Robin McKinley's Blog, page 21

Chicken, apples and cream

 

Blondviolinist

Behind is good. Farther away from the FRONT is GOOD. Also, it turns out, good is the awful spotlights that frelling BLIND YOU. It means you can’t really see the congregation.

Yes. Never underestimate the calming power of bright lights in your eyes. Congregation? What congregation?

Yay for having fun with singing!!! And when you do write that power ballad, I want to hear it.

Ha ha ha ha ha ha.  And here I thought you were going to say something all helpful* and knows-way-more-about-music-than-I-do.  Fie.

But . . . I’m pretty sure it was you, a long time ago now, posted to the forum asking about Maggie’s mom’s chicken, apples and cream recipe.**  I TORE MY KITCHEN APART*** looking for the frelling recipe and had just about decided that it must have been in one of the cookbooks I’d got rid of when I went off dairy—probably one of the Shaker cookbooks.  You know all these clean pure lines of Shaker furniture and houses and how they dressed simply and were celibate and so on?  THEY MAKE UP FOR IT IN THE FOOD.  If there was ever massive sublimation going on Shaker food is it.  Or anyway the several Shaker cookbooks I had in my twenties and thirties† were ALL cream and butter and thick gooey sauces and . . . glorious.††  Although it helps if you have a really fast metabolism and/or regularly save the world which is usually a high-calorie undertaking.†††  The rest of us have to have a week’s detox on lettuce and water after every foray.  Even if I hadn’t gone off dairy twenty years ago I’d’ve had to get rid of my Shaker cookbooks when I hit menopause and my metabolism said, nice knowing you.  Going to sleep now for several decades.

BUT I FOUND IT.  CHICKEN, APPLES AND CREAM.  YAAAAAAY.  From the notes in the margins there was at least one other recipe I had already tried—which probably was in one of those lost Shaker cookbooks—but I know I used this one too.  It’s been so long since I’ve made it I can’t remember much about it except that it’s good.  The original is from COUNTRY SUPPERS by Ruth Cousineau which I’ve praised in these virtual pages before.  I think it’s a lovely cookbook and it should have been a fabulous best-seller and still in print.  But it’s not—still in print, anyway.

2-3 T slightly salted butter

1 large sweet onion

2 medium-sized sour/cooking apples:  popularity was busy ruining Granny Smiths when I moved over here:  when they first hit the ground running they were the perfect all-purpose apple, not too sour to eat if you like brisk but excellent in pies and so on too.  So I’m not sure what you Americans use now.  I used Bramleys when I first moved over here‡ but they are VERY SOUR.  Also, Bramleys tend to HUGE.  You’ll probably only want one Bramley.  Anyway.  Choose your weapon.  Then core, peel, slice.  You know the drill.

3 T flour

1 c good strong chicken stock.  Either make it yourself or buy proper stock in the refrigerator section of your grocery.

½ c heavy cream‡‡

4 c chopped cooked chicken‡‡‡

Melt the butter, gently fry your fine-chopped onion.  Add apples and go on cooking gently.  If you’re using Bramleys be aware that they get fluffy if they’re cooked too enthusiastically.  Sprinkle on the flour and stir till you get something resembling a lumpy roux—all those apples and onions in the way.  Then slowly add the stock and cream.  As I recall I added it alternately in bits—so half the stock, stir till it’s all taken up, then the cream, stir etc, then the final stock.  It’ll be much thinner, obviously, but it should still be a proper thick sauce.

Add the chicken and heat through.

You’ll need some salt:  add how you like it.  You may want pepper.  I don’t but then I’m not eating this, am I?  You can think of me and feel superior.§

* * *

* I need to learn how to change key signatures and how to write a descant.  Okay?

** SHADOWS.  For those of you still waiting in the loan queue at your library.^

^ Suggest they buy more copies.

*** It did not, in fact, look a great deal different than before I started the tearing process.

† Before I went off everything that was fun besides tea, chocolate and champagne

†† I was just googling Shaker recipes and there seems to be some revisionism going on.  Simple pure lines of Shaker cooking.  Hmm.  Okay.

††† Ask Kes.

‡ I sashayed back and forth over the ‘no dairy’ line for a while till my body convinced me that it meant NO DAIRY.

‡ Oh frell.  US/UK translation problems.  I think if you’re in the UK you want what’s called ‘whipping cream’.  I’ve just been pestering google and that seems to be the consensus.  I too fell into the ‘double cream’ trap.  The UK is just cream mad.  Which is why I started falling off the no-dairy wagon when I moved over here.  Clotted cream.  Be still my heart.  SIIIIIIIIGH.  I’m old and mean now though.  I’m used to my bitter privation.

‡‡‡ The original recipe calls for shredded chicken.  Ugh.  You can also just joint your chicken.  It makes quite a nice presentation if you arrange your chicken pieces on a platter, pour the sauce over and artfully arrange a few slices of raw apple on top—not Bramley.  People die of intense shrivelling by eating raw Bramleys.  This method also saves all that chopping time.  You could knit several rows in the time you didn’t spend chopping.

§ I CAN STILL EAT BUTTER.  With black tea, champagne, chocolate and BUTTER, my life is not a desert.

Mindfulness

 

 

Samaritans training was Tuesday this week* so I made it to Aloysius’ Wednesday afternoon silent prayer for the first time since . . . the last time Sams training was on a Tuesday.  And Aloysius wasn’t there.  Feh.  I knew this, and I’d said I’d come hold the floor down in his absence.  There were actually a few other people there—slight gleep from yours truly—but I lit the tea-light, read out a bit of psalm and hit my temple-bell timer.**

Catlady

I’ve found, myself, that it’s not that I’m not praying when I lead/ sing for services, it’s just that I’m praying differently. I’ve always felt that prayer has to be a verb — for me, it’s prayer when I set up the sanctuary . . .  it’s prayer when I’m whispering directions to those joining me in front of the congregation. . . .  It’s even prayer when I’m singing the Mi Chamocha by rote and trying to figure out who would be moved by the next reading . . . don’t give this one to that person, because it always makes her cry, which is best done if you’re not trying to read aloud . . . it’s just not the Mi Chamocha that I’m, you know, praying. Occasionally, when it’s a solo, and there’s nothing left to coordinate, and everything goes right, I get to lose myself in the actual prayer that I’m actually praying, which is holy in a different way. But it’s all prayer to me…

Thank you for this, and for your previous on the same subject.  It’s a mindfulness thing, isn’t it?  I think part of what has helped me about the headspace for performing worship is that I got put on the prayer chain at St Margaret’s really quickly*** and floundered rather trying to figure out how to cope with all this praying for people when I was new to praying at all.  I’ve told the blog that I ‘sat’ at a [Buddhist] zendo back in Maine during a year I was finding very rough, and the silent mindful daily sitting made a huge difference in my ability to cope.  I fell out of the habit of daily mindful sitting when I moved over here but I didn’t forget that that space existed and was accessible.  And then hey-presto I became a Christian and . . . gleep.  The silent-sitting space is both utterly transformed by the presence of God and also strangely—reassuringly—familiar.

The sitting-space became the prayer-space and having God to orient myself toward makes me feel as if I have an idea where I’m going, even if I don’t always fully arrive.  You have to leave your stuff at the door and sometimes I . . . can’t.  But I take my prayer-list there—or as close to there as I can get—and I go to Aloysius’ Wednesday afternoon silent prayer when Samaritans’ training doesn’t get in the way, and the high point of my practising-Christian week is half an hour sitting silently in the dark with some monks, Saturday evening, during the ‘Exposition of the Blessed Sacrament’, before night prayer starts.  The more often you go to the prayer-space the plainer the track becomes.†

I can gather a few little wisps of prayer-space when I stumble†† up on stage to sing for service.  I’m not much of a singer or a musician—I have to work at making what I hope is a half-decent noise—I have to focus.  It is, at this point in my dubious development, relatively straightforward to focus on the prayer side rather than the music side.  The less kind way of putting it is to say it rates as prayer because intentionality counts.  It does not rate as music because intentionality only gets you a pat on the head and a bellow of NEXT from the bloke running the auditions.†††

But . . . where we came in.  If you can hold your feeble, wavering, mortal focus on prayer . . . what you’re doing is praying.  It’s a bit like deciding to run a marathon when you’re over sixty and have bad knees, but hey.

* * *

* Last night was writing emails and texts.  I was expecting this to be shocking and dislocating, like a watercolourist being handed a block of granite and a chisel, but in fact it was a whole lot like . . . writing.  In this case, emails and texts.  The texting was funny.  I’ve told you that I’m older by a good fifteen years than the next-oldest of the trainees, and probably thirty-five years older than the youngest.^  And I’m like, texting, fine, okay, I can do texting, and all these kiddies were saying TEXTING?  We have to TEXT as Samaritans?  And we’re supposed to understand all those nasty text abbreviations?^^  And I’m going, oh, cool.  Txtspk!  160 characters??  And I’m saying, oh, it’s like a slightly stretched tweet—you know, Twitter.  Sure, I can do that.  And they all recoiled as if from a slavering Rottweiler and said, TWITTER?  We have nothing to do with Twitter.  —Snicker.  Us do-gooders are so straight.#

^ How did I get this OLD?  I was supposed to just kind of stay forty.

^^ Which we’re allowed to use, cautiously, trying to take our cue from the texter.  We get a lot of texts and emails from overseas and from people whose first language is not English and we do have to communicate.

^^^ Which, not very long ago, when, I think it was Jodi, used it, I had to ask her for a translation.

# I’m talking to Merrilee tomorrow night and I will have to remember to tell her, since she’s the one dragged me kicking and screaming into the twenty-first century, including both this blog and Twitter.+

+ I don’t count Facebook, which I don’t use.  I post the blog links there and if FB is in a good mood and lets me, I read any comments.  But about the seven millionth throw-it-all-up-in-the-air-and-stick-the-bits-to-the-wall-as-they-fall-down-again revision, I mean upgrade, I lost the will to live about all of it.

** And went home with Eleanor after and spent an hour and a half wringing our hands and rending our garments over an incomprehensible political situation that has recently arisen in St Margaret’s.  THIS IS WHY I HATE GROUPS.  THEY’RE FULL OF CRAZY PEOPLE BY DEFINITION.

*** ref comments about saying ‘yes’ to things you think you can do so you don’t get ploughed under with things you can’t, it being the function of a community, including a religious one, to extract as much practical value out of its members as it can.^  St Margaret’s is thriving in a general society where a lot of churches are struggling, and I’m sure one of the reasons why is the bloodhound look in the eyes of the admin as soon as a fresh victim crosses the threshold.  When you sign up to be an official mailing-list member you are doomed.

^ See previous footnote.  Sigh.

† More or less.  Some frelling day I will be able to sit properly at home.  The old Zen-Buddhist, and Zen-Christian, thing is just that every time you’re distracted you bring your mind gently back to your breath, or whatever you’re using as a focus.  If I’m sitting with monks I need to bring my mind back, oh, no more often than thirty-seven times a minute.  At home alone, relying solely on my own resources . . . it’s like trying to whack a manic fly with a flyswatter.  LAND SOMEWHERE YOU DEVILSPAWN SO I CAN NAIL YOU.  Sigh.

†† FRELLING CABLES EVERYWHERE.  MICROPHONES, KEYBOARDS, GUITARS, BASS GUITARS, DRUMS^.  I DON’T THINK THE FLUTE IS ELECTRIC YET BUT I’M SURE IT WILL BE.

^ Or drum accessories.  I don’t think the drums themselves are electrified (? Like I have any idea), but there are certainly cables running (perilously) to the drum kit.

††† This is aside from questions of the quality of the actual music we’re attempting to perform.

 

Tra la la update

 

Jonas Kaufman, AKA world’s most fabulous male singer*, was interviewed on Radio Three this past Saturday afternoon**—early enough Saturday afternoon that I was still kind of staggering around groping for more caffeine and tripping over the hellterror, who gets very excited by the prospect of . . . everything.***  And I was listening to him and thinking [sic] approximately three things:  (1) He sounds nice.†  (2)  He sounds a lot like Nadia talking about singing.  (3)  WHY AM I BOTHERING?  If he’s a Ferrari I’m a junkheap bicycle with bent steering and a tyre missing.  SIGH.

I sang for service again last night.  I think I’ve told you I’m singing approximately fortnightly because they are mysteriously short of singers††.  Horrible confession time.  It’s fun.  Even more horrible confession time:  it’s chiefly fun because of the team thing, I who loathe groups and feel that the perfect social assemblage is two hellhounds, a hellterror and a laptop.†††  I realised the fun thing with particular acuteness last night because we were attempting a song that nobody knew, but Buck, who was leading, had decided we should.  So we were all somewhat equaller than usual, although not that much because Buck and Aloysius more or less know what they’re doing and the rest of us say ‘yes boss’ and try not to look stuffed.  But learning something as a group—learning something that needs a group to do it—is, you know, bonding.‡  I suppose God gets a look-in here somewhere too.‡‡

It is interesting, how far I’ve come.  Nadia teases me about the sleep she lost, when I was first taking lessons from her, wondering how she was ever going to open me up out of a faint squeaking noise.‡‡‡  Due to various traumas today was my first lesson in three weeks and I’ve been missing her—the thing I go to her for even more than knocking the weevils out of my repertoire§ is to reset my voice.  The longer I’m left un-reset the less voice I have as the old habits relentlessly shut me down again.

Except . . . not so much.  I was certainly glad of my resetting today§§—we also had a little weevil-elimination from THE SUN WHOSE RAYS ARE ALL ABLAZE—but I’d had enough voice to leave a singe mark on the back of Buck’s shirt yesterday evening.  I’m learning more music because every note isn’t a life or death struggle against entropy.

Singing is, you know . . . it’s fun.

* * *

* http://www.jonaskaufmann.com/en/  Note that I’m not the only person who thinks so.  The thing about Kaufman is the dark edge:  I adore Juan Diego Florez ^ http://www.juandiegoflorez.com/ for example but he doesn’t scare me.  Kaufman in full transcendent roar is scary.

^ We’re sticking to tenors here.  If we let baritones in+ we’ll be here all night.++  And when did opera singers get cute?  I never wanted to go home with Pavarotti.+++  When I was still young enough to go hang around stage doors they were never cute.  Unfair.

+ Dmitri Hvorostovsky http://hvorostovsky.com/ for example.

++ Um.  It’s already morning.  Just by the way.

+++ Note:  ewww.

** http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b04571zt  I really hate the BBC web site, it is such a mess.  If you don’t know exactly where to find something in the schedule you’re gerfarkled.  I idiotically, because I so should know better, just now started by putting ‘Jonas Kaufman’ in the search window and . . . got one hit, to a review of some CD he was in quite a while ago.  You need to download your podcasts fast while they’re still unearthable on the recent schedule.  Because I am a dedicated, not to say pathological, listener to Radio Three I use the wretched BBC site a lot and have I think three times filled out one of those PLEASE TELL US HOW WE’RE DOING questionnaires in which I give them relentlessly one star for everything and fill the ‘other’ options with detailed complaints. . . . And for some reason nothing ever changes.

*** Hellhounds open one eye and say Wake us up if the world ends.  Well, wake us up if the world ends if there’s going to be anything good to chase.  Demons, sprites, fifty-foot mutant rabbits, etc.

† It’s not enough that he’s cute, he has to be NICE?

†† Any Fool Can Sing.  As witnessed by the fact that I’ve received a few compliments on my singing.  HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA.  I think this is known as ‘be nice to her so she’ll keep coming and filling up a gap on stage’.  Although Buck turning on me—I was immediately behind^ him last night—and saying, you’re really loud, may not exactly construe as a compliment.

^ repeat behind.  Behind is good.  Farther away from the FRONT is GOOD.  Also, it turns out, good is the awful spotlights that frelling BLIND YOU.  It means you can’t really see the congregation.

††† Peter is in bed asleep as are all sensible people at this hour.

‡ I’m trying to decide why it seems so different in kind from bell ringing, which is also a necessarily team thing.^  Maybe because music is simultaneous rather than serial?  And by being simultaneous rather than serial there’s slightly more room to go wrong without anyone hating you?  Well, at least in an informal service in a small-town church.  There isn’t a losing-the-quarter equivalent in informal small-town service singing, I don’t think.  If you make a horrible clashing noise you stop and start again at the beginning of the verse.  Nobody dies or goes home mad.  And nothing that happens on stage at St Margaret’s is ANYTHING like as intimidating as the frelling ringing chamber at Forza.  Which I have to start cranking myself up to face again as soon as Wednesday night Samaritan training is over—and as of this week we’re more than halfway.

^ And which I blame for getting me softened up on the subject of team activities.

‡‡ Pretty much every musical friend I have warned me that singing for service may make it less about worship and more about performance.  I am very likely missing something but this doesn’t seem to be what is happening.  It may have to do with the fact that This Voice is as new as my Christianity is.  Newer.  It’s like oh, gee, thanks, God, I like being audible when I sing^, here, have some back. ^^

^ So long as I am remotely on pitch

^^ I’ve started thinking about writing my own Jesus Is My Boyfriend power ballad.+  Or maybe just setting a few lines of a psalm.

+ I still think most Modern Christian Worship Music sucks rabid wolverines.  Maybe it’s just that holding a microphone makes me care.

‡‡‡ Remember that we’re talking about something growing from the size of a bacterium to the size of a small, undernourished Chihuahua.  Very impressive in context^ but I will still never make Mastiff size or, to put it another way, I will never sing with Jonas Kaufman.

^ Yaaaaaaay Nadia

§ When I’ve been performing something in an especially weevilly way I tell Nadia that at least it proves I’m not slavishly listening to the pros on YouTube.  Speaking of pros:  Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau singing Schubert lieder:  AAAAAAAAUGH.  WHY AM I BOTHERING?^

^ For fun?

§§ Nadia can briefly raise me from undernourished Chihuahua to mini bull terrier.  If I ever made it to whippet x deerhound I’d start going to auditions.

Spring at Biltmore Estate, Part I – guest post by TheWoobDog

 

My husband and I (and our dog, of course) recently spent a weekend in Asheville, NC, to enjoy a mini-vacation celebrating both the fact that tax season was over (you’d think this would only affect me, since my husband’s job has nothing to do with accounting, but since he has to live with me during tax season he’s just as glad to see the rear end of it as I am) and the fact that in some parts of the state spring has actually started to manifest with no take-backs.

Here in the mountains, spring is a tease* – we’ll have balmy temps for a week (maybe two), and all the plants feel the soil warming and suddenly pop out of the earth.** Spring, fickle mistress that she is, then invariably heads south for a few more weeks, at which point the temps drop back to 18° F (roughly -8° C), everything green is instantly blighted and we all fall into a deep depression. It’s at this point that all of us in the mountains head in droves to lower elevations to remind ourselves that there is hope.

So following this tradition, we headed to Asheville, where we endured miserable cold and rain for the first two days of our vacation, desperately checking the weather forecast every hour or so to make sure the promised sunshine and warmth were still on for the weekend and hoping the single pair of long pants and jacket each of us brought “just in case” would last until the weather broke.*** Sunday the long-awaited sunshine finally arrived and we drove over to Biltmore Estate to have a picnic among the glorious spring blooms.

 

Biltmore house exterior, showing the grand staircase

For those unacquainted with it, Biltmore Estate is the largest privately owned residence in the United States, a 250-room chateau built by George Vanderbilt in the 1890’s in the French Renaissance style. The grounds and gardens – originally totaling 125,000 acres but reduced now to approximately 8,000 – were designed by landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted, who also designed New York City’s famed Central Park. Olmsted turned the over-farmed, over-logged, nutrient-depleted expanse of misused land purchased by Vanderbilt into a marvel of landscape architecture considered to be his most successful project.

A portion of the Biltmore landscape

 

Still today, a team of over five dozen full-time arborists, gardeners, foresters, and assorted horticulturalists work to further and maintain the vision he had for the property, which included extensive conservation work to reforest the property and turn the estate into a sustainable, functional, and self-sufficient model of beauty and utility.

 

A field planted with canola – the pressed plants will feed estate livestock, the seeds will make cooking oil for estate kitchens, and the used cooking oil will be recycled into biodiesel for estate equipment

 

It’s pretty incredible to read about the history of the house and grounds, as well as the strides still being made on the estate in the area of conservation and sustainability, but that’s not really what was on our minds as we settled in for our picnic. It was 70° (about 21° C), we were sitting in the (slightly damp) grass in the shade of a huge tree, and this was our view as we drank wine from the estate’s winery and nibbled on grapes and cheeses:

 

Picnic view

 

Technically we were in the Azalea Garden, a 20-acre# area containing one of the largest collections of native azaleas in the world, but none of the azaleas save one were blooming while we were there. I managed to sneak up on the one and snap a pic, but I couldn’t tell if it was just over-eager and burst happily into bloom a week too early or if it was a late-comer to the party and blossomed after the others had turned in. It’s possible a late frost caught a lot of the azaleas – some looked as though they were past their peak while others looked as though they were just forming buds, so it was hard to tell, but our timing was obviously off in one direction or the other.

 

Lone azalea

 

We didn’t really want to hike down through any more of the Azalea Garden after eating, so we walked up toward the house to check out some of the other gardens that were bursting with spring color. On the way, we passed this random Staircase to Nowhere charmingly tucked into a shaded hillside and I had to take a pic (one of my most fervent desires for our home landscaping## is to someday be able to incorporate stonework).

 

Stone stairs

 

The Italian Garden, the most formal garden on the estate, isn’t too exciting this early in the year as none of the water plants are out, so we strolled through the Shrub Garden. This area, also known as the Ramble since its meandering paths take visitors through four acres of native and exotic plants, connects the formal Italian Garden with the English-style Walled Garden and was designed to showcase a succession of color throughout the year. I have a particular fondness for spring-flowering trees and the Shrub Garden delivered these in spades – we saw absolute riots of blooms high and low, much to the delight of my winter-shriveled heart.

 

Hybrid Magnolia

White Dogwood (our state tree)

Pink Dogwood

Littleleaf Lilac

Burkwood Viburnum

Common Flowering Quince

Bleeding Heart – this little guy was tucked in the shade next to the path and I almost didn’t see him

 

We also saw this, which wins the prize for best visual of the trip (they were delighted to pose for a picture, but I’ve cropped out the man’s face since I’m sure he didn’t anticipate being plastered on the internet for international readers to enjoy):

 

This cat was wearing a harness and leash and riding on this man’s shoulder – note the flower tucked jauntily behind his neck.

* * *

* This will be important later, when it comes time to understand certain oddities of my gardening habits.

** It’s literally possible to watch things grow – we’re talking an inch-and-a-half of new growth in a day.

*** The original forecast had been for warm temperatures and sunshine the whole time we were in Asheville, then the lovely weatherpersons suddenly announced the unexpected arrival of a cold front as we were driving down.^

^ In other words, right when it actually hit. Was this really not something anyone could see coming in advance? Really?

# Some sources say 15-acre, but our official Biltmore Guide says 20-acre so that’s what I’m going with.

## Perhaps an overly lofty word for the state of affairs currently surrounding our house.

 

KES, 133

 

ONE THIRTY THREE

I sucked in a vast rough breath that felt like swallowing gravel, or possibly the shards of a broken sword.  I was going to shriek I am not your bloody goddam Defender, and then I was going to have my strangely thus far deferred nervous breakdown.  Or I was going to pull Silverheart from her sheath and cut Murac’s stupid tactless head off to relieve my feelings.  Or both.  Although if Silverheart let me do my own chopping it would probably be my head that rolled.  But she seemed to be part of the ‘Tha’s Defender’ team and would probably decline to behead either of us.  And maybe Murac would laugh so hard at the woman he had memorably described as a useless mare tugging hopelessly at the sword refusing to slide out of its sheath that he’d fall off his own horse and break his neck.

But whatever I might have done was rudely forestalled by someone grabbing my wounded leg.

I would have levitated right up off Monster’s back except that, of course, someone was holding my leg.  I was so shocked I didn’t scream—I made a sort of guttural moan, like a dying frog, and my vision briefly went red and funny.  But I didn’t scream.

A voice I knew I hadn’t liked the first time I heard it said, through the roaring in my ears, “Her needs sewing up.  I’ll fetch kit.  Droko is mending half the company.  Tha,” said Torpedo Shoulders fiercely, letting go of my (throbbing) leg and straightening up to glare at me, “next time, tha stay with tha company.”

There was that phrase again.  Next time.

“Most of uz are common soldiers, fathom it, zo?  We have no horses that can run like fire, we have no swords that know where to cut, we have no —” and he raised his (enormous) left arm and snapped it round in front of him in a gesture I instantly recognised from watching old Xena reruns.  I didn’t remember that Xena’s forearm guards were magical, particularly, but I tended to use Xena as a sleep aid so I might have missed something.  However I doubted I looked nearly as impressive as either Torpedo Shoulders or Xena when Glosinda was zapping my arm around.

Had tended to use Xena as a sleep aid, in that old life I was finding increasingly hard to remember, although maybe that was just the result of blood loss or a kind of bruisingly extreme disbelief, as if my brain had been used as a basketball in the national playoffs and returned to owner frayed and deflated.  I doubted this world contained on-line reruns . . . or anything else that my world would describe as this decade’s technology.  Unless you counted forging enchanted metal into self-motivated swords and arm guards, which was a useful trick, certainly, but I preferred dishwashers and email.

Wait a minute.  What had he said?  Sewing up?  I doubted present technology included anesthetic either.

But Tulamaro wasn’t finished scolding me:  “Tha’s Defender!  If tha wants to live to defend Gate, tha must begin by defending tha company!”

My mouth wanted to say “Yes, sir” like a kid in the principal’s office.  I clamped my jaws against the impulse and tried to glare back.  I didn’t want to live to defend Gate, I wanted to live to get out of here.  And while we were discussing such matters, what kind of a cheesy company didn’t shower their unexpected Defender in leather and chain mail to alleviate the shortcomings of her costume?  I might have tried to say some of this aloud (throb throb went my bare, ungreaved leg) but I didn’t think the dying frog in my throat would let me.

My glare needed work.  Tulamaro didn’t curl up at the edges and start smoking or anything.  He just went on glaring at me.  At the point I wasn’t going to be able to keep it going another moment (I did have a goblins-with-hammers headache), he dropped his own eyes and turned away.

“Get her off horse,” he added, striding away.

Murac swung down from his horse as easily as if the last—hour, had he said?—had been a nice little trail ride where the scariest thing was your horse spooking absent-mindedly at a squirrel.  “Can leg take tha weight?” he said.

I stood in my stirrups.  Throb throb THROB went my leg.  I nodded.

“I’ll hold horse,” he said, his own reins looped over one arm, and took hold gently of Monster’s.

Which at least left me two hands to cope with the exigencies of dismounting in a nightgown.  Eff eff eff eff eff eff eff.  I managed it, I think, one eye, when I could spare it, on Murac—but he kept his eyes fixed on the ground.  Murac the gentleman.  I had no idea.

My leg didn’t much like being stood on however.  I was just thinking about this when Tulamaro came back with a skinny, no-nonsense-looking man with him, carrying an ominous-looking box in his arms.

Sewing up, I thought, and the dying frog in my throat got larger.

 

Tired hellterror. Look fast, the effect doesn’t last.

 

Yesterday was a veeeeeeeery bad ME day and while I did go bell ringing at Crabbiton in the evening it was chiefly because the tower captain is a trifle fierce and has extracted promises out of her regulars, including recent vague wandering semi-alive, semi-conscious and semi-skilled dorks like myself, to let her know if we’re not coming.  If I’ve genuinely got something legitimate on, that’s fine, I know it and I can say so.  But on stupid bad-energy days I keep hoping I’ll start to improve any minute* and then the minutes trickle past and trickle past and on a bad day I’m not too plugged in to the whole time thing either and then suddenly it’s HALF AN HOUR TILL BELL PRACTISE AND I DIDN’T TELL FELICITY I’M NOT COMING SO I HAVE TO HURTLE A FEW HELLCRITTERS AROUND THE BLOCK FOR A PEE AND THEN PELT OFF TO PRACTISE.

Today has been better, but hellcritters might be permitted to feel a trifle aggrieved at their summary and abbreviated hurtling yesterday.  Peter wants to go to the farmers’ market on Fridays, so I bring the hellhounds and we have a nice nonstandard hurtle while Peter buys stuff.  That was them.  They were happy to come home and flop.  I then contemplated the hellterror (who was in my lap at the time) and decided she should have an adventure, so I took her out to one of the countryside walks none of us goes on any more because of the Other People’s Dogs problem.  Pav is very nearly the perfect companion for such an excursion—not quite perfect, there is no perfect when the world is full of idiots and their dogs—because she’s a bull terrier the average moron shudders away from her and makes a more concerted grab for his/her manic off-lead danger to society than he/she would for a mere pair of lurchers/longdogs/large whippety things.  No one is afraid of a mild-mannered sighthound.  Anyway.  If the OHMIGOD IT’S A PIT BULL** WE’RE GOING TO DIIIIIIIIE thing doesn’t work, I can pick her up.  We had several occasions of each this afternoon.

We managed to have a good time anyway.  But here’s the amazing thing:  I wore her out.  I WORE OUT a hellterror.  By the time we got back to Wolfgang she was throwing herself belly-down into the long grass by the side of the track and trying to convince me to carry her the last stretch.  No.  You can walk.  You know there’s foooooooood waiting back at the car—she always gets a little handful of kibbly treats to convince her that climbing into her travelling crate is a good thing—oh, right, fooooooood, she said, and deigned to totter the rest of the way after me.

It took her all of lunch and a half hour’s nap to recuperate. . . .

* * *

* This is not quite as daft and irresponsible as it sounds.  As often as I not I start coming out of an ME haze with a surprisingly graphic sense of my energy running back in, like pouring water into a pitcher.  Sometimes it’s more like fog lifting.  Sometimes it happens faster and sometimes slower and sometimes it’s like WHAM and sometimes it’s pretty subtle—it might  occur to me that I could stop playing Triple Town^ and concentrate on something for example.

^ I CANNOT FRELLING BELIEVE I’VE GOT RE-ADDICTED.  The beastly [sic] game is so last year.  Or last two or three years, I mean, ago, I think.  But I was trying to wean myself OFF all the unblessed word games I was playing too much of+.  And I turned the frelling ninja bears off and suddenly, whammo, I’m frelling playing frelling Triple Town again.++

+ Especially the ones with the really dark background colours so you can get eyestrain while you waste your time?  What a great system.#

# Apparently it never occurred to the designers that old people might want to play their finglegartmore games.

++ And doing a lot better for some reason.  It’s not just lack of ninja bears.  Maybe it’s the boomerang result of Wild Robert trying to teach me to call real touches of Grandsire doubles.  I can call the cheating touch, where you just call yourself in and out of the hunt every other lead, and all you have to keep track of is how many calls you’ve made so you yell THAT’S ALL at the right moment.#  Wild Robert, who is a fiend in human disguise##, wants me to learn to keep track of all the bells and where they are in the pattern so I’m calling from awareness rather than a memorised pattern.  I get this###—it’s the difference between real conductors and people who have memorised a few patterns—but that doesn’t mean I can do it.  Triple Town is just a frelling computer game.  Arrrgh.

# Which I never do.  I usually manage to count my calls accurately but then it’s like, Here?  Here?  Do I call an end here?  —No, you call half a lead ago and now we’re ringing an unscheduled plain course while you feel foolish.  CALL NOW BEFORE WE RING FORTY-SEVEN MORE PLAIN COURSES WHILE YOU’RE THINKING ABOUT IT.  Sigh.  I was not snorfleblasting made to be a conductor.

## And I’m sure he keeps his good humour about teaching an endless array of hopeless dorks by setting those of us with victim mentalities impossible challenges because we’re fun to watch.

### I was thinking last night—blearily—that this conducting nightmare is not totally unlike learning the Samaritan mindset—what the trainers call ‘your Samaritan head’.  You can grasp in principle all kinds of things about offering emotional support, no more and no less, and the minute you’re dropped in a role-play to practise what you’ve just so-called learnt, your frelling mind goes frelling blank.  WHAT DO I SAY NOW.  I am going to be very glad to get my first genuine duty shift over with . . . so it is over with and I can stop frelling obsessing about it.~  The thing about conducting a touch of change ringing is that the worst that happens is a really bad noise that the neighbours may complain of and you decide to stay home henceforth and do more knitting, which is quieter and involves fewer rope burns~~.  With the Samaritans . . . you may actually hurt someone’s feelings.  Eh.  Well, no one was holding a gun to my head when I went along to the info evening, and then along to the flushing out the secret Klu Klux Klan members first-cut evening, and then the interview and now the training. . . . And it’s fascinating.  It’s not cheerful—if everyone were cheerful we wouldn’t need Samaritans—but it is fascinating, and clearly worthwhile, and I’ve always been a (cranky) wet knee-jerk liberal and I’m now a (cranky) Christian wet knee-jerk liberal and although the Samaritans is comprehensively and categorically not a religious organization, still, God told me to do it so I can shut up and get on with it.  Yes sir/madam.

~ Which the trainers say is dead common and not to worry about it.  Try not to obsess, but don’t worry about . . . obsessing.

~~ It is very hard to give yourself a rope burn, bell ringing.  Just by the way.

**  Bull terriers are not pit bulls.  Also just by the way.

Ow, continued

 

Last night* did not begin well . . . when I shut Wolfgang’s front passenger-side door on my thumb.

I was very good.  It was urble-mumble o’clock in the morning** so I did not scream to make the welkin ring, although there was some fairly dramatic hissing, and the thirty seconds or so it took to hustle the frelling hellhounds into the car—they dork around and dork around looking for THAT ILLUSORY PERFECT PLACE TO PEE—may have been the longest thirty seconds of my life*** before I could pelt back indoors and fish out the arnica bottle—with, you know, my other wounded hand, the one with the slightly cracked finger.  Meanwhile I don’t suppose my thumb had really blown up like a balloon on an electric bicycle pump but . . . close.†  So last night I took the other half of the bottle of arnica I’d started the night before when I semi-broke my finger.  And last night’s insomnia was made more interesting by my thumb going BANG every hour or so necessitating me to sit up, groggily feel around for the arnica bottle, and take another tiny pill.††  Plus a certain amount of hypericum.†††

And today my thumbnail is turquoise.  I think it’s slowly turning black, the way squashed fingernails do, but it was a positively brilliant turquoise this morning.  New experiences.  I could have done without this one.  This is also the first time since my discovery of the wonders of arnica that I’m going to have a black fingernail anyway.  Sigh.  I hate black nails;  it takes a good six months for one to grow out—on me, anyway.  And it makes you look so hopeless.  No one ever got a black nail saving the universe.  It’s always because you’re a dolt and you shut your finger in a door.  I need more sleep.  I’m not usually quite this self-destructive.

Meanwhile . . . at the moment neither hand works very well.  And except for the fact that it’s my left thumb which is superfluous to requirements on a keyboard, it’s a lot more inconvenient than the middle finger on my other hand.  No opposable thumb.  No grasping.  Also I can’t hit the brake on Chaos’ lead—now that’s dangerous—and Pav is usually on that side too, but I can at least make a wild poke with my right thumb.  But it’s REALLY GREAT TIMING that I have two sub-functioning hands when I’m trying to yank us toward readiness to move house.  Which in this case chiefly means BOOKS.  Lots and lots and lots and lots of books.‡

Ow.  Ow.

* * *

* And by night we mean that time at the end of a long evening which reaches well past both the big and the little hand on the tick-tock^ device sticking straight up, and begins with that fell and doom-laden moment I face the necessity of loading sixteen hellcritters and enough kit for an assault on Everest in January into Wolfgang to make our slow bleary way back to the cottage.  Well, that’s how it feels.

^ I’m sorry, but all the best clocks still go tick-tock.  And have hands.

** Which is late even for me.  Well, I’d been having a long semi-unplanned conversation with an across-the-pond friend earlier, not for lack of trying to create something like an advance strategy.  NONE OF MY TECHNOLOGY WORKS.  NONE.  Am I only suffering from aggravated nostalgia, or am I right in thinking that back in the days when street mail and telephones were your only options, they mostly worked pretty well?  TESS OF THE D’URBERVILLES wouldn’t make you crazy if misdelivered letters were a commonplace.^

^  ANGEL CLARE IS A MOULDY DOG TURD.  Just sayin’.

*** Although the rather fewer seconds between bouncing off the side of a caroming car and watching the ground rushing up toward my motorcycle and me also took a surprisingly long time.  I’ve told you this story, right?  Well, I haven’t told you in at least six months and it’s one of my favourites.  I was lying there in the road and someone who’d pulled over and stopped his car came running up to me yelling, Son, son, are you all right?  And I said, Well, you could get this motorcycle off my leg, and he said, Oh my God it’s a girl—and ran away and was never seen again.  Although he was probably responsible for the deluge of fire trucks and ambulances that began to arrive shortly thereafter.  This was—gleep—over forty years ago.  No one, including William Gibson, was entertaining any fantastic notion of mobile phones yet.  You had to go find a phone booth or one of those EMERGENCY PULL/PRESS HERE boxes.

† I want to know—well, I think I want to know, graphic gore is not my thing—what happens if someone who’s shut a toe or a fingertip in a car door^ doesn’t have a source of cold water or arnica to stop the swelling?  Fingernails don’t stretch.

^ All those jokes about silly-putty steel in modern vehicles are suddenly not funny.  But then one of the reasons some of us like VWs and Volvos and various not-I-think-exclusively-German four-wheeled bombs is the higher percentage of real steel in their composition.  A headlong juggernaut will still take you out but a careening lorry might not.  I think there could be some research done into rubber door mounts however.

†† Plus the two phone calls and two no-you-don’t-have-to-sign-for-it-but-we’re-still-going-to-knock-on-your-door-and-wake-you-up-again deliveries.  In their defense, both deliveries were after nine a.m.  And I sleep in clothing I can answer the door in.^

^ Kes is telling herself that sleeping in chainmail would be really uncomfortable.

††† Hypericum is another really basic homeopathic first aid remedy.  For injury you always start with arnica, but if it needs some help, hypericum is particularly good for nerve-rich bits like fingers and toes and your coccyx.  Also for injuries that stab you repeatedly.  This one echoed very unpleasantly not just through the rest of my hand but up my arm to my shoulder.  BANG.

‡ The Oxfam bookshop is going to ban me.  No!  Not more classics of English literature that no one reads any more!^

^ I’m keeping Dickens and Faulkner.  And Anthony Trollope.  And Hardy.  And George Eliot.  And Elizabeth Bowen.  Some Conrad.  Some Henry James.  And a ridiculous amount of poetry.  Willa Cather is out.  F Scott Fitzgerald—out.  Madame Bovary—out.  Most of the Russians—out.

Another frelling Bank Holiday weekend

 

It rained in torrents the last two days* and then today, when it was supposed to rain in more torrents, it cleared off and was gorgeous—and everything green** and rooty that had sucked up lake-sized draughts promptly shot up another couple of feet.  Atlas mowed Third House’s lawn last Monday and I swear it’s chest-high again.  But I really have to take some new photos because the ones from a fortnight ago that I still haven’t got round to posting are like last century.  Meanwhile I seem to have got a little distracted by footnotes again.***

* * *

* . . . well I think it was approximately two days.  Between being brain-destroyingly short of sleep and going to bed after dawn, the days kind of smush together.

** Not necessarily green green.  If you’re a copper beech you’re deep maroon.^  If you’re a black-leaved dahlia you’re, um, black.  Or anyway a very dark green.

^ Love copper beeches.  LOVE.

The hellhounds had had a good hurtle around Mauncester Friday morning so I took the hellterror with me to Warm Upford in the afternoon to top up Wolfgang’s fuel tank since it’s a frelling Bank Holiday weekend frelling frelling again FRELLING NO VOICE LESSON TOMORROW FRELLING FRELLING FRELLING.  About two miles beyond Warm Upford on the road to Prinkle-on-Weald there’s a huge old estate that’s been mostly turned into a conference centre or similar.  They’ve left the landscape alone, bless them, and various outbuildings and the astonishing old stable block, which is a kind of miniature palace, are still there pursuing new careers.  When we lived at Warm Upford we used to hurtle the previous generation out there pretty often, and back in my running days my two main loops—one five miles, one seven—began there.  Before I lost my nerve and Darkness his temper about off lead dogs I used to take the hellhounds out there occasionally, but I can’t now remember the last time we hurtled there.

Part of the landscape that the conference centre has left alone is the old avenue to the Big House . . . lined with copper beeches.  There are a lot of copper beeches around here, including the one that hangs over Third House’s garden from the churchyard+, but this is the only proper avenue of them that I can think of.  It is dazzling in its splendour—especially this time of year and especially-especially in a good rain year because beeches are shallow rooted—at least it is if you are crazy about copper beeches.  Friday I parked under the tree I used to park under to go running, about halfway down the avenue, and it was like MY OLD FRIENDS!  HOW YA DOING??

Also, the hellterror was beside herself with delight.  I swear there were about eight hellterrors, all of them HURTLING.  Do all short dogs have pogo-stick legs?  BOING.  BOING.  BOING.  She met her first horse—up close, I mean, being ridden past, not at a distance in a field++.  And she did not bark.  I was very proud.+++

+ Mine mine MINE.  Never mind where the roots are.  MINE.

++ She also met her first horse crap.  Horse crap = dog chocolate.  Ewwww.  Sigh.

+++ Today every nincompoop with a dog was out with it.  Bank Holiday Sunday the end of May in glorious weather—hopeless.  But us rain-or-shine regulars are grimly out there too.  The hellterror and I were attempting to walk past a bench upon which were two women with dogs and one dog-free bloke.  The dogs were large.  The women were medium.  The bloke was small.  The dogs had that superior look that often goes with largeness, to which the hellterror took exception.  Well I’m kind of with her there.  Walking past quietly on a loose lead was out of the question, but we could at least walk past in a series of short controlled hops with a minimum of sotto voce comments about the heritage and personal habits of the unnecessarily large dogs.  I was bent over with some fingers hooked through her harness the better to continue the conversation—she does listen, the little evil eye rolls back toward me with that but-they’re-LARGE-and-SMUG-you-can’t-expect-me-to-IGNORE-them look—but she has a somewhat non-existent attention span# so I have to keep reminding her that she did agree to be polite.  And the bloke says, you training him?

In the first place HER HARNESS IS PINK.  I’m aware of the cultural dorkiness that says that all dogs are he like all cats are she.  And, okay, never mind the vagina and the prominent nipples.  HER HARNESS IS PINK.  In the second place WHAT DO YOU THINK, POTATO FACE?  I usually walk all bent over with my hand hooked through my short-legged dog’s harness murmuring sweet nothings in her pointed ears for the entertainment of the teeming Bank Holiday hordes.

# I have to tell you again however our late-night training sessions are a hoot.  There are now several things she does pretty well but our default is that she sits and gives me a paw.  Whenever we start getting tangled up in some dumb thing I’ve failed to explain successfully in hellterror language, we revert to sitting and offering a paw.  Because these sessions involve fooooood the lack of attention span disappears under an avalanche of greed, and she has a full-body offering of paw(s) I find hilarious.  What I really want to video however are my attempts to teach her to roll over.  She is, of course, a total ham—I think this is in the bullie gene map—and if I’m laughing, as far as she’s concerned, she’s doing it right.  Especially if she gets chicken/cheese/apple for it.  But I haven’t got enough hands to run a video camera too.~

~ Especially since I think I may have broken a finger.  I can’t even remember what I was diving for, last night, in my clumsy, sleep-deprived state, but my hand slammed into a chair instead and there was this tiny nasty snapping noise.  Oops.  I took about half a bottle of arnica and I can still type—this is not coming to you via voice-recognition software, no—but the finger has turned kind of a funny colour= and it’s (yelp) rather sore and I don’t think I want to hold even a small video recording device in that hand.  If it gets no worse I’ll just let it sort itself out but there may be a hiatus in bell ringing.  How long does it take a small finger bone that is probably cracked, not broken, to heal?

= Rather copper beech coloured, in fact.

*** I keep telling you I need sleep. I.  NEED.  SLEEP.  Sigh . . .

KES, 132

 

ONE THIRTY TWO

It occurred to me—WHANG THWANG THUD CRUNCH WHACK SMASH GLURP—that I was getting tired.  Tireder.  Even with Silverheart and Glosinda doing all the work it was harder and harder to stay in the saddle.  My thighs wobbled and smacked against the saddle flaps like underdone pancakes hitting the plate.  Splat.  This was desirable in pancakes.  Not in legs.  Also . . . finally a reason to be glad of the divorce.  After half an eon grinding around on a saddle wearing nothing but a cotton nightgown I wasn’t sure the usually-acknowledged-as-crucial love-making body parts were ever going to work again.  Ow.  Blisters.  Ow.  I was pretty certain the twisted strap under my knee had gouged a sufficient hole that that was blood I felt running down that leg.  So it matched the other leg which one of my enemies had had a chop at.  But scar tissue on a knee or a calf was a little less, um, disabling than scar tissue, um. . . .

Enemies.  I had enemies.

Ssssssssslsh

Well, I’d always had enemies—My first-grade teacher because I could already kind of read, and thought her books were boring and stupid.  Pansy Doncaster, who made my life a misery in junior high.  I hoped her husband had left her for someone younger with a bigger bank balance too.  I might even wish her some inconveniently placed blisters.  I definitely wished the regular SF&F reviewer for Bookitydoodah an entire suppurating rash of inconveniently placed blisters. . . .

Claa-aang

Ssssssssslsh

Thud . . . squish.

Monster was tired too.  It wasn’t only that I was turning to vichyssoise that made it harder to stay on him.  He wasn’t bounding and arcing any more, he was lurching and careening.

Ssssssssssslsh

Claa-aang

Did enchanted weaponry ever tire?  I was barely keeping my hand closed around Silverheart’s hilt;  on one of her savage parries soon I was going to drop her.  Would she fly on without me?  Or did her magic require contact with human skin to activate?  Glosinda was pulling my arm as a dead weight;  the hand sticking out the far end flopped like a doll’s.  Both my shoulders hurt like I was being drawn and quartered;  my head hurt even worse.

Ssssssssssslsh . . .

It took me a moment to process the information that there seemed to be a lull—and the moment wasn’t over yet when something slammed into us from one side.  Silverheart darted upward instead of whizzing toward the slammer—which both prevented me from toppling forward on Monster’s neck and turned me slightly in that direction.  I lost a stirrup and had to grab Monster’s mane (again);  fortunately the lull meant that Glosinda let me.  I straightened up wearily and looked over at . . .

Murac.  Of course.  It would be Murac.  But he wasn’t trying to kill me which in the circumstances made him my best friend.  I couldn’t read his expression.  I didn’t want to try.  I rubbed the hand that wasn’t holding a sword over my forehead.  It felt damp and slimy . . . blood.  I looked at my hand dispassionately.  I didn’t think it was mine.  The blood, I mean.  I hoped I recognised the hand.  Then, trying to hold onto dispassionate, I looked back at Murac.

“Next time,” he said—

NEXT TIME?

“. . . donna outpace tha company.”

“Next time?” I spat.  I hope I spat.  I hope I didn’t whine.  “What do you mean, next time!”  It wasn’t a question.  I was not asking a question.  “There is no next time about—about —”  I hope I was shouting.  I hope it wasn’t a loud whine.  I still didn’t know how to end the question I wasn’t asking.

“Molovaron is our finest.  Defender’s horse.  Kept tha alive, this hour:  tha should not be ’live, even with Silverheart in tha fist.  Next time, donna ask him to take tha awa’ from tha company, because he will:  he runs like a race-horse, not a war-horse.”

My mouth dropped open.  I hoped my face was too dirty for Murac to see the tears slipping down my cheeks.  Surreptitiously—Murac was on my Silverheart side, not my Glosinda side—I gave Monster’s unhurt shoulder a rub.  Monster sighed, and stretched his neck down—down—till his nose briefly touched the bloody ground.  He raised his head and gave himself a massive shake.  I grabbed his mane (again) and lost a stirrup (again).

When I looked up, Murac was holding what my genre-fantasy-honed mind thought it recognised as a waterskin.  “Drink,” said Murac.  I awkwardly wiped Silverheart on the already-stiff-with-nameless-substances skirt of my shabby nightgown and slid her into her scabbard.  I took the waterskin.  I braced that foot hard against that stirrup to take the weight:  unenchanted waterskins weigh a lot more than enchanted swords.  My arms were like old disintegrating elastic, but I got the mouth of the thing to my mouth.  The water tasted better than Gelasio’s champagne.

“I’ll teach tha, give Molovaron water from saddle,” Murac said.  One of the foot soldiers had brought a leather bucket for Monster, who was drinking greedily.  “Part of his training, drink from waterskin.”

I lowered the waterskin and said firmly,  “No.  No next time.”

Murac was silent so long I had to look up.  He gave his head a tiny shake as he met my eyes.  “Tha’s Defender,” he said.

 

Summer is icumen in, continued*

 

 

I had planned to post more photos today.  Stuff is rioting out**, most of it several weeks early.  I’ve got a sheaf of photos I haven’t posted yet and I should have taken more photos today except I was buying a potting bench.***  Also, it was raining.

But then I got distracted by footnotes. . . . †

* * *

* Rikke posted to the forum about having to look up this reference.  I sometimes have trouble remembering that not everyone is an American Eng lit major^ of a certain age.  I am generally so awful about quotes and references and cultural benchmarks and so on that I assume that if I know it, everyone knows it.  Apologies for apparently wilful obscurity, yesterday, tomorrow, last week, next year, whenever.^^

^ Ie went to an American uni/college and read/studied English literature

^^ Personally I prefer jokes I can understand.

** Including terrifying numbers of dahlias.  And glads.  Gladioli do not survive winter!^  It’s in the contract!  You get used to buying more, and complaining!  Well, they don’t survive winter except when they do, and when they do they tend to reproduce.  Since I frequently put glads into dahlia pots^^ there’s a certain struggle for supremacy going on.  May the best triffid win.

^ The extra-weird thing is that the books and articles all hammer you with the fact that it’s not frost kills things like glad bulbs and dahlia tubers but wet:  they sit in sodden soil and rot.  Excuse me guys.  We’ve just had the wettest winter since the Palaeolithic.  What gives?

^^ They can all fall down together.  Glads will mostly stand up without staking—mostly—but not when an inadequately-staked dahlia crashes over on one.

*** For Third House.  Atlas has pretty well taken over the shed, including the potting table, and I’ve done the throwing-hands-up-in-despair routine about this and declared that I’m leaving the shed to the boys, and will buy a tiny garden storage doodad and a cheap potting table for me which can all go under the minimal overhang in the corridor between Third House and its neighbour.

This gave Fiona and me the excuse to go look at garden sheds on Tuesday instead of attending to business.   I was pretty well incapable of attending to business on Tuesday.^  And we saw some very nice sheds.  Fiona thought I should buy the climbing frame/slide/sandpit for Pav.  Hahahahahaha you’re so funny.  The littlest cheapest shed will do nicely thank you very much, good grief, people apparently get a little carried away with their back-garden empire building.  The shed I have in mind doesn’t even get to call itself a shed, it’s a ‘garden tidy’.  If you’re a shed you have to have windows, a portcullis and a concierge.  No.  And I don’t want the purple Alice house that I can’t stand up in anyway, Fiona, I’m looking at you.

Today however since I had to blaze into Mauncester for a meeting with a bank official^^ I went via the Extra Large Everything for the Domestic Empire Builder store in one of those industrial estates that make you suspect you’ve wandered into an alternate universe^^^.  Their minimal selection of sheds was nasty—I think you’re supposed to build your own:  you’re letting the side down by buying something that someone else has already cut crooked and drilled the holes in the wrong places—but they did have a cheap potting table that looked possible.

Now here is where I began to think I really had wandered into an alternate universe.  The British are polite.~  They’re vaccinated for it when they’re half an hour old.  Of course you get rude ones but then people who’ve had the vaccination get measles too.  The potting table, even in its inelegant flat pack, is large~~ and I’m neither very little nor very old but I’m a whole lot older and skinnier than the half dozen stalwart young men in store uniforms I went past toting the blasted thing to the tills.  I then went back for a bag of the right-sized gravel~~~ which weighed even more than the flabberjabbing table, and went past a different assortment of stalwart young men in store uniforms . . . and not one of them offered aid to my frail grey-haired= self.==  The woman at the till was obviously not having a good day and when she’d rung me up with a lot of slamming and pinging she snarled, would you like help to the car with that?  Er—no thanks, I said, sidling away clutching my gravel.  When I came back for the potting bench she was immersed in making some other hapless customer’s life a little more miserable.  Feh.

^ Smoke and mirrors update:  I’m not telling you how bad it’s been with the hellhounds lately, or how much sleep I’m not getting or how much morale I’ve lost or how a properly tightened harp/violin/guitar string has nothing on me.  Hellhounds are not having a good time either of course.  The decision to stop being a daily blog probably has less to do with the Samaritans+ than about hellhound management.  I finally talked to the vet again today who has recently cured two hopeless cases of digestive mayhem and wants to try the same protocol on my hellhounds—but it’s a little experimental and I have to sign a release form.  Yes.  Whatever.  Pleeeease.  We reached the end of the line a while back.

+ Which continues to be brilliant even if I feel like the stupidest person on the planet at least three times per training evening.#  We’re halfway through the first module.##  Eeeeeep. 

# Which may have something to do with stress levels and lack of sleep, of course, but the truth is that the idea of being able to do something for someone when you can’t do shitfuck for various members of your own family is very appealing.

## At the end of which is when you start taking duty shifts.  There’s a second (required) module in the autumn but it’s not as intensive.

^^ On whom I walked out after twenty minutes+ sitting on an uncomfortable chair in the waiting area slap next to the entrance which must be a total thrill in cold weather with the wind turning your pages for you every time someone comes through the front door.  Tomorrow I go back to my branch office and ask for the frelling customer complaints address again.

+ Also on the wall opposite the door was a digital gizmo (presumably) displaying today’s date.  It read ‘21 May’.  This was not reassuring.

^^^ But then Atlas’ shed kind of makes me feel that way, which is where we came in.

~ Last night one of our Sams trainers, in discussing dealing with our occasional aggressive male client, made reference to ‘the gentle sex’.  I nearly fell out of my chair laughing.  This bloke is probably my age.  I can’t imagine any American under the age of about a hundred and twelve using that phrase.

~~ I had a bad moment when I finally got it out to Wolfgang.  But it went in.  Just.

~~~ The invisible gravel-eating dragon at the cottage is particular about the size of his gravel, and apparently particular invisible gravel-eating dragons are common in this area because it’s hard finding the right size.

= All right, not very grey yet.  But getting there.

== You may be aware that it is one of the laws of the greater universe, not just our small subiverse, that the carts available at Large DIY Stores are made out of tin foil and coat hanger wire and, furthermore, all drive at weird angles so you’re always urgently trying to keep them from ploughing into the two-storey begonia display, and that if you dropped a potting bench flat pack on one, let alone a bag of invisible-dragon fodder, its axles would disintegrate and its wheels explode and the store detective would arrest you for vandalism.

† Also, as mentioned above/below, depending on how you read your footnotes, I’m just a trifle demented from lack of sleep.