Robin McKinley's Blog, page 136

Sartorial Drama

 

Occasionally being a lazy, careless, indecisive slob is worthwhile.  I belong to the Ramblers http://www.ramblers.org.uk/ * and more often than not when their magazine plonks through the mail slot there's a sale offer of something of interest to walkers included.  This winter there was a flyer for waterproof parkas, always a subject of deep interest to someone who hurtles hounds every day in frequently-soggy Hampshire.  I tend to burn—or sog—through parkas kind of quickly.**  The current one is starting to look like Pernicia's spell in the run up to Rosie's*** one-and-twentieth birthday, and the frelling zipper died about two years ago, and while this is mostly not a big deal since the snaps still work, it IS a big deal in a monsoon headwind.   So I looked at the special-price-for-Ramblers parkas.  And I looked, and I dithered, and I looked, and I dithered, and by the time I decided that the hot raspberry one was the one for me†—well, maybe—the offer had expired.  Oh well, I thought.

            That was now several months ago.  The current zipperless parka is letting the rain in pretty freely at this point.  I really do need a new parka.

            Today I was taking Peter—and me—to Tabitha, my Bowen [massage] lady.  I've been trying to persuade Peter to try her again for months, and in his current post-fall bruised and weakened state I barely had to get out the handcuffs and the flails.  But we both had errands to run in Mauncester first.  I went to the Outdoor Stuff shop and looked at parkas.  There were lots of parkas.  There were black parkas and white parkas.  Once upon a time I would have instantly snabbled a black parka, but that was before I lived in town with a hellhound named Darkness for cause.  I want the cars to see me.  And white . . . oh, glory, I can't face a white parka.  I would fall down in the mud even more often than I do, in a white parka. 

            There were green parkas.  There were blue parkas.  There were purple parkas.  There were green, blue and purple parkas.

            None of them was what I wanted.  The sleeves were too short, the pockets were too small, the belts were disgusting and the fake fur was worse.  Also, approximately half of all women's parkas are cut from some other design than the way the female human body is actually shaped, but you can't always tell this till you get the offending object off the hanger and draped over your female human body.††

            I didn't have much time;  we'd got off later than planned ††† and Tabitha would be waiting.  I was having a last sprint through the shop when a flash of something raspberry caught my eye.  No, no, it won't be.

            It was.  It was the only one in the shop, it was at the back of a row of fashionable, mud-attractant ecru parkas . . . and it was in my size.  This doesn't happen.

            It was also still flaunting its full-price tag.  Rats.  But the faded-mushroom coloured ones were all on sale, so I took it hopefully to a clerk and he buzzed the tag through the system, and it came back with a price better than the Ramblers deal last winter.  Careless slobbishness rules.  Wheeeeeee.  So I bought it and shot back to Wolfgang.  Where Peter was already waiting (of course).‡

            And this system of going to Tabitha together is great.  I sat in Tabitha's frighteningly clean and beautifully decorated sitting room for an hour while Tabitha worked Peter over like a bowl of recalcitrant bread dough and I knitted.‡‡ 

* * *

* Although to my embarrassment I've never been on one of their walks.  I've told you this before, haven't I?  The Hampshire group is lively and active and hellhounds and I regularly cross paths with a Rambler hike.  When we first moved into town I thought of trying—meant, in fact, to try—going out with the Ramblers.  The previous generation of hellhounds were elderly by then and only wanted a mild stroll around the block any more;  I was on my own.  But I never got around to it, partly because I was feeling pretty wretchedly anti-social after the move^ and partly because Peter among others told me it would make me nuts because of course they pretty much have to go at the pace of their slowest walker—or you spend a lot of time waiting around at checkpoints.  Which would make me nuts.  And now, of course, there are hellhounds.  Who are used to travelling at my clip, except when they're going faster than the speed of sound—and I'm standing there muttering the mantra, they will come back.  They will come back.

            But I remain a bit wistful about the Ramblers.  I belong because I support their work in keeping the countryside healthy and open to walkers, but I also still read the magazine, and the Hampshire schedule.

^ I am very grateful for the irresistableness of those noisy bells two garden walls over from the cottage.

** And I don't, myself, find that the re-waterproofing or de-clogging or whatever it's supposed to be, of old parkas all that effective.  Although with the accumulation of bramble-slashes and what-the-hell-was-that-fence-post-doing-there climbing-over-stile ripped-out seams it's usually pretty moot after two or three years.

*** I had a very sweet email from a reader a few days ago who said all the right things for several gratifying paragraphs and then ends saying that she wishes I'd write more tall awkward heroines.  That besides Harry in SWORD, they're all small.  They what?  Sylvi is the only little one.  The rest are all middling-tall to gigantic—Rosie is another whopper, like Harry, and [semi spoiler alert] Cecily is not merely big enough to pass convincingly, she also picks up her wounded friend and walks away with her—and granted I'm 58 years old and have ME, but I would not want to have to lift Hannah in my arms.  Tall and awkward is what I do.^

            This is one of those GAAAAAAH CANNOT WIN moments.  Here I was so pleased to have Sylvi, who is finally short.^^ 

^ Or at least awkward.  The only unawkward ones—Beauty in ROSE DAUGHTER, Lissar in DEERSKIN, and Rosie's friend Peony—are that way because the plot requires it.  I had to sort of not think about this when I was writing about them.  Gracefulness and I are strangers.

^^ If I ever get the story written, the woman sitting by the pool in Aerin's vision is short.

† You're saying, there was a hot raspberry and I didn't immediately know it was for me?  Well—no.  There was also a very nice lilac which was considerably cheaper. 

†† I am normal, aren't I?  Aren't I?

††† Something to do with hellhounds and lunch 

‡ Peter is always on time.  I am always late.  This is the sort of thing you don't realise till after you're married.

‡‡ And gloated.  Although I'm dreading tomorrow, and examining my prize more closely, and discovering the large purple ink stain, the scorch mark, and/or the torn-off hem where the Hound of the Baskervilles almost got the official store tester of new clothing.  The zipper works though.

Little teeny demonstrations of progress

 

I spent most of Saturday knitting.  Well, it gave me an alternative excuse for red, burning eyes* and at least at the very plain beginner knitting level I'm still doing it's soothing.    Nothing matters but that next stitch-loop, and the one after that, and the one after that, and they're so cute, as the neat little things line up on your needles,** and so orderly***, as row piles up on row.  The appearance, however illusory, of control, plan, system, is part of the comfort.  I wrote this to a non-knitting friend† who is something of a science/medical geek, who wrote back that as it happened she'd just been reading AN ACTUAL SCIENTIFIC STUDY of knitting and the release of endorphins:  it's the small precise repetitive motion that drugs us silly.††  The knitting world, by a casual glance at google, is apparently well aware of this connection anecdotally.  I still don't recommend knitting and chocolate simultaneously:  they may rub off on each other to mutual disadvantage.

            But I'm fascinated at this acquisition of another new skill:  this one is so much more methodical than, say, singing.  I think I may have said this before:  the hellhound blanket squares are in pretty fat yarn, so-called 'chunky', and on 6 mm needles.  When I started of course this was quite fiddly and scary enough . . . and when I leaped somewhat too quickly to my first Secret Project on 4 mm needles it was total moan and bane and horrible crooked knotty things.  Then I made it worse by adding a new yarn to Secret Project #1 that had BOBBLES on it.  I did not, of course, realise that they were, you know, REAL bobbles.  I thought they were just flecks of colour.  Nooooo.  When I got them home and cast them on the needles the ghastly reality was revealed.  Bobbles.  After struggling through a square of that diabolical stuff the ordinary smooth 4 mm is positively feasible.  And then . . .

            Okay.  I need to hang photos.  Among other things I need to demonstrate to doubters that I am not indulging in my bent for fantasy:  the (various) squares are mounting up.  But I'm not going to do it tonight.†††  For one thing, I want a little time for knitting before I go to bed. 

* * *

* Must get some better lighting sorted out for my standard chair at the mews.  At the cottage my knitting locations seem already to have suitable lighting but at the mews I'm mostly either at the computer or the piano.^

^ Hellhounds occasionally try to run between my legs in such a manner as to make me fall on the sofa but this hasn't been working very well.  And yet I've still got some operas stored on the TV.  Supposing I remembered how to turn it on.  Supposing the storage machinery hasn't been eaten by moths or grey nanobot goo.

             I am occasionally nostalgic for the bad old days of three or four TV stations, when all you had to do was turn on the power and lo!, there was a rerun of Wonder Woman or Leave It to Beaver, right there on the screen.  There was no 437-button remote and yes, you did have to get up to change the channel, but that meant channel-surfing hadn't been invented yet.  There was no forty pages of on-screen menu, including the page of instructions and inexplicable acronyms.  In America the stuff just came beaming in, over here you were (and are) expected to pay a relatively minimal yearly TV license fee—and the stuff still just came beaming in.  Only weird people had satellite—only the wealthy and/or obsessed paid proper money for TV.   There were only 9,813 ways for everything to go horribly wrong, instead of several gazillion, most of them involving long queues on the telephone to your ginormous corporate personal beam provider whose customer service centre is located on several of the larger of Saturn's moons, and attended by inadequately trained aliens with a rudimentary grasp of all human language, which does not seem to include English at all.  You didn't use to have to have a frelling password to watch TV.+

           I think that the pinnacle of the home entertainment system happened somewhere in the mid-80s, when using  VCRs stopped being slightly more complex than a combination of the Large Hadron Collider and the Tardis, and before two billion channels became the norm++ and you were obliged to develop a close personal relationship with an electronic negotiation consultant whom you need to answer questions at those times when the telemetry to Saturn's moons is down. +++ 

            I was originally thinking that I might finally get back to watching TV—I'm sure hellhounds can learn not to lie on my knitting.=  But maybe I'll just stick to knitting.

+ Passwords:  the Unacknowledged True Destroyer of the Modern World and Civilisation as We Have Known It.  Global warming?  No.  Terrorism?  No.  Cheap nasty acrylic yarn?  No.  The real villain is the  malign proliferation of passwords.  I think passwords may be the grey goo of urban myth. 

++of which no less than 51% by contract are home shopping networks, which does offer some relief to someone wanting dragons or the Doctor. 

+++At least one chronometric exception to stopping in the mid-eighties must be made:  Buffy.  Buffy is necessary. 

= Okay, not sure sure 

** Supposing they are neat, which is still a somewhat aggrieved issue.  

*** See previous footnote 

† Yes I do have them.  And I'm planning on keeping them. 

†† It's also supposed to be a good defense against arthritis and rheumatism, which would be me^—also Alzheimer's.  Mmm.  There's Alzheimer's in my biological family, and I have friends who've nursed Alzheimer's relatives, so I'm most emphatically not being offhand about Alzheimer's, which may be the ugliest, most horrible disease ever, or is anyway in the top three.  But have you noticed the way 'prevents Alzheimer's' has become a buzz phrase?  Chocolate, champagne, fantasy novels, singing, hellhounds, they all prevent Alzheimer's.  There are periodic little flurries in the bell-ringing world about method ringing being a preventative—and there are always the sad rebuttal stories about the multiple-surprise-peal ringers who nonetheless developed Alzheimer's.  I don't know if anyone has done a statistical comparison between incidence of Alzheimer's in method ringers and the rest of the population however. 

^ While I was poking around for mentions of knitting and endorphins, I wandered across several sites about overcoming depression—knitting again is cited for the repetitive motion thing:  it should include the fact that your repetitive motion produces something, which is to say, knitting, but I didn't read that far—and was reminded that a favourite folk remedy for depression is potatoes.  So long as you don't eat so many that you get depressed about the whole new wardrobe you have to buy.  I had to go off potatoes and tomatoes—another notorious health food—a few years ago when menopause began to bite, and rheumatism with it.  Works a treat.  I don't know if it's permanent or merely a staver-off for some years, but I'll take what I can get.  But menopause with its hormonal havoc is also when my depressive tendency went from something I knew was there to full-blown I'm-not-at-all-sure-this-is-worth-it, and the chief thing that kept me putting one foot in front of the other for about three years was the hope that it was menopause and would go away.  Which it mostly has.  But potatoes weren't an option if I wanted to go on using my hands and walking on my feet.  And that's aside from the fact that your frelling metabolism shuts down with menopause too, and chances are you can't afford the calories.  I certainly couldn't.  Unless, of course, I wanted to buy a whole new wardrobe.  Which I didn't.+  Menopause:  one of life's little practical manifestations of killer irony.   

+ You know those periodic la-la-land stories about people who claim not to eat at all—this is usually in aid of being at perfect one with the planet and not having to murder things to survive—if any of them is a menopausal woman, I might just believe her.  

††† And probably not tomorrow night either.  I don't want to frighten the non-knitters, who seem to be a much twitchier bunch than, say, non-singers, non-bell-ringers, non-rose-growers, and non-owners-of-hellhounds.  Feh.

Crying in Your Beer

 

I had a rather emotional voice lesson today.  I wasn't at all sure how—or maybe I should say whether—it was going to go at all, and I briefly thought about cancelling.  The problem with a Monday appointment is that you don't have twenty-four hours' standard business lead time in which to cancel,* and you feel like such a jerk ringing up first thing Monday morning**.  Second . . . I did not in fact want to cancel, I just wanted not to make a complete dork of myself, and I wasn't sure if singing without dorkification was an option.  What I have been finding over the weekend is just how rooted in your life your voice is.  I know:  duh.  I am someone for whom music is a very emotional experience—indeed I find it difficult to comprehend how anyone can not find music an emotional experience:  I feel that they must just not have found the right music yet.  And I have spent many many hours in my life playing recordings and crying, and more recently playing the piano and crying has been a not-unknown response to stress and sorrow.  But dear gods and gremlins, singing when you have lumps in your throat and knots in your stomach is eviscerating.  There was a moment on Saturday when I thought I might literally fall down.  So I sat down instead.  Hastily.  And waited for the world to stop spinning.  Nothing wrong with my breath control (such as it is).  No, this is about making contact with the lumps and knots.  I'm sharply aware of the physical herding-cats aspect of Yourself as Instrument but . . . dumb as this is, no, I wasn't really expecting the instant sizzling zap to my emotional reality.***

            But I remembered Nadia saying that there'd been a rough stretch in her life when she'd go in to her voice lesson, take a deep breath, open her mouth . . . and start crying.  So I went.  And it was okay.  It was not great, but it was okay.

            But as I said:  I did not, in fact, want to cancel.  Life goes on, you know?  Which is chiefly what I wanted to say to you tonight.  Any of you—and that will be most if not all of you—who have lost someone† dear and important will know that the world changes irrevocably as a result, and that getting used to that change—which is to say grieving—takes a remarkably long time and, frankly, is never complete.  The person-shaped hole that your friend leaves is a unique shape and no one and nothing can fill it but them.††  The other thing that happens with every loss is that all your other incompletely-adjusted-to losses come back and sodding mob you.  Gah.  And the indispensible ones you're thinking about every day anyway.†††  Sorry, but I think this life and death system sucks really, really big hairy tentacled Lovecraftian monsters, and first I want a refund and second I want to be in admin next time around because I'm sure this frelling system could be improved on.

          Meanwhile I'm going to try to return you to your regularly scheduled programme.            

          Tonight, for example, Peter was playing bridge and Penelope was out being a theatre critic, so I bought Niall a beer on the way home from tower practise at Glaciation.  I've been thinking, he said earnestly.  You said that Wild Robert was offering to bribe us with handbells.‡  Yes, I said warily:  there was a look in Niall's eye that I know means trouble.  I'm sure, said Niall, blinking rapidly to prevent me from reading the secret agenda stamped on his retinas,  that the reason Wild Robert is trying to bribe us is because he really wants to ring Cambridge minor on handbells.  So do you suppose you could learn . . .

* * *

* Dentist from R'lyeh requires three days.  This totally freaked me out when my Nice Normal Dentist first sent me there saying that she could no longer cope with the disaster level, but to give Dentist from R'lyeh credit^, they have it on my record that I have ME, and if I ring up and say I'm wobbly and can't risk dental anaesthesia today/tomorrow they say, now you take care of yourself, do you want to reschedule now or later?   It doesn't really surprise me that a dentist that demands you deposit a gold ingot at the door every time you cross his threshold—and that's before you get the bill—has to be a bit strict about compliance.  But is it only the state of the economy that has everyone who ever submits an invoice stamping it with large red letters pay this in the next thirteen and a half minutes or we'll kidnap your dogs?  Peter says yes, it is, that small businesses are all suffering cash flow problems.  I keep thinking it's also a plague of rudeness.   I'm feeling a bit testy about the bill I got from the electricians a few days ago:  these are the electricians who didn't answer four phone calls in a fortnight, took another fortnight to do what they promised in a week, then took three weeks to send me a bill . . . which demands that I pay it within two weeks or they'll sell me into slavery. 

^ much as this pains me+

+ ha ha ha ha ha

** Supposing you were awake first thing Monday morning 

*** I also have some fuzzy, inchoate thoughts about the linkage between talent and its practical manifestation.  However good or mediocre I am on an absolute artistic standard, I have a professional-level writing talent.  In practise this means that the strength of the talent itself will drag me through some pretty rough stuff, both stuff happening in my life and stuff happening in the story, which I have to try to make work, with whatever skills I have available, on the page.  While I'm beginning to feel rather cranky about the decades of amateur choir singing I've missed, I do not have a professional-level musical talent, and I wonder if this means my singing—or my piano playing—is more likely to be derailed by stuff just because it is itself weaker?   Does anyone else have a strong talent—it doesn't have to be a standard 'artistic' one, just something that taps into what you know to be your own personal individual selfness, which is what usually gets called creativity—that will ride the big stuff, and some smaller talent/creative activity which is tapping into the same place in your self but isn't as suited to who you are, which is to say you're not as good at it (whatever good means), which goes to pieces when you do?  —Told you they were inchoate.  But if anyone follows any of the above, and has a 'yes' or a 'no', I'd be interested to hear.

            I'm also very curious about how much more disintegrative singing is for me than piano playing.  Is it just the Yourself as Instrument aspect?  Or that I've been playing the piano for longer?  I know there are volatile, ardent, not to say temperamental, instrumentalists out there whose emotional reality, whatever it is, is heightened by musical expression.  But I was pretty shaken by just how directly the zap happened, singing:  like lightning striking a tree.  Smell of burning Robin.

† And of, I wish to add, whatever species.   Love and grief are not restricted to humans. 

†† Which is why getting a new puppy or a new rescue critter or a new horse is because you want to have dogs or cats or horses or guinea pigs or boa constrictors in your life, not because it's a replacement for the one(s) you lost.  There are no replacements.  Loss is absolute. 

††† I want to die before Hannah.  It doesn't have to be a lot before, and she can be in a coma in the next bed over at the old folks' home.  Still.  I want to be first. 

‡ Have I told you this story?  I may not have told you this story.  Ask me tomorrow.  Or some time.

Landscape

 

I've spent a lot of the last two days in the garden.*  The weather has been heavenly, and dirt and sunlight are therapeutic.  Today is a bit more of a heavy slog than it was going to be anyway because I managed to forget that the clocks were due to go forward.  In my extremity last night I was actually talking to a friend on the phone—I'm allergic to telephones—and congratulating myself on retaining sufficient presence of mind to remember I had to go to bed in time to get up and ring bells this morning . . . and after we rang off and the darkness was starting to close in on me again, some irritatingly chirpy bloke on the radio said, Remember, the clocks go forward tonight!  It is now ten past an hour later than you thought! **

            Blerg.

            Furthermore I'd promised to ring for evening service at Crabbiton, which is suffering an unusually high percentage of ringer injuries, illnesses, and assorted hors de combat.  I was inclined to grumble about the time indoors and away from my garden(s), but I brought my camera*** and . . . there's not a lot of the Christian bible that speaks to me, but 'I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills, from whence cometh my help' feels like a warm blanket when I'm colder than sorrow. 

fine tilth for sowing. You can see the streaks of Hampshire chalk.

* * *

Sorry about the less than perfect focus. My camera wants me to tell it something when it's supposed to be focussed on 'infinity' and I haven't figured out what yet.

* Diana was a gardener.  Her garden is tiny, like mine, but she too grew roses.    

            She was growing roses when I was still living in Maine with two granite boulders nearly as large as the house occupying what would have been the back garden if there hadn't been boulders instead, and thinking of roses as annuals.  Diana liked my boulders—most people liked my boulders:  they were pretty spectacular—but a good deal of Down East village life was as alien to her as . . . Hampshire village life was to me a few years later.  I could feel my face settling into similar lines of awe and disbelief when confronted by an especially gnomic utterance or you-made-that-up-right? local custom—and I thought of Diana in Blue Hill.  I've told you the story of Peter handing me a basket at the greengrocer's, the day I arrived in England after our mad this-is-the-beginning-of-the-rest-of-your-life weekend in Maine, and suggesting I pick out some oranges?  And I stood in the middle of the floor clutching the basket and thinking frantically, Oranges?  Oranges?  This is England!  I don't know how to pick out oranges in England!  —Something very similar happened to Diana when I took her to Merrill & Hinckley, the grocery-and-everything-else store in Blue Hill, which is a bit notorious for its Ye Olde American feel—Natty Bumppo and Paul Bunyan in aisle eight.  At the time she and I thought it was funny—but then Diana was going home again in a few days.  (I didn't tell Peter about the oranges for years.) 

            Diana was recklessly brave to be going anywhere.  Her travel jinx was legendary.  That first trip to Maine she got off relatively lightly:  the airline merely lost track of the fact that she was on one of its planes heading for Bangor (and she didn't even know this:  I was the one having the nervous breakdown) and it took two days for her suitcase to be located on the carousel in Tashkent and sent back to us.  But it's perfectly true:  buying toiletries in an unknown and clearly unknowable culture (especially one that has just eaten your suitcase and has blue livestock in aisle eight) is very unsettling.   

           Years ago now, but after I'd married Peter and become a gardener too, Diana had been ill, and I gave her a gift certificate for David Austin Roses as a get-well present.  She bought three Golden Celebrations.  http://www.davidaustinroses.com/english/showrose.asp?showr=2935  They're like small golden suns, she wrote me. 

            Once when I was there this winter, there were several new, dormant roses in pots on the front step, recently bought, waiting for a day anyone could bear to be outdoors in, to go in the ground.  May they and every other rose already in her garden bloom more than any roses ever have, this summer, in her honour.

** I was, however, on time.  Niall was late.

*** Who needs a name.  I'm thinking.

Diana Wynne Jones

 

As most of you already know—the news went viral with incredible speed—Diana died this morning.  Quietly, at home. 

            . . . I keep sticking at this point.  I know I want to tell you about Diana—about my Diana.  I've known her since we were both Greenwillow authors in the early 80s.  Although our friendship has had long hiatuses due to illness and evil technology—her computer karma makes me look like a Silicon Valley geek—and my self-sabotaging default position that my friends have better things to do than talk to me, she's been one of my favourite people for thirty years. 

            I also know I don't want to talk about her today.  Probably not tomorrow either.

            Everyone leaves a themselves-shaped hole when they go, and we all feel it, whether we know or recognise the individual holes or not.  No one is an island, as John Donne almost said, each human death diminishes me.  But Diana was a bigger piece of the promontory than most.  This is not the same world without her in it.

            And I'm sure you'll forgive me if I stop there.

Spring gardening

 

I had six boxes of mail-order plants on my front step this morning.  And so the rush begins.*  This afternoon I spent feverishly slamming things in pots and potting-on trays—and sighing prospectively over this year's meconopsis—er—meconopses?   Blue Himalayan poppies.  I occasionally manage to get a breath-stoppingly fantastic blue flower out of one but several of them apparently have to die first—the meconopsis god is a savage one—and I have yet to keep one over to flower again the next year.**

            But speaking of cranky things in pots:  you're told (fiercely) by snowdrop specialists, of whom there are an awful lot around, that you mustn't put your snowdrops in pots, they don't like it.  I didn't mean to put mine in pots, I just . . . well, they send you snowdrops 'in the green' because unlike most bulbs (tulips, daffs etc) which you're sent and you plant dormant, snowdrops prefer to be moved while they're growing.  Mine were busy coming into flower, and since I couldn't immediately decide where I wanted to put them*** . . . I put them in pots.  Given the all-the-plumbing-in-Hampshire aspect of my cottage's garden, pots are always a good choice anyway.  They flowered nicely.†  And then I was . . . vaguely . . . going to get them in the ground because you mustn't grow snowdrops in pots but where?  Because the thing about snowdrops is they're little and they droop, and this is not only a tiny garden it's a tiny untidy garden.  So I kind of didn't get around to putting them in the ground.  And they died back, the way snowdrops do . . . and I forgot which pots they were in . . . because of course the labels had come out, which is what labels do, supposing I'd remembered to make them and stick them in which in this case I had . . . and I found the labels trampled into the ground, but as spring-bulb pots go over, I shove them back against the walls and pull forward the things that are coming into flower.  I have learnt the hard way not to disturb apparently-empty pots shoved against the walls, because they can be assumed to contain bulbs that I'm expecting to come again next year.††  What is in them frequently comes as a surprise. . . . †††  I thought crossly about my double snowdrops, because I don't like killing things because I simply don't get around to doing what they need—as opposed to helplessly failing to give them what they need, as with all those meconopses—and also because they were, as plants go, modestly expensive. 

            So imagine my delight when long strap-like snowdrop leaves started coming up in a couple of those not-empty pots in January.  They're not only alive, they're increasing.  By next year—the gardening gods willing—I'll have to tip them out and split them up.  Maybe I'll finally get a few of them in the ground.  But I like them in pots:  I can put them on the front porch stairs, where I can see them easily.‡

            I still want some Himalayan blue poppies. 

* * *

* And then there's the rant about the reality of mail-order plants.  I love being able to order on line and have the things appear as if by magic^, and the fancy named nurseries (mostly) do an amazing job.  But the 4,673 marigolds and a free giraffe companies—the ones that are pretty much your local garden centre, only a lot bigger—and who aren't really interested in plants, but in moving product . . . they're something else again.  In the first place, I don't want 4,673 of anything^^, and I never want the free electric popover kit.^^^  I realise that I and all my gardening friends are supposed to get together and plan what to order together . . . in some other life and probably on some other planet.  So perhaps it's all part of the system that at least half your marigolds are going to arrive in a previously-living condition.  One of those boxes today held six geraniums.  The box was too big, and the container inside the box that has individual slots for the individual baby plants was also too big, and the slots were too big.  So some clever person had run some tape down both sides of the slots, which hadn't stuck very well . . . and five of the six geraniums had come loose and toppled round in free fall, scattering leaves, stems and roots as they went.  Geraniums are generally pretty tough, and I expect three of them are recoverable.~   And I don't actually need more than three—I'd rather've had three, it's just six is what they were offering.~~  But . . .

^ Not by magic, mutters my credit card

^^ Probably not even roses.+

+ I wonder how many acres you'd need for 4,673 roses . . . ? 

^^^ Except very occasionally when it's the free rose-gilding device+ that is the only thing I do want, and then I have to order the 4,673 marigolds to get it.

+ Gilding the lily is so old 

~ Of course I planted all six.  You never know. 

~~ And a free cheese grater.  Shaped like a hedgehog.  Mmmm.

** I had three last autumn, two that hadn't flowered last year, and one in its second year of life, that had—you're supposed to not let them flower their first year which in my experience only means you end up with even fewer flowers, since it doesn't, in my experience, slow the death rate at all.  Aaaaaand I'm pretty sure all three of them are now ex-.  What a good thing I ordered more.  Learning from my experience.  Now, do I let the new ones flower—supposing they survive and produce flower buds?  Or do I let myself be swayed by the myth about letting the plant have a year to get strong?

            Peter had a glorious blue poppy last year.  I was so jealous.  If it flowers again this year I may have to emigrate to the Antarctic.  Where I will keep a plastic cactus on my bedside table.^ 

^ And I really will have to knit hellhound booties.  

*** This is mysteriously a much harder decision in a tiny garden than it is in a two and a half acre garden. 

† I'm pretty sure I hung photos of them, didn't I?  Two different doubles?  I think it was only last year.  It might have been two years ago. 

†† I no longer even try to keep most tulips going.  They flower, I pull them out, I buy more next year.  One of the advantages of a tiny garden is being able to afford to do this.  Barring the little species ones, which mostly do come again without fuss. 

††† . . . and a reprimand.  There are also always lots of little pots that get shoved so far back that I forget they exist, and they don't get watered or fed or anything.  It astonishes me how tough many bulbs are.  I have an unexpected and undeserved forest of small fragrant daffs and striped and white grape hyacinths that I discovered when I was clearing out a larger-than-usual heap of leaf litter—larger than usual because it was a drift over a collection of forgotten pots. . . . 

‡ Not to mention the slight swank factor of having some slightly unusual double snowdrops.

The Therapeutic Value of Handbells

 

. . . a hitherto unknown and unexamined aspect of the handbeller's art, craft and mania.   Yesterday was roadkill.  Yesterday remains better not described, barring the weather, which was glorious, and I did manage to totter out and fossick around the garden for several hours.  I love this time of year;  despite the horror and outrage at all the plant life that didn't make it through the winter*, there's also not merely the pleasure of what's alive and coming into growth** but there is all that space left both by the annuals that were supposed to die, and the deaders that weren't, and looking around there's that ridiculous sense that this year you know what you're doing and you're going to have things under control.  Hahahahahahahahahaha, etc.*** 

            Anyway.  Sunlight on the face and bent back are always good, but yesterday was still bad.  Today started out even worse.  Last night I couldn't sleep and this morning I couldn't wake up.  Eventually the pitiableness of hellhounds† got me moving, but it was ludicrously warm today, unhingingly warm, that kind of spring warm that your still-winter-braced body can't really cope with†† and neither hellhounds nor I were moving very fast, nor, in my case, very coherently.  Got down to the mews, turned on computer and my brain was not working.  Not.  Working.  And handbells were early today††† because Niall was ringing a handbell peal this evening,‡ so I wasn't going to get any extra vitamin-D time in the garden.  Moan.  Moan.  I even considered cancelling, but while Fernanda has decided not to run away to sea after all, she won't be back till next week, so if I cancelled nobody would get to ring.  Which of course would distress Niall profoundly, since he's only ringing a peal (note:  two and a half hours) later. 

            But just the three of us would mean ringing St Clements again, and while I had (to my own considerable surprise) rung it on the trebles last week Niall, because Niall is like this, had told me to look at the 5-6, and I had looked at it, and it had looked at me, and it had said, nyah nyah nyah.  And when I looked at the trebles again this afternoon in something of a sweat, they looked like hieroglyphics from an alien and inimical culture.  So Niall and Colin blew in, dismayingly on time, and more or less the first thing Colin said was, yes!  Happy to ring another practise quarter on the first [of April.  Yes, sic]!  —which before I went into my decline was something I'd urgently wanted Colin to get back to me about, and since I went into my decline I've been thinking well, what a good thing I hadn't set up that quarter.  Ah.  Um.  Niall was busily unpacking bells and he said, so, what do you want to ring?  And I said, Well, I assume you're going to make me ring St Clements, and I did look at the 5-6, but—

            St Clements!  Great! said Niall, handing me the 5-6.

            No, no, I said feebly.  That's what I was trying to tell you, I'm not ready to ring the 5-6.

            Yes you are, said Niall, handing the trebles to Colin, who promptly rang them.  Niall followed on the 3-4.

            Whimper, I said, and rang the 5-6.

            There was, let me say, a lot more dragging of the 5-6 by the other two pairs than was at all pretty, but as does just happen sometimes with ME‡‡, I could feel my energy level starting to flow back in again, like a turning tide, and Pooka the Wonder iPhone had clearly given me more of an idea of the shape of the method while I was learning the trebles than I realised.  By the time we'd stopped for tea and then started picking our bells up again afterward and Niall said, what do you want to ring now?, I said instantly,  I want to get this.  So we kept on ringing St Clements with me on the decreasingly inept 5-6.  Now you want to be looking at the 3-4, said Niall on parting.

            Do you suppose I should be telling the NHS about handbells?   

* * *

* Part of the outrage is the weirdness of what does and doesn't come through.  I must have ten snapdragons still alive, which should all have been dead in last November's long hard frosts—and I was sure they'd bite it when we had three freezing nights in a row last week because I'd been dumb enough to clear out around them and trim back the dead bits—well there's still time, it's not May yet.  On the other hand I have some supposedly-nearly-the-original-wild violas that are supposed to be tough as old boots and to spread like ground elder and . . . they keep dying.  Drainage?  Don't talk to me about drainage.  Having lost them in the ground I have started putting them in pots where I can provide MAJOR ENGINEERED DRAINAGE . . . and they still die.  I think I'm giving up this year.   

** Markham's Pink [clematis]!  Yaay!  I kept losing it in the ground, against the back wall, so this third one I put in a pot.  And this is its second year.  And it's growing.  In fact . . . it's growing too frelling much.  It's going to burst out of that pot and it's taking over the little picket fence that faces the kitchen door.  Arrrrrgh.  Life with plants.   If they're not dead, they're triffids.  But still.  YAAY! 

*** Pause to wipe my eyes and get my breath back. 

† The big melting-gold eyes, the flattened, beseeching ears, the hopeful tails. . . . 

†† Especially when the frelling temperature is seesawing 20 or 30 degrees (F) every day.  Glurk.  The ME can't resist adding its distinctive anarchy to the situation either.  I have been looking and feeling a lot like a badly-knitted hellhound square the last two days. 

††† Quick—another cup of tea. 

‡ Yesterday's other bright spot was a cup of tea with Penelope who, poor woman, mostly had to listen to me moan.  But she mentioned in passing that Niall at present is ringing seven days a week.  And I suspect this does not take into account days when he rings twice. 

‡‡ And depression, in my experience of it.

My Yarn Stash – guest post by Fiona

 

So, having rashly mentioned in Robin's earshot something along the lines of  "I really should get my stash together and take some photos at some point" – a statement which garnered the INSTANT response of "Guest Blog!" – Here I am to provide a yarn fix for those who  are that way inclined. (I'm afraid that those who aren't yet infected with the yarn virus will probably be groaning and muttering "Oh no! Not MORE knitting stuff !!  ;) ) I'll try not to bore you all TOO much…

I started knitting with eyelash and novelty yarns, making first scarves, and then patchwork blankets – that kept me occupied for a couple of years, and then I got bitten by the sock bug and the novelty yarn has languished ever since. (I really should do something  with it at some point I suppose).

There's a direct correlation between my starting to knit socks, and developing a SERIOUS yarn problem… *

Here's my Picasa Web album of my yarn stash with explanatory captions.

 

* Snork.  Also . . . Yarn?  Problem?   eeeeeeeeeeep

Good and very damn bad

 

So, first things first:  is everybody on board with the fact that Elizabeth Moon's KINGS OF THE NORTH is out today?  http://www.elizabethmoon.com/books-paksworld.html#kings 

I can use some good news.  (And I can always use another good book to read.*)  It's been a mortally—literally—sucky day, in that I got the expected-but-you-always-hope-it-won't-come news that a dear friend is dying.  Damn, frelling sod it and ratbags.  I am therefore a little overwhelmed with the standard forehead-clutchers like so what is life for then anyway?  And, why death?  There has got to be a better system than this sudden-irrevocable-horrible-accident, getting-old-and-going-to-pieces, stupid-ugly-soul-stealing-disease system that we've got.  Times like these I remember those sour old adages about how the clinically depressed are the ones with a true view of reality;  those of us still functioning are in denial.

            So I'm going to pull some more comments from the forum to give myself something to think about, since my brain will keep reverting to how much I am going to miss her.  

In response to the multiple-project theories remark, boddhi_d wrote:

…I swear, I'm going to have to include projects in my will, the completion of which is a requirement to inherit. ('To my beloved second cousin I bequeath my pearl earrings and $1000, to be distributed upon finishing the rosebud quilt that is nearly done.')

ROSEBUD QUILT?  Hey, I'll finish it.  (The pearl earrings might be nice too.  Thanks.  Your second cousin can have the $1000.  Don't you have something else she can finish?)

In the southern U.S., we have an all-purpose phrase that can be used to GREAT effect in many circumstances, and I think is appropriate here: "Bless your heart." As in, "Bless your heart, child, why don't you just go sit down and try it again, and this time actually pay attention?" It's a fabulous way 'not to be rude.' AND it can be repeated ENDLESSLY.

(Snork.)  It's southern, is it?  That's one of my mother's family's phrases, and I have increasingly suspected that my grandmother was far more southern than she wanted to admit.  (I have no idea.  She was a strange woman.)  Hey, do you know 'oh my stars and heavenly bodies'?  Which is a phrase I love, and have never heard it anywhere except my mother's family.

'I have no clear idea who the main character is'

Bless its heart.

::falls down laughing::  I totally have to relearn this.

I can't help but wonder, is this maybe a problem of the reader trying to decide which of the males is the main character?

Getting slightly ahead of myself here, yes we do know that Rglmmph is male . . . or anyway I have never seen . . . ahem . . .  'Rglmmph' as a girl's name.   And I'm hilariously tickled that several of you picked this out as a probability.   I have told you, haven't I, about one of my favourite reader letters, from back in the days when I got letters rather than emails, which was, siiiiiiiigh, a school assignment letter, from a junior-high boy, who had managed to read THE BLUE SWORD under the impression that Harry is a boy?  The thing that made this so killing is that he got the plot pretty well accurate—he or someone had read it—but—but . . . the mind boggles.  One possibility is that someone else read it for him and silently changed the relevant detail of the protagonist's gender . . . sounds like the sort of thing a brother or sister might have done, doesn't it?  And maybe he wasn't paying well enough.

'If Oisin doesn't stop flapdoodling around on the flimsy excuse that he has 1,000,000,000,000 things to do already^^^ and get the New Arcadia Singers organised,'

…and write another GUEST BLOG…*

*That was a cue, wasn't it?

If it wasn't, it should have been.  I'll be sure to point this out to Oisin. 

I have had a slender but gratifying stream of emails from blog readers saying more or less what Stephanie said on the forum: 

. . . reading your blog has changed my way of looking at authors – not that I didn't know that an author is a person, but I just didn't know any personally. I realize that the blog is just a small and selectively edited part of your life, but a lot of your voice comes through and I really enjoy feeling like I know a little bit about Robin, the person. . . . I want you to know how much I appreciate you spending the time to share some of yourself with us. Thanks

Thank you for recognition of the selectively-edited part;  and at the same time, yes, you do know a little about Robin the person, and to the extent that this blog is succeeding in putting over the concept that authors are ordinary people too (normal = insane) then it is a success, and I feel a lot more cheered up about how much work it is and how much it probably isn't much of a marketing tool because I can't think in marketing.  I'm missing a lot of important brain lobes:  higher maths (well, okay, lower maths too), analytical philosophy, British crossword puzzles . . . book marketing.  But this humanising thing is, indeed, one of the things that the internet has proved very good for:  all this connectivity includes making broader genuine personal contact than was ever possible in the era of street mail and rotary-dial telephones and IBM Selectric typewriters.

P.S. And I have a terrible lot of yarn stored up, and a dearth of finished projects too.

Normal.  Insane.  And because I've ordered yarn and knitting needles from two mail-order companies I am now on their email lists for SALES and SPECIAL OFFERS.  AAAAAAAAUGH.

cnaught writes: 

Regarding Rglmmph:

I'll admit I was a bit confused the first time I read Hero and the Crown — an issue sorting out what was flashback and what was current

I wouldn't do this kind of thing if I had a choice.  I'm too used to hearing people say that they like my books once they get into them but they're usually a rough beginning—and as someone who buys hellhound food and yarn on book sales I don't like the thought of how many people may be putting my books back down again because of those rough beginnings, who might have liked them if they'd persisted.  I know what you're all talking about, but in the first place that's the way the frelling story comes—and in the second place as a reader I like the indirect beginning, the moseying around the world for a bit before you start finding out what you're there for, which is no doubt why the Story Council keeps sending me stories like that to write. 

 – but:

(a) it only lasted for about the first chapter

(b) no trouble discerning who the main character was (really??) 

Yes.  I understand the slow-deliberately-not-clear-but-it-may-just-look-muddled beginning thing.  But to not recognise the main character?  What? 

(c) I was in fifth grade at the time, and

Just an aside:  arrrrrrrrrrrrgh.  You're one of the unusual ones.  The Newbery was very, very, very good for my career, and I don't want to pretend I don't know that.  But if I had a dollar/pound/handful of yen for every fifth-grader or fifth-grade teacher who has written to me in great offense declaring that my books are too hard for children and some variation on a theme that I am writing them wrong and/or they want their money back and/or they want them clearly LABELLED as for 25-with-a-college-degree-in-English-lit and older, I could frelling retire.  

(d) I liked it!

 Yaaaaaaay!

 It felt so grownup to have to work a little bit to accurately process what I was reading.

YAAAAAAAAAY!

Most books that kids get to read don't really try to challenge them re narrative structure.

YAAAAAAAAAAAAAY!  Oh good.  Oh good.  And when it works . . . yes.  But it's also true that overfacing a kid with a book they're not ready for is counterproductive.  I just feel—ahem!—that teachers, parents, librarians, and the various grown-ups associated with early or reluctant readers could possibly take a little more responsibility than is indicated in outraged letters to authors of somewhat challenging books. 

Scorpiomouse writes: 

After nearly three decades of trying to be SANE and SENSIBLE and NORMAL, I'm finally accepting that insanity is just fine. I consider this blog to be part of my self-therapy – we . . . identify with your less sane moments. Ta da! . . . (For those of you thinking, "I could never contain my insanity, it is too central to my character," I respectfully posit that you probably could, it would just have dire consequences requiring lots and lots of self-therapy.)

Allow me to recommend knitting to complement the chocolate and the To Be Read pile, those bastions of self-therapy.

BurgandyIce 

I do have lots of time-squandering little people ("demonic"?! Really?!)

Hey, I'm a hellgoddess with a brace of hellhounds.  Demonic is our territory.  We like demonic.  Demonic is a major portion of our readership.

 * * *

* Speaking of which . . . those of you who keep inquiring/moaning/protesting/shouting about the lack of e-versions of my backlist . . . you can't possibly be as big a pain in the neck about this as I am, so please, please, cut me some slack.  There is nothing I can do about it, except inquire, moan, protest, and shout and, trust me, I'm not letting anyone who can do something about it forget that I am still sitting here unresolved. As Merrilee keeps (patiently) pointing out to me, publishers are a very, very, very large herd of cats^:  and the implications of all those proliferating electronic rights are messy, so in fact you can't just say 'yo, dudes, stop meowing and do it'. . . . The same plea goes to those of you who want audiobooks:  there's nothing I can do about the situation.  Merrilee is working on it.  Merrilee is ace.  It'll happen, but I don't know when.  

^ Here's a small but frustrating example of trying to deal with cat herds.  I am not top of anyone's list for potential plugs for books because I'm neither a big enough name brand nor a generous enough reader, but I do get 'em.  In the last month I've had three requests that I read manuscripts—not ARCs or books, but stuff still in page proofs.  They usually try to send these to you in some electronic form or other, but until the iPad 2 comes out in the UK I don't have an ereader, and I hatehatehate reading anything but Twitter and the blog forum on a computer.  So I ask for hardcopy pages.  I've never had a problem receiving ARCs or books—they go in a mailing envelope and they arrive as normal post.  For some reason manuscript pages make everyone go all trenchcoat and undercover—there's clearly some malign security programme that self-boots:   It's not a book yet.  Top secret.  Red alert.  Whoop whoop whoop.  Pass it on.  The result is that every one of these frelling manuscripts has arrived for signature.  And delivery company drivers show up any time they frelling well feel like it between 8:30 am and 6 pm.  I know what's happening:  between the time the editor grinds her teeth over the necessity to provide hardcopy to some aged retro anti-geek who lives in the back woods of where and tells off some hapless assistant to produce said pages, and the resultant bundle still hot and curly from the office printer goes down to the mailroom with my address on it . . . the fact that I'm a solitary human being living in a small house in the semi-wilds of Hampshire and not a fellow behemoth with six receptionists on the front desk has got lost in the factory-assembly-line of a big corporate mailroom.  Their rules to live by say that anything that isn't a book goes out for signature.  And by crikey that's what happens.  ARRRRRGH.

A day full of adventures

 

. . . which I think I don't want to risk hanging up here because I'm not sure how the more interesting ones are going to work out and—rather like not talking out the plot of a story you're writing, which might screw up the writing*—I don't want to talk out the story of my life just now.**  What if I'm right/wrong?  What if what I'm predicting is better/worse than I imagine?  What if a gremlin is listening?  Gremlins are always listening.  You don't want to give them any more help messing you over than you have to.***

            Last night I wrote that while I'd stumble to a halt pretty soon if there weren't indications that someone was actually reading this blog, why you were reading it I preferred not to think about too closely.  White_roses posted to the forum:

I'd say we read because it's a funnier-seeming spin on self-created havoc than we could make by ourselves. We can associate with you, and your issues, and the Yarn Collection/Multiple Project theories. Reading the blog lets us know that, while you create amazing literature, you're a regular person: insane, just like the rest of us. It creates a sense of kindred spirits, of friendship, even though we might never actually meet you.

Oh good.  (And thank you.)  That's what I'd like to think I'm doing.  And on days like today—when one of the things causing me to leave head-shaped marks on the wall is/are certain manifestations of the reader/writer credibility gap, frequently apostrophised here as Othering—I can use the frelling comfort.  I'm well aware that I have certain advantages, the chief one being that I'm a professional writer—I'm used to word-wrangling.  I'm also not raising any children, demonic little time-sucks that they are.  But the bottom line is that I'm a lot more like you than I am unlike you. 

            Insane, in fact, if you like.†

 * * *

* The usual reason expressed is that you risk losing the impetus you need to write it.  This may be true in some cases, but my own experience—and you will know that I don't talk about work in progress^—isn't about impetus per se, since a story that really wants to be written is a violent and impatient creature, but that you're hanging harness on something that isn't anything like tame enough yet for it.  Like a bad trainer you may force it to do something that it will, by that force, do clumsily, and which it would have done gladly if you'd given it a little more time and freedom to find its own way.

^ Barring the odd ARRRRRRRGH I'm going to get a job as a HAT CHECK HAG

** Speaking of the writer's life.  Allow me to proffer excerpts from two emails that arrived yesterday.

I am a children's librarian for a private school (ages 3-14). . . .  I have been reading your books for years, starting with Beauty and The Hero and the Crown, and passing them on joyfully to my students for over 23 years.  I have never written to an author before today, but I just couldn't help myself after finishing Pegasus this morning. . . . I read about 100 books for young adults every year and so feel qualified to say that I think this is your best work yet.  Thank you for hours of enjoyment.

 Purrrrrrrrrrrrrr. 

My name is Rglmmph and I am in 7th grade advanced english [ital mine, lack of init cap Rglmmph's] . . . and I have a few questions. First off, why is The Hero and the Crown so confusing? My english [sic] teacher already made us read 6 chapters and not to be rude,

I always like 'not to be rude'.  Not to be rude, but your heroine sucks pond scum.  Not to be rude, but DEERSKIN/SUNSHINE/DRAGONHAVEN is the dumbest book I've ever read in my life.  Not be rude, but Stephen King/Anne McCaffrey/Edmund Spenser did it better. 

but I have no clear idea of who the main character is and what the plot is.  

Seriously?  Six chapters and you have no idea who the main character is? 

. . . What should I do to better understand your book? I feel like every paragraph has more and more confusing stuff in it. Is there a particular way I should read this book? Should I just read the dialoge [also sic] or the details or both?

Usually when you read a novel you read all of it, yes.  Usually there's stuff you need to know in both dialog[u]e and, er, details.  But then advanced english has clearly changed a lot since my school days. 

*** One thing I can tell you though is that my voice lesson went far better than it had any business doing^, since one or two of the adventures earlier in the day had knocked me pretty sideways.  I went gimping in there thinking Nadia is going to get bored with me and my excuses^^ but in fact barring that I'd managed to leave the accompanist's copy of The Roadside Fire behind, which meant she couldn't keep an eye on what I was doing or play the melody to keep me on track, it went amazingly well.  (We worked on The Minstrel Boy instead, which I did have the copy of.)  If Oisin doesn't stop flapdoodling around on the flimsy excuse that he has 1,000,000,000,000 things to do already^^^ and get the New Arcadia Singers organised, I'm going to have to start singing on street corners or something.

            The other thing I can tell you is that we rang St Clements minor tonight in the tower.  St Clements is my new handbell trick—Colin and Niall and I rang it last Thursday, and very smug and self-satisfied I felt about it too.  Smug and self-satisfied is a really bad idea with Colin around, it brings out his Inner Tease (which is never all that inner anyway).  So he called for St Clements tonight to yank my chain, and my chain was duly yanked.  It's a whole frelling different thing on one bell in the tower.  It's a bit like walking down the same piece of street in All Stars with hellhounds for a hurtle, and in lady clothes without hellhounds to meet Peter at the Bard and Orpharion~ for dinner.  What you're watching out for and guided by are entirely different (do I have enough plastic bags if Chaos is in one of his Crap Factory moods?  Is that another dog?  Is that other dog off lead?   Did I remember to bring a crossword puzzle?~~  Is that mud?  Is it coming after me?).  It's still the same stretch of road. 

^ All you singers out there:  what's your opinion on dairy products?  Regular readers of the blog may remember my going off the nutritional rails with a sticky toffee pudding and ice cream at the Questing Beast with Tilda and Peter a fortnight and a bit ago.  I don't eat dairy because it blows up my digestion and gives me rheumatism, but I can usually get away with something like ice cream on my sticky toffee pudding if I don't do it more than about twice a year. But on this occasion it's taken up till a few days ago—so nearly a fortnight—before my vocal cords stopped feeling like they were coated in an unpleasant substance.  Nadia says that it's more likely that I've been having a head cold that never quite manifested, but that reactions to dairy this prolonged are not unheard-of.  

^^ Although she teaches school kids.  She's used to the often quite spectacular excuse-making faculty of the human animal. 

^^^ Who among us does not? 

~ I was going to use Rauschpfeife because it's supposed to be really loud and good for scaring people—there's a stop on the pipe organ called Rauschpfeife—but it being a woodwind it's probably not the best instrument for a bard.  The Bard, Accompanist, and Accompanist's Rauschpfeife, possibly.  It's kind of a lot to fit on the average pub sign though. 

~~ I've told you, haven't I, that Peter and I out for dinner tend to do American crossword puzzles together?   Somebody does across and the other one does down, and we take turns.  

† And no, I didn't stop at the yarn shop today.  Sigh.