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The Day After the Day Before
For some utterly mysterious reason I didn’t sleep well last night. And then the phone started ringing. AAAAAUGH. It wasn’t till the third time I had plunged out of bed to answer it that it was Peter, saying that he had an appointment to see the doc at 10:40, which is quite civilised even by my terms, at least nights/mornings when I’ve had some sleep.
This doctor doesn’t think it was a TIA, with all its fresh new implications of prospective direness, which suits me and, of course, Peter. It’s interesting what adrenalin will do to the constitutionally anxious, which is to say, nothing very good. But some time during the dark sleepless watches of the night . . . well, okay, the bright sleepless watches of the morning . . . it began to seem to me more likely to be something more nearly resembling what happened last spring rather than a whole new thing. Not because whole new things don’t happen but because yesterday’s incident could be explained by dehydration, resultant screwed-up electrolyte levels, and Peter’s naturally low blood pressure. Which would then suggest it should be solvable by fairly simple and straightforward means.
And that is what the new doc thinks happened.* I acknowledge it gives one pause to worry** how much the way one presents the story affects the doctor’s reaction, but I don’t think we told it all that differently today.*** Possibly more to the point is that the doctor at the clinic had Peter’s case notes available.†
So Peter gets to have a lot more blood tests, with firm admonitions from his doctor to keep his fluid intake up and supportive threats of violence from his wife ringing in his ears. And I got to go home and hurtle, or rather mooch, hellhounds in the middle of the day, which none of us enjoyed much, since it’s gone all sweltery again. Rather against expectation I had a not-too-bad afternoon with PEG II†† and then spent a little time trying to hack††† Fantin Latour back to bearable limits and a lot of time watering. Watering out front at the cottage was enlivened by the arrival of the first guests for across-the-road’s 21st birthday party.‡ Dear gods. Four-inch heels, perfect hair and lacquered faces. I’m glad I was young a long time ago. I hope my dirty hands and ponytail didn’t ruin their mood.
When hellhounds and I got back to the mews for supper I compulsively checked my email, just like someone with perfect hair and four-inch heels,‡‡ and a blog reader had sent me a link to a fascinating and mind-boggling story of copyright violation and unbelievably clueless self-righteous malfeasance. Gah. How far we have come—in the wrong direction.
Read it and weep. Possibly also with laughter. http://www.jasonrobertbrown.com/weblog/2010/06/fighting_with_teenagers_a_copy.php ‡‡‡
And maybe tomorrow I’ll finally blog about the book I was going to tell you about yesterday.§
* * *
* Whom we saw at 11:30. I could have hurtled hounds or had a little more sleep. Okay, probably not sleep.
** See: constitutionally anxious
*** After another lo-sleep night however I was probably failing to give off the same rabid waves of dread and terror I was clouding the atmosphere with yesterday evening. Peter, of course, being British, wouldn’t dream of emitting rabid waves of dread and terror.
† I suppose it’s something about patient confidentiality but no, the hospital doc can’t tap into some central database and look up the history of the person sitting in front of them. WTF?? This is the sort of thing the Great Computer Revolution was supposed to be for, fifty years ago or so, when monster mainframes still needed to be sold to the public as a good thing: centralised data access.
†† Unless of course when I reopen the file after the next time I’ve had any sleep and discover today’s efforts say cksjhfgwonnbdujiwopwlqyttx.
††† Hacking is necessary to relieve my feelings. One of those phone calls this morning was from the dentist to remind me I have an appointment tomorrow.^ Aaaugh. Will the horror never end.
^ And no, no voice lesson. Whimper.
‡ The one that’s going to go on till one in the morning.
‡‡ No, she’d be checking her texts. I don’t know how to text. No, wait, I’ve promised Merrilee to learn as soon as I get my iPhone.^ I had a little on-line browse at the Orange phone store today, and they now let you get as far as choosing your phone and your payment plan before they tell you they haven’t got any 4s. But they say, brightly, that they’ll email you as soon as they get more in. I duly filled out their form and . . . got an immediate email saying, Hi! Keep checking our website for availability!
^ Although another friend is due to pass through the area soon and dandle her shiny new Android at me.
‡‡‡ Thank you, KW!
§ If I’m not wholly occupied tying my injured jaw back into line and pouring medicinal champagne over the wounded places.
Death is a low chemical trick played on everybody except sequoia trees*
I’ve been on a train all day, going to visit an ailing friend—a probably dying friend—a friend who, just by the way, the world can’t do without, let alone my private feelings on the matter. I am not in a good mood. Blood, spit and damnation, but this system sucks. I want to speak to the management.** The subordinate mortal bureaucracy is clearly run by idiots.
I’m also frelling shattered.*** I give the ME credit: it pretty well held off all day† and even more or less let me drive home†† but the moment I fell through the door ††† . . . farewell voc . . . vocab . . . vocabula . . . words. Farewell walking. Farewell sitting upright in a chair. . . .‡
So what do you do under emotional duress? I haven’t got time for the pages and pages and pages in the private journal option (or, probably, the intestinal fortitude). But there’s still poetry.
This is the one that came immediately. It’s funny, I was a late convert to Emily Dickinson‡‡; she was much too niminy-piminy for me. I never made the mistake of thinking the emotions weren’t there, I merely felt she had put frock coats and antimacassars on them—trammelled the hell out of them. But there are times when putting your personal scourge in a frock coat is the best plan you’ve got. There are a lot of terrific poems about death, but most of them are on to untrammell the hell out of you. Today Emily is just what I want:
Because I could not stop for Death,
He kindly stopped for me;
The carriage held but just ourselves
And Immortality.
We slowly drove, he knew no haste,
And I had put away
My labor, and my leisure too,
For his civility.
We passed the school, where children strove
At recess, in the ring;
We passed the fields of gazing grain,
We passed the setting sun.
Or rather, he passed us;
The dews grew quivering and chill,
For only gossamer my gown,
My tippet only tulle.
We paused before a house that seemed
A swelling of the ground;
The roof was scarcely visible,
The cornice but a mound.
Since then ’tis centuries, and yet each
Feels shorter than the day
I first surmised the horses’ heads
Were toward eternity.
And, even odder that this should force itself on me, the following. I had to study this in school, and haaaated it. I’m an island! Don’t you talk to me about clods! I came to John Donne backwards, by his love poetry‡‡‡. But this one, to me, is a prime example of how true things become clichés. This whole poem (except it’s not a poem, it’s a meditation arranged to look like a poem) is one long (or really one rather short) duh.
No man is an island,
Entire of itself.
Each is a piece of the continent,
A part of the main.
If a clod be washed away by the sea,
Europe is the less.
As well as if a promontory were.
As well as if a manner of thine own
Or of thine friend’s were.
Each man’s death diminishes me,
For I am involved in mankind.
Therefore, send not to know
For whom the bell tolls,
It tolls for thee.
And last, Robert Frost’s Death of the Hired Hand, which has nothing to do with the case, except that it’s a poem about death, and I love it, and . . . find it consoling, even when it has nothing to do with the case. And when I don’t have any friends actively dying at the present moment. If you don’t instantly recognize it by the title, it’s the one with the famous line ‘Home is where, when you have to go there,/ they have to take you in’ from the skeptical Warren, and the kinder Mary replies: “I should have called it/ Something you somehow haven’t to deserve.”
http://www.eliteskills.com/c/1140
I hope you’re all home and safe and warm.§
* * *
* J.J. Furnas
** And no, Luke isn’t doing very well either, although they’ve patched him up as well as apparently they can and will probably send him home soon. Three bleak cheers for the National Health Service, because he will (probably) need round the clock care, which his family wouldn’t be able to afford.
*** I did get most of two books read during my long exile from on line.^ One of them is fabulous and will duly make an appearance on these virtual pages. The other one . . . well, I suppose the author might still pull her plot structure out of a closet and snap it up like an umbrella—whing—and finally begin protecting her shivering readers from the cold rain of credibility. But while the writing is lovely and creepy and atmospheric the story makes no sense. This bothers me for some reason.
^ Zowie. Gotta get that iPhone.+ The poor old RaspBerry is just not up to coping with on line. We struggled through finding another connection on the British Rail site when I caught an earlier train from Mauncester, which certainly beat sitting helplessly and fretting, even if the information turned out to be wrong, but cruising or working or even [blush] tweeting? No way.
+ Mwa ha ha ha ha ha
† Although I could hear it drumming its fingers impatiently
†† Although it’s a good thing Wolfgang knows the way. See, this is one of the reasons I don’t want a new car. I don’t want to have to teach it where everything is. And what if my next car is the internal combustion engine version of trying to teach Chaos to pick up his feet to have his harness put on?
††† Where I was greeted by hellhounds so ravaged by despair that they had eaten their lunch for the dogminder. Clearly I should go away more often. Hmmmmm.
‡ It’s not all bad. I’m much too tired to do any tidying up.
‡‡ http://www.poetryfoundation.org/archive/poem.html?id=180204 It may have all started with A Narrow Fellow in the Grass: I like the whiplash unbraiding in the sun—which then wrinkles—even better than the ‘Zero at the bone’ which is the famous line.
‡‡‡ ‘Thy selfe must to him a new banquet grow’—a line from the no-nonsense-ly named ‘The Brides [sic] Going to Bed’. He wrote a whole series of epithalamiums and never mind the holy vows and all that, they’re all totally about getting laid. Or of course the famous poem, To His Mistress Going to Bed, which gave the Mary Whitehouses/Tipper Gores of his day spasms: ‘ . . . Off with that girdle, like heaven’s zone glistering/ But a far fairer world encompassing . . . To teach thee, I am naked first: why then/ What needst thou have more covering than a man.’
§ Not too warm. But we’re back to woolly jumper/pile of hellhounds weather here in Hampshire.
Havoc, various and extreme
My editor’s assistant is very on the spot, bless her, and while the copyedited ms of PEGASUS in all its red-pencilled, Post-Itted glory* isn’t due to arrive till Thursday**, she sent me the copyeditor’s queries last night so I can at least get started on the more or less substantive stuff, as opposed to the melting-down-over-the-question-of-semicolons stuff, which will have to await arrival of the large square boulder of typescript. Or printerscript.
I am, of course, hyperventilating.*** Deadlines crunch underfoot like the ice that I hope is not out there forming after yesterday’s rain and today’s temperature plunge. Anxiety, foreboding and self-doubt fleet gibbering past like wraiths. And I have a headache that feels like being thwacked repeatedly by the Chrysler Building †. And I may be getting a job tomorrow at the recycling plant, sorting plastic bottles and cardboard boxes. Or old computer components. I’m not fussy.
And I haven’t even told you yet about the latest edition of SUNSHINE which they’re shoving through in some kind of inside-out Douglas-Adams timeframe†† to take advantage of some opportunity for a special promotion last week or something, and they sent me the cover roughs today which there is no time to do much about except keep going and I recognise that they are hip and flash and attention-catching and even pretty on their own terms but I can’t even breathe this fast††† let alone make decisions and AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAUGH.
NO PRESSURE OR ANYTHING.
* * *
OKAY. IT’S OFFICIAL. FEDEX HAS SCREWED UP, AND I’M NOT GETTING PEGASUS ON THURSDAY.
KILL ME. KILL ME NOW.
* * *
* Yup. Hard copy. I’m old and feeble and retro and sad.^ Most of this publishing doodah happens electronically these days, except among those of us who are old and feeble and retro and sad. We agreed to deal with the copyedited FIRE electronically, and it frelling near killed me.^^ Probably a great many of my mysterious aches and pains have nothing to do with hellhounds, large heavy potted plants, boxes of books, or cranky bells, but are the result of those pins various publishing people are sticking in wax figures labelled ‘Robin’. She gets her damn book in four months late and she wants the copyedit in HARD COPY? What did I do with those hat pins?
^ And I compulsively reread Calvin and Hobbes. When I get to the bottom of the pile+ I start over. Aside from the astonishingly high level of inspired lunacy Watterson maintained, I like the way Calvin’s parents sit around reading books. I read a strip today where Calvin’s mom is using a typewriter. The copyright date is 1987—that’s only twenty-three years ago! The usual date of the invention of the world-wide web is 1989, isn’t it? And PCs (and Macs) as more than a geek phenomenon are only about ten years older than that. I know, I know, the world does keep changing, but this is the first time I’ve been old, and I think the electronic revolution is pretty amazing.
Robin McKinley is on Twitter? Robin McKinley who was given a phone machine as a house-warming present back in Maine because her nearest and dearest were sure that after she and her phone-answering housemates went their separate ways they would never hear from her again?
I’ve been trying to find that joke about the bathtub and the phone: The bathtub was invented in 1850 and the telephone in 1875.++ This means you could sit in the tub for twenty-five years before the phone rang.
If you turned the phone off, you could sit in the tub for 125 years before your email pinged. You’d be pretty wrinkly by then though.
+ Of course I have them all. I am a card-carrying obsessive. You know this.
++ Except that the bathtub was invented either by the Romans in BCE quack quack something, or by Thingummy in 1883 who came up with the trick of enamelling of a large iron basin, and the phone really was invented in 1875 or thereabouts. Never mind. I still like the joke.
^^ Sheer chronological age is not necessarily the determining factor. Peter coped. I didn’t. And he can remember twenty five more internetless years than I can.
** IT HAD BETTER BE GOING TO ARRIVE ON THURSDAY. I’VE ONLY GOT TILL NEXT THURSDAY TO TURN IT AROUND. AS I SIT HERE, TWITCHING EVERY TIME MY EMAIL PINGS^, THE MS. HAS NOT YET ARRIVED AT MY PUBLISHER, WHICH MEANS MY PUBLISHER HAS NOT YET SENT IT OUT.
It’s bad enough that sodding Fedex delivers when they feel like it, so while they guarantee 48 hours, they don’t tell you which end of the forty-eight, so to speak, so Peter is going to house-sit while I’m hurtling hellhounds. On Thursday. If it’s Thursday. It’s looking bad for Thursday. OH. GODS.
^Fortunately I am not sitting in the bath. It occurs to me that the real reason I find myself incapable of going to bed at a decent, civilised hour, is because I like to lie in the bath and read. At mmmph o’clock in the morning the phone very rarely rings.+
+ Although Peter scared me silly ringing at 11:15 from Elsewhereshire this weekend. Eleven-fifteen is, of course, the mere shank of the evening by my standards, but anyone who rings me after about 9 pm~ earns my undying opprobrium. (I’m still not a big fan of the telephone.) Ordinarily I would make an exception for Peter, but what was he doing in Elsewhereshire this weekend when he should have been at home bringing me cups of strong hot stomach-quelling tea and frosted flutes of medicinal champagne?
~ Or before about . . . never mind.
*** The funny thing is that today is pretty much the first day that PEG II has not felt like a Giant Spiky Monster which is going to roll over me juggernaut-fashion and leave me a little blot on the carpet^, but a story I might conceivably manage to tell.^^ The last two or three weeks or whatever it’s been it’s been like, No! Go away! I’ve done all that! What do you mean it’s not finished! Of course it’s finished! I know when I’ve finished a novel! Sequel! I don’t frelling do sequels, and if you say that again I will make you eat my desktop!^^^
^ To go with various other recent blots on the carpet. What a good thing we go in for patterned carpets.
^^ I say nothing about finishing it by next autumn.
^^^Which is the computer whose email is still not working.
† Point down, of course. This is all part of the Giant Spiky Monster metaphor.
†† “Oh no, not again.”
††† Especially when I’m hyperventilating
Snow Day*
It’s snowing. And snowing. And snowing. And . . . There’s only about an inch and a half** out there now, but it’s coming down in that steady, concentrating way that is bad news. Well, it’s good news if you’re a kid and want to stay home tomorrow and build a snowperson.*** It’s bad news for those of us who get claustrophobia easily, don’t like falling down, and have hellhounds. And are worried about the fresh-veg deliveries† to the local greengrocers’, fresh veg having become about the only thing I eat in quantity in these metabolism-challenged days.
Meanwhile I have managed to get through nearly an entire day without really noticing that I haven’t done anything.†† I could get used to this.†††
Meanwhile . . . tell you what, I’ll write another quick post when I get back to the cottage. Just so you’ll know I’m not lying in a snowdrift trying to strike wet matches to see why my RaspBerry is refusing to function. If I fall in a snowdrift I more or less guarantee it will be a snowdrift in a dead phone zone.
* * *
* It didn’t start till this evening. It’s just been threatening us all day.^ Hellhounds and I had a lovely walk . . . waaay the ungleblarg out in the middle of nowhere, because it took that long for Wolfgang to stop whimpering about being cold and all his engine oil is pooling in his ankles. And have I mentioned how I’ve got a box of matches on the dashboard so I’ll remember to leave them outside under the windscreen wiper on the driver’s side in case of unlocking problems when we come back from our hurtle? Outside on the driver’s side so I can’t possibly miss seeing them? Actually a box of wooden matches rides around perfectly well in the little hollow at the hinge of the bonnet where the wipers attach. Ask me how I know this.
^ With luck there will be before-and-after photos tomorrow. Snow skies and . . . snow.
** Mmm. Two inches.
*** I am building a snowperson. Remotely. He’s called Wolfgang, and by morning all he’ll need is the carrot and the lumps of coal. ^ Hellhounds and I are walking home tonight. I haz yaktraxz. I walk on water. Well, so long as it’s frozen. I actually did walk in them for the first time today: although I had previously spent a remarkable amount of time figuring out how to get them on. I suppose the manufacturer thought any damn fool ought to be able to stretch some rubber bands over their shoes and decided to save 10p on the purchase price by omitting the diagram. Well, yes, but there are variations on this stretching process, and I was assuming that the YAKTRAX insignia would be arranged for the wearer’s delectation. Silly me: of course it faces out to gain new friends and influence people.^^
I told the Midwestern friend who’d recommended them^^^ that they’d arrived and she said that she hoped . . . well, no, she said, she knew me well enough that she was SURE that I had ordered them in an AMUSING COLOUR. She said that aside from aesthetic considerations, you wanted them in an amusing colour so they were easy to find when they flew off and landed in a snowdrift. Um. Pause for deep throbbing sorrow. No. The British market is clearly deemed not ready for amusing colours. Mine are black because the choice was . . . black.
^ Hey. What do kids use for snowperson eyes these days?
^^ Hey! She’s not falling down! It must be . . . YAKTRAX!
^^^ She’s recommended them before. But this is the Longest Spell of Really Cold Weather in Britain in Over Twenty Years, which is how long it takes to make me pay attention.
† And if they’re serious about this nonsense continuing for the next several days then I’m going to start worrying about all the other deliveries. Like . . . Green & Black’s.
†† No. Wrong. I have done things. I spent an hour and a half on the phone with Hannah. And I watched a programme on TV. I mean . . . wow.^ Now you’re all avid to know what I watched, right? A rerun of Simon Schama’s The Power of Art? A no-holds-barred study of how to clear your gutters so they stay clear for at least fifteen minutes?^^ The end of season three of Buffy the Vampire Slayer?^^^
Nope. Stargate Universe. Huh? There’s another one? With Robert Carlyle? It was the first intro ep, and we learn that (a) winning on-line computer games is dangerous (b) Robert Carlyle is a Bad Guy and (c) they’ve got enough backstory loaded for a very long series. Other than that I’m damned if I followed about two-thirds of what was going on. Is it now de rigueur that ‘excitement’ is demonstrated by mad cutting techniques so that no scene lasts more than twenty-two seconds and that you then zap to another one which takes place at another time, in another place, and with enough of the same characters to be really confusing?
But it was great. Lying on the sofa covered in hellhounds with the professional brain in abeyance. Every few minutes it would stir and make little anxious thinking gestures: shouldn’t we be doing something?# No, no, I’d say. We’re just going to lie here and watch more stuff get punched till it blows up.## Notice how happy the hellhounds are. We are providing joy to little furry creatures from the fifth infernal circle.###
^ It’s less unheard-of that I should spend an hour and a half on the phone with Hannah than that I watch an entire TV programme at one go. Well, barring Sky Opera. And they didn’t run an opera every night for the entire month of December. Hmmph.
^^ First you hire your Klingon. . . . The one drawback to the magnificent copper beech in the churchyard that hangs companionably over the back garden at Third House is the way it sheds.
^^^ Please. Buffy isn’t television.
# Still haven’t found the beginning of what is now, or had better be, PEG II
## I don’t really have to remind you of http://wondermark.com/520/ and http://wondermark.com/521/ do I?
### Also possibly the eighth. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inferno_(Dante)
†† No, no! Must find rest of PEG! Or at least write that story (which Peter gave me the plot to) about the parking fairy!
Nope
I didn’t make my PEGASUS deadline today. I probably knew by the end of last week that I wasn’t going to. Sylvi—my heroine—goes off and has adventures, as my heroines are wont to do, and when she comes home again, all kinds of things have changed, including her. Followed by my Frodo-was-alive-but-taken-by-the-Enemy ending, and you’re not going to be able to turn the page and find out what happens next for at least a year, and . . . well . . . let’s just leave it as ‘at least a year’. I decided I needed to [insert verb that does not exist in English here*] the last thirty pages a little more to bear the weight, as it were, or possibly the drag into the bottomless ravine, of that ending, and the waiting that follows. Part of the difficulty is that when Sylvi comes home it’s no longer home** and she spends those last thirty pages going the high-fantasy equivalent of ‘huh?’ a lot, not knowing what is happening or what to do. And the story is told from her perspective. Now, you can get away with this in the middle of a novel***. It’s called ‘transitional’. Not so much the end of a novel, even if it’s only the middle of the story. Dranglefab. More frelling learning curves. Isn’t learning to sing/compose/ring bells† at my advanced age enough?
So I’d more or less just finished exchanging emails with my editor yesterday—we having agreed we’d make the final decision on Monday—when the news about the car crash came in. No, there isn’t really anything more to tell you today. If we’re lucky we should know something by Christmas—if we’re really lucky we’ll know something good by Christmas—last night they were saying 48-72 hours post-surgery. But while there’s nothing either Peter or I can do besides sit by the phone/computer and wait for it to ring/ping, the waiting is pretty grisly.
And about PEGASUS, the Novel with The Ever Retreating Final Deadline . . . 4th January. That’s when everyone at Putnams goes back to work.†† Pre-car-crash I was saying drily to Peter and Merrilee that the irony is that if my deadline really had been Christmas Eve, as I’d declared in the first place, I’d’ve probably made it. Drat Christmas anyway. But post-car-crash I’m moving a little slower and my concentration is a little more fragile. I wanted Christmas off.††† Well, I’ll have time for yet another read through now. I’m not sure I’m bouncing up and down with glee about this.
* * *
* Sharpen? Hone? Focus? Expand? Rework? Redirect? Rearrange? Brace? Fortify? Reinforce? Rejuvenate? Rip to frelling shreds and start over? No.
**PhD thesis support alert^: I think I was born and built or built and born to be an outsider, and even if I’d grown up number four in Cheaper by the Dozen I’d’ve still felt I didn’t belong. So far so normal; it’s a common enough trait among those of us driven to do weird stuff like obsessively write stories. It’s also normal to find out at some point that you can’t go home again, whether you’re a nutca—a sensitive artistic type or not. I’ve told this story many times before but it is one of those informing moments of my life, and every time I find myself doing something like it to yet another heroine I remember it happening to me: coming home after five years in Japan, where I was clearly and absolutely a foreigner, and finding out that America was no longer home. This was also during the first drowning high-water mark of my passion for LORD OF THE RINGS and you all remember what happens to Frodo when he gets back to the Shire, don’t you?
^ and don’t bother telling me I’m giving myself airs, there are already a few PhD theses out there on me, although I don’t know or anyway don’t remember if any of them got accepted and granted their strange-topic-choosers any doctorates
*** THE HERO AND THE CROWN, say
† On the subject of ringing bells. Someone posted to the forum the other night in response to my snarling about keeping the Old Eden tower ringing with almost no help from the locals, that possibly they don’t realise they’d be welcome in the tower, possibly they don’t realise that we really need more ringers. Sorry, but this is a sore point. We’ve done everything BUT lock them up till they agree (ref another poster’s she-thought-she-was-being-funny-but-if-it-worked-we’d-do-it suggestion) to try and convince a few of them to stick around and learn to ring. We’ve put ads in the local newspapers and parish magazines, posters on what’s-happening-in-this-town bulletin boards including in the church vestibule(s), since we need ringers at New Arcadia too, just not as acutely, Vicky has done talks at schools and the WI^ etc. We used to have tower open days but Vicky says they NEVER EVER ONCE GOT ONE learner out of them^^ so since open days are a pill to organise we don’t any more.
And I know from my own experience that as soon as you say anything about coming along some practise evening to give it a try to some congregation member or even ordinary joe on the street complimenting you on the sound of the bells, they instantly go all shifty. Part of the problem is that they think it’s a difficult skill . . . and they’re right. It’s not hard to get to basic call-change-ringing competence, but it does (usually) take several months, and unless you find you LIKE bells, you probably won’t bother. And if you do like bells, then you’re really frelled, because unless you’re young and talented, you have one unglefarb of a steep and bumpy road ahead of you, learning proper change-ringing.^^^
I wish I knew what the magic ingredient is—what herb you sneak into your victim’s tea^^^^ that will make any dormant bell-ringing urge leap to active life. It is a totally addictive skill, but you do have to put yourself in the way of becoming addicted, which includes a lot of time on the end of a rope, and a lot of time being direly convinced you should have taken up knitting instead. Which is when you need friends like Niall to talk you out of any dramatic renunciations.^^^^^
^ Women’s Institute. It’s not a lot of fluffy coffee klatchers. http://www.thewi.org.uk/
^^ Which surprised me, since that’s how I started the first time, eleven years ago.
^^^ There are in fact a lot of people out there who get to call-change ringing or possibly plain hunt or treble ringing and . . . stop. But this is so utterly alien to my own frantic little personality that I’m not going to try to discuss it. And a call-change-only ringer on a Sunday morning when there are only three or four of you is still a blessed event.
Oh, someone on the forum asked if we were ringing Christmas Day. Yes. I have to get up early on Christmas morning to go ring some frelling bells.+
+ Okay, maybe there is a reason why not everyone who reads this blog regularly has rushed out to sign up at their nearest bell tower.~
~ Two hundred miles? Oh, stop whinging.
^^^^Eww, what is in this, it tastes like feet/water from a vase of really dead flowers/cat pee
^^^^^ No, no, you don’t want to learn to knit, knitting needles are sharp. . . .
†† And yes, it’s still on the autumn ’10 list.
††† Yes, I know I can take Christmas off. And I probably will. But the book will still be sitting there sort of looking at me.
