Wet wet wet
It’s okay. I can write a blog tonight. Darkness ate dinner. *&^%$£@#~}+!!!!!!!!!!! Cathy, on the other side of the table, is breathing a deep sigh of relief. She’d made the perilous, not to say fatal, offer to write another guest blog if I found myself incapable on account of the extreme reprehensibleness of hellhounds and the resultant need to wail and rail incessantly all evening.* Which is to say, Darkness stopped eating. Yesterday.
I know, I know (and you regular readers know, you know). Normal dogs—well, normal sighthounds—miss meals occasionally. It’s not a big deal. It’s a big deal with these guys because of their history. And it’s a big deal to me because I’m the human supposedly in charge of managing they survive their history. And they are a lot better, about food, about eating food, and about stopping eating (food) and about looking like they’re at death’s door after about twenty-four hours of not eating. And I may have an ever so slight tendency to hit red alert before it’s absolutely necessary. But. . . .
If you graphed hellhound appetites and the amount of food I actually manage to get in them, the lines would swing up and down wildly anyway, like the surface of Lake Superior just before the Edmund Fitzgerald went down. I’m used to this. I don’t frelling like it, but I’m used to it. Occasionally, however, one or both hellhounds ship a really big wave and head for the bottom. If I hadn’t been distracted by having fun with Cathy—because I am an irresponsible dog owner and a horrible selfish thoughtless human being—I might have noticed that the current oh-well-maybe-I-will-and-maybe-I-won’t food mood was hardening into something more drastic. It had crossed my mind that the current lack of enthusiasm phase was going on a little long.
AND THEN . . .
It has not been a good day. Today was our last chance to get out into the country and look at bluebells. And it rained. Again. It’s been raining all week. It was raining when I picked Cathy up at the train station.** It was raining as we both arrived at and left the abbey.*** It was raining most of Sunday in both Hampshire and Bristol, although Cathy managed to find a little sunlight and follow it around for a few hours. It rained on my voice lesson.† It rained on our going to Glaciation to ring with Colin. It rained on our trip to Mauncester yesterday.†† IT’S BEEN RAINING FOREVER. IT IS GOING TO RAIN FOREVER.††† It is just about hip deep around town and squelching out over the countryside when Cathy only has two pairs of shoes with her is not really a credible option.
AND THEN DARKNESS STOPPED EATING. AAAAAAAAAAAAAAUGH.
It has not been a good day.
But Darkness ate dinner. Enthusiastically. So I can revert to being all wet and soppy and droopy and soggy, not about the rain, but about the fact that Cathy is leaving tomorrow. . . .
* * *
* The deep sigh of relief may have been as much to do with the lack of incessant wailing and railing as the fearful prospect of coming up with another 1000+ words that could pass for a coherent synthesis of some damn thing or other only two days after the previous guest blog.
** It had only just started raining (again), fortunately, since I was late. Of course I was late. I’m always late. And then we had to hare off at extreme speed for the Reification of the Overgoddess at Forza. I have rung my first service at Forza del Destino.^ Eeep. This blood-freezing adventure began last Wednesday, when Ulrich said at practise that it was an all-hands-to-the-pumps situation Saturday afternoon for the reification. I looked away and shuffled my feet because I am not, after all, an abbey ringer, but Gemma said, oh, go on, I’m going to. So I checked with Cathy about train times and then, in fear and grovelling, although it’s difficult to get grovelling across in an email, I wrote to Ulrich, asking if they still needed extra hands for the reification, and he wrote back pretty much by return electron saying they’d be happy to see me. Oops. Now I’m for it.
In fact they didn’t need all of us shmo-level ringers, but they were nice enough to pile us all on for rounds on forty-eight. And Og came by with his clipboard and said to me, smiling in what I’m sure he was under the impression was a friendly manner, You are now on my LIST.
I may have a bell tower again. That is, I admit, may. I’m still expecting them to pull themselves together and bounce schmos like me.+++ And I wish it weren’t a gigantic, ancient, tourist-magnet, one hundred and twelve bell frelling ABBEY. However, I’ll take what I can get. And they’re still, with an irony so shiny and sharp it needs a scabbard++++, my best practical choice for a new tower. Hahahahahahahaha. Ouch, that hurts.
^ I’m feeling just a trifle creeped out by my having long ago carelessly blognamed+ it The Force of Destiny.++
+ I invent a verb. I feel it could have wider application however.
++ It could be a lot worse. I could have named it La Traviata or Aida.
+++ Or I could revert to not being able to ring anything. Anything. But we are not considering this possibility. We reject it.
++++ And its name may be Doomblade.
*** With a spectacular escort of guards. Yeep. We never had guards at New Arcadia, but then we didn’t rededicate goddesses either. But Cathy and I crossed three different cordons, getting in—I’m a bell ringer! I kept squeaking, feeling a complete fraud—and two getting back out again. Our favourite was the nice German lady (in the scary guard uniform) who wanted to know about bell ringing.
† Yes. I took Cathy to my voice lesson. And if she tries to write a guest blog about that I will destroy her.^
It was pretty interesting though. I hadn’t thought about this when I asked Nadia if I could bring a friend that Monday, but it was the day after Diana’s memorial and I was going to be another jigsaw for Nadia to put back together, as well as in (fractured) avert mode because There Was Someone Else Listening. It was not my most brilliant lesson—but it was not, in fact, my most embarrassing either. Nadia says sometimes your worst practises and your worst lessons are the most educational—and this one taught me some stuff. Nadia spent some time talking about channelling emotion into your singing. The impulse—my impulse anyway—is to stomp all that slithery, squishy stuff down, and the stomping process is a lot of what breaks you up into jigsaw pieces. Feh. I’ve told you about the frelling chasm between what I can do at home when no one is listening, but where I don’t have all of Nadia’s tricks for getting a better quality of sound out of me, and what I can do for Nadia, whom I want to please and therefore am afraid to get stuff wrong for—I mentioned that I’d torn the heart out of Che Faro over the washing-up and Nadia said briskly, I look forward to hearing it next week. EEEEEEP. This is pretty much the same kind of exciting and same kind of terrifying as the prospect of maybe having a bell tower again. I would LOVE to work on Che Faro with Nadia, but I’ve assumed that was seriously down the line from where I am now. And it probably is, you know? I’ll take it in to her and . . .
^ No, wait, I can’t destroy her, she’s helping me with New Thing.+
+ And in answer to some forum question or other, yes, it will get a title, at least of sorts, as soon as you learn the protagonist’s name, which is in ep nine or so.
†† More *&^%$£”+=}]~#@!!!!!! Our trip was supposed to produce a certain outcome which was going to produce a particular blog post. And we were FOILED by . . . well, never mind what we were foiled by. I’ll get there in the end. And then I’ll write a blog post about it. Grrrrrrrrrr.
††† I tell myself, rain is good. We’re in a drought. We need this rain. I AM SURE I AM GROWING MOULD ALL OVER MY BODY.
Frost
So after a (splendid) weekend of too much champagne and too little sleep and my usual over-effusive Monday, today of course I stayed home and applied myself strictly to work. Of course. Totally. Except for the mmph-mumble hours in the garden. . . .
And there’s going to be a vile, putrescent THRICE BLASTED FROST tonight. Atlas, bless him, who was here today working in Peter’s garden, rang Peter when he got home and had listened to the local weather report—Peter listens in the morning, and I play musical weather apps on Pooka, none of which is worth the 69p or £1.23 I paid for it, but watching a series of them being clueless helps to focus the slowly-waking morning mind. Atlas tends to be right: he lives on a farm, he’s a farmer’s son-in-law, and he knows how to do that sniffing-the-air thing about coming weather. If he agrees with the forecasters, you pay attention. Anyway. I was back in the cottage garden, out of earshot of either Pooka* or the landline** when Peter was trying to call me, contemplating saying the hell with it and planting my sweet peas, which are busy climbing out of the little plastic nets they arrived in, because potting on all those sweet peas is way too daunting a prospect.*** Providentially I was distracted by the six or a dozen little vases of things on various window sills that have grown roots and are wondering what happens now—I have this bad habit of putting prunings in water, just in case they’ll decide to grow roots: a surprising number of your average house plants will—and speaking of plants climbing out of what they’re in, I think some of my geranium cuttings have learned to abseil: there’s got to be GROUND around here somewhere.
So I was out in the cough-cough-cough potting shed† mixing compost and vermiculite and putting great fuzzy-rooted cuttings†† in small pots till dark.††† And dark is about two hours later than it was a fortnight ago‡. So IT’S SUDDENLY EIGHT O’CLOCK, and I race indoors to slam hellhounds into their harnesses‡‡, discover a phone message from Peter about a frost, howl in a singing-voice-threatening way, furiously put down a plastic sheet in the sitting room since the Winter Indoor-Jungle Table has been put away for the year, and start ferrying stuff through. . . .
We’d better have a frost tonight.
* * *
* For someone who is theoretically attached at the hip to her iPhone, I’m out of range far too often. Most of my friends with iPhones who live in jeans like me keep theirs in a pocket, but noooooooo. Maybe I just wear the wrong jeans.
** This is less surprising since the landline only actually rings when it’s in the mood. Poor Cormac rang the cottage three times before the landline deigned to let us know someone was trying to make contact. Hannah was beginning to worry: Cormac said he’d call around now. . . .
*** I’m saving my potting-on stamina for the 1,000,000,000 dahlia cuttings I always find I’ve ordered. One of the many conundrums of the gardener’s life is ordering early, before the things you particularly want have sold out, but which means you do your spring ordering while winter is clamped over the landscape like a giant iron hand, you’re convinced everything in your garden is dead and you need cheering up, or ordering late, when the mere presence of more daylight is beginning to cheer you up, enhanced by the fact that all kinds of dead things are producing small green (or occasionally red or purple) bumps and nodules^, and you are at least slightly less likely to order enough stuff to overfill Sissinghurst^^. But your nurseries will have run out of several of your absolute favourites without which your summer will be ruined, AND what you do successfully requisition will mostly arrive so late you will have gone to the garden centre and bought too much stuff there because you couldn’t wait any longer. On the whole I do better with choice A but it’s not a perfect system.
^ I’ve got a few gosh golly WOW ::cartwheels of joy:: surprises coming up . . . but I’m afraid to mention them officially for fear such acknowledgment and acceptance will promptly make them die after all.+
+ This probably also goes for mentioning that my snake’s-head fritillaries are coming into bloom. But I’m mentioning it anyway because if I don’t tell you something I will explode. They are slightly fussy, but we grew them at the old house, but I had been having disastrous luck with them for years at the cottage when Ajlr mentioned that the insanely evil red lily beetle also eats fritillaries . . . which I then realised was my problem too. But while I have conclusive evidence that both the weather gods and the unexpectedly-living-plants gods read imprudent blogs, I’m hoping that the insanely evil red lily beetle god does not.
^^ http://www.invectis.co.uk/sissing/
† Which is to say the all-purposes gardening shed, overflowing with pots, pot saucers, trays, tools, buckets of various sizes and materials, bags of compost and fertilizer and boxes and bottles of intensive plant food, my tiny barbeque and attendant charcoal, plastic sheets and fleece, etc etc etc etc ETC ETC ETC . . . and a robin’s nest. I was really excited when I saw that—I haven’t had a nest since the blog’s first year, and have barely had a robin. I know he’s around—there’s always one robin in a garden: they like gardens and they’re territorial—but the blackbirds have become such thugs that he’s kept a low profile. Sadly the nest seems to have been rejected, and I haven’t seen the happy couple in a while . . . but one robin is very much in evidence. I also spent time I might have been spending planting sweet peas hoicking out frelling mats of crocosmia and lily-of-the-valley^ around Queenie and Souvenir de la Malmaison and I had a small feathered opportunist at my elbow. I was reminded that when you’re outdoors the whirr of small flapping wings is quite pleasant.
^ Which are WEEDS in my garden. Bullying invasive WEEDS.
†† I also had one of my moments of hilarity and decided to do the full soft-wood cuttings nonsense from an obstinate house plant that has refused to die, the gallant thing, but needed serious pruning when I repotted it. Sometimes obstinate plants can be very obstinate and what the hell. It’s only a pot, a plastic bag and some vermiculite. To give it any chance at all, I used hormone rooting powder. This is a story about egregiously bad design. The pot of rooting powder—which was simply on the shelf in the store, it’s not like I did a customer comparison^ or anything—is wider than it is tall, possibly to make the whole show short enough to fit on an average shelf, since it has a dibber^^ built into the cap like a slightly distrait unicorn’s horn. It also has a child-proof cap which is too wide to get your hand around to squeeze. And I have big hands with long fingers. I had to use the sticky-jar opener^^^ to get the frelling thing open. The end of the dibber is also the lid, right? Which means it’s also . . . never mind it’s too wide to get a proper grip on, you don’t need a proper grip to make holes in compost. But because the lid is so frelling vast you’re busy destroying your previous hole, or knocking over your sad confused cutting, while you’re trying to make the next hole. . . .
^ I save that colossal time-suck for things like electric blankets. I think I mentioned that mine died a few days ago. I was hoping the frosty nights were over for the year.
^^ Or dibble. A long pointy thing that makes holes in the ground/compost for you to put seeds or cuttings in.
^^^ I have the vicious-with-teeth variety, none of these wussy rubber rings.
††† Muttering to myself, as I have been doing for seven years now, about getting the frelling shed wired. Which would be dangerous for a lot of reasons, none of them to do with electrocution.^
^ What do you mean it’s midnight and neither I nor the hellhounds have had dinner yet?+
+ Nor written the blog?#
# If hellhounds would like to try, they are welcome.
‡ One genuine, one fraudulent.
‡‡ There have been little faces at the kitchen door increasingly often for the last hour or two. . . .
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.
Roses. And Singing.
I would be very grateful if the dranglefabbing weather gods would (a) STOP SENDING US HARD FRELLING FROSTS and (b) stop ONLY giving us good gardening weather on days I’m rushing around doing other things. Like today. Yesterday was a damp grey unfriendly day that felt colder than it was—but I was out there in the afternoon anyway, planting, ahem, roses*, and looking around nervously for places to put the friends of the one, single, solitary climber I ordered yesterday. There was an evil little wind and just enough rain falling at unpredictable intervals to make you wet if you were out in it** but nothing like enough to do the landscape any good.***
Roses are, at least, hardy†. But we’ve had below freezing temperatures the last two nights—and I had started planting gladiolas. Which are not hardy. But they’re all (I think) up against house walls so they should be okay. Arrrrgh. I’ve got dahlias and begonias and chocolate cosmos all lined up waiting eagerly to go outside. The ones already in pots I am now schlepping back indoors again at night—and meanwhile Hannah is coming this weekend which means the Winter Table has to come down†† whether I’m ready to lose it or not, because we want to be able to get the dropped leaf on the proper kitchen table up so that two of us can sit at it at the same time.††† Tea in the sitting-room is fine. Breakfast, not so much.
Today was a glorious day. It was still cold when I got up so I pottered‡ around drinking tea before I ferried the chocolate cosmos, the dahlias, the begonias, the kalanchoes‡‡ and the geraniums back outdoors again. Then hellhounds and I had a magnificent hurtle . . . and then there was the usual mad Monday scramble of trying to get some work done and some lunch eaten and some warm-up singing accomplished before my voice lesson. . . . I planted one pansy in the brief gap between taking hellhounds back to the cottage for the dog minder to pick them up for their weekly adventure and leaving for my rendezvous with Nadia.
I went in there still brooding about how to think about the performance issue, because while from my perspective an awful lot of where music comes from is where writing comes from, stories don’t need to be performed. The book goes into the reader’s hands and the reader reads it. Yaay. Simple. Music has to be performed, and this usually involves human input in some particular. I’m a professional writer, and I think the genre/literature, grown-up/kiddie face-off is bogus, so I don’t worry much about what rung of the great ladder of immortality I’m on.‡‡‡ But to me there’s this vast chasm between what for want of better terms we’ll call amateur and professional—not that there aren’t great amateurs and calamitous professionals—and I am nowhere on the great ladder of musical immortality. Why shouldn’t I not be able to face performing my pathetic little attempts at singing right after Oisin’s been playing an organ sonata that feels like something I should have been listening to and being evolved into a higher form of life by for the last fifty years? That’s my music, that sonata. Mine. My singing, however, is the dandelion at the foot of the giant sequoia. The lopsided dandelion.
Nadia gets this patient expression on her face when I go in with stuff like this.§ And the thing that’s really embarrassing is that she instantly dropped me in the teacher place. She knows that I’ve taught creative writing a bit—not a lot; little enough that I can forget when it suits me—and never more than a short seminar. I doubt that I’d be anyone’s Nadia§§ over the long term. But I do know a few things about being a teacher: that you cut your student slack for being there and wanting to learn stuff.§§§ That you’re glad to see them there wanting to learn stuff. That you give them huge credit for trying. That you look for the good stuff, so you can say, here, this is good, work from here, expand here,# think about what you were doing here, try to find that space again. You don’t say, you are crap, you don’t know it all yet and you are therefore a lesser mortal, you don’t say, you aren’t good enough. She said, how would you feel, if you were a teacher, and one of your students came in one day and had a cup of tea and a chat and as she was leaving mentioned that she’d brought a story—but she wasn’t going to let you see it? Would you be cross?##
Oh. Yeah.
Nadia said, You know, Robin, it’s not lack of talent that’s holding you back at the moment. It’s lack of confidence.
Sigh.
I sang . . . not too badly. I’m kind of getting somewhere with the emotional expressiveness thing. Kind of. And even I can tell that the quality of the noise I’m making has improved.### That positive feedback loop that Nadia talks about is definitely there, and getting stronger, which means that practise at home is less frustrating and more fun.
But . . . well. . . .
* * *
* I seem to have a few left over from last year. Ah. Hmm. The old I’ll-put-you-here-and-deal-with-you-later flimflam referred to yesterday. I had a lot more excuse for not getting around to and/or forgetting things when I had two acres and hundreds of roses. Now my only resort is blaming Menopause Brain. This year my negligence included the discovery of three roses heeled in in Peter’s garden. Oops.
** And to annoy hellhounds, if they were out in it with you
*** And, speaking of the things that the gods could do IF THEY’D STOP PLAYING POKER AND ATTEND TO BUSINESS: please let those odd little scritchy, flappy noises not be even-earlier-this-year-returning thirsty bats seeking redress from drought. Atlas is coming tomorrow to look for any holes he might have missed last year.^ And I’d maybe better fire up the extra-large plant saucers I had dotted about the place for any livestock that wants a drink. More sodblasted things to WATER.
^ And yes, I have ordered the mosquito netting to drape over my bed. Just in case. Except that it isn’t mosquito netting. It’s the stuff you put over your strawberries to keep the birds off. I don’t think the bats will care. It’s the right size, the right mesh, the right price, and it’s sold by a genuine gardening site. Mosquito netting doesn’t seem to bring out the better class of vendor, although I admit I’m a bit fascinated by the sheik-of-Araby romantic fantasy approach.
† Even if I agree with Diane in MN that my eyes got a little wide at what Antique Rose Emporium was offering as ‘extra hardy’. I’m at the wrong house but I’ll have a stroll through my rose book shelves some day soon. If I didn’t divest myself of them when we moved out of the old house^ I have at least two about rose-gardening in major-bloody-winter areas.
^ Yes I even got rid of some ROSE books
†† That which stands over the hellhound crate during the winter, with a green plastic garden sheet over it, to give me somewhere to put the indoor jungle. When winter gets serious, Atlas and I haul most of it up to the green/summerhouse/shed-with-a-grow-light at Third House. But winter never really got serious this year, until about a month ago, so there’s been a lot of bringing-stuff-indoors-at-night, taking-it-out-again-next-morning, and swearing,^ the last few weeks.
^ Gently. So as not to damage my throat.
††† I do keep telling you the living space at the cottage is small.
‡ I should be doing housework. Fortunately Hannah is not easily shocked. And she’s known me for over thirty years.^
^ Bats may be a bridge too far. But we don’t have bats.+
+ Yet.
‡‡ http://houseplants.about.com/od/succulentsandcacti/p/Kalanchoe.htm I didn’t discover these till a year or two ago. But they’re wildly tender.
‡‡‡ This is aside from Never Writing the Story as Well as the Story Deserves, but I’m not getting into that tonight or none of us will get any sleep.
§ Have I mentioned (recently) that Nadia isn’t thirty yet? Gods. I’m being mentored by a child.
§§ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nadia_Boulanger
§§§ I am very very very bad at students who are wasting my time because they don’t want to learn stuff.
# Not necessarily literally. Contrary to popular McKinley belief, some short stories should stay short.
## Might it even hurt your feelings?
### I’m not ready for the Travelling Tiddybumps Opera Troupe^ tryouts yet however.
^ Home made brownies at intermission. It’s why anyone comes. Not for the singing.
Another Monday
The days I have something to talk about* I’m too tired to talk about it.** Fortunately someone else derailed the Cambridge tonight at South Desuetude so I didn’t have to. Gah. Colin’s got two beginners and some poor wretched wild-eyed being trying to learn the paradigmatic two to plain bob doubles*** so for a good part of the evening I could hide behind rote ringing for learners. But Colin has gone and made practise longer again so there’s time for us upper level crowd COUGH COUGH COUGH† to do something upper level. Or to crash and burn in the third or fourth lead (of something upper level).
There have been a couple of off-stage sucker-punches to mental and physical well-being†† this last week so I went in for my voice lesson today a bit dubiously although I had (warily) noticed that my voice hasn’t shut down the way it did even as recently as . . . um . . . last week. Nadia††† said that possibly my body was learning to override my brain on the subject of singing. Um. Snork. Okay. I’ll take whatever encouragement I can get. Meanwhile . . . Muddlehampton Choir practise begins again Thursday week, that is, a week from this Thursday. Yaaaay. I think. Eeep. I’m louder than I was last October . . . Eeeep. When Gordon sent the all-points email around this weekend, asking us to check in whether we were signing up for this tour of duty or not, I wrote back that having missed two concerts in a row and having been out of commission anyway since last October I was feeling a trifle superstitious about saying I was up for both the wedding in April and the summer concert, but he answered encouragingly that he’d once been out two years with throat trouble and not to worry. Golly. And he’s one of our good singers.
I’ve been trying to get a mild head start on the music for the wedding since all regular choir singers will already know it, beginning with the singing version of Jesu Joy of Man’s Desiring.‡ Here I thought I was going to have to grapple with German at last and . . . we’re singing the (hideous) English text.‡‡ And I was going flat all over the landscape today from New Piece-itis and Nadia says, you must learn to bluff. Relax that top end, smile, declare to yourself that you’re going to be fine . . . and you’ll find yourself back on pitch. Oh. Meanwhile I’ve been singing Santa Lucia‡‡‡ for light relief and an attempt by the tireless Nadia to get me to loosen up and maybe even go a little cornball, and . . . every now and then, for about a third of a semiquaver if I’m lucky, I almost overcome my iron determination to remain inflexible, unvarying and invariable, and about as interesting to listen to as a plastic recorder. Nadia says I should take Santa Lucia to Oisin some Friday and see if he can tease me into hamming it up a little. . . .
* * *
* Aside from SHAgibbergibbergibbergibbergibberDOWS
** See previous footnote.
*** Ie learning to ring inside. The leap of mind-bending whimper-eliciting leaps in learning method ringing.
† It’s all in your perspective, of course. When you’re still struggling to ring rounds without having to stand your bell every dozen strokes or so to get it back on the stroke everyone else is on the idea of hoping someone else takes out the Cambridge before you do is a bit like the view of someone hoping for pole position in the Kentucky Derby^ by someone sitting on the back of an elderly cross-grained cob who hasn’t picked up the canter in years.
^ There’s been a conversation on the forum about UK vs US measurements and some (American) said she’d had to learn not merely miles and yards but furlongs. Possibly the one single moment of clarity in six years of elementary-school math for me concerned the furlong: I can do furlongs. Horse races are in furlongs.+
+ On my way to my voice lesson today I stopped at Waterstone(’)s# to buy birthday presents. I bought a copy of ALEX IN NUMBERLAND and PROFESSOR STEWART’S CUPBOARD OF MATHEMATICAL CURIOSITIES, and then Stewart’s TAMING THE INFINITE for me. And when I went up to the till I had to restrain myself from saying, here, I read these, and I’m going to read this one! Having been a clunch-head in school sticks.##
# http://www.thebookseller.com/news/waterstones-reverts-original-logo-drops-apostrophe.html Usually I’m poker-up-the-bum stiff with outrage at modern laxity and dereliction on the holy subjects of grammar and punctuation but I’ve got some sympathy here. They’ve wrapped it up in spin-speak and I have no idea what their real motive was, but I have an apostrophe in my street address and it makes every web site on the planet nuts. And most web sites most of the time are festering little ratbags anyway, especially the customer-service pages, and I don’t need any superfluous flashpoints. So I stopped using my apostrophe. Stuff still gets here (usually). There is the interesting side effect that charities who send you address labels you didn’t ask for and don’t want as a way of rousing cheque-writing guilt~ also leave out the apostrophe. I have retained the apostrophe on my address labels, thank you very much.
~ Has anyone ever done any follow-up research on this? Do free address labels stimulate donations? They sure don’t with me. Even when they have found a random apostrophe and put it in.=
= Possibly because the name line usually says ‘Mrs R Dickinson’. Omit the McKinley and die. I have cancelled credit cards for McKinley omission. Usually you get some whiner on the phone saying that they can’t fit ‘R McKinley Dickinson’ in the available space. Fine, I say, I’ll find someone who can. Last time I had this conversation when the credit card finally turned up it said ‘Mrs R McKinley Dickinson.’ Amazing. They must have found those extra four spaces under a cabbage leaf.%
% This may be a stream-of-footnote record.
## I also bought the Berlitz Japanese (-English/ English-Japanese) dictionary. Ahem. I don’t suppose any of you out there can recommend a good basic colloquial beginner-Japanese book/Mixed Media Product? I don’t have enough to do. I also have this pesky half-Japanese character in SHADOWS. Watashi wa baka desu. Except I don’t think you’d be using polite-form to call yourself stupid. Baka da, possibly?
†† Including . . . no, I did not get to the Live at the Met GOTTERDAMMERUNG. Siiiiiiiiigh. I’m beginning to think that just the prospect of sitting through six hours of Wagner brings on an ME flare. Accentuating the positive, I had a very good SHADOWS day on Saturday instead. At home you can fidget when your bones ache. They had better be planning on releasing this Ring commercially. I wonder what Lovefilm’s opera catalogue looks like?
More positive: after the frelling temperature got down to twenty degrees^ Friday night and I decided I didn’t have to wait till it hit the teens to be CRANKY ABOUT IT . . . the last couple of days have been . . . almost February-in-southern-England-like. Which is to say that hellhounds are out of their Coats of Evil Impediment and Constriction and are very happy. And I can stop remembering the way real winter does in fact demand that you protect yourself from death. There were various comments on the forum about this. Yes. When you can’t just say ‘oh well’ if you get it wrong and shiver a little. I may have to lay in a pair of thermal long johns for potential future extremities^^: cotton tights haven’t really been doing the job this last week. Speaking of things I haven’t bothered to replace since my old Maine clobber wore out.
And the indoor jungle is back outdoors again, I hope slightly before it’s all dead of light deprivation. I haven’t had time to finish setting the greenhouse up.
^ Minus 6.6 Celsius. I’m not going to leave the .6 off. Celsius’ degrees are too fat+ anyway. One wants to be able to agonize over as precise a description of one’s misery as possible.
+ So are centigrade’s. Apparently there is a difference, if you’re a chemistry teacher, but I can’t be bothered.
^^ All puns welcome
††† Who has a very bad case of Accentuating the Positive
‡ In the first place I keep getting distracted by singing the famous triplets which are not the singing line. This also means, if I am singing my own accompaniment, I am pretty well certain to come in on what is the singing line . . . wrong.
‡‡ Which is not merely clonking Victorian of the most egregious kind but doesn’t anything like fit the music.
‡‡‡ In Italian. Please.