Robin McKinley's Blog, page 132

Wildlife indoors

 

The story thus far, as reported on Twitter this morning:

I had an uninvited guest last night at the cottage. A Chiropteran guest. Small. Furry. Winged.

I was lying peacefully in my bath, reading (as it happens) a homeopathic journal on the treatment of shock and trauma. And there was a funny noise. A sort of light thumping and whacking noise. But not light enough, if you follow me, if you're lying in your bath in the middle of the night and are expecting only to hear the mellifluous tones of Radio Three, the gentle lap of water, the hush of turning pages, and maybe the occasional snore of a hellhound. Any loud or startling noises should clearly be coming from outdoors.

Thud*-thud-thud-thud-fluff-fwuff-fuff-fwip-fwup-whack.

What are those wretched dogs getting up to, I muttered, and rose from the depths, nothing at all like Botticelli's Venus except for the sheeting-water bit. I dripped into my office and there . . . were two utterly crashed out and oblivious hellhounds. Hellhounds are perfectly capable of shooting back to the dog bed, hurling themselves down and peering at me warily when caught, or semi-caught, in delinquency; but they aren't good liars. These were crashed out hellhounds. And as I stood there (dripping) I could still hear the fwuff-fuff-whack going on elsewhere. Indoors. Behind me. Oh gods.

Totally bizarre shadows in the hall. Whatever it is, it can move, and I don't think it's happy. A little dark spot coalesces, zigzagging furiously, over my windowsill shelf of medical textbooks. It pauses, briefly, grasping my ancient Steadman's Medical Dictionary.** But nothing else flies like that, that ducking, dodging, sideslipping motion, and the odd crooked wings and the little square body. Once I'd seen it I knew what it had to be.

It was a bat.***

I went back in the bathroom and slammed the door. When I came out again I was drier and clothed. Bats don't totally freak me out, and the urban myth that it's going to get tangled in my hair doesn't register. But I don't like wildlife indoors, and I can't believe that its echolocation isn't disturbed by the panic it must be feeling—and it's big enough to do me some damage as well as itself, if it slams into my geraniums or riffs off some of the more fragile of the Little Noodgy Things that (sigh) line my bookshelves.† And it was now in my office, and I thank the Gods of Natural Perversity that the hellhounds, for reasons known only to themselves, did not respond to this clear and one would have thought irresistible provocation. Darkness is mad for birds, but possibly he had opened one eye, murmured 'doesn't fly right' and shut it again. Whatever. I had a bat in my office. Aaaugh.

I withdrew to consider my options: I couldn't think of any. That didn't take long. But as I was moaning and clutching myself the bat stormed out of my office and streamed upstairs into the attic: I pelted up after it and prepared to close the trap door. My last sight of it was of it cozying up to my . . . er . . . bank of woolly-things shelves, specifically the cashmere shelf. You leave claw-holes in my cashmere, I will track you down and boil your bones for soup. Nonetheless, I closed the trap door.

I did not have a good night last night. I kept thinking about the four hundred and ten bats counted streaming out of my eaves last summer—the biggest mum-and-baby bat nursery the Hampshire Bat Group had ever counted. Last summer I was pleased. Last summer I didn't have any bats indoors. When and how did this one get in? And why? The Velcro-and-scotch-tape screens I have on my windows probably wouldn't stop a bat fixed on entry, but it would leave signs of its passage. My screens were all undisturbed. I assume it must have darted in when I was carrying garbage bags out to put in the bin last night, Monday morning being dustbin morning . . . but still, why? Every time one of the hellhounds turned over, or the house, being an old house, gave an old-house creak, I shot awake again, thinking about four hundred and ten bats living in my immediate vicinity.

This morning I opened the attic door again . . . cautiously. I assume that it went to roost . . . somewhere. I'm not going to go poke my cashmere†† sweaters and find out exactly where. No sign. No sign of either it or . . . four hundred and nine of its fellows. So far so good. I went downstairs again and rang the nice people who are the head of the Hampshire Bat Group and said, pardon me, but you counted four hundred and ten bats living in my house last summer, and last night I had a bat on my side of the barrier and neither of us is pleased. And she laughed lightly and got that soothing tone in her voice, that there, there tone, like a kindergarden teacher soothing a kid who has rejected its graham cracker. They rarely come indoors, she said. Just leave a window open, and it'll go back out again at twilight.

I'm writing this at the mews. I haven't been back to the cottage since twilight.††† I really, really don't want to think that this was one of the early scouts for this year's nursery, and it's now having a beer with its—her—friends and saying, listen, forget last year's cramped quarters—I don't care if it's traditional. Let me tell you about cashmere. . . .

* * *

* It should be thudlet really. But thudlet-thudlet-thudlet doesn't really put it over. Or mini-thud, which is even worse. But it wasn't a tap or a pat. It was a thud. Unmistakably a very small thud.

** I mean ancient. Us homeopaths are expected to read the foundation texts, the oldest of which was first published in 1810. Sometimes you really need an old medical dictionary to bail you out of total confusion.

*** My frivolous mind will revert to Gilbert and Sullivan: It was the (c)at. http://math.boisestate.edu/gas/pinafore/web_opera/pin18.html

† We've had this conversation. I swore I would never put stuff in front of books on shelves. I am an oathbreaker. It is very sad.

†† BY THE WAY. In the conversation that has been going on in the forum about one-space-or-two after a period/full stop, and how modern computer technology has rendered the need for a double space null and void because unlike on typewriters, all letters are the same size, or anyway occupy the same amount of space on a computer screen: wrong. I am amazed no one has mentioned the occasionally highly erratic little spacing ways of Word. I've asked not only my Computer Archangels but the occasional programmer geek and they shrug and say, oh, yeah, that's a known issue but Microsoft doesn't feel like doing anything about it. This comes to mind because it's usually 'e' that decides it feels unduly constricted by the standard spacing, and demands about half a space's extra range. This has just happened with the first 'e' in cashmere, as I write this post in Word before pasting it in the blog. It will have disappeared by the time it has been through the new frelling WordPress system, which may even out Word's vagaries but now eats all my double spaces and I hate it. Just by the way. . . .

††† I was going to tell you about the brilliant lesson I had with Nadia today but . . . this is long enough and I want to go to bed. I had a bad night last night. . . .

Blerg etc

 

Yesterday was pretty much a ratbag day. We had weekend visitors*, and the ME said, whoa! You aren't thinking about having a good time or anything, are you? We're not having any of that. So we didn't. And on top of bad timing and general ratbaggery I had another frelling wedding to ring.** And I had to give Vicky a lift to the church.

Vicky's car is so clean it hurts. I always feel I should roll myself up in Saran Wrap or thereabouts before I sit on the upholstery. But it was occupied transporting household appliances (no doubt first swathed in Saran Wrap) about the landscape yesterday. And Wolfgang . . . oh dear. The original plan had been that I'd hoover him out at the mews after lunch, and after I'd swept two dustpans-full of gravel out of the foot-wells and mopped off the dashboard and sundries, I . . . wasted twenty minutes (with some help from Peter) trying to find some combination of extension cords that resulted in the hoover actually turning on when I pressed the button. Gaaaaah. At which point I had to leave, dustily and smudgily, because I knew Vicky, who is also prompt to a fault, would be waiting on the corner. She was.

We hung around about forty minutes before it was time to ring, which is about standard. But I now like hanging around complaining about late brides. Because I can knit. I can't do much else . . . reading while waiting to ring is pretty much hopeless: you can't concentrate, and you end up more frustrated with the waste of time than less . . . but I can KNIT. FREE KNITTING TIME. YAAAY. LATE BRIDES. YAAAAAY. *** I'm clearly going to become the Knitting Woman of weddings as well as the Knitting Woman of opera.† And my careless brilliance in assigning Mobile Knitting Unit status to little old handbags means you can just hook the current Unit over your shoulder, feed the yarn out and . . . knit, standing up in a (damp, but not streaming) churchyard, say. Love love love love. I am so glad you dreadful people bullied me into learning to knit.††

Today has mostly been about more bloody rain††† . . . and potting up my 4,311 dahlia cuttings. Well, maybe only 4,302. Lots. That early-to-mid-spring gardening moment when you think you might keep it under control this year? —is over. All that lovely space I cleared is now full of seed trays and little potted-on things which are busy getting less little and which I am going to have to pot on again soon AND THEN FIND SPACE TO PLANT OUT.

***

* GAAAH. I have to figure out a way to PRACTISE SINGING SILENTLY. There's always my old electric keyboard for playing the piano—plug in the headphones, and Bob's your (inaudible) uncle. But I keep resisting the CPU socket under my collarbone option. I'm so retro I won't even have my eyes lasered!^ I'd rather wear spectacles!^^ Another reason to get Third House functioning: it is guest space, and my piano is at the mews. As were this weekend's visitors. And yes of course we've had overnight visitors at the mews since I've been taking voice lessons, but I've just missed three weeks in a row of voice lessons because Nadia leads a complicated life and I want to sing.

^ Don't You Come Near Me With That Thing.

^^ Although I admit to having hopes about the dental implant plan. The idea of teeth that don't get cavities or need root canals is just unbearably exciting. Now all I need is six or seven best-sellers to pay for them.

** Although the flower arch at the door of the church was so divinely pretty it was almost worth it. If I were going to get married again and had so much money I couldn't think of ways to give it away fast enough^ and was going to do it in a (picturesque village) church next time, just for variety . . . I'd have a flower arch. Although mine would have more roses.

^ But see previous footnote

*** This afternoon I was doing my phoning-round for Old Eden practise tomorrow night, and Felicity is on my permanent list although she never comes. The problem with Felicity is that she rules, which means that (a) she never has time to do anything you want her to do, like come to tower practise and (b) she usually has something she wants you to do. Can you ring a wedding on the 21st? she said. Application to my diary reassured me that I didn't have an opera that day. Yes, I said. I hope the bride is late.

† I'm getting on fabulously with Secret Project #1. Indeed I'm nearly done with the knitting part^ and am soon going to have to face the Sewing Together of the Jigsaw part. Uh oh. ::Deep breaths. Taking deep breaths.:: I keep saying, I can do hand sewing! I've done lots of hand sewing!^^ Hand sewing holds no terrors! . . . Er. I've never hand-sewn bits of knitting together before, and this whole weaving-the-ends in thing . . . holds lots of terrors. All those ends. Very . . . Cthulhuian.

^ One more wedding should do it

^^ Many, many years ago.

†† But if anyone tries anything else similar, you will be instantly killed. Do I make myself plain? I am the hellgoddess. Fear me.^

^ Cthulhu and I are old friends really. We have tea with Yog-Sothoth and Shub-Niggurath occasionally. Mind you, you don't want to know what's in the tea.

††† I had a singularly tactless friend^ tell me piously that I wasn't allowed to complain about the rain after a two-month drought. In the first place I can frelling well complain if I want to. In the second place, my singularly tactless friend doesn't have a twenty-by-ten-by-five foot rosebush with easily 200 flowers on her in her back garden having been effing well destroyed by an inch of rain in the last forty-eight hours thank you very dranglefabbing much. Life with Souvenir de la Malmaison is always a crap shoot . . . but to have two months of drought followed by torrential, delphinium-mashing, beetle-drowning, hellhound-miserabling downpours at exactly the moment that Souvenir is a quarter to a half out . . . is way over the sodding line.

^ I'm thinking of a nice woolly garrote for her next birthday

Steps on the way to bee-keeping III, guest post by ajlr

 

There were three main things that we were warned about in working with bees at the hive –

a) make sure you're not wearing perfume of any kind, and that you don't smell sweaty, as bees don't like smells on people;

b) always move and speak quietly and gently, with no crashing or thumping when opening or working in the hive;

c) always work from the back (or side) of the hive* so that you don't have crowds of agitated and fretful bees piling up around you on their way to or from the entrance.

The three communities of bees that my fellow novices and I were going to look at on this day at our bee tutor's home would be having the year's first thorough post-winter check of their home (apart from the roof being lifted off on a few occasions to top up the sugar feeders). The bees themselves had been active on and off for a couple of weeks and had been observed previously coming out on cleansing flights** so our tutor knew that the colonies were in general good health. There were two full colonies, each in their own brood box, and one starter colony in a nucleus ('nuc') box. We began with the nuc and stood round at the sides and back, watching carefully as our tutor started by gently puffing a little smoke into the entrance, taking the top and the crown board off the brood area and placing them on the ground to one side after examining them closely for any signs of pests. At this stage we could see the half a dozen frames (a bit like sling files in a filing cabinet drawer) in the box with the bees on and more smoke was gently drifted across the top of the frames to keep the bees calm and move them away from the tops of the frames. (You can see/read a nice account of a first spring inspection here.) Our tutor gently lifted out the first frame, after loosening it a little first*** with the hive tool, reminding us while she did so about making sure to pull it slowly straight up to avoid squashing any bees and to return it the same way once the inspection was over.  Each of the frames was examined in turn, to check there were no diseases showing, that there was a good pattern# of pollen stores, honey, eggs being laid, worker brood and the beginnings of some drone brood, and also to try and find the queen. One definitely needs to develop a knack of doing this, as the spaces between the frames at the top where one grasps them at each end are quite small and – when looking at deep frames that may be fully loaded – they're also quite heavy. A single short frame in a super that's full of honey, for example, can weigh 3 lbs and that's quite a lot to hold steady and manipulate between the thumb and forefinger of each hand. All was well with the young colony in the nuc,  they didn't seem unduly agitated, and once the floor had been pulled out and examined to check if any Varroa  mites were visible, everything was closed up again and we moved on to the next one.

Us novices were now invited to take turns in performing all the various actions required in checking the two remaining hives we were focussing on and it was while I was standing to the side of the first of these, having just been puffing a little smoke into it, that I happened to glance down at my right hand, where I was holding the smoker – only to see 20+ worker bees quietly sitting on the back of my hand and wrist, humming little hums to themselves.  Some had obviously just come out of the hive while others were on their way back in with full pollen loads and had stopped off on my hand to see what was going on. Perhaps the yellow of my rubber gloves looked a nice friendly colour? I raised my hand slowly and looked at them, they looked (I think) back at me and we all decided that nothing was wrong and we could all continue to be cool about things. Very reassuring it was, all of us feeling the same way. :)

Once all the hives had each been carefully opened, the frames (there are usually 11 frames for a full colony) in the brood box examined individually, the box closed up again, and appropriate notes made on the hive record sheets for each that we'd carried down there – had the queen been seen, was she laying, how many frames of brood and food were there, were any queen cells seen, any pests, what temper were the bees in, and a few other things, it was time to walk quietly away and reflect on what we'd seen and done. And despite the number of things to remember (too many to write about here), the knack of doing things smoothly that one needs to acquire, the low-level worry about 'what if I suddenly upset them' and various other thoughts, I'm now so looking forward to getting our own bees to look after in a couple of weeks' time. It's just fascinating.

***********************

* The proper siting of a hive, or hives, such that one has sufficient space to work round it, that the entrance is not facing out on to anywhere close that is frequented by people or animals^ but instead faces into a hedge or similar structure a few feet away so that they come out and then go up to get over it and fly away, and that if there is more than one hive they're facing very slightly different ways so that you don't get 'drifting' of bees from one hive to another, seems like a whole curriculum area in itself.

^ Bees are inquisitive and twitchy creatures.

** Bees are naturally clean and don't mess inside their hive. They will come out for a quick 'cleansing flight' on any days which are slightly warmer, throughout winter and early spring. They apparently zoom out, fly in an arc of around 10 – 12 feet from the hive, emptying themselves as they go, and dive back into the warmth of the hive again. We were warned not to stand near a hive on such a day – it apparently takes quite a lot of washing to get bee poo off garments…!

*** Bees stick things together with propolis in all sorts of small ways and one has to be careful to loosen things one at a time without any sudden cracks as something comes free. Bees tend to get tetchy about sudden vibrations and loud noises!

# On the frames in the brood box, a typical – and good – pattern will be of a central patch of brood, partially surrounded by an arc of pollen stores so that the nurse bees can feed easily, and then a further arc of honey stores. So the protein (pollen) and some honey (carbs) are both close at hand.

Geekiness, various

 

I GOT THROUGH AN ENTIRE TOUCH OF GRANDSIRE TRIPLES TONIGHT!! WITHOUT GOING WRONG OR GETTING YELLED AT!!!!! Okay, it was a short touch. Still. I think this may be the first time I've survived a touch that wasn't clearly organised around making it easy for me. My other moments of comparative glory tonight have to do with hanging grimly onto my own line when all about me were losing theirs—which is actually a gift more highly prized, in your average mostly-just-about-holding-it-together band, than pearls, rubies, or the ability to conduct full peals of Triple Surprise Banana Split Delight Caters, and which sadly I only have erratically. But I had it tonight.

Clearly I was inspired by the first opportunity to harass Oisin about blogs and singing in a month. He's been doing the holiday thing. Cheez, these thoughtless slobs who go on holidays. What is the world coming to. What we need is more DEDICATED UNSWERVING MANIA.* Anyway. He is now saying 'next week' for a guest blog—I did tell him that we'd had a few outbursts on the forum about the continuing absence of a guest blog from Oisin, especially from the other musicians and music teachers, and he said, Good. —Don't give me this good twaddle, give me a guest blog**.

I have potentially interesting news on the Oisin front however: Minnie is retiring. She's been headmistress at the local whatsit forever and ever and has got to the 'amen' point.*** This means—apparently—that she will be hurling herself into the New Arcadia Players' fray with added energy and enthusiasm† and the Players have all these plans to diversify, whereupon I said, in my best insinuating way††

::GRAH ARRRGH BLERGLEBLERGLEBLERGLE BAD LANGUAGE LOTSA LOTSA BAD LANGUAGE BAD BAD BAD LANGUAGE. THERE'S OUR RAIN. THE ENTIRE CONTENTS OF LAKE SUPERIOR IN THREE AND A HALF MINUTES. EVEN SUPPOSING THAT SOUVENIR DE LA MALMAISON DOESN'T TAKE A TOTAL PET, WHICH SHE WILL DO, EVERYTHING THAT ISN'T WROUGHT IRON IS NOW A PANCAKE. MEANWHILE, BECAUSE THE GROUND IS SOMEWHAT HARDER THAN OSMIUM, ALL THAT RAIN WILL HAVE FRELLING BOUNCED AND RUN OFF, SO WE'RE TALKING BEING WORSE OFF THAN WE WERE BEFORE. GRAAAAAAAAAAAH.::

. . . In that case wouldn't the New Arcadia Players like to diversify into the New Arcadia Singers? Silence from the man behind the teapot. Minnie even sings. Unfortunately her idea of a sufficiently large choir is about 120. A hundred and twenty? Good grief. I'm saying twelve. Oisin, when he can be forced to say anything at all, tends to say forty is a good number. Forty! I say to Minnie. Assuming it's an SATB situation, that's ten of you! Surely nine other people to hide behind—because I am far from unsympathetic to the concept of hiding—is enough! And since there's usually more women, it's probably more like eleven other people to hide behind!

I appear still to have my work cut out for me here. Siiiigh. I will attempt to get Oisin in the mood however by beginning to bring stuff to sing next week.††† This may of course be counterproductive, but I hope it will show willing. I said we can play a little game—Nadia having told me that Oisin is a very good voice coach, and that he'd prepped her for her audition to music college—we can pretend that I'm working toward an audition for one of those singing groups I'll never be a member of partly because the idea of an audition makes me turn green and croak like a frog.‡ He liked this idea. His eyes lit up and his teeth started to glisten.

Whereupon I ran away up to Third House‡‡ and squirrelled about frantically to drive the awful thought of even pretending to work toward an audition away, and fed and watered and fed and watered and fed and watered and . . . all of last year's chocolate cosmos have died after all, and I don't know why except that they are perverse little ratbags. Damn. But I was crossly yanking a lot of drought-stricken, collapsed forget-me-nots out of a crumbly-dry terra cotta pot with clearly nothing else in it . . . and found myself trailing something from the forget-me-not midst that was not a collapsed forget-me-not and was clearly still alive, if a trifle thirsty. Yeep. Back in the pot, honey, sorry about that, here, food, water, petting, shall I recite a wonders-of-green-nature poem to inspire you? Something by Gerard Manley Hopkins possibly? John Clare?, and a nice clear spot to sit next to a friendly rose till I figure out what you are. I think you're one of these tiny patio clematis which are reputedly rather fragile, but mine tend to cling on despite all. The one in the hanging basket back at the cottage which should be several times dead after this winter is about to flower—and the one in the big pot in the hellhound courtyard which clearly was dead in about February is the size of a small plantation and flowering like something auditioning for the Chelsea Flower Show (speaking of auditions). I'm still tragic about my chocolate cosmos however—especially since my new ones are now pancakes (see above) and my back-up ones apparently spent a fortnight in the back of a Royal Mail van and arrived brown and slimy. Siiiigh.

However . . . then I rang a touch of Grandsire Triples.‡‡‡  The world is still a good place.

* * *

* Niall would be very good at this if Penelope didn't occasionally say 'Put that handbell down, we're going to Orkney.' Peter who, like Penelope, believes in moderation, doesn't have a chance. I have hellhounds and ME. Mwa ha ha ha ha. One might as well embrace one's disabilities and turn them to one's advantage where possible. And of course having more than one crazed obsession has a kind of smoke-and-mirrors effect on the bemused onlooker.

** Or two. Two would be good. Three would be better.

*** Mind you she is much too young to retire. She's my age.

† I asked Oisin if they'd chosen a follow-up to the Octopus and the Chandelier, and when he said that they had, Minnie from the next room said, quietly but carryingly, in that Best Headmistress voice, that the Official Announcement wasn't for a fortnight or so yet, and if Oisin told me now there would be Blood on the Floor. —I admit this was an interesting prospect, but it might lower my chances of a guest blog.

†† I'm crap at insinuating. It will probably not amaze you to hear. I'm much better with the crowbar and the shouting.

††† I was going to do it this week. No, really. But Oisin and I became Caught in a Loop of Miscommunication and I thought he was still in Shigatse or somewhere and when he rang me up irritably this afternoon to ask where I was it was too late to Warm Up and Focus, so I didn't try. I just went over there and stared meaningfully at the teapot.

‡ I briefly considered pretending that I was working toward being one of the sacrifices, I mean performers, at the New Arcadia Players' next money-raising gala, but I decided that was pushing even fantasy a little far.

‡‡ For the next six days I can just sing! I don't have to think about this till next Friday morning! —Although I suppose I might tell Nadia. Maybe. Possibly.

‡‡‡ Oh, I was going to show you my new yarn, speaking of Geekiness, various. Tomorrow. . . .

Why I love Hampshire

 

Highlights from this morning's hurtle:

Oooh.

Aaah.

Mmmm.

Oooh. Aaah.

Mmmhmmm.

 

It's been pretty much a repeat, with more roses, of yesterday.* The mud, the blood, the screaming. I've bashed and slashed through enough of the back jungle at the cottage that I'm entertaining delusions of plunging into the central jungle, the jungle from which three minotaurs, six Midgard Serpents, and a special-delivery driver who pissed me off once too often, have disappeared, never to return,*** and finding the Fountain of Youth. I know I left it around here somewhere.† Gardens: the original Tardis(es). After six years here it amazes me what you can cram into a space not much bigger than a pudding-basin if you're ruthless enough. Meanwhile there are advantages to claustrophobia: The entire—tiny, walled—Tardis smells of Agnes; it's extraordinary;** you open the kitchen door and it's all about your early yellow rose. Lots and lots of your early yellow rose. But elsewhere Mme Alfred Carriere—the three-storey one working on swallowing my neighbour—is coming out, and the first Fantin Latour is open, with 1,000,000 to come; ditto the first Sombreuil; and the Fru is dazzlingly full out:  a large silvery-pink hummock with delivery-driver-noshing thorns.

And I think I mentioned yesterday that Souvenir de la Malmaison, my palest-pink bête noir, is cracking? Souvenir, for whom the merest hint of precipitation causes total wild-abandon-type breakdown, manifested by brown, rotten, balled flowers? And have I mentioned that we haven't had any rain to speak of in about two months? It's supposed to rain this weekend.

Souvenir in consultation with the weather gods

* * *

* Including the emergency summit with Niall. Sigh. Turned laptop on. Opened Abel, the Grand Old Personage of bell ringing software^, to look up a frelling method that Niall had been talking about^^ and the exact same cock-up as yesterday occurred—the cock-up that had also refused to reoccur yesterday when Niall had come round to help. ARRRGH. I happened to know that Niall was working from home today^^^ so I phoned him and he tried not to laugh and said, bring it over. Now? I said. Yes, said Niall: I'll put the kettle on.^^^^ So I unplugged it and put it carefully, still open to Abel and the Cock Up, on the passenger seat of Wolfgang, and drove over to Niall's. Where we, which is to say Niall, got the cock-up sorted almost immediately~ but I was still there almost an hour and a half because the only reason I have not been outed as a total drooling bell geek~~ is because I can hide in Niall's shadow, who is a worse one. Also Niall knows that my Not Very Secret Goal is to ring Yorkshire on handbells~~~ and so he was taking the opportunity to sketch out a study schedule. . . .

^ I think. It's certainly the only one that anyone around here had ever heard of a decade-plus ago when I was trying to learn to ring the first time. Hey, I remember Abel on DOS. Although Abel is now much shinier. And more complicated. And easier to get wrong, although reassuringly harder to do anything irrevocably awful. You were always within a hair's-breadth of the final apocalypse, on DOS.+

+ Speaking of Apocalypse, aka Pooka, aka my iPhone, I've just been having a conversation with Blogmom about bloody formatting, and what it does to you whether you want it to or not, especially lately with WordPress' latest update and Word's manifest disinclination to cooperate ARRRRRRRRRGH, and that on the subject of two spaces after a period/full stop I might as well go quietly, because a single space is now standard usage. I DON'T WANT TO. I LEARNT TWO SPACES AND I WANT TWO SPACES. I even use two spaces at the end of a sentence on Twitter, if I have spaces to spare. Texting on Pooka—you can tell me if this is generically true: I've only learnt to text recently—if you want a full stop, you click two spaces, and it adds punctuation and auto-caps your next letter. BUT IT ONLY INSERTS ONE SPACE. Rotten tease.

^^ The sad fact that I clearly am going to learn to ring Cambridge on handbells, although it may take me a little while, is giving Niall dreadful ideas.

^^^ Because the clutch on his car, the Other Least Prepossessing Car in Hampshire, decided that it had had one handbell peal too many last night, and died messily.

^^^^ I not only drink too much tea, everyone I know knows I drink too much tea.

~ Whereupon the question becomes why did it go away yesterday? —And I'm not giving you the details not to save me humiliation but because they're boring.

~~ Although I realise some of you suspect the truth.  Which is that I am several kinds of total drooling geek.

~~~ Which requires four/eight, which is why we need Wild Robert.

** I meant to count exactly how many flowers she has out.  I'll do it tomorrow.  If I remember.

*** Excellent fertilizer.

† Also, Alicia is going to be here next week. Eeeep. She gardens, you know.

Gardening update

Carnaval (sic) de Nice. Very, um, nice

I had a long, glorious (messy, painful*) afternoon in the cottage's garden.** I'm still (just about) in that delightful if self-deluding phase early in the gardening year when you think you're going to get it RIGHT this year. I was hacking back and clearing out and tying up and rearranging ( . . . pots) like someone who (a) had a clue and (b) had a prayer.

 

I told you Agnes was about to be amazing. Here she is, being amazing. Impossible to get in a photo--barring perhaps a helicopter and a very long rope ladder--but she's got about forty flowers out. No, really.

 

. . . and a dark red one or two. No, that's Souvenir du Dr Jamain. And she really is this colour: dark, dark red. Never let them tell you you can't grow full-size roses in pots. LOOK AT ALL THOSE BIG FAT RED BUDS.

I think this is my third try to grow her. Maybe fourth. She keeps dying. I finally got cranky and put her in a pot two years ago where I can keep an eye on her. She was good last year . . . but she's better this year. I just keep feeding her like crazy. And offering extra-tasty sacrifices to the rose gods.

You can see some of the boreal wind-shredding here. But she's still amazing. And have I mentioned she smells DIVINE? (So does Dr J.)

           However I have discovered a new use for knitting—I mean a new little irritating waste of time yarned over by having some needles handy: waiting while the frelling watering can fills. Arrrgh. The drought and the evil wind continue, although the evil wind is subsiding, having knocked down my delphiniums and petal-shredded my roses.*** The back garden is so—ahem—densely planted that it is a kind of self-mulching situation, and I have to water every damn thing in a pot slightly less often than you might think. And watering the back is fairly straightforward: I leave the tap running into the plastic half-barrel and run back and forth with cans. It's a lot of work—and BOOOOORING—but it's easy.

             The front of the house including the two stairs have to be watered every day because it's all individual pots on pavement and the cul de sac the cottage is on tends to be a bit of a wind tunnel the way the little inter-house space behind my greenhouse is a major if miniature wind tunnel. There is no way to do this watering gracefully. I can use the same tap-and-water-barrel system except it involves running around the house, through two gates and the greenhouse, which is a dangerous obstacle course when you're carrying heavy watering cans, and down the side steps, which are steeper than the front-door steps and railing-free.  The alternative is to carry watering cans through the house—the tap and plastic barrel are at the kitchen door—across the kitchen floor, which (somehow) invariably means mud and water all over the kitchen floor as well as negotiating two doors and a hellhound gate and the hellhounds themselves, who find the process interesting. ARRRGH. And the alternative to that is to fill one nice clean lives-under-the-kitchen-table watering can, easily manipulated because you still have a hand free, at the indoor tap in the kitchen sink. It takes a little longer but there is (generally) less bad language. This would be the preferred method but for the BOOOOOREDOM of standing there waiting for the tap to fill.

             I don't wait any more! And I get a row of hellhound blanket done about once every two cans! It's a brilliant system!

* * *

* Souvenir (de la Malmaison, the demon-curst) managed to stick me in the forehead with such unrestrained glee that I had blood pouring into that eye—it stings—and when I got indoors to clean it off I was too filthy to go upstairs where there's a mirror over the sink and it still took me several minutes to get my hands sufficiently scoured at the kitchen sink to deal with the situation—by which time I had said YAAAAAH and simply put my head under the tap, which then meant I had a wet sweatshirt to get out of. . . .

** Barring an embarrassing little visit from Niall. I'm learning Cambridge minor on handbells, right? Ewwww. Gruesome. Bell methods break down into leads, which are, at least in all the methods I'm ever going to ring, defined by when the treble gets back to the front and, er, leads. As you're struggling with a ratbag method, you will be getting a little farther and a little farther into it before you inexorably break down and have to start over. At some point it would be very helpful not to have to go back to the beginning every time. But—woe, woe—the iPhone bell ap won't let you start anywhere but the beginning. Anguish.^ So, trembling with dread and loathing, I fired up the big-daddy full-computer bell programme—which I have never got on with, but it lets you start at any lead you like—on my laptop and . . .

             It refused to work.

              AAAAAAAUGH.

              So I emailed Niall, who said he could stop by on his way to ring another handbell peal in Havisham Wedlock or some such outlandish place this evening and sort it out.

                And the frelling bell programme worked perfectly. We didn't do anything different than what I'd done earlier!^^ He did show me how to start on different leads however.^^^

^ And brickbats to the designer. Who I'm going to argue with about this.

^^ It was probably just responding to the presence of someone who has rung hundreds of hours on its clone. Which means when I try it again. . . .

^^^ But see previous sub-footnote.

***This sort of thing always reminds me of opening our garden on the National Garden Scheme at the old house: Weather Terror was always extreme, since—say—an unseasonable (but perfectly possible) hailstorm the day before an opening could totally wreck your garden. I love delphiniums, and they are fabulous with roses, but they are so fragile. And even the tough stuff is not going to be looking its best after several tons of ice crystals the size of quadruple-ought buckshot have been dumped on it.

 
 

 

THOR

 

Peter and I went to see a film this evening.  In a theatre.  Don't fall off your chairs or anything.  I suppose my resistance is down from all the time I've spent in the same cinema lately watching people sing in inappropriate and unflattering close up.*  But Peter is still recuperating from the after-effects of that fall, and I worry that he should get out more.  Since one of the things keeping him at home is the fear of upsetting an outing for other people by not being able to sit still comfortably I figured we needed back row aisle seats to a nice stupid noisy movie, so we wouldn't care if we had to leave, and no one else would notice if we did.

            THOR is getting good reviews as a cheerful monster park-your-brain Marvel-comic non-stop-action blockbuster** so I thought, perfect.***  Informed Peter I was taking him to a film, and booked.  And we didn't have to leave early.  Which is the good and the bad news.

            It may be the worst movie I've ever seen.  Granted there is some stiff competition.  But it's certainly in the top ten.  No, five.  No, three.  No . . . tonight, having just wobbled† home from the thing, which stole about four skeins' worth of good yarn money from me . . . it is the worst movie I have ever seen.  WORST.  Oh, and speaking of the ticket price:  I hate 3D.  I hate 3D.  It's not 3D in any convincing, realistic or even particularly entertaining way:  sure, when someone sticks a sword at you, it looks like it's coming out of the screen over the heads of the audience in front of you.  I don't need to spend an extra £2 per for this, including wearing a pair of heavy, insanely uncomfortable glasses over my own.  My nose isn't long enough, and the tops of my ears bruise easily.  GAAH.  And the rest of the time the '3D' breaks up to a greater or lesser extent into what looks like a bigger, waaaay more expensive version of those cardboard tableaux a few people who are as old as I am may remember making when they were kids:  You cut a viewing window out of the narrow end of a shoebox, and painstakingly create a 3D scene inside it, with cardboard and coloured cellophane and crayons and Scotch tape and so on.  Then you peer in the window and hope you will grow up soon so you can get a life.

            What can I tell you that isn't spoilery?  Why on earth†† did Kenneth Branagh want to do this rubbish?  I'm not a Branagh fan either, but he appears to have a brain, he can certainly act, and he's been involved in a lot of really interesting stuff.  Too many late nights, Branagh, honey, you're losing your edge.  Although since people seem to be liking THOR . . . well, I never had any edge to lose, and I should be beyond being surprised when popular acclaim and I march in opposite directions.  And I confess I don't get the hunk thing.  Chris Hemsworth—who plays Thor—is a snore.  He looks like a Chippendale escapee, and this is not a compliment.  But I don't like the super-cut, gym-bunny look.  We've had this conversation, haven't we?  I can't remember what heartthrob I was animadverting last time.  But I like muscles that look like they got there because they're used, not only because your personal trainer raised your reps again.  Hemsworth is so cut he looks plastic.

            Which makes him superbly suited for the plastic 3D master thwack-'em and thwack-'em blow-out that is THOR.  I'm also reading reviews about how terrific the special effects are and how gorgeous Asgard and Niflheim (?) are.  No.  Wrong.  Ugh.  Asgard looks like the more-money-than-sense fantasy version of those whopping Publishers Clearing House houses—are they still around?—with the Tudor half-timbering, the Greek Revival columns and the mansard roof all on the same building.  Oh, and crenellations.  And chimney pots.  What you might call the Very Expensive Cheap Nonsensical style.  Ugh.  And the Frost Giants' land is just murky.  And the 3D doesn't help.

            Sigh.  Plot?  One of those we-don't-need-a-writer plots.  Hey, it's mythology, it's all epic and out of copyright.  Father has two sons.†††  One of them is blond and charming.  The other one is dark and plotting.  Elder one loses his temper—in a blond, manly, charming sort of way of course—once too often‡ and is banned, more in sorrow than in anger, by dad.  Who then goes into a coma for obscure reasons, except that this allows the dark plotting son to get all darker and plottier.  Okay, look away now if you could possibly care less.  Pick-your-cliché follows.

            Elder son plunges to earth as a kind of meteorite with a bizarre event horizon, and is promptly run over by cute young female scientist who is out careening across the desert in the middle of the night searching for bizarre event horizons. ‡‡  Elder son's famous hammer is tossed over the edge by sorrowful/angry dad too, and lands a few miles away, and is instant centre of activity by a Men in Black gang . . . who barely frelling notice Thor himself.  Thor of course has to stage a Daring Raid to get his hammer back and when it fails‡‡‡ they let him go and as he's sauntering back out of this major top security area they've established he just happens to pick up the cute scientist's crucial notebook, the Men in Black having confiscated all her gear—it's just lying there and he picks it up and walks away with it and no one stops him.

            Do I really have to tell you any more?  No?  Good.  I'm going to bed.

* * * 

*Nadia says there should be a law against filming singers closer than twelve feet.  Upon reflection I think this is still too close.  First row of the stalls from the far side of the orchestra pit, say.  

** Peter and I have this little problem about agreeing on a film.   Noisy FX SF silliness is usually our best compromise. 

*** Although my track record with Marvel-into-movies is not too excellent.  Barring that I love love love the first two BLADEs (the less said about the third the better), which are among my guilty pleasures, I'm pretty unngh about the ones I've seen.  First X Men was reasonably amusing.^  I was annoyed that THE FANTASTIC FOUR was such a pulpy mess, because the comic had been one of the few I had defied parental ban to read hiding behind the shelves at the drugstore, ditto disappointed that ELEKTRA was such a bust since finally it's a girl.  And I liked the first IRON MAN.  For the rest . . . meh. 

^ Read:  Hugh Jackman is amusing. 

† Films don't have reels any more, right?  So can you say reeled home from a film without everyone groaning? 

†† Or Asgard 

††† Note that even Anthony Hopkins as Odin can't save this one.  Usually I find Hopkins to be one of those actors who confers dignity on anything by his mere presence.  Not this time. 

‡ WTF did he think he was going to accomplish by barging off to exchange pleasantries with the Frost Giants anyway?  Him and his four chums:  including the token Asian and the token girl.  The tokenism of this film is particularly gruesome.  The token black appears as Asgard's gatekeeper.  And the token over-forty-year-old woman appears as Renee Russo as Frigga.  Oh, and what I was saying about not hiring a writer?  This lack lends itself to spectacular tin-eared-ness such as one of the chums saying to one of the other minor leads–both of them standing in a timeless hall of Asgard, mind you–after the other minor lead may (or may not) have just lost a family member: 'I'm so sorry for your loss.'  GAAAAAAAAH. 

‡‡ There is absolutely no sense to our hero's reactions to present-day New Mexico:  to what he understands and what he doesn't.^  This is one of the things that loses the movie absolutely for me. 

^ And what is that mushy accent he has?  

‡‡‡ Predictably, because we have to have the Jesus/Aslan moment later on.  GAAAAAAAAH.

Singing and Belling

 

First voice lesson in three weeks today.  Insert sound of rusty gate here.  Oh dear.  I know I went for several months without a teacher telling me what to do and how to do it* between Blondel and Nadia** but I really noticed reverting this time.  The (written) notes I had (finally) begun taking during my lesson became mere silly words on a page again*** and I was singing like any other plebeian/rusty gate.  One of the purposes—at least for me—of any lessons is to keep the student up to the mark;  even if you don't need the teaching per se you know you're going to have to face your teacher.  I find however that I am absolutely dependent on Nadia† to do anything beyond merely learning the notes, and since I'm mostly singing folk songs at the moment†† that means . . . dependent.  So I go in there and she tells me to drop my jaw and straighten my spine and suddenly I sound about 156% better than I did warming up at home this morning, or for the last three weeks.  How does she do that?  And when do I start being able to do some of it for myself?

            And then . . . there were handbells.  It's a long story, made longer by the fact that all three of the principals—Niall, Wild Robert, and I—are space cadets, in each our different ways.  Anyway, Colin is away on a ringing tour, so there is no Colin tower practise tonight, and I had the bright idea to hook Wild Robert into some handbells since I'd be out there anyway having a voice lesson with his sister, which only left Niall, who you can pretty well assume will cross burning abysses and tie knots in the necks of hydras to ring some unscheduled handbells.  In practise this meant that I went from one terrifying brain-melt activity to another with no break.  If we do this again I want a break.  Fifteen minutes and some nice soothing yarn.  Gaaah. 

             It was worth it though.  We rang Cambridge.  And it was even worth ringing horrible Cambridge watching Wild Robert go wrong.  It does fascinate me, these ringing whizzes, Colin and Wild Robert, struggling with handbells:  Wild Robert can keep five people who don't know how to ring Grandsire doubles††† ringing Grandsire in the tower—I should know, it's how I learnt Grandsire doubles—but he has to think about it, ringing a mere two handbells.  Granted Cambridge minor is a much grislier challenge than Grandsire doubles . . . even so.  Gods are not supposed to have weaknesses:  gods are not supposed to perform miracles on a sliding scale, you know?  You're either frelling omnipotent or you aren't.  Heh heh heh heh.  Mind you, my Cambridge is a wretched limping discordant thing, but then I'm performing my own little miracle by ringing it at all.  Poor Niall with two of us going walkabout on him was failing to keep order . . . but I was actually enjoying being in the middle of the fray instead of the heavy drag on the end of the line holding everyone else back. 

             We have a rematch on Thursday.  I wonder if there's any chance of ensnaring Wild Robert into coming to our Thursday handbells after Colin gets home?  Then we could ring major again.  It's just that Wild Robert has always been very resistant to handbells . . . I'm afraid to push it for fear whatever it is deluding him into this uncharacteristic interest will go away again. . . .     

* * *

* One of Nadia's profusion of virtues is that she's another horsey girl.  Although she owned her own horse when she was a teenager, and I therefore hate her.  But all those insane, frequently counter-intuitive metaphors for riding are therefore available for the insane, frequently counter-intuitive business of singing.  There are more parallels than you might think—any of you out there who don't have experience of both singing and riding—between the voice you're trying to sing with and the horse you're trying to ride.  You may have some inkling of its talent and its temper, but it will react in unexpected and frequently enigmatic ways, and it will frequently be possessed by demons you don't even have names for.  At least the horse you (probably) bed down in a nice stable and leave.  Your voice comes with you.  Your own personal little conundrum.  Waiting to confuse the gorblimey out of you the next time you open your mouth.

** Never mind the fifty-seven years before either of them

*** And then there are the ones that aren't silly so much as too scary:  sing without piano more says a note from last time, it breaks up concentration.  But—but—but—no piano?  What am I supposed to hide behind?

            This is so the great revelation about singing.  It gets you where you live.  I've said this before, haven't I?  It's just . . . gibber gibber gibber gibber.  Even down here at my dweeb entry level the quality of the notes your singing teacher can winkle out of you is in direct proportion to your willingness/ability to let your frelling guard down. 

† As I was pretty nearly entirely dependent on Jenny and my riding lessons.  Sure, I could ride—better than I can sing, having done a lot more of it, including having had a lot more riding lessons—but to get anywhere, I needed Jenny's eye and input.  I don't know if this says something really embarrassing about my lack of practical/productive relationship with my own physical self, or whether it's more about how acquisition of skill happens.  Once you can read, you don't need any more reading lessons, you chiefly just need to read.^  But there is no dictionary for live things—horses, voices.  Experience and empathy aren't just interesting adjuncts—as in a discussion about different readers' reactions to the same book—but absolutely crucial to progress.  Unless you're the kind of genius who makes the how-to-progress stuff up in the first place, and there ain't none of them here, boss. 

^ Although this is a bit of a rant of mine+:  You do need to read.  There's an infinite difference between basic literacy and being able to read.  Back in the days when I still did school visits I used to say this to the kids:  I don't care if you get A-pluses on the quizzes from your textbooks.  To extract some fraction of the amazing riches available to you via the printed word . . . you have to read till the effort of reading is second nature to you—no, first nature, like breathing.  And then you have to . . . keep reading.

+ There are so many  

†† It is very pleasing, when you say you're studying voice, and people ask you what you're singing, and you say, oh, Britten and Beethoven and Vaughan Williams, when what you mean is folk songs. 

††† Ie five people who don't know what they're doing, and Wild Robert

Rain and drama

 

I was lying WIDE AWAKE in bed last night.*  The alarm was going to go off in about four and a half hours and I was not in a good mood.  And I was listening to the wind and the rain lashing the cottage** and thinking about little green things in pots balanced on walls and shelves outdoors:  a perfectly good system in calm weather but not so good when Eurus is playing silly buggers.  Or maybe Boreas.  Anyway I was lying there thinking about turning the light back on*** and worrying about my little green things.  Eventually I did turn the light back on . . . and went downstairs (grumbling), put my raincoat on† and went out to rescue the pots that sit on the little walls between the greenhouse and the stairs at the side of my house.  For some reason that tiny area is a total wind tunnel.  You'd think the greenhouse would break it up, but the house walls on either side are two—or three, counting slanty-roofed attics—high, and if anything the single-storey greenhouse seems to focus any wandering wind, or maybe just irritate it, so it curls up over the greenhouse and then comes down with an extra-heavy slam on the far side. 

            I was right to worry;  one of the pots had already gone over the edge—and of course the torch in my pocket didn't feel like working†† at 4 o'clock in the morning so I was on my (bare) knees, patting around for the frelling thing—found it.  Out of its pot and gasping.  I carefully got the other ones down off the walls and safely (well, relatively safely) on the ground, and then took my invalid indoors and dripped across the kitchen††† to put it in the sink, which I'm afraid is what I usually do with injured or orphan plants:  there isn't anywhere to put a scullery at the cottage even if I could afford more frelling builders.  I then went back to bed in the warm (if rather damp) glow of paranoia justified‡ and lay awake some more, listening to the wind yowl and the rain drum against the windows with tiny fists.  Eventually the alarm went off. . . .

            With the result that I am not at my best and brightest today.  My little green invalid is chirpy as frell, and I put it outdoors again, in the back garden this time, where it can tell the recently potted-on and impressionable young fuchsias about its adventures.  After all the noise we did not, after all, have much rain;   enough, I thought, staring owlishly at my rain gauge, to let me get away with not watering my pots today.  Peter and I went to a National-Garden-Scheme open garden‡‡ this afternoon:  very large, very grand, very beautiful . . . and it chiefly made me want to come home and rootle around in my own tiny messy crowded space.  Which is just as well because with this frelling drying wind I had to water my pots after all.  Sigh. 

* * *

* The joys of menopausal insomnia.^  Not.  Also I was still high on Il Trovatore.  Today, however, I am cranky.^^  And one infinitesimal supplementary indignation is that while only a few people have posted to last night's forum thread—which in itself is fine:  some things get forum members stirred up and some don't—but I've had more than the usual number of emails about it.  Anyone who wants to say something genuinely private, yes, I'd rather you emailed me^^^ but for the rest of you . . . opera isn't highbrow, okay?  You do not need a PhD in musicology to have an opinion.  You don't even need to be a professional musician.  You can just like it for the noise.  And you can say so on the forum.  

^ I will be fifty nine in six months.  When do I get to be OVER menopause?  When does that fabulous free less-crazed-by-tidal-hormones post-menstrual era begin?  Hey?  And meanwhile, are there any other Old People out there getting on with their lives, thank you very much, who find the amortal thing ANNOYING?  http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,2065156,00.html

http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2011/may/01/live-long-join-the-immortals 

So much of it is frelling luck.  Who doesn't keep on keeping on if they can?  And sure, you can—probably—improve your odds if you eat your vegetables and get your sleep+ and find stuff that keeps you interested and people you want to go on talking to—and if you're very, very wealthy you can have not only your own personal trainer but your own plastic surgeon, and your own private spring water flown in daily from Peru where any ovenbird or cock of the rock caught defecating in your spring is prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.   But I'm old enough by now to know a lot of people who've been felled by nothing more than bad luck:  everyone makes mistakes, and sometimes you make a mistake that your particular manifestation of your particular gene pool is vulnerable to, and it nails you.  Or maybe you're just in the wrong place at the wrong time.  And sometimes there's no discernable reason.  You just go down.  And these people who brag about being exactly the same as they were when they were teenagers?  They're bragging about this?  This is pathetic.  And the whole 'sixty is the new forty' or what-have-you?  What utter feckless crap.  Years mark you, so if you have any brains at all you will seek some use and/or satisfaction out of the inevitable scars and accumulation of experience—which will then make it easier to put the frell up with the sheer unadulterated, mitigation-less crap about getting older—including grief for the friends you've lost to that old bastard Death.  Who is probably laughing his ugly ass off at this quaint new fashion concept of amortality. 

+ supposing you can do that 

^^ When am I never not cranky?

^^^ Hey McKinley remember snogging through the last three acts of that interminable brain-suck Les Troyens thirty years ago?  Erm.  Can I say 'no'?+

+ Besides, I think it was Prokofiev's War and Peace.

**This is one of my standard silly stories of minor tribulations, but I've been reading the news reports about the tornadoes in the southern United States.  I know we've got at least a few forum members and I don't know how many blog readers from that area.  I tweeted a day or two ago that I was lighting candles for you.  I hope, pointlessly, that anyone reading this blog is warm, safe and happy, and that those dear to them are too.   A ridiculous wish, given the state of the world—and human nature—but it's the direction I'd like to see this planet spinning in, about tornadoes in Alabama and war zones in Syria and everything else that's sad and wrong. 

*** I'm rereading E Nesbit's THE PHOENIX AND THE CARPET.  What a total charmer.  

† Faint—very faint—rustling from the hellhound crate.  This was hellhounds burrowing farther under their bedding and hoping I didn't have any weird plans for them. 

†† Very like the torch in my knapsack last night at the opera when just before the lights went down I dropped a knitting needle.  Anguish unrestrained.  This was one of my precious rosewood needles, which are my favourite.^  So I was down on my hands and (denim) knees patting blindly around the floor under my seat and moaning, and after about two minutes the woman behind me said brightly, Have you lost something?  —I did find it.  And a good thing too since this was the beginning, and I still had an entire intermission to get through.  But I may have to revert to circular needles.  Shudder.  The idea of losing . . .  

^ Not only because of their name. 

††† Paralytic silence from hellhound crate 

‡ Or it may just have been another godsblasted menopausal flush 

‡‡ http://www.ngs.org.uk/

Il Trovatore

 

Tonight's Il Trovatore Live from the Met was a peak experience.  It was amazing. 

          It was also in a lot of ways a paradigm of a certain kind of opera—which is to say, I guess, a Verdi opera;  I'm such a Verdi-as-opera-touchstone girl I have difficulty separating this bias out.  Much as I love The Marriage of Figaro or the Barber of Seville—or Lucia—or Gounod's Faust, which I'm assured is a low taste—if you say 'opera' to me, I think Verdi.  And I think a particular little handful of Verdi too:  La Trav[iata], Otello, Rigoletto, Aida (with Simon B, several versions of Don C, Ernani—whose plot may be even more ridiculous than the Troubadour's—La Forza, Un Ballo, Macbeth* following on their heels before anything else, pretty much, gets a look-in).  And Il Trovatore.  The old war horses.  The real old war horses.

            I was tweeting about this earlier:  the problem with old war horses, especially an old war horse with one of the silliest plots ever to survive long enough to be set to music**, is that opera producers too often think they have to do something new and exciting.  No.  Wrong.  We're here to listen to the music.  We don't want to be blistered with fury or dismay by some frelling and distracting staging.  I've seen a few of these creative Trovatores, and they were not happy experiences.  Whoever was responsible here*** mostly left us alone to concentrate on the music, although I thought that the large scraggy symbolic figures being crucified, garrotted and (presumably) burnt at the stake were superfluous. 

            But . . . the singing.  Golly.  The first soloist isn't even one of the Big Four† and I was listening to him and thinking are the stars going to live up to this guy?  . . . Yes.  These are all big glorious heroic Verdi voices and each of the four of them made my skin prickle and the hair on the back of my neck rise ††—and reminds me, I suppose, of why I'm a Verdi girl in the first place.  This music, um, speaks to me—all the passion and melodrama and insanity.  These people are all driven mad by their feelings.  I like that.  And this is what I mean about paradigm:  when it's performed this well you can really see/hear/feel/experience what grand opera can give you—which is one hell of a rush.  And way cheaper than cocaine.†††

            But part of the paradigm is what it isn't as well as what it is.  It isn't realistic.  It isn't a barrel of laughs.  It requires you to buy in to the set up, and let the music glissando you over the improbabilities.  It requires you to like the sound of trained operatic voices.  I feel about people who don't rather the way I feel about people who can't read Tolkien:  I kind of know what you're talking about, but I feel really sorry for you.  And it also requires you to sit quietly in a chair for three and a half hours (including one intermission) next to some moron rattling his programme.‡

            And it probably isn't particularly well acted.  I'm not sure this isn't inherent in the music somehow however, or at least in how the composer has treated the libretto.  Serious Verdi arias are long.  Even in an excellent La Trav, for example, you have to get through that scene where Alfredo finds out Violetta has left him, and his dad starts singing to him about coming home to his family.  Really bad timing, Dad!  And there's nothing for Alfredo to do while Dad sings a show-stopper but clutch himself and look sulky.  It's a long time to have to stand on a stage clutching yourself and looking sulky while the other guy gets the spotlight.‡‡  A lot of standard-rep operatic comedies—including Marriage of Figaro and the Barber—need acting singers, and while they fall flat if they don't get them, when they do get them they can be a deliciously smooth and brilliant ride. ‡‡‡  Verdi§ requires a slightly more specialised mindset, and the disbelief you have to suspend weighs more.§§

            Tonight's Trovatore wasn't particularly well acted.§§§  There are kind of a lot of fabulous arias where everyone else has to stand around looking stuffed till they're over—in fact are better off if they're allowed to stand around looking stuffed, possibly including the one or ones doing the priority singing;  both dopey busyness and making someone who can't sing and act at the same time pretend to act is a lot worse than the old-fashioned walk to x marks the spot on stage, wave your arms, and sing system.   Get that soprano off her knees.  Tell the tenor to stop shaking his shaggy locks for pity's sake. We're here for the music, you know?  Bring back semi-staged concert opera.  It'll also be cheaper. #

            But.  Whatever.  It's easier to talk about the stuff that isn't transporting you to a higher realm of being than the stuff that is.  I loved tonight's Il Trovatore.  If you want to try a Verdi opera and they repeat this one somewhere near you, go for it.  http://www.metoperafamily.org/uploadedFiles/TROVATORE.HD.synopsis.DATES.pdf ##

 * * *

* No, not Falstaff.  Even Verdi can't rescue that grotesque old cretin.  I know that a lot of people think it's Verdi's best work.  Not in my ears.  I do, however, have a soft spot for Stiffelio. 

** What was Verdi thinking of?  He was not generally known for suffering fools gladly.  Nor was he notorious for punctilious politeness to his librettists.

*** Production:  David McVicar;  set designer:  Charles Edwards

† Renee Fleming, who still hasn't lost that dress designer, was the introducer again tonight, and repeated the famous old quote about Trovatore, that it's a very easy opera to do, all you need is the best four singers in the world.

†† I can nitpick.  The soprano's top end shows some strain, and the mezzo isn't bonkers enough.  The mezzo is the gypsy who threw the wrong baby into the fire under the stress of a hallucinatory memory of her mum being burnt at the stake, and is a trifle haunted.  Verdi almost named the opera after her instead of the troubadour, and it really does pretty much begin and end with her—especially end.  But she spends the entire opera being more or less off her face, and it needs to show more.

††† At least the cinema version is cheaper.  Although at least going to the Met in person is legal.

‡ I'm getting used to explaining that I'm making a dog blanket.  I'm also becoming notorious as the Woman Who Knits.  I am increasingly nonplussed that knitting isn't catching on as an intermission activity.  I was sure by the end of the season we'd all be knitting.  And all that's happening is that more and more people are coming up to me and saying, I saw you at Don Carlo/Lucia/Capriccio, didn't I?  What do you think of this one?  And, occasionally:  how's the dog blanket coming? 

‡‡ Although Alfredo is a major asshole, so frell him.  But this is almost in the contract, that the tenor is an asshole.  It's amazing how many lead tenors are.  Manrico, tonight, the troubadour of the title, is an asshole.  Edgardo, from Lucia, is another one.  They're always shaking their shaggy locks, leaping to conclusions, and having tantrums.  Give me the baritone.  In this case . . . yes please.  http://www.hvorostovsky.com/en/   Mmmmmm.  In the tenors' defence of course they are written that way, and like the heroine having the vapours, the tenors' tantrums are usually crucial to the plot [sic]. 

‡‡‡ Which is also why a good Figaro or Barber is a good place to start with an opera newbie. 

§ And, worse, Wagner, who I'm still working on 

§§ I'd also hazard that comedy is somehow allowed to be implausible in a way that tragedy isn't. 

§§§ I think the only one of tonight's Big Four who has any apparent gleam of acting ability is the baritone.  But that may be because I think he's cute.  Or possibly because, as the villain, all he has to do is look evil and shifty.  None of this sympathetic twaddle.  

# Which is not to say that none of the stage business worked.  There is a very creepy and effective business at the end for example:  Manrico has rushed away from his hasty battlefield wedding to Leonora to save his mum, who has stupidly allowed herself to be captured by the enemy.^  Just before they parted he took off his long military-style coat and draped it round her.  After he's captured, she's still wearing it when she goes to offer herself to the evil Count in exchange for Manrico's life.  The evil Count accepts . . . and lasciviously takes her coat off. ^^ 

^ One of the reasons I find every Azucena I've ever seen frustrating is that I think there's a strong argument that everything that happens in the opera is directly her doing—which would mean that she let herself be captured.  

^^ Mind you I'd take the Count over that twit of a tenor any day.  Ahem.  And, all right, I'm Count-obsessed, but what I was saying about acting, and about the built-in difficulty of acting within a grand opera framework:  the Count has an aria, very famous, very beautiful, about his frustrated love, which is to say lust, for Leonora:  Il balen.   For the duration of that aria, the Count turns into another person—a softer, sadder, non-villainous person.  Some Counts do this better than others.  Tonight's did it extremely well.  But I would think that, wouldn't I? 

## US encore 18 May.  Make a note.