christmas sales before all the good stuff is gone . . . and come to find out that most of the on line community hasn’t got its virtual act together to open their post holiday sales yet. I think this is pretty funny: there are more 26th-December-opening-day sales happening on the high street, apparently, than virtually. I was specifically looking for Christmas tree ornaments: some of Peter’s mice apparently eat them, because I swear every year when the boxes come out there are fewer. I’m still hoping there will be a Lost Christmas Ornament Box revealed in the rubble of unopened-for-years cardboard aggregations at Third House . . . but SIIIIIIGH that is now a quest for next year.‡‡‡ And somehow I’m just not going to pay full price for tree decorations on the 27th of December. So that was a bust.
And then there were the doggy bin bags. I use these biodegradable ones, right? I’m so frelling holy. And they’re a royal pain, frankly, because they aren’t big enough. It’s not the depth so much as the width. I’ll spare you the gruesome details, but let me remark that anybody with anything larger than a hellhound is just not going to be able to cope unless there’s some trick of the wrist I haven’t got. Ewww. So I use them, carefully, but I grumble. And then, lo! What should appear on the pages of a paper catalogue I am idly flicking through to get to the women’s knitwear, since I have a permanent weakness for little layery things in the sorts of colours that are usually in the sales, but a different brand of doggy bin bag. Bigger. With proper tie handles. Gods, I’m so excited. Yes, it’s true, we’re sad folk, us environmentally conscious dog owners.
So I leap on line to order them and discover . . . a disastrous discrepancy in price. What they say in the catalogue is disgraceful enough but it’s a lot worse on line: 140 bags for £15. Are you bloody joking? On a bad day I’ll use four. And cereal-free dog food already costs Rolls-Royce-hire prices. This particular catalogue happens to have a Live Chat Room! option. You can chat with a customer representative! This is getting really too sad to describe, isn’t it? It’s two days after Christmas and I’m only just killing off the end of the Christmas champagne while in a chat room with a customer representative discussing the price of biodegradable dog bin bags. Which no, I didn’t buy, because she said the 140 for £15 was the correct description.
But wait, let me tell you about my much more successful attempt to buy vitamins. . . .
* * *
* Edited for italics. Since I guess we’re pretending to be all rough and ready with this 140 characters thing, we don’t get wussy stuff like fancy type on Twitter and have to revert to asterisks for emphasis. Feh. It makes footnoting more confusing too.^
^ Yes of course I could start with something other than an asterisk, but that’s so impure.+
+ I could also just . . . emphasize less. You’re laughing, right? You’re supposed to be laughing.
** And I’ve already sheepishly admitted that that was more fun than I was expecting. People! Gah! Conversation! Gaaah!
*** Which unfortunately suggests quite an accurate image of my kitchen counters. There are a lot of Christmas cards I haven’t answered on the same counter. One of the slightly more peculiar drawbacks of this blasted blog is that it completely destroys you for those round-up letters you used to write at Christmas or twice a year to the people that you feel bad about neglecting. And so far as I know it’s still not done to send out a list of links to a few representative blog entries. . . .
† See yesterday’s entry. ‘If someone held a gun to my head’ is a phrase that occurs.
†† You haven’t forgotten that Edward is ringing master at my home tower, have you?
††† For example, from other bell towers around the country.
‡ Can’t remember why. Probably we had visitors. Shudder. Driven from pillar to post^ by superfluous humanity, that’s me, during the festive season.^^
^ Disaster. The disaster part is very important. http://www.usingenglish.com/reference/idioms/from+pillar+to+post.html
^^ There were zillions of people out walking their frelling dogs and churning the sodden countryside to ever deeper mud today+. We met a friendly Rhodesian Ridgeback. Cost me ten years’ growth when I saw that thing barrelling toward us. And an extremely friendly three-quarters-grown yellow Lab, whose owners finally nailed her and dragged her away . . . and about two minutes later there was uproar behind us and bang: three-quarters-grown-yellow-Lab bullet, did not want to continue with slow boring humans when there were hellhounds nearby.
+ It’s going to freeze again tonight which means that tomorrow the landscape will be a low but deadly massif of sharpened mud-stakes, like an iron maiden lying on its back. Tuesday it starts snowing again. I know that global warming is a complicated issue but . . . maybe this is Gaia saying GAAAAAH to the pig’s ear that useless lot in Copenhagen made of setting up a schedule for humanity to stop destroying itself.~
~ I tend to the theory that Gaia herself will survive, but she may have to get rid of us and put her energy into developing intelligence in axolotls and fruit bats. Or she may decide that intelligence was a mistake, and leave the axolotls and fruit bats alone.
‡‡ First I had to get up and go ring again. Any week that includes two mornings of getting up before 8 a.m. is not a good week. Although presents and champagne do help.
‡‡‡ And speaking of Third House . . . I need a greenhouse heater. I thought with the walls, the bubble wrap, the grow light, and the foliar mass, that I wasn’t going to need a greenhouse heater too, which make me a little twitchy although most of ’em have failsafes up the wazoo any more. It hasn’t even been that cold! 25°F! Big frelling deal! But my begonias have said, nope, not doing this, and croaked. Damn. I still have quite a few in the cottage windowsills but . . . damn. Everything else still looks alive. Cranky, maybe, but alive.
Merry/Happy Christmas
SUNLIGHT.
And, furthermore, we got out of town. For the first time since the meteorological siege began. The pavements are thawing, the roads are almost clear. Hellhounds and I had a proper hurtle today. Yaaay.
And the hellhounds are on lead despite huge open grassy field dazzlingly devoid of livestock because there are a bunch of frelling walkers coming up behind us. What is the matter with people that they go for a walk on Christmas Day, especially on an utterly glorious clear sunny Christmas which is furthermore the first time we’ve seen blue sky in about six months?*
It’s a little scary, realising just how reliant my mental and emotional health** are on pelting over the countryside every day. *** Back in Maine I produced the necessary effect during the three foot of snow months with a rowing machine and Led Zep † cranked up really loud. But I’d have trouble going back to that system after nearly twenty years in southern England.
Mmmmmm.
And yes, I did get the tree decorated. The plain brown Fortnum and Mason’s box contains champagne.
* * *
* Nearly
** Cough cough cough etc
*** Which of course makes me think of Luke, who can’t pelt anywhere right now. Sigh.
† And various other far more embarrassing sources of sweat-inducing noise.
