Robin McKinley's Blog, page 10

Life is like that*

It started raining in the five minutes between bringing hellhounds in, taking my raincoat off because it’s HOT and it’s not raining, and furthermore it’s not SUPPOSED to rain, this slender pause including hastily checking that my next organic-grocery delivery is not too deranged, because my deadline was midnight and I tend to get a little carried away about how much I’m going to put through my juicer* this week and probably needed to halve my beet order and quarter my carrot order**, and taking the hellterror out.  I was so not expecting it to be raining we were halfway to the main road before I realised I couldn’t see out of my glasses*** and my hair was sticking to my scalp.  By which time I couldn’t be frelling arsed to go back† so we went on:  the hellterror doesn’t like the rain any more than the hellhounds do, and as soon as nature’s demands were satisfied I’d be dragging her on for a bit of exercise for exercise’s sake while she tried to head for home††.  We were in no danger of drowning.  In an increasingly sodden state we passed under an awning where another damp, un-raincoated figure was addressing himself to his smartphone.  Calling a friend for a lift in bad weather doesn’t work when you’re hurtling your domestic fauna.  Hey, great weather, he said.  It started raining in the five minutes between taking the first dog shift indoors and taking the second shift out, I said.  He grinned (maybe his friend had with the car had said yes.  Maybe he was placating the crazy old lady with too many dogs).  Life is like that, he said.

* * *

*This should have gone up last night but I am having Extreme Computer Problems, to the extent that I really don’t know what to do.  Raphael was just here today, bringing my supposedly-mended ultrabook back and taking away the seriously insane old laptop that I’d been using in its absence and I can still barely make this one do anything.  If this post is not up to standard I can plead extenuating circumstances. –disintegrating ed

* My juicer and I are no longer best friends. When Alcestis first demonstrated hers she gave me beet, apple and carrot juice, and her juicer, which is the same one I then went home and bought^, calmly and elegantly chomped the doodah out of what she put through it, and produced a sparkling cascade of perfect juice. Mine, when presented with a series of hard things like apples and beets and carrots and sweet potatoes^^ has a tendency to buck like a rodeo bronc and spew a thin spray of juice through its not-quite-blast-proof joins. Beet juice STAINS. The bucking also tends to slam it backwards into the row of books which adorn the edge of my one ex-usable countertop, which has become my desk, which is not popular either.  I now wrap the freller in dishtowels and hold on while it’s juicing.   There tends to be language.

^ This was three or so years ago, when Alcestis was still walking and doing things like her own juicing, and I still thought my money problems were no worse than usual.

^^ Yes of course I cut them up. Am cutting them up in smaller and smaller pieces too.

** I’m still experimenting with how much raw cabbage I can hide inside the (raw) beets, the (raw) carrots and the (raw) sweet potatoes. I get a little lip-curly at these shiny fashion-conscious smoothies for health!!!! sites that suggest you slip in two or three raw spinach leaves with your mango, your banana, your pineapple, your yogurt and your half a cup of honey and you’ll never know they’re there! I like raw spinach.  All rational people like raw spinach.^  You want hard core, I suggest raw cabbage.  I, one of whose food groups is broccoli, still prefer it steamed long enough to get rid of the brassica bite. And cabbage . . . I’m not sure how this works out in terms of comparative quantities and proportions^^ but I can make one medium-sized cabbage disappear in a quart of juice—I drink a pint and put the other pint in the refrigerator for the next day.  According to the purists you should juice every day because all the freshiest freshness goes away almost immediately.  I think these people have staff.  I could use a second pair of hands to keep the frelling juicer under control.

^ All right, all right, most rational people.  I say nothing about cooked spinach.#

# And yes, spinach can be cooked in ways that are not slimy and disgusting. But what a waste.

^^ I spent way too much time this afternoon, when I should have been writing MMMPH or MMMMPH or AAAAAAAAUGGGGHHHHH, trying to put together a hellmob food order, now that I have made a thing of beauty# of the canine larder corner and discovered that I’m all out of stuff I thought I had lots of and have tins and bags and bales and boxes of stuff I keep buying because I can’t find it so I think I’ve run out.  Arrrgh.##  I use several different critter-supply sites because I really get off on making myself a drooling psycho hag, and because any faint quiver of interest from the hellhounds in a food or food-related substance and I’m on line researching.  And every site lists its quantities and comparative cost rates differently AND every frelling brand of frelling critter food lists its quantities and comparative cost rates differently I HATE MATHS I HATE MATHS and let’s not even approach the extremely embattled topic of INGREDIENTS LISTS.###  But Pooka was smoking from iPhone calculator overuse, and that’s only the numbers I think I can translate enough to plug them in to see how or if they talk to each other.

# Pink, purple and turquoise plastic beauty. There’s also a rather nice table half buried in there which I keep thinking I should extract and put somewhere it can be admired, instead of ruining its delicate profile by making its legs into a pen for 15-mg bags of kibble, which are, you know, dumpy. But when I say put somewhere, where, exactly, do I mean?, put somewhere.

## Next time: goldfish.

### I don’t want to know how fabulous and wonderful your flaming whatsit dog food is! I want to know WHAT’S IN IT!  I want to know EXACTLY what’s in it!!!  One hellcritter’s hypoallergenic is another hellcritter’s owner getting up three times in the night and it should have been four times! It also pitches me into rabid meltdown mode when I’m looking at an ingredients list and it has fu—fugging CORN SYRUP and/or SALT in it.  WHAT THE FRELLING FRELLING FRELLING FRELL.   Let’s force our dependent critters to develop the same stupid harmful addictions that we’ve given ourselves.  Dogs don’t know from sugar! Don’t freaking TEACH THEM. Also . . . WHY???  Neither the corn syrup nor the salt is going to be a substantial enough part of the treat, since it’s usually treats that are toxic-ified up this way, to make a profit difference to the manufacturer, so WHY???  I get it, kind of, that baby food is often spiced and sweetened and salted up because mums taste it and might think it’s too bland for their precious darlings who are going to grow up to rule the world and need to get a head start on the corporate dining thing, but DOG FOOD?  Okay, I tried Alpo when I was a kid~, but generally speaking we DON’T taste our dog food, do we?  DO WE?  Especially (let’s say) the dried, smoked, salted and sugared . . . um, leftover innards and genitalia of critters whose more-admissible-in-polite-society parts do mostly land on human dinner plates?  ARRRRRRRRRRGH.

~ This could perhaps explain a lot. How many of you out there tried Alpo when you were kids and have grown up Strange?

*** My new glasses, just by the way.  I’ve needed a new prescription since I got the first ‘come in for your eye test and discover you’re turning into an octopus’^ reminder letter last autumn but there were other things going on, and after Peter died my eyes went completely doolally and I didn’t want to buy new glasses and need another new prescription a fortnight later.  Especially not at these prices.  But by this summer I could barely see out of the old ones and there were some Terrifying Moments when I’d ripped my glasses off and laid them down somewhere while I got on with something held immediately under my nose because my close, I mean very close, I mean very very close, vision is still pretty good . . . and then couldn’t find them again.  My glasses, I mean.  And I am definitely in the category of not being able to see well enough to look for my glasses unless I’m already wearing them.  More Interesting Reasons Why I’m Always Late for Almost Everything,^^ Franticly Patting the Floor for Possibly Fallen Spectacles.^^^  However, this being able to see again thing takes some getting used to.  I keep making little jerks at my face every time I get the knitting out or open a book, because of course I need to take my glasses off. Erm.  No, I don’t.  I also keep trying to peer over them when the new, functional close-work strip is at the bottom of the lens, resulting in some very interesting neck-cracking up-and-down comportment.

^ Well, I’ve always had very light-sensitive skin, and lots of stuff gets worse as you get older.

^^ Except Mass with the monks. I may tear in seconds before the priest and server process . . . but I’m there.

^^^ Also, Another Excellent Reason for Having a Small House, although in These Circumstances Not Small Enough.

† Plus a dispiriting replay of the huge tragic eyes from Chaos, who has recently decided that every time I take the hellterror out it’s a personal betrayal. SHE’S LIVED WITH US FOUR YEARS AND YOU ALWAYS GO OUT FIRST.  WHAT IS YOUR PROBLEM.

†† FOOOOOOOOOD.  She only gets fed immediately on return occasionally, but she doesn’t want to make a mistake if it’s one of those days.

Everyday Wickedness

 

Or, Some Things Don’t Change

I blew off handbells today. Shock.  Horror.  But our usual Friday afternoon handbell madness is occasionally held in Morocco, because one of our regulars lives there, and for her to come here is a very long commute for a couple of hours of somewhat erratic handbells, since we are not all up to Niall’s standard, and occasionally we all go to her instead.  Furthermore she has a big garden full of wildlife and if the handbells are going badly someone can always look out the window and say ‘oh, look, a djinn.’

But the days we drive to Morocco are a long commute for those of us coming from New Arcadia and Mauncester. And I, as I have told you, am beginning to do a little story-work again, but it’s kind of a struggle*, and most of this last week has been a non-event due to obsessing about the interment, the interment, and disintegrating after the interment.  And while I wasn’t looking, the story that was (I thought) unspooling the most steadily got itself into the most spectacular matted mare’s nest** and yesterday I pulled most of it to pieces trying to figure it out, speaking of morale problems.  So when Niall told me handbells were at Jillian’s today I demurred and said I needed to stay home and work.

Well, I did need to stay home and work.  This is not necessarily what happened.  THIS IS NOT WHAT HAPPENED.  What happened is by mid-afternoon I was having difficulty not throwing this ARGLEBARGLEDOODAHBLITZIT object across the room, which is to say my so-called computer***, AND the mare’s nest now resembled a plait of plastic rope that someone has set fire to.  Not only is it not pretty and is incapable of holding anything together it PONGS.

So about the time Niall would have been setting off to Morocco I LEAPED INTO WOLFGANG AND WENT TO MAUNCESTER TO LOOK AT STORAGE SOLUTIONS. Such vice!  Such wickedness!  Where I came in:  some things don’t change.  I used to do exactly this in similar situations back in Maine.  When the pong of melted plastic rope got too much I would leap into Ferdinand and drive to Ellsworth and look at storage solutions, lack of storage having been a guiding principle my entire life.  The lilac-covered cottage in Blue Hill was smaller than this one†, but I had fewer bad habits in those days†† and now that I don’t have Peter’s larger house to spill into (and out of) the corners of, um.  I also had only one dog in Maine.  The hellmob larder situation is extreme AND IS TAKING UP POTENTIAL BOOK SPACE.

I can’t say I solved it, but I did come home with two Very Large Plastic Crates and four small ones.  I did not choose these because they were the cheapest bins available, which they were, but because I could get them in purple, turquoise and pink.

Some things don’t change.

* * *

* It’s always a struggle, it’s been a struggle for approximately sixty-three years^ it’s just sometimes my vorpal blade is shining with a burning flame and going snicker-snack and sometimes it is more of an overripe banana going squish.  I’m glad that—as someone on the forum has I think said—the Story Council seems to have unearthed my address and has started sending me possible projects again^^ but speaking of things that don’t change I’m working on two short things and a long thing, and the short things are (a) a SEQUEL to another short thing and (b) a retelling of a frelling fairy tale which means these are both RIFE WITH PERIL for someone who doesn’t do the short thing all that well, I mean, even rifer with peril, because a sequel means that there’s more there, you know?  Which is how accidents happen.  And retelling fairy tales . . . eh.  My record here speaks for itself.   And the long thing is, well, long.  So the Story Council’s latest hot delivery is THANKS SO MUCH YOU GUYS, a novel that has been lurking in the back of my mind and the bottom of my cough-cough-cough-cough filing system for thirty years.  Yes.  Really.  This is something I started poking at after BEAUTY, and then SWORD snatched me away, saying, yes, yes, you said that Damar was scaring you, we let you write BEAUTY to settle you down, now pay attention.  This other thing has waved to me from the shadows from time to time since then but . . . GO AWAY.  I’M SURE YOU’RE ADORABLE BUT I HAVE ENOUGH GOING ON.^^^

^ My memories of telling myself proto-stories in my crib are comparatively mellow

^^ Although I don’t actually think it’s the Story Council’s fault in this case. I think I’ve been ignoring that slap on the doormat that says INCOMING, unless, of course, it’s a gardening catalogue, a knitting magazine+, or that extra-specially splendid thud that declares A NEW BOOK, because, of course, I need more books, I can’t get up the stairs in either house because of the book boxes++:  that is, I can, because I have long legs and I won’t sue myself, but nobody else can.  However given that my housekeeping skills have never had a lot of profile and have been almost completely dormant for the last eight or nine months, repelling visitors has become an act of charity since the only loo in either house is . . . upstairs.+++

+ I have something hilarious to tell you.  I NEED A NEW KNITTING PROJECT.  I NEED A NEW KNITTING PROJECT. Hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha, stop, stop, hahahahaha I can’t stop, HAHAHAHAHAHAHA STOP.  Yes.  Well.  I’m sure I’ve told you that I’ve turned into the Crazy Knitting Lady Super-Extra Model since Peter died because having my head down over a lapful of yarn helps me not cry in public, and knitting through the sermons every week at St Margaret’s has revealed that, because I’m a fidget and sitting still takes effort, knitting furthermore helps me concentrate.#   With the unsurprising outcome that I’m getting through rather a lot of it.  The shortcoming of this system is that I can only do plain, plain, PLAIN knitting because I am a bear of very little brain and if I’m using knitting to suppress the fidgets as well as the tear ducts while I’m paying attention to something else I can’t do anything clever.##

So, yeah, my house is full of unfinished projects###, like the houses of most knitters I know, but I daren’t risk trying to finish any of these because I will bobble them extremely. So I need A NEW (simple minded) KNITTING PROJECT.  Too delicious.  And it’s not even on my forbidden-foods list.####

# Although I have to remember not to wave a needle around for emphasis during the discussion afterward.

## The fact that the strips of that infamous baby blanket are different lengths testifies to just how plain the knitting has to be.  Counting rows?  COUNTING?  You mean, like, MATHS?  Bad idea.  Really, really bad idea.

### Stuffed into an assortment of excellent tote bags emblazoned with slogans like ‘I knit so I don’t kill people’. What a pity it took me so long to discover knitting.

#### It probably should be BUT IT’S NOT.

++ I told you, didn’t I, that Atlas came off his bike about two months ago and broke both wrists?! So the shelf-building has been on hold.  It has begun again, now he’s out of plaster, but the Lodge’s walls are even more skew-whiff than the cottage and it’s more sculpture# than carpentry.  Which takes longer.

# The local what’s-on New Arcadia magazine this month has an ad for a beginners’ sculpture class. NOOOOOOO.  MCKINLEY, IN WHAT TIME?  WITH WHAT ENERGY?  But I keep thinking about it.  Let’s see I could give up . . . um . . . I could give up . . . =

= And it’s worse than that because I’ve started drawing again. In what time and with what energy.  And what result must be considered.  If my writing is too often adding three words and deleting seventeen, my drawing is adding half a syllable and deleting a page.

+++ They breed, you know, book boxes, like clothes-hangers in neglected closets.   Every time I go up to Third House there’s another one in a corner that I’m SURE was clear last time.  Empty wrong-sized plant pots do exactly the same thing.  Arrrgh.

^^^ Unless of course you promise, word of honour and sealed in blood, that I can write you in six weeks and you will be BRILLIANT and sell 1,000,000,000 copies in the first six months.

** Like necklace chains in the jewellery drawer overnight. How do they DO that?  ARRRRRGH.

*** My proper laptop—the ultrabook, laptops are so last decade—is in the frelling shop, because its keyboard went doolally last week.  Okay, so, how many people eat at their computer?  Like, most of us?  And why can’t the idiots in development create a bits-proof keyboard?  Now I’m off all cereal grains I’m not even producing many crumbs.  Although tahini and pine nuts are probably worse.  Anyway.  I’m presently attempting to work on my old, reconditioned laptop—back when laptops were laptops—and apparently it liked being retired because It.  Is.  Not. Cooperating.  So when Raphael brings the ultra back with a shiny fresh porous keyboard, he will take AWAAAAAAAY this pigbutt of a machine and whack it around some.

† The kitchen more nearly resembled a kitchen but the house had no attic. Reasons to move to England:  public footpath system.  Roses.  Attics.

†† YARN

Today

 

Not counting poor Third House I now have three gardens:  the four-burner Aga size behind the cottage, the hall cupboard large enough for one unlined raincoat and a pair of All Stars if you pile one on top of the other size behind the Lodge, and a ragged grassy square about the size of the palm of my hand* in a corner between two ancient, falling-down sarcophagi in the churchyard twenty seconds from my front door.   Since Peter was a clematis man I’m eyeing  the sarcophagi and wondering if anyone would mind if I planted a clematis next to the gravestone–there will be a gravestone eventually–and tossed it over them as it got going.  One each possibly.  I’m afraid to ask what the rules about churchyard planting are since I’m sure I won’t like them.

I do have photos from yesterday but I think they may be maudlin.  If I decide they aren’t maudlin I’ll think about posting them next 26 July.  This one is probably maudlin too but I’m incapable of believing that a photo of a red rose is ever inappropriate**.   Something I didn’t tell you yesterday because I was already too deranged is that I threw my wedding bouquet in the bottom of the hole before the box went in.***  My bouquet was the one a-little-bit sad thing about our wedding:  we left for London almost immediately after the registrar finished declaring us husband and wife so I only had it about two hours;  we’d only picked it up on our way to the registrar’s office.  But I knew I wanted to dry it so I could keep it, so I hung it upside-down in the kitchen before we left, and it was toast by the time we got back.†   It’s been sitting in a particular china pitcher for the last twenty four and a half years but I knew I wanted to bury it with him.††  Although that empty pitcher is now very eye-catching.

I wanted to say one more thing about all of this.  I’m not mythologizing–much.  I’m telling you the truth–my truth–about death and grief the way I have always tried to tell you the truth about anything I write here:  but all public blog truths are consciously selective truths and I’m a professional writer.  Peter was not a perfect human being and you already know with knobs on that I’m not a perfect human being.  In some very important ways we were a gloriously, life-enhancingly, ridiculously well-matched couple.  In some other very important ways we didn’t get on at all.  Everyone is a control freak about something, and our control freakeries did not integrate well.  And I’m stubborn, but I have nothing on Peter;  I keep remembering that I called him ‘monolithic’ in my memorial piece.  Yes.  I’m (ahem) volatile and (ahem) reactive, not to say overreactive, um, yes, let’s say overreactive, and Peter was a proper British gentleman who reverted to type under stress.  As I grieve I am not remembering a halcyon, glittering marriage with twinkling stars and fluffy bunnies–NO BUNNIES–with twinkling stars and dancing centaurs with rhinestone-studded hooves††† that went on and on in days full of unbroken golden sunlight‡ and the smell of roses, even in January.  And the last two years were grim.  But we loved each other and we did our best.  And I miss him horribly.

* * *

* I have big hands.

** Or a pink rose, or a white rose, or . . .

*** I’d been expecting some little cardboard number, just something to transport the ashes to the ground where they could become one with tree roots and earthworms, but it was this disturbingly classy wooden box with a plaque with his name on it.  Eeep.  It looks like the kind of thing you keep on the mantelpiece to discourage visitors.  If ash receptacles were discussed when we were first arranging the funeral, including indecorous details like the practical disposal of a dead body, I completely spaced on it, but I’m doing a lot of that.  We got the British-made woven-willow coffin right, and the flowers, and that’s what counts to me.

† We had dinner at a blisteringly grand restaurant in Knightsbridge that doesn’t seem to exist any more and I kept looking across the table and thinking, you mean I get to keep him?, spent the night at the Ritz, yah hoo whammy^, spent another night in London to go to the opera^^ and then drove to Cornwall for the rest of our honeymoon.  I’ve told you this story, right?  Peter said, so, where would you like to go for the honeymoon?  France?  Italy?  Japan?  Er, I said.  Cornwall?

^ They give you a bottle of complementary champagne if you say you’ve just got married.^  I still have the bottle.  You’re not surprised, I hope.

^ I assume they check?  Otherwise this system seems to me rife with possibility of misuse by the champagne-loving crowd who can afford the Ritz’s prices.  Spend £1,000,000,000 on a room and get a £50 bottle of champagne FREE!

^^ Turandot, because that’s what was on, not because I wanted to see Turandot, the plot of which makes me chew the wallpaper particularly hard.  I’m reasonably sure I’ve done a Turandot rant on these pages.  But, you know, opera, on your honeymoon.  Yessssssss.  Hey, it wasn’t me!  Peter suggested it!  Because he was lovely and adorable and kind and thoughtful when he wasn’t being totally frelling impossible.

†† Note that dried flowers as they get older and frailer, because I didn’t treat these with anything that would make them last, become increasingly undustable, and removing sticky cobwebs?  Forget it.

††† You may have guessed I didn’t get enough sleep last night.

‡ This was happening in England after all.

Twenty-six July Twenty Sixteen********************************

 

Today is the twenty-fifth anniversary of the famous day when I picked up that slightly-known-by-me, undeniably mad but equally undeniably fabulously talented British writer Peter Dickinson, at the Bangor, Maine airport, for a weekend of playing tour guide to someone who’d never been to Maine before. I was usually pretty good at this, and Maine is very show-off-able, nearly all year long,* but Peter was a somewhat daunting prospect.  In the first place he was PETER!  DICKINSON! and in the second place . . . I knew Peter well enough—anyone who ever met him for thirty seconds knew him this well—to know that he would need to be kept amused. Long afternoons relaxing in a lawn chair getting through the home-made iced tea and chocolate-chip cookies was not going to appeal.*  Mind you, he was totally capable of amusing himself, but this could also be disconcerting.  I’m pretty sure I’ve told you that when I presented him with lunch that first day, he looked at the two or three kinds of bread, bowl of fruit, salad, and assorted cheeses, spreads and nut butters, with total dread and dismay and said, That’s not lunch!  Where are the shops?  I’ll go buy something. ***  But have I told you—and forgive me if I have—the first words out of his mouth when he came through my front door for the first time, and I had opened my tiny hall closet† to hang up his coat, he peered into it and said, would you like me to build you a shelf?  And I could do better than those coat hooks.

That was twenty-five years ago today.

Today was his interment.

I can’t remember how much of this I’ve told you already, and if I look back at this year’s blog posts it’ll just make me cry. I’ve cried enough today.  You will remember that he died just before Christmas, and the memorial service was early January.  Those of the family likely to want to be there for the interment agreed that there was no hurry, that waiting for better weather was a good idea.  I’d originally wanted it in April, when spring is clearly here and the bluebells are out, but I couldn’t find a date that enough of us could come—‘us’ being chiefly Peter’s four kids and his retired-dean-of-Salisbury brother, who would also do the saying-a-few-words thing—and then I kind of lost heart.  As I’ve told you both morale and energy have been in short supply since the middle of last December.  May was passing and people were away in June and . . . I suddenly thought of our twenty-fifth anniversary.  We used to celebrate both the 26th of July and the 3rd of January, which was our wedding day, but I think if anything we took the 26th of July more seriously because it was so utterly improbable that what happened did happen, and I’ve been living in England twenty-five years the end of this October and answer (sometimes) to ‘Mrs Dickinson’.  I blinked a few times and thought yes. It’s going to be the 26th of July.  And I hope people can come, but if they can’t, the interment is still going to be the 26th of July.  I’m the widow.  I’m pulling rank.

As it turns out it was a good date for nearly everybody. Butterfly-netting the local vicar was a little more demanding because of the way vicars work twenty-six hours a day and rarely answer phone calls.  I finally had the critical meeting with the gravedigger yesterday, but at least it happened, and there was a suitable small square hole for a little box of ashes waiting for us today at noon.††

I’ve been obsessing about today increasingly for about the last fortnight and yesterday afternoon decided that I was going to make myself even more entirely crazy and go to early Mass this morning because I needed that sense of the presence of God that the abbey chapel gives me either like a warm eiderdown or a heavy blow to the head, I’ve never quite decided which.††† What a gift somewhere that offers daily Mass is:  you have an inconveniently timed crisis?  It’s okay.  Go to Mass.  It’s the spiritual version of kissing and making it better:  it doesn’t really, but it does too, somehow.  And there’s that wonderful sense of leaning on someone, or Someone, who’s bigger and stronger than you are.  Your own griefs and responsibilities don’t go away, but you do get to lean.‡

I’d also decided that if I was going to wedge this in, and still get home in time to eat something‡‡ and hurtle the mob I was going to have to go in my party duds.  Which today included sparkly bracelets to the elbows (nearly), a pink cashmere cardigan, the flowered Docs and the Liberty’s rhinestone belt I wore to the memorial service and my old black denim mini.  Yes, I’m sixty-four‡‡‡, and I wore my forty-year-old denim mini.  This occasional reversion to wild youth§ is getting more and more embarrassing, of course—it became officially embarrassing when I turned fifty which is now a long time ago—AND I DON’T CARE.  Peter liked me in my minis§§, and it’s not like I do this often. And 400-denier black tights cover a multitude of the sins of age.  But I am not thinking about what the group of little old conservatively dressed people at the abbey on retreat§§§ must have made of this vision in their midst, especially when it sat up front and cried like a river in spring flood through the entire service.  Gah.#

So. Well.  The little box was lowered into the little hole.##  Our local vicar did us proud, entirely without prompting or input from me###, and had put together not only a thoughtful brief ceremony, but printed out programmes with a photostat of Peter’s CITY OF GOLD on the front.  And Peter’s brother said a few words too which made me cry harder.~

We all retired to the Questing Beast for lunch~~ which put off the awful moment of coming home to . . . loneliness. With the interment it’s really, really all over, somehow.  And I bunged the hellhounds~~~ into the back of Wolfgang and we went off to Warm Upford:  I’m not sure if this was misty, romantic remembering or self-torture, but we walked from Montmorency’s Folly to the ridge behind the old house and through the meme field from Peter’s poem—and also, I didn’t think about this until we were already out of the car and hurtling, but we were recreating backwards most of the walk Peter took me on thirty years ago when I visited him and his first wife, which was the proximate cause of his visiting me in Maine five years later.

The hellhounds and I had a lovely walk. Late summer in the glorious Hampshire countryside.=

Sigh.

And then we came home again and I took the hellterror on a long hurtle== by the river, remembering that Peter had brought me through New Arcadia from Heathrow===, on our way to what was soon to be my home too, after our life-exploding weekend in Maine, when I came over for a week to see what I was getting into. . . .

Sigh. Sigh.  Sigh. . . .

Maybe I should go to bed.

* * *

************************************ NOTE THAT THIS WOULD HAVE GONE UP OVER AN HOUR AGO IF MY SO CALLED COMPUTER HADN’T GONE INTO FREE FALL.

* Winter is usually fine, if you have four wheel drive and good nerves, but barring March, when everything that has been frozen for the last four or five months melts, and it is not a pretty sight.  Or smell.  And black fly season. Black fly season is . . . worse than whatever you’re thinking.  Zombies and vampires are so overdone.  One of these horror writers needs to do something with black flies.  Stephen King even lives in Maine.^

^ Although he may have done black flies and I missed it. I’ve only read a few of his books—out of Maine-author solidarity, although I doubt he’s ever heard of me—because they ARE TOO SCARY.  And gross.  I don’t do gross either.+

+ SUNSHINE’s climax isn’t even close. The only reason it looks yucky is because most people come to it having read BEAUTY or SPINDLE or . . . pretty much anything else I’ve written.

** Aside from the fact that this was not going to appeal to me either. Nor did I have any lawn chairs.  Nor any lawn.  And my quarter-acre^ was overshadowed almost entirely by the magnificent old maple tree in the front yard and several house-high boulders in the back.  And lilac hedges down either side.

^ Which is a TINY plot in Maine and a HUGE garden in southern England. Granted we had two acres at the old house, but here at the cottage my garden is about the size of a four-burner Aga, and the garden at the Lodge is about the size of my hall cupboard in Maine.  See below.  Or above, depending on how you’re coping with the footnotes.

*** I married him anyway.

† Well, it was a tiny front hall. Two of us standing in it was kind of a feet-and-elbow fest.  Now add a cavorting whippet.

†† Yes of course I went round—with hellhounds—last night and checked.  I walk through that churchyard two, four, six times a day anyway, because it’s the nearest pleasant bit of grass for the hellmob.  We’ll be walking through the churchyard to visit Peter just like we used to . . . like we used to . . . no I’m still not cried out yet.

††† Both St Margaret’s and St Radegund’s, here in New Arcadia, where Peter is now buried, have the presence of God too, but God is, for me, especially vivid and almost tactile at the abbey chapel.  I don’t feel thumped in either St Margaret’s or St Radegund’s.

‡ Someone who is better at prayer than I am can of course get the same effect at home. I do pray at home^ and I am aware of God listening, but it’s a lot easier at church, where the church-space supports your tiny personal prayer-space.

^ Duh

‡‡ I can’t face more than tea and apples when I first lurch out of bed in the morning. The next thing on the menu these days is a Green Drink.  I will spare you the ghastly details.  It’s Very Healthy, and it’s another of those things that as your taste buds change you actually want to drink.  Which is kind of frightening.  I AM NOT GWYNETH PALTROW. NOT.

‡‡‡ Some of you will remember I start calling myself the age I will turn in November the summer before, so by the time I get to my birthday I’m used to it.

§ Some of you will also remember the black leather mini at Forbidden Planet a few years ago.

§§ Yes, his vision had been deteriorating for a while. And your point would be?

§§§ I say ‘little old’ but they’re probably frelling my age, they’re just doing it with more dignity. Dignity is overrated. And I brought my little cropped black leather jacket^ to drape over my knees. I am not lost to all propriety.  Just most of it.

^ Which is about the same vintage as the skirt. Ah, those were the days.  I’m so glad they’re over.

# Some of this was sheer relief and gratitude that I got there. On the way, arriving at the turn-off from the main road AND THE ROAD WAS CLOSED. NOOOOOOOOOOO. I NEED TO GET TO MASS AT THE ABBEY! I TOTALLY NEED TO!  Fortunately Wolfgang reminded me that we know another way^.  We weren’t even late, although we may have been slightly out of breath.

^ There were a few ‘diversion’ signs but they were mostly invisible in the hedgerows, badly placed behind other signs or missing at crucial intersections. More mild entertainment than, you know, directions for an alternate route.

## And had all that deluge earlier cried me out or anything?  OF COURSE NOT.  I am pleased to say however, that one other of our company at the interment, whom I will not embarrass by naming, is also a weeper, so at least I didn’t have to do the whole soggy thing alone.

### Our local vicar is a sweetie. I feel a bit guilty for belonging to another church five miles away—which is a confounded nuisance on bad-ME days as well—but this is a political decision, and nothing against the vicar here.

~ These began: ‘Here we return these ashes to the quiet earth from which they came.  They were formed of star dust and spun for a few short days into a life that dreamed and sang, that loved and wept, and died. . . .’  They’re all writers in this family.

~~ Where there was almost nothing I could eat, of course, but that’s why I needed to eat some of my Funny Food beforehand. And they did have green tea and lettuce.

~~~ Thank you, God, for the hellmob. Thank you, thank you, thank you.

= Full of excellent smells, the hellhounds wish me to point out.

== I anticipate being decaying vegetable matter^ tomorrow. Never mind.

^ Oh, the wormery? Seems to be working fine.  I guess.  Still rather enigmatic.  But it does add that touch of pink to my kitchen décor.  One thing however:  the bumf that comes with assures you that the worms can’t get out.  Wrong.  Not many+ and not often, but every two or three days I come downstairs to find a confused worm dawdling across the kitchen floor, or, more likely, under one of the dirt-catcher mats THAT ARE SUPPOSED TO KEEP THE FLOOR CLEAN HA HA HA HA HA HA, which I am learning to check, while I’m waiting for my (green) tea to steep.  I think most people keep their wormeries in the garden or this interesting situation would be More Generally Known.

+ Unless they’re congregating under the washing machine, the refrigerator, or one of the hellmob crates, in which case I don’t want to know.

=== Where he had lost the car in the multi-storey car park . . .

Something to hurrah about in a cautious, low-key, not-attracting-fate sort of way

 

I had the best working morning today—you know, story-words on computer screen type working morning—that I’ve had in yonks.*  So I thought I’d write a blog post to celebrate.

A lot of my long silences here are just . . . long silences. One foot after the other days** when getting the hellmob even semi-hurtled is the height of my ambition or capacity.***  But some of it, on evenings when brain function is still just about discernible, is not knowing where to start. I’m still programmed to be doing this every night, I just haven’t the time, the energy, or the morale.  And I don’t do the graceful summary thing.†  I’m missing the wetware interface for graceful summary.  So, ahem and apologies, Footnote Delirium ahoy.

But, you know, a good writing day? This deserves some banner-waving affirmation.  Maybe I’ll even do it again tomorrow.  The story-writing that is.  I’d probably break if I wrote a blog post two nights in a row.

Meanwhile . . . hello and whatever and I hope you’re all well and thriving and reading great books out there in on-line land.

* * *

* I’ve been working for a while now, but an awful lot of days it’s more, um, ‘working’. I have lots of days where I write three words and delete seventeen.  You have too many days like this you have a bigger problem than when you weren’t ‘working’ at all.

** Sometimes no farther than the sofa, where the feet stop one-after-anothering and cross themselves on the armrest, the hellmob pummels the inert human body into some less than satisfactory semblance of comfy rumpled bedding^, and silence reigns. Except for the soggy pop of gloomy human thoughts exploding, and the hellterror snoring.

^ Fortunately they are mostly tolerant of badly-placed knees and ribcages.

*** Also the way I eat now takes AMAZING amounts of preparation. GOOD GRIEF.  Anyone trying to maintain a mostly fresh-organic-fruit-and-veg diet had just better bring her laptop into the kitchen and get it over with because she’s going to be in the kitchen most of the time anyway.  In my case this is even more challenging than for someone who has, bless them grrrrrr, a real kitchen rather than a blip with a few cupboards.  My only half decent countertop is now my desk.  Arrrgh.  It’s quite useful to have a sink full of dirty dishes:  balance your chopping board on top of it and, lo, counterspace. Arrrrgh. And? And? Why has the British Appliance Agglutination decreed that all electric flexes on countertop appliances should be no more than three inches long^ ??!!???  In this kitchen this means that every time I decide to get my juicer^^ out it’s a major schlep of STUFF . . . mostly onto the floor, so it’s a very good thing that the hellterror has decided that stuff on the floor is not automatically interesting, unless, of course, it smells of foooooood. Chaos, who likes to lie near the Aga occasionally, will sometimes lay his head delicately on a well-placed and –balanced pile of books, magazines, rough drafts, notebooks shedding Notes to Self, prayer plans and private, idiosyncratic modernisations of applicable Psalms and business letters I’m trying to forget.  Disturbing a sleeping dog is, of course, not to be thought of, so on these occasions I get a stiff neck, a warped shoulder and a crick in my spine leaning over the sleeping dog to get at the frelling juicer, three inches away from the wall. You’d think the noise of the thing would wake him up and move him on but . . . nooooooooo.

^ ‘eight centimetres’ doesn’t even sound that much longer

^^ Juicing. The faffiest flapdoodling faff of all GOOD FREAKING DOODAH GRIEF.  And the FOOTPRINT of your average juicer?!  Sixteen hellterrors or a small bus.  Unfortunately I’m developing a, you should forgive the term, taste for juicing.  Not only, if you get it right, is a barrowload of fresh raw juice an amazing hit , but if you got a little carried away at the chance-found organic farmer’s market stall or the offers from your on-line organic grocery delivery gang that week, you can always juice your superfluity.

Especially for those of us who can barely remember what chocolate is any more.# Your taste buds really do change.  A few months AC## and raw carrot-apple-beetroot-sweet-potato### juice is so frelling sweet you’re sure it must be bad for you.

# In case of accidents, I’ve passed my stash on to the monks.

## After Chocolate

### Raw sweet potato. Yes.  Parsnip is supposed to be good too but it was out of season by the time I started getting goofy over juicing.

Also there are now worms. Hungry worms.  I’ve been threatening a wormery for a while now, as I’ve probably mentioned here:  I don’t have room for a compost heap, or several compost heaps, since you have to rotate them#, at either the cottage or the Lodge or the cottage plus Lodge, and I’ve always had a veg-trimmings problem, even before I went doolally in the alkaline-paleo-vegan direction, and with juicing I now REALLY have a problem, and our local recycle guys get cranky if there’s too much kitchen detritus among the rich plunder of triffid-lash nettles, evil creeping buttercup and taking-over-the-universe ground elder.##

BUT I’ve been saying, I’ll buy a wormery later. I’ve got enough going on and besides I can’t afford it, I’ve got all these vegetables I have to buy every week plus lorryloads of hellmob food.###

Meanwhile I am mysteriously on the hot list for ringing weddings this summer.  Stay with me here, this is not a non sequitur.  My energy levels, including the number of neurons firing in my brain, at any given day/hour/frozen stalactite of time, are both unpredictable and unreliable, and while I haven’t yet missed a wedding by being too wombly to drive to the tower, there have been weddings when I prayed for the rest of the band to be beginners so no one would expect me to ring methods.####  I made a bristling . . . um, compost heap . . . of a couple of pathetically basic methods at a couple of weddings and was totally ready to fall on my sword, except that ringers who are willing to ring weddings must be in short supply around here at the moment or they wouldn’t be asking me in the first place.

So there was a wedding at Crabbiton##### a few weeks ago. And Wild Robert was running the band.  And I should be used to his taking-no-prisoners habits by now, but IT’S A WEDDING.  Feh.  He drove us through methods I can’t ring recognisably on practise nights and I crawled home that night brainlessly high with my preposterous success###### and too exhausted to be sensible.  So I bought a wormery.  Of course.  As you do.#######  I’ve even rung enough weddings to cover the cost.

Hey. It’s PINK.  No, really.  I might not have bought it if it had been a subdued, business-like colour.  But PINK?  It looks very cute sitting next to the kitchen sink, except for the tripping-over-it, the-kitchen-door-only-opens-halfway part.  I also have no idea whether it’s working or not, except for the fact that it smells nice when I open it to throw in some more apple cores and herb stems and armfuls of post-juicing sludge.

# SIGH for the beautiful, built-by-Atlas wood-framed compost heaps at Third House. SIIIIIIIGH.~

~ Note that Brexit is a catastrophe. Including that the real estate market just hit bottom and frelling splattered.  You may remember I am trying—I wildly and hysterically need—to sell Third House?  But that’s a post for another day.  Preferably when I’m feeling stronger.  Preferably after the time machine unspools us back to the Wednesday before Really, Really Bad Thursday and this time we stay in the EU, thank you very much.  And I’ll think of something else to write a blog post about.=

= No a female Prime Minster is NOT worth it. Especially when she’s another thrice-blasted Tory.%

% I’m also having one of my American moments about the speed at which we acquired a new PM.  I’m sure this must be illegal somehow.  And the Queen is in on it.

## I almost forgive enchanter’s nightshade for being an ineradicable festering-festering ratbag weed for the excellence of its name.

### What I want to know is why, when the hellhounds don’t eat, we seem to get through SO MUCH dog food.  ::Eyes the hellterror::

#### Also, stage fright. If you bollix it up on practise night, eh, it’s practise night.  If you bollix it up for a wedding EVERYONE HATES YOU, except the bride, the groom, and the wedding party, who don’t notice.  But how many frelling weddings have I rung over the years? I still get stage fright. And open ground floor rings are my deepest, bursting-galaxies nightmare, because everyone comes down to your end and leans on the barrier rope and stares at you and PROBABLY TAKES PICTURES.  WITHOUT ASKING, OF COURSE, BECAUSE YOU’RE PART OF THE MULTI-MEDIA ENTERTAINMENT.  Crabbiton is a ground floor ring.

##### See: ground floor ring.  See:  stage fright.

###### Wild Robert is a sorcerer. It’s the only explanation.

#######  In the old days I’d’ve had to wait till the shops opened the next day, by which time I might have reclaimed my common sense, or cast an eye over my bank balance.  On line shopping is also a Borg invention.  Or possibly a critical factor in turning the human population into mush-minded proto-slaves, primed and ready for the return of Cthulhu.

The ranting, miserable-sod ones of course.  ‘Heal me, o God, for my bones are troubled.’

† The WHAT?  What was that word before ‘summary’?  Keep it away from me, I have sensitive skin, I’m sure it would burn.^

^ And, not speaking [of] the e-word, it’s also guaranteed that the day I put on clean jeans will be the day the hellterror and I have the kind of adventure which requires I pick her up and rest her muddy feet on my hip to ensure our best odds for survival.  ARRRRRRGH.  We met two women with five loose dogs—five large loose dogs—on the barely-one-thin-person-wide river path a few days ago, and the women were so profoundly engaged in their conversation that the hellterror and I had pied-pipered their flock of hairy, oversized rats some considerable distance before they even NOTICED. Arrrrrrrrrrgh.#

# And two days ago the hellhounds and I were walking across one of the little rec grounds in town when an idiot woman with a terrier on a lead and a spaniel off lead came through the gate.  Hellhounds and I, a good thirty feet away, paused warily . . . and the gorblimey spaniel came hell-for-leather at us, barking and snarling, and circling closer and closer and closer . . . CALL YOUR [*******] DOG, I said, and Ms Porridge-Brain said something like, oh now, Sweetbuns, that’s not necessary, in this placatory voice, and Sweetbuns of course ignored her entirely, making little rushes and snatches at my dogs and me.

So I kicked the bugger.

Ms Porridge-Brain melted down. I melted down right back at her. He was only protecting me! she yelled in outrage. PROTECTING YOU?  YOU ARE THIRTY FEET AWAY AND HE WAS [*******] THREATENING MY DOGS, I yelled back.  HE IS OFF LEAD AND MINE ARE ON LEAD. The exchange may have deteriorated from that high point of communicatory clarity.  And I’m still angry.

. . . Um. Not a good way to end a blog post.  Um?  La la la la la la la. . . . I’ve just memorised the lyrics to ‘Lord of the Dance’, I could sing . . .

Life in the Real World Take Me Awaaaaaaaaay

 

Soooo, everyone remember my Niagara Falls leak? The water company—we will call them Sludge & Ganglion—sent me a letter last November, while I was a trifle preoccupied with my dying husband, saying that I had a humdinger of a puncture somewhere in the system and they were proposing to put my water bill up to £1,000,000,000.07 a month, unless of course I wanted to do something about it?  As I say, I was preoccupied, but early in in January, I was at the bank, whom I don’t think I have named in these pages, much as it deserves a name, something like Ordure, Funk & Weltschmerz, anyway, I was at the bank starting to deal with post-death and probate issues.  The woman who was trying to tease out into its component bits of blither and doodah the latest utter festering mess of the sort that Ordure and Funk’s vast groaning technology specialises in, said, Golly, the water company hates you, doesn’t it?  Because, as it turns out, Sludge & Ganglion had gone ahead and started charging me £1,000,000,000.07 without making any further attempt to contact me.  Thus getting our relationship about this matter off to a really great start when I rang up and SCREAMED.

Fast forward through the sixteen engineers and the woman back at base* who (apparently) kept sending orders for engineers to attend me and my leak. When I finally said I HAVE HAD SIX HUNDRED ENGINEERS, COULD WE STOP SOON PLEASE?, she said, you have? I have had no notification.  The next time one comes, she added, would you please tell me?  —thus demonstrating that Sludge & Ganglion’s internal communications are as fabulous as their customer relations.

Anyway. All seven hundred and twelve engineers’ tea leaves and Ouija boards agreed that the leak was my problem, not theirs.**  I have about as much faith in their diagnosis as I do in the latest Elvis sightings in bags of gladioli bulbs with pompadours, but my options are limited.  Whereupon began the epic search for a plumber who would touch the job of re-laying pipes and rerouting my water supply.***

Plumber eventually found, not without stress, misery, and the application to friends and acquaintances who have lived in this area for generations and are related to plumbers, and then weeks and weeks of nagging followed while I tried to convince him that NOW is an excellent time, ahead of the kamikaze S&G leak-mending squad and/or the next monthly bill for £1,000,000,000.07.  At least he answers his emails.  He just doesn’t say what I want to hear.

This past Monday I got a sudden email saying he’d be here Wednesday. Erm, wha’, eh?  I mean, GREAT.  WEDNESDAY.  I’ll tell the woman In Charge of My Case who likes sending engineers, and whom no one tells anything.

Oh, and? I have to clear one entire wall of my kitchen because they’re frelling going to run those new water pipes first up the front of the house† and then indoors along the skirting board.  This beats peeling up my floors by a substantial margin†† but it is still not ideal. And clearing that wall involves the washing machine, the refrigerator, the hellterror’s crate and her in it since I’m certainly not going to have her underfoot with plumbers with soldering irons kneeling at hellterror level AND A SIX FOOT BY THREE FOOT BY TWO FOOT††† TALLBOY CHEST OF DRAWERS, every micron of whose drawers are crammed, as I’m sure you will believe, with stuff.  And the sitting room—and the stairs, and the upstairs hall, and my bedroom and office—are also CRAMMED, with boxes of further stuff from Third House.‡

But never mind the rest of the house.  Calling what my kitchen looks like at present the result of a global cataclysm only hints at the scene.‡‡

So. Wednesday.  Plumbers were TWO AND A HALF HOURS LATE.‡‡‡  You know in this modern world of mobile phones there’s not a huge amount of excuse for not ringing and keeping people waiting for you abreast of the situation????  Plumbers like their mystery I guess.  These plumbers eventually arrived.  Plumbers drilled holes, making moon-crater holes in my plaster which I assume Atlas can mend, laid slender, relatively tactful copper pipes, and made horrible pongs with their soldering.§ Of course they didn’t finish, so they were coming back Thursday to finish the job.

They were only forty-five minutes late on Thursday. Yaay.  They finished all the pipe-laying, pong-making and crater-provoking, and collected respectfully around the meter in the street for the Big Moment, when they turned off the water while they diverted the whatever-the-turkey so the water would now flow through the new, please God leak-free, pipes.

I was indoors, but I heard the sound of the voices in the street change from plumbers going about their plumbing to bemusement and consternation. At which point I clocked that there was a new voice added to the throng, that of my semi-detached neighbour, Phineas.

They had turned his water off too. BECAUSE MY METER IS A JOINT METER, WHICH SLUDGE & GANGLION HAD NEGLECTED TO MENTION, PROBABLY BECAUSE THEY ARE EVIL CULPABLE IDIOTS AND HADN’T NOTICED THIS CRUCIAL PIECE OF INFORMATION OR POSSIBLY HADN’T FELT I NEEDED TO KNOW.  AND?  AND THIS MEANS THAT THE PLUMBERS HAD JUST COMPLETED EIGHT HUNDRED QUID’S WORTH OF WORK, including collateral kitchen wall damage§§, WHICH IS NOW MOST PROBABLY UTTERLY USELESS, AND THEY HAVE TO START ALL OVER AGAIN, WHICH IN THIS CASE MEANS DIGGING UP  MY GARDEN, LOOKING FOR THE JOIN WHERE THE WATER SUPPLY SEPARATES.

Work re-begins on Monday. I may have run away to Tashkent by then.  I think the hellmob might enjoy Tashkent.  I’m not up for enjoying anything right now.

* * *

* And the jolly jolly jolly merry go round of the official Sludge & Ganglion robot email sending me a phone number that didn’t work^ thus putting me back at the BOTTOM of the frelling queue again trying make contact with the correct cabal of the customer persecution unit.

^ ‘This phone number is currently out of service. So sorry for any inconvenience’

** Just by the way, if you don’t have house insurance that will cover it, Sludge & Ganglion will provide one free leak mend.  THANK YOU GOD FOR PETER MAKING ME GET COMPREHENSIVE HOUSE INSURANCE THAT COVERS STUFF LIKE PERSONAL MANIFESTATIONS OF NIAGARA FALLS.  The mere idea of letting a gang of S&G’s buffoons loose in my house might cause heart failure in someone who hadn’t given up chocolate and champagne and whose mighty leafy-green-vegetable-fuelled strength is unassailable.^

^ I hope.

*** The leak itself has been declared essentially unfindable, because they would have to drag my house out by the roots and hold it overhead while they fossicked down through the cellar’s worth of builder’s rubble under the ‘ground’ floor of my house which is up a flight of stairs, to actual ground level.  As I have probably said on these literal pages before, if I ever found myself with more money than sense^ I’d hire someone to cut a door-shaped hole in the genuine ground floor outside wall of my house at the foot of the stair, yank out all the builder’s rubble and give me a cellar.^^

^ A lot more money than sense.  Amassment of sense is not a good measure of largeness in my case.

^^ I could keep BACKLIST in my cellar.

† So decorative and beautifying. Also, while it’s lagged—by a large brown plastic hangar that is really eye-woundingly beautiful:  maybe I can grow a Virginia Creeper over the thing, rose bushes have way too many gaps for satisfactory coverage—if the extreme-weather theory about global warming comes to southern England I could be in a lot of disagreeable frozen trouble.

†† Which is what happened to one of my ghoulish informants. AND THE FLOORS HAVE NEVER BEEN THE SAME AGAIN, he finished with relish.

††† And speaking of the criticalness of size, I still don’t have a refrigerator and freezer for the Lodge.  The gaps for these, both little under-counter items, are quite small, or perhaps under-counter appliances have grown since the two-owners-ago remodelled the kitchen, and my choices are limited.  And the ones I want are out of stock. And have I mentioned recently^ that I have people coming to STAY at the Lodge in . . . about a fortnight?  Who may conceivably want to, you know, eat, or at least have somewhere to keep a bottle of milk since I won’t have the nasty stuff in my house.  Although that’s chiefly because I don’t have room. I’m still schlepping up to Third House for my second organic grocery delivery of the week because my little under-counter-sized^^ fridge at the cottage can’t hold an entire week’s worth of mad vegetarian’s dark leafy super-powered greens.  Which use of Third House’s facilities is, I might add, a deeply depressing business, a kind of whoring:  I don’t love you, but I will use you(r refrigerator).  If I had more money than God has angels I would keep Third House, and the lovely new attic with the view down the garden . . . I could rent it while I figure out what I’m doing with my life, no, no, no, we are NOT THINKING ABOUT THIS.

Third House is now officially on the market. The housecleaners came and did the hey-wow-scouring thing last week.  But it’s still not frelling empty, and both the cottage and the Lodge are FULL. Meanwhile on cue the real estate market has died, while everyone worries about whether we’re going to stay in or get out of the EU, and what that will mean to little things like the economy.  And real estate values.  Guys. You do still have to live somewhere.

^ No, because I haven’t mentioned anything recently

^^ It’s not, strictly speaking, under-counter because it is the counter

‡ Including awful awful awful amounts of backlist.  Never mind that I am a collector and a hoarder.  It’s the backlist that makes my life unsupportable. Ha ha ha ha, sway-backed creaking floors anyone.

‡‡ This is one of those occasions when you’re way better off with dogs as live-in companions than humans. This way there’s only I pacing the floors and moaning like an unquiet ghost . . . no, wait, there are no floors available for pacing.  Perching on my kitchen stool above the battle zone, wringing my hands, dorking at the keyboard and moaning like an unquiet ghost.  The hellmob do not care. This is so fabulous I almost care less. I did think the hellterror might object to being exiled into the sitting room, especially since her crate is now kind of Gollum’s cave at the bottom of the Misty Mountains, but she’s all, is there FOOOOOOD?  My crate usually has FOOOOOOOOD.  There’s FOOOOOOOOD?  Then I am cool.  The hellhounds, of course, love everybody, including kneeling plumbers with soldering irons.^

^ I signed up for the 1-2 am slot of the forty-hour Pentecost vigil at St Margaret’s Thursday night. I took the hellhounds with me since I am a little twitchy about being all alone in an open, lit-up church in the middle of the night, but in fact if anyone of dubious provenance wandered in the hellhounds would want to be best friends.  However I was very glad of them when the 2 am vigilante did not show up and—hey, you know, it’s a vigil and it doesn’t count if no one’s there—I stayed on, with sleeping hellhounds—er, heavenhounds—keeping my feet warm WHY ARE CHURCHES ALWAYS SO COLD—I don’t suppose Jesus would have minded if I got down on the floor with them and draped them more comprehensively about my person, but I didn’t.  However I was wondering if Buck would kill me if, when the 3 am person didn’t show up either, I went round to the vicar’s house behind the church and knocked on the door.  Then Buck showed up as the 3 am person.  With a very, very, very large mug of coffee.  And I went home.  Yaay.  Alight with holiness.  Well something kept me awake for the drive.

‡‡‡ Meanwhile I was supposed to be meeting the estate-agent photographer up at Third House, having let the plumbers in to the cottage, but there were as yet no plumbers to let in.  So I rang the estate agent and asked for a favour, that one of them meet the photographer . . . and then I sprinted round the block with the increasingly cross-legged hellmob and arrived home to a phone message that the photographer was going to be late, and when I rang the estate agent who was supposed to be waiting at Third House already, he wasn’t answering his mobile AAAAAAAUGH so I then sprinted up to Third House with hellhounds, who thought we were having a really splendid adventure, AND HE WASN’T THERE.  AAAAAAAAAAAUGH.^

^ I also had a long-previously-booked probate-and-taxes appointment with the accountants that afternoon AND a meeting of the local alternative-practitioners group in the evening, who were going to be talking about homeopathy, and who were allowing unconsecrated members of the public past their august portals for some reason.  But the point is I don’t have days like this.

§ Hellhounds withdrew to the back of their crate and made snorting noises.

§§ And the tallboy will no longer fit in its corner, but has to sit a couple of inches farther into the room. In a room this small containing a tallboy this large this is a pivotal strategic consideration. There was language and maybe a few tears.^

^ And yes, I had to take all the (full) drawers out to move the sucker.

POSTSCRIPT: And as I, perhaps unwisely, have been putting my kitchen back together again since the cataclysm should be over in here and the next area to be sacked and ravaged is my garden, I discover that the new location of the tallboy means that the hellterror’s crate no longer fits where it used to go, and if I push it back so the door opens wide enough that her little square self fits through and I can get my shoulders in to change bedding and sweep . . . the back end jams against the fuse box and the WASHING MACHINE DOOR WILL ONLY OPEN HALF WAY.

Life, continuing

Part of the problem is that I don’t know what to say to you—to the blog. The Blog Persona, already crumbly at the edges since Peter’s first stroke, disintegrated when he died.  It was based on a few simple facts including that I was married to a lovely mad Englishman named Peter.  You yank a cornerstone like that out from under a house—even a fairground funhouse*—and it goes down with a crash.

I assume I will bolt together a new Blog Persona out of scavenged fragments of the old—like Peter building the kitchen at the old house out of bits scrounged from the tip and the side of the road waiting for dustbin pick up**—although the broken funhouse mirrors may be a problem.  But while both blog and I are a trifle moribund . . . it’s hard to know what to say, to demonstrate signs of life.  I don’t much want to hammer you with my bottom line, which is I go to bed every night bewilderedly aware of not having seen or told Peter about my day, and that I’m not going to see him or tell him about my day tomorrow either, nor twist his arm to come to the opera with me, or say that I’ve discovered a new tea shop and we should give it a try.  I never come home from any outing without wanting to tell Peter about it, and I still haven’t managed to stick a sock in the instinct that says, as I’m riffling through the local paper or reading the notices outside the village hall, oh!  Peter might enjoy that!***

It’s not just the idiosyncratic, not to say aberrant, I that writes the blog.  All of I doesn’t feel like myself any more.  None of me feels like myself any more.  I feel like someone else.  Someone I’d rather not feel like.  I didn’t realise the fairies went in for late-middle-aged changelings.

And just by the way I still can’t read his books. I was granted a stay of execution while we were pulling the memorial service together but since then just looking at a favourite dust jacket gives me the wombles.  I’m probably going to have an interesting time when I can finally spare Atlas from building shelves at the Lodge and hacking back the jungle at Third House† and he can put up the shelves he’s already built on the One Remaining Blank Wall at the cottage, which is due to contain as many of my copies of Peter’s books as a single wall can hold.

But all of this is not to say there isn’t life-continuing stuff going on, it’s just that it’s all going on through a filter of Peter.††

For example, long term readers of this blog, who are therefore well aware that I think SHAKESPEARE IS OVERRATED, will be fascinated to hear that I signed up to read a sonnet at the Shakespeare Sonnet Gala this past Saturday the 23rd of April 400th anniversary yatta yatta yatta, run by some muscular local poetry society that puts on festivals and generally makes iamb pentameteric trouble in the area.  I can’t remember how I happened to fall over the web site advertising that they were looking for 154 ordinary members of the public to read 154 sonnets but I did.  First I laughed a lot and then I thought, you know, even though it’s Shakespeare, I like the idea of involving the hoi polloi with high literature, especially because one of the things that makes me a little crazy is that Shakespeare was writing for the hoi polloi, will you stop making him some kind of ornament to academe? So I signed up.†††

This epic occurred at the big central library‡. They cleared out the fiction section‡‡ so we were plonked down in the middle of everything with stacks on one side of us and the café on the other, and people streaming back and forth along the usual passageways, which is the way live poetry events should be, you know?  It wasn’t quite a flash mob but it was maybe a close relative.

Most of us readers were okay. I was okay.  If the RSC had a talent scout in the audience I was not on his/her short list but I was okay.‡‡‡  I didn’t have to go home and drown myself.§  I left during a break, and while I was stuffing my KNITTING back in my knapsack a woman came hesitantly up to me.  Are you Robin McKinley? she said.§§  Yes, I said, blinking in surprise.  What are the chances that in a group of thirty or so random British readers one of them would know my name?  Dismal.

I just wanted to tell you I love your books, she said.  And so does my daughter.

Suddenly, standing there clutching my knitting, Shakespeare seemed like a really great idea. You’ve just made my day, I said to her.  I’m glad I came.

::Beams:: §§§

Life, continuing.#

* * *

* Not the frelling TV show, which is way after my time.

** ARRRRRRGH. MEN.

*** What age I’m remembering him at varies. I almost immediately reverted to thinking of him when he was young and lively—so ahem about the age I am now ahem which is not young AHEM and at the moment significantly unlively as well—when I’m just thinking of him—sorry to be unclear, any of you who’ve been through it^ will know what I mean.  My cornerstone Peter is the young [sic] one.  The one I talk to in my head is the young one.  But a lot of the looking-for-outings instinct is recent, and immediately after the, Peter might enjoy that!, is the, can I do it alone or do we need a third person to come too in case the ground/parking/seating/gargoyle raids are worse than I expect?

^ It being not merely the death, but the hideous decline and death of someone so inextricably and intrinsically mixed up with your molecules that you can’t really imagine living without them, even if you are, somehow, breathing and so on.

† Which is still not officially on the market, although it’s occasionally being shown unofficially, but we’re getting there which is to say it’s now cleared out enough that I’ve rung the housecleaning service . . . which is not getting back to me, festering festering festering ARRRRRGH.

†† Also . . . the ME is well beyond mere ratbaggery and has plunged into the flamingly demonic. As I keep saying to people who want to know how I am, I don’t have good days and bad days I have good minutes and bad minutes and I never know when I’m going to be in the middle of a sentence and my mind will not merely go blank but shut down, lock itself up and pull the plug.  Or that I’m out hurtling over the countryside and not merely have to stop to lean against a tree, but sit down, put my head between my knees, and wonder if I’m going to make it back to Wolfgang.  Or if I care.  No, wait, the hellmob would care.  One of the first things I did after Peter died was stop carrying Pooka with me everywhere because why?  Being attached at the hip to my iPhone was a Peter-related emergency thing which was no longer an issue.  But I’ve started taking her with me again^ just in case I am an emergency one day.  Grief with ME:  avoid.

But this whole quadruply-cursed journey of the Effect of Grief and Trauma on Physical and Mental Health deserves a post all by itself. Short form: I’m off ALL SUGAR AND ALCOHOL. No CHOCOLATE!!!^^  NO CHAMPAGNE!!!!!

It doesn’t bear thinking about. So mostly I don’t think about it.  Pity I can’t instruct my mind to shut up and lock itself in a cupboard on demand.

^ Erm. When I remember.

^^ So, please note, you kind people who keep giving me chocolate . . . the monks are delighted.

††† If you’re interested, they gave me # 101. I went for snarky, since himself is being snarky, and I can relate to being snarky at one’s dratblasted Muse.

‡ Where Peter and I used to go every week. Our best, most reliable regular outing.  Sigh.

‡‡ And stashed it in the theatre. Snork.

‡‡‡ The best reader I heard—I listened to about thirty sonnets, I think, whilst knitting frantically^—was a tiny little old lady who wandered up on the dais like she was thinking about her next cup of tea and sauntered through her sonnet like having a conversation with a friend.  It was one of those moments when what all those rudely mechanical actors are prating on about How to Perform Shakespeare suddenly comes to life.  You really can make Shakespeare sound like a conversation with a friend.  If you’re really good. Which, just by the way, I think most professional actors, including the Famous Shakespearean Ones, are not. They eat the scenery unforgivably and make me want to throw things and scream.

^ The kid’s due NEXT WEEK. I’m not going to make it.  I’m four-fifths done!  Plus the frelling sewing-up, however, which is sure to manifest unpleasant surprises.

§ I did however have to sit through the cream-faced loon of an introducer saying how nice it was to hear people with different accents doing Shakespeare. BITE ME.

§§ This is not as nuts as it sounds. I had signed up and was on the list as Robin McKinley Dickinson, not only because I have no idea what I’m going to do with my name in the long term but also because Peter was the Shakespearean in this household.

§§§ And if I’d had my wits about me I’d’ve asked her^ what else she’d been reading lately that was good. I’m always in the market for books to read like I need more books. Like I need to go to the library every week and check out more books. Still. I would have asked her if I’d thought of it in time.

^ Because she looked nice. Like someone you could have a cup of tea with and a good wrangle about books.+

+ As anyone who has ever been to a book convention or belonged to a book club knows, further common ground cannot be carelessly assumed with someone who merely happens to like the same books you do. Or possibly that you wrote.

# Although of course I wanted to go home and tell Peter. . . .

Three Houses

 

So last 7 September Peter had a second stroke.* And he was clearly much weaker than after his first, and while he did regain some strength, he stayed very frail.  He moved to Rivendell.  There were some discussions between us and among the family about bringing him ‘home’ with 24/7 care;  I was against this—as Peter knew—I way preferred having him somewhere with 24/7 medical care on the premises** and also the constant relentless cycle of staff shift changes*** is a boost—a pathetic boost but still a boost—to morale and energy levels.  You know that all that professional cheeriness is professional but it still has an effect.  I was nearly as depressed as Peter, even if I could stand up and walk without a steadying hand†.  And Rivendell has big open well-lit corridors suitable for people in wheelchairs or walking frames and Third House . . . doesn’t.††

I also felt that while the fashion lately seems to be that people should stay in their own homes if at all possible, coming back to Third House where he used to be able to live independently and wouldn’t be able to any more would be a complete downer—and while the focus is on Peter, the ‘complete downer’ part would include me too.†††

I did suggest day visits back to New Arcadia and Third House but he wasn’t enthusiastic—I assume for some of the same reasons that coming ‘home’ with 24/7 care was less than attractive—and the twice (? I think) we tried it were not a success. A nice sticky cake at a tea shop was a much better outing.‡

If it had been entirely up to me I would have put Third House up for sale immediately and get it over with.  But—ahem!—I may be slightly known for rushing into things.  I was talked into keeping it a little longer and seeing how things went.  And, okay, miracles have been known to happen.

Miracles, as we know, did not happen.

But I wanted to be able to take Peter somewhere that wasn’t professionally run, whether it was Rivendell itself or all the tea shops within Wolfgang’s and my limited driving range.  I couldn’t take him home to my cottage;  there’s a steep half-flight of stairs up to the front door.  Even if I cleared off the thick accumulation of plants in pots on the steps he’d never manage it.  Also, assuming that I would later if not sooner sell Third House, I needed ground-floor access for my piano.‡‡

MEANWHILE, the little house, not yet christened the Lodge, had been on the market most of last year. Real estate is funny.  This is a desirable area and another house within a thirty seconds’ walk of me went indecently quickly for way too much money recently.  And we’re all getting slavering come-hither notices through our mail slots from estate agents saying ARE YOU THINKING OF SELLING YOUR PROPERTY?  YOU SHOULD BE, YOU KNOW, BECAUSE WE WANT TO SELL IT FOR YOU.  PLEASE RING AT EARLIEST CONVENIENCE SO WE CAN DO A VALUATION . . . which will be for a lot more money than the house finally goes on the market for but they don’t mention that and ruin their jolly frolic.  But the Lodge is really rather small and most people want at least enough room to swing a hellterror.‡‡‡

I have a bit of history with the now-Lodge. The woman who lived there when I first moved into my cottage was very kind§ and I liked the house itself on sight.  When she died I even tried to buy it.  McKinley the Real Estate Magnate.  Only I failed.  But that turned out to be a good thing because I bought Third House later instead.  Sigh.  Full circle time, bleagh.  Spinning in circles just makes you dizzy till you throw up.

So: tiny house.  Diagonally across the street—the twisty, potholed, one-lane-wide-with-close-crowding-brick-and-flint-walls-to-emphasise-this-feature street—from me. Barely a second house at all.§§  It’s more the summerhouse at the end of your garden with a full kitchen and occasional traffic problems and not nearly enough rose-bushes.  I talked it over with Peter.  And he agreed to loan me some of the money from the sale of the mews—remember the mews?—so I could buy the Lodge before someone else woke up and bought it out from under me (again), and I could pay him back after I sold Third House.§§§

Then he died.

I was by then committed to the sale and I don’t know if there’s a ‘compassionate withdrawal’ option in the TOTALLY perverse and screwed-up British property law. But I still wanted the house, to the extent that I wanted anything at that point.  My cottage is blinkety-blankety well jammed, never mind that I couldn’t get my piano up the stairs or past the chimney breast, and I was going to want to keep more of Peter’s gear than a whippet-shaped paperweight and a bottle of champagne, which meant I needed somewhere to put it.  So I stumbled along, signing my name wherever someone told me to sign my name, and bought another house.  Which is why I presently, unwillingly, own three houses.

And this blog post is now at least twice as long as it should be.# I don’t know that I was ever going to get on with clearing out poor Third House toward selling it very quickly but under the circumstances that I am obliged to do it## it’s been going very slowly indeed—rather like getting this post written.  But spring is trying sporadically to arrive and it will make all of us feel better, right?  That’s one of the things spring is for.  Doodah doodah.  And I am coming to the end of the clearing-out.###  And I will get on with my life.

I keep saying I’m going to post sooner next time.  One of these days I’ll be telling the truth. . . .

* * *

* ::starts crying:: It’s not corn-cracker crumbs^ that’s going to do for this laptop, er, ultrabook, it’s being cried on.^^  My tear ducts are going to need replacement soon too.  Or a medal for loyal service under intolerable circumstances.  Or both.

^ Maize and rice seem to be the only cereal grains I can eat without risking dire reprisals. And I don’t LIKE rice crackers.+

+ Note that I didn’t eat any of Ruby’s high tea.  Scones?  Clotted cream?  Instant Death.  But I can still admire.

^^ Crying makes your eyes blur. So you lean forward.  Over your keyboard.

** 24/7 care furthermore which has had at least theoretically enough sleep each shift to be able see what they’re looking at, or hear a client buzzer go.

*** See:  have had enough sleep

† And there were days when a steadying hand would have been a good thing. Or at least taller dogs.

†† Also . . . I worried kind of a lot about getting one of those 24/7 live-in home-care people that Peter and I could bear to have around TWENTY FOUR FREAKING SEVEN.^ At a place like Rivendell, a staff member you don’t much care for, hey, she’ll be off in a few hours and you may not see her again till next week.  Or he, but the staff is mostly female.^^

^ Also—for any of you who haven’t been through this mill—they’re not 24/7. They get at least a couple of hours off every day which isn’t a big deal in your schedule—I spent increasing amounts of time running around doing stuff, Peter’s last two years, out of despair and helplessness, but I was still at Third House more than I was at the cottage—but it’s a big deal in your sense of responsibility.  Also your standard, even-remotely-within-budget 24/7 home care person has no more medical training than you do.  This would not have done anything good for my already chronic insomnia.

^^ This might make me testier except that most of the admin are women too.

††† Like putting up with the 24/7 carer would be an issue for me too.

‡ And for some of the same reasons as Rivendell was a better choice:  because of all that public professional bustle and chat.  At Third House the walls tended to close in.  Peter and I were/are both introverts which is only a good way to be when you’re not depressed out of your tiny minds and having to resist the urge to crawl into your hole and pull it in after you.  That last two years, resisting meant Peter played a lot of bridge.  I went out and joined stuff.

‡‡ And SOMEWHERE to put a gazillion boxes of backlist, both mine and Peter’s. Not to mention all those other, other people’s books that are accustomed to being out on shelves.  The shelves at the cottage are FULL and we’re not even going to discuss the piles on the floor.  I’m tallish and thinnish and have long legs for my height . . . I can negotiate.^

^ The hellterror is a bit of a problem. Her little bedspring legs certainly can take her cleanly over book mountains.  She just doesn’t see why she needs to do it that way.  It’s so much more dramatic to approach these obstacles in bulldozer mode.

‡‡‡ The hellterror is also in favour of this. She likes the view from my arms because the hellhounds are a lot shorter than she is.

§ It was also amusing, after having lived in a nine-bedroom etc house, to have a visitor who thought the cottage was large. Her stories of my predecessor were even more amusing.

§§ People keep asking me, puzzledly, why I don’t sell both Third House and the cottage and buy one house that is the right size? The short form is that the cottage has been my increasingly-necessary bolthole for the twelve years we’ve lived in town and I couldn’t bear to leave it now nor any time in the foreseeable future. Also I like the Lodge and the hellmob and I walk past it a zillion times a day and it feels like part of the family.^

The slightly longer form is that I won’t find that house in the centre of New Arcadia where I am now. In hindsight I lucked into the cottage because the previous owner wanted to sell and it needed some updating^^.  And real estate in little old Hampshire villages has gone completely nuts—or even more nuts—in the last dozen years.  A quiet cul de sac^^^ just off the frelling centre of frelling town?  How perfect is that?  I’m keeping it.  And while the Lodge does front on the main road it’s end-of-terrace because of the cul de sac, which means I have one wall that is not common, to put my piano on^^^^ and to sing at.

^ I keep having to remind myself that it now is part of the family.+

+ The house on the other corner of the cul de sac—so opposite the Lodge—has also recently sold and that makes me very sad because it’s part of the family too and I was friends with the humans who lived there and I will miss them and I don’t know if I’ll be friends with the new inhabitants or not. I never had any delusions of buying it however—in the first place that family had lived there forever and you don’t think about people who have been somewhere forever selling up, and in the second place it is LARGE.  Even if I wanted all that space, which I don’t, I couldn’t begin to afford it.

^^ Which I haven’t done of course. Fresh paint on the walls and I’m in.

^^^ Although there are going to be problems with the Lodge’s common-wall neighbour’s little mega-yappy frelling hysterical dog.  I’ll worry about that later.  Or maybe I’ll just let the hellterror eat it.  —Dog?  I’ll say.  You’re missing your dog?  I have no idea.

^^^^ Yes I know you’re not supposed to put a piano on an outside wall. It’s better than being AUDIBLE.  When my piano tuner comes I will ask him if I should do something like hang a RUG on the wall behind the piano.   I still have lots of rugs from the nine-bedroom country house with the gigantic front hall, despite several of the family gallantly adopting a number of them.

§§§ I wish I could tell you even some of the saga of The Buying of the Lodge. It is full of excitement and suspense . . . and morons. Especially morons. Morons who might conceivably take umbrage^ if I told my version even though it is the true version.

Well, here’s just a teaser: for various reasons, including the fact that I was out of my mind for about six weeks from the beginning of November to the middle of December, the whole rubbishing business of the sale went on and on and on and on and the moron-to-person-possessing-at-least-semi-functioning-brain percentages were not in the non-morons’ favour.

Peter had wanted to see the new STAR WARS and since I’d been sure it would be booked out weeks in advance I’d bought the tickets yonks before, for the two of us and some random family members. The tickets were for Christmas Eve Eve.  I declared I was going to go anyway because I didn’t want to blow off the last thing scheduled that I was supposed to do with Peter, and Georgiana said she’d keep me company.  We were going to Peter’s and my favourite restaurant afterward for supper and to raise a glass.^^

The film was the film was the film.^^^ Georgiana and I both dove for our iPhones as soon as we were sitting down in the restaurant—having ordered our fizz—because this is the modern world and that’s what you do, and because I was expecting the confirmation of the sale and the news that I was now the proud possessor of three houses^^^^ and Georgiana was worried about one of her in laws who was in hospital.

I had a phone message. It had arrived at 4:58 pm on the 23rd, so just as everything shut down for a week over the holidays.  And the message was that some creepazoid farther up the ‘chain’ [see:  capricious and degenerate English real estate law] had thrown all his toys out of the pram and declared he wasn’t selling after all, the chain, therefore, had disintegrated and my purchase of the little house was off.^^^^^

And Georgiana’s relative had just gone into intensive care. We got through kind of a lot of fizz that night.

^ I can’t actually imagine any of them reading fantasy authors’ blogs, but you never know.

^^ I don’t have to tell you that this glass would contain fizzy liquid, do I?

^^^ Not a rabid STAR WARS fan, sorry. And it kind of lost me in the first reel-equivalent when the English-rose complexioned sweetie was presented as living as a scavenger in a desert.  Although I did like it when that—ahem!—iconic object came roaring up out of a sand-dune [NO SPOILER!  NO SPOILER!] when she and her new confederate are trying to escape.

^^^^ And heavily in debt for the privilege.

^^^^^ I believe that everyone else involved—they let me off, which was kind of them, since I wasn’t really up to the full screaming, kicking and punching thing—went to this guy’s house swinging long lithe bits of heavy metal in a significant manner and told him you want broken chains? We can show you broken chains. However it was arranged, the sale was back on in the new year.

# For symmetry it should probably be three times. Um . . .

## Including that I now owe the estate the repayment of that loan.

### Of the house. Then I have to start on the garden and the shed and the summerhouse. AAAAAAAUGH.  But the estate agent can start showing it as soon as the house is clear and the heavily-armoured cleaning service has been around obliterating all traces of humanity.  And caninity.

Nor are we going to discuss the unpacking of the Lodge.  At least I’m good at jigsaw box-and-furniture arrangement, and Atlas, who is building the bookshelves, is used to me.

 

Things not to try at home or anywhere else

 

I set fire to my hair the other night. Oops.

It was very exciting for a second or two. I smelled that unmistakable frying-hair smell at the same time as I felt something odd happening on the top of my head—at the same time as Ruby, across the restaurant table from me, screamed, and we were descended on by several staff—at the same time as I jerked upright and away from the innocent candle sitting in its little dish next to the salt and pepper and a random flower in a vase.  I managed to burn my hand too by slapping at my hair while grabbing my heavy linen napkin* and whacking it down over my head a scant inch or two in front of Ruby diving across the table with hers.**

So I have a tiny frizzly patch on the crown of my head. My hair hasn’t been itself since menopause*** and while frizzle is never a good look I haven’t had a good hair day in about a decade and there is no effect† for it to ruin.

Don’t do bereavement, everyone.  It sucks on so many levels.  I’ve broken so much china I’m tempted to buy evil planet-destroying off-gassing melamine and get it over with.  Apparently I’m branching out into self-arson.

However.

Ruby was here nearly a week.†† We hung out.  We talked and talked and talked and talked AND TALKED AND TALKED.  We got through a surprising amount of therapeutic champagne.††† We had high tea at a tea shop that understands proper British high tea. Scones, clotted cream, the lot.  It’s surprising how few self-described tea shops do any more.  We made a special excursion to Winchester Cathedral because of the shop where you can get EVERYTHING branded with the Winchester Cathedral logo:  tea mugs, tea towels, tea bags, candles, pencils, note pads . . .  chocolate.  Ruby had to go home with gifts, after all.  I bought a Winchester Cathedral eraser. It’s shaped like a book and it’s PINK.‡  We went round to Niall’s and made her ring handbells.‡‡  We slogged across a lot of soggy Hampshire countryside with an assortment of hellcritters.  She’s another of my oldest and dearest friends.‡‡‡  And it was GREAT having her here.§  Except for the part about her going away again.  Sigh. . . . .

* * *

* It had never occurred to me before that restaurants provide heavy linen napkins just in case any of their customers are recently bereaved idiots who may set fire to themselves. If I’d done this at home I’d have had to hit myself with a hellhound.

** Staff were presumably approaching with a fire hose or possibly an order for committal to the nearest residential facility. Fortunately they restrained themselves.

*** SOME DAY I MUST change that mini icon photo of me with short hair that appears everywhere. I had short hair for about a year and a half when menopause made so much of it fall out I was seriously thinking about wigs.  But I couldn’t stand being fussed over having it cut every month or so UGGGGGGGH and after a while I just stopped having it cut which meant it . . . er . . . grew long again.  I’ve never had a lot of hair but it has just enough wiggle—I won’t dignify this by calling it curl—that it looks thicker than it is.  If I had any pride now I’d keep it short, but enough of it grew back in, still slightly wiggly, when I stopped having it cut that I’ve let it be long again, which it had been since my sophomore year of high school.  AND AT LEAST THIS MEANS NO ONE BUT ME IS MESSING WITH IT.

† Note however I had gone bolshie earlier in the evening when we were dressing up for our night out. I wore my black denim mini.^  Yes.  I’m sixty-three years old.  Sue me.  With heavy black tights I don’t even scare the horses.  Over Sixties of the World Still Wearing Miniskirts, UNITE.  Cross dressers welcome.  So long as you respect the heavy black tights obligation to society.

^ With the fabulous black and white rhinestone belt Peter gave me. Sigh.

†† I meant to write the official Three Houses blog before she arrived but various things got in the way, things like all the frelling emergencies that have been waiting, till you’re distracted by the final illness and death of your brutally, constantly, stunned-ly missed husband, to rain down on your head like—er—flaming arrows. The letter from the water board, for example, informing me that they have PROOF that I’m Niagara flipping Falls and are charging me accordingly^ and the letter from another brisk and competent branch of local government telling me that the loft conversion at Third House was never properly inspected—HOW MANY YEARS AGO WAS THAT AND THEY’RE ONLY JUST NOTICING?????—and they want all the paperwork I haven’t seen since I wrote the final cheque to the builders LIKE I CAN FIND ANYTHING RIGHT NOW, plus things like the ginormous wodge of paperwork from Her Majesty’s Customs, Revenue and Red Hot Poker^^ Service that arrived a few days ago and starts off saying ‘I am so sorry for the loss of your husband and I understand that there is a lot going on for you right now, including the six-inch-thick stack of paperwork included with this letter which must be filled out in triplicate in the next forty-eight hours or I’ll get you, my pretty, and your little dog(s) too.’

^ Yes. I’m metered.  Life in town.  I remind myself that Peter has a point about being walking distance of the shops and that I need to shut up and deal.  But I am not Niagara Falls.  Unless the hellterror has learnt to turn the taps on when I’m not at home.  I wouldn’t put it past her.

^^ There seems to be a slightly fiery theme to this post. Hmmm.

††† I said therapeutic and I meant THERAPEUTIC. Yes.^

^ And it was the BEGINNING of the evening when I set fire to my hair. I was still ABSOLUTELY SOBER.  Which I admit is not comforting, but not much is at the moment.  Comforting, I mean.

‡ I went into Idle Browse Mode the way you do in a shop when you’re there mostly for the person you’re with, and I saw something—I don’t even remember what it was any more—and thought, oh, that’ll amuse Peter!, and I had my hand out to pick it up when I remembered. . . .

‡‡ Hee hee hee hee. Well, she liked Niall’s brownies.

‡‡‡ Oldest is relative. She’s younger than I am.  But the friendship is old.

§ I took her to the monks last Saturday. Even by the monks’ standards last Saturday was AMAZINGLY COLD. AMAZINGLY. She got in Wolfgang^ afterward looking like someone who had been found under an ice floe in Antarctica having lost all hope of being found before the ice worms got her. She’s now very impressed with my commitment to my faith.^^  And she’s known for decades that I’m in the top category of dangerously nutso so no surprises there.

^ Who has a new bumper. I was carless for a week, RIGHT BEFORE RUBY ARRIVED , after he SPECTACULARLY failed his road test—more oops—like I didn’t know he was going to, since Her Majesty’s Division of Road Rage has no sense of humour or practical reality and was going to object to the bumper tied on with wire.  And they did object, or at least the bloke with the clipboard did.  IT WORKS FINE, TIED ON WITH WIRE.  I think I told you some creepazoid slammed into me in the hospital car park early last autumn and my only thin wispy comfort (although comfort is not the word here either) was the thought that they were probably as crazy and frantic and clueless as I was myself at that point.

But the bumper, unfortunately, was only the beginning. And they wouldn’t let me have him back till they’d mended him.  And it wasn’t till they finally DID let me have him back and the mechanic was going through the list with me that I realised it was all little stupid crap. Expensive little stupid crap, but still little and stupid.  WOLFGANG LIVES.

Hellhounds and I walked out to Warm Upford the evening before the morning I was picking Ruby up at 11:30, to fetch the car I needed to pick her up with. We didn’t know till the day before that if the final obscure replacement parts would arrive in time.  And I hate suspense.

He’s also officially 20 years old this year.  I know I tend to exaggerate& about things but calling him my 20-year-old car for the last couple of years hasn’t been exaggerating.  I’ve just been rounding up.&&

& ::hums a little tune::

&& Warning: I’ve started saying that I was with Peter for a quarter century.  That’s less of a round-up than you think:  we missed our 24th wedding anniversary by a few days under a fortnight.  But if you count from the end of July—the famous weekend in Maine—and which we tended to count from, he died five months after our 24th.#

# I said to Alfrick at some point~ when I was at the abbey weeping wildly~~ that while I had told Peter I wanted our 25th wedding anniversary together~~~ if I wasn’t going to have that, 23 years (and eleven and a half months) was somehow more interesting than 24 years.  Alfrick said immediately, of course.  Twenty-three is a prime number.  —Which is what Peter would have said.  And agreed with.

~ I don’t think I’ve told you this before.   But when I say that my memory, always pretty dire, is into the seriously frightening category@, believe me.

@ I broke yet another plate a day or two ago.  Maybe I’m manifesting some three-dimensional metaphor about having a broken cash flow?  Or maybe I’m just trying to cut down on the amount of STUFF I need to deal with?%  I feel there are better ways to perform this latter function.

% And the little/Daughter of Third/Gwendolyn house’s name is the Lodge. Niall, who if he weren’t a polite reserved British bloke would fall down laughing every time I refer to the difficulties and disadvantages of owning THREE houses, especially about having no money and getting really bad deals when you try to trade bricks or light fixtures for dog food=, said a week or two ago, so what does that make it?  The gate house, the lodge?  YES.  THE LODGE.  IT IS THE LODGE HOUSE.  It does, after all, front on the main road;  the cottage is tucked away up the cul de sac behind.

= ESPECIALLY the light fixtures at Third House that I never got round to replacing. Remember the plastic baronial hall candelabra? Brrrrrrrrrr.

~~ The real purpose of a spiritual adviser is to provide the box of tissues since the advisee will have already used all of hers up. There have been meetings with Alfrick recently when I got through most of a loo roll.  The abbey tissue boxes are ridiculously small.  Yo, Central Ecclesiastical Supply Co Ltd, LARGER TISSUE BOXES.

~~~ It’s not like I’m not going to remember, next 3 January, even if I meanwhile have been kidnapped by some beefcake pasha out of an early Mozart opera.  I’ll remember, and Peter won’t be there.

^^ So am I. I am generally speaking the modern first world’s coldest human.   I am cold all the time except briefly during heat waves when I’m too hot.  Ruby is not in my league.  But she does live in New York City , Town of Large Overheated Buildings, and it amused me a lot the way she clung to the Aga.

I’m known colloquially at the monks’ as The Blanket Lady.

One of the reasons I am not planning to move back to the States#, aside from the fact that Hampshire is home and that only moving out of Third House is already making me feel like I’m trying to obliterate Peter, is because the highest population density of my old friends is in New York City and I don’t want to live in a big city again.

# I am carefully not saying ‘I will never move back to the States, I can’t IMAGINE moving back to the States again’ because that kind of thing attracts undesirable attention.  Turning Christian maybe should wipe out your commitment to negotiating with fate and subcontractor gremlins, but it probably won’t.  My own feeling about this is that God is essentially unknowable so why take chances about where the lines are?  There are more things in heaven and earth Horatio etc.

La Traviata rules, or, Relief of the Lifelong Easily Offended Verdi Fan*

[THE ASTERISK IN THE TITLE SHOULD BE PINK.  BUT THE TITLE BOX APPARENTLY DOESN’T HAVE COLOURS.]

I’ve been having an unusually bad ME day. The ME has been surprisingly well-behaved the last six months*;  not that I haven’t had ME days but they haven’t been as severe or as frequent as recent stress/despair/grief levels might predict.  Today it decided to slug me with several at once.**  Unnnnh.  But I had tickets to the live-streaming LA TRAVIATA and Admetus to do the driving*** AND I WAS GOING ANYWAY.†

And we did. And this is a good one.††  If the Royal Opera House reruns it at a Theatre Near You and you have ANY finer musical feelings††† go. I didn’t know any of this cast—and the tenor took a little while to warm up—but they were splendid.  Violetta is a gift of a role, if you are a supernaturally dazzling soprano with a timbre richer than 85% dark organic chocolate who can furthermore out-act Ellen Terry‡, because you get such a range with her, from the resplendent but cynical courtesan at the beginning to the fragilely joyous woman in love at the beginning of the second act, just before it all comes crashing down, which is when you see what a real heroine she is, to the final act of loss, resignation, despair and a tiny flame of reunited rejoicing to make it more tragic.  But you have to respond to her as magnificent in the scene with the lumpen prig who is her (wet, puerile) lover’s dad or you’ll be frelling overcome by the blazing misogyny of the plot—I don’t mean that Verdi is the bad guy‡‡, but the story he’s telling‡‡‡ is major ARRRRRGH from start to finish.§  You need a Violetta that will make you love her anyway.

I could produce a few caveats about this production. But I won’t.  Much. §§  One of the dangers of La Trav is that if the tenor and the baritone are  too lifelike you’ll be so busy hating them you won’t thrill properly.  In this production the guys are actually sympathetic which is a good trick in the circs but it’s what you want so you can revel.  This is a very, very good show.  Go see it if you can.

* * *

* It’s February. I can no longer say ‘my husband died last month’.  However ‘my husband died just before Christmas’ still presents some faintest echo of how I’m feeling.

** I broke another plate today.  That makes five since Peter died, I who do not break things ( . . . very often).  With thanks to Gomoto, however, who suggested it, I did manage to replace the irreplaceable one by risking life and sanity on eBay.  The only drawback, that’s DRAWBACK, to this is that I had to join frelling eBay which I had thus far AVOIDED—yes, all these years, I have resisted eBay^ but apparently you can’t buy anything unless you join???  Big Brother isn’t just watching you, he has a slave torc around your neck.  And I suppose if I ‘desubscribe’ from the welter of emails encouraging me to BUY MORE and to SET UP AS A SELLER I’ll just have to rejoin all over again if I ever break another irreplaceable plate, which on present form I probably will.

^ I hate auctions, for one thing. All that SUSPENSE.+  Just tell me the price and I’ll pay it or I won’t, okay?  I also hate having to learn a whole new dadblatted system for some dadblatted web mogul.  Blogmom could tell you I have a meltdown every time WordPress has an update and Yet More Weird New Things happen back in the admin when I’m just trying to hang a blog post, you hyperactive creeps, will you LEAVE ME ALONE.

+ I just read a really, really annoying thriller. If I’d realised it was a thriller I probably wouldn’t have bothered, but it got all these FABULOUS REVIEWS and I acknowledge that it is stylishly written, it doesn’t just rudely go for your throat and sink its teeth in, it nibbles tenderly on your ankles a bit first, leaving dainty little lacy patterns.  But . . . SO ANNOYING.  Nothing and no one is ever what it or he or she seems to be, and several times in succeeding chapters.  Now, I hate suspense, all that waiting for which villain is going to leap out of which cupboard and in what order and bearing what weapons and what sordid tales of ancient wrongs or culpable desires, but in this particular case the agonisingly slow revelation of the true story through the endless lies, betrayals and labyrinthine motivations of all the characters stopped winding me up and just made me want it to be over with. I don’t think I followed the last sixty-seven monstrous discoveries anyway so when I finally got to the last shocking plot twist it was like, um, what?  Can I go now?

*** Peter was supposed to come too. Whimper.  That is, when I’d first brought it up when the tickets came available yonks ago, he’d rolled his eyes at the idea of another La Trav—I’ve told you before that he is not a natural opera lover—but I was planning to have a final assault on his artistic sensibilities/unreasonable obstinacy nearer time.

† Also despite the predictable waterworks at the end when she dies.  But lots of people cry at the end of La Trav.  Not so many for Beethoven’s Fifth.

†† I’ve seen this production at least twice before, both times live, really live, before cinema streaming. The first time when the production itself was new . . . with Peter.  The second time when I went up to London alone on the train to see Renee Fleming . . . which I’m afraid was more notable for spectacularly doing my back in in my unaccustomed high heels than for Renee Fleming whom I found brilliant but cold.^ I’ve never worn high heels since.^^  Just by the way.  And rarely have back trouble any more.^^^

^ She makes a great courtesan: not so much the dying heroine you’re going to cry over when she takes the final dive.  Which, for me, brings the essential appallingness of the plot into snarling feminist focus and kind of wrecks the cathartic wallow aspect.  You want the wallow.  That smug middle-class boys are a right pain you can get elsewhere.

^^ I wore my fabulously floral Docs to the funeral and memorial service.

^^^ She says nervously. Since there’s a lot of Hauling of Boxes of Books during a house move.

††† !!!!!! NOT THAT I’M PREJUDICED ABOUT THE ESSENTIAL SUPREMACY OF OPERA OVER ALL OTHER MUSICAL ART FORMS OR ANYTHING.

‡ Or possibly Tessa Gratton. Any of you who don’t follow me on Twitter

@tessagratton I performed some Shakespeare in honor of Peter Dickinson, for @robinmckinley, who asked for grief and despair: http://tmblr.co/ZVrdrw20wWkL5 

Or, since I’m having my usual trouble with links, the original Twitter one opens but this one seems to open better:

http://tessagratton.tumblr.com/post/138420610373/this-is-dedicated-to-peter-dickinson-kidlit-and

‡‡ I very much doubt Verdi was a modern feminist. Ha ha.  But he did live with and eventually marry a woman with a background a bit similar to Violetta’s but much better health.  And they took stick for it from the lumpen prigs.

‡‡‡ And for anyone who isn’t a regular Days in the Life reader or opera goer^, La Trav tells the story of a high-end Parisian courtesan who is dying of consumption, and knows it.  She lets herself fall in love with a callow young twerp who adores her and they retire to the country where they’re busy burning through all her money when his dad shows up to dispose of this trollop who is not merely ruining his son’s life but preventing his virginal daughter from marrying her fiancé because the fiance’s parents will call it off if the son doesn’t throw the whore back in the ditch where he found her and return to polite society.  Well, she gives him up, but doesn’t tell him why, and he has a meltdown and insults her publicly at a demi-monde party back in Paris where they met.  Last act is her dying, broke^^^ and lonely, rereading the letter from the prig saying that he and his disgusting son, whom he has told the true story of her leaving, are going to come see her now that she’s dying and won’t embarrass them much longer, presumably they aren’t going to tell the sister’s husband’s family about this little departure from the straight and narrow?, although the letter says, oh, take care of yourself, you wonderful woman, you should have a happier future ARRRRRRRRRRGH.#  And then she dies in the wet twit’s arms, and the curtain comes down.  Before dad and son exchange the look of relief and the ‘well that’s that then.  I wonder what’s for supper back home?’

If you’ve got a Violetta worth the diamonds she sold to keep her country villa## you won’t care. You’ll be slurping up all the melodrama with a large shiny spoon.  It’s only later when you’re stuffing the wet tissues in your pocket to leave the theatre tidy that your intellect catches up with events and starts wrecking your fun.

^ Do we want to know each other?

^^ Note: ARRRRRRGH.

^^^ It also makes me crazy, every time+, when she tells her faithful maid to divide up her tiny remaining store of money and give half of it to the poor.  WHAT IS THE MAID GOING TO LIVE ON AFTER VIOLETTA GOES?  I don’t think a glowing rec from a dying penniless prostitute is going to get her a good place right away.

+ Also the doctor saying authoritatively that Violetta only has ‘hours’ to live. Unless of course modern medicine has lost the amazing predictive powers of Italian docs of Verdi’s day.

# That’s an editorial ARRRRRRRRRGH, you understand.

## If they were so enamoured of the rural life why didn’t they just buy a COTTAGE?

§ Although if you’re a modern humour-challenged feminist cow like me, you couldn’t enjoy La Trav nearly so much if you didn’t know it was all going to go horribly wrong. If Violetta had a sudden deathbed recovery and she and the wet went back to their villa^ and the prig and the rest of their family, including the sister’s in-laws, realised that Violetta had a Beautiful Soul whatever her background, and had them over to tea on high days and holidays . . . nooooooo. Ewwwwwwww.

^ or cottage

§§ The last act is a particular ratbag to stage. She’s dying of consumption so she shouldn’t be flitting lightly around the stage, which Violettas usually are. There’s a famous, or possibly infamous, staging where she spends the entire act in bed, which is more realistic, and which makes the last moments of her sudden sense of joy and strength much more dramatic, when she finally does stand up and walk—just before she falls over for the last time—but it also makes the act static and (apparently) directors shy away from this. This particular staging has gruesome blood spatters on her pillows and the maid’s apron—but not on Violetta’s snowy white nightgown—which doesn’t make me think ‘ah yes consumption’ it makes me think ‘the devoted maid wouldn’t allow this NOR would Violetta be carelessly dragging her snowy white nightgown or her long luxuriant locks^ across these besmirched pillows.’  Personally I think they’re missing a trick during the orchestral doodah by not having her notice the stains and react.  But hey.

^ Also unlikely in a woman dying of consumption. And while opera companies are getting better about remembering the effects of close-up cameras for cinema transmissions YOU COULD SEE THE JOINS where Violetta’s hair extensions were attached to her real hair which is the sort of thing I find distracting.

* * *

* This should have gone up last night, of course, but the ME got me before I could proofread, especially since that involves, as it so often does, sorting out the footnotes. Which I’m not always successful at even when the ME isn’t eating my brain.  Which it still is today although not as badly.

But this gives me the opportunity for a GARDEN UPDATE! I had TWO robins in my garden this morning [sic]!!^  Maybe they’ll finally forgive me the Epic of the Falling-Down Wall and nest in my greenhouse again??! There’s been a determinedly kept-clear nook^^ just waiting for a nest, the last what’s it been, two years?  Three?  Since the Epic of the Wall.

^ Anyone not acquainted with British robins, they’re very territorial and the only time you see more than one—unless they’re fighting+—is when they’re breeding and raising the next generation.

+ And they aren’t kidding: they’re exacto knives with little round feathered handles

^^ And that’s not easy in my greenhouse