Robin McKinley's Blog, page 3

Is this a blog post which I see before me, its handle toward my hand?

Yes, you’re right.*  There is no reason to start a new blog & then stop posting to it.  Apologies.**

I don’t have an excuse that will adequately cover all the last [mumble-umble-unggle] months, because writing a blog post only takes about 46 hours & what’s my problem?  While a husband to make dinner is helpful it is not strictly required.  Or maybe it is.***  I will have told you last autumn, I am not going to look back & check, that way madness, & the falling down rabbit holes†, lies,†† I was actually bearing down on FINISHING SOMETHING, ie a novel, which I had been working on a very long time.†††

And I did finish it.  Huzzah, roses, 100% organic chocolate, champagne etc, also lying on the floor in a daze.‡  It is, however, not like anything I’ve done before—it’s not fantasy—nor anything anyone would be expecting from me—& it’s a tough book, so not any easy sell whatever my track record has been.  It doesn’t have a home yet.  It will some day.

Meanwhile I’ve done something I’ve never done before in my entire life, from the first time I seized a pencil with serious purpose‡‡ & started writing a story about a heroic horse.‡‡‡   

I started a new book immediately. 

TO BE CONTINUED. §

* All of you who have written me, mostly politely, for which thank you, & those of you who have written less than politely, well, go find something better to do, like deep-fry your dish towels & drink your laundry soap, & leave me alone.

** Except to those of you deep-frying dish towels^, but you aren’t reading this anyway, you’re busy.

^ Or tablecloths.  Or Converse All Stars.+ 

+No, no!  Not Converse All Stars!  Converse All Stars are sacred!

***  Sigh.  He made lunch too, & dealt with grim real world stuff like plumbers & invoices & getting all that scary tax paraphernalia together well enough that an accountant can do something with it.  There are BIG DRAWBACKS to being self employed, & a widow with no real-world skills beyond attaching a lead to a large frantic dog^.  I can just about wield a can of WD40 in an emergency.

^ He goes zero to Mach IV of frenzy the moment he sees me pick up the lead.

† I said that?  No, wait, I’m sure/I didn’t/I was going to/I meant to state unequivocally/I meant to add . . . here follows feverish looking up of stuff on the internet & off random bookshelves.^

^ I’ve lived here going on six years & no, my books are still not on shelves in anything like order.  The fact that there are too many of them to fit on the shelves is a secondary problem—or a third-ary+ problem—the much larger secondary problem is that I keep buying them, so the piles of only-slightly-sorted books keep getting LARGER & more CONFUSING.  I have the SF&F more or less in one giant mountain range in one room(s) & the fiction & English lit in another large ragged mountain range in another room(s) . . . & the non-fiction AAAAAUGH in a terrifyingly anarchic sort of Fingal’s Cave only with books++.  & Fingal’s Cave winds on quite a while, you know?

+ oh, tertiary, stop being so fussy

++I will have told blog readers this before, probably several times#.  When I was an undergrad## majoring in English lit, all my (male###) professors said, with varying degrees of condescension, that I would read more & more nonfiction as I got older.####  I sneered=.  I was going to read fiction EXCLUSIVELY== for the rest of my life.   They were, however, right, drat the patronising little gits.  I read astonishing amounts of nonfiction any more.===  & I have NO IDEA how to organise it.  I don’t even know which already-full shelves I should be stacking up the new stuff in front of.  Real life is so variable.

# Old People get stuck on their favourite stories.  I haven’t got to the waggling my walking cane at you for emphasis stage yet.  I could maybe waggle my German Wire-Haired Pointer at you.  He’s always up for a silly game.

## Millions of years ago.  I remember the Cretaceous well.  I had a pet Protoceratops, which didn’t need nearly as much walking as a German Wire Haired Pointer. . . . HEY!  WHAT!?  DUCK!!!  THAT’S THE BIGGEST FREAKING METEORITE I’VE EVER—uh oh. 

### I told you I’m old.  This was back in the days when a female college professor was about as common as . . . a Protoceratops in 2024.  I did have one—one—woman professor & there was at least one other in the department.  But the college was still reeling from the unwelcome shock of letting female students in a very few years ago.  They had followed this horrific act by hiring a few women, but they . . . um, well let’s say they weren’t rushing to offer these radical additions to the teaching cartel tenure. 

#### These were English lit professors, mind.  Makes you wonder.  Not in a good way.

= Standing up very straight in my beat-up motorcycle jacket & even more beat-up Frye stomping boots.

== Nearly exclusively.  I have always been up for another memoir of life with horses or another dog-training manual.@

@ NOT THAT ANY OF THESE FLAMING DOG TRAINING MANUALS HAS EVER BEEN OF ANY$ USE.  However, I’ve been blundering along in the company of dogs for so many years that we mostly just get on with it.

$ All right, limited use.  I will give you limited use. 

=== Dare I risk admitting that I probably read more non- than fiction any more.  No, probably not.  So I didn’t say that.  Non-fiction has its uses however.  When I’m working on my own stuff, ARRRRRRRRRGH, the fiction I can read sometimes closes down to nearly nothing@ because it’s too likely, ARRRRRRRRRGH, both to distract & to influence.  & fantasy?  Forget it.  There are days when I long to pull Tolkien@@ off the shelves as a comfort read, but I don’t dare, or my next chapter will be all Gilthoniel O Elbereth, which would not be a good thing.  Tolkien is very contagious especially when you’re eleven years old & at that time, back in the Cretaceous, there was nothing else like it.  & once you’re infected, there is no recovery.@@@

So nonfiction means I can keep reading something.  Also, you know, reading nonfiction . . . you sometimes learn something.  Golly.

@ I read a lot of murder mysteries.

@@ Any one of about sixty editions

@@@ Tolkien has a lot to answer for.  He’s also where I contracted my semicolon compulsion.

†† Um.  What was I just saying about rabbit holes?

††† Not as long as it looks however.  I did a lot of crashing & burning there for a few years.  If you’re a storyteller & you’re not telling any stories you feel like half your head is missing, or maybe a few limbs.  But if there are no stories demanding your attention—or maybe there’s one you don’t feel able to tackle—well, there you are.  Doing jigsaw puzzles & reading other people’s stories.  & limping.

‡ Possibly as a result of dancing on the ceiling a little too long.

‡‡ This was third grade, I think.  I hadn’t been serious before.  I’d just been fooling around.^

^ I HATE those stories, seemingly rife in the classical-music world, of musicians who picked up their first violin at the age of three, or shinned up the piano stool & started playing Liszt before their tiny fingers could stretch more than four keys+, & knew that THIS was what they were going to do for the rest of their lives, & if they needed to earn a living with it, they’d do that too, no prob, & then they just got on with practising till their fingers bled.++  Sure, I wanted to be a writer when I grew up.  So do three-quarters of the kids out there who still like stories, & I suppose the other ones want to grow up to write computer games or start a new social media platform even bigger than [whatever the biggest one is today, I’ve stopped keeping track, & I hope Elon Musk falls in a large vat of prune juice soon].+++  But how many of us do?  I’m still thrilled, almost half a century later, that I’m one of the few.  But I sure didn’t know it in third grade.  Or seventh grade.  Or as an undergrad being patronised by my male professors.  & I’m sure there are a lot of violinists who started at the age of three who grew up to be accountants & car mechanics & high school teachers & play in their local community orchestras.  But they’re not the ones you hear about.  & are there any writers who knew they were going to be writers when they were three?  & never wavered from that ambition? 

+ At least you can get quarter- or, I’m told, even eighth-sized violins.  If you’re a pianist, you’re stuffed.  Unless the keyboards-for-kiddies market has, you should forgive the term, grown up some.

++ or their vocal chords, if they are singers.  It takes a little longer to discover the French horn, say, unless a family member has one sitting dustily in a corner, or possibly the kid’s in her push-chair trundling past a pawnbroker’s with one in the window &, being a tiresome precocious musical genius, she leaps out of the chair, points to it with a small trembling finger, & says, THAT!!  Do they make quarter-sized French horns?  If so, playing it probably makes all the local dogs howl.

+++ I’m omitting all the young musical geniuses, who only read scores anyway.  Ha ha ha.

‡‡‡ No, really

§ I promise.  Erm.  I hope.  But what with all the footnotes,^ this one seems to have got rather long.

^ Some things don’t change.

I didn’t move to Scotland for this

. . . weather.  So yeah.  We’ve been having a hurricane.  All the official news sites & forecasters & blah blah were calling it a storm but that inadequately describes the experience of living through it, especially on the top of a hill, yeep.   Also, we had an eye on Friday, so I’m calling it a hurricane because it, you know, came back, which I don’t think ordinary run-of-the-mill storms are supposed to.  We’re not even in Kansas.*  We’re in SCOTLAND.  We don’t have big horrible lashing hammering storms with eyes here.**

I have periodic attacks of Not Sleeping without any external assistance, thank you very much, & all the banging, whooshing, banshee-shrieks & aggressive splattering made the three nights in question undesirably interesting.  I lay rigidly awake staring into the darkness & reminding myself that this noble house has stood here for over 150 years & is probably good for a few more.  Thursday morning also began interestingly when I was sitting here at my laptop going click-click-click with the radio on low & a dog snoring gently to my left & I could still hear a weird sort of rushing?? noise, & I suddenly trampolined out of my not-very-concentrating concentration*** & raced across the hall & . . . yes, I had water cascading down the inside yes that’s what I said INSIDE of the sitting-room window.  JOY.  NOT.†   

Never get into serious house renovation.  It will make you crazy.  & I, as we all know, was crazy before.  However, as I keep reminding myself††, if this house hadn’t needed major renovations†††, I wouldn’t have been able to afford it—&‡ I still don’t know why it wasn’t bought out from under me by the Scottish equivalent of the bankers from London who had ruined New Arcadia by the time I left.  But they didn’t, & here I am, GAZILLIONS of renovations later‡‡, & I love the house & I’m glad I’m here BUT THERE ARE A FEW THINGS . . .

One of them is that the new sitting-room window leaks.  I’ve told you this is a standard double-fronted Scottish Victorian, so the front windows are big & bay, which is to say bulgy.  All the windows were replaced, I having been advised by all the EXPERTS‡‡‡ that this was necessary, but they didn’t mention that they were going to destroy my windowsillsɸ . . . or that some supposed builder person was going to have a Bad Day & the sitting-room window would be installed in a less than optimum manner with the result that it would leak catastrophically from day one.  It’s been mended twice, as I recall.  That would be ‘mended’.  & while the aftereffects of covid come into it, let me not get started on a rant about builders who keep losing your email address & phone number as soon as you’ve paid them.

So.  Life in a hurricane.  First you mop the floor.ɸɸ  Next there is getting your hyperactive canine companion out.ɸɸɸ  I used to call it hurtling with the hellhounds, & hurtling will certainly do, but it doesn’t really fully encompass the multi-dimensional substantiality of HURTLING a GWHP.Ω

Ambergris-shire had red, purple & polka-dot warnings for extreme weather all over its council pages, & when I called up my weather app on the iPhone I was nearly dazzled by all the in your face WHATEVER IT IS DON’T DO IT, WE DON’T CARE YOU HAVE A GWHP, STAY INDOORS banners.  So I did try to be cautious.  Genghis & I usually use the back door, which has level access to a side street;  the front door not only leads you down the garden, with the hurricane screaming off the ocean at you & trying to rip your eyelids off, but there is a long staircase from the bottom of the garden to the street, not very negotiable with a small, staircase-sized vortex gnashing at you hungrily.  & I DID edge out cautiously at the end of the narrow, level-access pedestrian alley . . .  I was still very nearly lifted off my feet & thrown to the intersection at the top of the street.  Dogs are so much better designed for this kind of activity.  Low to the ground & four legs.  Well, the weather warnings had included that wind gusts were up to 70 mph.  So, greatly to the GWHP’s disgust, since he loves melodrama in all things including weather, we kind of crept through our outdoor adventure, & I had my hand through his collar kind of a lot, even more greatly to his disgust, so he could help keep me on the blasted ground.  I had thought to plait my hair, but I still couldn’t see through the smash of rain on my glasses, & I kept being knocked into walls, or after gingerly picking one foot up that leg would be snatched & slammed violently into the other one.  I don’t like hurricanes.  We also both came home DRENCHED.  Fortunately Converse invented Gore-Tex high tops a few years ago, although the colour selection leaves a lot to be desired, & I have one of those raincoats that are supposed to be inclement-weather-on-Everest-proof, although I hadn’t bought it expecting to test it for withstanding equivalent immoderate meteorological conduct.  & GWHP fur is designed to shed water.

During the EYE on Friday we ventured down to the shore to see what havoc had been wreaked there.  In the first place you couldn’t get to the shore because all the paths, roads, boardwalks, bridges, etc were jammed solid with detritus, & most of them were seriously under water as well.  We figured out a way through at lastΩΩ & . . . it was pretty impressive in a I-didn’t-move-to-Scotland-for-this way.  & the sea was still crashing up the shingle in great foamy waves higher than your head.  You could see snickering kelpies riding the crests.   I did get a few photos, but since this required coping with a maniacal dogΩΩΩ they are probably not that awesome.  Never mind.  What I did notice is that while the river is in frantic spate & there are a lot of deployed sandbags, this town looks to be in pretty good shape, at least the downtown bits Genghis & I regularly cruise.  The boulders, tree trunks & rhinoceros-sized clots of seaweed seem to have fallen short of human habitation.  Although a couple of the shore-side cafes look more than a bit worse for wear.

. . . & Saturday night?  STARS.  VISIBLE STARS OVERHEAD?!?  I’d almost forgotten.  & the wind wasn’t trying to take my head off.

* * *

. . . & today?  Uh, sunlight??  SUNLIGHT.  I remember sunlight.  Enjoy it while it lasts.  It’s supposed to start raining again tomorrow.  I hope without the hurricane part.

* * *

* & Genghis most definitely is not Toto

** Yes we do.

*** I do not do CONCENTRATION in the morning. 

† That’s one way to get the plants on the windowsill watered.  Not, perhaps, the best way.

†† with the occasional self-applied whack up longside the head for emphasis

††† I have told you, haven’t I, it’s one of those scary little loops that runs around my brain, that the house wiring dated from the 1950s??  I was told this up front, it’s not that the very nice lady who sold the house to me was trying to get away with anything.  But THE NINETEEN FIFTIES??  British frelling electricity is freaking dangerous even when it’s new.^  I was surprised she could sleep at night with all the hissing & sizzling noises.^^

^ It’s twice the something-or-other—let’s call it potency—of American electricity, so your average wall plug is the size of Mike Tyson’s fist, & has its own snarling, double-strength fuse.

^^ Maybe she couldn’t.  Maybe that’s why she decided to sell up & move into a pleasant, tidy, new, up-to-the-minute, dimmer-switches-in-every-room, retirement flat.  I don’t like dimmer switches & I LIKE all my stuff, I don’t WANT to move into anything smaller.  If I don’t sweep the floor anyway, who cares how much of it there is?  What I WANT is more bookshelves.

ONE MORE FREAKING COMPLICATION.  Like social media.  They may be very nice in their way, but I have 1,000,000,000,000 books to read & a dog to walk,= my life is complicated enough. 

= & a few more stories to write, God willin’ & the crick don’t rise

As it happens her shiny beautiful retirement flat is part of a new build complex down on the shore.  Where you haven’t wanted to be, the last few days.

‡ Another loop that keeps running in my tiny mad brain.  If you blog readers last long enough this will probably wear off, or at least I’ll start remembering I’ve told you this before.  Maybe several times.  Maybe several several times.  Maybe . . .

‡‡ I may also have mentioned that the next book REALLY needs to sell if Genghis & I are going to keep eating, in our fabulous hilltop house with only a FEW—few few FEW if I keep saying that maybe it’ll be true FEW—little renovatory^ GLITCHES that still need solving

^ Microsucky, which has no sense of humour, insists this is not a word.  I use not-words all the time, but sometimes maybe they are not as clear in context as I think they are?  Renovation-related, okay?

‡‡‡ *&^%$£”!!!!!!!!

ɸ Another epic saga.  Tell you later.

ɸɸ  When I’ve got a big enough puddle that it’s running gaily over the slanting^ better-than-150-year-old floor, threatening the legs of my old wooden furniture & possibly getting involved with that dangerous British electricity^^, yes, even I mop.

^ May I just say that I do not buy cylindrical dog kibble.  I do a certain amount of free feeding as part of keeping him amused, but it does not amuse me to be chasing runaway dog kibble into the cracks under the cupboards.  There should not be cracks under the cupboards, of course.  See:  do not get into serious house renovations, it will make you crazy. 

^^ The house has been rewired, & my electrician is one of the good guys.  Some of my present selection of lamps & electric fires, however, were old when I moved here.  To the UK, I mean, over 30 years ago, not Scotland, a little less than 5 years ago.

ɸɸɸ I’m kind of worried about most of the other dogs in this town.  We saw barely anybody else.  Granted German Wire Haired Pointer perpetual frenzied motion machines are uncommon, which demonstrates very good sense among the dog-owning population, but if you have a dog or dogs, you walk them, even the mellow, laid-back ones, even in the middle of a hurricane.

Ω Perhaps I will work on a nice non-word for the experience.  I like winding Microfrellinguglydoodah up, since it so often winds me up.

ΩΩ I was thinking, this is where I get to count myself as a local.  I’m certainly not, nor ever will be, a native, & I will always be an incomer.  But when you can think, okay, I can’t get through here, where can I get through?  & you come up with an answer, you get to be a local.  I’ve probably already told you that one of my Favourite Things is when people with heavy Scottish accents ask me for directions.  Hee hee hee hee hee.  This used to amuse me back in Hampshire too—I mean, people with English accents—but somehow it’s a richer, more fulfilling experience up here.  I also seem to get asked more often than I did in Hampshire;  I wouldn’t have said this was a particularly complicated town or layout, but I suppose it’s more out in the middle of nowhere than anywhere in Hampshire, & if you’re trying to find some other town you will probably have gone farther before you figure out you’re going wrong here than you would in Hampshire, where the next village or town starts nearly at the edge of the one you’re standing in.  Which is also to say that GPS hasn’t quite taken over the universe yet, any more than social media has stopped people from getting together for cups of tea in real time & real space.^

^ or on Zoom.   I’m old enough to remember when a trans-Atlantic phone call included pauses while what you’ve said swims across the pond & what the person you’re talking to says has to swim back to you.  Zoom is still virtual reality, I know, but it’s kind of realistic virtual reality.   

or the latest face-to-face thing, which probably doesn’t work on my tech, because my tech is like that.

ΩΩΩ & with one or two Serious Photographers who didn’t feel that a cranky old woman with an iPhone & a maniacal dog had to be considered as they set up their next fabulous award-winning shot.  Genghis will sit for a dog biscuit, but this process takes two hands, whereupon while he’s digesting I have to free up one hand, get the blasted phone out, line up the shot & TAKE IT before the dog biscuit wears off & he needs another one to stay sitting.  This doesn’t allow for a lot of adjustment in either time or positioning, & several of what would have been my best shots have a jerk with a long lens in them.  I tell myself the jerk provides perspective.  I feel that the tipped-over bins, the benches with water halfway to their seats & the cracked & splintery tree trunks that are a good half the height of the ground floor windows they’re sprawled in front of would provide enough perspective.   

Technophobe

I should be out there hurtling Genghis but it’s SHEETING RAIN & I’m looking for excuses to put it off.*  So I thought I’d tell you my next The Insanity of Technology story.  I should rename this blog The Technophobe.  But I’m not going to.  I love my piano.  Especially when it—she—does startling, unpianoish things, like fly.**  I do not love technology.  I may have said this once or twice recently.  & I’m certainly not going to give uglytech any greater freaking profile in my life by calling my blog after it.  Even, you know, reversely. 

Last post I was telling you that part of the terror of having my credit card shut down even for long enough for me to figure out what the menacing & mysterious*** charge was, was the possibility of having no credit card if I couldn’t figure it or similar bankish hysterics out fast enough.†  It’s been on my mind [sic] for a while now that I really should have a second credit card so if my bank’s card admin does jump off a tall building & go squish, I still have an option for ordering this week’s organic groceries & superfluous books.†† 

Mega department stores don’t exist much any more but there are one or two still hanging on.  I’ve been buying all my major appliances at—oh—let’s call it Mortimer Cheeseparing—for the 30-plus years I’ve lived in the UK.†††  It generally has customer service, which puts it up on just about every other giant corporation out there & a lot of the smaller ones too, & it tends to honour its guarantees.  Fancy.  So, possibly because I’m an old & comparatively rarely uppity customer‡‡, they sent me, & kept sending me, a come-on for a credit card.  Okay, I thought, they’re about as economically stable as anything else on this mad planet at the minute.  So I applied.  Except that at the point when they wanted to know your dog’s middle name & how often your bank has come after you about the overdraft‡‡‡ I started feeling nervous & wondering if I should be checking if the initial invitation was a scam, & if the answer is yes, how I find this out??  Once you start seeing conspiracies under the bed you see them everywhere else too, behind the woodstove§, under the piano, who hasn’t flown anywhere recently, taped to the back of the laptop screen which since I never put the lid down & there are giant piles of BOOKS on the other side of the table is a really good place for a (small) secret conspiracy. 

So I dithered about this for a while, AKA didn’t get around to doing anything§§, because it probably involved ringing Mortimer Cheeseparing’s customer service’s number & I comprehensively hate corporate phone numbers any more because of the Robot Factor WATCH THIS SPACE. 

& they sent me the card anyway.  Welcome to your new Mortimer Cheeseparing credit card!  We’re delighted to have a new way to get money out of you!  We’re so delighted we’re sending it to you even though you never finished applying!

But . . . wait . . . Where the screaming doodah did they get all that stuff they need to prove I’m a, like, solvent, human being, with a bank balance with actual§§§ money in it?ɸ

So at this point I decided it had to be a scam, & buried the fraudulent card in some pile of random Notes to Self, crumpled bits of the semi-discarded wrong sizes of dress patterns, magazines &/or confusingly ill-numbered drafts of story in progress, which is dismayingly easy to do in this house.

Then I started getting the, Please activate your shiny new Mortimer Cheeseparing credit card! emails.  We’re longing to start depriving you of your miserably inadequate moolah but we want what there is of it anyway!  These emails are of course ‘no reply’. 

Eventually I gave in to pressure, totally failed to find a working customer service email address—you know those endless loops you get sent in?  First they say, Let us HELP you!  Then they offer live chat, which turns out not to be open right now, then they shove you at the FAQ which does not, for some reason, have a Why have you sent me a credit card I didn’t finish applying for?? listing, you know, out there in public where other potential customers might see it & think, wow, I’m not shopping here where the admin’s total IQ must be roughly equivalent to that of a small heap of dead guinea pigs.  You’re beginning to realise that there is No Hope but a phone number . . . so you allow yourself to be chivvied to the list of phone numbers . . . none of which appear to apply to your situation.  A bit like the FAQ really.  There is no phone number for Would you like to talk to a dead guinea pig about something we screwed up?

So I chose a number more or less at random . . . & OF COURSE was instantly tangled up in the rotting, serpentine carcase of the ROBOT MAZE.  Holy meltdown, Batman.  I used to be able to talk on the phone to customer services although phone calls to strangers have never been my favourite thing, but since I moved over here & even after over thirty years still find some regional British accents difficultɸɸ, I like them even less & THEN SOMEONE LET THE ROBOTS IN.  I had thought musak was as bad as it could get. . . .

BUT THERE’S A NEW SHORT CIRCUIT IN THE ROBOT HYPO DRILL.  Oh yes, I forgot to mention that British customer-service robots never understand my unflagging & inexorable American accent.  What? they say.  Or [whirring noises].  Or long silences followed by the exact same question they’ve just asked you.  Which, as far as they’re concerned, you have failed to answer.  Occasionally you get ‘we’re sorry, we didn’t quite catch that.’  & then they say the same thing over again.

& over again.

& over again.

It ALSO used to be that if you failed once at the British-English comprehensibility test, they’d give you numbers to poke.  If you want the dead guinea pig option, please press one.  If you want the Amazonian rain forest soothing sound effects option, please press two.  If you want a live human being . . . HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA.

My relationship with my iPhone is not the best to begin with.ɸɸɸ  I go into these customer-service confrontations swearing to myself that I won’t throw it across the room (it might gouge my beautiful wallpaper), I won’t throw it on the floor & stomp it to shreds (Genghis might pick something up in his paw;  I won’t notice, such would be my fury, if my bare foot, since I’m almost always barefoot indoors, is streaming with blood & broken bits of curly wire), or throw it through a window (I might hit a litigious passerby). 

So after I’d been through the ‘we’re sorry, we didn’t quite catch that’ something like TEN TIMES & was beginning to wonder where headquarters was so I could go there & throw the iPhone through the window with a note tied around it saying Your customer service?  AAAAAAAAAUGH . . . Eventually Robot Mistress※ gave me some numbers, by which time I was gibbering with exasperation.

When I explained about the dodgy card to the LIVE HUMAN BEING!!!! who finally answered the ringing noise frequently halted for another robot voice to say, your call is important to us!  Take a long jump off a short pier why don’t you! at intervals of about three seconds, the live human being said calmly, oh yes, that does keep happening.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

So she activated the weaselly card & we had quite a nice chat as one human being to another & she promised, almost successfully stifling her laughter, to pass on my remarks about robot answering services to her admin.

It wasn’t till that night that it occurred to me that I had no idea what the PIN number to my Mortimer Cheeseparing Weasel Card is.  So I . . . please don’t kill yourselves laughing here . . . decided to sign on to the Cheeseparing web site & consult Manage Your Account.

Pardon me while I half-kill myself laughing.

Of course it didn’t work.  OF COURSE.  I appreciate that they’re trying to keep you & your embarrassingly paltry bank balance※※ safe, but after they’ve insisted on sixty-seven passcodes, which they keep sending to your overheating iPhone, I’m losing the will to live.  At some point I bumble through some virtual doorway & am told that the next screen will REVEAL.  MY.  PIN.

& then it rejects my passcode.

& then it does it again.

I go back to the FIRST passcode that worked to get me in the flaming Manage Your Account at all.

It rejects that one.

The little additional doohickey to all this is that the passcode screen does not have a ‘show’ option.  After the first passcode failure I also started making myself crazier by putting the blasted code in two or three times worrying that as my HANDS ARE NOW SHAKING WITH RAGE I could easily be putting it in wrong.  I could still be there, re-putting in some flaming passcode or other except Genghis thought it was time to go out again.※※※

You’re given eight tries before they shut you down.  I stopped after six.

Next day I HAMMERED MY (*&^%$£”!!!!! WAY THROUGH CUSTOMER SERVICE ROBOT ATROCITIES AGAIN & this time, when I finally got a live human being he said calmly, oh yes, that does keep happening . . .

SOMEWHERE WELL BEYOND ARRRRRRRRRRGH. 

I did say, you know I’m used to getting the PIN in a separate piece of STREET MAIL from the card, usually you have to scrape something off to show the numbers to PROVE it hasn’t been tampered with⁑, but the point is you don’t have to do any on line wiggins⁑⁑ to get your PIN!!  He said, yes, well, they didn’t send it because your card was sent before you finished applying for it . . .

Okay.  I have a working credit card⁑⁑⁑.  I have a PIN.  I am good to go.  I think I will lie down with a dog & a nice hard copy book now.

* * *

* According to the forecast it’s going to keep on sheeting, so it’s not like I’m doing anything practical.  I’m just shirking.  I can shirk a little longer.^

^ Although I live on a hill, & rain always sounds melodramatic, & even the lightest, ghostliest little breeze wraps around this house like a hurricane with supplemental banshees.

** Like sound warm & lovely even when I’m playing her.  On a good day, although define good?, on a day when my real-world brain is working even less well than usual^, & particularly now that it’s getting late enough in the season that mostly my windows are closed^^, I can sing & keep myself semi-right by hiding behind the sound my right hand^^^ is hoicking out of my poor patient piano. 

Sometimes, yes, I stop trying to sing & add my left hand to the keyboard mix . . . we should probably not go there.  There’s only so much even a warm & lovely piano can do with a seventeen-fingered insufficiently-jointed tone-deaf misfit.^^^^

^ generally speaking, having a non-real-world brain is an advantage for a writer, but it does sometimes make all that remembering to eat & hurtle the GWHP & pay the bills stuff a serious crashing bore.  I have to do what?  Why?  Who says?  Other than Genghis.  I do listen to him.  Sort of.

Except when he’s trying to put over something like But I haven’t eaten/been walked/petted/fussed over/addressed in terms of endearment &/or fiery wrath in DAYS!!  I am a poor sad starving forlorn ignored~ thing!

~ HA HA HA HA HA.  Dogs generally are not very ignorable, at least those that live in the house with you, but a GWHP?!  Nobody in the history of furry four legged moochers has ever ignored a GWHP.%

% Mine at present is doing the standard Genghis thing of taking up three-quarters of the space at my end of our two-person bench.  His end is empty.  We could have ANOTHER dog . . . NO NO NO NO NO.$

$ & to think I used to have several of these creatures at a time.  Previous generations have certainly lain on me when we were on the sofa together but I never had that body-snatcher sensation before, when I wonder if I might look down some day & discover that I have several extra legs & a strange desire to bark.  Weren’t we just talking about barking?}

} No, we’re just about to.  I can’t keep track of my own footnotes. 

^^ The problem with living in town is, you know, neighbours.  Mine have already commented on my Interesting Musical Choices, & all they’re hearing is the radio & my (interesting) CD collection.  You know, professional musicians.  

A few of them are barking, of course, but that keeps it . . . interesting.  &, speaking of barking#, my right-hand neighbours have a dog.  A dog nicknamed The Dogbell by a regular visitor.  The Dogbell doesn’t necessarily wait for visitors.  He has dangerous, threatening hallucinations.  At midnight these are not popular with his neighbours.

# Anyone not well acquainted with British slang:  barking as an adjective means bonkers.  Round the twist.  Mad.  Doolally.  Um, crazy? 

^^^ No of course I can’t play with two hands AND sing!  What do you think I am!  A professional musician??!!!

 & then there’s the tale of my violin.  Sic.  Some other post.  It’s a long, sad story.  But I’m still planning on a happy ending.  Well . . . relatively happy.

^^^^ Actually I’m not tone deaf.  That makes it worse.

*** The not at all freaking mysterious!!  Bank logarithms are more insane than I am!  Not only is it a magazine subscription, once I found it, but it’s a magazine subscription to The New Yorker for pity’s sake, how mainstream do you need it?, which, furthermore, I’ve subscribed to for years, & the sub therefore comes round regularly!  Arrrrrgh. 

† Another great scam would be to do this in a sufficiently labyrinthine way that the poor sucker whose card it is gives up mid-no-way-out-jungle & agrees to the charge to get it over with.

†† There is no such thing as superfluous books.

††† I’ve told you I’ve now lived longer in the UK than I lived in the US?—the apparent arithmetical disparity is the five years I lived in Japan as a kid.  & you’re going to have to get used, I think, to me hopping around like my feet are on fire about being this old.  It’s like the t-shirt says:  it’s WEIRD being the same age as old people.  & even someone with as cracked & leaky a memory as mine, if you’re this old, your memory goes a very long way back.  Halloooooooo.  & that’s weird.    

‡‡ Way too often I can’t be bothered.  My bad.

‡‡‡ Only once.  & it was the bank’s error.  Guess how long that took to get sorted.  Guess why. 

§ Which woodstove?  I have several.  Are they ALL bugged?

§§ A close cousin to can’t be bothered.

§§§ or virtual.  Who pays with money any more?

ɸ I assume the answer is that they frelling poached it off my frelling account with Mortimer Cheeseparing.  GUESS HOW PARANOID THIS MAKES ME FEEL.  WHO NEEDS CONSPIRACIES?  ORDINARY REALITY IS ENOUGH.^

^ with or without the secret cabal taped to the back of my laptop.  They unstick themselves when I’m not around & leave tiny teacup rings on the long-suffering oilcloth.  Just so long as they don’t leave rings on the books.  That is beyond treason.  Whatever beyond treason is.

ɸɸ At least the farming-out of all call centres to other countries where, I’m guessing, minimum wage doesn’t exist, nor does anything like job training, nor even some kind of check that the person just hired to do a job they don’t understand because no one has explained it to them can at least speak comprehensible English seems to be over.  We’re now back to English regional, with the occasional Scots or Irish regional thrown in.  Meanwhile I’ve also got a bit deaf.  I’m getting better at local Scots, but oh, glory, an Irish person in full singing flow . . . whimper . . . the Welsh don’t seem to do call centres?  Sensible folk. 

ɸɸɸ Another potential source of endless Technophobe blog posts.

※ Whose bright idea was it that women’s robot voices are more, what, emollient than men’s?  All that happens is that I have an overwhelming urge to find a headmistress & loo-roll her garden.^  Hey, I’ll use eco friendly loo roll.  The kind that will disintegrate on first contact with a single raindrop.  She’ll never know it ever happened.  Now let us consider how well this stuff does its supposed business.  Ahem. 

^ I’ve never done any of those classic Halloween pranks.  But robot voices can drive even the sanest grown up to untoward lengths & I AM NOT THE SANEST GROWN UP. 

※※  At my age I should be retired.  If I want to keep eating organic food, I can’t afford to retire.

※※※ Dogs are lifesavers.

⁑ Scammers have x-ray vision. 

⁑⁑ I’ve been rewatching BUFFY.  Deal with it.

⁑⁑⁑  Yes.  I’ve tried it.  I suppose it could still go wrong the second time . . .

If All I Ever Blogged About Were the Endless Shortcomings of Technology I would Never Run Out of Material, although It Might Be Hard on My Blood Pressure & My Readers’ Patience

I was rushing around because the Mongol Horde & I had to get going early because I was having my SECOND SEWING LESSON in the afternoon.*  The having-to-get-going-early would be why iPhone from Hell decided to blare at me.  I would like to say I shouldn’t have looked, but it’s a good thing I did, resultant nervous breakdowns notwithstanding, because Genghis & I were going to pick up my beloved pocket watch, which isn’t actually a pocket watch, you click it onto a belt loop like a Victorian housekeeper’s chatelaine**, which had gone in for the clockwork version of a spa weekend at the local jewellers, & one of the things the text blare was telling me was that my bank had shut off my one & only credit card due to Possible Funny Business.   AAAAAAAUGH.  & then it gave me the details of the transaction it suspected.

In the first place, the tocsin text was so badly composed that if it hadn’t called me by the name that my bank keeps insisting on calling me even though it’s incorrect, & for some reason for the last thirty-plus years it’s never NOTICED that it’s calling me by some bogus name which, for example, does not match the name both on my account & my cheques***, I would have thought it was the scam.  I’ve pointed out their appellatory error on a number of occasions, including when there are live human beings involved & no one does anything but fuss & blither & wring their hands, or, I suppose, their central processing unit & random access memory.  & my next robot letter or email comes yet again to Dear Ermengarde.† AAAAAAUGH.  I hadn’t thought of this before, but it does make a useful proof of legitimacy when your incompetent bank is contacting you incompetently.  It’s no wonder idiot scams are so successful, we’re all brainwashed by the total bunglefest exhibited by the real guys.

So I stared at the dubious charge.  It was to Large Anonymous Magazine Subscription Cartel.  No, of course it doesn’t tell you what magazine it’s for.  I subscribe to . . . WAY TOO MANY magazines.  & when you subscribe, you subscribe to the magazine, & the cartel doesn’t appear, unless perhaps if you’re in the habit of reading the eeny weeny unreadable text at the bottom of the sub page, telling you things like .0001% of your money is going to saving the penguins & the rest of it is buying luxury yachts for the shareholders, & even if I had, & I might have, because I’m paranoid, I would not have retained a no-doubt-purposely ambiguous name like Large Anonymous Magazine Cartel.   I looked at the blasted sub rate & thought, so, what the flaming doodah is that for??  Because it seems to me a really good scam would be to disguise a counterfeit charge as a magazine subscription.  & in this terrifying world the idea that scammers might be able to put together a list of people who sub to more than 1,000,000 magazines & won’t notice another fee seems perfectly plausible.  WHY DON’T THEY BLEEDING TELL YOU WHAT THEY’RE CHARGING YOU FOR OR QUERYING YOU ABOUT??

Nah.  That would be too easy, & wouldn’t cause nearly as many cases of the screaming abdabs which wouldn’t be nearly as much fun.††

Okay, short form?†††  I figured it out.  & they turned my card back on.  & my pocket/belt loop watch is ticking calmly at my waist.  But have I mentioned in the last six hours or day & a half how much I hate technology?

* * *

* Yes, it’s true, I lead an indescribably exciting life, full of swords & heroes^ & vampires & dragons & rabid seagulls & rhinoceros-sized seals with long gleaming teeth & Mongol Hordes & ^^

^ I don’t have to specify female, right?  I’m the author of THE HERO & THE CROWN after all.

I don’t mind the odd guy.  Here & there.  As long as he doesn’t get in the way.  & is perhaps decorative.#

# MISANDRY!!!!!!!  No.  Sarcasm.=

= SOME OF MY BEST FRIENDS ARE MEN.  Ha ha ha.  I was married to one for nearly twenty-five years.~  That has to count for something.~~

~ Granted he was unusual.

~~ & then I don’t have to count how many best friends I have.

^^ I have a copy of that gorgeous quote ‘There have been no dragons in my life, only small spiders & stepping in gum.  I could have coped with dragons’ tacked up to my full-length corkboard on the door leading to the potting shed.  It’s on a blank greeting card from about a gazillion years ago, well early Pleistocene anyway, & the author isn’t listed.  For years—this was the Pleistocene remember, some years before the internet—I assumed this was one of those zeitgeist things & maybe there wasn’t really an author???  There is.  Niki Nymark.  Shame on the original greeting-card printer.

Now this is where it gets really, really weird.  I went on line to check I was spelling Nymark’s name right.   & the first, the FIRST, link to ‘small spiders & stepping in gum’ sent me here:

arrrgh arrrgh arrrrgh.

I am failing to figure out how to insert a small tactful on-line address of the (blog!) post in question. As soon as the over-helpful *&^%$£”!!!!!! admin here in my blog sniffs out an internet addy it sticks it up HUGE with a photo & the first couple of paras & dancing girls & boys in feathers & hot pink lipstick & stiletto heels, & I’m not trying to give this somewhat tactless person a shout out, thank you, I want to make a small off hand comment on weird serendipity & maybe about credit where credit is due. So you’re going to have to take it on faith that the first link, as above, took me to a page where someone had, after fully spelling out Nymark’s name, painstakingly detailed the entire plot of HERO, speaking of dragons. But without mentioning where it came from. AHEM?!

. . . So back to our regularly scheduled programme. It’s a weekend, I’m not going to hassle Blogdad, it’s a blog post not a PhD thesis, I’m not going to rewrite or it’ll be another two months before I hang it.

EXCUSE ME.  SPEAKING OF AUTHOR CITATIONS.  

But the thing I was MEANING to say about small spiders & stepping in gum . . . it’s a great line & it will stay on my corkboard.  But really . . . how many people can say it truthfully?  I don’t think I know anyone who can.    Anyone who’s had someone important in their life die on them?  Dragon.  & who hasn’t?  Lost your job? Dragon. Lost your student grant? Dragon.  Relationship breakdown?  Dragon.  Relationship breakdown by dishonesty or emotional betrayal?  Dragon & a half.  I have a friend going through cancer treatment for the second time.  That’s at least two dragons.  Never mind the virus itself, anyone out there come through Covid lockdown unscathed?  Global dragon.  The only real problem with dogs is they don’t live long enough?   Permanent ongoing dragon for all dog people.  Etc.  I’d like to see more acknowledgement that we all have dragons, & all of us get flamed one way or another, & we cope as best we can, & the small spiders & stepping in gum is light relief.

One, nonetheless, of several corkboards, & that doesn’t include the two (smallish) refrigerators & two (smallish) freezers# that are covered with decorative & frequently rude magnets, & bits cut out of magazines held in place by said magnets, & other bits either copied out in my almost illegible handwriting or cut out of still more magazines## plus the occasional postcard taped or blu-tacked to the walls.###

# All four of these humble appliances bungie-corded together would not make up the cubic storage of a single one of those monster side-by-side fridge-freezers.  The kind that loom.  The kind that make you contemplate a story about bouncers at an intergalactic pub that caters to the dangerous multi-species rogue element.  The kind that are CLEARLY chock full of hazardous technology.  The kind that murmur the just-barely-audible hum that says they’re alive & watching you.  Oh, &?  America the too large, the too in your face, the too too?  They’re called American-style fridge-freezers over here.

## Don’t forget the important position magazines appear to take in my life & surroundings~.  This will come up again.  If I ever get back to the main post.  Is there an echo in this blog?

~ teetering piles of unread included.%  Many thanks to the inventors of Large Sturdy Pieces of Furniture with Flat Upright Sides.

% Also too many read ones.  These go in another pile from which I will (some day) extract the interesting articles I want to keep, which will . . . go in yet another pile . . .

### For every two or three people who cross my threshold & come in, sit down & calmly accept a cup or cups of green or peppermint tea, there is one who gets as far as the kitchen/dining/general living space door, opens their eyes very wide & perhaps slightly bulgily, & remembers a crucial engagement on the other side of town.  Or possibly Czechia.

This does hurt my feelings.  However four people a year is a pretty heavy social calendar for me so I don’t have my feelings hurt too often.

I spend my entire life on line, like almost everybody else on the planet who lives near a doodah whatsit supplier & can afford a doodah whatsit device to use it!  I’m just NOT VERY GOOD AT IT!!#

# & my capricious lifestyle includes NO SOCIAL MEDIA WHATSOEVER.

I wasn’t.

Anyone who has tripped over this blog for the very first time, is wondering what they’ve—er—stepped in, have never read a Robin McKinley book & are reminding themselves that while they may read to the end of this blog post because this footnote thing has a kind of deranged fascination, they are not going to risk any of this crackpot woman’s professional output~ . . . go look up a plot summary of the aforementioned THE HERO & THE CROWN.~~

~ I don’t do footnotes in my novels.  Just sayin’. 

~~ & no, really, these footnotes are, in all their peculiarity, going down chronologically.  I’d already made my remark about female heroes when I went to look up small spiders.  Life is sometimes as weird as fiction.

I am assuming I do get to call this zeitgeist.  I don’t know a dog person who hasn’t said it in one form or another.  & it’s dogs I know best.  Cats can live to 20 years, horses to 30.  It’s not long enough but it’s better than dogs.  I should have gone for a cockatoo.  Too late now, I don’t want to traumatise it when I die. 

** Well not a LOT like a chatelaine.  Mine is the stripped-down modern male version.  But you do snap it on a belt loop.  I gave it to Peter a long time ago & he wore it faithfully.  When he stopped wearing it I adopted it, & while the poor thing leads a hard life being cracked into countertops & Aga rails, I love not wearing a wristwatch, which was Peter’s point too & WHY I was clever enough to find one & give it to him.

*** Although no one uses cheques any more so what the hey.

† Why are they calling me by my first name.  Even if it’s the wrong one.  Snarl.

†† Readers of the old blog may remember that I believe that the Borg are behind the entire computer-centred & internet-implemented metaverse.  They’re keeping us nailed to Earth & out of their hair-equivalent by an endless short-circuiting loop of both built & biological crazy.  May I point out that one of their notable recent successes is that the NHS has crashed & burned under the weight of all the people who can’t cope with modern life.  Most of them present with excellent cause.  Some of them are doctors.

††† Wait.  Short form?  I don’t do short form.

APOLOGIES. Again. With trumpet flourishes & bagpipers (this is Scotland after all)

When I started this post a very long time ago* the title was Another Day, Another Technological Disaster, & the problem was this was so overwhelmingly true that I couldn’t force myself to stay that extra hour or two facing & interacting with a technological device & write you a blog post.  I was** maniacally focussed on finishing DIARY for the 3rd or 4th time*** & by the end of too many hours arguing with myself about word choice, paragraph placement, & whether or not the book really needs that scene where grzzgleffskuurzot xxyshooblahvungdorp???†, I couldn’t do the computer thing another MINUTE.  Besides, I probably needed to gallop the dog again.††

Contributing to, or rather the very very final straw to the whole tech-mayhem thing, remember I told you that Facebook wouldn’t let me in?  I was locked out, with no apparent option beyond looking at that infuriating chained-up cartoon box forever.  I did have two nice people, in response to that blog post asking if anyone knew a live human being who worked at FB, email to say that they did.  One person’s contact either didn’t get their query or I didn’t receive their reply††, & the other one offered what looked like a reasonable suggestion but it had no effect on the chained box.  I sent it on to Blogdad & he said . . . erm, well, I didn’t actually follow what he said, but the idea was that the suggestion was for a less-locked-up, banned, exiled, dungeoned, repelled by fierce warrior-mages with serrated enchanted swords with my name etched on them, etc, situation than mine. 

Meanwhile, back at my poor Contact-Robin email . . .

FACEBOOK, WHICH HAD LOCKED ME OUT, STARTED SENDING ME FRIEND UPDATES.  Which I don’t want, can’t remember why they’d be on my FB page anyway, since I don’t think I ever used FB much????, but I can’t get to, because if I click on one of these infernal affronts, I run smack-dab into the [VERY BAD LANGUAGE] chained-up [********] box again.  & WHY HAVE THEY STARTED SENDING ME THESE OUT OF THE SLOBBERING DOODAH BLUE IN APPARENT RESPONSE TO FACEBOOK REFUSING TO GIVE ME ANY ACCESS TO MY ACCOUNT???  Upon the realisation that I’m to be hammered by updates I can’t turn off I realio trulio flipped out††† &, because I am a sane, responsible, mature adult human being, my excellent answer to this was to stop ever going to the web site/blog/public email box at all.  ‡

So a few extra apologies to anyone who has written to me in the last x weeks, because I haven’t seen it.  I had actually made a stab‡‡ at keeping up with my writing-to-the-writer email when I, which is to say Blogdad, launched The Flying Piano a few centuries ago or whenever.  Sigh . . . ‡‡‡

HOWEVER.  I HAVE NEWS.  AMAZING NEWS!!!!!  To begin with, I have a guest.  Orli.  My over-achieving librarian friend.  Her skill set includes being technologically overachieving & while I have found I may sometimes be able to tease her into having a bit of her holiday as a holiday by reminding her of all those books I’ve suggested she read§ which just happen to be available on my shelves, mostly she hangs around saying, What can I DOOOOOO to help?§§  She’s been hearing me screaming (remotely) about FB since this revolting Grand Guignol racket began, so she brought her vorpal blade with her§§§ & said I AM GOING TO RESCUE YOU FROM FACEBOOK.

& she has.  She’s actually tried to explain to me what she did, but it flew over my head like an eagle over a somewhat dim tortoise, & NEVER MIND.  The thing is, she got in.¥  & the note saying I WANT NOTHING TO DO WITH FACEBOOK but you can find me on The Flying Piano, is pinned up, with the disturbingly recent selfie, but yeah, sorry, that really is pretty much what I look like ¥¥.  However, if I’m going to tell people to come find me on The Flying Piano I had better be there, hadn’t I?

So, hi.  I hope I’m back.  At least occasionally. ¥¥¥

* * *

* I don’t want to look back & see just how long

** All right, still am

*** This is the LAST TIME.  This time I mean it.  YES.  I think I’ve already told you that I sent it to Merrilee after I finished it the first time & so she’s read it & confirms it’s a book.  Which removes the immediate killer weight of DO I NEED A DAY JOB (when I’m too old for anyone to hire me)?  Usually I don’t want anyone to read anything till it’s as FINISHED as I can make it but I wanted earlier input on DIARY.  I’m assuming I’ll revert to type with the next book.^

^ Sigh.  For almost twenty-five years I did have an early reader.  Peter.  Siiiiiigh.  Well, I want—am planning —to go on writing .   I will remember how to do it without help.  SIIIIIIIIIGH.

Including that Genghis & I need to eat.  Writers don’t have pension plans.  Also I buy too many books#, rose-bushes, little noodgy things aka tchotchkes, silly t shirts like the one I am wearing today which says IT’S WEIRD BEING THE SAME AGE AS OLD PEOPLE, jigsaw puzzles, etc.

# Shock horror!  Film at eleven!!=

= I lie.  No film.%  At eleven or any other time.  But I am planning some day to video Genghis cruising the ground floor of this house%% for the dog treats I hide on shelves & in corners & under throw rugs & in keyholes%%% & buried in dog beds%%%% every day after (his) lunch.  I will do this as soon as I am capable of using some video thingy on some current piece of technological disaster without me screaming or it blowing up.  See main blog post.  If I ever get back there.

% It has been gruesome enough scwurdgling$ a new photo for various internet purposes UGGGH.  But that’s kind of what this post is about.  I seem to be getting off track?$$

$ SCWURDGLE.  A verb pertaining to someone who for professional reasons has been strongly advised they must have a photo of themselves on line, who must then & therefore produce one.  This painful, loathsome & embarrassing process is henceforth to be known as SCWURDGLING.  & if the sound perhaps resembles attempting to poke a banana cream pie through a sieve without harming the pie, well, yeah.

$$ REALLY????  SHOCK HORROR.

%% henceforth to be known as Wildrose

%%% I think I’ve told you Wildrose is a standard double-front Scottish Victorian.  It has most of its original doors, which have standard Victorian skeleton-key keyholes.  Which are big enough to wedge a bit of dog biscuit or chicken jerky in.

%%% There are a RIDICULOUS number of dog beds.  This is partly from having had three dogs & two houses in a previous life, but even so.

There had better not be any outcries of Shock horror here.  Ahem.

† You see the problem.

†† German Wire Haired Pointer ENERGY LEVELS!!  NOOOOOOOOOO!!!^

^ He’s coming up eight years old.  Shouldn’t he be thinking about slowing down a little???

Manifestly.  No.  Arrrgh.  I also have to hang some photos of him here.  I WILL.  I WILL.  Just as soon as I am capable of using some photo thingy on some current piece of technological disaster without me screaming or it blowing up.  THE POINT I WAS ABOUT TO MAKE is that he’s liver-coloured, which in a GWHP means the dark spotted brown has an overlay of longer harsher white hairs, & there are definitely more of the white ones on his muzzle & his tail than there were three years ago when I brought him home.  If he wanted to promise to LIVE FOREVER I’d grin & bear the energy level better.#  But I need him to have a nice mellow middle age so I can bring home a puppy or puppies to get the next generation going without killing myself keeping up with insane GWHP energy levels & simultaneously insane all-standard-puppy energy levels.  I do not want to go through the dogless thing again.  It was bad enough when I still had a husband.  I think I’ve already told you, three & a half years ago I nearly fell in Pav’s grave & stayed there.##

# Give up an excuse to GRUMBLE??  Naaaaaaah.

## Well, I was determined to dig it myself.  &, you know, ME & grief.   Plus solitary Covid lockdown.  Really not a good mixture. 

†† See:  Another Day, Another Technological Disaster, & yes this most emphatically includes Outlook

††† You can still see the marks on the ceiling

‡ Which is now several hundred doodahs longer what with one thing & another, including all the come-ons from people who want to provide blog posts, for a fee of course, or to improve my web rating, for a fee of course, or blah blah blah BLAH for a fee of course.  Why does decaying-faecal-matter Outlook block or spamify, for example, emails from friends who are even on my contact list, but let this phishing rubbish through????

‡‡ A stab like maybe attacking a brick wall with a quill pen

‡‡‡ Will I ever return to this state of grace?  Of answering at least some of my book mail?  We live in hope.^  But, like, don’t count on it, like don’t count on that quill pen making much headway on the brick wall.

^ What do you mean we, white person?

§ The recommendation list is much worse the other way round.  She’s a fast reader.  I am not.

§§ Librarians are a race apart.  This helpfulness thing. 

§§§ I have no idea how she got it through airport security.  I suppose they’re not set up for vorpal blades.

¥ Clearly there are things you can only do on site, or Blogdad would already have done them. The only reason I may persevere in trying to understand what she’s telling me is so I can tell Blogdad.  I think a better idea is to ask them to talk to each other while I do a nice jigsaw puzzle.  Or take Genghis for a walk. 

¥¥ I’m seventy-one years old!^  What do you expect!  & hey, great wallpaper.  I had to do MASSIVE not to say crushing^^ renovations on Wildrose, some of which I hope to spin fascinating blog posts out of at some point in the future, & most of it went pretty well.  Definitely including giant pink cabbage roses on the walls of my bedroom.

^ Readers of the old blog may remember I start calling myself my new age the summer before I actually turn that age, so I can enjoy my birthday when it happens.  I officially turn 71 in November.

^^ Yeah.  Say crushing.  See:  plan to keep writing & need to eat.

¥¥¥ I also still have to fill out the poor sparse new web site too.  AAAAAAAAUGH.  Not today.^

^ After I turn DIARY in for the 1,000,000th time.  Promise.

DOES ANYONE KNOW A REAL, LIVE, HUMAN BEING WHO WORKS AT FACEBOOK?*

AAAAAAAAUGH.  Several people I recognise from the old blog are kindly posting FB links via the contact-me form.** 

THERE’S JUST ONE SMALL PROBLEM.  I CAN’T GET ON FACEBOOK.  I suppose I could start a new whatsit with a new name and I can say I live in Outer Mongolia in a yurt and raise ponies, and the broadband is unreliable which is why I don’t write more blog posts or answer my email very well, BUT I’M NOT GOING TO.  I DON’T LIKE FACEBOOK.  I JUST RECOGNISE THAT A LOT OF PEOPLE USE IT.  Including some of the new-blog readers. 

This is a long, gory saga.  When the Grand Matriarchy thing happened last autumn and I realised it was my electric cattle prod to get back on line with a new blog, Blogdad and I wasted a lot of time trying to break into my Twitter and FB accounts, which I hadn’t used in years***.  We finally succeeded with Twitter.  There should be a little working link stuck to my name there saying I’m not on Twitter any more, but you can find me at the Flying Piano.  I planned to do the same for FB.

But we failed with Facebook.  Big time.  Repeatedly.  The best was when, having fallen into yawning tiger pits and bottomless ravines and sucking mires, we hacked and blowtorched our way to ‘so prove who you are, you lowly techless peon,’ and I gave them my passport details, for pity’s sake, although I acknowledge that an American passport photo is so gazzleblatted to be proof against identity theft or what-have you that it doesn’t look like a photo of anybody†, it looks like the sort of thing you see hanging from the ceiling when you’re la-la-la out of your tiny mind on an interesting if illegal substance,†† still, passports are some kind of gold standard of identity, aren’t they?†††  FB hoovered it all up, said some robotic version of ‘thanks’ and ‘we’ll get back to you’.

It got back to me all right.  It refused my passport and locked me out because I was clearly a militant anarchist seeking to bring down the kindly philanthropic Facebook empire.  Right on.

Blogdad said this is probably because my name(s) doesn’t/don’t match.  I don’t use the Jennifer Carolyn on anything but passport and driving licence, Robin McKinley Dickinson is quite enough in private life, and on line Being an Author of course I’m mere Robin McKinley.  Other people have different names for different aspects of their life.§  What do they do about tech train wrecks like Facebook?

I hilariously tried clicking through on one of the links that appeared in my Ask Robin email a day or two ago.  It seemed to pretend that I was a legitimate person with a legitimate account.  This pleasant fantasy didn’t last long, and I soon fetched up on a page that has a large gormless block of something with a chain and a padlock around it—so imaginative, Facebook—saying, your account has been SEIZED AND MANACLED because there has been funny business going on.  The only suggestion it had for surmounting this fatuous technological folly is try signing in from a device that you USUALLY sign in from. 

Have I mentioned that I haven’t used FB in years?  And how long does anyone’s tech last these days?

So if any of you live human beings reading this blog post know any live human beings at Facebook—I realise this is a stretch, not so much that someone who reads me would know one, but that there are any, see first footnote—please tell me.

* * *

*  The first question, of course, is, WHY are they working at Facebook?  Are you SURE they are live, real and human?

** I apologise for the lack of a forum on the Flying Piano.  I had one on the old blog but that was in another country and while the wench hasn’t died, she’s changed her name, address, hair colour and shoe size.^   While the Flying Piano is still more or less Days in the Life, I still haven’t settled into it yet^^.  First time around, no big, the blundering was all part of the newness.   But the interwebz^^^ have moved on.  I think I’ve already said that I’m not sure a more or less aimless, days-in-the-life style blog still has a place.  It’s a bit of a cleft stick.  I’m supposed to have a PRESENCE on line, however odd and marginal, because that’s what things like writers have to do in the new on line world, but I haven’t really got the time or the brain energy to get focussed about it.  When I finish DIARY properly^^^^ I’m going to want to sit down with the next thing.  If it’s not ready to be written, or written at, yet,^^^^^ then I’m going to want to be filling that vast underground story tank up, not expend writing energy on an ephemeral blog.  I grant you this may be my age and attitude showing, but my age and my attitude are what they are.

I like the idea of having a blog again, and it does give me that on line presence thing.^^^^^^ But at the moment I’m not getting the hits to make a forum plausible. And if I can’t figure out a sustainable way to be clever with the new blog, I probably won’t.  Last time, blogs just had forums (or anyway that’s how I remember it.  It was a long time ago).  By the time I’d scrabbled into some kind of pattern for Days in the Life–which included posting every day, which isn’t going to happen this time–the forum had pulled itself into a thing too.  For the minute, Ask Robin is the only option on the Flying Piano.  ALSO ON THE TO-DO LIST IS TO USE SOME OF THE THINGS PEOPLE SAY IN THEIR EMAILS TO WRITE MORE FRELLING BLOG POSTS AROUND.  Sorry.  If I were any more disorganised I’d forget how to breathe, which probably wouldn’t make my memory for stuff needing to be done any better.  I think I remember that your brain uses a lot of oxygen . . .   And it’s not that I don’t appreciate hearing from you people.  I do. Including a big YO. HOW’S IT GOING, to everyone I remember from before. I just . . . Gah.  Feh.  Arrrgh.

^ Oh, well, I guess I haven’t changed my name.  It just feels like WIDOW is stamped on my forehead, passport and the lintel over the front door.  And my hair probably still counts as dubious light brown, but forty years later I’m still cranky I got through most of my 30s more or less blonde, ish+, I thought if you got through your twenties still blonde (ish) you were safe, and then suddenly in my forties I’m light brown.  Feh.  As it goes grey if the light hits it right you’re almost blonde again . . . but mostly you’re just really old.  And feet do spread as you get older, especially if you put in as many FRELLING MILES as I do++, and I was quite resigned to going up a shoe size when buying Converse . . . and then I unearthed a box of old, pre-Nike All Stars, looked at the sizes and thought, I used to WEAR these?!?  Well, yes.  Most of them I can, in fact, still wear:  they’re the same length as the new ones in a bigger size.  One more misdeed to lay at the, ahem, feet of the Nike takeover.  I don’t know enough about the controversy over working conditions to have an opinion about that, but I will say that in my big-footed long-armed experience, shoes and clothing made in, say, China and Vietnam, is smaller and shorter-sleeved than stuff made in the UK or America.  Nobody seems to have messed up inseam measurements for jeans yet.  I live in fear of cold ankles and looking like a dork.  And I thank the fashion gods that someone invented wrist warmers which go a long way toward solving the short-sleeve conundrum.+++    

+ Although I used to pour household bleach on the ends during those long Maine winters= when I wasn’t getting any help from those UV rays we’re now officially supposed to be hiding from.  Personally I take my chances with the sun over the ingredient lists of most sunscreens.  And yeah, I was less crunchy-granola in those days, okay?  But I still only put it on the ends.  It didn’t get near my scalp.==

= Long MAINE winters????, says the woman who now lives in Scotland.  HA HA HA HA HA HA HA. 

== And only RARELY on the shoulders of my sweatshirt.  ARRRRRGH.

++ I realise there are other ways to thud out 1,000,000 steps a day than owning a German Wire Haired Perpetual Motion Machine,= but the GWHPMM is a very reliable method.  Furthermore it’s Baby Seagull Season, baby seagulls are dumb as rocks, and I’m starting to look like Sylvester Stallone in his heyday from wrestling with my blasted animal==, while the detestable feathered baby waddles mindlessly down the middle of the road wearing a sign saying I’M DUMB AS A ROCK and mom or dad divebombs us, shrieking.  I object to losing more hair to being whacked or trodden on by frelling seagulls.  Menopause was devastating enough.===  GO FIND A NICE CLIFFSIDE TO RAISE YOUR FAMILY ON, LIKE BETTER MANNERED SEABIRDS, I SAID SEABIRDS, AND TEACH THE WRETCHED KIDS TO FLY. 

= Or, say, a pair of hellhounds, who also exhaustively dragged me around a different local countryside.   Siiiiiiiiiiiiiiiigh.  Every critter owner must learn to live with cognitive dissonance.  The fact that I adore my current manic idiot doesn’t stop me from missing the flaming doodah out of previous generations.

== Yes, this happens every year.  Anybody who’s ever lifted weights knows this.  Boys bulk up fast but they lose it fast.  Girls bulk up diabolically slowly but once it’s there it tends to hang around, looking for an excuse to pop into existence again.  Possibly with fury-throbbing veins on the forehead.  The shrieking of imprecations is probably optional, but my one real weight trainer, back in Maine, used to ENCOURAGE his students to yell as an accompaniment to greater effort.   No baby seagulls required.   It made for an interesting workout atmosphere.  I try not to think about my local reputation in this small Scottish town. ~

~ Although getting patronised by people with either small dogs or no dogs is not my favourite experience.  ::mrghlzzzgluggnch:: 

=== YES.  IF YOU’RE A WOMAN, MENOPAUSE WILL PROBABLY MAKE A LOT OF YOUR HAIR FALL OUT.  ONE OF THOSE THINGS THEY SURE AS **** DIDN’T MENTION TO MY GENERATION.  I HOPE YOUNGER GENERATIONS ARE BETTER INFORMED AND BETTER BRACED.  Apologies if I’ve ranted this rant more than a few dozen times before.

+++ Would I have invented wrist warmers if some clever person hadn’t got there first?  I don’t know.  I might have, however, because knitting rectangles is my best knitting trick, and I don’t do fingers, as in gloves, at all.  AT.  ALL. 

^^  Yes.  Sorry.  Stating the obvious.

^^^ Oh, phooey.  Do I have to give up ‘interwebz’ because it’s rude and means stuff I don’t mean it to mean?

^^^^ I’ve promised the LATEST AND LAST tweak-fest back in Merrilee’s inbox by the end of this week

^^^^^ Historically I don’t start the next thing on the heels of the last thing, but I’ve been so long since the thing before DIARY there seems??, maybe??, to be kind of a queue.  Check back in a year or two.

^^^^^^ I know.  I haven’t got back to updating the web site.  AT ALL.  It’s on the list.

*** The short form is that my life came to a halt when Peter died, and reinventing myself has taken a while.  Of course it’s not that simple, but . . .

† or possibly an evil AI who works for Facebook

†† Not that I would have any personal experience of this.

††† Well AREN’T THEY?

§ I remember the cold blank terror of trying to pick Diana Wynne Jones up at the Bangor, Maine airport when her name on the passenger list appeared, as it appeared on her passport, with a ‘D’ and her husband’s last name.^   We found each other eventually.

^ This was long before Facebook, however.  I think Mark Jerkface was probably still in diapers.

Continuing Skeletal Vagaries

The problem with having back trouble when you’re this old is that it turns you into a little old lady.  Arrrgh.  When you’re 30 or 40 and you have back trouble and you’re hobbling around*, you’re a person with back trouble.  When you’re past 70 and hobbling around** suddenly you’re a little old lady.  I’M NOT A LITTLE OLD LADY***.  MY BACK IS BEING A DAZZLING FATAL-EXPLOSION-VARIETY-PAIN NUISANCE.  And yeah, I’m old, your point would be?  At least nobody has tried to help me across the street yet, but that is probably to do with the vibrant presence of a manic German Wire-Haired Pointer in the near vicinity.  I can assure you from effulgent experience that the long extending lead is dangerous to overly blasé Good Samaritans.†  Genghis, however, is basically very sweet natured whereas I refuse to take responsibility for any possibly violent reaction I might have to some ditzbrain trying to help me across the street.††

My back is better though.  I did talk to my homeopath about it††† and he prescribed something for stress, nothing to do with back pain per se . . . and suddenly I could pick up a dog bowl again without screaming or get out of bed ditto.  I mean, great, but also, siiiigh.  This is basically Book Stress and it’s not going away any time soon.  I haven’t had a new book yomping through the publishing wilderness in don’t-tell-me-how-many-I-don’t-want-to-remember years and this new one is, well . . . . Maybe I’ll tell you some other blog post.

Meanwhile I seem to have gone overboard on the footnotes again.  How did that happen??

* * *

* snarling.  Well, snarling may be optional for some people.  I snarl. 

** snarling

*** yet

† I fall down occasionally.^  Because I’m going slightly faster than I can in pursuit of said manic GWHP, hit my foot on some giant protruding garbanzo of Scottish stone or fissured walkway and I’m aaaaaaaairborne.  Briefly.  I am then lying on the pavement screaming F*** F*** F*** F***^^ while Genghis looks confused.  Come on, he’s saying, what are you doing down there, we’re hurtling.  I once had some perhaps slightly inebriated middle-aged gentleman extract himself from the doorway of the pub opposite where he was lounging in the pleasure of a fag^^^, and amble across the street to see if I needed helping up.  He was greeted with great enthusiasm by the GWHP, which got kind of interesting, because our current long extending lead has a nasty habit of sticking open instead of retracting^^^^ and the gentleman was having trouble figuring out what was coming at him from what direction.  And possibly why.  I did stop screaming F*** and started laughing, however, so his was not a totally unappreciated effort of rescue, although perhaps not in the manner planned.   

We don’t go down that street very often during pub hours, precisely because of the cloud of SMOKE we are likely to encounter, so I don’t know if said gentleman now ducks back inside if he sees us coming.  We are, unfortunately, highly recognisable.  Blokes are also often curiously averse to being laughed at.  Even in a good cause?  He was alone in the doorway;  I don’t think any of his buds saw our scene of entanglement.  And hey, fair play.  He was smirking more than a little at my horizontally appropriate language.

^  I don’t think this counts as weight-bearing exercise.  WHAM.  It should.

^^ I need a bad-language alternative-asterisk.  I can’t POSSIBLY get through a blog post without FOOTNOTES.  But bad language is also a thing in my life.  Ahem.

^^^ which fortunately he stubbed out in the repurposed+ spittoon the pub in question keeps by the door for smokers.  Pub culture.  Cigarettes and spittoons.  And dark sticky floors. And tobacco-yellow stained doorways.  Ewwwwww.  ++

+ I detest this word, just BTW.  I only use it when I’m being SARCASTIC.

++ Oh, and? This particular pub welcomes dogs.

^^^^ This one has been a diva from the day it came out of its box.  We are changing long-extending-lead brands when this one finishes kaputting its defective spring.  They’re too frelling frelling doodah frelling expensive to throw out idly, merely because yours is the one that got run over by the forklift and doesn’t work.+

+ RETURN it??  You ever try RETURNING anything to amazon?  Especially something you’ve actually taken out of its box and attempted to USE?  When I’m reading customer reviews—yes, I do read customer reviews;  if all the 1- and 2-stars say the same thing, I’m inclined to believe them, whether we’re talking murder mysteries or eggbeaters or embroidery floss, and I’m fascinated at the number of them that say ‘and so I returned it’.  Clearly there is some magical incantation I don’t know about slicing through all the hyperbolic nonsense amazon throws at you the moment you stop being a good little doofus and want to argue about something.  Or, perish forfend, return something.

†† Yes we should get out of town more, where falling on open ground hurts less and causes less blood loss.^

^ The worst thing+ about being chronologically a little old lady++ is the little old lady skin.  I’ve always had thin skin, but it’s getting RIDICULOUS, especially when one (a) is possibly a trifle clumsy (b) has a house full of STUFF so that basic activities like feeding the dog or making a cup of tea or going to bed are enlivened by the obstacle-course nature of all progress and (c) shares quarters with a GWHP who, at rising eight years old, still likes to play.  Those exuberantly waving forefeet are easily as perilous as a stooping roc’s talons.  I go through plasters+++ as if I owned shares in the plaster companies++++.  He particularly likes to play in the mornings, when we HAVEN’T DONE ANYTHING EXCITING IN HOURS AND HOURS, and when I’m vulnerable in my lightweight twirly dresses, which are usually not even sleeveless but possessing only little narrow shoulder straps, plus barefoot, and your average GWHP weighs about the same as a young Shire horse when he lands on you with, you know, purpose.  Mostly I mop the blood off my legs and figure a few more bloodstains on the insides of my jeans are no big,+++++ but I do tape up my arms.  I am at present displaying a bandage on my left forearm that looks like I blocked the attack of a crazed machete-wielding banshee.  No, just a passing gouge from a large whirling forepaw belonging to a resident GWHP.

+ so far

++ I’ve already said I’m NOT one, but I admit to looking over my shoulder more than I used to for what may be gaining on me.

+++ Band-Aids for my American readers.  I’ve mostly adapted to British slang# but ‘sticking plasters’ still makes me fall down laughing.

# As I know I told the old blog, and have probably already said here, living with Peter, who was not merely twenty-five years older than I but was himself old-fashioned, has made my everyday word usage a trifle eccentric.~  When, because Peter did, I caught myself absent-mindedly using the word wireless for radio—this would have been over twenty years ago and before the internet took over all our lives—I thought it was so funny I kept it.~~  Now of course there are whole world-wide-web regiments of scintillating ironies to calling, let’s say a radio, a wireless, that I’m certainly not going to give it up now.

~ When you add the rich little-changed American accent it becomes a whole new level of eccentric.

~~ Nobody has called a radio a wireless since approximately WWII, and it was out of date then.  It’s a radio, dummy!  Keep up!

++++ the latest personal first aid scam appears to be ecologically friendly plasters.  I’ve tried I think three brands so far?  They don’t work.  The bandage part comes off the sticky part or quietly disintegrates the first time it comes in contact with damp, like, for example, blood, the sticky part doesn’t stick except in gluey little clumps, and the fabric itself that the unsticky stickum is stuck to, shreds. partly because the edges are all flapping gaily because the sticky isn’t sticking.  I end up using micropore# tape to hold the whole shebang on, which I think is probably counterproductive on the ecological score.

# Since Word is objecting to ‘micropore’ I assume there’s an American word for it—although my Word is SUPPOSED to be set for British English it periodically has nervous lapses.  I only discovered micropore since I moved over here, so I have no idea what, if any, the American word is, and my search engine is not offering any alternatives

+++++ especially since more and more of my jeans have large colourful patches on them, and I back said patches with felt before I nail, I mean sew, them on.  Felt is very absorbent.  Someone tell me why all my jeans seem to be developing holes at the same time.

†††  Yes.  Homeopath.  Get used to it.

A New Low in Blog Content Is Reached

I’ve done my back in.  Somehow.  I think it’s done me in, I don’t think I had anything to do with it.  I can just about wiggle my fingers on a keyboard without screaming.  I expect to hear a giant exhalation of grim sympathy echoing across the networld at this admission.  How many people haven’t put their back out some time or other?   I am perhaps especially sulky because I don’t have back trouble any more, not in years and years, although the sheer lack of sleep the last three nights could explain any crankiness.  But my chronic (cranky-making) insomnia doesn’t hurt. 

I can no longer remember the order in which I took, as one might say, steps, toward muscular-skeletal harmony.  Unfortunately I think the important one was finally giving up high heels.  SIIIIIGH.  I realise you have immediately lost all respect for me and I agree that high heels as standard is, um, not in the best interests of yourself and good relations with your pelvis and your spine, let alone of walking quickly*, but I wore them for dress-up for many years** and because I am a silly person I’ve kept a few of my favourite pairs because they’re friends.***  But the point is I STOPPED HAVING BACK TROUBLE, FREAKING DINGBLAST IT, and I am not greeting its return with open arms.  Hey, raising my arms hurts. 

The (*&^%$£”!!!!!!!!!!!!! pain is the main thing, of course, but also the TACTICS involved in bearing a yelling, twanging, non-functional back?  I’m just about getting away with hurtling Genghis, although Genghis would tell you our walks the last few days are not the best he’s ever had, and there’s a lot of suppressed yelping going on from the human on the far end of the lead.  But let’s talk about feeding the dog?  His bowl is on the floor.  Um.  First you have to get down there to pick it up.  One hand on counter, one hand on stepstool, begin to lower rigidly upright body floorward.  Take third hand—I mean first hand—cautiously remove from counter and place on corresponding thigh.  Brace.  Bring knee matching second hand gently into contact with floor.  Pause to yelp.  Bring other knee to floor.  Gasp.  Now pick up the bowl??  And stand UP?  Are you JOKING?  And then fill bowl with food so it is now HEAVIER, and put it ON THE FLOOR FOR THE DOG?  Maybe there are worse things than having a dog that eats off the table.†

We will not discuss the insurmountable problems of, for example, getting dressed.  Catching your feet in the suddenly labyrinthine legs of your jeans.  The sheer impossibility of putting your shoes on.  Having somehow dragged socks on first.  Also my socks are in the bottom drawer.

I have to put the dustbins out tonight.  Wish me luck.

My back will get better.  It has to.

* * *

* That’s what CONVERSE ALL STARS were made for.

** I’m such a girl.  Peter derived a good deal of fun out of commenting on the difference between walking with me when we were out with the dogs at home in Hampshire, AKA Rampaging Across the Countryside, and tittuping down a London street toward the English National Opera or some goofy white-linen-tablecloth restaurant that had both good champagne and the leather-tongue French reds Peter loved.^  I got a certain amount of my own back however when I bought what Peter dubbed my French schoolgirl shoes, or rather boots, which were flat black leather lace-ups—there were freaking more tiny holes to thread your laces through than I have ever seen ANYWHERE else, they climbed halfway up your calves, seeking, and no doubt puzzled at the lack of, fastenings to a chastity belt—with a demure leather bead across the smoothly rounded toes.  French convent schoolgirl shoes, I think.  But I could WALK in them.  And then I found out that the long swirly skirts I favour UNDID THE BLASTED LACES when we were going at speed, which restarted both the spousal hilarity and the tittuping.^^  Arrrgh.

I think I’ve told you I’ve found a non-damaging and non-infuriating work-around, since my going-to-restaurants-and-live-theatre days are past, for my (girlie) affection for long swishy skirts?   That I started sleeping in dresses I could answer the door in because I live alone and can guarantee that any night I’ve stayed up particularly late there will be some gargleblasted delivery at 7 or 8 am the next morning?^^^  But this also means that every morning when I fall (crankily) out of bed^^^^ some cheering-up happens because I am wearing a long twirly dress and I can go on wearing it till I have to gird various body parts in sturdy denim to take Genghis out for his hurtle. Any legal method that makes mornings, and the prospect of all the stuff you should have done yesterday or last month that you aren’t going to get done today either, less appalling, is worth investing in.  I have quite a few long swirly dresses at this point.  All of them machine-washable, none of them having seen an iron since they were purchased, and all of which would probably get me stopped at the door of any white-linen restaurant.  Especially because I’m barefoot and wearing a lurid apron.

^ Ah those were the days.  Although I miss them less than you might think.  Live broadcast opera is great for those of us whose allergy to other human beings is increasing with age and things like global pandemics, and I really don’t miss the days after the nights before—it only takes about two glasses and an unwise hors d’oeuvre to do me in;  we’re not talking a gorge-fest here—but my first mouthful of Vieux Telegraphe I admit was a mind-blowing and transformative experience.

What I miss is Peter.  Going on eight years and counting.  Sigh.

call it agoraphobia if you wish.  But it’s not the marketplace, it’s the people.

I still have the (empty) bottle.  Of course.  You’re developing an understanding of why this four-bedroom-plus-attic house is JAMMED WITH STUFF?

^^ Yes I still have these shoes too.

^^^ While I admit that the missed deliveries, brain-exploding frustration and general mayhem of having no doorbell for about eight months wasn’t worth it, not being awakened by loud bonging noises four or five hours after you finally got into bed had its attractions.

I can’t remember if I’ve told you about the epic effort to find a doorbell that has more than one Bonging Unit?  Doorbells are wireless, these days, which is a good thing in theory, your electrician dorks around with the fancy stuff outside and then all you have to do is plug the bonging unit(s) into handy wall outlets inside.  Except most doorbell packages only come with one unit.  WHAT?  Lots of people live in houses that are more than one room AND have those remarkable heat-saving inventions, internal doors.  When I’m shut in the kitchen with a large snoring dog and the radio on I don’t hear a single bonging unit singing to itself in the hall.  If I’m asleep# with a pillow over my head## I don’t hear a single bonging unit singing in the kitchen, especially if that door is closed, which during the winter it most certainly is, so the Aga can get on with keeping my heating bills down, as she’s supposed to. 

My lovely electrician### had to fossick in dangerous professionals-only sites, where you had to know your Ohms from your Circuit Protective Conductors before they let you in, to find a two-unit gizmo.  So I now have a doorbell with two Bonging Units.  Yaay.  HOWEVER in this over-specified, choice-heavy world, where something doesn’t work in sixteen different ways#### instead of working in one way, you have eighty-nine choices of bong.  If any of them were amusing it would help, but they aren’t.=  They’re all either boring or migraine-instigating.  I have settled for the basic old-fashioned doorbell noise==. 

THE BUTTONS TO CHANGE YOUR RINGTONE ARE DOWN THE SIDE OF THE UNIT, SO YOU CAN’T POSSIBLY TOUCH IT, LET ALONE PICK IT UP, WITHOUT CHANGING YOUR FRELLING RINGTONE.  AND THEN YOU HAVE TO CLICK THROUGH THE EIGHTY-EIGHT OTHER CHOICES TO GET BACK TO YOURS.  SLOWLY.  BECAUSE EACH RINGTONE HAS TO GO GLEEP BEFORE YOU CAN FORGE ON TO THE NEXT ONE.  Did they hire a designer to come up with this plan?===

# or pretending to be asleep, which is likelier

## Ear plugs and eye masks make me hysterical with claustrophobia.  Pillow over my face, no problem.  Go figure.

### Out of all 1,000,000,000,000,000 workmen~ involved in the, as you might say, monumental renovations on this house, I think my electrician is the only one whose guts I don’t want on a plate.  Not least because he’s pretty much the only one who answers my phone calls now that I’m no longer a Big Client that he can expect to put his kids through college on the paid invoices of.~~

~ and yeah, I’m afraid I mean men. 

~~ possibly these statistics would be more favourable if not all of the work force were MEN??  Just sayin’.  And yes, I’d’ve hired women if I’d known of any who did joinery, plumbing, etc.  The backwoods of Scotland may conceivably be a little behind the times about this.  At least I hope this counts as behind the times.

#### I KEEP PUTTING OFF ANOTHER RANT ABOUT TECHNOLOGY BECAUSE I WILL MELT THE LAPTOP AND SCARE THE DOG.

= NOT AN IPHONE FAN, speaking of possessed-by-demons technology, but it does bark for a phone call and sound a hunting horn for Robin Hood when a text comes in.>

> When it’s in the mood, that is.  See:  all technology is possessed by demons.  It’s bad enough I’m a space cadet my own flesh-and-blood dingbat self, I regularly am not informed I have a phone call or a text because my iPhone doesn’t feel like telling me just then.@  It’s dyeing its eyelashes or something and doesn’t want its concentration disturbed.

@ or an email, because Outlook doesn’t feel like it.  ARRRRRRRRRRGH.  ::fights off almost overwhelming urge to rant about technology::

== I was reading—probably a silly murder mystery;  when the ME turns my brain to jello I mostly read murder mysteries—where someone says of mobile phones, ‘oh, everybody has old-dial-phones ringtones’.  What planet is this person living on?  I must have been reading fantasy and didn’t realise.  I don’t know ANYONE who has an old-fashioned landline ringtone on their mobile. >

> Okay, I admit, this is a statistically small sample, and probably somewhat skewed from the population in general.

=== Hey, good excuse not to dust the thing.  I’m always looking for good excuses not to dust things.  I’ll settle for bad excuses.

^^^^ WHAM.  Grace is not in my gift. 

*** It’s not anthropomorphising.  They’re shoes.  They’re also friends.^  And your point would be?

^ Also I never throw anything out.  Which is why the four bedrooms and attic of this house are JAMMED FULL.  See above.  Stuff that isn’t friends and is in good shape can go to charity shops.  Stuff that has Loyally Worn Itself Out in My Service is only going to get binned at a charity shop and it has earned a peaceful retirement.  Dusty, crowded and disorganised, but peaceful.  Some day I really have to get into the attic and . . .  

Plus empty wine bottles the draining of which marked important occasions.  I even remember what most of those occasions were.  These are mostly out on shelves.  Sometimes decorated with flowers, ribbons, dangling tchotchkes, etc.  

† But not very many.  We aren’t there yet.  At present I’m just white with muffled agony at every meal.  And I’ve told you that I hide treats around the house for him to find every day after lunch?^   The last few days they’re all at human waist level.  For some reason.  Fortunately he is a tall dog with a long neck.

^ SOME DAY I’m going, not only to ask Blogdad to teach me how to load a video on the blog, but to take notes so that I can still do it more than two minutes after he’s rung off, and then I will give you a video of Genghis in treat-hunting mode.  I don’t think it’s only the fond-owner thing that makes this, on occasion, very entertaining.  Yes, I know I promised you mere still photos of Genghis as soon as I was installed in my permanent Flying Piano home, and no, it hasn’t happened, and it won’t surprise you to know this isn’t Blogdad’s fault, although THE PERVERSITY OF TECHNOLOGY certainly comes into it.

It’s the fourth of July*

[OKAY SO IT’S THE FIFTH OF JULY BY THE TIME I GOT THIS POSTED. IT’S STILL THE FOURTH OF JULY TO ME. I STAY UP LATE.]

Which means it’s the anniversary of the death of William Byrd.  This year is the 400th anniversary, definitely worth celebrating with a fancy meal, outdoors if you prefer, and enough prosecco/beer/toasted marshmallows/raw organic 100% chocolate** to be willing, after excess consumption of same, to cluster round the piano/campfire and sing.*** 

Fireworks, however, are forbidden.  I have this dog.†  And I’m sure there’s a footnote somewhere in some scholarly article no one has read in ninety years except me, that says that Byrd HATED fireworks.††

Anybody who doesn’t like footnotes, look away now.

* * *

* I strongly object to it being July already—my brain is still stuck back in, oh, April or something—but at least the longest day is over with and we’re now shooting down the other side of the year.  Relief.  By October I’ll be complaining about the darkness^ but there’s a limit to the amount of sunlight the human body can withstand.  At least a human body that likes late nights and has trouble sleeping all and any time of year, especially when there’s a lot of frelling superfluous daylight around.  I live in one of these latter models.

^ the six weeks from about my birthday in mid-November to the beginning of January are definitely TOO DARK.

** I’ll leave you to guess where my vices lie.  Hint:  the very idea of marshmallows makes me feel faint, not in a good way, although toasting them is fun, especially if you have no intention of eating the result so if they melt off the stick before they get properly brown it doesn’t matter.  Although I’m sure the toxic pong of burning sugar is bad for you.

*** You really don’t want me at your party.  It’s not only the raw organic 100% chocolate, I never know the right songs.  At the moment I’m pretending to learn one by Steve Earle [sic] and one by Victor Herbert [sic].^  The Steve Earle one is harder because I apparently can’t get the sheet music???^^ and these country bozos are trickier than they look, this one’s full of weird intervals and I AM NOT VERY MUSICAL I JUST LIKE THE NOISE IT MAKES so I am driving myself round the twist just singing the freller over and over AND OVER AND OVER, slithering over the tortuous bits and then slithering over them again, because it’s the only choice I’ve got, and having now started I can’t stop, can I?  If I’d REALISED what I was getting myself into. . . .^^^

I have learnt many folk songs singing them over a few times!!  What is with this country music clamjamphrie!!^^^^

^ Well, maybe three.  Who doesn’t want to rant and rave as a mad gypsy?  But Jamie Barton, of whom I have been a maddened fan since she swept the board at Cardiff Singer of the World in 2013+, is playing Azucena++ at the Royal Opera House right now, Radio 3+++ broadcast it last Saturday and . . . SIIIIIIIIGH . . . there’s a limit to self delusion, and I may have reached it. . . .  Nah.  Hold on.  Give me a week.  Maybe a fortnight.  Stride la vampa is still up on the piano, and Marilyn Horne singing it is still bookmarked on the laptop and I’m REALLY GOOD at fantasy.

+ CARDIFF GAVE IT TO THE WRONG PERSON THIS YEAR.  Jamie was one of the previous-winner presenters and she chose correctly AND her colleague agreed with her# and I was, okay, good, the right person is going to get it, Jamie says so, and then The Right Person DIDN’T.  The Italian bass is fine, very nice voice, doodah doodah, but he didn’t break my heart, and [see #] did ##. . . . Hmmph.  And the GUARDIAN### agrees with Jamie and [unnamed colleague~].  The G columnist doesn’t quite come out and say THEY GAVE IT TO THE WRONG PERSON, but they do say SM had the week’s ‘most memorable voice.’  I’d put Beth Taylor in second place—not that I’m prejudiced by the fact that she’s Scottish or anything—and the Italian bass third.

# I HATE THE BBC WEB SITE.  HAAAAAATE.  Right at the moment I hate it because I’d like to give you the names of (a) Jamie’s previous-winner colleague AND (b) the name of the mezzo WHO SHOULD HAVE WON.  I think the latter is Siphokazi Molteno, this is painstakingly copied and pasted off some news site or other, but there are TWO South African mezzos this year, both of them with impossible-for-parochial-northern-hemisphere-Anglos names, but the Real Winner, if you’re poking around on line for verification, is the one who sang last, and she also sang one of my all-time favourite arias, Una Voce Poco Fa, and nailed the sucker, and I’m pretty proof against parvenus, I’ve heard millions of Una Voces in my long life and I’m like, go ahead, give me a cadenza I haven’t heard before, go on, try. 

## I don’t even remember what else she sang.  What I remember is that I was a little puddle on the floor and then she cracked into Una Voce as a finish and it was WHEEEEEEE.=

= It was prosecco and 100% raw organic chocolate

### Yes I read the GUARDIAN.  I am a wet knee-jerk liberal, and the GUARDIAN is way too moderate for me=, but it’s the best I can do.

= Except when they get into gratuitous America-bashing, which is a rant for another day.  Focus your ratblasted aim, jerkhead.  We’re not all Trump apologists.

~ all the sodding BBC site says is ‘celebrated figures from the opera world who give their expert commentary’ BLAH BLAH FREAKING BLAH.  And if BBC staff were in a hurry to get it up because live, it’s now nearly a frelling fortnight ago and they could blasted well update. 

++ From Il Trovatore.  Dooooo keep up.

+++ LOVE HATE RELATIONSHIP.   ARRRRRRRRRGH.  At least Radio 3 exists, and broadcasts stuff like the Cardiff Singer of the World and proper full length staged operas, mostly from the Met in New York and the Royal in London.  But then they do stuff like not bother to tell you who the finalist SINGERS are or whose commentary you were listening to for the Cardiff climax??#

# PS:  I dread the blasted Proms every year.  Two months of wildly self-congratulatory rubbish and no opera.~

~ I’m exaggerating.  A little.  Except about the dread.

^^ I’ve had sheet music to Copperhead Road forever, so it’s not that part of Steve’s good ole boy thing includes some kind of if-you-cain’t-feel-it-you-cain’t-sing-it to sheet music+.  Maybe somebody offered to publish paper music for dummies to Copperhead Road some time he was short of funds and he said oh well++, okay.

+ I wouldn’t necessarily disagree with this attitude.

++ I have no idea what the West Virginian for ‘oh well’ might be. 

^^^ If I’d realised, it would mean I am more musical than I am, in which case there wouldn’t have been a problem.+  Ergo.

+ If I were Mozart or Tchaikovsky I’d just write it down from listening to it.  I tell myself Mozart and Tchaikovsky would have been crap at writing fantasy.

^^^^ It’s TOTALLY worth having moved to Scotland for the vocabulary. 

† I have this shrieking, chandelier-dangling dog in the presence of fireworks.^

^ You’d think, after three years of living with me, he’d have kind of adjusted . . . ?

†† They were certainly around.  Apparently Eliz I’s dad made them popular?  One more thing to have against nasty Henry.

SFWA Grandmast . . . clunk

The SFWA doohickey arrived yesterday.  Trumpets and shouting.  This is the actual award itself, this massive great Perspex, or similar, thing with embedded planets and galaxies and my name on a plaque at the bottom.  It freaking WEIGHS.  I peeled it out of the box and, you know, it’s kind of a wow.  Modesty forbids me to say that it is a wow. 

This is the woman, after all, who keeps her Newbery Medal in its box and mostly forgets where she put it, and after many years of first staring at HP Lovecraft’s ugly face* looming over the World Fantasy Award and then at the unfortunately rather phallic shape of HP Lovecraft’s ugly head under the tea towel I’d thrown over it, when I was packing to move up here I levered the plaque with my name on it off the base of the thing and THREW THE REST OUT.  When the archaeologists** are squirrelling down through the layers of dreadfulness in our 20th and 21st century junkyards and rubbish heaps I imagine them falling back with cries of shock and dismay when their efforts reveal a perfectly-preserved plastic grey, blank-stary-eyed, head of HP Lovecraft.*** 

The plaque is somewhere.  Possibly in the back of the same drawer or shelf as the Newbery Medal.†  I am really REALLY pleased to win stuff.  I was really pleased to win one of the WFAs.  I’m not the only writer in the world who tends to obsess over the bad reviews—well, I don’t read reviews.  The good ones make me look nervously over my shoulder for the person they’re talking about and the bad ones make me miserable.  But I do read book mail, and while a lot of the things people write me about what I did wrong Does Not Compute††, being bashed still hurts even if you’re an involuntary stand in for someone else†††.  So winning awards does make you—me—feel as if I’m managing to tell my stories the way I meant—hoped—to tell them, at least for some of the people some of the time.‡  But the looking over my shoulder thing?  That’s why the Newbery lives in a drawer.  No, wait, I’m pretty sure it’s on the mantelpiece in my study.  In its unmarked box.  The WFA plaque . . . that is a bookmark somewhere.  Somewhere.  Have I mentioned that I have 1,000,000,000,000 books at last count?‡‡

Anyway.  Back to SFWA and the Grand Matriarchy.‡‡‡  I pulled it out of its box and smiled at it in what was undoubtedly a distastefully self satisfied way, but there was no one around to see, except Genghis, and he doesn’t mind when I’m being a prat.§  And held it up, thinking, this one I am going to put on a shelf at something like eye level—at least till I start getting embarrassed;  maybe I’ll hide it the next time I have the kind of house guests who find my peculiar approach to décor amusing and like to wander around looking at things—and noticed . . .

. . . one of the corners is broken.  AAAAAUGH.  And I had just been thinking, oh good, the statue-making plaque-stamping company spelled my name right.

I’m hoping there’s insurance or something and it can be mended?  I’m writing to SFWA to ask.  It’s only the bottom plinth thing, I don’t know if there’s a way to prise it off and then super-glue a new or mended plinth back on to the rest of it?  Because the broken bit is small but eye-catching.  I thought it might just be me and wounded vanity, but the first person I showed it to said, Oh, cool, that’s really ni—oh, no, the corner’s broken!

I would think this was the ghosts of some of the early classic guy winners rising up in patriarchal outrage, but surely they’ve kind of worn themselves out already over some of the other recent winners??  No, sadly, I think this is just my bad luck.

* * *

* Hideously modelled of some kind of greasy grey plastic:  whose idea was this?  It looks like a Gahan Wilson when he was having a really, really bad day.^  And this was the World Fantasy Award, not the World Icky Horror Award.^^

But this was also many years ago.  The WFA probably has a fabulous rearing dragon/chimera/manticore/basilisk/Frankenstein^^^/Bandersnatch/leviathan now, and anyone winning one can sell it on eBay for millions of pounds/dollars/euros/yen^^^^ and never have to work again.

^ If it is a Gahan Wilson, of whom I am a fan, I’m very sorry he was having a really, really bad day when he designed the WFA, um, statuette?  What do you call the thing? Besides ew?

^^ I’m an HP Lovecraft fan+, come to that, but I don’t want Arkham or Dunwich or the Colour Out of Space or their author looming at me from anything but a page of text I have voluntarily opened and can unequivocally close. 

+ with the standard caveats.  Lovecraft himself was a nasty piece of work, and it shows. 

^^^ the monster, of course.  The monster is the hero. 

^^^^ if it’s yen, it’s gazillions

** Possibly alien from a galaxy far, far away, after humanity put off dealing with global warming just that one more decade too long, and we melted.

*** The only question is how many of these they will find in tips all over the world where award-winning fantasy writers have lived and been creeped out.

† I do have the two Mythopoeic Award library lion statues out, facing each other at either end of the mantelpiece in the sitting room.^   One of them is mine, for SUNSHINE.  One of them is Peter’s, for THE ROPEMAKER.  Siiiiiiiiiiiigh. 

^ There are a MILLION things squashed between them of course.  This is not a household that believes in empty shelves.  And mantelpieces were made for tchotchkes.  Nu.#

# DIARY’s heroine uses Yiddish as a comfort thing.  In the process of writing it therefore Leo Rosten has become my new best friend and I find myself using more Yiddish than I used to.  As a comfort thing.

†† I will EVENTUALLY get a new/revised FAQ up on the new/revised web site.  At least one answer won’t have changed:  The question is, What single thing would most improve the quality of your life?  That readers would learn the DIFFERENCE between this book sucks dead bears and this book didn’t work for me.

††† Who presumably meant to be writing the book the reader wanted to read, and failed. 

‡ My WFA was for the anthology IMAGINARY LANDS however.  I’ve never done another anthology—of other people’s writing, I mean;  there was only one story of mine in it—because I am hopelessly disorganised.  Sigh.  I was then young and naive enough to think I might acquire necessary skills;  I liked the idea of putting together more anthologies.  But learning systematic and methodical and structured?  NO.  WRONG.  NOT WITH THIS STRANGELY WIRED BRAIN.  So in poor IL’s case it’s a good thing it only sold about six copies^ because figuring out everybody’s royalties would have killed me, if there had been any.

^ how many people are on the voting panel for the WFA?  That’s how many copies it sold

‡‡ And more arriving every day.  I mean, duh.  And while the Kindle is a great invention, I have 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 more books on that^, and I swear my iPad bulges out the back.  It could be that the lovely wooden stand it is propped up on is slightly warped, possibly from the amount of tea that’s been spilled over it in the last twenty years^^, but I prefer the idea that a megazillion ebooks stress all those chips and electronic neurons and whatevers and eventually they swell like arthritic joints^^^.

^^ random household tip:  green tea doesn’t stain wood.  It only barely stains even white cotton t shirts, and I’ve never—yet—had a problem washing it out.

^^^ Actually, no, I don’t.  Turmeric, green tea and no vegetables from the nightshade family.  This doesn’t work for everyone, but it works an absolute blinding golden charm for me.  I will have told you this story on the old blog:  when I hit menopause and all kinds of faecal matter hit the fan, one of the things that happened is that I started gaining weight.  I’ve always gained weight easily—I know I don’t look it, but this body goes to pieces really easily, starting with my knees, so I’ve been pretty fierce about staying thin—so I shifted over to tomato sauce—I don’t mean sugar-laden ketchup, I mean honest-to-goodness tomato sauce—as my condiment of choice.  Six months or so later I couldn’t close my hands when I got up in the morning and I was getting on towards not being able to close my hands on a bell rope at all, that being the era of my life when I was change ringing several times a week#, service ringing tends to happen in the morning, and my knees were starting to protest stairs, especially bell tower stairs, which tend to the steep and twisty.  I went into panic research mode, went off nightshades—tomatoes, potatoes, eggplant, peppers—and hey presto, my hands reverted almost immediately to bell rope friendly and my knees soon viewed stairs with equanimity again.  The turmeric and green tea started later, but the point is that I’m fifteen or so years older, and still swollen-painful-joint free.

# SIIIIIIIIGH.  Bell ringing is one of the things I really WANT to wedge back into my life one of these days.  Weeks.  Months.

‡‡‡ I’m so accustomed to calling it the Grand Matriarch that the Grand Master printed on the plaque is kind of a shock.

§ So long as the dog biscuits keep coming.