My life as a bell ringer . . .
IS NOT OVER. You will be glad to hear. Well. You are probably blinking slightly, having not realised there might be a question that it was over. Let me repeat: last Wednesday’s practise was really, really, really bad. Bad bad. Bad to the bone. B-b-b-b-bad. I’d been planning to go to the pub after and . . . I told you I ran out of there. I ran out of there because I couldn’t face the rest of them. Granted I’m a trifle thin skinned about things. Still. It was bad. And I really did come home and wail and moan and wring my hands and consider spending more time on origami.* Gemma was a little late to handbells on Friday, so I had time to do a Sarah Siddons** at poor Niall, who was feeling a bit low himself for having been (according to him, although I’m not sure I believe him) instrumental in losing a (tower) quarter (peal) the previous Sunday. We had got to the point where we were about to swear off tower bells forever and cleave exclusively to handbells, and in another few minutes we’d probably have nicked our fingers and made a blood pact, but fortunately Gemma showed up. She was quite startled at my Lady Macbeth imitation.*** She must be a fabulous family doctor†: she does that calm, patient, rational-as-if-you’re-rational-too-and-just-had-a-bad-minute-there thing superbly. She very nearly cheered me up. And she did at least convince me that my ignominy Wednesday evening had not been complete.
As previously (often) mentioned, I sometimes think my single virtue is frelling obstinacy.†† Sheer mindless persistence I can do. So there was never any real doubt that I would show up at the abbey for Sunday afternoon service ring . . . but I can’t say I was looking forward to it. The not looking forward was getting pretty disagreeable by last night and by the time I got out of bed this morning I wanted to change my name††† and run away. It’s a beautiful gardening day.‡ I could stay home and garden.
What if I turn up and they stare at me in disbelief and say, For pity’s sake go away? —Even if Gemma keeps insisting this isn’t going to happen.
In the first place there were only, and exactly, eight of us. Including me. Which meant that with me they could ring triples. Without me they could ring doubles or minor with the seventh sitting out. Triples is much better. So yaay. I’m useful. (Which has been one of Gemma’s strongest arguments right along: they need Sunday afternoon ringers. You get lots of brownie points if you ring Sunday afternoon service. As well as more time on a rope.) So we rang Grandsire Triples—with me (relatively) safely on the treble.
But the best thing was that I had a chat with Albert. I wanted to tell him I wouldn’t be there for practise next Wednesday‡‡ but that after last Wednesday I thought I should probably revert to doubles and minor till I had adjusted a little more to the (frelling) abbey’s (frelling) bells. And he looked surprised and said oh no, you don’t have to do that, everyone has trouble getting used to these bells, they’re not the easiest bells anyway, the ringing chamber is huge, and the sound is muddy and erratic.
Well . . . yes.
And, he added, last Wednesday was a bad practise. People who have been ringing Grandsire Triples for thirty years were going wrong. It wasn’t your fault.
Oh. Um. I had actually thought there was a little variability elsewhere, but . . .
But the thing he said that really sent me away with a song in my heart if not precisely on my lips, was that when he’d first been ringing here he’d had trouble focussing on each bell rope because, the blasted room being so big, the ropes were so far apart.
Focus. Yes. That’s exactly the right word, and it hadn’t occurred to me (so not a word person as I am), because it’s counter-intuitive. Ropesight is the ability to see which bell you should follow next by PRECISELY where the person ringing it is in their stroke (since everyone ringing will be in a slightly different place than everyone else). Part of the problem at the abbey is that since it has ninety-seven bells, if you’re only ringing six or eight or ten or twelve, you’re in more of a queue than a circle, and you have got used, in smaller towers with fewer bells, to ringing in a circle,‡‡ and your ropesight has probably developed from looking around a smallish, more or less circular, group of bellropes. You would think that having them more spread out would mean each comes into much sharper individual focus but in practise, as I have dreadfully discovered, it seems to have the opposite effect: they all blur together.
So Albert and I have something in common besides being bipedal air breathers with opposed thumbs. Yaaay. And then he said, let’s ring a couple of plain courses of Grandsire Triples, and you ring inside, and you can practise looking. So we did that.
I may still have a future as an abbey ringer. . . .
* * *
* I was just writing to a friend that I’d bought a couple of books on basic origami to remind myself what folding feels like, for SHADOWS, since Maggie is a folder, and a couple of books of extreme origami to see what the . . . er . . . extremists can get up to, and that I could feel the attraction of another obsessive-friendly activity but that I didn’t have time for any more all-consuming pursuits and would probably stick to cranes, which are hard enough, frankly, if you are over-equipped with thumbs. The mere fact of possessing twelve thumbs wouldn’t stop me, you understand, since I don’t hold out for things I have some talent for. See: bell ringing.
** http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarah_Siddons
*** Out, damned bell rope! Out, I say! One; two: why, then, ’tis time to do ’t. Hell is murky, just like my ropesight!
† Which is what she is
†† Not just plain obstinacy. The frelling kind. Which is much gnarlier.
††† Possibly to K MacFarquhar. Hee hee hee hee hee hee.
‡ Old Blush is out. Barely the middle of May is early even for her. It’ll be another fortnight or so before she’s in peak hurrah, but she’s got three roses full out now. And I have two robins again, so there must be a second nest in prospect. Robin #1 was rushing around yesterday dispensing mealworms but robin #2 sat in the apple tree and stared at me as I galumphed haphazardly, potting things on and swearing. Robin #2 is gigantic. I am not seeing anything about size differential between the sexes in robins—having just hit three robin-info sites^—but if it’s true that dad sticks around to feed the fledglings, the gigantic one is mama. And she’s probably deciding if she wants to risk me. I don’t know if robins re-use their nests? I won’t clear this one away till the end of the year so it’s available at a very reasonable rate, not to mention all the mod cons, like trays of mealworms on the balcony.
^ One does mention that robins are so crazy about mealworms they will take them from human hands. That does, however, mean that the human hand has to be holding the mealworms. I will pick mealworms up when I drop them+ but the idea of standing there . . . um. Peanut butter for the chickadees back in Maine was less lacerating to one’s delicate sensibilities.++
+ And did you know they CLIMB? You want to be certain of your containment vessel.
++ When I first moved over here one of the things I missed the worst was all the wild critters I was used to. Chickadees were very high on that list. It’s hard not to love something that little and cheeky. British robins are out of the same box: little and cheeky. And the funny thing is that I feel that I’ve always lived with British robins.# I know my love of skylarks and brown hares and beech trees is only twenty years old. British robins . . . I can’t imagine life without them.
# American robins are fine. But British robins are the real deal.
‡‡ Fiona and I are going to get into trouble. Unfortunately there were only tickets available for trouble on Wednesday evening.
‡‡‡ Mind you there are some fairly strange layouts in small towers too. But the small part does limit the grievous possibilities.
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.
The Continued Non Arrival of Doodles
I went ringing at the abbey again tonight.
Pause.
More pause.
Even longer pause.
. . . I wonder how long before they ask me politely not to come back?
SIIIIIIIIIIIIGH.*
I then came home to a query from Blogmom about all those doodles and doodled books I haven’t sent out yet. Yes. I haven’t sent them out. I said that I was going to have the rest out by the end of March. I lied. I didn’t mean to lie, but I lied. I was at that time in the grip of the delusion that I would have finished SHADOWS . . . about a fortnight ago.**
I’m still working on SHADOWS. And as I keep moaning to everyone who doesn’t quickly run away from me, it’s going fine. It’s just not going fast enough. I’ve had to slow down, indeed, precisely because I’ve been ramming it through slightly faster than it’s wanted to go, and I came to the point with the third draft—which is usually my final one—that I had to slow down or risk botching the job. As it is I’m skating over stuff I didn’t want to skate over. I’m hoping I might get to use this world again—like ALBION takes place in SUNSHINE’s world—which might give me a chance to poke more ignorant fun at quantum physics and chaos theory. But I think the algebra is specific to this book, and the Japanese language and culture, which appear to be settling in for the long haul in my life***, are tied in SHADOWS to a specific character which is inconvenient since I don’t write sequels.†
And it’s hard to judge what to put on the blog—about anything, really. I’m never in a good mood when I wonder what kind of an absolutely weird impression of Robin McKinley I’m giving by the public persona who appears here. I don’t think I’m quite as TOTALLY FRELLING SELF OBSESSED as you’d be forgiven for thinking I am from these (virtual) pages: it’s just that I’m my own safest material, since I don’t have to worry about hurting, humiliating or infuriating anyone else when I talk about me.†† At the same time I’m so conscious of what I’m not saying about me that I genuinely can’t guess what I look like to all of you.†††
And . . . I don’t like whiners. If I whine here, I’m very sorry. My judgement was off that day(s). So I’m not telling you how the undone doodles pray on my conscience and how grim my office at the cottage is, full, as it also is, with heaps of books, lists, and mailing envelopes. Circumstances conspired—PEG II crashing and burning, and my then urgently trying to get on with SHADOWS as fast as possible—but that still leaves you waiting over six months for something you paid for last autumn.
Since I mostly write here about all the rushing around doing too much that I do, you would also be more than forgiven for thinking‡ that if I stopped flitting about the landscape and concentrated I would be getting both SHADOWS and doodles (etc) done a lot faster. You’ll just have to take my word for it both that it doesn’t work that way—and that there’s perhaps less flitting than you think. I work seven days, remember, and I don’t take holidays, or anyway I can’t remember the last time I took one. For one very minor example of this wombly balance: I guarantee that if I weren’t whacking myself silly over SHADOWS I would be getting on with learning how to ring the beastly abbey bells at least fractionally faster than I am.‡‡ Indeed I’d be getting on with bell ringing generally at least fractionally faster if I didn’t pretty invariably have no functioning intellect left by the time I go to bell practise in the evenings.‡‡‡
But believe me, you will be the first to know when I send SHADOWS to Merrilee and instantly morph spectacularly into a Doodle Factory.
* * *
* Well . . . I’m getting a lot of knitting done while I sit out. There’s no point even watching Stedman on twenty-seven: it’s just a storm of ropes to me. But I can sometimes learn something standing behind someone with his or her hands on a rope, and intently watching what they’re doing. And at the abbey I can use all the help about anything that I can get. So I stood behind the treble for some Cambridge Major^, because in other towers I can treble bob, which is what the treble does in Cambridge . . . and got horribly lost. So when, later, they called for Bristol Major, which is another treble-bobbing method, I decided to stick to knitting. But I’ve been tagged as a stander-behind—it’s one of these how-you’re-wired things: some people find standing behind of zero use—and one of the other ringers said to me afterward, oh, but you should have stood behind the treble again! I decided it would be impolitic to say I’d rather knit.
I was knitting on Monday at (bell) practise and Anthea, who did use to knit, and quite glamorous things too, says she doesn’t knit any more because ‘nothing happens fast enough’. But I knit in waste time: those three minutes at that exasperatingly long light on my way to Nadia’s, sitting out in bell towers, during break at the Muddles, waiting for my computer to stop sulking and do something.^^ And all that effort, even at my knitting speed, does blerg or bludge into something eventually: I now have the world’s longest leg warmer and I’d better cast off and start the other one. It would be nice to have a pair by November. . . .
^ To the extent that I ring it inside, I ring minor, which is six bells, not eight.
^^ Yes, I can sing while I knit. As necessary.
** Positive thinking doesn’t always work. Sometimes even putting something on the blog to make sure I do it doesn’t work.
*** Have I mentioned that I’ve found a language school in Hampshire that offers Japanese? I’ve told the woman who is my contact that I can’t commit to lessons till I’ve dealt with an overdue work project. Ahem. But this is so much old-unfinished-business-coming-back-to-bite-me, not a brand-new, for-godssake-McKinley-get-a-grip fascination. I’d be more inclined to see it as some kind of serendipity rather than actual unfinished business if it weren’t that Damarian has a certain amount of Japanese grammar in it—as well as some funny alphabet stuff. I only started writing down what I think I know about the Damarian language in the last ten or so years, when I would have told you I remembered nothing of Japanese except how to count to ten and say ‘hello’ and ‘thank you’. That’s true, but the Story Council apparently saw an opportunity and pounced.
† PEGASUS is one story in three books! It’s not a trilogy! The word ‘sequel’ will not be bandied here!
†† I have arguments with myself all the time. China is sometimes broken.
††† Don’t tell me. I’m sure I don’t want to know.
‡ Simultaneously grinding your teeth optional
‡‡ This is hardly a silver lining, but it did occur to me that . . . the abbey has always been my best local opportunity to learn some of the slightly-more-upper-level stuff that the New Arcadia band can’t reliably support. But given how steep the learning curve for adapting to the abbey’s bells is, the only way I’d ever have stuck the course is by something like this—having cast myself off from New Arcadia first. As it is . . . I’ll stick the course unless they tell me to go away.
‡‡‡ I write the blog every night on fumes, okay?
Something New to Worry About
So this evening I spent about ten minutes staring hopelessly at the line for Grandsire Triples—hopelessly because I know the sodblasted line, that’s not the problem—carefully negotiated taking hellhounds back to the cottage and giving them their final hurtle around the fact that I apparently have a car that doesn’t like to start when it’s warm* . . . and set off for the abbey. I haven’t rung there in over a month, I think, due to a combination of family visitation, annual road tests that don’t cover the connections to the starter motor, fancy practises for the upper echelons to essay Thirty Two Bell Marshmellow Lime Jello Cottage Cheese Surprise**, and random consecrated events suitable to an abbey requiring silence.
I didn’t ring there tonight either. There was another random consecrated event (requiring silence). I didn’t find this out, however, till I got there, having turned off my car that doesn’t like to start when it’s warm about two minutes before. And the abbey town is one of these places that closes at 6 pm, barring the odd pub, and I did not fancy wandering its streets in the dark while I waited for my car to cool down.***
So I sat in the driver’s seat, getting cold, since it’s still frelling winter here†, and looked up the abbey calendar on Pooka, which I should have done before I drove over, and . . . yup. 7 March: bell practise cancelled due to RanConEvReqSil. RATBAGS. BULGING RATBAGS.
. . . And then I turned the key and Wolfgang sprang immediately to life. ††
* * *
I had an extremely friendly and polite email from a non-blog-reading doodle-buyer wondering if hers had got lost in the post. Guuuuuuilt. No. It’s still in the ink sloshing around in the pen lying on the doodle desk at the cottage. I was thinking about this again as a result of the recent blogs and subsequent conversations about singing. The chief reason I’m not getting on with the doodles any faster is because all doodling, even the umpty-seventh fanged muffin, takes at least a tiny fraction of a sparkle of creative energy, and at the moment ALL sparks, and sub-sparks, sub-sub-sparks, and immeasurably infinitesimal fractions of sparks are carefully swept together and hoarded for SHADOWS. Which is, as you may have already surmised by the fact that I haven’t mentioned it recently, running late ARRRRRGH.††† It’s multiply frustrating because really it’s going very well, it’s just going to its own frelling pace, which is not rapid. It’s not even slow as I measure my writing in glacial degrees . . . but it’s slow for a book that was supposed to be finished in five months. Siiiiiiigh.
And meanwhile, I have ME, and yet I insist on rushing all over the landscape, hurtling hounds, ringing bells . . . singing. Pretending to learn Japanese. Knitting is restful, right? I don’t have to list that among my vices. I’ve blithered to you often before about coping with ME: while forcing yourself to do stuff when you feel like death and yesterday’s tea leaves is a really really bad idea and I don’t care how many experts say otherwise, the other side of this is that you have to work at staying as fit and active as you can because the ME will take you down at the first sign of weakness. ‘Use it or lose it’ has extra resonance (and teeth) when you have ME. Hellhound hurtling has as much to do with how much physical exertion I can stand and keep standing‡ as it does with how much hurtling two manic whippet cross deerhound longdogs want. Fortunately this is a fairly successful overlapping series.
Mental, emotional and creative energy are a different scale. And, as with the physical, you use it or lose it, whether you have ME or not, but more dramatically if you do.‡‡ Bell ringing knocks the flimsy stuffing out of my brain and, especially on cranky bells, does a fair bit for upper body strength and flexibility too. The algebra, pre-calc, quantum physics and the Japanese are . . . hahahahahahaha . . . well, I have a strange idea about what’s amusing, okay? And if I want to fall asleep in the bath with THE LANGUAGE OF MATHEMATICS or in bed at mmph-mumble o’clock in the morning learning a few kanji, well, it’s better than slashing tyres and sticking chewing gum in parking meters. It’s still all pure mental, with a little frill of mostly frustrated and occasional flares of delighted, emotional energy.
But I’ve had a sudden unsettling thought about the singing. Singing lessons and joining the Muddles have been about making more and better noise, and about learning a little more music and a little more about music, and about producing what I’m learning a little more accurately and less excrutiatingly. I do still play the piano, but I do it strictly for fun and goofiness and I haven’t had a real piano lesson from Oisin in over a year. I stopped composing somewhere around the time that PEG II began to demonstrate recalcitrance, although long before I realised what the recalcitrance was about. I am just beginning to feel the stirrings of singing self-expression, and in my relentlessly naïve and credulous way am excited about this . . . . But that’s not going to count as creative energy, is it?
* * *
* We’d had our morning hurtle around stopping at the farm-supply store to buy more bagged, composted manure for the garden(s). Where they had one till open, and a queue of about 637 people, two thirds of whom had complicated questions that required phoning the warehouse, consulting clipboards, and filling out complex forms. ARRRRRGH. But Wolfgang had plenty of leisure to go dead cold by the time I got back out there again and he started fine.
** Who says technological progress is a myth? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7tWuG2oPL3o
The last time this pinnacle of the singer’s art^ was mentioned here, this was not available on YouTube.
^ Hmmmmm.
*** I had my knitting with me. I could have gone to a pub. And yes, I do belong to one of those roadside-recovery groups^ but by the time they got there Wolfgang would be cool enough to start on his own. Probably.
^ This one: http://www.rac.co.uk/breakdown-cover/
† I am tired of winter. I am very very tired of winter.^
^ I hope it’s not feeling obliged to stick around till I get my extra-long leg-warmers finished. I’ve been thinking about them and their unfinishedness a lot the last few days because these jeans are too short and I really need leg-warmers to block the ankle draft.
†† Hellhounds were, of course, delighted. Since they’re usually reasonably interested in supper I think they do clock the difference between getting fed on time and getting fed late: if I’m there they mob me if I am still sitting at the computer when I should be cutting up chicken, and if I’m late they mob me at the door: you don’t need to take your coat off to chop up some chicken. But Peter was playing bridge tonight, and I don’t leave hellhounds unsupervised at the mews, so we had to get back down there. And I have this little car problem. . . . I put Wolfgang’s nose up against the corner of the brick-and-flint wall around my neighbour’s parking slot in case the handbrake failed and left him running. I also left the rear hellhound-access door open—flung open the door of the cottage, beckoned hellhounds out and they ran straight down the stairs and into Wolfgang. Yaay hellhounds. In my experience dogs don’t much like going near a turned-on car.^ I locked up the cottage, threw their harnesses in after them, and we were off again in about twenty seconds.
^ Would that this kept them safely out of the street.
††† Not shouting! Not shouting! But I may have a few bruised fingers and possibly a new hairline fracture in my keyboard!
‡ The cute side of this is that by focussing on your ME you don’t have to think about how much of it is age creeping up on you.
‡‡ ME, particularly what is (as I have to keep reminding myself on bad days) a mild case, is way, way far from the worst restraint and constriction you can have on your life. I’m just talking about me here.
SHAAAAAAAAA. . .
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA AAAAAAAAAAAADOWS*.
AND IT’S THE 30TH OF JANUARY. NO. IT’S ALREADY THE 31ST. AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
AAAAAAAAAAA AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGGGGGHHHH.
* * *
* I did go to my voice lesson. I told you yesterday, I’m getting even stranger, bent over my computer twenty hours a day^, and I thought it might even be good for me to go get strung out in a different direction, even if SHADOWS is frelling due frelling tomorrow.^^ Also I only just started singing again last week and—I wanted to go. It’s been a slightly dubious week in terms of practise—there’s still crud in my throat and all this emotional-aspect stuff makes me kind of jumpy—if you manage to miss with the carving knife you go to A&E, get some stitches and a lecture, come home, mop up the blood, keep the bandage out of the bath, be a little careful of yourself till the stitches come out, and hey voila, there you are. Another interesting scar. But when you’re trying to patch yourself together from some kind of immaterial wound, where and how you put the stitches in, and what constitutes the kind of bath you should keep your damaged limb out of—and what exactly the limb is—is not so straightforward. So I’ve been singing sort of cautiously, and of course I’m wildly out of practise and I have no time.^^^ Also, my voice still keeps disappearing on me—less than it was doing before, but every time it does I’m convinced that this is The End and I’m too old to be reaching for this nonsense anyway.^^^^ Nadia waggled her eyebrows at me in that disbelieving-teacher way and said, now as I remember it we found out last week that the chief reason your voice was dropping out was because you were letting it get cut off from its air supply. Oh, I said. Um.
So she made me frelling breathe for a while, and connect, and all that really annoying stuff you shouldn’t NEED to be told over and over and over and over and over and OVER. But you do, because you’re a moron. And then she ran me up and down some scales and some exercises and kept reminding me to breathe and to connect, and I could actually feel the air sinking down and lying with this lovely rounded, grounded weightiness at the bottom of my pelvis, and every now and then I also remembered to let it out again, and carry my voice with it. I had already admitted that occasionally this week when I wasn’t convinced I still couldn’t sing and was therefore producing a self-fulfilling prophesy of squawks and silences, I’d made a few noises that were fuller and freer than what I’m used to . . . and with the teacher-magic she teased them out of me today, and convinced them to bring friends. I was singing back up at the top of my range again—which I haven’t even tried at home since before I was ill, because I have been too busy feeling fragile, convalescent and overworked—and I was loud—me! Old no-voice me!— the kind of loud your average local amateur choir would be happy to have yelling from its benches—loud the way I don’t sing, especially at the top end where my brain is busy saying, no, no, wait, we don’t do that. Nadia stopped me where she did not because my voice was failing, she said, but because my brain was closing me down.
But. There’s life in the old cow yet. Mooo. Yaay. And I came home again all exhilarated and threw myself into SHADOWS.
^ That leaves two for hurtling hounds and two for sleeping. Other crucial activities like eating chocolate can be performed coincidently while typing.
^^ Later today. Shut up.
^^^ And the twenty-fifth hour is for singing practise.
^^^^ I actually raised this with Nadia today. How big an embarrassing moron am I being, taking voice lessons at nearly-sixty? For some reason I’ve heard like half a dozen times this last week that sopranos lose their voices really early and it seems sort of fated to be hearing this over and over again when I’m convalescent from the throat infection that had stopped me singing altogether—and ten months off my sixtieth birthday.+ And she said, two things: there’s no reason you shouldn’t last a good while yet as a choir singer—it’s professional sopranos that fold predictably early because of the colossal demands they put on their voices—and you’re lucky—you’ve got all the alto notes too. If you need to slip down to sing alto, you can.
::Beams:: Good. On with the voice lessons, then.
+ And before you answer that, I added, let me say that while this is all contingent on you being willing to teach me, I’ve already figured out that I’m in it for the journey. Never mind that thirty years ago I’d’ve had no voice to train either, all this trying to bind yourself together in a seamless whole to produce a sound is fascinating, even if the resultant sound is nothing much.