Robin McKinley's Blog, page 135

Steps on the way to bee-keeping I (guest post by AJLR)

I've always liked bees – whether of the bumble or honey variety. Four or five years ago I started thinking seriously about becoming a bee-keeper but apart from collecting a few books and reading more about it, in a desultory sort of way, I hadn't got much further. Working full-time for an organisation tends to leave relatively few day-time hours to do one's own things in and I knew I'd want to do it properly if I did it at all. Then, from about the same time, there seemed to be more and more news headlines appearing about the ways in which bees of all species were suffering from the cocktail of noxious chemicals we seem to pour over so many things these days, plus the spread of things like the Varroa mite and its baggage of viruses, not to mention the ways in which a lot of commercial bee-farmers appeared to treat the poor creatures. I found myself thinking more and more about what would be involved if I were to take up bee-keeping now rather than when I retired from a full-time day job in a relatively short number of years. Not – of course – that one person extra taking up bee-keeping is going to have any effect on the overall situation but I wanted to understand more and perhaps become involved in some small way. Plus there was a possible beneficial by-product – honey!

So last summer, after lots of musing and kicking ideas around, I was not altogether surprised when my husband suddenly announced that as part of my birthday present he'd bought me a 'hands-on afternoon' with a lady who runs a local bee-keeping business. And it was great – as you can see from the smile on my face in the photo below.

The bees didn't worry me, I moved quietly and gently as instructed, the bee-keeping lady said I was a 'natural' at it (still not sure why – perhaps she says that to most people :)).

After such a positive experience I was very keen finally to get started. The university where I'm based offered me some space for a hive or two*, out on the edge of the campus near the kitchen-garden scheme I'm involved with, and the Students' Union offered to buy a hives' worth of equipment provided that some students could have the chance to become involved if they wished. All that remained was for me to start learning the skills of a bee-keeper…

The first thing one does in such a situation, naturally, is try to involve one's partner in the work. Luckily, my husband had no objections (he's a retired ecologist and wildlife conservation worker), and so we went happily off to do the theory part of the local Bee-keeping Association's** beginners' course in February this year. Two very full days later, we collapsed at home with our brains seething with information about honey bees and bee-keeping generally. Allow me to share a little of this with you:

Worker bees born during the spring and summer live for about six weeks, whereas those born in the autumn usually live about six months as they don't have such a punishing schedule of daily nectar collection (all bees keeping to the hive, for warmth, during winter);
It's the youngest bees, up to an age of about three weeks, who produce wax for the comb, feed the brood of unhatched larvae, clean up generally, tend the queen, produce royal jelly, ventilate the hive, etc. After that age they go out on nectar/pollen collecting flights and keep doing that until they die;


The concept of 'bee-space' was formalised by the Reverend Lorenzo Lorraine Langstroth (1810-1895), a native of Philadelphia, who discovered through observation that honey-bees need a depth of around 1 cm to move around in and that they won't build comb in, or block with propolis, that minimum space. This fact made it possible to structure and build the first fully modern bee-hives, with frames inside that are moveable and can be taken out individually to check for diseases or other problems affecting a hive, extract honey, and check that you have an active laying queen. In most of the thousands of years before this that humans had been working with honey-bees it had been the practice to kill all the bees in a hive or skep in order to extract the honey and wax;
All modern hives now follow the same general  internal structure, although they come in a number of external shapes and depths. Most in the US are apparently of a rectangular shape, named after Langstroth, while others – mostly square in shape – widely used in the UK and other countries are the National, the Commercial, the WBC, the Modified Dadant…the list goes on;
A fully-active hive will, in a good summer, produce between 30 and 100 pounds of honey;
A queen honey-bee goes out on one mating flight, about a week to 10 days after she hatched. Provided that the flight is a good one and she mates several times during it, she can lay c.180,000 fertilised eggs over the next three years, using sperm she has kept stored within her body;
Worker bees die after stinging something but the queen doesn't as her sting isn't barbed and so can be retracted back into her body. Drones (males) do not have a sting;
One of the ways in which bee-keepers monitor the numbers of the Varroa mite is by dusting the bees occasionally with a little icing/confectioners' sugar – as the bees comb themselves to clean this off they also tend to dislodge the mites, which then fall through a special wire mesh-covered Varroa floor the keeper has put in at the bottom of the hive and which can be removed and the mites counted. A high count means that an anti-Varroa treatment may be needed.
Drone (male) bees come from unfertilized eggs.
Varroa mites tend to favour laying their eggs in the cells of drone larvae, so at one stage it was thought that culling areas of drone brood in the hive would improve the overall health of the colony. However, further research has found that for a hive to be healthy it needs a good number of drones even though the only thing they apparently do is eat and then wait for a virgin queen's mating flight. Too few drones and the hive doesn't thrive – no-one yet knows why.
When moving hives the often-quoted rule is that you can move them either up to three feet, or no less than three miles, if you want to keep your bees with the hive. In between that and all the active flying bees will just return to where the hive used to be, when they come back after a flight.

So, you can probably see why our brains were full to overflowing with these and many more facts. An introduction to the practical side of things was covered in the hands-on part of the course, that we had a few days ago. I'll be sharing some of the particular joys of this in a second post.

* * *

* We have got room for a hive in our back garden at home but the garden has a public footpath, running along outside part of one of our boundary hedges, that is used by children going to the local primary school. While I'm a learner bee-keeper I wouldn't want to inadvertently upset my bees and have them suddenly take off in revenge after any nearby (and probably noisy) children!

** The UK has a number of local, county, bee-keeping associations, most of which are affiliated to the British Beekeepers Association. The BBKA provides information, advice both scientific and practical, and help with such things as how to deal with notifiable diseases, basic and advanced training programmes, etc.  A very useful body. We could have just gone out and bought some bees and a hive – nothing to stop us doing that – but we wanted the mentoring support and information that comes with being part of our local association.

Part Two. As Promised.

 

A pleasing degree of chemically-enhanced hilarity has been successfully achieved, and what a good thing I have something to hang a blog post on.*

Speaking of physical aspects of heroines, I've always found it interesting that so many have very long hair–which is to say, Harry and Aerin do.

::Cringes with embarrassment::  Yes, I'm afraid so.  Harry in particular has ankle-length hair, as I recall.  Good frelling doodah grief.  I was very young when I wrote that, and I even knew I was being a trifle self indulgent.  That's one of the things I would change, if I could—I don't mean literally could, I don't know if my publisher would let me or not, but You Don't Mess With Stories, even your own, once they've gone out into the world and developed their own life without you.  Without a really powerful reason, and authorial embarrassment isn't powerful enough. 

And I will identify EMoon as saying this:  

Characters need to be the size they are, whatever that is and I'm of the "not too much description please" persuasion. But readers vary widely in what they want/like/will stand for in physical description (I've had people ask plaintively why there's not more, much more.)

. . . Because I want to agree.  Strongly and vociferously.  Characters are the size that they are.  And I too get the complaints about not enough physical description—and I also get people who want to argue with me about what this or that character looks like.  That's fine, honey, if he or she looks like that to you.  But it's not in the book. 

I've been picturing Jake as Latino. But I did get that he wasn't all white. 

Um.  Latino is white.  It's a different ethnic from Anglo-Saxon, but it's still white.  And Jake's dad's name is Mendoza, so yes, he's Latino—he's, you know, recognisably ethnic.  Pause for groaning, since of course we're all some kind of ethnic, including the Anglo-Saxon uber-nonsense.  I briefly tried—speaking of characters being what they are, and not what you make them—making Jake's dad the one who was part black, thinking I could work in some physical description when he and Jake are having one of their rows . . . but it didn't work.  Forcing stuff on your characters never does.   The nearest I got was that Jake had a photo of his mum that he used to talk to, but that's one of the bits that was left on the cutting room floor. 

I personally have always had it very clear in my head that Harry was definitely tall–and as a short person myself, left to my own devices, I will make heroines shorter, if their height isn't absolutely necessary.

Yes.  This is a kind of summing-up of what I've been blundering around saying in too many words.  What is necessary needs to be in the story—the rest is and should be up to the reader.  That's how the characters go live for that reader.   And I haven't got a problem with readers lying to themselves a little to make a character more what they want them to be.  I do it myself.  What—as an author—I do object to is when readers insist on their version as the One True Version.**  There aren't that many one true versions in any aspect of life . . . but that's another rant for another day.

One of the things I loved about reading "Sunshine," for instance, was how amazingly little description there is for Sunshine, at least in the classic terms. We have a few side-ways descriptions (like Pat telling Sunshine how he'd described her for the desk assistant), but there isn't a lot of the usual physical list and detail. And it left so much more for me to just allow form naturally, rather than trying to "force" an image to appear with all the "right" description. It's not to say that my image of Sunshine isn't clear enough that I could probably describe her like a friend I see often, it's just that most of it is made up out of my own head, and I rather enjoy that.

Sorry.  Brief pause for authorial purring.  Mmmmmmmmm.

Then again, another thing I like about the McKinley heroines (and heroes!) is that they're so rarely ever stunningly beautiful creatures, or at least not beautiful because of their "raven black hair, and emerald green eyes."

I find the habitually beautiful stock character type a total and complete snore.  But speaking of necessary, Beauty in ROSE DAUGHTER has to be beautiful;  it's part of the story.  So does Lissar in DEERSKIN.  That nonetheless didn't stop various readers—including one famous author/critic who I'm still mad at—from slamming the latter book because I'd sold out my audience, blah blah blah blah, by reverting to the 'beautiful heroine' trope.  READ THE STORY I WROTE AND NOT THE ONE YOU WANTED TO READ.***   Arrrrrrrgh.  Although people mostly hate me for the end of Part One of DEERSKIN.  I was even braced for this and it still surprised me.  What?  You think awful stuff doesn't happen?  Oh, my bad, awful stuff isn't supposed to happen in a fairy-tale fantasy . . . at least not a Robin McKinley fairy-tale fantasy.  Grrrrrrrrrr.   It amazes me the permission some people give themselves to blame and be abusive.  And that's not even touching my major rant about DEERSKIN, which is about the people who tell me in outrage that I've RUINED my heroine, that she is RUINED . . . hey, great, you guys, please get on the next rocketship to Alpha Centauri and don't hang around on this planet making it harder for people who have awful stuff to get over to get on with their lives. . . .

            DEERSKIN isn't for everyone.  No book is for everyone.  And that's fine.  I just wish a few more people would remember that their personal opinion is their personal opinion and not the latest delivery from Mt Sinai. 

Over-description narrows the imagination. 

Yes.  

I'm tall enough that it's the sort of thing that people comment on. I never forget how tall I am (since if you're a woman I am probably looking at the top of your head), so when Sunshine didn't have that awareness, I figured she was probably somewhere around average height. I was a little disappointed 

You realise that remarks like this are what drive authors to drink, or to getting jobs as warehouse technicians.†  We can't be all things to all people.  We can't write all stories for all readers;  we can't make perfect matches between readers and stories. We can only do the best we can by the stories the Story Council sends us.  I can't write enough tall characters to suit everyone who wants tall characters, and I can't write enough short characters for people who want short characters. ††   Which is kind of where we all came in, since this conversation began with me tearing my hair over an email from a reader who claimed that most of my heroines were too short.

             I wanted to grow up to be Harry or Aerin or Cecily or Rosie or Sunshine or Mirasol or Sylvi.  Life, that freller, is disappointing.  But at least we do have stories. 

* * *

 * . . . having also been awakened by the phone two hours before my alarm was due to go off.  Moan.  However, the need to appear sane and coherent to a superfluous in law whose chief impression of me is that I'm American and another of these peculiar writer people^ woke me up so thoroughly there was no chance of getting back to sleep.  Which at least meant hellhounds had a nice hurtle before the arrival of Computer Archangel Raphael.  Who says there's at least a month's wait for an iPad 2.  There are two iPad 1s among our visiting houseful.^^  They are hideously desirable.  It's going to be a long month. 

^ Couldn't Peter have married an office manager or a mechanic or something? 

^^ We were playing Scrabble on one of them at dinner around the glasses of champagne.  Fortunately we were playing in teams, so I could just say, mm hmm, good idea, occasionally.  I am terrible at Scrabble. 

** This kind of thing leads to trashing a book for not being the book that reader wanted at that moment, or expected from that writer, and never mind what the book is.  Hell has a whole special subdivision dedicated to the permanent containment of these people.  The only reading material found anywhere in its smoking ravines is the backs of cereal boxes.  For eternity.  Old cereal boxes.   This infernal area is however shared with the people who read books wrong and trash them for what these readers thought they read.  

*** See previous footnote.  Did I mention the sharpened stakes in the bottoms of the smoking ravines? 

† Or office managers.  Or mechanics.

††  Or red-haired characters, or not red-haired characters;  or fat characters—I get kind of a lot of mail from women who are offended that I don't seem to have written any heroines with weight problems;  or boys, or not boys:  opinions are divided on Jake, either I'm such a genderist and it's about time or I've sold out my (female) audience again;  and I get a lot of mail from people who feel there should be more kissing.   Visible, centre-stage kissing.   Which is pretty well balanced by the people who are mortally offended by the kinky almost-sex in SUNSHINE. . . .

             I'm not listening, you know.  I only listen to the story.  I can only listen to the story.  This kind of thing is just the fire-ants a malign fate is tipping down your collar while you're trying to work.

Part One: Silly Day

 

It has been a Silly Day.  It's very nearly too warm in a rather glorious and sybaritic way and we're all pretty unhinged, the way you get when serious seasonal heat finally makes contact with your still winter-braced muscles.*  Not to mention your brain.   I was trying to claw my bob major back to some semblance of . . . I started to say accuracy and realised this was extreme.  Some semblance of bob major . . . this afternoon before our usual Thursday handbell practise and it was like I had never seen method lines before in my life, let alone two of them at the same time.**  Hells, I was having trouble opening Pooka's case and turning her on.  Wheeeee . . . is this an iPhone?***  How exciting.†  And you tap these cute little bell drawing things and they make noise. . . .

            Apparently Fernanda has run off to sea after all, because it was just Colin and Niall and me . . . and I had wasted all that time attempting to relearn bob major, which requires four pairs of hands.  Whereupon we strove to ring St Clements minor, and because Niall and Colin are mean and cruel and they hate me, they made me ring the three-four.  Generally speaking the middle pair or pairs are a more brutal and abominable experience than the outer pairs—and Niall and Colin are the ones who know what they're doing—so it was a bit like not only putting a saddle on your [hell]cow, but making her jump.††  Mooooo.†††

Meanwhile . . . I've been reading through the forum thread on heroine size and feeling . . . a slight sinking of the heart.  Since I'm going to take some mild exception to a few of the comments, I'll leave off people's names, although of course you can go ferret through the appropriate page if you want to know. 

I thought it was refreshing to read about short Sylvi, and I felt like she's the most feminine of your heroines so far. Still a strong, independent girl, but I do like that she's not as tomboyish as most of the others.

Beauty in ROSE DAUGHTER.  Lissar.  Sunshine.  Mirasol.  (Peony is probably cheating.)  None of them are tomboys.  I think I would also question this definition of 'feminine'.  I feel that I'm a tomboy and feminine, for example:  I am usually covered in hellhound hair and garden dirt and I wear make up maybe once every other year, but I always always wear jewellery—because I love jewellery—and my favourite pieces are my little coral rose and my pearls.  Not to mention my thing for pink.

            What interests me however is my guess that it's the first time a reader really engages with one of an author's books that provokes a sense that this author's plots or characters are 'usually' like this.  Those of you who fell first and hard for Damar, for example, seem to feel that 'most' of my heroines are tall and clumsy.  Aerin, just by the way, isn't more than middling tall—tall enough to count, but Harry's at least a hand (er—four inches) taller, and maybe more.  Aerin is clumsy however—more clumsy than Harry, who's mainly just tall, and impatient with traditional femininity.  I've been thinking about this marking effect about a first loved book because of Diana—what's your favourite Diana Wynne Jones book?  Good gods, I couldn't possibly choose.  But if  I had to I realise I'd choose CHARMED LIFE—because it was the first one I read and it completely blew me away.  I'd never read anything like it.  And Diana had a besotted fan for life.  Realising this does make me a little more patient with the people who still insist on telling me they love BEAUTY or the Damar books the best . . . although my impatience is for the people who tell me these are my best books and I've never written anything as good since.  I wouldn't say that CHARMED LIFE is Diana's best book, merely the one that first took me captive.

. . . .both of them [Harry and Aerin] can ride a horse without stirrups… which means they can get on a horse sans stirrups, a WAR horse at that… and rock or no rock a short person wouldn't have the leverage to be able to manage that. . . .

Yes, Harry and Aerin are both tall, but Harry is very tall and Aerin is only middling.  But you're mistaken about the vaulting.  You've never seen vaulting at the circus?  What the vaulter needs—this may vary, but the vaulting I've seen—is either a strap or a saddle-flap to grab, and then they do a kind of half-flip into the saddle.  It's very impressive, but it's about skill, strength and dexterity, not height.  (Indeed relative smallness is an advantage:  less weight.)  It's true that the vaulting my Damarians do tends to be the rather tamer putting your hands on front and back of saddle and heaving, which mostly does require some height, but Talat, you know, is short himself;  you wouldn't have to be more than middle height to vault onto Talat—supposing he'd let you, and supposing you had the muscles and the agility.  There is also the way less romantic method known to every child who's ever ridden a pony bareback, which is to spring-board yourself belly down over your pony's back, and then swing your leg over.  Quite little kids can do that—if the pony stands still. 

            The best vaulter I ever knew was from my misspent adolescence.  He was an ex-jockey;  he'd started on the flat and graduated to steeplechasing when he got too big.  He was still a good two inches shorter than I am (I'm 5'8", which makes me middling tall) and he could vault onto an 18-hand grand-prix horse by putting his hands on front and back of the saddle, giving a quick heave, moving the rear hand smartly for his leg to go over—and settling gently into the saddle.  He was kind of a jerk, but I had a massive crush on him because he could do this trick, which over forty years later still seems to me almost miraculous.  It's where my Damarian vaulting comes from.  It's about as plausible as (as I've said elsewhere) an entire regiment of bridleless horses is, but never mind.  It's possible.

            The real point about any mounting and dismounting is that you want it as kind to the horse as possible.  Therefore, use your mounting block.  Totally unromantic.  But it does mean you can be as short as you like, and you don't have to drag the saddle against the horse's back at all. 

We have a houseful (or more than one houseful) descending tomorrow, which will include not only cancelling my semi-music-lesson, semi-cup-of-tea-and-rant ‡ with Oisin but also not going to sacred home tower bell practise.  How Will I Bear the Shame.  Well, dinner out at The Questing Beast will probably help a lot.  And while I may be in an aggravated state of chemically assisted hilarity by the time I get home I will probably manage to produce Part Two.

            Stay tuned.

 * * *

* One of my winter-braced muscles went PING yesterday for no good reason so I've been hobbling around and telling it that I can't afford to have a knee out of commission so it's just going to have to cope, and does it want one of those stretchy marathon runners' bandages, which is the best I'm offering.  Hurtling will continue.  Gah. 

** The usual phrase for the diagram of a method is 'the blue line'.  Since you ring two handbells it tends to be 'the red and blue lines'.  For all that it's much more gruesome on handbells^ 'the red and blue lines' or even 'the lines' somehow just doesn't have the fateful ominous ring of The Blue Line.  One of life's many little injustices.

^ More than twice as gruesome.  Trust me. 

*** Note that rescheduled Computer Archangel Raphael is coming tomorrow.  Possibly with news of iPad 2s.  I can't even decide what to hope for.  The cost/desirability flow chart is such a ratbag.  Short of Steve Jobs reading SUNSHINE last week and having decided to give the author of such a brilliant book a free one. 

† See previous footnote.  At the price she'd better be exciting.  —Who out there does not have 3G on their iPad?  Are you happy? 

†† Everybody knows about this, right?   Especially suitable for a Silly Day.  http://www.kansascity.com/2011/04/05/2776919/horse-dreams-dashed-german-teen.html

http://www.vancouversun.com/entertainment/Leaping+Luna+Teen+rides+jumping+Internet+fame+video/4569092/story.html

Although I have to say this one looks like he's having more fun:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ee1pzhspKD0&feature=related

††† Not to worry.  Much general silliness.  They were infected by the weather too.

‡ Okay, the cup of tea is not semi.

Exploding Chandelier

 

It's been a GORGEOUS day* and I've spent way more of it than is good for me** in the garden.  This is probably the gorgeousest day we've had so far this year—blue sky!  Balmy breezes!  Both the front and the kitchen door open for better blow-through by bumblebees!—and you just had to be out in it.***

            It began, of course, with me oversleeping, because that's how all my days begin lately.†  Hellhounds and I then had to hurtle with preternatural swiftness, which is okay for them but not so great with me, because we had electricians coming. 

            Electricians were late, of course.  I had, however, not wasted the time:  I had been hammering my way through a few inches of the heaps around my desk at the cottage, where all the stuff I should do soon but not necessarily today accumulates††, and screaming, which, in my experience, is the natural accompaniment to all desk work.  The screaming may vary,††† but screaming is crucial.‡  It provides a safety valve, so the top of your head doesn't blow off. ‡‡

            The electricians came, and thoughtfully examined the blackened light bulb with the exploded contacts‡‡‡, and then with whips, chains and a tranquilizer dart gun they removed my chandelier.  I've told you about my chandelier, haven't I?  When I first moved over here, into a house that several generations of Dickinsons had lived in, my office was a little room that had been hacked off one of the sitting rooms for Peter's first wife, but she'd got ill before she'd ever really used it.  So it was just standing there empty, with a wall between it and the rest of that sitting room.  The first thing that went up was bookshelves.  You will not be amazed to hear.  But it also needed an overhead light.  The two sitting rooms—reception rooms, what you call 'em—on either end of what had been a square Georgian house were Victorian, and put on by a widow with delusions of grandeur.  They have Very High Ceilings.  And I looked at the high ceiling of my office and said thoughtfully, you know, I've always wanted a chandelier. 

            We can do that, said Peter.    

            At the time chandeliers were apparently out of fashion and we had to choose one that was rather more tactful than it might have been if there had been more lurid to choose from, but this turned out to be a good thing when we moved into town and I took it with me.  The cottage has high ceilings for a cottage, but they're nothing like as high as that of a Victorian sitting room of a widow with delusions.  And my small tactful chandelier looks very nice in my office, and it doesn't whack you in the forehead when you walk under it or anything.  It does, however, explode after twenty years.  They just don't make chandeliers like they used to.

            The electricians then examined my fuse box.  And their faces grew Very Long and they said, this fuse box is Old.  Yes.  I was afraid they'd notice.  Southern Electric keeps sending out mailings adorned with graphic photographs of Old Fuse Boxes and large red text saying if your fuse box looks like this you need to buy a flash new one that we would be happy to provide for a mere 25% of your yearly income.  I keep throwing these in the trash, despite recognising my fuse box immediately.  Electricians, just by the way, were late coming to me because they'd been up at Peter's doing an Exhaustive Test of Everything.§  And they said to me, there's two ways you can do this.  You can have an Exhaustive Test of Everything too, like your husband.  And they paused, and looked at each other, and then the older one said, But you don't really need to bother with the Exhaustive Test.  Your husband's electrics have their little problems, but they aren't archaic.  All you need to do is get our Tamerlane to come round and give you the Official Eyeball Test, which is to say that he'll look at your fuse box, blanch, and say yup, gotta change it.  And then you can book us in for the work.  —I think it was just a trick of the light that made his eyes glisten as he said this.§§

            Joy.

            So is it any wonder I ran out into the garden to play?    

* * *

* Why do I have to WORK for a living?^ 

^Weather like this I want to be Atlas.  Although I'd have to be able to measure things and hammer nails in straight.  And make cranky lawn mowers start.  

** Or PEG II 

*** Headline:  Office Blocks Empty.  Central London Deserted.  CEO says:  You Just Had To Be Out in This Weather.  Film to Follow. 

            Although I have slightly mixed feelings about t-shirt weather.  The long sleeves of your gardening sweatshirt mean that you bleed less. 

† I may have been knitting last night.  Not being able to read in the bath^ is making me sulky and I may have had to knit longer to cheer myself up.  That and trying to interpret the hellhounds' latest Food Ritual so I can play my crucial role as efficiently as possible.  This is also time-consuming.  Gaaaah. 

^ Someone told me to use candles.  Candles?  To read by?  Someone has much younger and less flimsy eyes than I do.  I do, in fact, have three excellent read-by-able Aladdin oil lamps, from my life in blizzard- and power-outage prone Maine, but they have the little drawback that if you knock one into a full bath the flame does not go out. 

†† Today tends to come down to the mews with me at lunchtime.  Where it creates another pile. . . . 

††† There's the Frelling Story in Progress scream, there's the Oh Mares' Nests and Mayhem That Invoice Was Due Three Months Ago scream, there's the Omigod Christmas Card from Two/Three/Four Years Ago scream, there's the What the Frell Is This scream, there's the I Can't Have Promised to Do This scream, there's the . . . 

‡ This may explain a lot about my singing.  

‡‡ I can't imagine how office workers cope.  Especially the ones in those little cubicles where the Styrofoam walls only come up shoulder high.  

‡‡‡ Maybe it should have tried screaming 

§ The electrics in Peter's kitchen more nearly resemble fireworks.  You're standing there cutting up chicken for hellhounds and, ZOT!!!  —Wow!  That was a great one! 

§§ The good news, however, is that, once they had rootled around in the depths of their kit for the necessary obsolete tools, they replaced the fuse^ and the other lights came back on.  

^ I don't mess with scary overcharged British electrics any more than I have to, wussy American that I am, which is to say that I turn lights on and off and (warily) change light bulbs, and it ends there.  I have changed British fuses, but I'd rather not.  And in this case I didn't want to touch anything.

Philip Larkin

 

This is not the only poem Philip Larkin ever wrote: 

http://famouspoetsandpoems.com/poets/philip_larkin/poems/14515 

 . . . although there was an era in my young wanting-to-be-a-rebel life when it seemed like it was, and that was fine.  Okay, and this one too:  

http://famouspoetsandpoems.com/poets/philip_larkin/poems/14516 

But that isn't all he wrote.  He wrote this, for example: 

http://www.poetryconnection.net/poets/Philip_Larkin/4765 

And this: 

http://famouspoetsandpoems.com/poets/philip_larkin/poems/14518 

And (ouch) this: 

http://www.poetryconnection.net/poets/Philip_Larkin/1674 

He is not, I grant you, the jolliest of poets.  But I personally respond to the combination of what looks like the poetry you studied in school—or I studied in school, which did not include Larkin—and the slang, the rude language, the sex and bodily functions.  It brings the poetic stuff closer, and gives it an edge that makes you bleed.  I have always approached Larkin slightly warily—and the periodic reminders of or revelations about his personal life don't help at all, especially as I am someone who thinks that the life does matter.  If you were an emotional two-year-old who liked pulling wings off flies, it undermines your work, I don't care how gigantic your talent was.*  And while I suspect the women in Larkin's life brought their own issues to their relationships with Larkin, still, I don't think I'd've wanted to go there, and I don't think Larkin is blameless.  And yes, I think there is a colossal misogynistic streak in his work which is insufficiently explained by the era he lived and worked in.  Reminds me of my youth—I came to sexual maturity not so very much after the infamous 1963**—and not in a good way.  I've told you before, I think, that my slightly-late-to-the-party impression of the so-called sexual revolution is that us girls were still expected to make the coffee, we were just supposed to be permanently sexually available too, and if we weren't, we were frigid—this is a paraphrase of someone who was in the thick of it a lot more than I was, but I've forgotten who it was, I just remember shouting YES! when I discovered the quote.  Anyway.   I've fallen into the habit of thinking of Larkin as, well, mean-spirited.

            And then The Paris Review, whom I follow on Twitter, posted this a few days ago:

First and foremost, writing poems should be a pleasure. So should reading them, by God. – Philip Larkin http://tpr.ly/ihMVWa 

I loved the interview and while I don't think Larkin missed anything by not having met me (ahem) I recognise, perhaps sometimes a trifle ruefully, a lot of fellow curmudgeonliness,*** and could imagine, because I'm an overimaginative sort of git, another world and another century where he and I would have found a good deal to talk about, probably down t'pub.  Most of this interview, in fact, inspired a running (muttered) commentary from me, starting with Larkin's declining to be interviewed in person and insisting on doing it by post, and the huffing and puffing from PR about this and other things. I've excerpted a few of my favourite bits with complementary bits of muttery commentary here—now please click on all the links I've diligently and industriously supplied.  It's National Poetry Month, you know. 

LARKIN:  I shouldn't normally show what I'd written to anyone: what would be the point? You remember Tennyson reading an unpublished poem to Jowett; when he had finished, Jowett said, "I shouldn't publish that if I were you, Tennyson." Tennyson replied, "If it comes to that, Master, the sherry you gave us at lunch was downright filthy." That's about all that can happen.

Yep.  I'm there.    For most of the process of writing, the story is the only authority I do or can afford to listen to.  Anyone else putting their oar in would or will provoke the response, Do shut up!  I'm trying to hear the story!  —I would also like to think this is a story of Tennyson manifesting a sense of humour, but I think I'm fantasizing again.

LARKIN . . . The short answer is that you write because you have to. If you rationalize it, it seems as if you've seen this sight, felt this feeling, had this vision, and have got to find a combination of words that will preserve it by setting it off in other people. The duty is to the original experience. It doesn't feel like self-expression, though it may look like it.

Yes.  I don't know how ingenuous he's deliberately being here—my impression is that he's tweaking the interviewer when he can while trying to maintain apparent perfect po-facedness.  Part of the force of a lot of Larkin's poems is their apparent naked intimacy—not always about sex—but I also completely believe that they're not straightforward self-expression.  You don't get anything as sharp and sinewy as Larkin's poetry under the bulgy banner of self-expression.† 

INTERVIEWER:  Is Jorge Luis Borges the only other contemporary poet of note who is also a librarian, by the way? Are you aware of any others?

LARKIN:  Who is Jorge Luis Borges?

LOVE LOVE LOVE LOVE LOVE.  Again, I wish I knew if this were true or tweaking.  Larkin does keep saying he's not very interested in the wider world;  maybe he really didn't know Borges.  I grew up half admiring Borges and half resenting the requirement to go all awestruck about him.   He's fascinating, yes, but I have also found him a trifle fey and self absorbed.  You may pelt me with squishy rotten fruit now.

[Larkin continues] The writer-librarian I like is Archibald MacLeish. You know, he was made Librarian of Congress in 1939, and on his first day they brought him some papers to sign, and he wouldn't sign them until he understood what they were all about. When he did understand, he started making objections and countersuggestions. The upshot was that he reorganized the whole Library of Congress in five years simply by saying, I don't understand and I don't agree, and in wartime, too. Splendid man.

Yes.   (Including that Larkin knows how to tell a story.) 

[Larkin:] . . . Hearing a poem, as opposed to reading it on the page, means you miss so much—the shape, the punctuation, the italics, even knowing how far you are from the end. Reading it on the page means you can go your own pace, taking it in properly; hearing it means you're dragged along at the speaker's own rate, missing things, not taking it in, confusing "there" and "their" and things like that. And the speaker may interpose his own personality between you and the poem, for better or worse. For that matter, so may the audience . . . When you write a poem, you put everything into it that's needed: the reader should "hear" it just as clearly as if you were in the room saying it to him.

I love this too.  Vindication.  I am not a huge fan of listening to poetry read aloud, for all that (again) this was what my schooling taught me:  that you really MUST hear poetry read aloud.  Well.  Um.  But the reader does drag you along at their pace, and force you to take in their interpretation because you haven't got time and space to create your own.  Hearing poetry read aloud can be a great enhancement, especially to a poem you already know well, but if I'm choosing, I'll take the words on the page every time. 

LARKIN:  Sometimes I think, Everything I've written has been done after a day's work, in the evening: what would it have been like if I'd written it in the morning, after a night's sleep? Was I wrong? Some time ago a writer said to me—and he was a full-time writer, and a good one—"I wish I had your life. Dealing with people, having colleagues. Being a writer is so lonely."

Yes.  You're always wondering about the other guy.  Although I find one of the problems of being able to organise my own day is trying to figure out when the sweet spot might be.  Straight out of bed in the morning is not it.  But I think mine moves around.  I think possibly it lives in another dimension . . . not accessible from this one.  So I'm always writing at some wrong time or other.  Sigh.  Although I can't say I've spent much time feeling lonely.  Whoever said that should have learnt to ring bells.  Being forced to get up early at least one day a week is also good for your character.

[Larkin:] . . .  having a job hasn't been a hard price to pay for economic security. . . .it's worked for me. The only thing that does strike me as odd, looking back, is that what society has been willing to pay me for is being a librarian. You get medals and prizes and honorary-this-and-thats—and flattering interviews—but if you turned round and said, Right, if I'm so good, give me an index-linked permanent income equal to what I can get for being an undistinguished university administrator—well, reason would remount its throne pretty quickly.

And some things never change.

LARKIN:  Are you suggesting there's no sense of class in America? That's not the impression I get from the works of Mr. John O'Hara.

INTERVIEWER:  O'Hara overstated.

::Hysterics::  Larkin wins that round.  DING.

INTERVIEWER:  You mention Auden, Thomas, Yeats, and Hardy as early influences in your introduction to the second edition of The North Ship. What in particular did you learn from your study of these four?

LARKIN:  Oh, for Christ's sake, one doesn't study poets! You read them, and think, That's marvelous, how is it done, could I do it? and that's how you learn. At the end of it you can't say, That's Yeats, that's Auden, because they've gone, they're like scaffolding that's been taken down. 

Or Tolkien, Kipling, Heyer, Nesbit.  Or . . .

* * *

* Thus the self-righteous cry of the genre writer who gets up every Sunday morning to ring bells.  Eh.  You do what you can.  I think it's important to do what you can. 

** I say nothing about any other kind of maturity. 

*** I am also reminded of his reputation as a witty and skilful letter writer. 

† And my heroines aren't me, either, as I keep saying.  We share certain traits in common.  I'm in love with Ebon too, for example.

Singing to Different Tunes

 

Last night I almost got to bed early.*  I was lying comfortably in the bath reading something that will probably make an appearance here on this blog some day.  And then there was a faint, ominous popping noise and . . . all the lights went out. 

            Fortunately it's a small house, I've lived there six years, and I know where the fuse box is even in the dark.**  It is a very odd sensation, doing familiar things you don't actually need to see in the dark, like towelling off and putting your dressing gown on.  Getting out of the bath was negotiated very carefully as was going down my 180° twirl of slippery carpeted stairs.  My ancient fuse box with the early 19th century circuit breaker converted in 1923 from gas*** creaked over with a faint smell of dragon, and . . . some of the lights came back on.  Joy.  And no, I don't have five replacement bulbs on hand:  who needs five in the same day?†  Arrrgh.

            Meanwhile of course my computer early-warning defense system was shrieking its head off.  Its Rottweiler imitation isn't necessary often enough for me to get accustomed to the shut-down protocol and I always end up shrieking back at it.  By the time I could go to bed I wasn't in the mood.†† 

            And then Computer Archangel Raphael was due to come today and sort out a very long laundry-list of problems††† written in Pooka shorthand which I think I can still deciper‡ but he rang while I was still asleep to say that he had the lurgi‡‡ and wouldn't be coming . . . so I went back to bed and had the nightmares I always have if I am sleeping too late after I've been too thoroughly woken up, in which fire and destruction usually figure in a very unrestful way.‡‡‡  So when I finally did get up it was terribly, terribly late and I had to race around like fury cursing myself for my slothful habits§ . . .

            One of the things Raphael was supposed to do was bring me a new flummoxer for my frelling printer/copier, which stopped working a fortnight or so ago, except for the petulant declaration on its screen that it wants a new flummoxer if I'm absent-minded enough to turn it on.  And one of the immediate reasons I wanted it is because I need to be able to make copies of what I'm singing for Nadia.  Arrrgh.  So I had to go off to my voice lesson copyless.  Arrrrrrgh.§§  I've been playing with my new Benjamin Britten folk song book and as an alternative to mangling The Minstrel Boy, which I've hammered pretty flat [sic] over the last few weeks, Nadia said I could sing The Ash Grove for her.§§§  I suggested that she have the music and I'll just sing—vocalise—without the words, which has worked rather well on the Minstrel Boy, who seems to be rather overburdened with large angular English consonants that get tangled up around my teeth somehow, and she said no, she had a better idea, she'd give us the starting note on the piano and then she'd harmonise with me while I sang.

            Eeeeeeeeep.

            Okay, here's the news, you guys, hold onto your seats.  This was fun.  Singing with my voice teacher was fun.  It was not exactly a thing of beauty and glory on my end—especially the don't-think-about-it-just-GO-NOW beginning—but it was FUN.

            . . . And then bell practise tonight was in Colin's garage, with his frelling overturned-flower-pot frelling mini-ring frelling bells, where the ropes keep trying to jump out of my hands like frightened rabbits,  ARRRRRRGH.  I think I'll take up knitting. . . . 

* * *

* Earlier.     

** Fuses never explode when there's ever some residual daylight or (ahem) the remote beginnings of dawn.  No, they hold it in till a blanket of perfect tenebrosity enshrouds the area about to lose its electricity. 

*** Making it contemporary with the local phone lines.  We received a your-town-councillors-working-hard-for-you mailing this week where we're supposed to tick off the three issues we consider the most crucial from a list of things like recycling, parking, support for the elderly/disabled and so on.  One of the items is 'high speed broadband'.  Pardon me while I fall down laughing.  

† Is anyone else having way too many problems with modern supposedly ecologically-friendly light bulbs?  We're being forced to shift over soon to eco-bulbs and I shifted early because I thought this was enlightened (so to speak) and responsible.  But there are waaaaaaay too many bad ones and I'm pretty tired of it.  Although this is the first time I've had one blow out five.  Which is certainly one way to guarantee future business for light-bulb manufacturers, at some cost to positive customer relations.    

†† Which is just as well, since hellhounds were not in the mood for their final snack either.   Although I'm always glad to have dogs around during a blackout because they so manifestly couldn't care less.  What's important?  Food (sort of)^ and walks.  And watching their sacred person carefully for any sign of immediate interaction with worshippers.  And sleep.  Especially sleep.  Electricity?  Feh.  

^ Although you never saw anything more attentive than hellhounds when a roast chicken comes out of the oven.  

††† And possibly tell me something exciting about the iPad 2.  

‡ I am not totally a fan of the iPhone keyboard 

‡‡ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lurgy#The_dreaded_lurgi 

‡‡‡ There's a scene in ALBION that is straight out of one of these nightmares.  Or anyway I think so.  I won't know for sure till I write it. 

§ Which pleased hellhounds very much.  You know your day is not going well when taking hellhounds for a hurtle is calming.  

§§ I have spent some time recently poking around google and elsewhere for information about Local Singing Groups.  It wouldn't hurt to start getting some experience while I'm waiting for Oisin to create the New Arcadia Singers which of course he is going to do, it's just these things take a little time.  The problem is that the no-audition groups tend to sing a lot of stuff I would not voluntarily touch with a barge pole.  It's a rough go being a low-talent, no-time musical snob.  Nadia said, there, there, you can always give something a try and quit if you can't bear it.  And (she said) a lot of cheesy choral crap is actually a lot of fun to sing, even if you hate yourself in the morning. 

§§§ Speaking of the very high proportion of folk songs being about death.  The other one I've been looking at is O Waly Waly in which she's still alive, she's just miserable.  I should move on to the Miller of Dee, except it's the Beethoven version^ I love, which requires hanging around on your top G kind of a lot.  I can do this at home when I'm having an especially wild and free day, but the idea of singing it for Nadia makes me yelp piercingly, like a hellhound who thinks his harness isn't being put on fast enough.  

 ^ It's the Beethoven Minstrel Boy too

Heroine size

 

Blooorgh.  Another tied-to-my-chair evening.  I got very tired dancing with hellhounds last night at snack time* and then the alarm went off in the middle of the night the way it does every Sunday morning.  BLOOOORGH.  And I made a pig's ear of calling plain bob doubles at service ring (arrrgh) and was then mugged at the florist's, in my dazed, half-awake state, because it's what they call 'mothering Sunday' over here** and a lot of wild-eyed people were getting stuck in doorways in their haste to buy a bunch of daffodils or a dozen semi-perfect roses.  I spent most of the afternoon in the garden at the cottage and then came back to the mews to have tea with Georgiana, who is also in publishing and is nearly as old as I am, and we agreed in our elderly, rheumatic way that we rather like the internet and the web, even when it complicates everything and probably creates a hell of a lot of extra work, and that direct contact with the author is . . . well, it's direct contact with the author, and there isn't anything else like it, and publishers have been promoting us as well as our books pretty much since Gutenberg, and when we aren't unprofessionally losing our rag in the way that the keyboard and the 'send' button make altogether too easy and seductive, I believe that the internet is also a very excellent and powerful anti-Othering device.  And you know about me and Othering.

            So, speaking of direct contact with the author, we haven't had an Ask Robin in a long time, which is to say I haven't talked about writing in a while.  Because I keep getting distracted by bells or yarn or something.***  And I wanted to respond to a thread in the forum that was the result of my moaning about some hapless reader writing to tell me I need to tell more stories about tall awkward heroines because mine are all short.†  So while this isn't exactly an Ask Robin it's pretty much out of the same box. 

SEMI SPOILER ALERT

You guys who still haven't read OUTLAWS, you really need to get with the programme.  But if you haven't, go knit a hellhound square or something and come back in a couple of paragraphs.

             To all of you who have written to say that you thought Cecily was short . . . Remember what she DOES.  She would have to be built like a weight-lifter to do what she does physically . . . unless she's, well, not short.  She's middling tall—and she's probably still built like a weight-lifter, after all that quarterstaff work and so on—and needs to be.  And yes, everybody looks short next to her mentor.  But have you ever tried to lift and carry an adult human body in your arms?  Especially a floppy, wounded adult human body you're trying not to damage any farther?  Adrenalin only works so far.  Not short.  Cecily is not short.

              This is one of my permanent dilemmas as a writer of Girls Who Do Things.  There are limits on the sheer physical mixing-it-up-with-the-guys when you throw a woman into the melee—or of the possibilities within extreme situations generally, as for example what Cecily finds herself in at the fair.  Harry HAS to be enormous to face up against Corlath and Thurra the way she does.  Granted I didn't know this going in—the story is the story—but it's something you have to deal with in certain kinds of plotlines.  Cecily has to be big and strong enough to carry her injured friend. ††

              I tend to think of my heroines in terms of my own height—which is another limitation, if you like, but it's also grounding.  It's one of the things that makes them real to me, and that therefore gives me the ability to make them feel real to you:  Harry is taller than I am.  Sylvi is shorter than I am.  Some of them I'm not sure about:  I don't do any more physical description than I have to in a story, and that includes trying to find out stuff about my characters I don't need to know, if it doesn't just arrive with the storyline, whether or not it goes down on the page.  I don't like a lot of brown-hair-piercing/faded/bright-blue-eyes-and-a-scar-just-under-the-left-ear type of description either as writer or reader;  I feel characters live on the page better without it, and tend to stumble over paragraphs of it in other writers' stories.††  This is one of the reasons I blew it about Jake, who is mixed-race (his mum is either half or quarter black:  speaking of not always knowing things about characters), but I never found a way to put this in that didn't have Hi!  I'm making a liberal POINT here! written all over it, because I'm an author who doesn't physically describe her characters,††† and you could say I didn't have the muscles, having not had my character-describing quarterstaff training.‡

              . . . It's always something.‡‡  And I'm getting to the post-articulate phase of Sunday night on too little sleep Saturday.  Sorry.  I'm sure there's a conclusion I should be making about character elucidation.  But . . . blooooorgh.   

* * *

* Hey, they ate.  Whatever works.

** 'Mothering'?  What is that supposed to mean?  It's your mum's day.  Mother your mother?  Give her a lot of advice she doesn't want and then make her put on a sweater because you think it's cold.  Ask her if she's taken her vitamins.  Tell her she can do better than her current boy/girlfriend.  And get that dog off the furniture. 

*** I have snakeshead fritillaries for the first time in three years.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fritillaria_meleagris   Neither the slugs nor the lily beetles nor the alien raiders from Antares got them this year.  They're a wild flower, right?  You see them in unkempt lawns and the fringes of forests and things.  And they've disappeared three years in a row in my little walled town garden.  This year?  I have them in pots on the front steps.    Fritillaries aren't supposed to like pots any better than snowdrops do.  And I adore them and it's been breaking my heart that I can't seem to grow them.  This was a gesture of final despairing resort.  YAAAAAAAAAAY.  —And I have quite a few of them.  At least if mentioning it doesn't mean the Antareans lay them waste tonight after all.  But this is the best crop I've had since moving into town.  YAAAAAAAAAAAY.   

† Grrrrrrrrrrr etc. 

†† And Sylvi has to be small enough for the end of Chapter Five.  

††† One of the reasons I don't read romances is because the customary deluge of physical description starts sapping my will to live.  Although the main reason is that with the exception of Georgette Heyer I don't think romance is ever a plot.  It's something happening while the plot is thundering ahead elsewhere.  Hey, I think PRIDE AND PREJUDICE is only okay.  Sue me.  

‡ Rule of the universe:  every choice has a downside. 

‡‡ I had various helpful people make suggestions, like the old character-looking-in-the-mirror thing.  I HATE THE CHARACTER LOOKING IN THE MIRROR THING.  Just by the way.  I did it myself in BEAUTY and there are (other) examples out there that work in their individual contexts.  But generally speaking . . . no.  No, no, no. no, no. 

‡‡  Insert pile of PEG II pages here.

Day Two of National Poetry Month

 

Today has been nowhere near as bad as anticipated after comprehensively doing myself in yesterday* but I'm still pretty tired.  And chiefly thanks to knitting ('just one more row!')** I'm getting to bed later . . . and later . . . and later.  And Sunday mornings are Sunday mornings, which is to say a semblance of function and coherence by 8:45 am (shudder).  I need a night off.

            Meanwhile it's National Poetry Month.  http://www.poets.org/page.php/prmID/41  If I'd noticed it was coming*** I'd have got myself a little bit organised.  Well.  Maybe. 

             But I thought tonight I'd at last give you the poem Peter wrote me—gak—thirteen years ago, when I'd finally had the glandular fever† diagnosis.  I'd had 'flu' for two months, and still felt like . . . slime mould and old fish fingers.  And had compromised my principles to the extent of going to the doctor, who said 'hmm, glandular fever', took a blood test and . . . yes. 

            At the time it was the most enormous load off.  Little did I know.††  But the poem still makes me giggle.  Especially the golden retriever.†††    

Ode to an Ailment

For weeks I have felt like an under-achiever

I have lacked all the bounce of a golden retriever

And moped round the house, a mere groaner and griever.

Though in orthodox medicine I'm no believer,

I went to the doctor.  Was she a reliever!

She said "Dearie me, you have glandular fever."

I have a disease!  Not a husband-bereaver,

But a dear little, mild little glandular fever.

It is real.  So I am not a sympathy-thiever,

Not a weakling or wimp, not a self-centred diva,

Nor a hypochondriacal fantasy-weaver.

No more at my desk I will toil like a beaver,

But lie on the sofa and watch Ralph the Reiver

And really enjoy having glandular fever.

(All right, yes I know it is called Ralph the Rover.‡

You can tell me all that sort of thing when it's over.) 

* * *

 * I posted to the forum that while our New Arcadia tenor rings perfectly nicely you still have to pull the freller off its perch.  Vicky, who is about half my size, can do it, so it's not a matter of brute strength, but the knack is elusive, and I seem to have sproinged quite a bit of my front, chest and stomach.  This reminds me of learning to sit the trot by strengthening your stomach muscles.  I wonder if improving my singing, which is (partly) another belly-strength thing, will also improve my pulling-off of large bells?  There's no holding-your-horse-up-on-the-bit upper-body equivalent in singing however.  I don't think.

** Well, I have to read too, you know.  It's not like I'm going to give up reading in the bath just because I want to get into bed^ and knit.  

^ Having fed hellhounds their final snack.  Siiiiiiiigh.  Hellhounds periodically take against one particular meal, for unfathomable reasons+, and lately they've taken against their final snack.  A certain amount of hanging around waiting for the stars to align is not a bad thing++ but eventually the temptation to look for a cereal-free-kibble sized funnel starts becoming rather oppressive.  Last night was one of those nights.  Predictions for tonight are that it will be epic.  I don't have time for epic.+++ 

+ I keep remembering my homeopathic ex-vet saying gravely that sighthounds are 'psychologically the most complex' dogs.  Snork. 

++ Hint:  knitting 

+++ Remember that letting them merely skip a meal, as one would do with less psychologically/digestively complex dogs, tends to produce a storyline which is a kind of cross between Ragnarok and Rambo VVIX: Universal Meltdown. 

*** Okay, so it started in 1996.  I'm a slow learner. 

† AKA mononucleosis 

†† Well, yes, little did I know, but this is a classic good-from-ratbaggery story too.  I'd been riding the spare hunter of a friend to keep him fit for when she needed him, and had had to stop . . . permanently as it turned out.  So this became one of the several occasions when I gave up riding because I couldn't be relied on.  Which is why, then, six or eight months later, I decided to give learning method bell ringing a try.  Bells don't need to be kept fit.  And yes, I gave up bell ringing too when regularly-recurring glandular fever morphed into ME, as it is inclined to do, and I didn't go back for five or six years.  But I did go back, and given my state of mind when we first moved out of the old house and into town, if the Bell Virus hadn't also already nobbled me I'm not sure that even being only two garden walls over from that glorious noise would have roused me to action.  

††† You may get some more poetry before the month is out.  

‡ http://www.poetsgraves.co.uk/Classic%20Poems/Southey/the_inchcape_rock.htm I've wasted a little time trying to find out if anyone made a film out of it, but my limited google skills aren't bringing anything up.  I imagine Peter was just grabbing the rhyme.^  And it should be Buffy anyway.  But 'Slayer' really doesn't rhyme.  

^ He's gone to bed.  I can ask him tomorrow.

Triumph from the Jaws of Defeat So Assured It Wasn't Bothering to Bite Down

 

What I didn't tell you about the concert yesterday—and which is part of why I didn't burble more*—is that, as you know,** folk music is all about sex and death, and about halfway through the second set there was one too many songs about death and I just bailed, quietly, sitting in my chair.  The invisible bubble shuts down around you and you're no longer there.  Or not there there.***  I'm also assuming you've all had this experience:  you're not coping, and you just go away.  It's not a great place where you go away to—I always think of it as the bottom of a well—but it beats reality.  Then I had a seriously bad night† and got up this morning [sic] feeling like, well, death.  I have continued to feel like slime mould and old fish fingers all day and by second hellhound hurtle†† I had grimly decided that I was going to have to ring the treble tonight. 

            This was my last-line tease from last night's blog:  what I couldn't bring myself to tell you about today is that we were supposed to be ringing another of my so-called practise quarters.  Whose bloody idea was this practise quarter peal thing anyway.†††  This one was specifically for Niall to call:  he's called several quarters in hand[bells] but never one in the tower.  I had thrown my net a bit wider this time, finding ringers, partly because a few of my standards had the temerity to be otherwise occupied, but also because part of my self-declared brief is to make this practise quarter series available to other erratic nebbishes like me.  You can't afford to have too many dangerous variables in the same quarter if you want any kind of chance to get the thing, but two of my new ringers tonight were tower captains, and one of them—Amy:  you've met her before—even said that she had a couple of beginners who might benefit from a low-stress quarter. 

            Both the best and worst of being the frelling organiser is that you get to ring.  But I'm definitely on the dangerous-variable end of the range.  I had said out loud to Colin and Niall a fortnight or so ago that despite my erratic-nebbish status, I did want to ring inside—but as the organiser, if there wasn't a treble-only ringer‡, which in this case there wasn't, and no one else wanted the treble I'd have to take it.

            Then today happened, and at 5:45 I went drearily off to Ditherington resigned to my fate as the treble.  Niall as conductor got to dispose us as he wished, but he just waved his hands and said we should ring where we liked.  I headed for the treble, to be met by Colin's basilisk stare.  Colin is generally such a sweetie you would be forgiven for forgetting he has a basilisk stare. 

            I had a bad night, I said, and the ME has been gnawing on me all day.  If you want to get this quarter, you'd better let me ring the treble.

            Colin went on staring.  Basilisk-like. 

            Er, I said.  Unless you want to take responsibility for my going off the rails, in which case you can ring the treble.

            Fine, he said, stopping basilisking immediately, and took the treble rope away from me. 

            Crumbs, this is such a bad idea, I said, finding myself on the four.  Remind me where I start.‡‡  Amy, imperturbable on the three, told me.  Treble's going, she's gone, said Colin, cheerfully, and we pulled off.

            Clearly I wouldn't be telling this story like this if we hadn't got it, right?  Right.  We got the quarter. 

             WE GOT THE QUARTER. 

             Yaaaaaaaaay.  We got the quarter, and I was ringing inside, despite having no brain and muscles made of jello.  Also despite the fact that as mere luck would have it, the four, in the particular quarter Niall was calling‡‡‡, had about six Dreaded Three-Four Down Singles.  How frelling unfair is that.  The Dreaded Three-Four Down Bob Minor Single gives beginner, mediocre and erratic-nebbish ringers nightmares.  One of the trickiest bits of learning to ring inside is the rhythm of the zigzags.  A tower bell is a big heavy thing and you are dependent on its inertia to keep it ringing—you on your rope are only adjusting it slightly.  Some adjustments are easier to make than others.  The Dreaded Three-Four Down Bob Minor Single is an especially nasty piece of adjustment where your inertia is sending you amiably down to the front till the single is called, whereupon you have to hang around where you are for two blows (two dongs of your bell) and then turn around and head back up to the back again.  Three of the other inside bells didn't have any three-four down singles and one of them had two.  How did I get so lucky? GAAAAAH.

             There were a few crunchy moments.  The two zoned out, as will happen sometimes, and missed a dodge, and we spent an entire lead going CLANG CLANG CLANG with Colin shouting directions.  But we got right again.  Niall made one rogue call but Colin, Amy and Gillian all bellowed No single!  No single! so we recovered from that too.  I never quite lost my way but I got a little wandery once or twice and Colin yelled at me too in a preventative manner. §

             The funny thing is that we came round long before I had any idea we were anywhere near the end.  Niall shouted, That's all!, and I was like, What?  What?  What?  Which means not only that I survived but that one of the reasons for trying to get myself ringing quarters again is working:  that by ringing them they will become less monumental, you know?  The sheer terror has been so debilitating I'm defeated before I begin—especially with the ME riding me.   Even with the ME—since as I keep saying I have a mild case as ME goes—I probably can ring quarters, if I could stop driving myself to a state of collapse before I grab the bell rope.  So double yaaaaay. 

               . . . And then Niall and I had to go to normal tower practise and be particularly bright and sharp to prove that our practise quarters are not a bad idea (there has been some anxiety expressed on this point) which was pretty frelling challenging in my case.  Colin, who rings full peals pretty much every other day and for whom an extra quarter is about as stressful as a cup of tea, came too, and Anthea, who doesn't ring long stuff but said we sounded very nice from the churchyard.  We'd got New Arcadia's first six (bells) up in peal, and then as more people streamed in Niall and I got the seven and eight up and while this is no big thing for Niall I was thinking, yo, is overcompensation necessary?  I rang bob major inside for the first time–in the tower.   Niall said, bob major, Robin, you ring inside.  I don't know how! I squeaked.  Sure you do, said Niall.  You ring it on handbells.  Oh.  Well.  I also rang our frelling tenor, which as I've said before is actually a very nice, cooperative bell, it's just big, and it scares me, and . . . I have blisters.  No, really.  How embarrassing.

                 But . . . yaaaaaaay.§§ 

* * *

* Mainly I was just falling out of my chair with post-overstimulation and yarn-fumes exhaustion

** Anyone who reads this blog had better have at least basic acquaintance with folk music or I will lecture you unmercifully.  I don't lecture well.  You don't want this.  

*** Note that this is not poor Steeleye's fault.  And no way I wasn't going to go to the concert (also Fiona had bought the tickets last autumn when the schedule came out.  When you go with Fiona, you sit in the front row).   No way I won't go next time either.  Supposing Fiona is around with her poking stick.  And her car.  

† Not at all assisted by a phone call at a normal human post-breakfast settling-down-to-work o'clock from one of my ringers wanting to check the time tonight. 

†† Hellhounds are beginning to forgive me for Extreme Absence yesterday.  That they got a chickeny plate to lick after supper tonight I think confirmed my return to favour.  

††† Mine.  Totally mine.  I talked to Niall about it first and then Colin, and both of them steadfastly^ refused to save me from my insanity.  So there I was.  And am.  

^ I keep trying to spell 'steadfast' without the first 'a' because the bell method Stedman does not have that 'a' and all things bell rule, you know? 

‡ Long-time readers of this blog pick up a few of the essentials of method bell ringing whether they want to or not.  One of the simpler facts is that the treble in most standard methods is the easiest.^  Its line on the page is straight out to the back and straight down to the front again.  There are no zigzags.  Inside bells have zigzags.  Beginners ring their first quarters on the treble because they can't ring inside yet. 

^ Shut up about the tenor, you clever-clogs.  We were ringing minor tonight, so we were all working bells.  Standard even bell methods if you insist. 

‡‡ This is not quite as pathetic as it sounds.  Remember that method ringing is a kind of relay race, where you're all on the same track but you start at different places.  The shorthand for the bob minor 'work' is:  three-four down, five-six down, five-six up, three-four up, seconds.  The four, at the start, has just done three-four down, so its starting place in the pattern means its first work is five-six down.  All the bells just all keep going around the same track from their individual starting places. 

‡‡‡ There are lots and lots and lots of quarter compositions.  Speaking of things that don't bear thinking about.  

§ Generally speaking I'd much rather be yelled at than not.  If I think I've figured out what I'm doing after all it's support and confirmation, and if I haven't, it's rescue.  

§§ And no, this is not April Fool.

Yarn and quite a lot of etc

 

Some days are just entirely too exciting.

            It's midnight, and I've only this minute fed poor, neglected, starving hellhounds their dinner.*  It counts, doesn't it?, that I've only sat down to my own dinner now?  After feeding hellhounds?  And that they got their lunch when I had about three mouthfuls of mine before running off in some other flapdoodling direction or other?**

            It began by oversleeping an hour thanks to setting the timer wrong.***   I stumbled out of bed with a yell, groping for Pooka to text [sic] Fiona . . . turned Pooka on and discovered a text from Fiona saying she'd overslept by an hour.  So that was okay, except that it's meant we've been sprinting in front of the gnashing-teethed time monster all day.

            I've said this to you already, haven't I?—that it is just like me to have finally found someone to do a little secretarial work for me . . . and promptly force her to teach me to knit and let her tease me into taking up my old folk rock mania and start going to live concerts again ( . . . she drives).   She did so little work today that she's refusing to let me pay her for it.†

            But we went to a new yarn shop.  We went to a fabulous new yarn shop, in fact:  http://www.lisswools.co.uk/   It's a bit of a schlep from here but hey.  We both staggered out again about two hours later with smoking credit cards and wailing bank accounts.††  And raced back to New Arcadia for me to hurtle hounds and fail to eat lunch, and Fiona††† to do a little of the work she claims not to have done.  Because then we had handbells.  Well, 5-7 Thursday evening is sacred to handbells.  Fernanda has a streaming cold and Colin is in Petra installing a ring of eight in a rose-red tower half as old as time, so that left Niall and me.  I tried to cancel, but Niall said, you have a friend visiting?  Why don't we teach her handbells?  —We have, in fact, tortured Fiona with handbells once before.  So we did it again.‡  If she's not careful she's going to learn how.

            And then we had to go to the concert.   

For anyone old enough to be scratching their (grey) head and muttering, didn't that album come out in about 1974?  —Yes.  But do you really want to argue about the opportunity for a new Steeleye Span t shirt?  (The Spring 2011 tour dates are on the back.) And when they did All Around My Hat and Gaudete for their encores and Maddy said sing:  all us old geezers sang.

            And tomorrow . . . No, no, I can't bring myself to tell you about tomorrow. . . . ‡‡

* * * 

* Which they ate with unseemly, which is to say delightful, alacrity.  

** Which may help to explain why I was starting to feel a trifle light-headed the last couple of hours.  I used to carry a nice little vacuum pack of roasted salted organic cashews in my knapsack for these emergencies, but I got tired of playing guessing games with the ordering system at the frelling store, and if I had time to roast my own organic cashews I wouldn't need to be carrying them around, you know?  Grump. 

*** I never could count.  Except places in a bell method, and that's work.  

† We may have to argue about this a little more.  I haven't decided yet. 

†† Fiona bought MORE YARN than I did.  No.  True.  Really.   On the way to the concert tonight I sat in the passenger seat of her car taking skein after skein out of her shopping bag and going oooooh.  I've told her she has to take a photo.   The thing that worries me is that Fiona has been knitting eight years or something.  What I'm going to be like in eight years . . . doesn't bear thinking about.  At the moment I'm partially defended from my worst self by the fact that I'm still so clueless.^  I'm really good at looking at yarn and going oooooh, and I can look at patterns and go oooooh too, but that's about the limit of either my conversation or my comprehension of the subject. 

            I also overwhelm easily.  When we first walked in the shop I was instantly riveted by the cardigan that the owner was wearing, which is one of my Ideal Sweater styles—slightly cropped, v neck, little shawl collar, long sleeves—yes she had made it, yes she could sell me the pattern . . . and as these things go, yes it looks like something I could conceivably grow up to make.  So I bought the pattern, went dutifully over to the specified yarn shelves (DK, as it happens) . . . and was promptly overwhelmed.  How do you CHOOOOOSE?  Aaaaaaaaugh.  And then Fiona wandered up to me, clutching, as I was, several different Rowan felted tweeds^^ and whimpering, and Fiona said, isn't that the stuff you went back and bought all of your dye lot at the first shop?  And I looked at her wildly, and we both dove for the pattern and . . . yessssssssss.  I need seven skeins and I have seven skeins.  Occasionally fate is kind.

            Of course then I saw another knitted-up thing on a hanger and did my shiny new knitting-ooooh trick and yes the shop had that pattern too and it's even designated easy knit which in my experience usually means 'boooooring'^^^ so I did buy the yarn for that and it's huge.  I mean the gauge is huge.  Big fat ropes of yarn.  I need more needles!  YAAAAAAAY!  I haven't told you about My Favourite Needles in the Known Universe yet, and this is my excuse to buy more. . . .

^ Although apparently cluelessness is rife in the land.  I've discovered that the frelling clerk at our frelling original little yarn department in the big local fabric-and-girly-stuff store, having punched the buttons on her calculator in a professional-looking manner, told me to buy TWICE as much yarn as I'm going to need for the type of project I had in mind.   This was the famous occasion—my second visit to the yarn shop, I think?—when I was told by the visiting authoritative American knitter person that if I saw a yarn I liked I should buy it now because it won't be there when I come back.  So I did.  Only I bought twice as much as I need.  GRUMP. 

^^ Turquoise, forest green and dark cranberry red+ 

+ I'm still kind of thinking about the cranberry red. . . . 

^^^ And in fact I would have passed right over this one if I'd been looking through the pattern books, draped, as it was, on a sulky anorexic 14-year-old model.

 ††† Who doesn't eat.  I don't know how she manages this.  She's not even menopausal.  I occasionally see her taking furtive pulls at a bottle of fruit juice. 

‡ She could have kept working.  And let me pay her. 

‡‡ Okay, this just in from Fiona.^  Supposing I can persuade WordPress to load it.

^ Wow.  I didn't see the foot fetish toy this evening in the car.