Robin McKinley's Blog, page 212

Yesterday, continued

 

So the first thing that went wrong is that I got to the train station and it was no longer a train station but a Labyrinth of Fell Intent.  Didn’t I just say a few days ago, Never feel smug, it’ll nail you every time?  Yes.  I’d got to the station in vast quantities of extra time and positively strolled in from the car park, not quite humming a carefree tune, but nearly.*  And arrived, and couldn’t get in.  There were arrows describing ideal delights such as ticket purchase and departure platfo

A Midsummer Night’s Dream, or

 

. . . An Early May Evening’s Entertainment. 

. . . Okay, wait.  Interpolation.  I’m about to hare off in my standard self-absorbed way about everything but the performance.  

http://www.bbc.co.uk/pressoffice/proginfo/radio/2009/wk19/7day.shtml 

If you scroll down nearly halfway through this extraordinarily long page* you will see a clip on what I’ve just come away from:  a performance of A Midsummer Night’s Dream:  text by Shakespeare, music by Mendelssohn. 

http://www.templemusic.org/events 

Here i

Cuckoo. Cuckoo

 

I heard my first cuckoo this afternoon.*  This is excellent.  They’re endangered** and for several years now I’ve been hearing them later and later and later in the season–and often when I’d finally hear one at all it would sound frail and doubtful.  This one today sounded ready to scam any number of mild-mannered dunnocks into raising young cuckoos.  When I was first over here I used to hear cuckoos while I was trying to convince myself to get out of bed in the morning*** and it was all part o

The Inauguration of . . .

 

. . . Robin’s Saturday Night Off. 

            I hope.*

            I’ve been saying for . . . well, twenty months, approximately, give or take, that I Have to Spend Less Time on the Blog.  Have to learn to spend less time on the blog,   one of the problems being (as I have said before, anguishedly) that when I sit down to write an entry, it tends to take 1200-1500 words (night before last’s was 1800, as I recall) . . . and I continue to be ridden by the ‘ubi** known as the Every Night Entry, and

Guest post by Jodi Meadows

Hightop Mountain, the Conquest Of

Every time my friend Laurel visits, we head up to the Shenandoah National Park. She and her husband do a lot of hiking in their home state and have all sorts of cool hiking gear: boots, backpacks, GPS… And the Shenandoah has trails galore, waterfalls, and is utterly beautiful all times of the year. There’s no way to resist it.

So the last time they visited, we tried the Appalachian Trail. Not the whole thing, obviously! But there’s a part near the park entrance th

Cavorting hellhounds

 

Oisin and I wasted an hour and forty five minutes of our LIVES this afternoon TRYING TO GET FINALE TO TALK TO MYORGAN.

            We failed.

So let’s have some photos of cavorting hellhounds to cheer ourselves up.  Well, me up.*   These are the ones I promised you, from Gloucestershire last weekend.  Peter’s son and his family have this lovely loooong garden, dropping, in the sacred Gloucestershire way, like a plumb-line from the rear deck to the river.  Hellhounds, I feel, could grow used to Gl

There’s harrowing and harrowing

 

It has been a harrowing day.  It began way too early with a knock on the door at 8:30 from a deliveryman.  I do not consider 8:30 a.m. a civilised hour to be knocking on people’s doors.  Especially when I wasn’t planning to get up before 9.  Earliest.  I’ve told you that one of the cute things about ME is that when it’s really bad it’s hard to sleep?  Yes.  You get too tired to sleep.  That’s really sensible*.  It’s like you are so tired you don’t have the energy to change states of consciousne

Catalogue company follies

 

 It is really not my day.  On the afternoon hellhound hurtle there was a strange small snapping noise and . . . the spring on Chaos’ long lead had broken, and we limped home again amid entangling festoons of long red lead-tape, with Chaos taking my shoulder out every few yards and then looking wounded when he hit the end too soon because I couldn’t let go fast enough . . . or when he knotted himself up to a falling-over halt and I had to go unpick him, like a bad row of knitting.  Darkness, who