Robin McKinley's Blog, page 121

Life with Hellhounds: the soap opera

 

 

I am very short of sleep.  Why, you might ask, am I very short of sleep?  Because I FORGOT that one of the reasons my days keep running later and later and later has something to do with . . . hellhounds. 

Diane in MN wrote a few days ago, in response to this in a blog post:  

I put the food down, they looked at it and . . . there was an instant slump and a backing nervously away, looking uneasily over their shoulders and exchanging anxious glances. I let this go on for thirty seconds or so and then took pity and put the bowls back in their corner. Back in the corner and CORRECTLY ALIGNED. Then they fell on it like ravening fiends.

I once tried to feed Teddy–this was after . . . he was eating regularly–out of a differently-shaped bowl. He gave it one look and fled. ::HEADDESK::

There's a cartoon by Charles Barsotti that perfectly illustrates this trauma. This is not fiction, folks.

(I don't trust multiply copied links, so here it is again:)   http://www.barsotti.com/pup5.html 

No, it is not fiction.  But ah, but would it were even that simple, which Diane among others could affirm . . . that it isn't.  One of my guys' many peculiarities is that there are levels of eating and not-eating.  If they are briefly attaining the heights of normal dogness they will even eat in the middle of the floor.  They had one of those moments last night at dinner.  They came roaring out of the dog bed when I did my phony 'oh goodie look here's dinner' chirrup.  And while I looked on in stunned amazement, they swallowed everything on offer in about thirty seconds.  Wow.  Spectacular. 

            This is, however, a highly unusual sighting—approximately equivalent to a takahe in a Hampshire garden.  Usually hellhounds don't bother coming into the middle of the floor in the first place.  Usually I have to caaaaaall them as they press themselves into the shadows in the back of the dog bed.  Sometimes calling degenerates into ordering, as a hellgoddess might order a superfluous hellslave to jump into the (nearly) bottomless ravine and be eaten by basilisks.  Darkness comes out first, slinking and reluctant, and collapses in his Food Corner, where the wall with the piano on the other side of it meets the refrigerator.*  Lately, in a new manoeuvre to drive me farther around the twist than I already am,  he has taken to having a casual but thorough stretch—front first, then rear, then a full-body shake—the whole process takes a good minute—before finally resigning himself to putting his back to the wall and facing the dreadful approach of the Food Bowl.

            At this point Chaos crawls out of the dog bed, very nearly on his belly, head, ears and tail flattened in full please-don't-beat-me-I-am-a-poor-abject-creature posture.  He usually hides behind my chair and stares at me hopelessly—portrait of loyal dog desperate to please cruel, incomprehensible owner—as I set THE BOWL OF FOOD down in front of him. . . .

            They may eat.  They may not.  If they don't, it's a question of how long I wait before I . . . move the bowls.   I discovered this stratagem by accident, trying to find the correct alignment, since in my life with dogs I've met quite a few who demand their bowls to be in the RIGHT PLACE, rather like people who will only eat their hamburgers with ketchup.**  I have no idea what's going on in the labyrinthine hellhound minds, but I have learnt from experience that if they haven't eaten after several minutes in one location, they aren't going to.  And so, rather in the nature of using an egg-beater on the slush in the freezer trays so you will end up with ice cream instead of a brick, I interrupt the hardening process and move them. 

            Generally speaking we have two positions:  In Bed and Out of Bed.  On an only mildly dysfunctional day, this is enough.  If we start Out of Bed, they will suddenly decide to eat after all when they are put In Bed.  Or vice versa.  Sometimes it takes a third move:  in-out-in is usually more successful than out-in-out but it varies.*** 

            Sometimes it takes a fourth move.  Sometimes . . . and at about this point I start looking for fresh locations.  But this is a tricky gambit—especially in small houses with limited floorspace.  You can't just cavalierly pick up hellhound food bowls and march them into another room.  Well . . . you can do anything you like with the bowls, but the hellhounds will be at the back of the dog bed again and it will take a winch to get them out.

            Where was I?  —Why I am short of sleep.  Night before last, after eating both lunch and dinner with relatively little faffing around, I was expecting no particular flapdoodle for post-midnight supper.  Wrong.†  But that was Sunday night, after the Quarter Peal That Wasn't, and I wanted to go to bed.  I had a voice lesson to pull myself together for.  So I said to myself, it won't kill them to miss a meal. . . .

            Well, it didn't kill them.  But in the morning Darkness had what I call colic, which is that his stomach makes loud, horrible noises, he is clearly not his best and won't eat.  He was lethargic on the morning hurtle, and his evacuations were not pleasing.  Of course he wouldn't eat lunch.  Fortunately my voice lesson was later than usual yesterday which gave me time to argue with him.  This involves descriptions of the hearth-rug I am going to make of his skin, moving him in (and out of) fresh corners where usually only the spiders hold sway, and working my way through the short list of homeopathic remedies I've compiled over the years, one of which sometimes works.††  Yes.  He ate.  Finally.

            Last night when they both refused to eat their late supper again there was no way I was going to go through all this again.  So I was up till the frelling birds††† again.  Yes.  They ate.  And I slept through my alarm and woke to the sound of Atlas knocking on the door, I having told him I would be up at an almost normal hour this morning.

            Hellhounds have been blithe and jolly—and eating—so far today.  So far.  I'm going to start late supper earlier tonight.‡

Maybe I'll wait till tomorrow to tell you about my surreal experience of trying to sign up with audible.‡‡   By tomorrow I should also know if it worked.  

 * * *

* Need I mention that YOU MAY NOT OPEN THE REFRIGERATOR WHILE THE HELLHOUND IS EATING.  But you knew that, right?

            I admit I've never tried playing the piano.  For some reason I feel this is not an experiment worth making. 

** Back in the days when I ate either hamburgers or ketchup, I was one of them. 

*** This may be more apparent than real anyway.  Traditionally their best meal is dinner.  Dinner usually starts Out of Bed because I still naively feel that eating Out of Bed is the paradigm we are still striving for.  But because lunch tends to be a loaded gun pressed to my forehead anyway I usually start them In Bed. 

† I know they do this deliberately.  I know this.  

†† My impression is that what works is two-phase:  first I have to make the colic go away, and then I have to convince him to disturb the pleasant new sensation in his belly with that dangerously insurrectionist substance, food.  I should be able to do this with one remedy, but I haven't found that one remedy yet.  Dosing critters is a ratbag because they can't tell you what's going on—but you can usually see the critter cheering up when something works. 

††† Possibly including a takahe 

‡ On the last forum hellhound blog thread there's been another conversation about dog training, and clicker training always comes up.  Yup.  Clicker training is great, if you have a critter that will respond to anything as a reward.  My guys would prefer not to eat at all, so treats are out^ and their favourite toy is me.  One of the good things about hellhounds as companions as that they don't require a lot of stimulation—sleep, hurtling, and quality petting time are all that's necessary—but there's always a down side.  

^ To the extent that they like any foodlike matter they quite like liver, and I briefly had hopes of desiccated liver.  Nah.  

‡‡ http://www.audible.co.uk/ 

 

Some guarded chirping

 

Every now and then, after fate has trodden on your favourite chocolate brownies* you go to the corner store for loo rolls and find that they're having a half-price sale on Taittinger's.**  Today's voice lesson was really kind of exciting in a little tiny down-here-among-the-wood-lice*** way. 

            I've been toiling and thudding on with Sebben Crudele, convinced, among other things, that I'm getting nowhere†.  Oh, Italian.  Oh . . . Italian.  I am the woman who still sounds (nearly) as American as she did when she stepped off the plane twenty years ago to stay.  Linguistic adaptability is not my forte.  Which may help to explain why my Italian remains staunchly as it might be spoken in . . . southern Montana.†  I even seemed to be going backwards:  those of you with the fortitude to be paying attention to my encounters with Nadia may remember that I claimed to have figured out that it's all about vowels, and you tack the occasional brief consonantal hiatus at the edges of syllables occasionally.  And then I frelling lost this again, and languiiiiiiir†† in particular was coming out languirrrrrrrr.  As I am known to say:  arrrrrrrrgh.  I'm fond of rrrrrs.  Dangerously fond, evidently.

            Meanwhile another song that Blondel had flung at me had begun intruding on my practise sessions.  Sebben crudele, I would begin . . . Caro mio ben.  Wait.  Wrong song.  Go away.  But it kept humming itself in the back of my mind while I was singing Suzanne and Gypsy Rover.†††  So eventually I fished it out and had another look at it.  Hmmm.‡ 

            I don't know, maybe being overwhelmed by Italian by adding on a second frelling song sort of loosened the grip of the 'no-no-no-can't-can't-can't'.  It's not that my Italian got better, exactly‡‡, but it did start becoming less of a frelling barrier.  Match up the funny syllables with the notes and just get on, okay? 

            Meanwhile I had been carefully sparing myself endless morale-diminishing re-hearings of that amazing young woman on YouTube singing Sebben Crudele, but when the languirrrrrr started ruining my day I decided drastic measures were called for—and I listened to her three times straight through, like taking your cod liver oil in one big gulp‡‡‡.  And—languuuuuuiiiir!  Of course!  How could I not have got that—!

            I went to my lesson today feeling, if anything, a bit sheepish.  The mountain strained and produced a mouse§ and all that.  And one of the stupidly frustrating things about learning to do anything is that as soon as you do start learning it . . . you develop something to lose.  Frell.  I used to go into Nadia merely looking forward to forty-five minutes of teacher-magic.  Now, while she still gets noises out of me I can't get out of myself at home, I want the work I'm doing to show.  And I'm not at all convinced that it does.§§

            Today was, furthermore, complicated by the fact that—it's school hols or something—I was Nadia's only student, and she'd come out without most of her music . . . including her Italian Arias book.  So I had to sing without the piano.  Good, she'd say.  Do it again, and sound like you mean it.§§§

            And you know . . . I did, a little.  I'm not ready to sell tickets or anything but . . . I was a person singing a song today, for Nadia. 

* * *

* Read = quarter peal

** I wish I had a corner store like this. 

*** What?  You don't know Cantata for 1,007 Wood Lice, Two Organs, and a Squirrel?

† Ie, normal sort of week's practise.  The other things include that I am a prat, that poor Nadia really needs the money to go on giving me lessons, and that the reason Chaos comes and stares at me when I sing is that he knows he could do it better.^

^ Or possibly that he longs to alleviate the terrible pain I am clearly in. 

† And if there is a large Italian-American community in southern Montana, my apologies. 

†† The basic translation that you find everywhere for Sebben Crudele, which appears to be one of those songs that everyone sings, is dire^.  I don't know if a proper poet has ever tackled it—or if he/she has, if the result is under copyright somewhere—or if the original Italian is also dire, and it's just a bunch of syllables to hang some tuneful anguish on and never mind.  But this translation, while no more graceful, lets you see what the words you're singing mean, and I agree that you want to know this.^^  http://www.wikihow.com/Sing-the-Italian-Art-Song-Sebben-Crudele

            You have to scroll down a ways.  This is your tiny on-line Nadia.   Although in the pronunciation guide you need to cut that first 'b' on Sebben.  Seh-behn.  Speaking of consonants. 

^ 'with the patience of my serving'?  What?  

^^ . . . Good grief. 

††† Suzanne because it's all on about three and a half notes, the way Leonard Cohen songs usually are, bless the boy.  And I love his lyrics^, speaking of real poets.  Gypsy Rover . . . well, because I've loved it for pushing fifty years and because it turns out to be surprisingly easy to fool around with when your teacher has started nagging you about dynamics.  Don't know why Gypsy Rover particularly.  But of the dozen or twenty or so songs I sing more or less regularly when I'm not practising for my lesson^^, it's the one that I can most easily twiddle so the individual lines not only feel like they have some shape and (cough cough) direction, but I can make the verses differ one from another—without feeling that I'm just jerking some poor innocent song around.  This may be nonsense—I may be just jerking a poor innocent song around—but at least it gives me a chance to think about this stuff. 

^ Even if he is perhaps just a trifle obsessed with sex.  At least his sex is interesting, says the woman who has just thrown another urban fantasy against the wall for having a long detailed graphic sex scene without naming any embarrassing body parts.  'He was heavy and thick'.  Really?  Don't you want an intelligent one? 

^^ The Voice Is A Muscle and Needs Exercise Like Any Other Muscle 

‡ Do any of you real singers out there, or any of you attentive art-song listeners, think that the standard piano accompaniment to Caro mio ben makes the rather plinkety-plonk piano of the notorious Italian Art Song book—where Sebben Crudele appears with twenty-odd of its mates—sound like Chopin? 

‡‡ Or for that matter, inexactly 

‡‡‡ It amuses me a lot that when I was a kid I was the only one I knew who was still forced to take cod liver oil . . . and now fifty years later cod liver oil is totally hot and trendy among the nutrition mafia.  Yes, I take it—again.   

§ Or possibly a wood louse 

§§ Yes. Normal, says Nadia briskly. 

§§§ There was also a terrifying conversation about how a C# may be more than a C#.  Oh gods!  I said.  You're going to try to talk to me about equal temperament tuning!  Yes, she said.  The voice is not a tuned instrument.  We do not have to compromise.  We can adjust to each individual note. 

            The funny thing is that away from the piano I could hear that there was something wrong with my C#.  I thought I was just going flat.  Well, you are, a little, said Nadia.  But that's because that C# needs to be a little sharp.  Which, since you're singing it, you can do.

            AAAAAAAUGH.  —So much of this, as I have said before, said to Nadia today, and will say again to both of you, is that there's so frelling much to remember.  As soon as I remember one thing six others go to the wall.  Sixteen.  Sixty.  Just singing frelling exercises, as soon as I'm trying to loosen/balance/ground one thing something else stiffens up/refuses to play/flies away.  Remembering and managing:  the whole your instrument is your body thing . . . does everything make my voice seize up?  Well, yes, more or less.  Could I absolutely not sing last night after our failed quarter attempt?  You bet.  Was it only that I was tired?  No.  I'd like to say yes, but . . . no.

No.

 

No.  We didn't get it.  We didn't get our quarter peal tonight.

            Sigh.

            But—let's get this over with—IT WASN'T ME THAT FIRED US OUT.

            I will say, now that it's all over with a smell of burning and a sound of rafters crashing to the ground, that it always was a high-risk attempt.  In the first place, we had our beginner.  Although chances are that if he had strayed from last place, someone would have been able to shove him back to the end where he belonged.

            But that still left the fact that Roger had decided to call this non-standard quarter.  Usually for first quarters you choose something as dead square solid standard as possible, to raise your chances as high as possible for getting the freller.  But for someone who rings a lot of quarters—like Roger—I daresay the prospect of yet another forty-five minutes of plain bob doubles or Grandsire makes the heart sink.*  And of course I had to have put my big fat All-Star clad foot in it and ask about mash-ups.**

            And that's what did us in—the mash-up.  After all the drama, shouting, and nightmares***, I was on the frelling treble.  Well, someone had to ring it, and I had the short straw.  We were about twenty minutes in, and Roger called us from Grandsire back to plain bob again at a place in the method that even I on the treble, where the real dramas of change-ringing pass you by, thought seemed a little odd . . . and all four inside ringers went wrong simultaneously. 

            So.  That was that.†   But I was just as exhausted as if we had got it—and that I'd been ringing inside—so I crawled home to the cottage and . . . got out my knitting.

I'd been thinking about this yesterday.  Knitting is the perfect thing for a bell ringer waiting around for weddings to be over with.  You are busy doing something†† but you can still pay attention to conversations going on around you, if you want to, or you can look like you're still paying attention to conversations going on around you if you don't.

            Which perhaps brings up again the to-me-rather-surprising question of knitting in public.  There's been an interesting conversation on the forum (on the Ringing and Knitting thread) about this:  that there is a clueless and unimaginative††† segment of the population who feels that knitting in public is rude, or distracting to other people or even 'unprofessional'.  That last one, claning, who first drew it up as a list, suggests may be an anti-women's-cosy-crafts bias, which I'm afraid is my knee-jerk reaction too.‡

            For the others . . . I understand the teachers wondering if knitters would be better off taking notes‡‡ in class.  I can to some degree see the non-knitter wondering if the knitter is being rude—and here I would accept that there is some onus on the knitter to make it clear she/he is not being rude:  making eye contact in class, for example, or adding comments to a conversation she/he is supposed to be part of.   The woman who tried to teach me to knit twenty-odd years ago could knit, hold a conversation and keep her teenage daughter on track making dinner (we were sitting in the kitchen), answer her son's questions about his homework, and tell her husband where she last saw the slibbergrunch, all without dropping a stitch or losing her rhythm. 

            But I'm not sure how much farther I agree that knitters have to bow to non-knitters.  Blondviolinist says that if she sees someone glancing at her knitting repeatedly, she will stop knitting so as not to distract the other person.    She says 'I can live through one meeting without knitting.'  What if it's your regular monthly department meeting?  Will you say to them, 'I notice that you keep glancing at my knitting, is there a way we can sit so that it doesn't catch your eye?'  I entirely agree that you must be able to knit silently‡‡‡ . . . but why should the quiet, productive knitter be penalised because someone else can't keep their mind on the business at hand? 

            I did use to doodle in meeting-type situations, but it was only a way of not going mad, it wasn't productive and for me it wasn't satisfying.  Doodles such as the ones going on sale any minute on this blog take attention.  Coming up with a new doodle takes concentration, but even whipping off repeats of a design already more or less settled on takes some attention.  Plain knitting is just the fingers—and you have something you (probably§) want at the end of it.  I'm a fidget, and it seems to me that the people who are distracted by knitting are fidgets too, or they wouldn't be distracted.  There ought to be some way to create a bond out of this, rather than get on each other's nerves.§§

            I don't know.  I'm still a new knitter and I haven't run into much anti-public-knitter-ishness yet, so I mostly don't know how I'm going to react.  I've told you that so far it's mostly the other way—people come up to me and want to know what I'm knitting and tell me that they or their granddaughter or their granddaughter's ex-boyfriend knits, and what a good idea, to bring it along to x and have something to do. §§§

            It's also great therapy when you've just lost a quarter peal. 

* * *

* Penelope, who does not ring that many quarters, has been heard to declare that plain bob doubles makes her lose the will to live. 

** Although I didn't say anything about service quarters or Monty's first. 

*** I did at least sleep last night.  But the dreams were . . . interesting. 

† Everyone else is full of plans for a rematch, but I may very well drop out.  There are other sixth ringers out there.  The angst and perturbation are just not worth it.  I never wanted to ring a service quarter!  And I don't want to ring someone's first quarter either!  I know I'm unreliable, and worrying about it just makes it worse! 

†† Something that you may not be clawing enough time out of your insane schedule usually to do enough of, so there's an extra, satisfying little boost of accomplishment involved. 

††† Just so you know where my sympathies lie 

‡ Although if knitting in (for example) business meetings catches on with the (male) admin beware the directive that all attendees at meetings are required to knit, the official list of recognised patterns and the schedule for completion is appended, and anyone not meeting the minimum quota will have their salaries docked accordingly. 

‡‡ If I ever manage to go back to homeopathy college to finish my last year, I doubt I'll be able to knit in class.  Sadly.  But I am a classroom note taker.  Or anyway if I got my knitting out I would be insulting the lecturer.  Although I can think of a few of the lecturers I would quite like to have had knitting during. . . . 

‡‡‡ Yaaaay wooden needles.  And 'silently' includes no rustling of patterns or muttering to oneself or, for that matter, flailing about with a three-quarters-complete king size bedcover in orange fun fur.^ 

^ http://www.lionbrand.com/yarns/funFur.htm 

§ I have some unique squares 

§§ And yes, I realise 'Let me teach you to knit' is not necessarily the answer. 

§§§ Penelope had not brought her knitting yesterday.  Shock.  What is the matter with the woman?  Well, she may be a little distracted by imminent birth.  Her chickens are due to hatch today.^  No, really.  One of this year's hens has been broody pretty much since they brought her home last autumn, and Penelope finally decided to let her go ahead and have chicks, and maybe this would get it out of her system.^^  So she's got a job lot of live eggs off a friend and . . . we're all waiting breathlessly.  I will certainly get photos of brand new little cheepy things—speaking of every baby being new—if I can.  

^ This-minute update:  the first chick has been sighted. 

^^ Otherwise, it's chicken fricassee.  You buy a layer to lay eggs. 

 

I moan better than I ring

 

Wedding ring this afternoon.  I've told you that I get a thrill every time I pull off for a wedding—it doesn't get old, somehow.  The fact that it's a wedding makes it new all over again every time*.  A bit like babies:  no matter how many babies you've seen, each one is new.  So, wedding ring this afternoon.  Only about half an hour late:  whoopee.**  I was on the two, and the treble and the two are on either side of the little window we in the ringing chamber have to the inside of the church, so Daisy on the treble and I were the ones who could see what was going on. 

               We pull off when the newly married pair are halfway down the aisle.  Here they come.***  Daisy and I spring to our ropes.  Treble's going, going—gone.

                DING DONG CRASH BANG THUD CLANK. . . DONG.†

                 Sigh.  I hope this is not any kind of forecast of tomorrow's quarter.

Mrs Redboots wrote: 

I am really looking forward to Monday's blog post in which our Hellgoddess will admit, after a lot of bluster and smoke-screen, that the quarter-peal went off superbly, without a single hitch!

And Cathy R wrote:  Ditto!!

Um.  Guys.  I really appreciate your vote of confidence—I can use all the positive thoughts I can get†† but . . . I have lost quarters before now:  I personally have screwed up and lost the quarter for the entire band.  I hope tomorrow's quarter goes brilliantly and we all have a good time and the striking is at least reasonable and we light a fire under Monty about bell ringing that will last the rest of his life††† but . . . well.  Keep those positive thoughts coming.  Please.‡ 

* * *

* And no, I don't particularly care if it's a first wedding or if anyone's a virgin, or any of that.  With the occasional exception of a glinty-eyed gold digger, of either gender, which we don't see a lot of in our little church in our little town, I think most people bother to get married because it means something to them.^ 

^ Yes, I'm a hopeless romantic.  Sue me. 

** Yes, I had brought my knitting.  I know I keep mentioning this, but new converts tend to be noisy and enthusiastic.  I BROUGHT MY KNITTING!!!! YAAAAAAY!!!!!!  

*** Very nice bouquet this bride has.  Pink roses. 

† I have no idea.  Pulling off is one of those ought-to-be-easy-but-is-surprisingly-hard-to-get-really-accurate skills that bell ringing is so distressingly rife with.  And three of the eight of us were not from our regular band, and several of our bells are audibly odd-struck^, and all bells are variously deep set^^ and so some volatility may be expected in the first rounds.  Still.  These were all experienced ringers and we sounded like a scratch band of drunken beginners. 

^ Which means they don't strike quite where you expect them to, so you have to pull your rope a little quicker or a little more slowly to get the 'dong' in the right place. 

^^ Which is how hard you have to pull to get them tipped off their perch and swinging, aside from how much they weigh.  A deep-set light bell may take more effort to pull off than a lightly-set heavy bell.   Which is aside from the fact that really big bells have to be light set or you'd never get them off at all—which probably means they're going to be extra ratbaggy to persuade, when the conductor calls 'stand', to get back up on their perch and stay there. 

†† Have I mentioned yet in this post that tomorrow is a service quarter^ and I DO NOT RING SERVICE QUARTERS?  

^ I never know how often to repeat this ringers' jargon stuff.  A quarter peal is approximately forty-five minutes of non-stop ringing to a blow-for-blow precise pattern, as organised and called by the conductor.  It's usually a single method, which is how I've tended to describe quarter peals before, but Roger, who's conducting tomorrow, has had this dumb idea that it would be amusing to do a mixture—there are rules for this too, but I don't know what they are, only that if you want to claim you've rung a quarter you have to follow them—so we're going to be doing some mash-up of two methods, plain bob doubles and Grandsire doubles.  This is, I grimly admit, partly my fault, because back before my idea of practise quarters crashed and burned+ I was asking him about doing mash-ups as a way for those of us who don't ring very many different methods to ring slightly different quarters.  But it seems to me a really bad idea for someone's first quarter:  what you want is to get the quarter, which means you want to ring something as simple minded as possible.  Tomorrow is Monty's first quarter.  He'll be on the tenor, so all he has to do is stay last.  Which is still harder than it sounds.

            And a service quarter means that we're ringing it before a church service.  I've told you that I get very cranky about ringers who can't be bothered to drag their sorry asses out of bed to ring Sunday morning service, which is what we're for:  in return for the honour and pleasure of ringing tower bells at all, we're supposed to be on the spot to ring the faithful to service.  You're only supposed to ring what you can ring for service—you don't want to mess it up.  The ME makes me very unreliable.  Therefore I don't ring service quarters.  And tomorrow is not only Monty's first quarter, so you want a strong band to make sure he gets it, and I'm not a strong ringer, it's a frelling service quarter. 

+ I'm still hoping to resurrect it, but that's another story

††† Surviving things like discovering girls^, which is going to happen any day now.

^ Or, possibly, boys

‡ AJLR wrote:  

When he's figured it out he'll email the method line to everyone and then they'll all meet on the day and ring a peal of a brand new method none of them has ever rung before. 

It makes your brain hurt! Good grief, woman, you're up in the pantheon of notable ringers so far as I'm concerned.

You poor thing.  Never mind, you'll get over it.

My brain is going ta-pocketa-pocketa-whirr-graunch-clang!!! just reading that. 

Oh, Walter Mitty.  Thank you for reminding me of Walter Mitty the night before this wretched quarter.  Tomorrow I will murmur 'pocketa-pocketa' to myself just before we pull off . . . and for at least thirty seconds I will feel better. 

Cathy R wrote:

And then there's ringing "silent and non conducted". Eric (my version of Robin's Wild Robert) has told me about peals where they draw lots for which bell they are going to ring, and then the whole thing is rung totally silently. No calls from the conductor, no corrections given. Ten whole pulls in rounds, then start. That means they must all have learnt not only the blue line for the method, but also the composition/arrangement for that particular peal (ie when the bobs would be called by the conductor). Now that makes my brain hurt! 

ta-pocketa-pocketa-whirr-graunch-CLANG!!!! 

 

The Ghastly Prospect of a Service Quarter

 

I had just got hellhounds back on their leads again when I saw someone climbing over the stile we were headed for.  Oh good.  Hellhounds are very friendly.  Chaos being fixated on me doesn't stop him being eager to make acquaintance with the rest of the world.*  Darkness is usually slightly more subtle in his affections—unless he feels Chaos is getting more than his fair share of the attention.**  So—especially when the chappie turned around, came into focus and was revealed as a chinos-Ascot-and-boater wearer—I was very glad I had my elegant-looking but mayhem-minded hounds under control.***

            But the get-up was tooo fabulous, even for the back of beyond in High Tory Hampshire.   Yeep.  I knew I would have to hail him for the pleasure that my rich American accent would give him.  Not. 

            And then he hailed me.  Oh, P G Wodehouse, my man.   Hast thou an empress of pigs awaiting thee at the family pile?  I was longing for him to say What, what?†  But this joy was not vouchsafed me.  He did, however, ask me the way to the Wooster Arms.†† . . . And this was the original point of this gone-off-the-rails††† story.  I know perfectly well where the Wooster‡ Arms is.  We pass it frequently:  it's one of those six-hanging-baskets-per-square-inch pubs, which are very popular in this area.  There must have been a scientific study that I missed that proves that scarlet begonias, blindingly blue lobelias and orange bedding dahlias cause acute thirst. 

           But the Wooster Arms was not on this walk.  And—thus the menopausal brain, perhaps especially when the pre-menopausal brain hadn't been very good at sticking bits of reality together either—for a moment I couldn't tell him.  I was standing there with the synaptic version of the yellow-alert whoop whoop whoop going off in my inner ear while my data screen was flashing NOT ON THIS WALK!  NOT ON THIS WALK!   Fortunately I covered my inadequacy with chat about the hellhounds‡‡ while frantically whirring through my mental maps till I got to the one with the Wooster Arms on it and figured out which edge of it went against which edge of the one I was on.  Then I gave him very good directions, including where the footpath appears to disappear across someone's garden‡‡‡.  He thanked me and said, You're not from around here.  I said, no, but I've lived here twenty years and two generations of hounds, and I know all the footpaths.  I did not describe my sorting and aligning problems.

            I hope he tipped the bar maid.

 

I worked all afternoon and, having re-hurtled hounds adequately I had a few minutes before tower practise began, and made the mistake of taking a stab at Cambridge Minor on Pooka.  LIMITED MENTAL RESOURCES, MCKINLEY!  LIMITED MENTAL RESOURCES!   GAAAAAH!  The problem is that Gemma's away next Thursday, so it's just the three of us§ and I know the other two are going to expect to ring Cambridge.   So I was already in a sad state of neural depletion when I showed up for tower practise.  Vicky, who has been worrying about me, stopped me ringing up one of the big bells§§—we got up all eight tonight although there were only six of us, because we have a wedding to ring tomorrow, and not merely Sunday service but that wretched quarter peal Sunday evening§§§.  I tend to be Pavlovian about these things:  Niall says 'fill in for . . .' and I'm groping for the nearest bell rope.

            So we were standing around with six ringers and eight bells up and Niall said 'fill in for bob doubles,' which was going to give Monty, our first-timer, a little extra time on the tenor, which is what he'll be ringing on Sunday evening. 

            And then the touch went on.  And on.  And on.  And on.  I was planning on going back to work tonight.  And on.  I thought, if he's trying for a quarter now, I am going to kill him.

            He wasn't.  We stopped after a mere . . . twenty-five minutes.  I DON'T WANT TO RING FRELLING TWENTY-FIVE MINUTE FRELLING TOUCHES ON FRELLING FRIDAY NIGHT.  ESPECIALLY A FRIDAY NIGHT I WAS PLANNING ON GOING BACK TO WORK AFTER.

            It has been all downhill from there.

            I think I'll go to bed early (again) and sleep another nine or ten hours.  I have a quarter peal to ring . . . uh, tomorrow, since it's now after midnight.  AAAAAAAUGH.           

* * *

* He clearly has not absorbed my attitude. 

** And if we meet the dogminder away from home, and they see her before I do, she needs armour.  

*** So to speak. 

† Maybe I've got my derivation wrong.  Maybe he was tracking the Questing Beast.  He didn't offer to show me any fewmets though. 

†† Maybe it was the Pellinore Arms. 

††† I am very tired.  My usual excuse.

‡ Or Pellinore.  Okay, I'll stop now. 

‡‡ I forgave him the Ascot when he told me the hellhounds were beautiful. 

‡‡‡ Gigantic pet peeve:  people whose first move on buying a property is to try and close down the footpath that runs across it.  This is, of course, illegal, but it doesn't stop them 'losing' the footpath markers, wiring or padlocking the access gates shut, 'forgetting' to keep the way passable and/or letting their six Rottweilers run free.  I love Rottweilers, but I do not love them when they think they're guarding their territory. 

               This is the same gigantic pet peeve I have about people who buy a house next to a 500-year-old church and then immediately start trying to shut down the 200-year-old ring of bells in its tower. 

§ In thunder, lightning, or in . . . rain.  And the hurly-burly starts here.^

^ I don't think there are any handbells in Shakespeare.  I might like him better if there were. 

§§ And Roger, that . . . that . . . creep said, that's right, Robin, you want to save yourself for Sunday afternoon.  —That's the frelling quarter peal he frelling bullied me into.  I DON'T RING SERVICE QUARTERS.  THIS IS A SERVICE QUARTER.  I've wasted a certain amount of time this week trying to convince myself to drop out, but two things stop me:  the fact that Vicky would kill. me. because she'd be the one expected to find the replacement and it's August and all bell ringers retire to towerless atolls for the month of August.  And the fact that I would never hear the end of it from Roger.^

 ^ I don't think he fully realises the risk he's running. . . .

 §§§ Groan.

Staying out of the Rain

 

Hellhounds have just fallen on their dinner like ravening fiends.*  Yaay.  This would, however, be more impressive if they hadn't wholeheartedly ignored their lunch.  I acknowledge this was not entirely the fault of the standard sighthound anti-food bias.

            The purpose of dozens of ever more apparently precise ways to look up local weather predictions is to burden you with a false sense of guidance and counsel.  I have I think five weather aps on Pooka ** plus the Met Office at the ends of my googling fingers.***  They all said scattered light rain today.  I forced myself to get out of bed this morning when the hurricane began trying to lift said bed off the floor with increasingly powerful gusts into the canopy, which was belling out like a spinnaker.  The lash of cold water in the face was also quite reminiscent of my sailing days, although at least it wasn't briny this morning.†

            When I finally stayed out of bed†† long enough to let hellhounds out of the crate and get dressed and acknowledge that the day had begun††† it was teeming down so hard you could see the pebbles jump, like a kind of meteorological tiddlywinks.  Hellhounds were staring at me hopefully.  You won't like it, I said.  They knew that whatever it was it was bad when I put their raincoats on.‡  We lasted about fifteen minutes outdoors:  by which time we were all soaked to the skin:  there is some excuse, perhaps, for nylon dog coats, but my expensive human raincoat is frelling Goretex.  The All Stars were going squish, squish, and the rain was running down inside my jeans.  UGGGGH.

            We went down to the mews in less than a good temper.  And, later, while hellhounds stared at their lunch with undisguised loathing, Peter, on his way upstairs for his post-prandial nap, said, I think it's beginning to clear off.  Yes.  Certainly.  That explains why, a little later on our way back to the cottage for handbells, I couldn't see out of Wolfgang's windscreen even with the wipers on HIGH. 

            Hellhounds got another fifteen minutes' mini-hurtle and another soaking, and retired crossly to their nice dry den.‡‡  I had handbells.

            As I keep saying, the ME is not in a good mood, so I'm delighted not to be struggling with Cambridge on handbells just now.  At the same time, bringing on a beginner is hard work—for everybody.  There's the frantic identification that makes you worry so much about how awful a time your beginner is having‡‡‡ that you go wrong ringing a plain course of idiot's rapture.  Then there's the going to sleep at the wheel/bells because if you have to ring one more plain course of idiot's rapture you are going to run away to sea and spend the rest of your life being slapped in the face by the cold briny.§   So Colin, who likes to complain about his short attention span anyway§§, got creative.  I HATE CREATIVE.  No, no, I hate creative in handbells.  The known—the learnable—stuff  in handbells is QUITE BAD ENOUGH.§§§  Also, Colin and Niall worry that I'm not being brought on while we're all trying to bring Gemma on.  This no doubt explains why I got snorgled into ringing the 5-6 to bob major (eight bells), with Gemma reading it off the page.  I don't know the 5-6!  Somebody!  Please go wrong and let me out!  Please! 

            . . . Hellhounds finally got a proper hurtle after this.  I had some frenzy to wear off, and it was raining enough less hard we could kind of dart among the drops. 

* * *

*  Sort of.  They were SO HUNGRY that they came out of their corner^ INTO THE MIDDLE OF THE FLOOR for their food.  All bright eyes and pricked ears and very sitting-up sits.  I put the food down, they looked at it and . . . there was an instant slump and a backing nervously away, looking uneasily over their shoulders and exchanging anxious glances.  I let this go on for thirty seconds or so and then took pity and put the bowls back in their corner.  Back in the corner and CORRECTLY ALIGNED.^^  Then they fell on it like ravening fiends. 

^ As seen last night in the action-eating shot+ 

+ Which was difficult to get.  Hellhounds are dubious enough about bowls of food anyway.  When the hellgoddess starts lurking in strange parts of the kitchen and holding small black boxes up to her face while (apparently) staring at them, they assume the worst.  

^^ I have my suspicions that Correct Alignment varies with the phases of the moon, and if I could figure out that particular continuum our successful eating ratio would go up by at least 10%.  

** I only use four.  The fifth needs a new update from the mother ship about every 6.2 hours and this gets old fast.  Especially when every now and then they make you pay for it.  It's not like they're any more accurate than the other ones. 

*** http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/weather/uk/uk_forecast_weather.html 

† Whooah.  If I'm starting to get sea-water through my landlocked first^ storey bedroom window, I am going into another line of work.  I worry about the membrane between the worlds. . . . 

^ American second 

†† I haven't got TIME to sleep nine or ten hours every frelling night. 

††† The day had begun hours ago.  After I shut the window on the hurricane I put a pillow over my head.  And slept through my alarm. 

‡ Noooooo!  Not the . . . RAINCOATS!  

‡‡ Since the crate is draped in a three-seater-sized sofa throw both to make it a little more decorative than a Large Metal Cage Taking Up Three Quarters of the Floor Space in My Kitchen and also to make it more of a den, you could just about see the billows of hellhound steam curling out the door. 

‡‡‡ And if she has too bad a time she might stop coming.  

§ It wouldn't work.  Handbells are small and portable.  And think of your captive audience of potential learners.  Mwa hahahahaha.

§§ This is a man who has rung pushing a thousand full peals:  three and three-quarters hours or so of a single method where there are strict rules disallowing any repetition of your route through the method^ and requiring precise accuracy of that route.   And he's conducted quite a few of them.  His latest little toss-off is that someone asked him to compose a new method in honour of the newly-hung ring of bells that they're going to ring it on, and to conduct a peal of it.  This makes my brain hurt just thinking about it . . . no, just trying not to think about it.  When he's figured it out he'll email the method line to everyone and then they'll all meet on the day and ring a peal of a brand new method none of them has ever rung before.^^  

^ Allowing for the numbers of variations possible on the number of bells.  Doubles or minor you have to repeat because there just aren't that many permutations of five or six bells.  By the time you hit triples—seven working bells—you've got lots of permutations to choose from. 

^^ He says it's not that big a deal.  There are lots of computer-generated methods these days.  All you have to do is pick a nice one, and . . . AAAAAAAAAUGH.  I DON'T WANT TO HEAR ANY MORE.  

§§§ Look, the three of you just go ahead and ring minor, it's what Gemma needs, to grind away on minor.  I'll knit.  See?  Knitting.  Nice knitting.  —They kept taking my knitting away from me.  Whimper.

It's . . .

 

 HELLHOUND BIRTHDAY!!!!*

Birthday hurtle

 

Pam Adams wrote: 

Your family's gundogs would laugh themselves silly if they ever met the hellhounds. I think these guys are the worst trained dogs I've ever had and that's a combination of their—most especially Chaos'—cluelessness+, and my lack of grind.

No- it's in the genes. Gundogs (and herding dogs) need to have strong 'obeying' tendencies. Those who don't pay attention get flung out of the gene pool. Sighthounds need to chase. If they spend too much time listening to direction, they will lose their prey. Same argument with scent hounds, sled dogs, and terriers- their genetic drives (that we put there!) often outweigh any tendencies towards sweetness, light, or obedience.

            Of course, thick-headedness doesn't help. 

LOOK ! LOOK! THEY ATE LUNCH!!!! YAAAAAAAY!!!!!!!!!

Some of it is in the genes, certainly.  But a good gundog will hunt down a wounded pheasant or other critter without waiting to be told 'a hundred yards to your right and check behind that hedgerow'.  And you want your having-taken-the-initiative sighthound to bring its catch back to you. 

            My guys' dad, a pedigreed whippet, had got his super-extra-whammy companion/obedience 24-carat golden star and ruby-studded collar when he was eighteen months old, which is pretty good going even for one of the classic obedience breeds.  And Darkness is, or would be, very trainable.  My favourite example of this, although there are plenty of others, is that it took him about a fortnight to figure out picking up his front feet one at a time to have his harness put on.  Chaos, three years later, is still thinking about it.  If I only had Darkness, or had two Darknesses, I would have posted that video of the three of us Spanish-walking down Main Street long ago.  But I have one Darkness and one Chaos.

            At the same time . . . even though on nearly a daily basis, after some tragic confrontation between Chaos and his harness, I am heard to mutter, you are so thick . . . he isn't.  He's just not very trainable as someone without a lot of experience in the far-flung vagaries of canine temperament understands training.  But he's the one who figured out that the sound of the computer being turned off means I'm about to move, for example.  At going-home time in the wee hours he will probably stagger from the dog bed and go collapse by the door.  (Darkness waits to be called.)  In the afternoon or evening he'll solicit a hurtle.  But I often don't turn my computer off at late-hurtle time—yet more often than not he still seems to know when my going for a pee is purposeful and will be followed by the putting on of shoes, and when I'm just emptying out the last cup of tea and going straight back to my desk-equivalent (having turned the kettle on again on the way).  I have no idea what signals he's picking up—there are other examples of this too—but he is undoubtedly responding to something.

            I tend to think, whew, I'm lucky they're this way around—that Darkness is the trainable one, and that life with Chaos can be coped with because he's so fixated on me.  Darkness comes when he's called:  Chaos merely runs back to me if I wave my arms and shout.  Doesn't matter what I shout.  Hellgoddess:  shouting:   he attends.  It makes me wonder if there's a type of dog temperament here—that someone like Chaos needs someone to organise himself around.  That that's just how his brain [sic] works.

AND FURTHERMORE THEY ATE DINNER!!!!!!

BurgandyIce

My favorite is when First turns to look at me to see if I'm not paying attention before doing something he shouldn't. Second runs around frantically happy to follow rules completely unrelated to any great training, but First… if he sees I'm distracted, he gets creative.

You're not going to make us eat AGAIN, are you?

Yes.  It's still an awful lot in the individual personality.  As Pam Adams said, sighthounds are very one-track-CHASE-minded.  As above, my two litter brothers are astonishingly different personalities, but they're alike in that the danger with both of them is that if the CHASE switch gets flicked, they turn into hunting machines.  You've got a crucial fraction of a second longer to get your counter-order in with Darkness than you do with Chaos.  But if they're just mooching, Darkness is likely to be the creative one—and you'll probably miss it, because you're busy intently scanning the horizon for the perilous approach of Chaseable Things.   Gah.

               Remind me again why I have hellhounds. . . .   

Because they're SO CUTE. That's my two in the middle, getting on with the bonding process at about six weeks old.




Chaos again in the centre. Darkness is . . . obvious.

AWWWWWWWWWWWWW.
 
* * *

 * It was Diana Wynne Jones' birthday yesterday.  I'd forgotten.  Knew it was August.  But her old friend Dave Devereux tweeted it yesterday.  Sigh. . . .

Something somewhat resembling a blog post

 

Brain dead.  Brain, brain, brain dead.  Brain.  Brain?  Sigh.  I am hammering myself into the ground for your benefit* and am distinctly into the stage where the story is a lot more real than this . . . this . . . reality thing. 

Ithilien wrote:

'People say that life is the thing but I prefer reading' has been true all my, er, life, and is the personal entropy I have to resist

But it's not entropy!  Reading is connecting up all sorts of lovely things in your brain and even better, connecting up your brain with someone else's story through the words. Reading a story makes it alive, giving it reality and meaning and resonance. Perfectly virtuous. 

          Or at least, that's my story and I'm sticking to it.

You have an office job.  You can AFFORD to get all hooked up with a book.  You will be obliged to pull the wires off and climb out again.  If I didn't have to hurtle hounds and ring bells** and sing and so on I might very well disappear forever through the cracks in my keyboard.***  Reading can be a busperson's holiday for a writer, certainly†, and I also have to be careful what I'm reading when I'm writing hard because all those you-me-reality-story membranes get very thin and permeable and I may find myself writing LOTR where Merry really is a girl.  But mainly I have to remember that I'm still this-world REAL, whether I like it or not.††

            So by all means stick to your story.  But don't forget to go to work.†††   I'm sticking to mine too, warily, only mine has evil magicians and vampires and burning deserts and demesne usurpers and . . . I think I'm a little confused. 

Speaking of singing, EMoon wrote in response to last night's blog:

Moaning on key is better than moaning off key…says the person who was up very early listening to the morning moaning of cows while checking on the wildlife watering stations. The neighbor's cows (adjacent to our fence) in conversation with some distant cows (at least two fields west.) These cows do not "moo"….moo suggests coo suggests pleasant dove-like sounds, maybe in a lower key.

No, these cows make loud unfortunate sounds "Mooo-AWWWWWW!" "MOWWW-AWWWWW!" and "OooooouGHHHHH" and occasionally rapid loud resonant grunts that sound oddly like recordings of lions coughing on the veldt. "OUGH! OUGH! OUGH!"

I decided this morning that they were discussing the relative merits of their pastures, the number of predators, the shortage of water, etc. and amused R- by bawling out these comments in cow-voice during breakfast, when I came inside. (This is not good for singing voice, and is thus not a recommendation to Our Hellgoddess to try it.) "GOTTT GRAAAASSS?" "NOOOAWWWW!" "NOTTT USSS!" "WAAWTr?" "NOOAWWWWWW!" "DROWOWOWOWT!" "YAHHHHAWWWW!"

This was also mixed with the goats or sheep only one field away, who were bleating in that insane way of caprids or ovids who expect to be fed soon. "Nyah-ah-ah-ah!" "MMaa-aa-aa…" I can do goat-voice too…also not good for the singing voice.

::Falls down laughing.::  I didn't tell you, yesterday, that Nadia had been telling me about ways to teach kids things about singing and the voice.  One of them is how to make yourself breathe from the belly:  Bark.  If you bark properly:  RUFF.  RUFF.  RUFF RUFF RUFF, you will breathe from the belly, and you'll feel your belly muscles driving the ruff.  The other one is how to find your head voice:  whine.  You know that falling eeeemmm, eeeeemmm—I can't think how to spell it—noise that emphatically whining dogs make?  Chaos has a really good whine, he being a hellhound who frequently feels the world is not attending to him as it should.   You do that properly and you'll be doing it in your head voice.  So my voice teacher barked and whined at me and said she wouldn't make me do it—whereupon of course I did.  I haven't yet quite dared use either of these study aids at home however.  The dog bed is next to the piano anyway, and hellhounds already tend to hang over the end of it and stare at me while I sing.  Chaos—again, Chaos—will get out of the bed, come over to the piano, tip his head, and gaaaaaaze. . . . beseechingly?  I don't want to know.  But I think the barking and the whining might drive them too far. 

* * *

* Also so that the hellhounds could keep eating, supposing hellhounds wanted to keep eating.  Also I need to buy more books.^  And yarn. 

^ Alicia was exaggerating.  I don't have more than 9,999 books in my sitting room.  And I'm sure I could fit a sixth person in.  I have four chairs [two of them imported from the kitchen] and a two-person sofa, after all.  I might even conceivably fit in a seventh person.  So long as she was small.  And was willing to sit on the floor. 

katinseattle wrote:

I used to prefer to sit on the floor. . . . I'd say, "Because you can't fall off the floor," when people asked me why. But that was just an excuse. There's just something about sitting on the floor.

There is just something about sitting on the floor, especially in a household containing critters.  Most critters find floor-sitting humans appealing.  But I consider the not being able to fall off it more than just a remark.  I'm a fidget.  Sitting on an ordinary straight chair and fidgeting can be dangerous.+  If you're expecting me to SIT in a chair I need handbells.  Or knitting. 

+ b_twin wrote: 

I've always been a fast healer from bruises (often with nothing to show for the pain). 

Not me.  I used to turn blue and purple if you dropped a hat on me (in the infamous words of a very-long-ago boyfriend.  I could argue that it depended on the hat).   This is approximately the only drawback to arnica—the sacrifice of pity.  Pity sometimes produces gratifying results.  Cups of tea while you languish on the sofa.  Chocolate. Champagne. 

            There's a curious loop to self-prescribing arnica though.  Generally speaking it's good for injuries, full stop.  Give arnica to the toddler who just fell down and bumped her knee/nose/forehead.  Give arnica before and after the dentist.  Give arnica while you're waiting for the ambulance, alternating with tightening and loosening the tourniquet.  Arnica.  It is the answer.

            But one of the additional symptoms for arnica is the person who says no, no, I'm fine, while they're haemorrhaging from a severed femoral artery.  There's a sub class of people who need arnica because they think they don't.  If you are one of those people, it's very difficult to remember to take your arnica.  Since I really dislike being covered with bruises, I can usually remember to take the initial one or two or even three, depending on severity.  But then I decide oh, McKinley, stop being such a wet . . . and stop taking it. 

            Remind me, the next time I put my foot through an extra-large loop of All-Star shoelace and fall down# to take MORE arnica.  I can still only kneel on one knee—AND THIS FINGER IS A DEAD BORE.  Both of which are beyond what arnica can do at this point. 

# Did I ever recite my at-least-I-didn't litany for you?  At least I didn't fall in dog-horse-pony-deer-cat-sheep-cow-goat-fox-badger-hedgehog-rabbit-wild-boar crap.~  Most of which I see samples of most days on most walks. 

~ I don't think we have any wild boar around here, but if we did, I imagine its crap would be fairly epic.  

** Is this a handbell which I see before me,

The handle toward my hand? Come, let me clutch thee.

I have thee not, and yet I see thee still.

Art thou not, fatal vision, sensible

To feeling as to sight? or art thou but

A handbell of the mind, a false creation,

Proceeding from the heat-oppressed brain?

I see thee yet, in form as palpable

As this which now I draw.

Thou marshall'st me the way that I was going;

And such an instrument I was to use.

It's strange how well that works . . . 

Diane in MN wrote:

Calling Niall obsessive obviously fails to do him justice. Does his obsession extend to commentary? When do we get a guest blog out of him?

VERY GOOD QUESTION.  I'll ask him the next time . . . I'm buying the beer.  

*** Eh.  Awful lot of crumbs down here.  

† Possibly exacerbated by rampant jealousy, either of skill or of bank balance. 

†† There are drawbacks to being the person who wrote SUNSHINE, when you are also a person who tends to go home at about 3 a.m.  I keep thinking about the 9 mph rule.  Hellhounds and I don't move at anything like 9 mph as we amble down the hill from Wolfgang's parking space to the cottage front door.  And—I think I've mentioned this one before—there is always that moment, when I'm closing the door successfully behind us, that I close it just a little quicker because there might be something just about to . . . 

††† Birds have to eat too.

Moaning on key

 

The ME is being an evil humourless ferocious ratbag*.  It's been more on than off for probably the last fortnight**.  I knew I was in trouble last night, for example, when I was too tired to play Montezuma.  Montezuma is one of these blow-as-many-tiny-sparkling-objects-up-as-possible-within-a-ridiculously-short-time-span games, which means you have to be able both to focus and refocus your eyes and to move your fingers around the screen and tap with extreme speed and agility.  None of these skills was much in evidence last night.  At least I slept.  But I slept about forty-seven hours*** and it still took me three tries and another forty-five minutes before I could claw my way out of bed this morning.†

            My Inner Child and Outer Adult spent the next six hours arguing.  You should cancel your voice lesson, said the Adult.

            Won't, said the Child.

            You need to work, said the Adult.  You don't have time or energy to hurtle hounds, practise for your lesson—do I have to remind you you're already behind on practise time?

            Oh shut up, said the Child.

            —ingest enough caffeine to make even marginal functioning possible, continued the Adult, unmoved, and get some work done.  Do you want hellhounds to starve because you can't afford to buy dog food?

            Very funny, said the Child.

            The only responsible thing to do is to cancel your voice lesson, said the Adult.

            Won't, said the Child.  Besides, I cancelled only a fortnight ago, and I was traumatized for the entire week.

            Well, maybe you're doing too much, said the Adult.  Maybe you should rethink your schedule.

            Maybe you should find a large body of water to fall in, said the Child.  You can't swim, can you?

            Actually, I can, said the Adult, stiffly.

            That won't work then, said the Child.  You could fall on your sword.

            You could cancel your voice lesson, said the Adult.

            Could, said the Child.  Won't. 

            Cancel, you little sod, said the Adult.

            Won't, said the Child.

            At 3:30 I tucked my music under my arm, took hellhounds back to the cottage and went off to my voice lesson.  About an hour before this the caffeine had finally begun to kick in and I figured I probably would get there and, with luck, home again, without running off the road.  I might even be able to speak to Nadia in complete sentences, although that was probably pushing it.  I'd had a kind of go at running through Sebben Crudele, but it had been a bit sad, not least because frelling Atlas was at the mews today and I do not sing if anyone can hear me, †† except Peter, hellhounds and (occasionally) Oisin. †††  But I went, with the Adult still snarling in the background, and the Child going nyah, nyah, nyah. 

            And then the lesson was not too bad.  I had done some practising earlier in the week before the ME knocked me over again, and there was some discernable residue of this, plus Nadia's teacher-magic in extracting some of those sounds out of me that only she seems able to do.  There is some dastardly irony developing however:  partly because I'm so embarrassed by my Amer-italian and partly because some of what Nadia is trying to teach me is beginning to stick enough that I can use it without her there to chivvy me, there are moments when I'm singing more freely at home than I do in my lesson.  There is just beginning to be some dynamic arc to the awful muddle of my Sebben Crudele, and Nadia plucked it from the affray and brushed it off.  Here, she said, polishing it on her sleeve.  Look.

             Yaay.  I think. 

 

I was much too tired to go bell ringing.  But Niall was driving and . . . ‡             

* * *

 * I'm working too hard.  Don't bother trying to disguise your delight. 

** This seems to be running more or less parallel with the hellhounds' latest attack of not eating.  There is perhaps some connection.  I don't have the time and energy to spare waiting with apparent serenity for them to come round to the idea of eating while Chaos demonstrates his opinion by trying to bury his latest meal^ and Darkness deliberately re-lies down so he can curl up with his back to his bowl.  ARRRRRRRGH.  Repressing the screams of rage and frustration is even more tiring than the apparent-serenity shtick.  

^ Be thankful for small favours:  both the dog bed mattress and the floor are resistant to being scooped up by a hellhound nose and flung over a bowl of dog food.  Occasionally, however, when there's a blanket in the dog bed. . . . 

*** Which would explain a lot about how blurry my memory of the last two days is.

 † 'Morning' is, of course, a relative term.  

†† And yes, it's perverse that I should be taking voice lessons to get louder.  I want to sing in a choir, okay?  With other people.^ 

^ I am not thinking about the next time Percival and Andraste visit.  Not.  Not.     

††† I have, however, found an excellent study aid on YouTube.  I was preparing to burn myself in effigy when I discovered that there was a clip of Cecilia Bartoli singing Sebben Crudele and it's not available in the UK.  ARRRRGH.  I suppose it's Customs & Excise I should be burning.  Not in effigy.  However, there is available a performance from a vocal-arts school by a young woman whom I hope I will hear singing Verdi any day now and Wagner in another decade or so.  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XEfFCftI3kg

Sebben Crudele as I will never sing it.  SIIIIIIGH.  I used YouTube a lot when I was taking lessons from Blondel, because he was always throwing new music at me, and it was a personal floatation device.  Nadia has more the sneaky, gradual approach—plus I've been mostly singing stuff I sort of know already.  Also, everything with Nadia heretofore has been in English.  I'm sweating the frelling Italian a lot, and while I wouldn't know how good this young woman's Italian is, I can tell you it's a lot better than mine^.  So this afternoon I was playing this clip over and over, and sort of breathing it along with her. 

^ One of the things I've finally twigged is what Nadia keeps telling me about how it's all vowels, and you sort of tack the consonants on briefly here and there.  You'd think, after forty years of listening to Verdi voluntarily, that I'd have some clue what she meant.  No.  But I'm finally getting it, listening here.  Whether I can reproduce it or not is a whole other, ugly question.  

‡ . . . and I rang Kent.  Which should not be worthy of note.  Except that—you know this chorus—Ionlylearnbygrind, and I haven't rung nearly enough Kent to have an auto-pilot for it, and, the first time I'd rung it in months last Friday I made the most awful hash.  Uggh.  So when Colin asked me what I wanted to ring, I asked for Kent.  Everybody else held their heads and moaned—I like Kent, but this tends to be a minority opinion—but I got straight through it like 'there was a problem?  What problem?'  Mind you my striking is still . . . fairly dire.  But I was nearly enough in the right place not to lead anyone else astray.

Handbells and hopelessness: guest post by Alicia

 

One of the important things to remember when attempting to ring handbells in company with the Hellgoddess and her Thursday evening group of fellow ringing maniacs is that IT'S ONLY TWO HOURS, MAX.* Anyone with a reasonable sense of self-preservation can survive that, right? 

It's strange, really. There're these nice, normal-looking, friendly people, who will sit and drink tea, eat chocolate biscuits even, at the halfway point in the handbell session. Robin, Niall, Colin, Gemma.  They talk to you, they smile, they presumably breathe and think, walk and laugh in the same way as the rest of us humans. But put handbells within their grasp and some little synapse in their brains goes 'Click' and switches the neural energy down a new path. Then they turn into lifeforms that have a whole other take on what being sentient means.** Catch them on an evening when the ringing isn't going as smoothly as it normally does for them and – Oy! 

The last time I joined the group, about 10 days ago, it turned out to be one of those evenings. Sitting hunched in a chair I'd wrongly thought would take me out of everyone's line of sight, there in Robin's sitting-room*, I had the two smallest bells in the set thrust into my trembling hands by Niall. "You know what to do, don't you", he said. "You just hunt up to the back and down again." Oh sure. "We'll be on the working bells." Uh huh. Robin was saying nothing at this point. Perched, cross-legged, on her sofa cushion, she was obviously in a state of intense mental preparation for the trial ahead. I would no more have interrupted her at that point than I would have attempted to remove its first meal for a week from the paws of a (normally) friendly tiger.*** And then we were off, all six bells (in this method) ringing, one after the other, in the space of about 1.5 seconds per round. Or rather, that would have been 1.5 seconds if yours truly could ring at the correct interval. #timingfail. #Ididtrytowarnyou. Try again from the beginning…and again…and again…and…well, you get the picture. What's really unnerving is that no-one breaks down and screams. There's no throwing of objects, no drumming of heels on the carpet or shredding of the cushions by teeth, no whooping for joy when something works out. It's all very British and restrained† – it's just that there's this immense mental pressure to Get It Right. Every Time. 

After 10 minutes of this, the hands of the less-skillful tend to be shaking rather badly. There's very little computational space left in the brain, either. That's the point, I've found, where phrases such as 'Wouldn't you all rather ring something more interesting and I'll just sit out and listen', or 'May I visit your bathroom, Robin?'** come in useful. On this occasion, one or more of these plaintive and despairing cries was accepted and the real addicts all (metaphorically) hitched themselves forward and really concentrated on the next method. Gemma and Colin came in on this one so there were eight hands/bells ringing something that sounded so complicated it would have been no surprise if any bats still within hearing range had their echolocation abilities warped to the extent that they were forced into time-shifting and were eating their insects before they'd actually caught them.†† And even then these addicts were not satisfied. "We'll try a Touch of that, shall we, now that everyone's settled down?" said Niall. This means that on top of ringing a series of patterns that would tax the ability of Einstein to visualise, the person conducting calls for a 'Bob' or 'Single' at various points. This introduces the fifth and seventh dimensions of time/space to the method and makes the average mortal's eyes cross, inextricably. And it wasn't all plain sailing, even for this group. There were several occasions where one could see a slight tightening of fingers around bell handles, where that heavy quivering stillness one gets just before a thunderstorm breaks was hovering almost visibly over each ringer's head, and where the chocolate biscuit crumbs left on the plate in the middle of the group started forming into fractal patterns. ††† 

Still, all things end, eventually. With the heavy sighs of those who won't be meeting to ring again until the next week, the group members switched to light conversation (centred around ringing, towers, and ringers, naturally). Niall then had to leap off home in order to ring handbells with another and more advanced (!) group, while Colin and Gemma were off to live the lives of normal humans once more.‡   And after they had all negotiated the Kissing-Gate structure that leads to Robin's front door***, Robin went off to hurtle hellhounds and I retired to her garden. I really needed to chop the heads off things for a while… 

(Thanks, Robin. May I come and ring again sometime? :)) ‡‡

* * * 

* I feel that 'sitting-room' is probably a slight misnomer in this case, unless you're a book (or a form of recorded music). Sitting space for humans = five, at most. Shelving space for books, on every area of the walls not taken up by doors or windows = >10,000, easily. This ratio is, obviously, something we should all aim for. ‡‡‡

** This one is good for an absence of quite a few minutes as one naturally has to pet the hellhounds in their kitchen lair during both outward and return journeys. Hellhounds, during these sessions, have expressions I've not witnessed on dogs before. There's a bit of 'Our goddess has been away from us for 6.5 minutes/31.25 minutes/42.60 minutes, oh waly waly!' but it's mixed with 'Did you hear how Xxxxx missed the 3 / 4 up dodge at that last bob?'.§  Robin may be raising the only canine handbell judges in the history of change ringing. 

*** Having a small entrance area in conjunction with two hellhounds who would joyfully greet anything warm-blooded that comes through the front door does mean a combination of doors and gates that require a certain amount of timing and agility to negotiate.§§

* * *

* Mwa ha ha ha ha.   Um . . .

** Gemma's a beginner.  She still thinks we do this for fun.  We aren't sure yet if she's going to become a member of the true anointed, or whether, when the truth is finally revealed, she will blanch and shudder and take up bowling.

*** Wise woman.

† AND TRY TO IMAGINE WHAT A STRAIN THAT IS.  I WASN'T RAISED IN THIS COUNTRY, YOU KNOW.

†† You missed some clothes moths.  Let me point them out to you.

†††  Yes.  A dangerous sign.  Did you notice the way some of the crumbs tend to blink in and out of existence on this plane?

‡ Colin is no more normal than I am!  He rings full peals!  He has his own set of change-ringing bells in his GARAGE!  His only salvation is that he does not write fantasy novels.

‡‡  This Thursday at 4:45?

‡‡‡  ::Beams::^

^ I've still run out of shelf space. 

§  This is all a ploy, you know, to get themselves invited into the sitting room.  They are not totally thrilled with handbell evenings.  Used to be only regular use of sitting room involved lying on sofa with hellhounds. 

§§  ::Hilarity::  You're right, it's exactly like a kissing gate.  Hellhounds are very smoochy.