Robin McKinley's Blog, page 33

Zero Brain

 

That would be me.

I’ve told you that I’ve done that standard stupid human thing of getting through the crisis—in this case the immediate aftermath of Peter’s stroke—and then when everything else is beginning to find some tentative stability . . . going to pieces.  In my case of course the manifestation of disintegration is the multiply-blasted ME.  I’m just about getting the hellpack hurtled . . . and the rest of the day is horizontal, in spirit anyway.*  I’m getting out of bed at what is nearly a responsible adult hour in the moooooorning but it’s not doing me much good;  the first two or three hours are a blur, which means I’m still having trouble getting down to the mews before lunch to take Peter shopping.

At the moment I may have an hour or two around midday that are not too bad and then it’s all downhill again.  Yesterday I was already pretty marginal by the time I had to leave for service ring at Forza . . . so I didn’t go, telling myself that this should at least mean I could pull myself together enough to go to church last night.  Nope.**  By the time I would have had to leave to go to St Margaret’s I was definitely not safe behind the wheel of a car, not to mention the whole ‘sitting upright in a chair’ thing once I got there.

But today . . . today was my first voice lesson in a month.  I was not going to miss this if I had to yoke the hellpack to a sledge. . . .  Nah.  Wolfgang knows the way.  And a good thing too.

I’m paying for it now and I’m trying to make no plans about tomorrow.  But I’m still glad I went.  It’s been interesting, in that I-could-have-done-without-knowing-any-of-this-way, trying to sing, these last few weeks, the noise I make, or not, and the stuff I’m willing to have a go at and the stuff I’m not willing to have a go at—this latter is not about the technical difficulties, which are just technical, but the emotional ones:  I’m not in the mood to sing anything I’m going to have to inhabit.  Just doing warm-up today with Nadia tweaking and adjusting as she does, I could hear some of the last three weeks coming out.  So could Nadia, of course.  But . . . as I said to her, I wanted to come today because singing is good for morale, but also my voice wanted to come, because it knows she’s its friend and me, not so much, lately.  It’s very odd, this having a voice.  That even with the ME, once Nadia had found where I’d hidden the key to the jail cell and let my voice out, it was . . . there.

* * *

* Hellhounds are cool with a horizontal hellgoddess.  Hellterror not so much.  And she’s a lot easier to suppress on your lap than your chest.  She’s as big as you are, on your chest.  Eeep.^

^ Also she’s a solid little hellspawn.  When she bounces on you you know you’ve been bounced.+

+ . . . I’ve just wasted about fifteen minutes of my . . . well, zero-brain time can’t really be wasted because the implication is there’s something to waste.  Anyway there’s a series in the Sunday GUARDIAN, which is to say the OBSERVER, called ‘why it works’ and every Sunday there’s a photo of a celebrity and some member of staff does a more or less tongue-in-cheek run down of why the look ‘works’.  Generally speaking it never looks like a look to me;  mostly these people look like celebrities being more or less dorkily aware that someone is taking a photo of them and they’re celebrities so that’s why they’re wearing what they’re wearing, including if it looks like something they picked up at Oxfam five minutes ago.  Especially if it looks like something they picked up at Oxfam five minutes ago.

This week it’s Marc Jacobs.  People who don’t spend all their more or less spare time hurtling hellcritters and ringing bells may know who Marc Jacobs is.  I didn’t till just now when I was trying to find a link to the ‘why it works’ page.  Now that I know he’s a frelling clothing designer I realise that the ridiculous coat he’s wearing is actually a fabulously expensive designer creation and not a rather adorable piece of over the top kitsch.  I’d wear it—I’d’ve seized it instantly if I’d found it in Oxfam.  It’s fuzzy plush, like what stuffed animals for kiddies are made of—at least I hope it’s fuzzy plush and no real animals died for this—with rainbow stripes.  Cootchy-coo.

Anyway.  He’s walking his dog.  And his dog is a (standard not mini) BULL TERRIER.  YES.  And furthermore it’s a coloured bull terrier, not a white one.  Coloured.  Like someone we all know# and love, although I think Marc’s is brindle and white rather than tricolour.  And it’s strolling along with its head down looking away##, and the ha-ha funny why-it-works caption goes:  The dog.  ‘No pictures!’

NO.  WRONG.  If this dog ever finds out its photo was taken unawares, it will be crushed.  It will be devastated.  Bullies LIVE to play up to any opportunity that presents itself###.  And here was an opportunity and it MISSED IT??!  This bullie may feel itself obliged to hunt down this photographer and deliver a little lecture, with the famously evil, varminty little eyes shooting out laser beams and a certain shark-like smile much in evidence.

Oh, and Marc is carrying a little green bag of dog crap.  Yaay Marc.  Either that or a seriously ill-designed man-bag.  I prefer to think it’s dog crap.

# And some of us have the bruises to prove it.

## In what I admit is a rather un-bullie-like posture—maybe it had had a hard night sitting in celebrities’ laps and drinking champagne.

### And one had better present itself fairly regularly or the bullie in question will be forced to create one.  Ask me how I know this.

** When you’re choosing a church you don’t really think in terms of how often your frelling ME is going to prevent you from driving that far.  Although maybe you should.  The additional aggravator in this case is that St Radegund, from which I am two garden walls over at the cottage, also has an evening service but it’s earlier than St Margaret’s.  I’m still deluding myself I’m going to make it to my own church when St Radegund’s service starts.  Feh.

From house to home, Part 2 – guest post by rachel

 

This autumn we are having a house warming party. It counts as autumn because it is not yet December.* And it is the season of mists. My current mood could not be described as mellow, and there is a distinct lack of fruitfulness in the air. However, there is definitely going to be a party. To this end I have laid down the following requirements to PB.

There will be a large room in which our friends from the choir can sing show tunes. (The choir itself is of the principled unaccompanied variety which has a tendency to sing African liberation songs in four part harmony. I am of the firm belief that liberation would be much improved by a few show tunes. I understand that not everyone may agree with me on this point.)

There will be a place where people can eat, drink and be merry. Drinking, in this case, will mostly consist of the highly recommended Aldi Cremant de Jura plus anything people choose to bring. And possibly some champagne to libate with.

There will be a downstairs loo to ease the pressure on the single avocado bathroom that retains its 1970′s period charm.

Said downstairs loo will be functioning in the space under the stairs.  Yes, the one that leads to the large pile of rubble. Therefore, there also need to be steps to reach the aforesaid sanitary facility.

This is the hole that is going to be turned into a beautiful flight of steps.

On the left you can see the gap that was the old pantry.

This is the old pantry that is going to be the new loo. PB has lowered the floor to enable an upright posture.

He is currently placing stairs in the void.

There has been progress.

It is much darker for two reasons. Firstly, the photo was taken at night. Secondly, there is wall on the right-hand side. Wall! These things are very exciting, you know. It may be plyboard at the back of studding, but wait until you see what is on the other side of that wall.

You will observe that the old pipe which ran directly across the void in the first photograph has been replaced by a new shiny pipe running down the wall.  Said pipe bends into the loo to be. You may not fully appreciate that the invisible tap on said pipe was the only supply of running water in the house. It made filling the kettle a little challenging.

Now for the big reveal. The other side of the wall.

To start with, I will present a posed photo of PB considering what to do.  He is staring into a raised box which exists so that there will be the correct head space for the stairs in the basement.   https://www.dropbox.com/s/u061eiiwzapwv10/2013-08-03%2017.39.51.jpg

You will notice that there are several holes in the floor. There is an absence of ceilling. The fireplace in the back right has been opened out. Stuffing has been built to support the wall.

This is what is looked like when the wall was first put in.

Observe the fabulous socket boxes. The amazing plaster board. The way the floor goes from one end to another with no visible gaps. The lovely new pipes for the central heating.

Here is an even better photo.

It’s a kitchen cabinet. A real, honest kitchen cabinet. Assembled by me. Which is going to have pan drawers in it. I draw your attention to the very fine piece of wood on the top. This is reclaimed iroko. It used to be a school lab bench. There is a gas pipe going up the back of the plastered fireplace. At some point in the not too distant future there will be an oven in that space.  And what you may not fully appreciate is the floor.

That floor has been completed with reclaimed Victorian planks. It has been stripped back. It has had its cracks filled in with natural wood filler. It has been lovingly coated with two layers of natural oils and waxes. It is a thing of beauty.

The worktop was also, briefly, a thing of beauty. Here it is. Before a single hot pan, wet coffee mug or spilt water drop had fallen on it.

Being intelligent, dear readers, you will immediately realise that the reason no drop had yet fallen upon it is because the sink has no tap, the socket boxes have no covers, and the general scope for cooking is rather limited. But it is a worktop. Hand-rubbed by me with two coats of wood protector and two coats of top oil. In theory these will protect it from water drips. (Speaking with hindsight, it now has what is known in interior decorating circles as a “distressed” look.)

I think it was at this point that my daughter was about to start her new school and we had found some tenants to move into my current house. Who really wanted to move now, but were prepared to wait a couple of weeks until our new house was ready to move into. Time was pressing.

* * *

* Er well.  It wasn’t.

KES, 113

 

ONE HUNDRED THIRTEEN

“You’re kidding, right?” I said.

It only stood where it was with its sword half raised.  Or a quarter raised.  If it raised it any higher it would miss me completely.  Unfortunately it didn’t look like the kind of gigantic black killer thing that would go in for ineffective slayage.

Well.  This wasn’t how I’d planned to snuff it.  I had had the soft bed at a hundred and twenty option in mind—part of the plan being that life expectancy was going to boom by the time I started getting toward the end of it.  And here I’d been worrying about turning forty.  “Dear God and any saints or angels that might be good at this sort of thing,” I said out loud, and my voice may have quavered a little.  “If I’m about to die, which I think I am, please let me go out trying.”

My bare feet were freezing.  I might just fall down when the numbness crept up my legs far enough that they couldn’t hold me up any more.  And then the black thing wouldn’t have to bother with its sword.  It could just stomp me.  For that matter, why was it bothering with its sword?  It could just stomp me now.

But it went on standing motionless, holding its sword.  I was pretty sure it hadn’t turned to stone like that, like a troll in daylight.  I was ever so slightly grateful that what light there was was so dim I couldn’t feel the sword’s shadow lying across me, which it probably would be doing since confrontations with doom tended to have little symbolic touches like that.  I should know, I’ve written several.

This particular doom seemed to be waiting for me to do something.  Maybe it had a code of honor that said it couldn’t smush an enemy, however pathetic, until the enemy tried or pretended to fight back.  Maybe I could just stand here forever?  No, I’d get hungry.  And bored.  Maybe it was more fun to smush an enemy (however pathetic) if it was trying to fight back.  I was as sure as I was that the black thing (and its sword) hadn’t turned to stone that turning around and running away wouldn’t do me any good.  Aside from having no clue where I was or which way to run.  And that my feet were too cold for running and I hadn’t run barefoot on bare ground since I was about six.  This didn’t look like a good landscape to start with either.

I sighed.  I looked away and down (half hoping the black thing would smush me and get it over with) at my dangling arms.  At Silverheart, who knew what she was doing, although right at the moment she was half-lying at a completely useless angle with her tip buried in the dust.  I looked at the rose bracelet, who clearly knew what she was doing too although her sparkle was muted in this dull twilight.  The nightgown sleeve hadn’t survived the twelfth or two hundredth wallop the bracelet had turned away, so she was fully visible under the ragged edge.  She should have a name.  Maybe as my last action before I met my early doom I could name her.  Glosinda.  I’d always meant to name one of Flowerhair’s colleagues Glosinda:  Glosinda was going to be a good one, competent, clever and loyal, and they were going to be friends.

Oh well.

I didn’t even have my phone with me, to text a last message or two.  Probably no signal around here anyway.

Slowly—my muscles were strangely reluctant to bring on the final catastrophe—I pushed my shoulders back from their defeated slouch, straightened my spine, and prepared to lift Silverheart and Glosinda.  I needed a motto to shout, like Death or glory!, or Fortune favors the brave! —no, not a good choice in the circumstances.  Or Honi Soit Qui . . . whatever.  No, I’d stick to Let me go out trying.

I wanted to get a sweep going, like Watermelon Shoulders might have done, bringing my flimsy defences up to their ready position, as if I knew what their ready position was, but my efforts were more of a series of small uncertain jerks.  Unh.

And the black thing gave a kind of roar which I heard through my feet and my body more than my ears, and I thought the dingy twilight flickered, and the wind tossed and pulled at my hair and my ridiculous nightgown.  Flowerhair tended to go to bed with her long hair rebraided in case of midnight alarms, but it had never occurred to me that I might need to do the same.  Okay, maybe it would be a good thing if my hair blinded me at the salient moment and I didn’t see the final stroke coming.

But the salient moment was not yet.  I saw the thing raise its skyscraper sword and wheel it down at me, and it wasn’t only Silverheart and Glosinda:  I was putting everything I had into yanking them up to answer the impossible blow. . . .

Hellcritter follies

 

I took the hellhounds to Mauncester with us this morning* because the only errands I needed to run were to hellhound-friendly shops where they are much admired**.  I won’t say we had a good hurtle.  We had, by hellhound standards, a fabulous dawdle.  There are clearly too many dogs in Mauncester and EVERY FRELLING BRICK IS WORTHY OF INTENSE CANINE SCRUTINY.  EVERY SAPLING, EVERY GATEPOST, EVERY DUST MOTE.  ARRRRRRGH.  I WANT A HURTLE.  I’d settle for, you know, a walk.

Anyway.  We got home to the mews finally to a hellterror hanging from the ceiling of her crate*** like a square furry Dracula so, since the hellhounds were sated, I hurtled her back to the cottage because I wanted to get the indoor jungle outdoors for a few hours.†  It’s the hellhounds who usually go back to the cottage with me, both because the Off Lead Dog problem is least diabolical if you stick to the middle of town†† and also because hellhounds will GO LIE DOWN when so instructed and not follow me around and attempt to HELP when I’m trying to do things like ferry the indoor jungle outside, repot the frelling dahlia that is insisting on growing and start another load of washing.  Here, take this geranium and put it on the second step, okay?  And could you bring me a fresh bag of Perlite please?  AND STOP STEALING SOCKS.

It seemed unkind, she was so relishing being part of the action†††, to lock her up so I could mop the frelling cottage floor before we returned to the mews for lunch.  So I have that to look forward to as soon as I post here and go back to the cottage.  IT COULD JUST STOP RAINING SO MY BACK GARDEN AND THE ENTIRE SOUTH OF ENGLAND IS NOT A MUD BATH. . . .  And is inevitably (and squishily) tracked across a lot of kitchen floors.

* * *

* Morning!  Yes, morning!  You know, that thing that happens before noon and after the wee hours and, um, dawn, which this time of year happens even later than I want to stay up for.^  I admit there wasn’t a lot of morning left by the time I picked Peter up BUT IT WAS STILL MORNING.

^ Except after a Street Pastors night when I’m not sure but what dawn serves to remind me that the ordinary world is still there.  Maxine and I were talking about this last night while the long-timers were out of earshot:  here we are about to go descend on some innocent congregation and hold a Street Pastors pep rally+ and we’re still really both in the Early Gobsmacked stage.  We’re what?  We’re doing what?  If you stop to think/worry about it, all it is, practically speaking, is handing out lollipops and flipflops and hot chocolate—okay, and listening—but it is another world where we’re doing it++ and by putting on your logo—your God-armour—you’re kind of taking leave of this world before you enter that other one.+++  You need new skills—new ways to connect—and neither Maxine nor I really feel we’re getting much of a grip on this.  On New Year’s Eve she was watching Jonas engage with our target group the way I was watching Dominic—she was in one team and I was in the other—and thinking how does he do that?!  But Jonas and Dom have been doing this for three years and Maxine and I have been doing it for three months.#

+ Give me an S!  Give me a T!  —Pompoms optional and it’s been a lot of years since I did the splits.

++ ‘The nighttime economy’

+++ Of course all us practising Christians move serenely and gracefully through the ordinary world in perfect awareness of God at all times.  Of course.  There is never any bad language or any screaming or any dirty dishes in the sink.  And all our tulips are planted by the end of November.  This is why I turned Christian, you know?  Because I wanted to get all my tulips in by the end of November.  Ahem.

#Although the fact that I immediately manifested an entirely alien ability to catch strangers’ eyes, smile and say hello proves that the Holy Spirit has a foot in my door.  This made Maxine laugh, but then she has a normal job and deals with the public and has colleagues and so on.

** And no one says anything to me about the number of ribs on dramatic show.  In some cases because these are fellow sighthound people and they know.  As I was moaning to one woman (who has a Labrador/spaniel cross and a pointer puppy but her sister has skinny greyhounds) if the hellhounds were working lurchers in hard condition the ribs wouldn’t matter.  Pet dogs just look malnourished with their ribs sticking out.^

^ Note that they have eaten dinner.  We say nothing of supper to come.  Or what kind of a mood I’ll be in by the time I go to bed.+

+ SERENE of course.  PERFECTLY BALANCED in my awareness of God.~

~ BrgggglerreeeeeeeppppGAAAAAAARRRRGH.

*** She totally has prehensile paws.  I’ve told you about her putting her forelegs around your waist to hug you.  The current ritual is that last thing at night before I put her finally in her crate with more fooooooood she has a lap for as much time as I think I can get away with for random reading.  The moment I put my book down in preparation for putting her down, she sits up, wraps her forelegs around my neck  . . . and chews my face off.  This tickles something crazy.  She makes ridiculous noises while she is performing this liturgy and it is a good idea if I’ve got my earrings and my glasses off first.

† Hard frost last night, and the January sun has no strength to it so it takes forever to warm up in the morning.  In the MOOOOOORNING.

†† It’s not undiabolical, it’s just least.

††† BOING BOING BOING

Drums and trumpets . . .

 

. . .  I am taking the night off.*

However I don’t want to leave you entirely without reading material.  Those of you who follow me on Twitter will already know this because Stephanie Burgis, who writes funny, charming novels of her own,** and who nominated it, tweeted the news a few days ago.  But my editor sent me a link today so it must be true.  SHADOWS is on the short list for the Cybils award.

http://dadtalk.typepad.com/cybils/finalists/

SHADOWS is down there near the bottom under Speculative Fiction.  But read through the rest of the categories:  several of these books are going on my amazon wish list . . . or are already in one of the tottering health-and-safety threatening TBR piles scattered around the cottage.

* * *

* I think I got some sleep last night.  It was very disconcerting.  I hardly know how to behave.  But I thought I might try it again.  It might, you know, grow on me.  I might decide—whatever—that I liked it.

But I’ve just spent rather more of the evening than planned hanging out with the other St Margaret’s Street Pastors.  I’m not sure how we particularly have got stampeded into this^ but Llewellyn, our area head, is eager that local SPs go round to other local churches and talk about how wonderful SPing is and how they want to do it too.  And Jonas is all, why certainly.  Anyway we seem to have been nailed for our first gig and so we’re all making fish-mouths at each other and wondering what we say.

And I have to get up way too early tomorrow and take Peter to the big farmers’-and-miscellaneous street market in Mauncester.  New Arcadia has its own farmers’-and-miscellaneous market but it seems to be specially designed not to have any of the stuff we want.  The cheap beaded jewellery is actually pretty nice, but not weekly—the same with the hand-woven baskets—and the eighty-seven kinds of fudge in vibrant decorator colours^^—no thanks.

But the possibly-tentatively-eeeeep big news is that there may be a softening attitude among hellhounds toward food.  Don’t make any sudden gestures.  It might go away.

^ Actually I do know:  Jonas is relentless and he just assumes the rest of us will come along

^^ I can’t imagine what they use to get those colours.  Dulux?

** http://www.stephanieburgis.com/

Also:  http://robinmckinleysblog.com/2011/08/10/a-night-semi-off/

 

Bleeeaugh

 

The truth is I’m not doing very well.  We had both the speech therapist and Tabitha yesterday—note the we—and the speech therapist tired me out almost as much as she did Peter.*  I tottered after hellhounds and hellterror while Tabitha worked Peter over and admired the floods and the torn-up trees and the flattened fences in her neighbourhood** and then after she’d pummeled me it was one of those Wolfgang-knows-the-way journeys home again.  Sigh.  I didn’t make it to Fustian bell practise last night.  I barely made it off the sofa at the mews to go back to the cottage.  I didn’t make it to Forza bell practise tonight either.***

This is, I think, mostly the backlash from Peter’s stroke.  He’s getting better so I can afford to fall apart.†  Even people who don’t have ME may indulge in a spot of this behaviour under similar circumstances.††  Booooooring.†††

So maybe I’ll try that going-to-bed-early thing again.‡

Thank you all of you who have posted about book recs past.  I was looking over the list and thinking oh, wow, I remember that, and I was going to do . . . and . . . and. . . . Maybe this will inspire me.  And, speaking of personal inspiration:

Stephanie

I got Shadows for Christmas and finally had some time to read it this week. IT IS FABULOUS!!! I went to reread my favorite parts and sat there for another hour. Good work McKinley.

Thanks for the awesome story!

::Beams::  This is especially cheering on a day when the energy level is .05% of the live human average and there’s a monsoon out there that won’t go away.  Thank you.

* * *

* It was the knitting.  When you’re as stupid-fingered as I am knitting is hard.^

^ I missed the frelling chunky-yarn sale at one of my favourite on-line yarn stores from dithering and not noticing when the deadline was.  Bah.  I’m quite taken with the idea of knitting myself a large triangular navy-blue shawl/scarf in time for next New Year’s Eve when I may need it to Disguise My Logo—and the rest of the time it can wrap around my neck.  I want something fairly big-gauge—yarn that will play nicely with 6.5 mm to 8 mm needles—so it will knit FAST+—and I also like the bounce you get with big fat yarn.  But this does bring up the question of fibre.  It has to be something I can bear next to my skin, which means either merino or not wool.  But I like wool. I like the heft and the texture and the warm-when-wet.  The two yarns I have my eye on—which both have a bright friendly dark blue and both are from reputable yarn makers—one is 100% merino and the other is half merino and half acrylic.  Given that this scarf is likely to have a hard life do any of you people out there with EXPERIENCE have an opinion on what would survive better?  I’m a natural-fibres snob so my immediate impulse is the 100% merino, but I’ve wondered sometimes if, in my extremely limited experience, merino is all that tough.  Also, this is, you know, reasonably priced merino, so not top end, and I’m thinking about how cheap cotton is nasty and expensive cotton is often worth the added pop, even when it doesn’t call itself pima or anything snooty.  But then frelling acrylic varies in quality too. . . . Maybe I’ll just take a black plastic garbage bag next New Year’s Eve.

But if I’m going to do this I need to get started.++  It’s only eleven and three-quarters months till New Year’s Eve.  Now all I need is another chunky-yarn sale.+++

+ As fast goes, in my case.  But I’m going to be knitting my big square scarf on 4 mm needles for several years yet.

++ YAAAAAY another unfinished project YAAAAAAY.  One cardi, one jumper, two scarves, we’re not even going to mention the hellhound blanket(s)~ and do I have to count all the unseamed leg warmers?  I’ve finished knitting them.

~ Or the two or three items I’ve flatly given up on

+++ . . . and my fate is sealed.

** Although hellhounds and I went out to Warm Upford today, mostly because the monsoon backed off for a few hours^ and I’m getting claustrophobia about town walks, and it’s relatively unwrecked out that way.  Took the hellterror over the hill just outside this town however and we were scrambling over fallen trees and little landslips and sinking up to our knees in new mudholes.^^  The hellterror thought it was a fabulous adventure..^^^

^ Not many.  It’s out there eating the scenery again now.

^^ These jeans were clean this morning.

^^^ And had to keep pogo-sticking off my body to encourage me to share her enthusiasm.  Some of the mud on these jeans is recognisably pawprint shaped.

*** I will soon forget what Grandsire Triples or Stedman is.^

^ . . . Ah.  Hmmm.  This has possibilities.  Bob major?  Fie.  Cambridge minor?  Piffle.  . . . I could grow to like this.

† Learning to get down to the mews in time to take him shopping in the morning is very good for my character.  Or will be as soon as I learn it.

†† And the hellhounds not eating and not eating and going on not eating is not helping.  There’s only so much force-feeding you can perform before you get utterly demoralised.  Yes, I’m going to ring the (homeopathic) vet again.  It’s just that they usually cycle out of these spasms and this one is just going on and on and on.  But I’ve been reluctant to mess with the fact that what he gave them last time seems to have significantly improved the eliminatory aspect.  Can’t I have dogs that both eat and crap solid?  Is this too much to ask?^

^ The hellterror eats and craps solid (mostly).  I know it can be done.

††† Even more boring:  this frelling laptop may be dying.  Raphael is trying to get here tomorrow to perform either resuscitation or last rites, but the monsoon ate his car.

‡ Sleep is probably too much to ask, however, like the eating-and-crapping-solid.  But lying down is restful, right?  And I have MARCO AND THE BLADE OF NIGHT on Astarte.

Book rec: Marco’s Pendulum by Phil Rickman#

 

I haven’t been doing a lot of serious fiction reading* in the last few weeks.  Mostly I’ve been lunging for escapism.  Which in my case, if it isn’t Georgette Heyer, is probably fantasy.**  My goodness—or rather my badness—there’s a lot of pustulant rubbish out there.***

I’d slogged through a terrible amount of redolent garbage† before I decided to give myself a break with an author I already knew.  I think this is Rickman’s first book for pre-adults;  I’ve been devotedly reading his Merrily Watkins series since THE WINE OF ANGELS came out in ’98 †† and waiting for the next one I’ve read most of his other books too.  He writes ‘low’ fantasy:  it’s this world, but not as we know it, Jim.†††

Marco’s Pendulum is laid in Glastonbury, which is a promising beginning:  Rickman has done Glastonbury before and he’s very good on both the real presence of the place and the sometimes rather strange people it attracts.‡  Marco is a London teenager whose mum has just gone off on a business trip snarling over her shoulder at his dad . . . and his dad, who has a girlfriend to get back to, barely waits for his wife’s airplane to leave the ground before he’s hustling Marco down to Glastonbury to stay with his mum’s parents for the summer.  Whom Marco has never met.  Whom his mum never mentions.

Who may, possibly, be rather strange.  Or even very strange.

Rosa is also on to have a bad summer.  Her dad used to be a policeman, but he heard another call, and retrained to be a priest.  He’s been made curate in Glastonbury in the hopes that his old-fashioned copper instincts will make short work of the local lunatic fringe.  He is very, very definite that all that psychic woo-woo stuff is either imaginary or the work of the devil:  which means Rosa cannot tell him about the ghost monk she sees in her bedroom at night, or that she’s sure that something really awful happened in the empty shop under their flat:  something like, you know, black magic, maybe.

And then there are a bunch of dubious-looking businessmen who want to start up a seriously creepy theme park called Avalon World.  They say it will modernize Glastonbury, create jobs, boost tourism and generally enliven the economy.  But there’s something really wrong about these guys . . .

I thoroughly enjoyed MARCO’S PENDULUM.  It’s funny and exciting and first-rate escapism.  It turns out there’s another one—MARCO AND THE BLADE OF NIGHT.  I found the first one on one of those mostly-bogus Kindle sale pushes and bought it immediately for Rickman’s name.  I’m now going to go look for the second one.  And Rickman, unlike some others I could name‡‡, is good at series.  Maybe he’ll write a third.

* * *

# I’ve asked poor Blogmom to make a separate list of all the book recs that have appeared as blog posts.  Since I’ve only just begun to put ‘book rec’ in the title, she is having some difficulty finding the old ones.  Here is the list so far:

http://robinmckinleysblog.com/book-recommendations/

If anyone remembers any others—including guest posts—would you please tell us?  Blogmom suggested I put a separate thread in the forum for Missing Book Recs, which I will do.

Thanks.

* Knitting magazines and homeopathy, yes.  Henry James and Donna Tartt, no.

** Official fantasy.  Not that Georgette Heyer isn’t fantasy.

*** And the worst thing about ebooks?  You can’t throw them across the room.

† Ah the disadvantages of fame.  Forty years ago you could fit the entire genre on a few shelves.  I should know, I did.  And supposing E R Eddison didn’t make you run screaming, it was all pretty good stuff.

†† And I’ve been meaning for the last six years to do a Merrily Watkins round-up book rec for the blog. I’m still meaning to.

††† Not as most of us know it anyway.  I don’t want to generalise.

‡ Pause for GNASHING OF TEETH AND HOWLING.  The bloody Kindle app has EATEN ALL MY BOOKMARKS.  I have no idea.  It appears to have selected two excerpts entirely on its own initiative and the ones I chose have disappeared.  So no witty excerpts and scintillating one-liners to intrigue you.  Apologies.  Arrrrgh.

‡‡ Cough cough cough cough cough

Rain doesn’t begin to describe it

 

But first, a word from our sponsor:  YAAAAAAAAAAAAAY.  FRELLING HOLIDAY IS PAST.  IT IS DONE.  IT IS GONE.  FRESH BEAN SPROUTS IN OUR ORGANIC-GROCER DELIVERY TODAY.  Holidays are overrated.  I eat A LOT of fresh raw stuff, including a two-or-three-apples-a-day habit and raw bean sprouts in my lunch-salad or salad-lunch every day, that’s EVERY DAY, and I like a few fresh herbs too, okay?  And while the apples keep on, er, rolling, salad becomes BORING when this frelling winter holiday thing happens and you have to get by on turkey and Christmas pudding for WEEKS.*  I’ve been jonesing hard for bean sprouts.**  THE DROUGHT IS OVER.

. . . And how. The monsoon is back, with knobs on.  Literally:  We’ve had an artillery-barrage of hail at least twice today,  BANGITTY-BANGITTY-BANGITTY-BANGITTY-BANGITTY-BANGITTY, which I suppose could count as assisting in the winter garden tidy-up where if you’re a good gardener*** you cut a lot of stuff down† and put it on your compost heap, if any, or haul it off to the town compost heap and let them deal with it and sell it back to you next year.  My (untidied) garden is a lot shorter than it was this morning, and I am going to be CRANKY if the hail managed to cut down the hippeastrum buds—it’s monsoon temperature too, so the tropical jungle is all outdoors, including this Christmas’ hippeastrums which I, cough cough, didn’t get planted promptly cough cough cough.††  But as far as composting is concerned . . . I think what is happening in my back garden is more sort of an auto-mulch.

I managed to get the hellhounds hurtled relatively rain-free, barring the footpath, um, bridge over the ford on the far end of town, where the river was cruising at above Converse All Star level and the hellhounds and I clung to each other so we wouldn’t be washed downstream.  But the hellterror and I got hammered.  It’s been come and go all day and we left between black clouds, but that’s the best you can do, so you just wear your raincoat and hope.

Hope failed in this case.  The rain quickly became undesirably small-hard-fist-like and then the frelling hail started.  Hellterror and I took shelter on someone’s porch and watched the hail battering parked cars and the wind trying to pull more trees over.  Eventually when the hail went away to flatten some other town we made a dash for it through the teeming rain—hellterror kept trying to stop under something that ought to be shelter—why doesn’t this tree have a ROOF on it??—and we got home sodden and squelching.

Can we have some nice weather please?  I want to go bell-ringing tomorrow.

* * *

* I have found some chocolate mints that are . . . pretty good, although they aren’t what the old Green & Black’s was and is no more.  They have a serious drawback however which is that at my normal rate of (chocolate) consumption they would cost me TWO POUNDS A DAY.  I don’t think even I can face a fourteen-pound-a-week chocolate habit.  Moan.

** I know I could make my own.  But it requires counter space and all my kitchen counters are full of (a) interesting dog treats^ and (b) magazines^^.  When KES in hard copy and ebook form(s) earns me a million pounds I will put a conservatory with a scullery at one end on Third House and then I will grow my own fresh herbs and my own bean sprouts.

^ The poor hellterror’s training has fallen into a black hole the last few weeks.  Last night for the first time in too long I sat down on the floor with a handful of Interesting Dog Treats and she knew EXACTLY WHAT THAT MEANT.+ It’s a pity I was not prepared to take a video of a mini bull terrier trying to sit, lie down, stand and give me all four feet simultaneously.++

+  She was as excited as I was about the bean sprouts.

++ I had started trying to train her to roll over, but Southdowner had warned me this was liable to be somewhat intoxicating to the bullie personality so I had dialled down to trying to teach her dead dog.  Our dead dog last night was very unconvincing.

^^ Especially knitting.  I usually manage to throw the rest of them out when I’ve read them.  I admit the ‘when’ can be a problem.

*** Any good gardeners on this blog?  If so, shut up.  I don’t want to know.

† Leaving a few attractively architectural stands of this and that for the birds and hedgehogs^ and spiders and things.^^

^ I wish the triple-blasted hedgehog in the churchyard WOULD HURRY UP AND HIBERNATE.  And then maybe wake up in March with a yen for . . . Dorset.  Or Portugal.+  Hedgehogs are territorial, and this one is recognisably a small one, so I’m assuming it’s the same one.  The same stupid one who can’t seem to learn to hide behind a gravestone or a tree when he sees the hellhounds coming.  ARRRRRGH.  I’m also wondering why no one has yet called the cops one of these nights at one or two (or three) o’clock in the morning when some woman is screaming NO NO NO NO NO NO NO!!!!! in the churchyard.++  I guess they all think, oh, that’s Robin, yelling at her hellhounds again, and put pillows over their heads.+++  Chaos won’t pick up the little round ruffled-out thing, but Darkness will—delicately—but English hedgehog spines are nothing like the diabolical barbs that rhinoceros-sized Maine porcupines damage the local dog population with.  I don’t think there’s any harm done on either side here but the hedgehog can’t be enjoying it so why doesn’t it learn to AVOID these encounters?

+ Hey, it could stow away.

++ Sometimes I see it first and march us firmly past.  Sometimes I don’t see it first.

+++ This may be my urban background but I find it a little disturbing that no one has ever tried to find out what’s going on.

^^ Not bats, so far as I know.  They’re all in trees and hollow walls and belfries and similar.  But they probably eat some of the creepy-crawlies hanging out in your long grass.

†† Or the indoor hyacinths.  Cough.

From house to home, Part 1 – guest post by rachel

 

Last spring, the chap that I’d been seeing for five years and I decided to throw our lots in together. My lot includes a teenage daughter, a ginger cat and a small house. His lot included four large (mostly adult) sons, and a partially remodeled house in a place I didn’t want to live.

He is a jack of all trades. He can build, plaster and plumb. “Wonderful” I hear you cry “How fortunate you are”. Well, yes and no. The first problem is that he is a perfectionist, and has been known to remove someone else’s brick-laying and redo it to his own standards. This can occupy a great deal of time. The second problem is that because he can do it himself, he doesn’t like paying other people to do it. This may also take up a lot of time.

Anyway, we found a house that we could afford on my salary (the income of perfectionist builders being not as reliably high as you might hope) which we could afford because it had been lived in by an elderly lady and had no central heating.

Here is what the kitchen used to look like.

What you cannot see in this picture is the vinyl covered boarding behind the table, which conceals a vertiginous ladder leading down to the basement. Sadly I did not take a photo of this.

My PB (perfectionist builder) and I had enormous pleasure in sketching out redesigns. We could knock the wall through (the stripey one) into the room next door and create a fabulous kitchen diner.

This is what the room next door used to look like.

We could change the ladder down from the kitchen into some proper stairs and turn the basement into a wonderful workroom. Or perhaps even a small flat for one of the adult children.

We could put in a wood burner and a new chimney.

We could add solar heating to the roof.

We could…

Well. We bought the house. And PB went in and knocked the vinyl covered cladding down. And discovered that the existing electric wiring was copper encased in perished rubber and wrapped in lead. His first action therefore was to turn off all power to the house until he’d re-wired it.

Then he knocked down the wall between the two rooms and put in a supporting RSJ (I believe that stands for rolled steel joist). Inserting the RSJ took three large men and me. Two of the men were well over six foot tall. One of them was standing on the floor holding the RSJ up with his fingertips while it slid into place. The other stood on the scaffolding and bent down to the job.  I provided the soundtrack, inserting “Ah!” and “Oo-er!” at appropriate intervals.

(To be fair, I did help carry it over the garden wall and into the house. I supported an end.)

Here is a warning to anyone who is planning to have a wall knocked through. It is surprisingly quick to knock a wall down and insert a joist if everything has been properly prepared.  You get an immediate sense of achievement and a sense that things are really cracking along and the job will be finished quite quickly. It can take a very, very, very long time after that for the RSJ to be boxed, plastered and painted. For the damaged lath and plaster ceiling to be replaced with plasterboard, skimmed and painted. This of course, includes the time for the woodworm revealed in the newly exposed joists to be treated and many discussions as to the purpose of the odd bricks that were found in the gaps between the joists.

The next thing that happened was the digging out of the basement to put in the new stairs. We had hoped that there would not be much to dig out. In fact, there was quite a lot. Fortunately PB’s youngest son was persuaded that he could earn a reasonable wage by labouring over the summer before leaving for university. He dug. And nipped home to make coffee and check Facebook. And shovelled. And nipped home to play a quick half hour of an online computer game with his mates. And dug and shovelled and wheelbarrowed. And had a break to check his email.

Before he could even start on the digging, he had to remove the vinyl lining that had been applied to the basement walls to prevent damp. It hadn’t prevented it. It had contained it. The damp was flourishing behind the cladding, and beginning to creep out, rotting any timbers which touched it.

This photo shows the mound of rubble that was removed from where the stairs are going to be.

The dark patch on the wall to the left  is the amount that used to be underground. The gap in the floorboards on the right is the space where the old stairs used to be.

All the work had to be done around the large hole in the floor. PB, being over six foot, could still get down into the basement without stairs. I could not.

You can also note the long orange extension cable that leads from the basement: ­ the only safe electricity supply in the house.

We are planning a house warming party in a fortnight.

KES, 112

ONE HUNDRED TWELVE

. . . . And I was on the floor of the kitchen of Rose Manor, or anyway I thought that was where I was, because there were four sturdy legs surrounding me that looked very like those belonging to the table that stood in it.  I had a brief funk-ridden moment when I considered just staying there . . . but tentacles could reach under tables, and what if I found myself face to face with a short werewolf?  For an even briefer moment I thought one of the legs stamped, and fortunately there was no one to confess to that I was certain I heard something snort, like a stamping horse may snort, and thus reveal that I had definitively lost my mind.  I scrambled out—much hampered by my sword—and stood, waveringly, trying to see around three-hundred-and-sixty degrees at once for whatever was going to bite me, snatch me or lop my head off first.

The world was still roaring and the coils of darkness were still murking up the place.  Or maybe it was just me.  Where was Sid?  In present circumstances I could wish my dog were some color other than black, but at the same time I already couldn’t imagine her as anything other than exactly what she was.  Something on my right caught my eye and I saw Watermelon Shoulders bring his terrifying sword up in a way-too-smooth move like he did it all the time and—and—no—

—I looked away, my heart racing and my stomach turning over.  This used to be—this was supposed to have been my home, where now—

Another gesture caught my eye and I jerked toward it, both hands, as if obeying some rules of behavior they sure didn’t learn from me, reaching out in front of me, the sword at a defensive angle (have I mentioned recently that a sword weighs, it wasn’t just the funk that was making my right arm tremble so badly), my other forearm held up with the bracelet medallion turned out toward potential tentacles, werewolves, swords and other riffraff.  My poor house.  My house.  It took the opening of the hellmouth for me finally to take possession.  My house.  Where was the Slayer when you needed her?  But then that was pretty much what I was objecting to in the way Watermelon Shoulders was operating.  Slaying was so much messier when it wasn’t on prime time TV.   Where was Sid?

What I found myself facing made no sense to me at first, confused as I was by self-motivated darkness and being comprehensively and stupefyingly freaked out—so freaked out that I was hearing my kitchen table stamp its feet and snort.  There seemed to be a kind of kaleidoscopic explosion of black lines dangling in the air in front of me:  unless it was the spiky thing and a few rose-bushes.  If they were on my side I thought I could cope with walking rose-bushes.  Just give me a minute.  A biggish piece of jaggedy-edged darkness broke away from the tangle and became Sid.

But I didn’t have time to be relieved because something else came boiling out of the darkness—out and up.  And up.  And up.  It seemed to drag the rest of the darkness into itself as it grew;  it seemed to drag everything into itself  because by the time it had stopped growing everything else had disappeared—house, Sid, Watermelon Shoulders, spiky thing and rose-bushes, snorting table and Caedmon.  Everything but me in my pink nightgown.  And the sword in my hand and the bracelet on my wrist.

Nothingness was silent too.  There was the tiniest stir of air against my face;  that was all.  I looked away from the mountain of darkness long enough to glance around:  a bleak grey landscape, vaguely irregular against the grey horizon.  No trees.  No buildings—no lights.  It might have been twilight, but it didn’t look like a very healthy twilight.

I looked back at the black thing, the black thing that had sucked up all the darkness.  I hoped that was all it had swallowed.  Not my house.  Not Sid.  My arms were hanging at my sides;  the hands-out-in-front-of-me ready for action dance seemed a little silly in the circumstances, when I had to tip my head back till my neck creaked to see the top of the black thing.  The top was a narrower hummock in the centre of a long level line:  it might have been a neckless head on shoulders as wide as your average city block.

It stirred.  It became recognisable as a figure with two legs and two arms hanging from the city-block shoulders.  It seemed to bow its head to look down at me.  Hey, don’t mind me:  I have nothing you want.  Really.  The breeze against my face became a little stronger as if even the local wind wanted to get out of this character’s neighborhood.  I felt seriously underdressed in my nightgown.  Its hem flapped against my legs in the wind.  I shivered.

Slowly the thing raised its right arm.  It held a black sword half as long as Manhattan.