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Same bat time, same bat station*
I have bats. No, really. In fact I have a lot of bats. Stop that laughing.** These are real bats. Pipistrelles, in fact: the common pipistrelle, which is also the commonest bat species in the UK; but all bats are protected, and you’re not allowed to disturb a roost. Not that I want to. Eat bugs! Eat more bugs! Bats are my friends! Yesssssss!
There are about a million and a half links for info about pipistrelles*** but here are a couple to get you started. I admit that the opening screen of the first one is not exactly reassuring, but they’re tiny and furry and they eat millions of bugs so never mind about the teeth, and I persist in finding them cute. Which is a good thing, as it turns out.
http://www.bio.bris.ac.uk/research/bats/britishbats/batpages/commonpipi.htm
http://www.arkive.org/pipistrelle-bats/pipistrellus-pipistrellus-and-pipistrellus-pygmaeus/
My bat odyssey began about three weeks ago. I was out in the garden at oh . . . ten o’clock or so. In the evening, I mean. It was an evening Peter was playing bridge and I was not bell ringing and it wasn’t dark yet†, so I was still out there. I don’t know why I happened to look up—well, I like watching flying things swoop around†† and something must have caught my eye. I looked up. There were several of them, whatever they were, darting and swooping. My eye was drawn to where they seemed to be coming from . . . which was a corner of my house. As I stood there another one shot out from under the eaves. And another one. And another one. Eeep.
I assumed they had to be swifts or house martins or similar because they were so noisy. I did think of bats because they were emerging at dusk, but anything that likes bugs might very well come out for a cruise at twilight—and, as I say, they were noisy. Bats are silent, right? Their echolocation pings are out of range unless you have very good hearing, and I haven’t had very good hearing in a couple of decades.††† I stood there getting a crick in my neck and watched them blip into existence, one after another after another after another after . . . little dark winged bodies materialising in the dusk and then zinging off in all directions, whoop zap. I counted about thirty after I started counting, and there’d probably been a dozen or so before that. Golly. Whatever they are, they like it here. They’ve brought all their sisters and cousins and aunts. And however many came pouring out, the mad chittering under the eaves didn’t seem to be getting any less.
I went indoors thoughtfully (rubbing my stiff neck). Next day I went up into the attic and stood in the corner where the things had come from the night before . . .and I could hear them chittering away like anything—I’m glad I sleep a floor down and on the other side of the house—but I could see no traces of them inside (whew).
I told Penelope about them the next time I saw her, because she’s very good on natural history, and her first reaction to the chittering was the same as mine—us old folks can’t hear bats. It must be some kind of bird. But she agreed to come round one evening the following week and watch the exodus. I took her up into the attic first‡ and she listened to the chittering—so far as I can tell they sit around up there and talk all day—and said, Mammal. That’s definitely a mammal noise.
We then retired to sit‡‡ in the garden and wait for the air show. First one popped out and Penelope said, bat. Yup. Bat. You have bats. This time of year it’ll be a nursery roost: mums with babies. And the next day she sent me the contact info for the Hampshire Bat Group [sic].
This time of year official bat group members are out every night counting bats. My local pair had trouble fitting me in. But they said they could come round tonight, at about 9 pm. And I said that I probably wouldn’t get home till about 9:20‡‡‡ but I’d leave the greenhouse door open and they could come through into the garden for the bat spectacle.
I got home to find two wired-up people in my back garden, staring up at my roof, listening to their radio gizmos on headphones, and clicking their counters furiously as my bats dove out of their hideaway and into the bug-laden air. Go bats! Eat! Eat! Click click click clickclickclick click click . . . Blimey, said the man. Turns out there’s a second exit round the corner in the peak of the roof, so he was getting more bat-clicks than his wife. They told me my tenants are the common pipistrelles, but while they’re not endangered, all bat populations have been dropping, which I knew, and the woman said that by percentages the pipistrelles have dropped more drastically than some—which I did not know—so it’s always good to see them thriving somewhere.
Okay. Are you ready for this?
Final count: 410. I have four hundred and ten teeny-weeny pipistrelle bats living between my roof and my attic ceiling.§ And maybe a few more, since any late babies may not be flying yet.
They said that this is the biggest mum-and-baby roost they’ve seen, and that it’s a sign of the good health of the environment—well, I don’t spray, so all the bugs they’re eating in my garden are finest kind, and I use eco-green stuff indoors, so there are no noxious fumes in my attic either.
I don’t just have bats. I have serious bats. Beam.
* * *
* And no, actually, I am not a huge wet nostalgic fan of the old Adam West TV show. As far as I’m concerned it came out at exactly the wrong time with the result that my life was made a misery for several years by teenage boys saying, Hey, Robin, where’s Batman?, and then laughing like drains.
Although my then-boyfriend did convert me to comic books when The Dark Knight Returns came out in 1986. Ah, yes, the 80s, when I finally got round to having my adolescence. I was way too weird and serious when I was a teenager. Aggravated, possibly, by a lot of teenage boys shouting HEY ROBIN, WHERE’S BATMAN during a delicate transitional period.
** You’re going to hurt my feelings.
*** And an awful lot of video. Once you get on YouTube you could be there for a week, although a lot of it isn’t very good, and some of it is rather alarming, like one of someone letting a pip crawl through his fingers. I don’t think the pip is having a very good time.
Bats apparently count pretty high on the ick-o-meter though because I notice that the come-hither column of other video clips down the right hand side moves into monster spiders pretty quickly. Anyone out there remember Attack of the Fifty-Foot Spider^ last autumn? I posted photos. I’m also still suffering traumatic flashbacks and view the approach of this autumn nervously. One of the videos shows someone letting one of these gigantico house spiders climb over his hand. Although I don’t think the spider is having a good time either.
^ Which Black Bear kept insisting was a male looking for a mate. It was a FEMALE, okay? F-E-M-A-L-E. Females are bigger. It was not a male. Not. Very, very, very not.
† It kills me that less than a month after the longest day the nights are already closing in again. I know they do this every year. Every year I get all whiny about it.
†† Yes, this predates PEGASUS.
††† The Bat Conservation Trust^’s own downloadable pdf tells you that you can’t hear the radar pings and doesn’t say a thing about social calls.
^ which I belong to. Just by the way. Conserve a critter? You bet. Where do I sign.
‡ And derived the distinct impression that she looked round at everything up there a little wildly.
‡‡ Yes! Sit! As any crazed gardener knows, the last thing you do in your garden is sit in it!!
‡‡‡ I went bell ringing. With Niall. To Colin’s tower. I said to Colin, so, on a scale of one to ten, how bad was yesterday’s quarter? And he said (more or less), lighten up. The striking was not 100%, no, but I don’t like Grandsire Triples^, I call by the treble, and if you hadn’t led bang right every row, we wouldn’t have got the quarter.
Whatever. I still need more practise. Aside from needing more practise anyway because bell ringing is like that and time on a rope is the only grail there is, I need practise ringing on eight. And I don’t know how I’m going to get it, since eight-bell bands are kinda rare in my bailiwick, even where we’ve got the bells, drat it.
However I rang several touches of Stedman doubles (six bells) and a not-all-that-bad-and-was-only-yelled-at-twice plain course of Cambridge minor (six bells) tonight, which was very good for morale—and feels pretty idiotic that I’m ringing comparatively high level stuff on six when I can barely stagger through trebling on eight. I said as much to Niall on the way home and he said, crossly for him—neither he nor Colin does cranky like readers of this blog know cranky—stop beating yourself up, okay?
I still need more practise on eight bells.
^Even Colin has faults
§ And no, I don’t have to worry about this. I knew bats weren’t rodents and don’t gnaw, but I didn’t know they don’t do anything but crawl into spaces that are already there and hang out. And their droppings are dried-up insect bits, and unless the roof leaks, they disintegrate into dust. As tenants go you can’t really ask for better. So long as you aren’t trying to sleep in the next room.
Skylarks
The Skylark
by John Clare
The rolls and harrows lie at rest beside
The battered road; and spreading far and wide
Above the russet clods, the corn is seen
Sprouting its spiry points of tender green,
Where squats the hare, to terrors wide awake,
Like some brown clod the harrows failed to break.
Opening their golden caskets to the sun,
The buttercups make schoolboys eager run,
To see who shall be first to pluck the prize—
Up from their hurry, see, the skylark flies,
And o’er her half-formed nest, with happy wings
Winnows the air, till in the cloud she sings,
Then hangs a dust-spot in the sunny skies,
And drops, and drops, till in her nest she lies,
Which they unheeded passed—not dreaming then
That birds which flew so high would drop agen
To nests upon the ground, which anything
May come at to destroy. Had they the wing
Like such a bird, themselves would be too proud,
And build on nothing but a passing cloud!
As free from danger as the heavens are free
From pain and toil, there would they build and be,
And sail about the world to scenes unheard
Of and unseen—Oh, were they but a bird!
So think they, while they listen to its song,
And smile and fancy and so pass along;
While its low nest, moist with the dews of morn,
Lies safely, with the leveret, in the corn.
This is the third year in early spring that I’ve said to myself, the day I hear my first skylark I’m going to hang Clare’s* poem on the blog.** And then I forget. It’s a long time from morning hurtle—when we’re out somewhere we might hear skylarks—to the middle of the night when I’m squeezing the last remnants of semi-coherent thought out of my brain for a blog entry. I’m remembering this year, finally, perhaps because it’s so late—usually I start hearing skylarks in February. Apparently they haven’t liked this winter any better than us humans and hellhounds. I hope the extravagant cold has merely stopped them singing and that the local countryside is not dotted this spring with unmarked skylark graves. Skylarks are endangered, but not around here; we’re teeming with the things. I hope we’re still teeming with the things. I love them. Love, love, love, love, love. I can be in the blackest, bleakest mood, stomping grimly after hellhounds because hellhounds must be hurtled, and . . . for the duration of a skylark’s song I am the world’s greatest living writer, the Dalai Lama, the Archangel Michaela, and the inventor of Green & Black’s mint dark chocolate, all rolled up into one. It’s a thrilling sensation. It’s a thrilling song.
There are plenty of recordings of skylarks on the web, but I’m not even bothering with a link. They don’t sound like much, recorded. Oh, you can tell it’s probably an exciting noise—but it isn’t exciting when it’s tinging out of a computer at you. It’s like the difference between a poster of [insert name of chosen iconic heartthrob here***] and Zaphod Beeblebrox† himself. WOW.†† I like to say, grandly, that I’ll take skylarks over nightingales any day . . . but I’ve never heard a nightingale live.††† And I’m happy with my skylarks.
And I’m glad finally to have heard one this year. Except when I’m complaining about the weather I like the middle of March, because the days are suddenly as if impelled by rocket launchers getting longer—it’s about this time of year I always really notice that they’re getting longer. We had sunlight this morning too so hellhounds and I had a delicious hurtle, accompanied by a skylark who is apparently ready at last to set up housekeeping.
I had read very little John Clare before I moved over here; he’s one of those slightly obscure English English writers who [cheesy generalisation alert] while you may have admired them in a semi-engaged sort of way‡ suddenly make profound and exhilarating sense when you’re standing on English ground viewing English landscape. And, if you’re very lucky, listening to English skylarks. There’s a solidity, a reality, to Clare’s skylark that appeals to me—the song is the thing, but what produces it is a little brown dust-spot with ‘happy wings’—I like the happy wings. I also like the hare ‘like some brown clod the harrows failed to break’—which nests on the ground among those clods. None of the aerial high jinks of swallows, say; any metaphor you want to hang on a skylark has to include the low nest in the corn.
And my low nest among the corn at present is the frelling proofs of PEGASUS.‡‡ See you tomorrow.
* * *
* No, not frelling Shelley and frelling Shelley’s very famous skylark. http://www.poetsgraves.co.uk/Classic%20Poems/Shelley/ode_to_a_skylark.htm
I think frelling Shelley is a big washy self-regarding pain in the behind. Sure he was talented. He wasn’t as talented as he thought he was and gods does he go on.^ He’d’ve been scary if he’d lived in the computer age, when everyone goes on too much.^^
^ HAVE YOU EVER READ ADONAIS? CHEEZUM ZORK.+ GAH. ETC.
+ Here speaketh the Phi Beta Kappa English lit major.
^^ Ahem.
** There are, I’m sure, plenty of copies of it on the web, but I’ve typed this one in so it’s here.
*** No, I’m not being coy. I don’t seem to get crushes on photogenic celebrities any more.^
^ I keep telling you old is better. Although maybe you enjoy your overheated fantasies more than I ever did. This may be a downside to having this vivid an imagination: coming back to ordinary reality always felt like waking up to discover I was a liver fluke. The better I’ve got at channelling this stuff into stories the happier I’ve become.
Although this does bring up a sensitive topic. I don’t like graphic on the page—I have a number of rants inappropriate for these (mostly) clean family pages on the subject of Bad Silly Literary Sex—and I’m damned if I’m going to write it. I think the best steam is produced in pressure cookers with the lids on.
† Oh come on you Windows programmers. You’re giving me a jagged red underline for Zaphod Beeblebrox?
†† Although in Zaphod’s case, probably not a good wow.
††† Peter says we ought to have nightingales around here, that it’s the right habitat. They don’t think so.
‡ For at least having the decency not to be William Wordsworth^
^ Yes. Another of my unspeakable prejudices. The English department at Bowdoin College and I really did not get on at all well. Even Peter has trouble with my attitude toward Wordsworth. Another of these fatuous spoilt self-regarding blokes who thinks that golden daffodils shine out of his backside.
‡‡ Not feeling too archangelish at the moment.
Aggle redux, etc
What I haven’t been telling you is that the ungleblarging ME is back. Sunday night I was thinking, mmphf, maybe I’ve overdone it a little* . . . and then Monday was a wipe.** Bad. Really bad. Big major ick and bleeurgh which is the sound you make when you pour floppy and gasping off your chair.*** Sigh. I spent all day Monday and this morning trying to convince myself to cancel my voice lesson this afternoon . . . and about noon-thirty today, having just tottered back in from a rather abbreviated hellhound hurtle, I was fishing my RaspBerry out of my pocket and perversely hoping that I hadn’t got round to putting Blondel’s phone number in it because then it would be on One of Those Little Pieces of Paper . . . somewhere. And then, rats, there it was, on the RaspBerry. I stood there (possibly swaying a little) and thought, but I don’t want to cancel. Supposing I can manage to focus my eyes to drive that far. And besides, it’s now less than three hours off and unless the house is burning down or I’m in surgery I don’t think I can cancel this late.
And . . . well, frankly, the ME was a good excuse. A desperately needed good excuse. Remember I said last week that I thought maybe that the hard work had just begun with He Was Despised? True. Geezum crow, all that you-against-your-accompaniment thing, as if you’re two different things, it was a disaster. First few run-throughs we hit the ‘he was despised’, ‘and rejected’, where the singer has to come in all alone, not to mention the on the right note aspect of the situation . . . I just stood there. Silent as a peak in Darien.† Siiiigh. And when I did manage to make some noise . . . it would have been better if I hadn’t. Well, I had told him I have a slight paralytic stage fright problem. And I’ve told you I have no voice worth developing—this is just to find out about singing from the inside, so I can write better songs. I shouldn’t be allowed to come in alone without a nice supportive drowning-out-type accompaniment. SIGH. And I had worked on it this week, knowing that I was finding it difficult.
Next week has to be better . . . doesn’t it? ††
* * *
* I even got out in the garden this weekend, hauling out decrepit annuals and stuffing spring bulbs everywhere.
** I’m sure the adrenaline spike caused by the Attack of the Fifty-Foot Spider didn’t help, but the ME was already on the train to Hampshire.
Baybelletrist wrote:
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHH*ahem*
Robin, that’s not NICE. Springing (and I do mean springing) a picture like that on a poor unsuspecting reader. I might suspect you of trying to give me heart failure, but I know you’re not that kind of Hellgoddess.
Well, what do you think seeing it ALL SPREAD OUT ON MY WALL DID FOR ME? At least it’s in a glass! And there’s an off switch on your computer!
Black bear wrote:
Is this your friend, Robin? http://www.uksafari.com/housespiders.htm
Ewwwwwww. Yes. The thing I find the most horrifying however is that this is . . . the common house spider?? You mean I could find one of these things AGAIN some day? . . . Maybe my roots in southern England aren’t quite as deep as I thought. Antarctica. Antarctica doesn’t have a lot of spiders. Although you really can’t put them outdoors there if you find one indoors with you. . . .
I notice that it says these spiders are more active in autumn, as this is mating season. I’d bet you had a gentleman spider there out looking for a girlfriend…
Well, I’ve always learnt that the female spiders are bigger . . . AND IF THIS IS A SMALL MALE I’M MOVING TO ANTARCTICA. TONIGHT.
I’m not sure I believe the business about house spiders dying if you toss them out, though I’ve heard that also; the main species of indoor spiders we have around here I also see in sheltered areas around the edges of my house (particularly in my canoe.) I usually compromise by throwing them onto my back porch.
I figure if geraniums and snapdragons can survive (sometimes) snuggled up against the outer cottage wall facing (west) into the walled garden, so can house spiders. After all, a house spider can move around and find the coziest spot. To which it’s welcome. Outdoors.
Bookgal71
Well, I’m from Melbourne and I think your attitude to Wolf spiders is perfectly rational!
Oh good.
In fact, my rules for spiders (other than daddy long legs and other weeny harmless things) boils down to if you come inside the house, you are declaring your desire not to live any longer.
I am philosophically compelled to try the glass and cardboard approach. But you know aside from the fact that we are all brothers and sisters in the unity of the universe . . . I don’t want to squish something that large. I’d have to frelling repaint the entire frelling wall.
The large hairy ones (mostly huntsman round here but sometimes other things) give me the heeby jeebys and many of the others are capable of nasty bites and there’s no way I’d be brave enough to do the glass/cardboard route. Plus huntsman JUMP
. . . and there you have my ultimate worst horror about Things with Too Many Legs. Some of them JUMP. AAAAAAAAAAAAUGH. I’m under the impression that wolf spiders jump. I gave those sitting room curtains a very wide berth. But really . . . the speed at which most of these things scuttle is quite horrible enough. And when THEIR LEGS ARE LONGER THAN YOURS ARE. . . .
(usually towards the poor hapless person attempting to catch them…!!) I’m fine with mice and rats
I seriously do not do rats
and snakes and all other general forms of creepy crawlies so I allow myself one category of semi-phobia. In the interests of fairness, I did announce my policy to the backyard when I moved in and if I spot one outside, I remind it in firm tones *g*. So far it’s worked.
I tried telling the mice eating my flower bulbs to piss off and it didn’t work. Snarky little frellers. So now it’s the netting. And I’m going to try traps in empty cardboard loo-rolls this year too. I could probably come around to spiders bigger than my hand if they’d promise to eat some mice.
Diane from MN
I’m not a good eco-greenie either: I see no excuse for houseflies or mosquitoes or slugs or cockroaches.
Quite right, too. And don’t forget ticks and fleas . . .
And greenfly/aphis/aphids. And whitefly in your greenhouse. And those serried ranks of curly caterpillars that eat your rose leaves in late summer. Yes.
Audrey Falconer
I don’t mind the odd big spider
Do you hire out with a glass and a piece of cardboard? Have you thought of relocating to southern England?
(and yes, they are big here in Melbourne!) in the house and I ignore them, but my husband (who comes from Brisbane) objects to them and imposes a “top two feet of the house” rule on them. If they come within reach (we have 10 foot ceilings) they’re for the glass and paper and outside!
They JUMP. They LET THEMSELVES DOWN ON THEIR WEB THREADS. They SCAMPER DOWN WALLS. I’m willing to put up with two foot of lush and superabundant spider webs at the top of a twenty-foot bell tower ringing chamber—or I’m willing to put up with it just until the day that I get a grapefruit-sized spider running down my bell rope at me—but I’m not welcoming anything on my ceilings.
Mrs Redboots
Spiders really don’t worry me
Feh. One of us is a different species.
- oddly, I prefer those ones with the long legs that look a bit like daddy-long-legses
I agree . . . BUT THERE ARE LIMITS. Daddy long legs do NOT have legs (almost) as thick as your fingers WITH SPIKY GOTH HAIR ALL OVER THEM.
to the ones with thick furry bodies & legs,
One of my awful little secrets is that I think tarantulas . . . are kind of cute. I’m not sure this would withstand meeting one however. Almost certainly not on my upstairs hall wall at mmph o’clock in the wee small morning.
but I was brought up to believe that spiders were Nice People
I was brought up to Kill on Sight and then I started thinking, you know, wait a minute, aren’t we all sisters and brothers, blah blah blah (except houseflies, mosquitos, slugs, greenfly, ticks and fleas . . . ). Practical response was a lot easier when it was just Kill on Sight.
and definitely of the race that knows Joseph…. although I do put them outside when I find them in the bath.
I’ve told you, haven’t I, that I leave my bath mat at an angle, so spiders who fall in the bath can find their own way out? I have to rescue them from the sink occasionally however.
I gather they are more numerous than usual this autumn, also daddy-long-legses
This thought didn’t bother me quite so much till Sunday night.
AJLR
Could have been this one?
NB Anyone of a nervous disposition, or arachnophobic, should probably avoid clicking the link.
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAUGH. Yes, that’s definitely my . . . friend. It doesn’t seem to say they bite . . . Trying hard to find a bright side to look on. . . . I am so totally freaked out that this is the common house spider.
Black Bear, who obviously likes spiders way too much, posts again:
Now, those who hate spiders generally shouldn’t click this link either–but in trying to find a species name last night, I came across a marvelous video of a male jumping spider trying to woo his lady friend. Jumping spiders are already the charmers of the spider world, in my mind… and this little guy is just trying so hard to impress her! But she is unmoved by his prowess. If you do watch it, turn your sound on, as the little buzzing noises he’s making are pretty hilarious.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D92AUXhYZ0M
It’s an ak-ak! It’s anti-aircraft fire! It’s little teeny anti-aircraft fire! So now we know where the military scientists came up with the idea!
*** Hellhounds say, Sofa? Sofa?
† I know I’m misquoting. It’s a joke. Mountains rarely sing Handel.
†† Except that next week it’ll be two days before PEGASUS due date. I should probably start a countdown. . . .
AGGLEBLAGGLEDORGLE* URK! Also GALVINIZED BLISTERING EEEEEEK!**
Or, there are Serious Disadvantages to Living in a Separate House from Your Husband, husbands being made for dealing with Certain Things. Look at what I found waiting for me at the cottage last night:
[insert more strong language HERE. Blah! Arrrgh! YAAAAAH!]
Peter always says ‘oh, poor thing’ and picks it up gently in his handkerchief. EEEEEEEE. I’m not a true arachnophobe; mostly I pursue a policy of live and let live.*** And I think I told you I had an ethical crisis when I found out—not all that long ago, given my age and my fond belief that I pay attention to crittery things: while we were still in the old house, AKA Spiderhaven—that house spiders die if you put them outdoors. Oh gods. Okay, okay, I can stand a few indoor spiders.† BUT THERE ARE LIMITS. This one is clearly and definitively over the limit.††
I don’t think she was too happy to see me either. She was spread-eagled—and I mean eagle—on the upstairs hall wall, probably screaming in a little high beyond-human-ear-range, especially middle-aged-human-ear-range spider voice: Turn that light off! She was sufficiently dazzled that I had time to race downstairs and grab a glass and race back upstairs again, slap it over her—which EWWWWWWWW required convincing her to DRAW HER LEGS IN A LITTLE EWWWWWWWW—and then stand there, sweating and panting and thinking, uhh, I forgot the piece of cardboard.††† Gaaah. Fortunately there were two (or possibly three) empty cardboard boxes sitting on the stair-ladder to the attic‡ at my elbow (ow). I will leave the details of ripping a flap off one of them with one hand, two feet, and some teeth to your imaginations.‡‡ We got there in the end.
She was probably further traumatised by the camera flash going off in her face. I hope it will give her a dislike of the cottage.‡‡‡
And then I dumped her out the window. And closed all the windows on that side of the house.
And it was cold last night. I am a bad person. But just in case you’ve forgotten since the top of the page, this is what she looked like.§ Look at those hairy legs! Look at those mandibles! 
Do you really want this hanging down from the canopy of your four poster some morning as you’re groping for glasses/radio/kitchen timer§§/alarm clock/brain? I don’t think so.
* * *
* Peter wishes me to point out that words like ‘ungleblarg’, ‘dranglefab’, and ‘aggleblaggledorgle’ are clearly derived from the Dickinson vernacular.^ This is true. They are directly inspired, not to say stolen, from the sort of thing Peter says when he drops something or trips over something or is otherwise confounded and discomposed by the material world. Some of us just swear.
^ The urk is mine.
** It is a source of continuing sorrow and frustration to me that Wordpress titles won’t go bold or italic.
*** And one of this summer’s peak experiences—have I told you this already?—was whapping a housefly midair—sometimes you can knock one down long enough this way to finish the job—and having it sail straight into a spider’s web and stick there, buzzing furiously. The spider got it. Yaay. I’m not a good eco-greenie either: I see no excuse for houseflies or mosquitoes or slugs or cockroaches. Most things I’m willing to negotiate with/about.
† Especially if they catch houseflies, even if this does result in having to clean the corners of remarkably adherent remains of dinner and spider effluvia.
†† I’ve got a UK things-with-too-many-legs guide somewhere but I can’t find it. So I’ve been cruising the web^ hoping to find a good UK spider ID page and what I find instead is a cheery site saying, hey, we bet you think that you’re safe in the UK. Wrong. There are all kinds of UK spiders that would loooove to sink their fangs into your flesh! Let us tell you about them!
^ Shudder
††† And before anyone, for example, from Australia, wants to laugh condescendingly and send me some links to Australian spiders . . . I don’t live in Australia! The wolf spider that lived in the sitting-room curtains^ of the house we were staying in when we were in Melbourne “oh don’t worry, just leave it alone” cured me of ANY lingering romantic feelings I might have had about further exploring the territory that produced Elyne Mitchell!^^
^ I know I’ve told you this story before. I will tell you again too. There are certain milestones in my life you’re just going to have to get used to seeing here occasionally. If you say Melbourne to me I will still say kangaroos, wallabies, wombats, dingoes, Healesville+, mangoes++, bougainvillea, eucalyptus, wolf spider in the sitting-room curtains.
+ http://www.zoo.org.au/HealesvilleSanctuary Nice bats too. Note: I am not a koala fan.
++ The memory of fresh mangoes almost overcomes the memory of the wolf spider. Almost.
^^ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elyne_Mitchell I spent a sizable proportion of my preteens being Kunama, Daughter of the Silver Brumby.+
Elyne Mitchell probably had whole packs of wolf spiders in her sitting-room curtains. She wouldn’t have minded. I am a wuss.
+ I’ve probably told you this before too. See above.
††† You all know the glass-tumbler-over, piece-of-cardboard-under method of dealing with unwanted wildlife, yes?
‡ As there often are. I have a love-hate thing with cardboard boxes. When you need one, you never have one in the right size. This leads to hoarding behaviour.^ I had managed to break myself of this addiction when we moved into two little houses but Third House’s attic is affecting me like offering Green & Black’s to a someone on a slimming diet. No, no! The attic is for backlist! —Oh, I’m sure there’s room for just a feeewww cardboard boxes!
^ In the old house we had an entire attic devoted to my cardboard box collection. No, really. But we did have five attics.
‡‡ Moments like these I get a little wistful about Lassie. I’m sure she/he knew how to rip cardboard flaps off boxes if Timmy asked her/him to. Hellhounds say, What do you want cardboard for? She’s no fun to chase in a glass!
‡‡‡ Er. Not the kind of dislike that results in her and her sixteen Godzilla-sized friends coming back for a rematch.
§ I had two service rings yesterday, the second one for the harvest festival at Old Eden. While we were waiting for our last stragglers we were looking up at the ceiling, as we often do at Old Eden, where the cobwebs are thick and luxurious—and well beyond the reach of anyone but a tall person on a ladder with a broom-handled duster, and life is short. Vicky was saying that it has been a particularly good summer for spiders, and I was nodding sagely. . . .
§§ Best alarm clock I’ve ever had. Except I occasionally have a little difficulty with the adding and subtracting thing. Let me see, six hours from now would be. . . .
Mamee mamee oo oo oo
No, I haven’t lost my mind.* It’s a vocal exercise. Today was my first voice lesson in—eep—three weeks. Life has kept getting in the way.** And for a variety of reasons, including that it’s been three weeks since my last lesson*** and I’ve only just started voice lessons and I have no clue, I was expecting it to be kind of a disaster. Blondel would be very nice about it, because he’s a nice young man, but it was going to be bad.
Starting with the fact that I got to bed at 4:30 am this morning.†
No, sadly, I was not boiling on in a hot haze of creativity and miraculously finishing the third draft of PEGASUS while the last shadows of the 31st of August still lay in the unswept corners††.
There was a wasp. And not just a wasp, but a wasp of wasps, a titan of wasps, a veritable leviathan of wasps, with a buzz that shook the floor. You could see the light fixture tremble in its socket as this behemoth bashed against it. It was not a lot smaller than my thumb, and no, I am not exaggerating. It’s the biggest frelling wasp I’ve ever seen. Its head was as big as my thumbnail, if a little more triangular, and when it turned its head and looked at me every cheap horror movie I’ve ever seen ††† rose gibbering out of my memory and mocked me.
I tried locking it up in the bathroom with the light out, the window open, and the kitchen-door-into-the-garden light on. I tried this for a long time. I’d close the door and go . . . pay a few bills. Renew my subscriptions to The Society of Homeopaths and the Alliance of Registered Homeopaths. Donate to a few more charities.‡ Rub upside-down hellhound tummies.
Check bathroom.
It’s still there. It’s nesting among my clean sheets.
Open window wider. Go back to office. Reread the currently most salient bits of FIND YOUR VOICE‡‡. Whimper.
Check bathroom.
It’s still there.
I finally killed it. I didn’t want to kill it, both because I don’t like killing things and because it frelling terrified me. And I had a godsawful time doing the killing, trying to get anything like a decent shot at it—the cottage is not set up for getting decent shots with a flyswatter at zooming fiends, especially zooming fiends more realistically faced with a shotgun—whining with fear and shaking with adrenaline: but there was no way I was going to sleep with that thing in the house.
So I rolled out of bed this morning very late, and stupid with the aftereffects of murder and epinephrine—and needing to get my soggy, lumpy self going because I had a voice lesson in a few hours. The omens were not good.
And then sometimes you just totally luck out. Today was one of my days for lucking out. In the first place I was just happy to see Blondel: ah yes, the deranged young gentleman who thinks he can teach me to sing. What larks. So to speak. But I’d got myself in a no-no-I-can’t-do-it posture of helplessness and despair about correct breathing during the last three weeks, and in hindsight my salvation, I think, is that I more or less said ‘okay, can’t do it, fine, just get on with it’. I can do my funny exercises‡‡‡, which I have been doing, which are mostly various scales on various vowel sounds, and I can stop to breathe at the end of each scale, and I can learn the melody of my songs enough that—eventually—the melody will be the one thing I don’t have to think about when I’m trying to sing the wretched things.
I can also, in a mwa ha ha ha ha two for the price of one way, get on with my transcriptions. Since I last saw Blondel I’ve transposed Beethoven’s ‘The Miller of Dee’ and ‘The Pulse of an Irishman’ down a few steps to make them more easily in my range. I didn’t have the top notes for either one and it also just seems wasteful to have all these notes at the other end and never use them. Transposing probably looks like a mindless, mechanical exercise, and for someone who knows what they’re doing it probably is. It isn’t to me. In the first place I have a messy sort of mind, and the idea of going through an entire song and counting down two or five steps for every note and writing that down sounds paralytically boring. So I just gave myself a first note and made it sound like the original only lower, and wrote that down. I found it really made me look at the music, what the composer is doing and how he’s put it together,§ and the mwa ha ha ha ha part is that I figure I can use this with Oisin as well as Blondel. But I’m already scuppered: having flourished my manuscript paper at Blondel today he said, hey, that’s great, well done, bring me the piano accompaniment next week. Uh. Well, I was planning to do a piano accompaniment: but I was planning on simplifying it quite a lot. For me. Blondel is a real pianist. As well as a singer. Frell.§§
Even my breathing is better! And I have no idea why! I murdered§§§ Sebben Crudele so much less savagely this week that Blondel was actually trying to convince me to add a little expression. One more thing to remember. Go away. But I wasn’t getting dizzy with hyperventilation at the end of every phrase this week, which was giving Blondel ideas.¤ I think what has happened is the ‘okay, you can’t do it, just get on with it’ thing of merely singing has been getting me used to singing. I sang—well, I was making noise¤¤—pretty steadily for the entire hour, and I am not hoarse, and I am not going to have to take the next day or two off. I also guess that that year of voice lessons I took back at the dawn of time left one or two permanent traces, and my long-disused singing voice is saying ‘oh—yeah—actually we can do this’. Now, I suspect, is when the real work begins.
We finished with a pass through Panis Angelicus, which did not, I admit, go as well as Sebben Crudele had: it felt weirdly high, and the notes kept not being quite where I expected them to be, which meant I totally blew the timing of the last page, which looks straightforward and isn’t. I thought oh well, never mind, I’m getting tired, it’s been a pretty relentless hour. And then Blondel noticed that he hadn’t flipped the automatic-transposition switch on his fancy electric piano back off again—his Sebben Crudele is lower than mine—so the Panis Angelicus he was playing was higher than I was used to, and the notes were not quite where I was expecting them to be. . . .
Same time, same station, next week. Excelsior, and all that.
* * *
* Um. I think I haven’t lost my mind. I don’t guarantee it.
** His life! Not my life! I don’t have a life! I’m too busy doing stuff!
*** And now that term has started, Blondel says, he will be as steady and reliable as Renee Fleming hitting a high C.
† Well. Maybe 4:27.
†† Unswept Corners a Speciality.
††† I only watch cheap ones. The expensive ones are too scary.
‡ Mostly I subscribe to charities because it’s easier. But there are two or three that I’ve never quite signed on for who have hit on the wheeze of sending you address labels and saying ‘this is to thank you . . . blah blah blah’. If, in fact, I use their dranglefabbing address labels^, I send them a donation, although I disapprove in principle of printing all those address labels on spec.
^ If they spell my name right and have some decorative plant icon, preferably a rose
‡‡ by Jo Thompson, http://www.amazon.co.uk/Find-Your-Voice-Self-Help-Singers/dp/1904411258/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1251839443&sr=8-1
‡‡‡ I thought mamee mamee oo oo oo was silly enough—the ‘oo oo oo’ are supposed to be done with sharp little kicks from your belly muscles, which of course I haven’t got and can’t do. I had managed, partially in self-defense I think, to forget how this exercise goes, or is supposed to go, and Blondel kindly reminded me today, and, no doubt to discourage me from further wriggling out of things by forgetting, gave me an even sillier exercise. You stick your tongue out as far as it will go and then try and talk, or rather sing: ma-na-la-va: up the scale and down again. Supposedly this is going to make your consonants crisper, when you fold your embarrassed and exhausted tongue back in your mouth again. Yes. And I’m Maria Callas.
§ Clever bloke, that Beethoven
§§ Meanwhile, because getting tangled up in your own machinations is always amusing, Blondel was playing the scales for me to sing today, and after a while he stopped. I had told him that my voice just shuts down between one half step and the next, and it hadn’t yet, so I looked at him and he said, I don’t think you need to go any higher, and tapped the note we’d got to . . . which was the top note of the Miller of Dee. Oh. Another object lesson in how expecting yourself to fail is a self-fulfilling prophesy. I’ve been playing those scales the last three weeks and topping out several notes lower.
§§§ There seems to be an awful lot of blood and violence in this entry
¤ This is the problem with all real teachers. They keep having ideas.
¤¤ This is something else about teachers that fascinates me: they have to be able to ‘hear’ something other than what’s being produced or they’d run screaming to the nearest job agency and ask for something easier like finding the equation for cold fusion or a solution to global warming. The hearing is literal in the case of a voice teacher: I sound like a cat being strangled, but Blondel, who, as I say, has a gorgeous voice himself, is hearing that I’m improving.
