Robin McKinley's Blog, page 2

When I asked for good blog material

. . . THIS IS NOT WHAT I HAD IN MIND.

The day after I wrote the previous post, including telling my life to make a note that I wanted blog material*, Genghis & I were walking, or rather plunging & careering, across Strathspey** Park.  I think I had done my usual cack-handed version of posting, which is to say it went up at least a day late, while I forgot it was waiting to be proofread or thought I already had posted it, or something, but the adventure I’m about to relate occurred on a weekend afternoon, right?  So G & I are off-the-hedge-wall-ing*** on either side of the little narrow access road that runs round one side of the park, & having a perfectly pleasant time on a sunny weekend afternoon with only a patchy hedgerow between us & playing fields full of children & meadows full of dogs & children, & suddenly from a break in the hedge on the other side, where a footpath takes you in a different direction, comes a Very Large Black Dog.  Off lead.  I had maybe half a second to think ‘well surely it’s friendly’ when all of its fur stands on end & it breaks into a volley of barking which takes no imagination whatsoever to recognise as not friendly.  & IT GALLOPS STRAIGHT TOWARD US.

When I’m frightened I tend to get angry.  There are certainly situations when this would not be a useful response, but in most ordinary affrays it beats collapsing helplessly on the floor/ground & bursting into tears.  HEY! I shout. Angrily. Where’s the doodah blasted owner??  HEY!  Meanwhile Genghis is straining against his harness & barking & snarling & generally indicating that he is up for this, whatever it is, & listen up, you on the other end of the lead, LET ME AT HIM I CAN TAKE HIM WITH ONE PAW TIED BEHIND MY BACK.  Genghis, as I’ve told you, is long-legged, so he may have been as tall as the dire wolf† facing us, but it probably weighed twice as much as he does, & giant whirling paws can only do so much. 

Some small ineffectual humanoid had scuttled through the gate during our initial confrontation, & scampered (ineffectually) at the dire wolf, which easily dodged out of his way.  I am by now yelling WHAT IS THAT ******* DOG DOING OFF LEAD, not having the presence of mind to say ‘dire wolf’ & besides that’s two syllables & takes longer.  The dire wolf is still barking & snarling & making little darts at us, & Genghis is yanking me around keeping us facing the enemy.  As an aside here †† I was interested, after the fact anyway, that Genghis squared up to the threat with no hesitation & stayed squared up. Genghis is so good natured I’d, if anything, have expected him to be nonplussed & dismayed rather than going all he-man—er—he-dog about it. †††  I’m not sure if this creature was all mouth & no trousers anyway‡ or, if Genghis had either cowered or I’d been dogless, it would have actually sunk its teeth into flesh. 

This was all happening over the course of maybe a minute, it just felt like a year.  The dire wolf was perhaps getting bored, since Genghis was refusing to be bullied, so it‡‡ let the scuttling humanoid sort of shoo it down the road, but the humanoid still couldn’t grab it, so it circles BACK to have another sally.  Both my shoulders & my throat are getting sore.  The unextinct large canid & the scuttler loop around us a couple more times & then the canid again decides we aren’t all that much fun since we’re not grovelling & snivelling & lets the scuttler shoo it‡‡‡ on again & this time he got his lead on it.  “Sorry,” he muttered.  “£$%^&&*(()_~#!!!!!!!!” I replied.  Presumably he kept it on lead, in which case he’s stronger than he looks, ɸ & ruined its afternoon by preventing it from eating any small children or fat slow terriers.

So, life, no more sweepingly magnificently death-defying blog material, okay?  I’ll just talk about the weather or something.

* * *

* dumb move, right?

** If life is going to start coming after me with, if not malice, then a perverse sense of humour aforethought, then I’m going to try to encourage it to satisfy its undesirable urges in directions that we might both groove on.^  Or degust.^^ For example:

THERE ISN’T ENOUGH BAGPIPING IN THIS TOWN.  WHAT DID I MOVE TO SCOTLAND FOR yes all right several things BUT MORE BAGPIPING WAS DEFINITELY ON THE LIST.  IF I WANTED LIVE-RECORDED BAGPIPING ON YOUTUBE I COULD GET IT IN HAMPSHIRE.

It seems to me there are all kinds of ways life could unhinge the creaking door of my mental stability^^^ using bagpipes.  Note:  I’m six blocks from the market square.  When it hosts bagpipes I hear them.^^^^  I live in a kind of goofy fantasy-fear of someone serenading his/her/their beloved, who in this story happens to live near me here on Juggernaut Street, at an hour I would find inappropriate, like Count Almaviva & Rosina,^^^^^ only with a mob of accompanying bagpipes.  & AT LEAST THERE WOULD BE BAGPIPES.

^ We actually said this in the 60s.  It was another world then, including as it did bell bottoms & tie-dyeing.  I note with deep cultural dismay that both bell bottoms & tie-dyeing cycle back through currency now & then.  So groove on I guess.

^^ I was just looking this up to make sure I’m using it correctly.  Yes.  It means to enjoy, to taste, to relish.  My iPhone dictionary+ has a little arrow thingy so you can click back to the previous word or forward to the next word.  The previous word is ‘degum’.  Ooh, cool++, I thought, I wonder what ‘degum’ means?  Something to do with monks or shamuses?  Deglazing or degringolading?+++

Nope.  It means ‘to free from gum’.   Siiiiiigh.  The world is so drab. 

+ IPHONE = CURSES . . . no no no no no we are not going there today, or we’ll never get out of here alive.#

# Some other day, when we’ve donned our flameproof armour & sharpened our enchanted sword in advance.

++ Yes it’s true I still say ‘cool’

+++ Yes, I’m cheating.  I absolutely had to look up the spelling of ‘degringolade’ & wasn’t entirely sure it wasn’t from a language I’ve made up & wouldn’t be in the dictionary anyway.  In which case I could decide how to spell it.

^^^ did I just end that, um, creaky metaphor with mental stability?

^^^^ & if it’s after . . . say . . . ten in the morning—maybe eleven—oh, maybe noon—I will probably hitch up Genghis & descend from our hill-height+ for a closer look.  This is usually less than fully gratifying, however, since there will be a lot of people there before us, & trying to edge tactfully for a better view isn’t an option with an accompanying GWHP milling around.  He’d be happy to be thrilled by the sight as well as the sound of bagpipers—he’s happy to be thrilled by most things as long as a majority of them have to do with food—but tactful is even less in his skill set than mine.

+ We might say experience a DEGRINGOLADE. Our hill is steep.

^^^^^ First act of The Barber of Seville.+  You can look it up.

+ ROSSINI. I didn’t really have to tell you that, did I?

*** I did describe our progress as careering

† No they are not extinct.  There’s at least one living in Scotland

†† Should this be a footnote?  I’m not always sure

††† He is also totally DEPERSONNED by his rank terror of fireworks, & a royal gigantic & frequently bruising pain that is too^, so it’s not that he’s fearless.

^ & the fifth of flapdoodling November is approaching

‡ Reasons to live in the UK include being able to use this phrase as if, you know, it’s just a phrase you can use.

‡‡ There was too much fur to check its undercarriage, & I was also a trifle preoccupied, but I of course leap to the conclusion that it was male.  Bitches can certainly be dire & wolfish^ but this seemed like standard male I’m-so-big-&-scary nonsense.

^ I should know, being one, although I’m not a canid.  Um. I don’t think?

‡‡‡ With a gesture STRANGELY FAMILIAR from my interesting experience at Bounder & Blighter the other week.  I should have bitten him.

ɸ unless the collar has hidden sedative-tipped spikes on the inside, responsive to the pressure of the lead

::falls down laughing:: another continuing series

This one is called Reading Reader Mail.

. . . So the ME is still bashing me around some,* speaking of continuing series, although I hope most of the other series aren’t boring.   Also there’s an unnecessarily large amount of extraneous rubbish falling across my personal landscape that I can’t quite think how to turn into an exciting blog post or twelve.**

So I thought I’d distract myself, & I hope you too, by telling you about a couple of recent reader emails. 

A BRILLIANT one a few days ago suggests ‘in my copious unallocated free time’ for which the acronym is, of course, IMCUFT.***  YESSSSSSSSSS.  This is now totally in the lexicon.  Put it in yours too.  There is such need for this acronym in the MORE &^*($£”!!!! STUFF ALWAYS INCOMING modern world.

But I hear from some of the very best people?   Apparently they read my books?  There’s just no accounting for taste even in IMCUFT reading??, but, believe me, I’m grateful. † 

I had an email yesterday from a young woman who describes herself as working in the corporate world because it pays the rent/mortgage, & that the next time someone gets on her nerves she is going to consider biting a leaf at them††.  I will now forever treasure the image of someone rising to her full height, twitching her snappily tailored blazer in a subtle beige tweed & her complementary-ecru wrinkle-free pencil skirt into perfect drape & conformity, tossing her magnificently coiffed hair in a gesture both confident & indignant . . . & plucking a leaf from the bouquet of roses she brought in from her organic, chemical free garden that morning, & biting† it at the large looming authority honcho master person standing in front of her.  Who will of course throw up his [sic] hands & stagger back with a cry of, No, no!  Not the leaf biting!

I have a frivolous mind, even when the ME is whacking me.   I feel much better, thank you. 

& hey.  There are lots of footnotes to this post.  I can write about ANYTHING, right?  As long as there are footnotes.†††

* * *

* On my way to somewhere else, which is how it usually is on the internet, I fell over a recent rant on the subject of life with ME.  This person’s problem is that they still go to &, worse, listen to doctors.  Of course they’re upset.  But I was disheartened that the nonsense I dealt with over twenty years ago when I first crashed & burned with that particular diagnosis is still going on, & thumping patients who do not need any more thumping.  I’d got to my ME the, or at least one of the, usual routes, regularly recurring glandular fever for about the last two previous years—& I’d had mono[nucleosis] in my 20s, so I was already on the way, I just didn’t know it yet—I tested positive for Epstein Barr, blah blah blah.  & my delightful NHS GP didn’t believe in ME^, & said that viral flu ‘sometimes took a while to get over.’  Uh huh.  I’d meanwhile done my own reading, I’d had a lot of time for reading, the previous two years, lying around having flu, although the ME brain does make comprehending what you’re reading a little wombly . . . we had to go private, finally, to find a doctor who would take ME seriously.  I can say, in long, grim hindsight, that doctors have made me worse, not better, about 90% of the time in my 72 years & still counting^^, but this one was in that top 10%, & he gave me some very useful suggestions & then set me up to start figuring out what worked for me, because, he said, doctors really don’t know what’s going on.  Bless him.  My experience is that your average doctor’s First Law is not do no harm, but if you don’t know, don’t admit it.  I think the graded-cumulative-exercise thing as a ‘treatment’ for ME hadn’t really got going yet;  I was starting to learn how to manage mine before I heard about it, & when I did, I was appalled.  The basic idea seems to be that we’re not exactly not crazy or malingering, we’re just poor sad self-doubting creatures who need a little encouragement from a jerk in a white coat. 

OKAY SHUTTING UP NOW.  It’s just . . . I’m really upset that this is still going on.  Anyone out there who has ME, or suspects they have ME, believe yourself.  You’re the expert on you.  Do your homework, & get on with your life as best you can.  If cumulative exercise works for you great.  But if it doesn’t, STOP.  & don’t let some jerk in a white coat bully you about it. 

Readers of the old blog will have heard all this before.  It’s just . . . I’m not much of a joiner, as you will have noticed, & I don’t belong to any ME forums or follow anyone talking about their experience of it.  I wasn’t ready to find out how little has changed in the last almost quarter century.  I was lucky when I was first struggling to cope:  I had Peter, who buckled down & took care of me—including when I took it out on him that I needed taking care of, which I am not proud of.  I was eighteen months on the sofa & I hated it.^^^  

But the thing that has made it possible for me to cope is that I work from home on my own schedule, or lack of one, & I do it sitting down.  Bad brain-fog days are—bad;  but I’m not a ballet dancer or a stevedore.   I’ve never gone through—because I haven’t needed to go through—the awful business of trying to get a disability pension.  If you weren’t sick & exhausted at the beginning of that process, you would be by the end.

^ This was years before the NHS grudgingly acknowledged that ME/chronic fatigue was real, & we weren’t all malingering &/or crazy.+

+ just crazy.  & delusive etc.

^^ No.  I’m not exaggerating. 

^^^ Although even that wasn’t all bad.  Peter bought me a proper TV, big & fancy at the time, although it would look like anode ray tubes & rabbit ears now, & my best friend told me to watch BUFFY, which was only just being broadcast over here for the first time.  & also, our three whippets had the best time of their lives, that 18 months, because they got to lie on the sofa too.+   Dog rules in any household I hold sway over is that dogs are only allowed on the furniture when a human is there first, & invites them.

+ Peter walked them.  I used to fall off the sofa, crawl into the kitchen, make myself a cup of tea & prop myself in a chair till they got back.

** YO, LIFE.  I NEED BLOG MATERIAL, OKAY?  MAKE A BLASTED NOTE.

*** You need to have read the previous post.  Just in case you haven’t. 

† At least I assume, or I hope I will be forgiven for assuming, that people who write to me via the blog & the email address listed there & on the web site^ have read my books.  Maybe there are a few people who typed in ‘German Wire Haired Pointer’ on their browser & stop round this blog occasionally, hoping for more hairy four-legged slavering thunderbolt stories, and their idea of fiction is Colson Whitehead or Marilynne Robinson or Francis Spufford, all of whom are splendid but so far as I know none of them has ever written about dragons or enchanted swords or border collies.  However I think most of the blog readers & people who write to me read my books.

&.  Erm.  Thank you.  It’s not just earning a living:  you want to hear that your books reach some of their readers.^^

^ Yes still sadly neglected & on the raging doodah list SIIIIIIIIGH, I am sparing telling you how long the list is I don’t want to be responsible if you faint & fall out of your chair.+

+ This is what dogs are for.  Genghis is presently wrapped around me# in such a way that if I tried to fall out of our shared bench the only thing I would be able to crack my head on is a dog.  Who would probably mutter huffff & go back to sleep.

# Very useful as winter closes in.  I don’t have the central heating on yet.  I go from dog blanket at the laptop to blanket blanket in bed. =

= Although speaking of winter, & ways to avoid turning the central heating on, I have a GOOD DOG GENGHIS!! story for you.  Really!! 

I have two woodstoves & a working fireplace downstairs@, although the only one I use is the woodstove in here, the long kitchen-dining room@@, which is the chimney I had CLEANED yesterday.  Genghis was delighted with the stove cleaner.  He started rolling out all his I’m-so-cute-play-with-me moves, & after about a minute of this I grabbed him by the scruff @@@ & ordered him in a calm, firm, I am-boss-&-you-are-obedient-dog voice, to get back up onto our bench.  You could see the thought bubble over his head:  BUUUUUUUUTTTTTTTT . . . I persisted.  Eventually he climbed onto the bench, & gave me The Look.  He doesn’t glare, he’s too good-natured, but he can certainly look sad & disappointed & oppressed. 

The thing is, he stayed where I’d put him.  WHAT?!?!?  I wasn’t ready to sit down yet—I was chopping fresh organic vegetables or something, I do an awful lot of that—so he had yards of opportunity to pour off the bench again & go see what interesting thing the stove cleaner was doing.

BUT HE DIDN’T.  I have no idea why, but don’t tell him that.  VERY GOOD DOG GENGHIS.

@ & the kitchen hearth chimney, which is blocked, plus four more unused & now blocked chimneys upstairs.  Old Victorian house.  When in doubt, the Victorians put in another chimney.  This whole area is Victorian, & we all bristle like mad with chimneys.  If you squint, you can almost turn them into crenellations.$

$ ESPECIALLY AFTER THE EXTERIOR-CHIMNEY MAN PUT ANTI SEAGULL SPIKES ALL OVER EVERYTHING YAAAAAAAAAAAAY

@@ I knocked a wall down.  Some day I will tell you stories about house renovations.  I think I’ve threatened you with this before?  Be afraid.  Be frightened out of your wits.  Perform distraction techniques, like sending me funny emails that I can riff blog posts on.

@@@ Genghis doesn’t wear a collar indoors.  Of course I knew the stove cleaner was coming.  Of course I knew Genghis would be thrilled with the stove cleaner.  DID I PUT A COLLAR ON MY RABBLEMENT & STRAMASH MACHINE??  No of course not.  Never occurred to me till I was linking my hands around his neck & pulling. 

^^ I am very well aware they don’t reach all their readers.  We aren’t going there today.  Not all books are for all readers, okay?  Okay.

†† See previous post again.

††† You seriously don’t want to put any commercial florist leaves anywhere near your mouth.  I don’t even recommend picking them up in your bare hands.    

‡ Almost anything.^

^ Okay this is another list I’m not going to scare you with.

Tottering on

One of the friends I told the Blighter & Bounder story to went home & told her husband, & he went to a friend of his who knows someone who works at Blighter & Bounder & the friend said judiciously,  Hmm, yes, they aren’t good with women.

SO I GUESS MAYBE.

Although it is reassuring to have an outside source—especially a Scots male outside source—confirm my suspicion, & the suspicion of all the female friends I’ve told this story to, about this.  & a male friend—who unbent the whole detached British thing enough to look totally disgusted at my description of events—said something else, which hadn’t occurred to me.  Blighter & Bounder is a private firm.  The garage he uses & recommends is part of a national chain & every time you go there the head office sends you a dorky little form that says, How did we do?  If some other Mr Personality gives me stick there, I have options.  & as it happens, a female friend goes to this other garage, which we will hopefully name Shining Example*, & she says they’ve always just fixed her car, no roaring or breast-beating.** 

Something else I was thinking about—this is not the most robust economy the history of civilisation has ever seen.  Blighter & Bounder can afford to throw away a paying customer for the sin of being the wrong gender & wearing All Stars?  What?   

I’m still tired.  Arrrgh.  I was supposed to go to dinner last night—Saturday—but the friends had friends visiting.  I was still invited, but I didn’t go.  I’m a little sorry to have missed the friends, who are also members of that benighted race, the Americans***, but as I told the person who had invited me, when the ME is in a snit, I can either talk to strangers or I can work, & I’d rather work.  & possibly get another blog post started. †

A day or three ago I met someone, while out hurtling, whom I know very slightly & would probably like if I knew better.††  We contrived not to run her over, & I further successfully heaved Genghis back to very short lead (he was not pleased with this) so we could exchange a few words.  She asked me how the ME was, & I said not great, & she said she’d had it when she was younger but had got over it, & I said, lucky you, I’ve just learned to manage it, & I would have asked further, but the light changed & Genghis & I took off at Formula-one speed, & I was thinking, as we shot down the pavement, what she must be thinking.  ME?  You’re telling me you have ME?  Well, yes.  But this is the management thing.  Everybody has ME/chronic fatigue differently.  I have some slack with mine, which means I’m surviving the invasion of the Mongol Horde—although part of my management technique, learnt the hard way, is that any physical energy I have I HAVE TO USE IT, or it goes away—like you have to keep going to the gym, only in the case of living with ME, it goes away a lot faster.  You don’t go to the gym a couple of weeks or so, maybe your belt is getting a little tighter.  You don’t perform your dog-walking or equivalent for a couple of weeks with ME, & you can’t get out of bed.  But Genghis is a little more extreme than strictly necessary, & the result is, weeks like this one just past, all I do is charge across the steppe with my relentless master the Khan, keep us both fed, & work on story-in-progress.  & maybe write a blog post or two.†††   I know:  first world problems, & the sound of the world’s smallest violin.  It’s a nice life really, I just wish there were a little more of it.

* * *

* Please note that I am an elderly, cranky fusspot, & I am using ‘hopefully’ correctly, which means ‘full of hope’ not ‘I hope this is what is going to happen,’ & that NOBODY GETS IT RIGHT ANY MORE MAKES ME CRAZY.^

^ I do not deny that I am made crazy easily.#

#Also, any more is TWO WORDS.  CRAAAAAAAAAAZY.

** Did you know that gorillas have tiny penises?^

^ I was just looking up# dominance displays in gorillas, & apparently they may bite off a leaf while roaring & breast beating.  I love this.  It sounds like a Monty Python## routine.  I AM A BIG STRONG BREAST-THUMPING MALE & IF YOU DON’T BOW & GROVEL I AM GOING TO BITE A LEAF AT YOU. 

# Yaaaay internet

## I do keep reminding you how old I am.

*** I don’t think there were any All Stars involved.  My friends would have told me.

† The unmet Americans are now off on a tour of the Highlands.  It’s what Americans do.  & I’m going to indulge in a nostalgia break.  I’ve told you that Peter & I barely made it as far as Paris a few times because the American wife was so fixated on seeing as much of the UK as possible.  We spent a statistically significant portion of that travelling time in Scotland.  Our first gambol through the Highlands we stayed at some castle on a crag that was so drop-dead romantic that it wouldn’t have mattered if the food was terrible (the food was fabulous) or the sheets were damp (the sheets were not damp & the giant fourposter was totally in keeping with the castle vibe, even though it was probably out of the upscale hotelier’s Ikea catalogue).  Their bar was large, shadowy, very well leathered in the upholstery department . . . & had a bit of a speciality in single-malt Scotch.  I discovered Laphroaig at an early age & haven’t really wavered in my loyalty since, but this place had like fifteen single malts I’d never even heard of.  I think I also gained a bit of credibility, despite my accent & the fact that I appeared to be married^ to a man a good twenty years older than I^^, when I confessed I was a Laphroaig enthusiast.  Oh, well, in that case, said the man behind the bar^^^, you have to try this.  & he poured me a shot.  Ooh, I said.  Here, he said, now this one.  Oooh, I said.  & this one, he said . . .

He seemed to be having as good a time as I was, & I don’t think it was only the marks he was putting on our tab.  Single malt aficionados tend to be zealous.   I’ve never had any head for alcohol, & I’m usually careful.  But—single malt.  Single malts I’d never heard of.  By the end of the evening I was so legless I literally couldn’t get up the stairs.  Peter had to carry me, like that scene in GONE WITH THE WIND, only with more giggling.

^ the wedding rings are not conclusive, but they are persuasive

^^ twenty five in fact

^^^ or the Scots bar equivalent of ‘oh well in that case’, ‘hae the wee nossock then’ perhaps+

+ Any true Scot reading this please do not damage yourself laughing

†† I did briefly & timorously think of suggesting we get together for a cup of tea some time but I don’t think fast on my feet anyway,^ & especially not when all the blood is pounding in those feet, sprinting after himself . . . & I probably don’t have the nerve anyway.^^  I’ve never learnt British social mores, the Scottish ones are different, &, worst of all, she remembered my name & I didn’t remember hers.  I NEVER REMEMBER ANYONE’S NAME.  I have enough trouble remembering my own, there being kind of a lot of it.^^^

^ Nor is there a graceful way to specify ‘some week the ME isn’t sandbagging me’  

^^  I mean, conversation, with another human being.  Yeep.

^^^ Jennifer Carolyn Robin McKinley Dickinson+ in case anyone has forgotten.  I think it’s on the web site somewhere.++

+ yes, I still use the Dickinson, & no, not because my poor stepson got me up here & feels obliged to keep an eye on me#

# that might be an argument for stopping using it.  ‘Oh, there’s an American writer named Robin McKinley who lives near here?’ he could say blandly & dispassionately.  ‘How interesting.’

++ I REALLY HAVE TO GET BACK TO PLUMPING OUT THE WEB SITE.  In my copious free time.  That should be an acronym, we can all use it:  imcft.  It needs to be more fun to say however.  Imcuft perhaps?  IMCUFT.  That sounds sweary & aggravated.

††† Reading murder mysteries gets a look in.  Sweeping the floor does not.

I am not having a good week

. . . & STINKEROONEY WEEK CONTINUES.  I CAN’T DOODAH DOODAH WHATSIT DOODAH BELIEVE I FORGOT TO POST THIS LAST NIGHT [FIND THE APPROPRIATE FOOTNOTE ※ AT THE VERY BOTTOM OF THIS BLOG, OKAY?  IF I TRY & ADJUST ALL THE FOOTNOTE SYMBOLS SO THAT THIS ONE COMES FIRST WITH THE USUAL SINGLE ASTERISK, I WON’T GET THIS POSTED TONIGHT EITHER] BUT BE AWARE THAT THIS WAS WRITTEN ON THURSDAY

I AM HAVING A ROYALLY & SPECTACULARLY [deleted]*

. . . week.  Weeks like this one shouldn’t be allowed out of Week School to harass & demoralise the general population.  Weeks like this one need to take more classes in kindness, compassion . . . & maybe rational thought, & how to develop a clear comprehensible line from causes to consequences.

So, it began, as weeks often do, on Monday.  You will probably not remember that when Kinsukey had her nervous breakdown, the garage, hereafter to be known as Bounder & Blighter Ltd, couldn’t see to her till this past Monday.  When I was going to take her in, & they were going to make her all beautiful & perfect.

This is not what happened.  I’m not actually sure what did happen, because it was pretty surreal.  But I was told, after some energetic opportunity was taken to delineate my shortcomings, none of which aligned with my admittedly wonky grasp on reality, that they were not going to take her, & the flower of Scottish manhood I had the misfortune to be addressing then made little shooing motions with his hands, like you might do at an importunate dog,** turned his back on me, & sauntered off.  So I left.  What else was I going to do?  But it’s really really disorienting & distressing to have your head ripped off & handed back to you on a platter for no reason you can comprehend, or even guess at, unless it had something to do with standing there in the flower’s space breathing.   What effrontery. Although my brain will have suffered some oxygen deprivation between the time my head was ripped off & when I got it reattached, so maybe I’m missing something obvious.  In hindsight I think being a clueless old woman with an American accent wearing gaudily patched jeans & Converse All Stars was doing me no favours with the flower.  Yes!  I am totally clueless!!  I don’t know a piston from a carburettor***!  I thought that’s what garages & mechanics were for!  & I can’t help the old or the American accent, & I like gaudily patched jeans† & All Stars.  & maybe he was having a bad day.††  But.

Meanwhile I now have a large expensive useless lump of metal sitting in the street.†††  Yes, there are other garages in this town.  Research has commenced.  But they’re all full of men, you know?  & Scottish men at that.  & I’m feeling a little wary.  But it would be nice to have a vehicle that runs.‡   

So that was Monday. 

Of course the ME reacted badly.  As at least some of you will know, it’s VERY UNPLEASANT being yelled at when you haven’t deserved it, & the experience can shake people more stable than me.  Me, I wasn’t all that stable even before I had the ME to give me an excuse.  So I was not at my best when I tottered out with Genghis on Tuesday.  & it was raining.  I did have the sense—yes, really!—to stay in town on pavement.  Nearly.  I feel guilty & anti-dog if he doesn’t get any grass on our walks.  So we were walking down the PAVEMENT running beside one of these tiny threads of water that the British—apparently including the Scots—insist on calling rivers.  & because I am paranoid for reason, I already had Genghis on Very Short Lead, just long enough he could get to the grass while I remained safely on the pavement.  & then there were, as feared, ducks.  I forgot to mention, whenever I was doing my last rant on wildlife‡‡, that I hate ducks only second to baby seagulls, & for similar reasons.  They WON’T FLY, & these are grown ducks, so they don’t even have the I-don’t-know-how-to-use-these-wing-things-yet excuse.  They waddle along whining, just like baby seagulls.  ARRRRGH.  I had cranked Genghis in so I could grab his harness, & we were doing the stomping along toward them tactic that is pretty much my only odds for control, not to say survival.  Except in this case, he lunged, my feet hit the grass &

WHAM.

I can’t remember if I’d gone into radio-blog silence by the time I had my rather worse Genghis-related fall last autumn, when I slid down a (short) hill at rocket-launcher speed & hit hard.  I messed up my shoulder some, & I’m not sure it’s ever come entirely right.  Tuesday was, as falls go, easy & straightforward.  It was on grass, the slope was gradual, & unlike last autumn, I had that split-second to think GO LIMP before I hit—& I did.  Go limp.  I am surprisingly undamaged—including that I somehow fortuitously managed to hang onto Genghis’ brake-stopped short lead;  if he’d hit the end of the extending lead with me flat on the ground & I didn’t let go fast enough, he would have dislocated my spine.  Anyway.  I’m okay.  But the ME was even madder. 

So you’ll forgive me if I’m TOO TIRED to tell you about Wednesday.  Or today.  Which isn’t quite over yet.‡‡‡  Uh oh.

* * *

* also involving italics

** Very like, indeed, the shooing motions I make at Genghis when he’s hanging around for a biscuit & knows perfectly well that he hasn’t earned one & isn’t going to get one, but thinks he might just try it on, I might be in a uniquely uncharacteristic indulgent mood.  On the subject of biscuits, Genghis is always willing to try it on.

*** & yes, I had to look up the spelling of ‘carburettor’, of which there are about six choices, & spellcheck doesn’t like any of them.

† I have a frivolous mind.  There is no way I would sit still to patch jeans if I couldn’t use loud, lurid fabric. 

†† & I’m not totally clueless.  I did not refer, in my nonconversation with the flower, to Kinsukey or she.  I called her the campervan or it. 

††† Liberally garnished with seagull crap.  I have to go out there with a bucket again.  In my copious free time.  These guys—the ones I see are always guys, although I’m sure there are vehicularly obsessive women too—who are out there assiduously cleaning their cars every weekend, down to the toothbrush for the interstices of the hubcaps, give me an immediately blinding headache.  Granted I’m the other end of the spectrum, & should be out there with a bucket more often.^  But get a life, guys.  If you can’t think how, go volunteer at a homeless shelter or something. I wonder how many of these clean freaks even name their shining chariots of steel?^^

^ People who run a hose & a brush over their cars a reasonable sort of occasionally merely make me feel inadequate+.  & I exempt owners of fabulous old cars from any ban on compulsive car-polishing.  There’s someone who keeps his, dunno, 1938 limited edition Semiramide Estella or something, on the little cross street at the end of my pedestrian alley, & I would have said I don’t see him out there shining her up nearly enough, except that since she’s always dazzlingly beautiful, he’s either doing it in the mornings when I’m still prying my eyelids open & groping for my first cup of tea, which I left on the Aga the night before so I don’t have to wait to steep one, since the physical coordination to perform such a complex function is going to remain beyond me till I’ve had my first cup of tea, if you follow me, anyway, I think he has a Car Hob.  Why shouldn’t friendly domestic hobs move with the times like the rest of us?++  I wonder what you leave out for a Car Hob?  Do they still like milk?  Kefir?  Single malt?  Gingerbread?

+ because I am inadequate about keeping cars & vans# clean

# & front steps & gates & painted iron fences & patio paving & doors & doorknobs &

++ voluntarily or otherwise

^^ or whatever cars are made of these days.  I don’t think there’s much steel involved any more.

‡ even if I’m only using her to go to the dump.  SIIIIIIGH.  As soon as she’s running again I have a friend who is going to take me—us—Kinsukey, Genghis & me—out & show us things.  She said this to me very firmly when she & another friend^ were here yesterday.  We’d discussed this before, but I keep weaselling out of it.  She’s catching on to me.  She’s going to stop being British & polite, & become pushy & demanding.  Yaaay.

^ who is having an even worse week than I am, we won’t go there

‡‡ & have I mentioned HEDGEHOGS yet?  The thing is I like hedgehogs, but they are perhaps not the brightest, or maybe they’re having more difficulty entering the modern age than domestic hobs are^ & when I see one rolling itself up in the road, I tend to sigh heavily, & go risk life & limb to chivvy the blasted creature to the kerb.  The risk of life & limb in this situation has nothing to do with cars.  Imagine if you will trying to boot a rolled-up hedgehog gently to the side of the road while hanging on to your prey-mad, writhing, thrashing, coiled-steel-spring, screaming GWHP.  Life-threatening?  Mmph.  Dragons are nothing to a GWHP in prey frenzy.

^ Maybe we should try leaving kombucha & gingerbread out for them?  NOT milk.  Do. Not. Give. Hedgehogs. Milk.   

‡‡‡ Yes it’s past midnight.  I don’t do time, right?  Today isn’t over till I go to bed.  Tomorrow starts when I go to bed, midnight^, 3 am, whatever.  & whether I sleep or turn the light back on & read another murder mystery. 

^ I wish

※ & if you’re wondering why it took me so long to notice, two reasons.  First, I’ve had another hook, line & stinker of a day.  & second, until Blogdad & I get the post counter sorted^, I’m FORBIDDING myself to check the hits on a new post more than once a day, & the later the better.  I know by arcane means^^ that I’m getting a lot more hits than the blog counter will stoop to acknowledge, but it’s still kind of demoralising having your very own blog counter telling you nope, nobody cares.  It adds helpfully, Why don’t you get a job . . . as a CAR MECHANIC??

^ which is to say Blogdad gets it sorted, with me running a kind of flapping-whining-baby-seagull impression while attempting to supply things like passwords & those multi-blasted verification codes & so on

^^ Other people’s arcanery, of course.

Houseplants

Another hilarity-inducing email a few days ago:  How many houseplants do you have?  Do they all have names?

1.  Lots. 

2.  NO.

To begin with, it depends on how you count.  I have gazillions of geraniums, & most of them root so easily that if you want the bits you cut off not to root, you’d better bury them in the compost heap immediately.  But when you know that all you have to do is put the lopped stems in water & they’ll promptly grow roots & if you then plonk these little waving rootlets in something resembling compost you’ll have another plant . . . even if your windowsills are already full* . . . I mean, aren’t you kind of committing low-level Plant Murder if you don’t put them in water & let them grow roots & become More Plants?  So the gazillions produce more gazillions.**  There’s one called Appleblossom, except that there are at least half a dozen not quite identical geraniums out there called Appleblossom, all of them variations of pale pink & double, so the flowers look like tiny roses, right?  So I am a trifle besotted.  & it’s one of the ones that roots really easily.  I have many (slightly various) Appleblossoms.

But the geranium that is taking over the house is one called Mr Wren.  The garden centres that sell it—on & off line—warn you that it gets leggy, but the flowers are so engaging—they’re single, but they’re red with a white border & totally adorable.  But golly don’t the plants just get leggy.  You want a nice bushy geranium, nice big green leaves & lots of them, with a rich scattering of flowers.  Appleblossom does this.  Mr Wren does not.  Mr Wren doesn’t really believe in leaves.  Maybe it thinks it’s a kind of flowering bamboo?  Tall straight knobbly stems . . . I don’t know of a bamboo with red-&-white flowers, but I’m not much of a botanist.  I’m a, Ooh!  Shiny!, sort of gardener.

With the result that I am forever lopping off yet more Mr Wren stems, putting them in water, & starting over.  I have an entire windowsill upstairs that is almost nothing but Mr Wrens, all jammed together & tangled up with each other.  & every time I water them there’s at least one more that is nearly as tall as I am*** with loooooong bare green stems & a glorious little bright clump of red-&-white flowers twinkling at the top.  Arrrrgh.  Oh, the Plant Books will also tell you not to bother trying to root a flowering stem, because it won’t.  It’ll finish flowering & die.  You are supposed only to put non-flowering stems in water.  Mr Wren didn’t get this memo.  Mr Wren rarely produces nonflowering stems anyway.   Which would have solved the surfeit of Mr Wren problem before it got started.  But . . . I was going to say that when I bought my first Mr Wrens† I didn’t know you couldn’t root flowering stems.  I think it’s more that you—okay, I—look at that long bare green stem & can’t resist just having a go . . . it’s not like (another) glass of water takes up that much space.††

. . . Okay, this is clearly another continuing series.†††  But I’ve had a quick cruise around the house, & not counting Mr Wren, & only counting half the Appleblossoms, I have probably . . . um . . . in the general vicinity of ninety houseplants. NINETY.  Good grief.  Well, that certainly explains why they soak up so much time.  Um.  & I probably missed a few.  No, I didn’t count Maude the Monstera twice or three times.  & I only counted the trays of compost liberally studded with tiny short-stemmed things that may grow roots if given time as one, & the tray of hippeastrum/amaryllis bulbs ɸ I only counted once too, although there are about nine of them that will probably come to something. 

That’s another story of my, um, unsystematic approach to houseplants.  There was a SALE on random hipp/am bulbs, you get ten undersized ones in a sack for the price of one proper fat ready to pop one, with the allure that some of them will probably bulk up & flower some decade or other.  One of the advantages of a big house—& a haphazard attitude—is that you can afford to stick stuff in corners & let it get on, or not.  I managed to lose the sack, & had convinced myself that I must not have bought it after all, that I had had a sudden spasm of good sense & resisted.  The spasm of good sense & the resisting didn’t seem very likely, but the sack, if it had ever existed, had disappeared.  Which is the down side of a large house.  Because A YEAR LATER I found the sack.  & hey, the bulbs were all still solid, not squishy, so it can’t hurt to stick them in a tray with some compost??  Two of them flowered that year.  We’re now coming up on the second year since I planted them, they’ve all got leaves, & one of these years I’m going to have more hipp/ams than I flapdoodling know what to do with.  Maybe the secret to burgeoning hipp/ams is to lose them in a dark cupboard for a year.  Oh, &?  Hipp/ams produce bulblets.  You carefully split these off & pot them on, & in another year or two they flower.

In a few more years I’ll have more hipp/ams than I do Mr Wrens.

* * *

* Hardy geraniums are a whole other animal, er, plant.  We’re talking about the kind that have to live indoors in winter, &, in a haphazard household like this one, probably live on their windowsill year round.  The Plant Books^ all tell you that your houseplants will enjoy a summer outdoors which will recharge their tiny green batteries for another shut-in winter.  I don’t know why I keep buying plant books^^.  Their chief purpose is to remind you of your inadequacies.  How much reminding do any of us need?

^ Of which I have too many, it will not amaze you to hear  

^^ Um . . .  

** Of course the FANCY EXPENSIVE geraniums do not root easily in water.  Occasionally you can winkle a cutting into producing roots & even more occasionally beguile it into not instantly dying when you put it in excruciatingly researched & chosen Best Houseplant Compost^.  I was once thrilled at my success . . . till the little ratbag produced the wrong flowers.  I still don’t know what happened.  It wasn’t something obvious like that I’d mixed up my cuttings;^^ whatever these were, they weren’t any of my other, easy rooting, geraniums either.  They were Something Else. 

^ Ah, the internet.  Life was simpler when you went to the garden centre & bought what was on their shelves.  If it was an exciting, achievement-oriented garden centre it would have several brands of, for example, houseplant compost, & you could waste several minutes reading the advertising bumf & struggling with the nitrogen, phosphorus & potassium percentages,+ & then putting the nearest, the cheapest or the biggest/smallest bag in your basket.  If it were a really go-ahead garden centre it would have a clerk you could ask plant & planting questions of & they would answer you instead of looking at you blankly, & possibly slightly warily, as if uncertain whether you might bite.++  Now we have the internet, & an infinity of sites of hours-eating advice, frequently contradictory just to keep it interesting, on any subject you want, or don’t want, to name.+++

+ AAAAAAAAAUGH.  I don’t do numbers.  This may be related to why I don’t do time.  It does me, of course, but I don’t cooperate.  I’d like to say I stand proudly & defiantly & shout You don’t own me!  In actual fact it’s more I look up distractedly from what I’ve been doing for several hours too long & say, Huh?

++ Somewhat similar, perhaps, to the way I look at the clock or the timer or the setting sun# when I look up distractedly & say, Huh?

# or perhaps the blasted rising sun although it’s getting late enough in the year that if I’m seeing dawn I’m really in trouble

+++ producing even more moments of looking up distractedly & saying, Huh?

^^ Yes of course this happens.  Duh.

*** Okay, so it is sitting on a windowsill

† A three-for-one DEAL!!!  Clearly the garden shop was having the same proliferation problem I now know well.

†† Except when you already have about nine glasses of water with various things trying to root in them.  It’s not like they’re only Mr Wren.  I put almost everything^ in glasses of water, just to see if anything happens.

^ bits of green plant everything, okay?  I don’t put dog hair or rocks off the shore or chocolate+ in glasses of water.

+ Especially not chocolate.  100% organic chocolate COSTS.  I tell myself 100-year-old malt Scotch costs worse.  Well, it does, but . . .

††† I haven’t counted how many have names . . . uh oh

ɸ I’d feel friendlier about the whole Latin nomenclature thing if the blasted botanists didn’t keep changing their minds from one impossible Latin mouthful to another impossible Latin mouthful.  Peter used to tell me that Latin names are useful because then you always know what something is.  NOT WHEN THEY KEEP CHANGING IT.

On blogging & the presence of an audience

I received an adorable* email a day or three ago, telling me that the obvious answer to seagulls is to import a few griffins.  :: falls down laughing ::  OF COURSE.  WHY DIDN’T I THINK OF THAT.**

Thank you, all of you who have written to say they’re glad to see this blog again.***  One of the questions that keeps coming up is whether there will be a forum again too.  Well . . . probably not, unless something dramatic happens, like I win the National Book Award† & start getting 1,000,000 hits a day††, in which case I will hire someone to mind the forum.  I had volunteer minders on the old blog, for whom I was, & retrospectively still am, very grateful, but my conscience was never quite clean about it, & I wouldn’t do it again.†††

There is also the dreadful possibility that the time has passed for random blogs like this one.  Perish forfend & all that, but the internet is beyond comprehension-ly‡ ginormous, & there’s way too much to choose from when you have 5 minutes or 5 hours to spare‡‡, even for someone like me who doesn’t know what she’s doing as soon as she turns on her computer, let alone takes a deep breath & clicks . . . on line. ‡‡‡    &, you know, social media is The Enemy. ɸ  I dropped out of Facebook & Twitter, when it was still Twitter, except for the pinned notes under my name to say I’m not there any more but see, here’s a link to a blog that may be live again, & a web site that needs attention.  I only even know what, for example, TikTok is, because more au courant friends occasionally send me links ɸɸ, & the rest of social media, eh.  So when I say I’m clueless I REALLY MEAN IT.

But . . . I was reading some potted biography of some previous-era author recently, about answering street mail.  I remember street mail . . . & I was never very good at answering it.  ɸɸɸ   Some things don’t change, even when the medium does.  & as I have said many times, including in the old blog, I don’t feel an author owes anything to her readers but her books.  But I do understand the wish to see an author as a human being.  This blog is what I can do about that. Ω

So I hope I’ll keep doing it.  & that enough of you will keep reading it.

* * *

* I told you—a soppy cranky old woman

** & me a frenzied Diana Wynne Jones fan.^

^ I still miss her.  Sigh.

*** I’ve had a few people tell me that I rant very well.  Oh good.

† Yes, I know.  I need to get a new book out.  We’re working on it

†† Although I’m not sure the NBA actually results in sales???  Maybe it’s just me viewing Serious Literary Awards with deep suspicion.  I was (almost) dismayed to read the shortlist for the Booker this year & discover I’ve read one of the books.  Oops.  How did that happen?^

^ Eh.  Well, I know how it happened.  It was recommended to me by a boffiny brainbox friend, & every now & again I feel I want to prove I’m not entirely incapable of reading something containing deep sagacious insight into the human condition.  I know some long words!  I can (probably) follow a plot that is slightly more complicated than (a) Find the Bad Guy(s)!#  (b) Dispatch same!  (c) Celebrate! 

I realise this is a character flaw, but I have limited tolerance for Profound Thought, particularly Anguished Profound Thought.   I’d much rather reread Tolkien than spend chapters of heavily-adjectived time with moony twits.  I’d even rather read a cereal box, if I ate cereal any more.  Bags of buckwheat flour don’t have a lot of text.

# ‘Guys’ is, you realise, a generic term, covering men, women & everything in between or proceeding therefrom in an expansive–& genderly confusing way to someone my age.  Remember I grew up when even being gay was a threat to world order.  Some things do manage to change for the better if enough people yell & scream & demand their concerns be recognised.  Hold that thought. 

††† The friend who in her day job is a librarian & whom I shamelessly exploit^ should read this & do her own falling down laughing, but she’s too nice.^^

^ She keeps insisting that she lives to look stuff up, & having more things to look up makes her happy

^^ Or addicted.  I wonder if there’s a detox programme for people who are so busy getting high on looking stuff up they forget to do ordinary upkeep tasks like eating & going to bed.

‡ My comprehension, anyway.  I don’t do tech like, in fact very like, I don’t do time.  I blistering-doodah swim in time & tech, but it’s like bleeding in shark-infested waters.  UH OH.  THERE’S A BIG ONE.  WHERE’S SOME SEAWEED TO HIDE IN.  I have a million clocks^ but every time I look at one I can feel my brain groping reluctantly for its Translator Function.  Time is not my native language.  When I was little, & first learning to tell time, I used to say things like ‘it’s five minutes past half past’ or ‘it’s five minutes before quarter past.’   The local grown-ups had a problem with this for some reason.  I still feel pretty much like that.  But when I was a kid all you had to contend with was a clockface with the numbers 1-12^^ neatly spaced around it.^^^  Now you have, you know, digital, & 24 hour clocks which expect you to know that 1500 is actually 3 in the afternoon, & 19:30 might be suppertime if you were the sort of person who went to bed before midnight, but since you aren’t, you don’t care.  You’ll eat when you get around to it.  Or when the dog tells you he hasn’t eaten in at least 48 hours.  There’s always a horrible vertiginous moment when he starts trying to put this over because . . . maybe he’s telling the truth. 

^ & at least a few of them work.  The ones that work are the most likely to be obscured by giant looming houseplants.  Or piles of books, of course.  Everything in this house, including Genghis & me, is at risk of being obscured by piles of books.  Although the giantest of the looming houseplants are increasingly making their presence . . . inexorable.  The Swiss cheese plant+ has taken over the landing with such energy & relish that it’s getting hard to make it round her corner & up the rest of the stairs. 

You know the proper name of the Swiss cheese plant is Monstera deliciosa?  Isn’t that great?  Don’t you now have to have one?

+ her name is Maude#

# yes, really

^^ I can cope with Roman numerals.  Up to twelve.  Don’t make me read copyright dates in Roman numerals.

^^^ Although as a Navy brat I did have to endure the ship’s bell system that starts over every flipping four hours, because that’s how long a watch lasts.  You’re supposed to know which four-hour period you’re in when some noisy officious bell tells you you’re half an hour or three & a half hours through that watch?!?  IN WHAT UNIVERSE?+  & some psycho came up with the great idea to make clocks for home use that ring watch bells. 

+ A wet one, with lots of oceans

‡‡ WHO EVER HAS 5 HOURS TO SPARE

‡‡‡ AAAAAAAUGH^

^ If this heartfelt exclamation is not large-font & in colour, Blogdad’s latest patient, one-syllable-words tutorial in How to Make the Blog Work, Yes, Robin, Even for You, has been unsuccessful.  Although one-syllable words can be quite expressive.  Mid-tutorial he was heard to exclaim, WHAT?  WHY HAVE THEY DONE IT THAT WAY??

ɸ  Says the woman who is very tired of yelling HEY at idiots so fixed on their tiny handheld screens that in another step they’re going to smack into a certain cranky old woman & her large whirly-pawed dog.  If it weren’t that he might get hurt, I’d be tempted to let them trip over him & get tangled up in those feet.  But, NOTE, the real world is still out here.  It’s not all virtual.  Those paws are definitely real.

However, Sauron on a two-stroke [motorcycle]^ is an image that works for me perhaps too well.  I think the huge dark immaterial all-seeing eye is quite a good metaphor for bathed in broadband first-world life.  That leaves the two-stroke bike to be a palantir. Yeah. I think I like that too.

^ See previous post.  

ɸɸ whereupon TikTok has a meltdown because its tentacles or algorithms or whatever they are unmask me as not a member & sometimes it has such a mega tantrum about this shortcoming it won’t let me see whatever the link was to anyway.  However, I know that ‘TikTok made me buy it!’ means this isn’t a book I want to read, so actually it does serve a useful purpose in my life & maybe I do owe it something.^

^ No.

ɸɸɸ  Better than I am at answering emails.  But not a lot.

Ω Not guaranteed I admit.  But I’m likelier to be able to write a blog post occasionally than I am to perform any of the other, Yo!  Yes I am a (cranky) human being!, options out there.

Dog stories, a continuing series

As luck or the irony of the universe would have it, the day after I posted my last, a friend gave me a clipping* from THE TIMES** that he thought I might be interested in, he being somewhat acquainted with Genghis.***  The headline reads:  MY RESCUE DOG IS A SNARLING HELLHOUND.†  I’d give you a link, but it’s behind a paywall.††  If you want to try to find it yourself, the author’s name is Georgia Stephens, & the article begins:  ‘Let me tell you about the biggest mistake I ever made.  Her name is Maggie, she weighs 16kg & she’s a rescue dog from the streets of Bosnia . . . This is a dog that has laid waste to Tunbridge Wells . . . car chaser, dog gnasher, child snarler, 2-time doggy day care reject . . . ’

Yeah.  I can relate.†††  I was planning to write a ‘um, actually Genghis is a very nice dog in a lot of ways’ post to follow the last.  Yes, he is a handful, in fact he’s several handfuls, & it’s unfortunate humans only have two hands per.  I haven’t even tried to find a doggy day care that would take him, partly because I burnt out badly on professional dog care people back in Hampshire, & partly because the other local GWHPs are doggy day care rejects, & Genghis mostly makes these others look like Crufts obedience finalists.  I will have both hands wrapped through his harness while he stands on his hind legs paddling the air with his giant whirling paws, while I’m trying to have a conversation with one of the other owners, & their dog(s) are just standing there on a loose lead looking mild-mannered & butter-wouldn’t-melt-ish.‡   ARRRGH.

HOWEVER.  He does not chase cars.  Mostly.  Occasionally one is wearing a Running Deer Costume, unrecognisable to the mere human on the other end of the lead, & then . . . shoulders like a stevedore, I have mentioned this before.‡‡  & he doesn’t gnash other dogs, he wants to play with them, it’s just his idea of playing is to LEAP on them with all the force of his slightly-more-than-16kg‡‡‡ frame, which other dogs, not to mention other dogs’ owners, may not appreciate.  He would adore children if I let him—in both cases, other dogs & kiddies, you can see his heart’s in the right place by the angle of his ears & the frenziedly, one might almost say ferociously, wagging tail—but, ahem, if a kid wants to pet him I usually not merely wrap a hand through his harness, but lean on it so he can’t express his immoderate enthusiasm by jumping up.

The bottom line about Genghis for me, however, is that he is always in a good mood.  ALWAYS.  Happy & cheerful & hoping for the best.ɸ   & ridiculously glad to see me.ɸɸ I’ve told you about my first glimpse of him, when his previous owner brought him round for us to meet, that bright-eyed whiskery face, emerging above that last top step into my garden from the street gate, looking around eagerly & interestedly.  Expecting the best. Where did he GET this??  He was a street dog!  A rescued stray from—Serbia, I think.  Somewhere that involved a long & inevitably alarming journey to Scotland.ɸɸɸ  But if there is one character trait a cranky old introvert, solitary, works-from-home woman should have in her companion animal, it’s A POSITIVE ATTITUDE.  Which the cranky old woman herself lacks.  If there are small lacks & large lacks about things like cheerfulness & a positive attitude, mine is a large lack.

& hey, I don’t like seagulls anyway.

Oh, & the rest of the headline quoted above is . . . ‘& I won’t give her up for the world.’  The last line of the article is:  ‘And she is, & for ever will be, mine.’

Yeah.  I relate to that too.  I’m a soppy cranky old woman.

* * *

* Yes!  A clipping!  A real, live, hard copy, instantly-inky-fingered newspaper CLIPPING!

**Yes.  I have at least one friend who reads THE TIMES—any of you^ who have the faintest of faint awareness of the political leanings of UK newspapers will immediately realise that a hardened, not to say deranged^^ GUARDIAN reader such as myself^^^ will walk delicately in the company of a TIMES reader.

^ approximately .000765% of you, in my best scientifically-arrived-at+ estimate

+ I have a really excellent trance state, which I can turn on with a flick of the ME, & from which, whilst floating therein, I can pluck all kinds of fascinating factoids & nonfactoids & general sedfjhucolk, straight out of the universal aether#

# which are sometimes ironic, sometimes excruciatingly earnest.  Now, is that due to the mood of the universe at that moment, or the bit of it I’m floating in?  Discuss.=

= Um.  On second thought, don’t discuss

^^ yes, okay, you predicted this footnote, right?  It goes ‘all right, do say deranged’

^^^ & just so you’re clear about what you’re dealing with here, the GUARDIAN, which is the refuge of wet knee-jerk liberals, I being proud to count myself a member of this cohort & in serious need of such refuge, is way too moderate & middle of the road for me.  & they absolutely suck on alternative health.  They’re just better than any other national newspaper.  & for you .000765%, yes, I pay for my on line subscription, because I do try to put my money where my mouth is at least occasionally.  I also pay for the weekly hard copy round up, although this may chiefly be so I have something to throw against the wall when they or their op ed writers are pushing my buttons.  & paper, thrown against the wall in a rage, still makes perfectly good fire-starter for the woodstove(s).  The bigger problem in this house is finding a bare bit of wall I can safely throw something against which is, furthermore, over a bare bit of floor it can safely fall on.+  Ahem.

+ & to think I’ve only lived here 5 years.  The acquisitional future is terrifying.#

# I know that ‘if it’s books it’s not hoarding’, I wear that t shirt= too.  Books, however VALID an accumulative item, still take up space. 

= or rather, hoodie.  In NE Scotland you get a lot more wear out of hoodies than t shirts. 

*** My beloved, & still much missed, hellhounds^ had beautiful manners.  Well, mostly.  Readers of the old blog are allowed to guffaw loudly here.

^ I can’t believe I’ll never see them again, you know?+

+ Chaos would be delighted to play with Genghis.  Darkness would do his elder-statesman routine, which he started developing at a young age, probably because he felt Chaos & I were too frivolous.#  Maybe some of their good manners would rub off on Genghis.  Maybe Genghis could teach them to like food.

# It’s worse, somehow, missing the hellhounds.  I only had Pav not-quite-8 years, & the whole awful business of her having bull-terrier-genetic kidney trouble, & dying of it during lockdown, is so traumatic, that to some extent I’ve blocked her.  & the original whippets I shared with Peter, so losing them is also mixed up with losing him, even though he knew & loved the hellhounds too, but he was already starting to get frail by the time I brought them home=.  The hellhounds were MINE, body & soul.  It’s going to be very, very, very, very bad when I lose Genghis, who is also MINE, body & soul==, but he is HEALTHY=== so I’m hoping for a lot more years.  A lot.  A Methuselah among dogs.  Despite his many drawbacks, which is theoretically where this post started . . . but then maybe by the time he’s, oh, 18, he’ll have mellowed.====

The basic problem is that the older you get, the more people you love, however many legs & however much fur they have, die.  Ugh.   This is a rotten way to run a universe.  Just saying.

= as tiny insane puppies

== & large snoring lump taking up most of this theoretically three person bench which is my desk chair any more.  The measurers of garden benches are not allowing for large spread-out dogs.  Anyone else who owns even a small dog knows how they suddenly get larger as soon as they get on a bench/sofa with you & lie down.

=== AS FAR AS I KNOW.  EEEEEEEP. 

==== HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA

† Especially the Genghis who, visiting any other house, requires a constant background descant, shrilling above what should be the relaxed & engaged human conversation, singing GENGHIS.  STOP CRUISING FOR STUFF TO GET INTO^ & LIE THE SCREAMING DOODAH DOWN. 

^ the legitimate resident dog’s secret stashes of tennis balls, all over the house, for example, which no mere human can find, or the bowl of apples on a shelf that is THEORETICALLY tall enough to be out of reach, but dogs get taller when they’re away from home like they get larger when they’re lying on the sofa, or the grandchildren’s toys which are clearly toys, & Genghis isn’t particular about provenance, in plain sight under the coffee table.

†† Of course it is.  Someone tell me if there’s a respectable economic reason for the absolute paywall almost every newspaper^ & magazine is now behind on line, or if they’re doing it because they can.  Back in the bad old days of hard copy only, if you wanted to read your news new, yes, you had to buy something.  But yesterday’s news was free, possibly because there was no technology to make yesterday’s newspaper disappear in a puff of smoke at midnight.

^ except the GUARDIAN

††† I wonder what the seagull situation is in Tunbridge Wells?  It should be far enough inland, but I’m sure the SEAGULL TIMES is spreading the word that they’re legally protected from nasty human interference & only dangerous criminals & people who own GWHPs are any kind of threat^, good-quality garbage is fully available inland, & fish is overrated.

^ & possibly a few careful & responsible car drivers who are just minding their own business but, you know, baby seagulls are DUMB AS BRICKS.

‡ I feed him too well.

‡‡ Two-stroke motorcycles, however, are THE ENEMY.^  If I hear one coming soon enough, I will loop the lead a few times around a lamppost.  If I don’t, well, shoulders like a stevedore. 

^ I don’t remember Sauron driving a two stroke??? 

‡‡‡ He’s about 40 lbs.  A little heavier than Chaos & a little lighter than Darkness.  40 lbs of rocket-fuelled steel springs however.

ɸ Especially if he has some expectation that it might include food. 

ɸɸ Very very glad to see me.^  Of course I am the Provider of FOOOOOOOD & WAAAAAALKS but it’s one of those things that domestic pets really have down, persuading you that it’s not only food & walks or fancy toys or whatever your species prefers that make them love you. 

^ YO STOP THAT.  The huge brown eyes & the wag-blurred tail work pretty well on me generally, but the whiskery muzzle with the cold wet nose attached thrusting under my wrist with a violent upward jerk IT’S TIME YOU PETTED ME AGAIN is not popular when I’m working.  & before you tell me it’s my own fault because of the bench we share, he’s plenty tall enough to do this standing flat-footed on the floor.

ɸɸɸ & it’s not that he doesn’t have his quirks.  I think I’ve told you he is dementedly afraid of fireworks—he turns into some other dog when he hears fireworks—& I can’t use a fly swatter around him, he gets down on his belly & scuttles away, frightened & miserable.  He’s clearly been beaten—his previous owner thought so too—& the trip to Scotland? & how many temporary homes did he blast through before he came to me?—why does he still view humans with such joyful ardour??

Oh woe, oh woe, oh woe woe woe, when is baby seagull season ooooooooo-ver

Seagulls are doodah-whatsit protected in this sanity-challenged country.  ARRRRRRRGH.  Now I grew up with seagulls, my father was in the Navy so we were mostly posted near salt water*.  When he retired the family moved to Maine.  & to my own surprise I moved back to coastal Maine as an adult.  I KNOW FROM SEAGULLS.  They’re fine.  Well, they always used to be fine.  & then I immigrated to the UK & lived in inland Hampshire for nearly thirty years, where a seagull was an event.  We had them, occasionally, but they weren’t something you saw out your window every day or . . . ahem.  This post is going to get a little rude.  I’m just warning you.

The seagulls of northeast Scotland are aggressive vermin & I hate the beggars.  The human-hostage situation is particularly stark in this small seaside town, surrounded as it is by long booming empty cliffs in both directions, vast reaches of unpopulated space for blasted seagulls to lead a normal seagully life.  But nooooooo.  They’d rather move into town, crap all over you, your dog, your house, your campervan and your garden, as well as everyone else and everyone else’s dog, house, vehicle etc, loudly quarrel & squawk ceaselessly all night, & yell at you all day.  I object to being yelled at in my own garden, especially when this is followed up by a giant smelly grey-white squelch falling from the sky in your general direction.**  They also steal food from small children who even having been warned about seagulls don’t necessarily have the fine motor control or the sheer muscular strength to resist—as well as likely being frightened by something as big as an adult seagull with its wings spread, coming for them, & that clearly built-for-business vicious beak?  Yeah.  If I were a 6-year-old with a hot dog or an ice cream cone I’d let go too.  When there aren’t enough children to victimise—they’re clever enough to snatch something off an adult who isn’t paying attention as well—they eat garbage.  Don’t leave interesting-smelling trash bags outside.***  & golly do they crap.  A big smear of seagull effluvia is slippery.  You hit one plunging downhill after your maniac dog, you’re in trouble.  & wouldn’t you think that public health & bird flu & so on might enter this equation?

But the daily year-long ratbaggery of living with resident seagulls PALES TO INSIGNIFICANCE during baby seagull season.  Oh glory.† 

Because they’re PROTECTED, the only population-suppressing action you’re allowed is to do a nest-sweep.  Since they nest on people’s roofs & in people’s chimneys††, the only way to perform this rite††† is with a cherry-picker truck.  Hiring one is expensive, & even covering only the downtown-est part of the town‡ it’s a long & labour-intensive process.  & the town council in its infinite wisdom decided a few years ago that they couldn’t afford it any more.  !!!£$%)@#]!!!£!!! WE WON’T GO THERE.  Bird flu!  Piffle!  Faecal bacteria count!  Phooey!  But the result is that baby frelling seagulls are now rife, proliferating & doodah doodah thronging.

It varies from year to year, but you know when the serious nesting has begun because from being an ugly messy belligerent unhygienic nuisance the adult seagulls, because this is their town, start attacking you.  Yes, I mean attacking.  They swoop down, shrieking demonically, & whap you with their wings, stomp you with their feet & peck you with those bills.  Oh yes, & crap on you.  & your dog, who is, especially if he’s a German Wire Haired Pointer, going not merely nuts but well past nuts, into some other indescribable dimension, the part that is describable being that when this particular GWHP goes nuts, he flails, & when he flails, those long GWHP legs get all tangled up with mine.  I’ve learned (bruisingly) some coping mechanisms for this, but I’m telling you that if you have several of these bloody birds attacking you at once—& those spread wings are getting on for a 3 foot span, okay?—you can’t move, because you can’t see, & your dog has turned into a canine Sleipnir‡‡.  There are parts of town you flatly have to avoid—quite a lot of this relatively small town, indeed, & two hours a day at GWHP speed covers serious mileage, & doing laps around, say, the (small) industrial estate car park, which is seagull-free, is boring.  We’ve literally had to be rescued by kindly, anti-seagull, dog-free passers-by occasionally—one lady went after them with her (furled) umbrella, & said to me after that her terrier (safely at home) also HATES seagulls, but he’s smaller—she can pick him up.  Siiiiiiiiigh.  During baby seagull season I think wistfully of my joke that when I agreed to take Genghis, I was so dog-starved I’d’ve taken anything, & that I’m grateful he wasn’t small & yappy.  Maybe small & yappy isn’t so bad. 

So the early warning system for baby seagulls has already told you that the worst is on its way.  Then they hatch, & off & on for about a fortnight you see horizons of baby seagull heads where there should be level rooflines, & your heart sinks further & further.  This new next-generation vermin get turfed out of the nest really soon, for some inexplicable evolutionary reason.  Whereupon they stand around cluelessly in whatever road they’ve fallen onto, this being a town, & stare.  Oh yes, & whine.  They are master whiners.  They will stand there doing their creaking-door imitation for hours.  They are also dumb as bricks.  What they like best is to stand in the middle of that road they’ve dropped onto.  Staring.  & whining.  I don’t know why the entire species hasn’t died, or rather been squished &/or blotted out. ‡‡‡  They may wander around a little—keeping steadfastly to the middle of their road—but mainly it’s staring & whining.  & WHINING.  & WHINING.  & WHINING.  Oh yes, & crapping.

Genghis, as a result, is in a permanent state of Hysterical Prey Drive.  Walking him is not exactly a joy at the best of times, since he is utterly focussed on finding things either to eat or to chase, & he’s very good at this, which is not a lot of fun for the schmuck on the other end of the lead.ɸ  But during baby seagull season . . . saints & angels, freaking save me.

I’ve told you my house is on a steep hill.  You come through the front gate, up a full flight of stairs, & then keep going uphill till you reach the (several more steps to the) front door.  But there’s also a tiny level-access pedestrian alley out the back door, that lands you on a little (but also steep) one-block-long side road.  There has been a pothole on that side road the five years I’ve lived here, getting a little bigger every year.ɸɸ   & every year, during baby seagull season, there is a baby seagull roosting in it.  I bet you think I’m joking.  I’M NOT. 

I think I’ve also told you that I have Genghis in an ordinary harness.  I tried one of those halter things, the recommended halter thing, the recommended halter thing that other GWHPs in this area wear, & after a few short introductory walks—during which he made it very clear that the halter thing was not to his liking—he came home from his first full length walk in the thing bleeding.  Of course I knew he’d been rubbing his face, but because of the heavy whiskerage, I hadn’t noticed that it was serious.  I COMPLETELY freaked out, threw the (literally bloody) halter-thing away, & since then we cope with the harness.  When he’s having a tantrum it’s not pretty—but I hadn’t noticed the halter was the slightest bit of use with the Sleipnir problem, & at least with a straightforward harness I can’t accidentally hurt him, although I have shoulders like a stevedore, supposing they have stevedores any more???—it’s probably all clever AI cranes & loaders & things—& I have left more precious Converse All Star sole rubber skidding along the pavement than I want to think about. 

There were three of the little muckers living on my main roadɸɸɸ this year, as well as the one around the corner in the pothole.  Well, the three-plus-one that weren’t mashed by passing cars right away.  I told you, dumb as bricks.  I also suspect that some of the local drivers of large metal mayhem-machines may have an attitude toward seagulls similar to mine.  It is of course illegal to cause harm to a seagull, poor widdy ickle helpless thing.  “Oh, so sorry, Officer of the Law!  It wandered straight out in front of me!”  & it may very well have.  You may not have had to chase it.  But I was getting Genghis out the back door & into slightly less seagull-populous territory every day with him hopping along on his back legs while I had both arms around his front end to prevent him lunging.  He also, under extreme seagull provocation, starts screaming.  A screaming GWHP makes a lot more noise than a whining baby seagull, although that may be because Genghis is usually very close to my ear while this is going on.

It got so bad that I started doing a sweep before I took him out—with a water pistol.  The bloody birds only waddle—I mean, I could catch one—so I jog along behind shouting GO AWAY WE DON’T WANT YOU HEREΩ & squirting.  The whining gets worse with this treatment.  They’re nearly whining in English:  Waaaaaah why are you being so MEAN to me.  Don’t get me started.  The problem is that with three of them, since they are in their own dumb-as-a-brick way, territorial, by the time you’ve water-pistoled the third one off the premises the first one is back.  ARRRRRRGH.  I always did the side-street-pothole one last, & then raced back indoors, hitched up Genghis, & made a bolt for it.

When we ran into stupid feathered trouble away from home—& during the season mainly what you do is run into stupid feathered trouble, at home, away from home, anywhere that governmental admin isn’t DUMB AS A BRICK about seagulls—it was mostly back to me grabbing him as he lunged, wrapping my arms around his lovely deep chest full of large pumping lungs that help make his screaming so impressive, impressive enough that probably my swearing like an entire Naval Fleet Auxiliary ForceΩΩ of sailors remains unheard, & struggling & hopping & lurching along till we were out of range again.  Another coping mechanism for Away from Home is that I get my wretched dog by the short connecting back strap of the harness & march toward the offending feathered object.  That’s the direction Genghis wants to be going anyway, & if I’m braced in advance I can keep us going in a (relatively) straight line.  I am yelling, of course.  GET OUT OF HERE.  GET.  OUT.  OF.  HERE.  There may be some colourful adjectives to go with this desperate cry.  The point is, if you keep steadily after the shuffling chowderheads, large screaming dog optional, they will eventually kind of flap away, whinging like mad.  But if I make the mistake of trying to walk past them, Genghis will do the Sleipnir thing again, while turning in frantic circles.  I can hang onto him when we’re going forward.  When he starts swinging around, my wrist starts making noises like a baby seagull.

One of the things that makes Genghis quite so nutso is that they DON’T fly.  If his chosen prey FLIES AWAY, or bolts into the shrubbery, depending on the variety, he calms down, sort of, or at least I can risk letting him have all four feet on the ground again.ΩΩΩ  One of the additional hazards of life during baby seagull season is that once Genghis has manicked himself into Hysterical Prey Drive status he stays there.  But, as above, the wretched fledglings are thrown out of their nests long before they can fly.  So they waddle.  & moan.  & grizzle. & crap.  Oh yes, & their parents may be hanging around, so the Attack Squadron situation continues, although the air cover is surprisingly erratic—it’s much worse during the early egg-&-hatchling phase, which doesn’t make a lot of sense to me;  they’ve put all this effort into producing baby seagulls, & once they’re on the ground, it’s like right, that’s over, & the adults go back to stealing ice cream cones.  Although if Genghis has prey in his sights, he won’t care if it’s several squadrons of velociraptors.※

Eh.  This has got a bit epic.  I’m interested that it’s all in past tense since I started this saga because baby seagull season isn’t over yet, & indeed two of our worst encounters have happened painfully recently.  Maybe I’ll tell you next time.  Maybe I’ll win the new ME Paralympics category in dog wrestling, & get distracted.  I distract easily.  Oh yeah that’s something else I keep meaning to tell you about . . .

* * *

* with the somewhat surprising exception of three years near Lake Ontario in upstate New York

** It could just be the circumstantial chance of their sitting on the rooftree^ of your house.  But if you’re asking me, I think they aim. 

^ This is another chapter of the story.  We will come to it in due course

*** You know this in Maine.  Not on account of the seagulls, which are off eating fish the way they’re supposed to, but on account of raccoons and foxes and SKUNKS.  You do not mess with skunks.  And the occasional bear, but not so much in town, at least not the towns I lived in.  It surprises me we don’t seem to have town foxes here.  We certainly have foxes—I see them occasionally in the woods^—but they don’t seem to come into town.  London has an urban fox problem.  We don’t.^^  Go figure.

^ Things I didn’t necessarily want to know.  Foxes in Scotland are bigger than foxes in the rest of the UK.  You can look it up.

^^ Yet.  If they start chatting up the seagulls, we’re in trouble.

† }[#_{@)*)^%$£”!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

†† As I say, we’ll come to this.

††† Barring a trained orangutan, as per Murders in the Rue Morgue

‡ & which wouldn’t include me

‡‡ You all read Norse mythology, right?  Odin’s horse Sleipnir has eight legs.  When Genghis is in full flail, I swear he has sixteen, but whatever.

‡‡‡ No, I wouldn’t mourn.  Generally speaking I’m pretty eco-minded—I spend HOURS peeling doodah doodah blasted plastic tape off all the cardboard boxes that come through my door so I can piously recycle them, I also wash & reuse the plastic bags that come ditto,  I pick up criminally irresponsible people’s dogs’ unpicked up crap, personally I don’t think it gets any more self-martyring for-the-good-of-society-minded holy than this, & I also compost like mad, even if (or perhaps because) my garden is a little . . . ahem . . . ramshackle. 

ɸ It’s even less fun when he nails something I don’t get away from him in time, & it gets us up at 3 in the morning when it wants back out.^  With the result that I’m in a fairly constant state of Hysterical Anti Prey Drive, which is bad for the ME.

^ Okay, 7 in the morning.  We probably got to bed about 3. 

ɸɸ But if we want to talk about where I want my tax money to go, I’d rather it went to hiring a cherry-picker.

ɸɸɸ Yes, I’ll get around to naming everything eventually.  But I like to do this in a leisurely, thoughtful manner.^

^ & what would ‘a leisurely, thoughtful manner’ be when it’s at home?

Ω No doubt to the delight of the neighbours

ΩΩ Naval organisation is beyond me.  They don’t seem to have nice straightforward categories like regiments & battalions.

ΩΩΩ Another of my many pet [sic] peeves is tame town wildlife.  Genghis chomps pigeons now & again because they can’t be bothered getting out of the way.  Oh yeah, in a minute, they say, this is a particularly tasty [dead thing, rotting pizza, etc], but they don’t have a minute.  Urban rabbits are even worse.   

※Yes, he nobbles a couple or so every year.  Big ugh.  Really, really big ugh.  I usually see them before he does, but he’s on a long lead, so he sees around corners before I get there.  You don’t want to hear about it.  I will say, however, that the worst slayage aftermath was once when he croaked a pigeon.  Pigeons aren’t even that big, but he sure punctured something, & there was blood everywhere, including all over him, & me, as I was trying to get the corpse off him again.^  “Yet who would have thought the old [bird] to have had so much blood in him?”  We were probably leaving bloody footprints.  I was expecting to get stopped on the way home by policepersons in Kevlar vests with their hands on their tasers.

Oh, & yes, I know, JURASSIC PARK got it wrong about velociraptors.  But the JURASSIC PARK version has kind of entered the cultural language.  & the word is so satisfying.

^ As above.  You don’t want to know.

The Tale of the Campervan, Chapter XII, approximately

Chapters I-XI are about why/how/WHAT??? I have a campervan, yes, a campervan, what was I THINKING, that I bought a campervan*??  Well, so, in medias res here.  I have this campervan, poor thing, which I rarely use, because rather than my four-wheeled other self, which Wolfgang was, she’s One More Thing & . . . my last post is about how the end of every day keeps coming a whole lot sooner than I’m expecting it to?**  My neglected campervan is always on tomorrow’s list, having got bumped off today’s.  Again.  Oh, & yes she has a name—Kinsukey—but that’s part of Chapters I-XI, so never mind that now. 

My sainted stepson, whom for the moment at least I’m going to call Jerome, because St Jerome is really tiresomely erudite***, keeps an eye on me. He feels responsible for the fact that I live here now.  It’s true he is responsible, but from my perspective I find this saintly & worth being grateful for, as opposed to a pain in the neck, which must inevitably be more what his view is, although he’s much too kind to say so.†  Anyway.  He’s aware that my relationship with Kinsukey is not flourishing, so he suggested we have a nice drive into the wilderness†† and take the dogs for a walk†††.  This part of the plan went very well.  It was a perfect day for a walk, & in spite of it being Saturday we weren’t run down by mobs of ravening off-lead dogs or flaming-eyed devil horses ridden by whip-cracking goblins, or any of the things that happen to you on a beautiful weekend afternoon in the wilderness.‡

Then on the way home we stopped at a convenience store‡‡.  I spent the 5 minutes Jerome was in the shop‡‡‡ trying to figure out a few more of the arcane symbols on the above-my-pay-grade frelling dashboard.  Which I assume is where the trouble began, the inchoate poking of enigmatic symbology, which I’m pretty sure isn’t a word but it should be, although neither Jerome nor I could figure out which particular prod had been the calamitous one.  Because he came back, climbed§ into the passenger seat, I turned the key, the engine fired up . . . & instantly turned off as soon as I put her in drive.§§  & again.  & again.  Meanwhile every time I took the brake off & put my foot on the pedal & nothing happened, we rolled ominously a few more feet toward the road . . . Granted only a few feet, the convenience store is on a relatively flat piece of ground in this very hilly little town.  But it doesn’t take long to roll too far on a small convenience store’s access road.

Nobody died.  & Kinsukey still has a dent-free front end.  BUT IT WASN’T A FUN TIME.  Jerome couldn’t figure out what was going on either—he’s not a Car Man nor particularly techie, but he’s a lot more plugged into the real world than I am—so after a lot of faffing around, & muffled screaming on my part§§§, we figured out how to disengage the whatever so Jerome & a friendly random clerk from the shop could push her into what would pass for a parking space while I attempted to steer, & the random clerk said she’d be fine there, he’d make a note so no one would have her towed. 

I spent Saturday evening & all of Sunday racing Genghis up the hill every few hours to check that she was still there, which she was.   As Jerome said, if you’re going to have a breakdown—late on a Saturday afternoon when your garage is closed—let it be somewhere that has CCTV & lights on all night.  This hadn’t even occurred to me yet.  I was busy hyperventilating at the idea of having driven her home by myself & parked on the grievous hill where I live & . . . .  Last year they took the tree out behind the place where I usually park.  Maybe because too many people were running into it.  I hadn’t run into it.  Yet.  But its absence means there’s nothing behind me but the next unfortunate parked car, & you gain momentum fast on a steep hill.  

Do I have even to tell you that when the imported-from-the-nearest-BIG-town person with the flatbed trailer—because my small local garage doesn’t have a recovery service, let’s not think about what all of this will finally cost me—showed up this morning, KINSUKEY STARTED IMMEDIATELY & RAN PERFECTLY???

I refuse to declare that this means I shouldn’t have a campervan.  After all, she broke down, or whatever it is that she did ɸ, on a reassuringly almost-flat surface, where furthermore there was CCTV & lights on all night.  Okay?  Yes????ɸɸ

* * *

* & golly the little squirrels cost.  I think I’ve already told you that renovations on this house went waaaaaaay over budget^.  They hadn’t finished going WILDLY over budget when Wolfgang died only a year after I moved up here & I was still under the impression that I was relatively flush.  Relatively.

^ that would be The Tale of the House That Needed More Renovating Than You or I Could Imagine, Chapters I-MMMXX & still awaiting a conclusion, or merely a denouement, any possibility of conclusion still being of the uncut Gordian variety—& which indeed I failed to imagine, & me a fantasy writer & all, I should be ashamed of myself.  Well, yes, okay, I am, but I still spent GEYSERS+ of money on this house.  & I bought a campervan.  & while I’d much rather be writing more stories than not, the truth is that I can’t afford to retire, which I realise I repeat kind of a lot, but it is so good to be writing again I can’t help myself.

+ the giant drowning Yellowstone kind of geyser, not the little hot water thingy that your plumber installs, if you live in Britain & are unlucky.  There are a variety of British habits & usages I have never adapted to.  One of them is the educational system.#  Another is the PLUMBING.

# Don’t get me started.  Let me just mention as an aside that a public school is actually what any sane American would call a private school, ie you have to pass an exam or have an interview, or both, to get in & then you have to pay money to stay.  Eton is a public school. ~

~ warming the mug before you make your tea in it, however, that’s a good one.  (Peter, of course.  He was horrified that I called myself a tea drinker & didn’t do this.)

** I will probably drone on about this more later.  There actually are reasons why I keep losing hours, besides the staring-at-the-blank page thing.  I do too many things, one might almost say cranky things if one were in a punny mood, & I’m slow at all of them.

*** Just like his dad.  Arrrgh.  My stepson, I mean. I don’t know if St Jerome’s dad was erudite or not.

† I have to say, how did I luck into a family who feels that second wives, you know, count? 

†† This isn’t the Highlands & the wilderness is not half an hour from my front door in any direction.^  But it feels like the wilderness to someone who is failing to adjust to a strange new vehicle in a strange new countryside, even five years later. Kinsukey is an ordinary-van sized van, despite her fancy insides, but she still feels twice the size of Wolfgang AND I have no sense of direction.  Which malign amalgam is the fundamental problem. 

^ Except maybe straight out to sea, which isn’t the plan here.

††† Have I named their dog yet?  Hmm.  Let’s call her Francoise, in spite of my current lack of an available c with a squiggle under it, which is another story, this another one about THE HORRORS OF TECHNOLOGY, which I seriously don’t want to get into now.  Seriously.^

^ &, speaking of seriously, & not getting into technology, what are the chances that the blog post tech wouldn’t let me use it even if I had it?  A TRIAL FOR ANOTHER DAY.  Probably including Blogdad.

‡ This view of wilderness may be being influenced by Story in Progress, but I’m still not telling you about that, so never mind that either. 

‡‡ VERY UNROMANTIC.^  Small towns in Scotland shouldn’t have convenience stores, they should have farmers’ markets & bagpipers.  Because I’m organic-from-scratch I sneer at convenience stores, but Jerome still believes in food that comes in plastic packets.^^

^ High Romantic, I mean.  Walter Scott & Robbie Burns.  Not kissy kissy.  Although you certainly see teenagers grappling with each other in convenience store car parks. 

^^ It’s probably a good thing he has some weaknesses or he’d be unbearable.

‡‡‡ Buying sinister misleadingly-food-shaped items

§ Crinklingly.  Those plastic packets, you know

§§ She’s an automatic.  Apparently you can’t get a juggle-the-gears-yourself campervan.  AAAAAAUGH.

§§§ & a surprising number of people blowing their horns & yelling at us.  WTF?!  We’re obviously broken down, & yes we’re in an inconvenient spot, when did anyone ever break down in a convenient spot??  But they could get around us.  Yo, angry jerk in car, what is your deal?! 

§§§§ on a gearshift car, you just frelling put it out of gear & it free-rolls fine.  In an automatic it says, no, no, dear, naughty-naughty, mustn’t do that. It’ll roll freely WHEN YOU DON’T WANT IT TO, but you can’t put it out of gear.

ɸ I have a WITNESS!!  JEROME was there too!!!

ɸɸ Because, with reference to how much this is all eventually going to cost me, yes I am still going to have the garage take a look at her, & they’re BOOKED UP TILL THE END OF SEPTEMBER.^  Which meant I drove her home & parked her on this hill, & I’m not thinking about what happens the next time I turn her on, take the emergency brake off & put my foot on the go-forward pedal . . .

^ It’s not September, of course, not yet.  It’s July, I think.  Time.  Ugh.

The Big Questions

You know all those Big Questions?  What is the purpose of life?  Why were we put on this planet?  What is reality?*  What is the future of the universe?**  All those huge searingly intense questions that philosophers*** have exercised their scintillating intellects over for hundreds of years?

They’re barking up the wrong hypothesis.  The real question of the, you should forgive the term, ages, is WHERE DOES THE TIME GO?

I know where some of it goes.  The staring at a blank screen/piece of paper with fingers poised quiveringly† over a keyboard or clenched white-knuckled on a pen†† engulfs surprising amounts of time.  You go into a kind of negative zone and trance out.  And when you come back, lo, hours have passed.  And the frelling page is still frelling blank.†††  Also, in this household, a lot of time goes to organic from-scratch food prep‡ and trying to keep up with a German Wire Haired Pointer.‡‡

But there is definitely time that whistles away through the cracks in my life, and possibly through cracks in reality,‡‡‡ and is never heard from again, let alone productively made use of.  Some of that time is the time I’d be writing this blog.§  If I had it.  The time.

Oh, right, I’m supposed to be telling you about the new book I’m writing.  I seem to have got distracted, which proclivity, the Distraction Proclivity,§§ I also want to write about.  But probably not tonight.

I know.  I’m supposed to be telling you about the new book I’m writing.§§§  I am a cow.   I am a highly distractible cow.  Mooo.  Another one of those things that doesn’t change.

Onward next post.§§§§

* * *

* Or, as one of my well-worn, beat-up sweatshirts has it, Who am I?  Why am I here?  What is my fate? Where are the cookies?^

^ Sadly I don’t eat cookies any more, or not anything that anyone else would recognise as cookies.  I’ve made reference to my health going kind of kablooey after Peter died+ and as a hope for a way forward I went all drastic on what I eat.  I’ve had monster allergies all my blasted life, and stress makes my gut explode, and eating politely does help.  I really have no vices left++, which is kind of boring, but at this age, ‘bouncing back’ isn’t really a thing, and if you find something that works, you keep doing it.  Hey, I’m still functional enough, for example, that I am more or less keeping up with the resident German Wire Haired Pointer, but even more or less, when applied to a GWHP, counts.  But one of those drastic food manoeuvres is that I gave up sugar—all sweeteners, honey, molasses, the lot, barring something to wake the yeast up when I make bread, except that no one would recognise what I call bread any more either, since it’s not merely gluten- but grain-free.  To the extent there’s a purpose to this latest extended footnote digression+++ it’s that I’m thinking about some of the things I did on the old blog, and one of them was sharing recipes.  Not a plausible option now.  Although, dunno, revelation of what I consider food might be a kind of modern ecofreak horror story?  HP Lovecraft for the 21st century?++++ 

I still wear the sweatshirt. 

+ ME doesn’t like grief or any of the attendant head states.  Its purpose is to make you miserable, and it takes it as a personal affront if anything else tries to challenge its supremacy in this matter.  Trust me, you do not want to live with a case of affronted ME.

++ 100% organic chocolate is not a vice.  It’s good for you.  Look it up.

+++ do I need a purpose?  Have I ever acknowledged needing a purpose?

++++ without the racism and the misogyny

** And how many ways can us humans screw it up?

*** Who historically have been male, and have had things like wives and staff, or at least helpful friends, who, recognising that men have their minds on higher things, rally round with the life-support stuff, like casseroles and firewood.  And, of course, let us remember charming and precious Cyril Connolly’s^ ‘There is no more sombre enemy of good art than the pram in the hall.’  Philosophers certainly don’t waste their intellects raising children.  There’s a bit of a conundrum here however.  If somebody didn’t raise the next generation—if someone hadn’t raised the philosophers—there would pretty soon be no humans around to screw up the planet.  Possibly even soon enough to save the glaciers and the polar bears.  WORTH CONSIDERING.

I was just looking up ‘philosophy’ and was slapped in the face, as by a wet fish, with this quotation:  ‘The problems are solved, not by giving new information, but by arranging what we have always known.  Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language.’  Ludwig Wittgentiresomegitstein.  SPARE.  ME.^^

^ Anybody still read Cyril Connolly?  I didn’t think so.

^^ Also, of course, I write fantasy.  I depend on the bewitchment of intelligence by means of language. 

† Spellcheck just changed this to ‘quaveringly.’  GO.  AWAY.  At least I caught the freller this time.  I’m blaming spellcheck for ‘vocal chords’ in my last post, which fortunately some kindly and sharp-eyed soprano quickly pointed out, so only the early arrivers at the resuscitated+ blog will have seen this before I fixed it.  IT WAS SPELLCHECK.  REALLY.++  Also that I can’t proofread my own stuff, and it’s amazing I don’t make more really embarrassing errors.

+ We’re TRYING for resuscitated

++ No, it won’t have corrected cords to chords.  It probably corrected crods to chords.  Or doohickey flimflam to chords.

†† fountain pen.  I do have my limits, these are fountain pens that take cartridges, not the kind that you have to refill yourself, getting ink all over the entire town and rendering at least one German Wire Haired Pointer unrecognisable.+  But still.  Fountain pens.  Which, even with cartridges++, tend to be a trifle capricious, so you can waste a little more time trying to get the nib back in a mood to, you know, write, as in make marks on a page.  This would not be an issue of course if I did more writing in the first place, and less staring.

+ Hey!  That looks like a German Wire Haired Pointer!  Except it’s black as ink!

++ & I can create a surprising amount of black-spotted disorder even with a cartridge.  It is possible to insert a cartridge wrong.  In fact this is surprisingly easy.  I have the mottled fingers to prove it.  I like to think this makes me look devoted to my art, but I think it probably only looks like someone dumb enough to put a fresh ink cartridge in her pen wrong.

††† And the nib of your fountain pen has frozen up again.

‡ I tend to say, either self-deprecatingly or rolling-eyed frustratedly, that I don’t really cook, but golly do I do food prep.  This is not strictly true—see above, about bread and cookie equivalents—but organic from-scratch does take YONKS AND YONKS of time.

‡‡ On bad days, all that happens in this six-legged family is food, hurtling and staring at a blank page.  And probably reading/pretending to read a few chapters of a murder mystery to fill in the hours when I have no brain and no energy.

‡‡‡ Although my life and reality have very little to do with each other.  Possibly the one thing they have in common is a propensity for cracks.

§ Yes we COULD get into a discussion of whether or not blog-writing counts as ‘productive’.  Let’s not.

§§ including the Footnote Proclivity

§§§ Is there an echo in here?

§§§§ Keep thinking ‘resuscitated.’