Meteorological Mayhem
Hellhounds and I put Cathy on the train in Mauncester this morning.* Hellhounds and I then headed farther out, to Warm Upford, to check on the bluebell situation. And the heavens opened. Sweet bleeding demiurges, I thought it had been raining before. This was the solid wall of water variety, coming down so hard you not only can’t see out of your windscreen, but you wonder uneasily if it’s going to dent your roof and rip your windscreen wipers off. You’re going at 20 mph because you can’t see . . . and then you fall into the Mississippi River, SPLASH, and here you thought you were in southern England and what the frell happened to the frelling levees?** Fortunately Wolfgang is equipped with an amphibian button from his secret life as a stunt car for James Bond, and so we swam to shore and continued on our way, which had become brown and given to whirlpools. We were the second car behind a monster lorry, and when it hit a road-flood I swear the bow-wave was taller than Wolfgang. This kind of downpour doesn’t last, I told myself, clinging valiantly to the steering wheel, and indeed it didn’t, it slacked off to mere sheeting between onslaughts of cannonball rain. We got out to Warm Upford and turned around despondently to come back by another route and . . . there was suddenly and unexpectedly this astonishing manifestation called ‘blue sky’.*** I pulled Wolfgang over at the first opportunity and hellhounds and I got out for a sprint. A wet sprint. A very wet sprint. A very, very wet sprint. A very, very, very wet sprint. A . . . .†
I had a concert to go to tonight. In Frellingham. Arrrgh. Frellingham is about forty-five minutes from here. Nina lives there now, and she emailed me a while ago about the schedule at the little concert venue a few blocks from her and her bloke’s new house. We had agreed that tonight’s visitation looked amusing: a ragtag collection of old folk-hippie musicians who have (apparently) banded together against the encroachment of electro-techno alternative art prog dance-punk-metal experimental grungehorror cyberthrash, and gone on tour. Nina had bought tickets. Hellhounds and I got back from our wet sprint, and having used up sixteen towels getting half dry, I emailed poor Nina in a bit of a panic saying I’m not driving to Frellingham in this.
It cleared off. Sort of. Comparatively.††† Hellhounds and I only got semi-wet on the afternoon hurtle, and the wind wasn’t blowing more than 80 mph except for the occasional gust, so I slid a few extra lead weights into the special James Bond slots under Wolfgang’s chassis†† and we went.
The concert was . . . amusing.‡ Sometimes it is a good thing to be reminded that your youth is something you get to grow out of. And I only got slightly lost on my way to Nina and Ignatius’ new house—I’ve only been there once before and which way you go on the unmarked roundabout(s) may take a little while to lodge in the memory.
Tomorrow . . . reality bites. And SHADOWS reign.‡‡
* * *
* Waaaaaah. But . . . pretty much everything about the timing of this visit sucked dead (you should forgive the term) bears. She was supposed to be coming after I had finished and handed in SHADOWS.^ She was supposed to be coming after I was caught up to Hamaker New Thing Monkeywrench #s 1 and 2.^^ She was also supposed to be coming here to have long walks through the countryside and, it being bluebell season, she would not only see bluebells, but we might possibly get a hellgoddess and hellhounds surrounded by bluebells photo.^^^
No. None of the above. But she did see baby robins. And we lay on the folded-out sofa at the cottage with a plethora of hellhounds# and watched WONDERFALLS## on the Shiny Two-Ton No Longer New Entirely Rebuilt Ex-Lemon### Laptop, thus proving it can do something right.~ Also, that bartender is hot.~~ And the rain drummed on.
^ And was far enough along on the doodle backlog that you could actually get into my office again. Not, I suppose, that she needed to get into my office, but it’s easier to browse my F&SF shelves, which are what live (mostly+) in my office, from within arm’s length than . . . not within arm’s length.
+ There’s a wall of homeopathy too. Which is why SF&F spills into the bedroom.
^^ When in fact I’m writing ep 12 and it’ll be another one or two before we get to HNTM one. We started #3 while she was here anyway.
^^^ Instead she drank a lot of tea out of my bluebell mug+, since that was as close as she was going to get. Well, there are a few bluebells in my garden, but given the, ahem, lushness of the planting out there, you’d get just as soaked going to look at them as if you went and found some wild ones.
+ http://www.emmabridgewater.co.uk/flowers/bluebell-12-pint-mug/invt/ngbb002/
Hmph. It’s got more expensive since I bought mine.
# They expand to fill available space. I’ve noticed this before.
## http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wonderfalls
### She says with dramatic emphasis.
~Including, evidently, playing a region 1 DVD. I am so clueless about all of this.
~~ So is Beth.
** Ask George W. Bush.
*** It was still raining, of course. This is southern England^. It rains out of blue sky all the time. But it doesn’t usually rain the pummelling you all over your body kind of rain out of blue sky. Usually.
^ Unless it’s the Mississippi delta.
† And I’m afraid the rumours that it’s a bad year for bluebells appear to be true. There aren’t as many flower stalks at all, it seems to me, and the ones there are have four or six little bells per, and usually you get twelve or fifteen. Aside from the tricky questions about taking photos in the rain, if I can’t find a better forest floor of them, there won’t be bluebell photos this year. I have a couple more places to try, but I’m not too hopeful. That was my best bluebell sea today.
†† Very bad for mileage, but they do keep you on the road.
††† I’ve just had a frelling email from frelling Cathy saying it was beautiful and clear all day where she was on the south coast. WELL ISN’T THAT SPECIAL.
‡ There wasn’t a single person there under forty. There was also way too much khaki hemp^ and Birkenstocks, but I lowered the level as much as I could in a salmon-coloured turtleneck and All Stars and a watermelon-coloured pullover. My frameless glasses are against me though.
^ No, no, not that kind of hemp.
‡‡ And New Thing gets a nice padded footstool.
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.
On Not Yelling at Your Computer
MMMMMPHHHHPHHHHHHMMMRRRRRGGGLLLL
Peter said, I’m not dancing the hornpipe. I’m not. Besides, I don’t know any hornpipes. However . . . .
Do I need to suggest you stop right there? I said.
No, no! said Peter. This is a supportive, constructive remark! I was just thinking you might want to learn some angry songs! There’s a lot of good ranting in Handel, isn’t there? Sorceresses and things. Since you like Handel.*
Something of the sort had already occurred to me.** I have also told you that I was in psychotherapy/counselling for a number of years***. One of the bottom lines with each of the various psycho-disciplines my various shrinks had trained in is that you can’t just stop something, to make a change stick, you have to replace the behaviour or the thought-pattern or the what-you-like with some other behaviour or thought-pattern or what-you-like. So I warned Peter that if I am overcome with the need to shout at my computer I am going to start doing singing exercises.
So from this moment forward my day goes something like this: clickclickclickclickclick. Damn. Click. Clickclickclickclick. Oh damn. Click. Click. Click. DAMN.
Ee, ah eeee ah, eeee ahahahah, eeee, ah. EE. AH. EEEE. AH. EEEE AHAHAHAH EEEE ARRRRRGAH.
Good breath control. Great projection. This is so going to help my EXPRESSIVENESS.
Blogmom
| I HAVE TO STOP YELLING AT MY COMPUTER BECAUSE I’M HURTING MY SINGING. |
Oh, this is too funny. Made my day.
I CAN STILL SHOUT BY EMAIL, YOU KNOW.†
* * *
* A partiality I do not share with my husband. Back in the days when we still went to live operas in London, I did manage to take him to Semele. Afterward he said no more Handel. —Hmmph. Philistine.
The furious aria that is going to come first to the average opera-goer’s mind however, is the Queen of the Night’s second appearance in THE MAGIC FLUTE: Hell’s vengeance boils in my heart.^ Excellent.
I don’t think so. I still have happy dreams of regaining my high C, although I haven’t decided yet if I mean a working C, which means I need a D to float down from, or a C to float down to the B from, but my high F days are past.^^ And, speaking of technique . . . yeep.^^^
^AKA Kill the beggar: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Queen_of_the_Night_Aria
^^ I’ve told you I had a silly range when I was younger—I sang anything from high soprano to middling baritone. I’m a little fascinated in hindsight what that upper register must have sounded like. Like a needle through the ear, probably.
^^^ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8WNJyOKvKkM&feature=related
** And about interpretation? About COMMUNICATING with my audience the reality of the song? I bet I could do anger. I bet I could really do anger.
*** And a good shrink is worth her or his weight in gold, jewels and obedient hellhounds^ several times over. You think I’m overwrought and overreactive now. . . . My first shrink had a whip, chair and trank gun.
^ Actually this wasn’t a set up, but since I’m here . . . we were out striding over hill and dale beyond Warm Upford today.+ We turned at the top of the hill++ and were now walking on the near side of a low, thorny hedge, with a field on the far side. I could see a person ambling along near the hedge on the other side. Oh gods, I thought, she will certainly have a dog. She did. My heart sank. But then—joy—I noticed she had it on a lead. Hurrah hurrah hurrah. We were, of course, going faster than she was. We usually are going faster than the other guy. And we were no more than about eight feet behind her when—without looking around—she leaned down and let it off the lead.
Crapalooza.
Okay, I thought, the hedge is pretty frelling thorny, and we’re moving at a clip and can perhaps move a little clippier so by the time we get to the end of the hedge we’ll be well out in front and . . .
Bitsyboo! said the woman, who had finally noticed our existence, as we pulled even with her. Bitsyboo! Come! Sit! Wait! Stand! Stop! No! Bitsyboo!
Bitsyboo was galloping back and forth along the hedge, frantic for a way through. With this kind of persistence, of course the bloody thing found a way through and was on us at once. Great. Splendid. Gak. Frell me.
Fortunately it was friendly, more or less. It was completely manic, and it did an awful lot of dashing, pouncing and growling, but it was pretty clearly play growling, and while Darkness is not the most reliable coal-mine canary, if we agree about a dog’s intentions we’re probably right, and he wasn’t reacting to Bitsyboo—other than spare me which I powerfully agreed with. We kept going. We kept going at our best clippy clip because my experience is still that most pet dogs—I say nothing of working sheepdogs or hunting dogs or various other countryside menaces—are not particularly fit and if they aren’t actively trying to gnaw bits off you you have a pretty good chance of just outrunning the miscreant.
The cries of Sit! Stay! Bitsyboo! Come! were growing fainter in the distance, till they morphed into Excuse me! Excuse me! —I know what this means. It means, would you please stop, so I have some chance of catching my dog because I am an incompetent moron and it is an untrained disaster, and if you don’t stop I may never see it again.
No. No, I won’t stop. You are an incompetent moron and I’m not in a good mood and next time LOOK AROUND before you let your untrained disaster off its lead. I’m also running [sic] about twenty minutes behind time because every road in Hampshire is being dug up, including the ones that footpaths cross, and we’ve had to take an unscheduled detour and I don’t feel like wasting another ten minutes while you (a) catch up and (b) play tag with your mutt. And yes, if it were vicious we’d be standing in a tight little wodge while I tried to stay between it and my hellhounds and I am therefore being unfair to mere incompetent morons and I don’t care.
And yes, Bitsyboo did get tired before we’d sprinted the two miles back to Wolfgang. I admit I’d’ve stopped before we got to the main road: I have a deep dislike of blood, even incompetent moron’s untrained disaster blood.
+ There’s a house that got put up a few years ago in the middle of that heavily pheasanted and gamekeepered cultivated wilderness and I keep wondering what they do during shooting season. Lie flat on the floor for six months perhaps. Anyway. The house has a peculiar name. Let’s call it . . . Botulism. It’s in that category. Why anyone would want to name their house after a disease is a little beyond me. Even if it’s a private joke, still Botulism is what the world knows you as. Fortunately I’m not likely ever to be invited to dinner there (even out of hunting season, when we get to sit in chairs).
But it apparently exists in the Warm Upford Alternate Dimension. It’s got to the point that if we’re walking along the little road at the bottom of the valley and have to press ourselves into the hedgerow to let a vehicle past, and the vehicle slows down to speak to us, I open my mouth to say, yes, it’s half/a quarter of a mile ahead/behind. Today we had turned off the road and were toiling up the hill again when I heard a commotion behind me. I turned around. There was a delivery truck on the road, and the driver had got out of his cab and was starting to run up the hill after me. Miss! Miss! he said (he was a serious distance away, you understand). I stopped. Do you know where mumblemumblemumble is?
Yep. Half a mile that way, on your left. —And am I sure he was asking about Botulism? Yes. I could hear the B, the t, the l, and the fact that it was three syllables. But if I wasn’t used to people trying to find it, I might well have said, Bottlebrush? Never heard of it.
++ Yes, that hill
† As I believe I proved just a few hours ago on the subject of frelling Facebook’s latest draddarkle fambanged remodel, which Blogmom is going to have to cope with.
A Day in Which Almost Nothing Happens But I Rattle on Endlessly Anyway
Happy Leap Year Day.
Because we were a little short of hurtling yesterday I took hellhounds well out of town on one of our epic walks this morning. It’s one we haven’t been on in yonks and yonks and they’ve relocated the freller which you aren’t really allowed to do with legal public footpaths but at least it’s still there at all. The best relocated ones are when we’re three-quarters through the long loop back to Wolfgang and we do not want to turn around, and Sleeping Beauty’s hedge rears up in front of us. The standard bad-attitude farmer’s tactic is ploughing right up to the edge so you have nowhere to walk, but you can at least flounder on. Worse is the electric fence set three inches from the hedgerow. We’ve negotiated a few of these too, with hellhounds on strangle-short lead and clearly wondering what’s sent me off my nut this time. Chaos nonetheless managed once to sting himself and he turned around and looked at me reproachfully, the ungrateful cur. Possibly my favourite is the dog-impassable stile. I don’t like lifting forty-odd-pound hellhounds over these things* and there’s one chest-high one** that is a nightmare. I haven’t been that way in a while, to see if the frelling city council was sufficiently buried under infuriated dog walkers to have had the wretched thing altered. Arrgh.
But I digress. I never got very lost and the available paths were perfectly adequate, they were just kind of in the wrong places. And there’s one long stretch of open field where hellhounds were blistering away in all directions, checking back with me a good half a second before I panicked***, and blistering away again. This meant by the end of our epic walk . . . I wasn’t quite looking around for poles to rig a travois†, but I was beginning to wonder if it would come to that.
The rest of the day was pretty much head down over SHADOWS. No, it is emphatically not going to be done tomorrow. But it is moving along. Just not quite fast enough. I was supposed to go bell ringing tonight but I immolated this desire on the altar of getting paid sooner.††
The good news is that Wolfgang has a brand-new 2012 tax disc yaaaaaay.††† Now all I have to do is remember to put it on. Ahem. The other thrilling news is that someone emailed me the details of the Japanese country cookbook she was morally certain was the one I was quacking about the other night . . . and she’s right. More yaaaaay. This was several days ago.‡ I instantly went on line ‡‡ and found a clean copy, since it’s out of print and I have a deep dislike of cooking through other people’s splashes and maculations, wrote the bookseller a query . . . and didn’t receive an answer. I didn’t receive an answer to my follow-up either. So tonight I capitulated and applied to ungleblarging amazon, which as we know has everything. . . and I now have a second Japanese cookbook on its way.
librarykat
My Japanese mother has to deal with the (she thinks) drastic changes in the Japanese language; she left Japan in the late 1950s after she married my dad. He was stationed there again from 1961-64,
I was there then. Shall we play the silly game of did we pass each other on the street? We were in Yokosuka for the first year and a half— ’61 to ’62—and then Tokyo for the rest.
and since then she’s just gone back a few times to visit family. It’s even worse for the Japanese in Hawaii- their great (and multiple great) grandparents left Japan in the late 1800s, so many Hawaii-born Japanese speak an archaic Japanese, and in dialects that have almost disappeared in Japan.
This sounds a bit like the Appalachians?, where up till recently, since I don’t think there’s much untouched back country left, there were isolated areas where they still spoke the Queen’s English—Elizabeth I, that is, not II.
I remember a co-worker in the library system who hosted a Japanese college student back in 1992 – that student laughed at my co-worker’s Japanese, which was fluent but so old-fashioned the student could hardly understand her. My husband was teased by his great-aunt and cousins when he visited Japan as a teenager; same thing – his Japanese was not only old-fashioned, but also too polite, his cousins informed him.
This is one of the things that keeps stirring in the back of my mind as I plug on through my modern lessons. I don’t remember enough to be able to cite examples but that’s certainly my impression. I’m also sure—well, nearly sure—that I was told fifty years ago that there were five levels of politeness, although you probably wouldn’t need the most extreme two they existed. Modern lessons only even mention three and rarely deal with the third . . . and yet school lessons are always more polite than what you’re going to hear on the street.
When I lived in Japan as a young girl, the kids in the military dependents’ school sang a little ditty to the tune of “London Bridge is falling down” – moshi moshi ano ne, ano ne, ano ne; moshi moshi ano ne, a, so desu ka. 50 years later, I can’t get this out of my head! Apparently it’s called “Denwa Uta” – Telephone Song. Translates roughly as “hello, uh-huh, uh-huh, uh-huh; hello, uh-huh, ah, is that so”
Oh gods I haven’t thought of this in . . . fifty years. Yes. Oh dear. Yes. I was in one of those military dependents’ schools, and . . . well, the other kids sang it. Even then I was uneasy about the whole dissing another person’s culture thing, and I wasn’t sure if that’s what was happening or not.
Funny thing, though, when my mother talked on the phone with her friends, her side of the conversation often sounded just like that!
YES. I loved this when I heard it. But I was always too timid to ask a real Japanese person for details. . . .
* * *
* And to think I complain when hellhounds wish to skip meals.
** What do you do if you’re short? And have three Newfoundlands?
*** This involves standing in the middle of the field whimpering and chewing on your knuckles and remembering the old lurcher rule that your dog will come back, but it will come back to the place it left you, and staring around for two little dots appearing on the horizon and hurtling toward you till you can recognise them as hellhounds. Mine streak up to me, goose me energetically, and stare around hopefully, willing me not to put them back on lead yet.
† It’s pretty warm. I could have lashed my coat between the poles. With a combination of the bits of green garden string I always have in my pocket^ and the wire from my frelling mono earpiece which would then give me the excuse/impetus to buy another one preferably that does not make me crazy. I’ve been complaining about listening to one stereo earphone for months—listening to chaos theory or Japanese language lessons this way isn’t bad, but listening to music is dire—because I like to have some warning when we’re about to be mugged by off-lead Fluffy, which requires one ear free to detect the panting breath and thundering feet of approach. I haven’t been able to find anything plausible online in the UK^^ and then Peter strolled into the local ironmongers a few weeks ago . . . and came home with a mono earpiece. Calloo callay. Except it’s one of these gods*&^%$£”!!!!frelling D-ring things that fits entirely over your ear AND I HAAAATE IT. Between glasses, earrings and hair there isn’t room for it anyway. ARRRRRGH. But I do hear Fluffy coming, and I’m not always standing on the wire to the other earpiece after I’ve bent over to pick up freshly delivered crap and the wretched thing has fallen out of my pocket again.
^ Except occasionally when I want one and there aren’t any
^^ America is apparently rotten with mono earpieces, well how nice for you
†† Also it’s a last Wednesday of the month which means that Wild Robert has a practise for us scum at some arbitrary tower while Forza is taken over by demiurges and celestial beings. This month’s arbitrary tower is in New Zealand or something. I didn’t think I could drive that far.
††† I know you can do it online. I already said I knew you could do it online. I don’t want to.^ Especially when I have a perfectly good husband who walks past the post office every day because it amuses him to buy his newspaper in person rather than have it delivered. Although I hadn’t known, till you and Nadia told me, that the database would already know that Wolfgang is insured, even if I’ve lost the damn form.
^ And ‘old’ is a relative term. In my case it means I’m old enough to say ‘I don’t want to’. This middle-class first-world society I, and I assume most of you, live in is wildly overloaded with stuff to do, learn, experience, understand, seek, puzzle out, encounter, participate in, organise and reorganise your life by and blah blah blah blah blah. I don’t want to know how my computer works. I just want it to start when I turn the key in the little hole. Etc. If Peter stops walking past the post office to buy his newspaper every day, I promise to learn to get my task disc online.
‡ I’m still waiting for A SIMPLE ART to arrive. Don’t worry. You will be the first to know.
‡‡ See? I’m perfectly capable of going online when I’m sufficiently motivated.^
^ This didn’t do me a lot of good with the mono earbud however.