Another day, another frenzy
I am now officially putting in for a day that ISN’T another of those FRELLING DAYS. I had a friend coming for the afternoon so the first thing was, of course . . . I overslept. I woke up to the sound of the Delivery Man giving up banging on the door and carrying the FORTY FRELLING TONS of gold-dust dog kibble* up the steep half-flight of stairs beside the house to leave it behind the gate, which is where I ask for things to be left, but that means I have to wrestle the wretched thing back DOWN the (steep) steps and then back UP the steps to the front door . . . and then womanhandle it through the maze of doors, puppy gates, hellhounds, etc to get the freller into the far corner of the sitting room which is where it lives because I have ZERO storage space on the ground floor of the cottage.** ZERO.***
Then I failed to learn today’s Japanese vocabulary because the pdf print out simply doesn’t contain this lesson and my memory is nowhere near good enough to assimilate much from someone chirping it at me two or three times while hellhounds and I are out hurtling†. I’m starting to get a little cranky about the shortcomings of this package. Also I’m back to the squeaky, breathy Ashley-san section again. Maybe it’s time I loaded up the Japanese for Dummies CD.
So hellhounds and I finally got down to the mews with about an hour before I had to go meet a train. I was outdoors with a bucket, rubber gloves and a sponge, peeling a few layers off Wolfgang’s exterior†† when Peter appeared at the front door and said, You are seeking to impress? Seeking to impress? I said. No, I am seeking not to horrify. I’ve also got the two pairs of muddy hiking boots and two and a half pairs of muddy gaiters out of the front footwell, had a quick—very quick—swipe with the dustcloth at the dashboard, and refolded the hellhound-rubdown towels so that the dirtiest bits are inside.†††
I came indoors again, both Wolfgang and I a good bit damper than we’d been half an hour ago, but Wolfgang isn’t dripping on the floor. I glance at the clock and start on hellhound lunch. Don’t forget to get some food into you, says Peter. Menopause metabolism, I reply, I don’t need food, and weren’t you going upstairs to have a nice lie down from which distancy and horizontality you can’t make unwelcome remarks?
Hellhounds won’t eat their lunch. AAAAAAAAUGH.
AND THEN MY COMPUTER SEIZED UP AND CRASHED.
When I tried to text Clotilda that I was going to be late I kept getting the ‘this phone number does not exist, you call that a clean car you filthy slut, your computer hates you and your dogs are weird’ error message.
I was half an hour late to the train station. Clotilda was, I think, so relieved to see me at all that her initial reaction to Wolfgang was muted.‡ I think the afternoon went okay otherwise. Barring the extremely nasty cup of tea I subjected her to. Ambience is not all and next time I have a tea-drinking friend visiting we are going to penetrate into the unambient end of town where there is a rumour of a tea-shop that serves the stuff I drink at home.‡‡ Then I forced her to hurtle hellhounds with me. Oh dear. Poor Clotilda. . . .
I’ve been following your discussion of the research you do for your books with a lot of interest. Just this week you’ve mentioned how you’re brushing up on your Japanese‡‡‡ for Shadows and the studying on bees you did for Chalice. As a dog person, I’ve always loved Deerskin for how dog-smart it is, particularly what Lissar learns and observes as she tries to raise the orphan litter of fleethound puppies. Having raised pups myself, there are so many little details in there that ring true to me. I always smile when Lissar uses the straw to get milk into the pups, because it reminds me of the way modern breeders tube feed (though with different equipment, of course). You even captured the fear of what might happen if milk gets in those little lungs. In fact, it reads so realistically that I have to wonder if your research for this part of the book involved more than just reading about puppy raising. Did this scene come from a real-life experience?
Thank you! I’ve never raised puppies from first infancy, no, but I did raise the litter of puppies which contained my very first dog, a white German Shepherd, when I was a teenager. They were not quite two weeks old when their mum decided she wasn’t cut out for motherhood and bolted, and I was in that la-la-la adolescent phase when anything to do with a subject you love is good so I was like, raise eight tiny unweaned puppies by hand? Sure! Arrrrgh. Well, all eight of the little frellers lived, so obviously the learning curve wasn’t too steep. The owner did keep half an eye on me, but she was already way over her head with other duties—she ran a riding stable as well as a kennels—and I was the kind of over-responsible tool who would sit up all night if that was what was required. If you’ve been through it, then you know about the very real danger of diarrhea in puppies—it doesn’t take much to tax them past what their tiny little metabolisms can cope with. Eight hours for a full night’s sleep is way too long, even with vet’s drugs (although the drugs may be better and faster-acting these days). I never used straws, but I wielded a mean eyedropper. I can’t now remember where I learnt about foreign matter in the lungs—but I’d survived pneumonia myself only about two years before this, so the fragility of lungs was probably still a vividly disturbing subject.
Catlady
Fostered a litter of kittens. All four kittens (and mama) found homes. One kitten’s home didn’t work out. I don’t even like tuxedo cats, I said, nearly crying with happiness as he leaped back into my arms.
He’s doing his best impersonation of a fuzzy ball right now in my lap, purring and dozing with ears the size of bat wings. Speaking of bats.
I love stories like this. I therefore forgive you for the reference to bats.
Tassiegal
If I am not mistaken [Haro] is a very well formed wire haired fox terrier puppy. At which point I melt and go SQUEEE! I love my terriers.
He does look like one, doesn’t he? And far more this week than last—if I’d got photos of him last week you’d’ve known he wasn’t. He’s really come into his own as diabolically cute. No, he’s a Jack Russell/Border cross, and while they are all frelling little terriers he looks like he’s going to grow up to be a very handsome scion of the genre.
Sigh.
* * *
* Yes, it’s a lot of gold dust. Priced accordingly. But if you want free postage—and at these prices you certainly do want free postage—you have to order it in upper tonnage.
** I have lots of bookshelves, of course. But bookshelves aren’t storage. They’re bookshelves. They’re a basic necessity, like tea, chocolate and champagne. And books. Oh, and there are never enough of them. Like tea, chocolate, champagne and books.
*** Did I ever do you my tapdance-with-added-arrrgh about my little row of dwarf appliances under the stairs? Most people have an under-stair cupboard. I have to keep my refrigerator, freezer and washing machine under there, and I swear the spice rack on the wall above the washing machine sticks a corner out, like someone putting a foot out in a slapstick comedy, every time I straighten up from doing something with laundry. At least I can employ language. It’s worse on handbell evenings, when the spice rack nails me as I’m getting the milk out of the refrigerator for everybody else’s tea. And they’re all right in the next room, and they’re all British. MMppphggggrhrhrhrhrhGGGH.
† NO. STOP THAT. WHATEVER THAT IS YOU MAY NOT EAT IT. NO.
†† Hey! He’s red!
††† I have also decided I am not letting her indoors at the cottage, where I haven’t hoovered since approximately . . . when I turned the second draft of SHADOWS in. Furthermore I suspect her of being a neat freak and never having dirty dishes in the sink.
‡ And I haven’t even mentioned his vibrant array of dents which might cause a feeling of insecurity in the timid.
Since I nearly always order on line I don’t worry about this interesting factoid from their opening page: ‘ We are open seven days a week from 10.00am to 5.30pm, and Sundays from 11.00am to 3.00pm.’
‡‡‡ ‘Brushing up on my Japanese’ HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA. I now remember . . . maybe twelve kanji, although always for the wrong reasons. For example, the kanji for ‘father’ is described as ‘regrettably, hands wielding a stick’. Or, to my eye, two sticks. Or, how about this, from my lovely if over-optimistic READ JAPANESE TODAY: ‘The character for evening [squiggle] combined with the divining rod [squiggle], used by shamans and necromancers who worked at night to bring their customers news from the spirit world, made the composite kanji [double squiggle], meaning other or outside of. [previous double squiggle plus squiggle for person], gaijin, other-person, is a foreigner.’
There Is Hope, continued
GEEZUM FRELLING RATBAGGING CROW IT’S COLD. COOOOOOOOLD. We’ve had this super-mild winter when after last year we’re all jumping at shadows* and going AAAAAAUGH, was that a snowflake? It hasn’t been. But February has come in with teeth. And ice giants. And a hard bleak ridgy landscape that looks like a dress rehearsal for when hell freezes over. And a wind that leaves lash marks on your skin. My hands, wrapped around leads, even in gloves are too cold. And hellhounds vary from manic to petulant. First it’s WOWIEEEEEEEE, WATCH ME CLIMB A TREE LIKE A SQUIRREL** and then it’s MAKE IT GO AWAAAAAAAAAAAAAAY and then it’s, if you’re not going to make it go away, take us HOOOOOOOOOOOME.*** This evening when I took them out before bell ringing we got back in plenty of time for me to have another bootless glower at Grandsire Triples† because none of us could stand it out there.††
I almost didn’t go to practise. Well, no, I thought about almost not going. And I’d even forgotten that I’d announced last week that I was going to Forza again this week.††† But while SHADOWS is still moving, it was not moving today with the free and gallant gait it had been yesterday. ‡ So I thought about staying home and keeping working. I also thought about not having to go anywhere else in this weather.
But I’d programmed myself too well. I found myself putting my jacket and shoes back on, and stuffing my bell-method books (and my knitting) in my little knapsack, and trudging off to fetch Wolfgang. Ugggggh.
And then . . . there is hope. I almost bottled out of the Grandsire Triples (which the Scary Man cheerfully called for and beckoned to me) thinking that since I’m having such trouble with these bells and I’m safer on six, and it was minor last week that was finally the first thing I’d done right, maybe I should just ring six for a bit and leave triples for later. But I grasped my rope and clenched my teeth . . . and the Grandsire was not a total drooling foozle. I had to be fetched out of a hole twice, I think, by the Scary Man shouting in my ear, but I managed to see quite a bit of what I was doing. There is hope. THERE IS.
Although I’m still intimidated out of my tiny feeble mind by the sheer scope of the abbey. We rang rounds on eighty-four, because the abbot rings a little, and this gave him a chance to pull on a bell rope, and I almost died of terror. Rounds, for pity’s sake, McKinley! It’s only rounds! The bells going 1-2-3-4-5-6-7-8-9 up to eighty-four and then over again! NOTHING to remember! All you need is the most primitive bell-handling skill! But it’s rounds in a GIGANTIC room and I feel bizarrely vulnerable as if there are leopards in the shadows.‡‡ I feel all sort of wavery and reed-like, out in the middle of the floor like that—I’d grabbed the eight, just for variety, since I’ve been ringing exclusively round the front. Which—the front few bells—happen to stand relatively near the wall at that end of the room—the rest of the ropes career out into the middle of nowhere. It’s not like you lean against the wall—on the contrary, ringing too close to a wall in a tiny ringing chamber is pretty uncomfortable—but it’s there. You know there isn’t room for any leopards behind you. We rang rounds for, dunno, maybe three minutes by the end of which I was howling silently: please stop! Please stop! Please stop!
I am pathetic.
I am also going again next week.
* * *
* . . . you should forgive the term
** Chaos, who, as we know, has no attention span and after four and a half years of wearing a harness instead of a collar, cannot reliably remember to pick both front feet up to have it put on, remembers EVERY TREE he has ever chased a squirrel into. This is, as you may believe, a lot of trees. And a tree at whose feet he almost caught a squirrel he has to be dragged past moaning.^ I am particularly afflicted by two of these exceptionally trying trees at the moment.
^ Like you have to drag him past his girlfriend. The border collie. Who bites.+ I have to put him on short lead and frog-march him past her gate, while he moans. She loves me, he says. Moan. She does really. Moan. It’s her way of showing affection. Moan.
+ Mongo does NOT bite. He wouldn’t DREAM of biting.#
# Except curtains, sofa cushions, electric flex, etc.
*** The corollary to this is and GET THESE HORRIBLE COATS OFF US. Darkness, as usual, is the more stoic. Chaos, who feels the cold much worse, prances like a hackney pony the whole time, with a wild butt-swing that would get him marked down if he were a hackney pony, and tries to rub his coat off on walls and bollards and hedgerows and anything else he can get alongside. STOP THAT. Our one tentative breakthrough on the subject of winter warmth is that when I put them in the car I drape two bits of old blanket over them, one bit per hellhound. They seem to have figured out that if they lie down without the standard pacing and clawing first, their blankets stay on and they stay warmer. My mastermind hellhounds. Maybe intense cold has a wits-sharpening effect?^
^ Not on me. It has a bunker-mentality effect on me. Not unlike make it go AWAAAAAAAAAAY.
† I know the frelling line. Knowing the frelling line is not the problem.
†† TMI warning: avert your eyes NOW.
Neither of my hellhounds is prompt about the bodily-functions business. Chaos does have a crap almost immediately, but he will have two or three more over the course of an hour’s walk. Darkness unloads about ninety percent of his delivery in one colossal lot . . . but it takes him anything up to half an hour to feel moved to do so. And they stop for a pee every five feet, or do if I let them. Forever. If I walked them six hours, fourteen hours, ninety hours, they would still be peeing every five feet (if I let them). Anyway. Usually this is not a problem: in two hours of sprinting over the landscape there is time. Last few days, while the morning hurtle is merely a bit extra brisk, the evening hurtle is yaaaaaaah get on with it you have FIVE MINUTES.
††† I’d also forgotten Forza’s bell practise was going to have visitors this week. The Royal Loyal Grand Panjandrum and the chief abbot. The chief abbot looked more or less like a normal priest. Possibly his frock was more flowing than standard but that may just be that he is a tall abbot. The Royal Loyal was wearing a gigantic Seal of Office around his neck. I keep forgetting about the English and their 800 year old traditions to go with their 800 year old abbeys. The what? And he was wearing what? But it’s worse than that. Today’s the something anniversary of the Queen swimming the English Channel or bungie-jumping off the Forth Bridge or the day she dropped the Black Prince’s Ruby down the loo during an especially tedious reception, or something really important. So in honour of this significant global event and since we had visitors someone had brought a couple of bottles of (cheap) fizz—no, really—and about halfway through practise we all gathered around the tower captain who gave a little speech about whatever^ which ended with everyone raising their glasses and intoning, To the QUEEN.
I am not joking.
I love England. I love the landscape, the public footpath system, the cider, the sausages, the bell towers, the ringing, the roses, the National Trust, the V&A museum, the double decker buses, the fact that there is a train system even if it’s going to pieces, and many of the people. I don’t, theoretically, even mind the percentage of your earnings they take away from you because I believe, for example, in socialised medicine. I object a lot to what they do with your money (for example, they are currently trying to destroy the socialised medical system as they have already destroyed the trains), but that’s another story.
I do not love the monarchy.
^ The Heroic Deeds of the Plumber
‡ Maybe Fiona would like to relocate and open a YARN STORE in New Arcadia?
‡‡ There’s that word again.
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.