Robin McKinley's Blog, page 38

Other people’s off lead terriers and Milan Kundera

 

 

All right, this is not jolly upbeat blog tonight.  Anyone of a delicate sensibility, leave now.

While the following is not my malfeasance, it is malfeasance of a mind-boggling variety and I’m still brooding about what I should have done or what I could do if it happens again.  Hellhounds and I turned into the churchyard this morning behind an elderly gentleman and a terrier.  An off-lead terrier.  Hellhounds and I lingered to let this unwelcome pair get ahead of us.  Only a little smoke was coming out of my ears at this point.

As we strolled along the terrier . . . stopped and had a crap.  Gentleman was well in front paying no attention.  He turned back in time to see terrier finishing its crap . . . and began to turn away again.  I had just enough presence of mind to say, I hope you’re going to pick that up.  Oh yes, said this piece of walking faecal matter, I usually do, I just have to go get a bag, thank you! —cheerily.  And walked away.

I stood there I think literally with my mouth open, hellhounds waiting patiently beside me.  Fortunately the terrier was not mayhem-minded because I would have been in no shape to fend off barrage and foray.  Okay, what should I have done?  I did have enough time to have offered him a frelling bag out of my lavish store . . . and I didn’t (remember I had to make my feeble, as-usual-short-of-sleep mind up quickly) because I didn’t yet know what kind of a caprice the off-lead terrier might manifest, and Darkness is in one of his touchy moods lately.  I could have said, yo, you miserable stinking lice-brained toe-rag, pick that up with your bare hands if you have to, before I loose the forces of Darkness and Chaos on you.  I could have said, I want your name and address so I can frelling report you to the frelling dog warden.**

I did none of these things.  I stood there.  With my mouth open.  Till Mr Disease Bacterium toddled away with his terrier behind him.  And his terrier’s pile of fresh crap left farther and farther behind him.***

ARRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRGH.

People are amazing.  Not in a good way.

But speaking of dogs, as I so often am, a forum member recently put this in her tag line (if it’s tag line I mean):

“Dogs are our link to paradise. They don’t know evil or jealousy or discontent. To sit with a dog on a hillside on a glorious afternoon is to be back in Eden, where doing nothing was not boring–it was peace.” —Milan Kundera

Say what?  This was another mouth-open occasion.†  I copied and pasted this interesting remark several days ago to ponder upon.  Now I adore my assortment of furry catastropes and as a pleasant fantasy I can see this as a tag line but . . . has Kundera ever met a real dog?  They don’t know jealousy?  He can’t have lived with more than one dog and watched them knock each other out of the way for the petting hand or the bit of raw liver or the best place on the sofa.††  He’s never watched the established regime watch beady-eyed every scrap of attention and/or food the young interloper receives.†††  Dogs don’t know discontent?  Listen to the yelping and baying if you get home later than they were expecting you to take them for their next hurtle.  Darkness goes more for the enigmatic, but Chaos has a reproachful look that would melt case-hardened steel.‡  And evil?  Eh.  I belong to the love-wins camp of who God is.  Evil is evil, but it’s also ultimately transitory.‡‡  Although I agree that dogs don’t know evil.  They live in the moment—which is why they are such good company on a sunny hillside—but their focus is on themselves.  You are a means to an end.  Sure they love you.  You’re still a means to an end.  They cooperate with us and our weird ideas about leads and harnesses and coming when called and not eating garbage because we’ve made it worth their while.  We’ve spent forty thousand years breeding them to be dependent on us and to believe they like it that way.  They’re still mortal, and jealousy and discontent kind of go with the package as soon as your brain evolves beyond the medium-sized ganglion stage.

Maybe I’m not in a very good mood.

Maybe I should go sing.

* * *

* Sigh.  It would be the first footnote that I cut, and forgot that I cut.  I can’t face changing all the icons from the hysteria-prone WordPress window again.  Sorry about that.  THERE IS NO FIRST FOOTNOTE.

** Yes we do have one.  She’s overworked. She covers like half of Hampshire.  I went into this not long ago.

*** And if I see him again, what am I going to do?  Good question.  Since the terrier seems relatively harmless I can perhaps risk being somewhat . . . tenacious.  What I wonder, because the creep is clearly by his accent posh, and picking up dog crap is for the lower orders^, if I asked for his name would he give it to me?  How unplugged from reality is he?  Does he have any notion of social responsibility and/or guilt?  Or would he expect the dog warden to recognise his class superiority, pull her forelock, and go away?

I should call the cops.  Someone on the non-emergency line could at least tell me what my options are.

^ In which case he needs to bring his batman with him on terrier excursions.

† Although at least there’s no need to call the cops.  The asylum for people who are too sweet and hopeful and kind to live maybe.

†† He’s also never been at the animal shelter when someone brings in the previously-beloved family pet because it keeps trying to eat the baby.  Yes, that’s bad socialisation, but it’s also jealousy.

††† One of the few reliable ways of getting hellhounds to express an interest in food is to feed the hellterror.  Unfortunately the interest doesn’t last long enough to do much to improve calorie intake—but hellhounds are both there looking alert every time I bribe the hellterror into her crate with a handful of kibble, waiting for their, as it were, door prize of a square of fish jerky each.^  Which they do at least eat.

^   http://www.fish4dogs.com/Categories/Dog-Shop/treats.aspx

‡ Pav, who is on her side incandescent with jealousy of the hellhounds most of the time, specialises in screaming a wide variety of imprecations and hurling herself repeatedly against the door of her crate.  Or running up my leg like a banana-harvester up a tree with a particularly succulent bunch at the very top.

‡‡ Not nearly transitory enough however.  As too many of us know.

Singing and other things

 

 

It was not going to be a good day.  I didn’t get enough sleep and have been behaving like it.  I managed to catch the edge of the loaded breakfast kong on the edge of Pav’s crate, thus spraying the cottage kitchen with soggy kibble and wet tinned rabbit mince.  And then, bolting into the mews for an urgent pee, having been out hurtling and watching hellcritters pee* I unhooked my belt buckle** and with a sudden, sleep-deprived jerk . . . threw it in the loo.  Inadvertently.  Of course.  At least it was Monday morning and right after Peter’s cleaning person had been here:  it was a shining clean loo.***

Sigh.

I’ve also had a bad couple of days with the ratblasted ME and the hellhounds are only eating on alternate Thursdays when the moon is full.  When the moon is full, the proper sacrifices have been made, their paths have not been crossed by any black cats, hedgehogs, rabid snails or mad gypsy fortunetellers prone to throwing the wrong babies into the fire†, and they have not been put off by the unseemly delight of a hellterror disembowelling a kong.

But Nadia makes everything better.††  I won’t say I had the most brilliant voice lesson I have ever had today—I’m still too post-ME floppy—but I’m having lots more fun, now I have something more nearly resembling a voice to play with.

Bratsche

This is like being a real [music] student

Good golly, miss molly!! And gorblimey *@#&$(%&^ (drat is about all I really fill that in with, but asterisks look more menacing), YOU ARE A REAL STUDENT and have been for a VERY LONG TIME!!!!!

Feh.  I forgot you music teachers would be all over me for that remark.  It is difficult to take yourself seriously when you have no visible talent at something that there are Joyce DiDonatos out there doing at stratospheric professional level.  You can tell yourself you’re doing it because you enjoy it till you’re blue-with-spots in the face and that joy is important and fabulousness is not the only measure . . . but it’s still difficult.

I’m so glad you’ve been having and noticing progress with your voice! And I’m so glad everytime I read something about Nadia’s wonderful talent and helpfulness in getting you to find and use your voice.

A friend recently sent me an article from the NEW YORKER about Joyce DiDonato and I was completely riveted by descriptions both of her teacher and herself giving master classes:  so much of what is quoted is exactly what Nadia says.  Speaking of a teacher taking her students seriously, whether they’re ever going to do more than torture their dogs with their singing or not.  But this is clearly why I am making progress.  I have a good teacher.  ::Beams::

But, goodness gracious, as Blondviolinist and I have said many times, you are a perfectly wonderful student. If you lived in the States (or I in England) maybe I would badger you into wanting viola lessons . . .

Snork.  As a result of this frelling blog I now have several friends who play stringed instruments, and it’s like Oisin and his organ:  if I were thirteen and talented I’d be taking organ lessons—and lessons on something with strings, probably either a violin or viola.  I like both the size and the tone.  The bigger stuff and the stuff you mostly strum or pluck doesn’t appeal to me as much††† although I have the standard romantic crush on harps.

Nat

go on You Tube and find a couple of PROFESSIONALS I like singing it and PAY ATTENTION.

And then tell us which ones so we can hear what you’re aiming for!

It came down to a choice between DiDonato and Cecilia Bartoli—and to my own surprise Bartoli wins by a seven-league-boot stride.

Voi che sapete is such a cliché and every mezzo voice student in the known universe has to sing it—I assume because it’s not disastrously difficult technically and because the story line is fairly straightforward.  Even though it’s a trouser role, still, teenage [person] in love with every other teenage [person, possibly but not necessarily exclusively of the opposite gender] is a pretty obvious emotional arc that most of us can empathise with.  You don’t have to be a frelling philosopher to get into Cherubino.

But the very straightforwardness of it I think is maybe a slight trap for the unwary.  Or the ungifted or the clueless—but that shouldn’t include the professionals.  And it’s interesting, listening to rafts of professionals.  I didn’t hear a bad one, but I heard a lot that didn’t really have the fire in the belly that I would expect a teenage boy singing about love to have.  DiDonato is almost too lyrical for me:  too put together.  The passion is all planed and shiny smooth.  Bartoli, who in other repertoire sometimes eats too much scenery for my listening pleasure, gets Voi che sapete dead right for what I’m trying for—HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA—there’s fire in her/his belly and I’m not going to call it roughness, but as if the passion is going to break out occasionally, as she sings her beautiful accurate frelling professional line.

I suppose it’s also that I’m stuck with using what I’ve got:  and there are a lot of imperfect voices out there that can put stuff over.  I want to put it over.  I need role models that suggest a way to do this.  Bartoli gives me a little crack of light in the wall of my own . . . erm . . . limited competence.

blondviolinist

(And I want to watch those viola lessons! ) . . . Maybe I could disguise myself as a really large stack of sheet music. Or a double bass.

:: falls down laughing ::  Listen, you two, you’ve been hectoring me, in your kindly, well meant ways, for a long time now.  Come to England, and we’ll meet on a blasted heath somewhere and do something . . .  blogworthy‡‡‡.

Falwyn

Indeed, isn’t the Facing Down of Personal Demons exhausting? Reading this post was funny for me, because in my case I sing just fine (not great, by any stretch, but fine), but am lately facing similar issues – of fear about being heard, revealed, about speaking out – but mine are in re: writing. Sigh. 

I so hear you.  Nadia says over and over and over and over that singing is very revealing, that you have to get used to this.  I am, I guess, getting used to it, which is why I’m finally beginning to make a, you know, noise.

Writing is also very, very revealing.  But it’s revealing north by northwest:  as I’ve said probably with even greater frequency than Nadia reminds her students that singing is revealing, my readers know a lot about me:  they just don’t know what they know, because there’s no A equals B about it.  Even the blog is consciously and emphatically shaped.  But this is a rant for another night. . . .

* * *

* . . . every five feet because that’s the way critters are.  I was hoping hellhounds were unusually bad because they’re entire boys, but Pav, an entire girl, is nearly as bad.  Siiiiiiigh.  I’m an if-it-ain’t-broke-don’t-fix-it person and I don’t whack my critters’ bits out without a reason but going for a walk/hurtle without stopping every five feet for a pee sounds pretty attractive—none of my spayed girls were ever this obsessive.

But watching some critter take yet ANOTHER pee I often think of Calvin having to get up in the night after Hobbes has been evilly whispering sweet nothings in his ear about running water. . . .

** It’s made to come apart in two pieces, and the open-and-close half to detach from the leather strap

*** I do not have a cleaning person, and the loo at the cottage is never what you would want to call shining clean.

† Il Trovatore, okay?  I’ve been eyeing her aria again in my mezzo book.

†† As the mother of two small children, she would find this remark amusing.

††† Which is pretty funny, since up to two or three years ago I never really engaged with strings.  And then I had a Transformative Experience listening to one of those solo violin Bach things driving somewhere in Wolfgang and was so ravished I actually had to pull over to the side of the road and listen.  In hindsight I think this was a kind of practise version for the real Road to Damascus doohickey a year ago September—the Bach conversion was also pretty overwhelming and changed me.  Although one of the less usefully wonderful side effects was that pretty much everything I had or have composed or had a stab at composing since then has looked like trash.^  Sigh.  I’m having another go at setting a couple of lines from a favourite psalm. . . . Stay, erm, tuned.

^ This is not wholly Bach’s fault.  But sitting by the side of the road consciously, attentively listening to genius seems to be where it started.

‡ And probably embarrassing.

Dreaming Middle Earth

 

Bratsche

Do you dream Middle Earth, Robin, or is that just Kes? (If you’re willing to tell, of course.)

Yes.  Absolutely.  I was probably ‘dreaming’ the Shire before I got to the end of chapter one and it went with me when I went to bed.  I read LOTR for the first time at eleven, like Kes, and it immediately altered the entire shape and extent and bias and EVERYTHING of my mind and imagination.*  It was like adding dye to your rinse water:  suddenly all your white shirts are hot pink.  And will never be white again.**  And you become a different person, wearing pink shirts, when you used to wear white.  I really can’t exaggerate the effect reading LOTR had on me.  And I’m a very visual person, both awake and asleep.

Middle Earth is so irretrievably and inextricably mixed up with my mind and heart and life and memories that I can’t always be sure what is dream and what is memory—or what is dream-memory of Middle Earth.  You dream something enough and you develop a kind of belief in it:  I think before a year ago last September it was also my Dante and my Milton.   A lot of its landscape is as familiar as anything I’ve seen when I’m awake, and it’s mostly fairly consistent.  Also I’ve been dreaming it for fifty years.  [Note:  eeep.]  By sheer accumulation it’s a lot realer than some of my so-called real-life stuff.  And I’d much rather spend time there, even when there are Balrogs involved, than—oh—sitting in endlessly stalled traffic breathing exhaust and missing your appointment or discovering that your favourite dress in the universe has moth holes.

About questions I won’t answer:  when I used to talk to school groups a lot I used to tell them I’d answer almost anything but what I had for breakfast and what colour my typewriter was.***  The idea being that there are no stupid questions although there are a few irrelevant ones.†  I can usually put a spin on the ones that I consider to be invading my privacy;††  people have different ideas about where the lines are, and I don’t have a tattoo on my forehead that says PRIVACY FETISHIST.  A lot of mistakes are genuine:  even a hellgoddess knows this.

And I’ve relatively rarely been heckled.  It’s happened a few times, and very unpleasant it is—and I’ve also, a few times, had classrooms that were out to get me, but every one of those without exception I saw coming by the relationship of the kids with their teacher—but I don’t (much) write the kind of edgy, controversial, in your face stuff that attracts aggressive or splintery personalities.†††  My problem more often was the warm fuzzy patroniser:  the perfect stranger who would walk straight up to me (around a podium or signing table at a publisher’s booth as necessary), give me a hug, and tell me what a sweet little story BEAUTY is.  ARRRRRGH.

One additional reason why I am the snarling hellgoddess you see before you today is because of all those people warping me when I was a tender young author.  ‡

* * *

* This effect may have been exaggerated by the fact that it was happening in Japan.  I’ve told you this before of course.  My US Navy father was stationed there—this is the early sixties, less than twenty years after the end of WWII—and we lived on a ‘dependents’ base in a Tokyo suburb.  You don’t get a lot more alienated from your surroundings and apparent reality than being an immediately-identifiable kid belonging to the military-occupation gang, surrounded by a people and a culture who don’t want you there—and where by the shape of your eyes and the colour of your hair don’t belong.  Going native is only a limited option:  you can’t just go over the wall, borrow some clothes and hang out.  Japan itself looked very strange to me but—and I’ve told you this before too, but it’s also one of the major influences on my life and my storytelling so on a blog that only exists because I write books for a living it’s worth repeating—when I got back to America it looked strange and—alien.  Home was no longer home.

And I missed Japan, where I didn’t belong and never learnt to speak the language.  Speaking of dreaming:  I’ve dreamed of Japan all my life since we left too, and I guarantee it has as much to do with reality as the Shire does to the Worcestershire of Tolkien’s childhood.^

Lots of writers and other artistic types feel like rejects, oddballs, exiles and outcasts for one reason or another, and I was a dweeby, awkward kid and would have found my dork status quickly enough even if I’d been born and grown up in the same town and graduated from high school with the same class I’d started kindergarten with.  But I got to have the whole creative-doodah-stands-apart-from-society made manifest by being a Navy brat.  As the saying goes, if Tolkien hadn’t existed I’d’ve had to make him up.  I’m very glad I didn’t have to make him up.  I wouldn’t have done nearly such a good job.^^

^  My dreams of Middle Earth are, of course, dead accurate.

^^ Although there would have been more WOMEN.+

+ How frelling convenient is it that dwarf women are never seen?  And that there aren’t very many of them, and to outsiders they look just like the blokes?  Why didn’t Tolkien invent cloning and get it over with?  Or maybe they slam a couple of gems together and SHAZAAM!, new (male) dwarf?

** Which is a good thing.  White is a nightmare to keep white.^  Although I have no idea why I would necessarily think of this image in terms of hot pink.

^ At least if you spend a lot of time in the company of garden plants and hairy hellcritters.  And chocolate.

*** It’s been a very long time since I did a lot of school groups.

† I was also lucky.  No one ever asked me anything like ‘Have you ever had sex with a giant tortoise?’  That one is perhaps easy^.  But I also pretty much escaped any of those questions where the discernable pause before I said ‘no’ might have been suggestive.

^ No.

†† Where do you live?

In England.

††† Mostly.  I have referred occasionally to the fact that a few of my letters and emails are real snorters.  And it’s funny not-ha-ha what some people think is edgy and controversial and in your face.

‡ This is also one of the reasons I’m a bit testy about a certain attitude toward my first novel.  I know, I know, long-time blog readers have heard this all before.  The people who love BEAUTY because it’s sweet and who therefore (inevitably) think all the rest of my books are less sweet like this is a failing, FRELL ME OFF.  I know, I know, it’s just another demonstration of the ‘if you do something once successfully DO IT AGAIN AND AGAIN AND AGAIN AND AGAIN.’  This works pretty well with kicking footballs and making brownies.  IT DOESN’T WORK WITH STORY-TELLING.  NOT REAL STORY-TELLING.^

^ And please don’t remind me that some of those purveyors of the same frelling story, yea verily unto the ninety-sixth volume, are wealthy and I am not.  You win some and you lose some.

KES, 106

 

ONE HUNDRED SIX

When something struck me from behind I screamed.  “Lady!” said a strangely familiar voice.  “Thy sword!  Where is thy sword?  Fetch thy sword, thou hast need of it!”

“I haven’t got a sword!” I howled.  And I wouldn’t know what to do with one if I did.

“And thy wristlet,” went on the voice, inexorably.  “I left it for thee—there, I see it, tis on the table.  Put it on!”

If the owner of the voice could see the table, it—he—was doing better than I was.  I put the useless lamp down since the cord wouldn’t stretch far enough and blundered in the general direction of where I thought the table might have been before the world ended, and (of course) banged up against it.  Ow.  More bruises.  But at least it seemed to be the ordinary table I remembered. In the frenzy of the moment I decided it was better to put something presently on the table on me as instructed, whatever it was, so I patted over the nearly-invisible surface and found . . . a button.  No, wait, it was Sid’s pebble.  And the rose bracelet.  In the absence of anything likelier I slid the bracelet on.

Sid was still barking.  The universe was still roaring.

“Thy sword!” said the voice, sounding slightly desperate.  “We have little time!”

“I told you,” I said, sounding a good deal more desperate, “I haven’t got a sword!”

The voice made an inarticulate noise, of fury, frustration or—possibly—command, and there was yet another colossal bang, this time sounding like a dozen or so book boxes exploding across the floor.  I whirled in the direction of the noise and saw, abysmally clearly, through the open kitchen door, past the cellar door and into the front hall, the boxes by the (closed) front door scattering like rabbits from a sighthound and a gleaming silvery thing that was definitively not the frame of my Margaret Macdonald print emerge from the shadows behind where the stack of boxes had been.  It seemed to glitter with its own light.

It looked remarkably like a sword.  “Go!” said the voice, and something again struck me from behind, although this time it was identifiable as a shove in the direction of the glittering thing.  “What am I supposed to do with a sword?” I wailed.

“Grip it,” said the voice, Sid redoubled her barking—why wasn’t she paying any attention to the owner of the bullying voice?  As if she had bigger worries?—and behind me, in the direction the shove had come from, there was still another huge BANG . . . rather like, perhaps, a section of the back wall of Rose Manor disintegrating.  I plunged forward like someone falling downstairs and hadn’t quite finished losing my balance when I hit the wall next to the front door—and next to the, uh, sword.  Even more bruises.  I turned around, gasping, facing back the way I had come, and Sid was standing immediately in front of me, now barking at . . . an enormous black figure striding toward me, raising one arm holding another long silver gleaming thing that began to arc down toward us . . . no, toward my dog.

I grabbed my sword before I thought, hurled myself forward off the wall toward my opponent and interrupted the descending arc with my own blade.  Or at least that’s what I meant to be doing.  And the other blade bounced satisfactorily off mine, even though it nearly knocked me down in the process.  I threw the hand that wasn’t holding the sword up and back in an attempt to keep my balance—being right-handed, it was my left wrist I’d shoved the rose bracelet over, and when I saw the other sword swing round and come at me again much faster than I could move mine in response, I feebly brought my left arm down to protect my face. . . .

The other sword crashed into the bracelet, driving me to my knees.  The bracelet held against steel swung with intent—and erupted in a shower of sparks which pattered harmlessly, if somewhat alarmingly, off my skin, but where they struck my enemy, he screamed.  I knew he had been trying to kill me a second ago, but I still didn’t like hearing someone screaming with pain that I had (inadvertently) caused.  I screamed too, out of sheer overwhelming too-muchness.  My adversary reeled back, but finished the reel coming forward again—still, may I add, screaming, although it had mutated into more of a bellow—and raising his sword again, while I knelt there stupid with adrenaline and cluelessness.

But my black dog, invisible in the shadows, reared up from nowhere and sank her teeth in the sword arm reaching past her.  This dragged him off balance . . . at just the moment when another sword BLOOMED in the middle of his chest. . . .

And then I was really screaming, as the blood rocketed out, and he sank to his knees and then slumped to the floor.

 

Sunshine and Kes

 

It’s been a beautiful if cold late autumn/early winter day* and since you never know when the English weather is going suddenly to develop unending sleet for the next twelve weeks it seemed like a good idea to get everyone out for a Glorious Country Walk today.  Which would explain why I am shattered.   One of the rather expensive-in-other-ways aspects of no longer having a dog minder is that not only can I wedge in another Glorious Country Walk at a nonstandard time but I’m motivated to do so because with two shifts of critters seven days a week** it would be easy to go frelling nuts with only the standard local half-dozen hurtle possibilities.  I find that I’m using the poor hellterror as a kind of advance scouting party:  countryside we’ve fallen out of the habit of using in the last year, since the hellterror, and the second hurtle shift, arrived, I take her first, to look for new bad-tempered Mastiffs having moved into the neighbourhood.  Because I can pick her up.  And while you still get idiots who are brass-faced enough to tell you as their ****** dog is jumping all over you as you stand there with your critter in your arms that if you’d only put her DOWN you wouldn’t have a PROBLEM, generally speaking the owners of discourteous off-lead dogs are embarrassed if the frelling beast attacks you because you have uplifted your delicate little four-legged furry flower and are clutching her frantically you hope above drool and gnash level.***  Arrrrrrgh.

Hellhounds and I had a lovely extended hurtle out Jenny’s way and then farther into the sheepy hinterlands—you are slightly less likely to meet off-lead monsters in active sheep country.  Slightly.  I took Pav for a hurtle over a piece of ground I haven’t been to in yonks . . . and there appear to be no ill-natured Baskervilleans newly installed.  Excellent.  But it’s a longer stretch than I remembered and we were kind of each holding the other up by the time we got back to Wolfgang.  And this might explain why when I let Herself out of her crate after dinner to do her dangling-from-the-chandelier thing at the mews† she trotted around a bit, had an uncharacteristically mild go at a toy or two . . . and then came and nested . . . in EXACTLY the place I LEAST WANT HER.  I’ve been putting her long-down ‘bed’ to the other side of where I sit at the kitchen table with my computer because the side next to the bookshelves is also where all the wiring lives, the computer, the telephone, the electric fire, the glibberzinge.  And my knapsack(s) with their interesting ends of knitting yarn and lovely velvety-textural laptop sleeve and so on sticking out the tops sit leaning against the bookcase.

So that’s where she wants to curl up like a normal dog instead of a perpetual-motion hellterror and have a snooze.  Siiiiiiiigh.  She had quite fifteen more minutes of semi-structured pootling before I was going to make her long down.  And she went and frelling pre-empted me.  Here I am, with a nice quiet well-behaved dozing hellterror in the wrong place so when she woke up enough to ask for a lap, well, clearly this was the easy way out.††  Except of course that she takes up most of the space on the seat of the chair, because I need both hands free to type instead of holding a hellterror in place, and I am hanging by a thread and RATHER UNCOMFORTABLE.

It’ll keep me awake long enough to torture you a little in anticipation of tomorrow.

Vikkik

Aaaaargh!!!!

 Robin!! Did you HAVE to do that when I’m spending the night in a hotel room??

When I don’t sleep tonight I’m holding you responsible!

I dooooooo hope you aren’t in a hotel room tomorrow night.  Mwa hahahahahahaha.

EMoon

All RIGHT then…(glancing at the swords in the hall.) NOW we know where we are…(wondering where the dagger is. Yes, that one.)

Sigh.  I do have some weaponry:  I have a fencing sabre, which . . . well, it looks like something you take fencing lessons with, rather than something you repel burglars or Yog Sothoth or invaders from other dimensions with.  And I do have a Blue Sword, I’ve told you this story, haven’t I?  How it arrived in the post LOOKING like a sword, with a tactful little label on the obviously sword-shaped parcel-wrapping saying ‘ornamental arme’?  (It was from a friend who makes swords in France.)  But I envy you being able to say ‘glancing at the swords in the hall’.  And ‘wondering where the dagger is . . .’

So how much of this, I wonder, is because Kes has refused to call her agent back (unless I missed that episode somehow while traveling or something.) Or has whatsisface the ex-husband sent trouble after her because of those rosebushes? And do hobs who are happy with their new householders ever go stick a knife in an invader’s ankle?

I am under the impression, although I have often been wrong in stories past, that Mr Wolverine is being held in abeyance for future atrocities.  And I don’t actually think Gelasio is a villain.  He’s just some dork in midlife crisis with bad taste in relationship hopping.  Although I think possibly his second wife outclasses him as much as his first one does.  We shall see.  I hope.  Oh, and the hob!  Well . . . um . . . †††

Julia

Eeep! I know you are having fun with cliffhangers, but gosh! I don’t know how I’m going to wait a whole week to find out what happens next! You really weren’t kidding yesterday.

It’s only going to get worse, you know.  I may have mentioned that it’s only going to get worse?

Leeanne

I wish you many more years of terrorizing your readers with cliff-hangers!

Thank you!  Thank you very much!  Heh heh heh heh heh.

Kittispeaks

I’m really hoping KES comes out in a hard-copy version for off-screen reading..

So am I.

B_twin_1

I am now very glad that when KES is posted on the blog and I get to read it it is in daylight hours!!

Hmm.  Now that is something I hadn’t planned on.  Yo, Blogmom, is there any way to delay posting the blog in Australia till NIGHT TIME?  ‡

TheWoobDog

As for KES – where do I even begin to comment on this? The world is ending! Hoofbeats and candlelight and Sid barking (and Sid’s collar change)

Well observed.  Extra points.

and Caedmon rousing himself and Rose Manor shuddering and the driveway-rut universe descending and then… ?!?!?!?!

Yep.  Definitely ?!?!?!?!

In true hellgoddess form, that was a frelling ratbag of a cliffhanger!

Thank you!

Can’t wait til Saturday – will there be resolution? Will our heroine finally find herself irretrievably swallowed up by the alternate reality that has been shadowing her?

We-ell . . .

(I should just mention, by the way, that if Murac and all the scaries get horses, Kes better be given a magnificent, swift and sure-of-foot steed PDQ. Maybe Merry transforms into a glorious fleet-footed steed? I wonder if Caedmon will play an alternate-reality part? Protector, maybe? Although Sid seems to be covering that part pretty well…)

Hee hee hee hee hee . . .

AJLR

Halfway through the week now. Only 72 hours left until KES tightens the rack on us…

::falls down laughing::  Only twenty four hours now. . . . Is that the creak of rack-screws I hear—?

* * *

* Summer is in many ways to be preferred, because in the first place there are roses, and in the second place there is A LOT MORE DAYLIGHT^.  But there is nothing like the long golden afternoon light of this time of year, especially when you are fortunate enough to be watching it lying over countryside—Hampshire’s, for example—that is pretty fabulous to begin with.

^ You will observe I have my priorities clearly in order.  Even if perhaps the latter has a critical effect on the former.+

+ Note also that latitude has a lot to do with it.  You do get more sensitive to daylight, and lack of it, as you get older, and I was still relatively (!) young when I left Maine.  But the south of England, despite the friendlier climate#, is a LOT farther north and the swings of daylight-plus to daylight-minus are extreme.  My fantasy of the castle in Scotland didn’t founder so much on the standard questions of money and so on, but on the realisation that Scotland has even less daylight in the winter.  I don’t know how people in, oh, say, Lapland, or Barrow, Alaska bear it.

# Thank you, Gulf Stream, please don’t go away

** Which is twenty-eight hurtles a week, plus tiny round-the-block/churchyard/park sprints of about another two a day . . . this does not bear thinking about.  What a good thing my arithmetic is really bad.

*** Cough cough cough.  I like to think that it is a development of trust in my goddessy abilities that appears to make Pav enjoy these confrontations.

† The mews does not have chandeliers.  I have the chandelier(s).

†† Clever little ratbags, hellterrors.

††† Mwa hahahahahahaha.

‡ No, I’m not a nice person.  You knew that.

Sixteen November revisited continued

 

Bratsche

The dress with the extreme skirt is my favourite dress in the universe . . . the ninety-seven yards of skirt on my dress

Oh, pictures please? Pretty please! Even if it has moth holes, I’d still love to see your favorite dress, especially if it has ninety-seven yards of skirt!

Why don’t you come up and see me some time?

I realise I should post photos of me in it and I’m sure there are some but the only one I can lay my hands on easily is a lot better of me than the dress.*  Peter won’t touch my current camera because it has too many buttons** and I am not going to race upstairs and put the dress back on the next time a non-camera-phobic friend drops round.  So this will have to do.  It’s a very very fine wool—you’d need like .00001 needles if you were knitting it—and the bodice fits snugly and then the skirt drapes and swirls from the seam, including that fabulous deep V in the front, which is what really makes it.  ALSO THE SLEEVES ARE LONG ENOUGH.

Because I am a silly person I’ve left it sitting on the sofa.  It’s very like having a friend visiting, even if she can’t take a photo of herself.  Although I’ll have to put her away soon because in this weather the indoor greenhouse’s need is greater.

Mrs Redboots

. . . but you were so busy talking about the champagne that you forgot to tell us what you ate!

Not exactly forgot.  One gets a trifle shuffly-footed about what one puts on a public blog:  menus are like holiday photos, most people groan.  I had chicken liver pate because I always have foie gras or chicken liver pate any time it’s on offer, cod with lentils, and petit pois with bacon.  And a chocolate pudding.  Peter had onion soup and swordfish—yes and red wine:  the sommelier produced something that could cope—and wilted spinach, and then he sat there drinking coffee while I ate my pudding, although he helped me with the ice cream since I shouldn’t really eat any ice cream.

EMoon

. . . And that was supposed to have a paragraph suggesting that accessorizing the Doc Martens with painted roses and rhinestones might make it perfect for the dress. DUH.

I totally understood that!  No need to explain!  And I’m sure ANY regular reader of this forum ALSO understood immediately!  We’re a highly intuitive bunch!***

Diane in MN

I think it’s perfectly okay to be slow after a birthday celebration, especially one that included several glasses of champagne, which I find quite stealthy in producing its effects: a big red wine is up front about its alcohol content, but champagne seems so innocent until it isn’t. Hurtling hellhounds in heels must have had a few interesting moments.

Yes about champagne:  it’s all jolly and effervescent and it slides down so easily,† it can’t possibly hurt you.  Um.   Oh, and heavens, I changed my shoes before I took critters out—!!!

* * *

* Yes, it is from quite a few years ago.

** He’s right about this.

*** Also we’re mostly girls.  Girls make sideways leaps of topic, logic and network-iness with grace and aplomb.  Well . . . maybe not always grace and aplomb.  But we do it, and we think it’s normal.

† Especially when it’s very cold.  That was the other problem about Peter’s free glass:  you want to drink it while it’s still cold.  I won’t say I chugged two glasses of champagne on a nearly empty stomach, but they did go down pretty briskly.^

^ It’s probably just as well I didn’t get Astarte out and try to type anything.  Did I tell you we printed out, to have another look at, the beginning of GHOST WOLVES from . . . I forget, some restaurant celebration of yore.+  It foundered because we had no idea where we were going, and while Peter has written most of his books that way++ I tend to like to have some vague idea of what’s ahead, and this ridiculous attitude was holding up progress.  And I know some people collaborate easily but Peter and I each suffer from Minds of Our Own.+++  However we’ve now got a workable plot-idea, so all we have to do is . . . go out to eat a lot++++ and the typist must not have champagne.

+ http://robinmckinleysblog.com/2012/01/04/anniversary-2/

++ I would have sworn I’d told you the story that goes with the fabulous ending of Chapter One of YELLOW ROOM CONSPIRACY but I’m not finding it from ‘search’.  Here is the fabulous ending of Chapter One of YRC:

http://robinmckinleysblog.com/2012/12/09/hot-news/

The point is that this was the first Peter Dickinson book I read from the beginning of the beginning.  I must have told you this story . . . oh, maybe it’s back on lj.  Well, I’m not going there.  But when Peter and I decided to get married, I was in the final edit of DEERSKIN and I really REALLY wanted to get it finished before I blew up my life, and my ability to concentrate, by frelling packing everything up and frelling moving to England.  This ended up meaning that Peter lived in Blue Hill with me for about two months, and after he put up shelves and redesigned my garden# he needed something to do, so he borrowed my ancient manual portable typewriter and started YRC.  After a bit he gave me the first chapter.  I read it, gasped, and said, What happens next?

He replied:  I haven’t the least idea.

# Garden cough cough garden.  I didn’t start gardening till I moved over here and married a gardener.

+++ Yes, each of us has several minds of his/her own.

++++ Way too distracting, trying to do it over dinner at the mews.  Place is full of critters.  Also there’s a piano.  And books, some of them unread.

* * *

PS:  Yes, I know the caption is a misquote.  But it’s a misquote that has entered the language, and the original doesn’t work (say I).  And this ought to be a footnote, but I was already here in the WordPress admin window when I put the caption in, and I can’t face changing all the headings with WordPress having the screaming meemies, which it would.

 

Sixteen November, revisited

 

 

Mostly Peter. The magnificent peony bag is from Nina (and contains a SPARKLY scarf).

The thing that amuses me is that that flowered paper on the far right appeared three times this birthday:  people seem to think they know what I like.  They would be right about this.

I was going to post birthday photos yesterday and then frelling Niall and his frelling handbells intervened.  To put my tiny triumph into perspective, by the way, tonight at tower practise one of Forza’s good ringers was telling me excitedly that she’d rung her first full peal on twelve bells.  In the tower, this is, so she was only ringing one bell, but she was standing up for three and a half hours to do it and it was some infernal surprise method—I don’t think anyone bothers to ring anything but Infernal Surprise on higher numbers of bells—so while I don’t think she rings handbells, and I did tell her about my quarter, it was still like telling someone who’s just earned a place in the Horse of the Year show that you won your walk-trot class at the local gymkhana.

Anyway.  I wanted to get my NEW WATCH back from the jewellers before I posted photos:  I needed about nineteen links taken out of the massive wristband* but I wanted the blog photo of it ON MY WRIST.

Tah dah.

 

This is however slightly a lesson in ordering things on line.  As soon as I discovered that pink gold [plate] and rhinestones were in in wristwatches I stopped looking at anything else.  And as soon as I noticed this one had a day dial—I haven’t had a watch that told me the day of the week in decades, and I love having a watch that tells me what day it is:  us stay at home free lancers can be seriously pathetic that way**—I knew this was the one.  Also I love Roman numerals—Roman numerals and it tells me the day of the week??  And rhinestones?  Be still my heart.  I’ve never had anything half so fabulous.

And it is fabulous.  It also weighs four ounces—a quarter of a frelling pound—and is nearly half an inch thick.  I knew the face had to be big from the on line photo of everything that’s on it.  I did not know wearing it would feel like having a pendant hellterror dangling from that wrist at all times, or that I couldn’t ring [tower] bells in it because it would hook the rope.***  I feel that someone somewhere along the design line absent-mindedly added a zero on the dimensions;  and the giant-sized wristband is perfectly in keeping with the watch.  It was originally made perhaps for the Brobdingnag market, where pink and rhinestones did not go over.

But it is definitely fabulous.  And yes, those are rhinestones in the face as well as around the border:  the border ones only look pink because they’re reflecting the pink gold.

You will now see me coming any time I have my sleeves pushed up.

Oh, and my favourite silly present from a friend:

Hee hee hee hee.

In case I never find that blank needlework pillow I’m still covered. †    This is one of the other things that arrived in that rose paper in the first photo. . . .††

* * *

* This was part of my running-around day yesterday.  I also did thrilling things like buy vitamins.  And puppy toys.  There’s a very high rate of attrition in the puppy toy category.^

^ Ignorant, naïve people say to me, she’s not a puppy any more, she’s a year old!  Hollow laughter.  Whippets (and perforce whippet crosses) and bull terriers are apparently notorious for being slow maturers, but are there any dogs out there who are actually ADULT at a year old?  I’ve never met one.  I’m not planning to panic about the lifestyle of the adult bull terrier for at least another nine months.+

+ There is a fifteen-month-old puppy having a swell time with a bit of disintegrating sofa cover right now.  She has however earned it:  she long downed for AN HOUR with only occasional interventions.  I can even get out of my chair to pour myself another cup of peppermint tea without her immediately bouncing to her feet to follow me.#  Usually.  ##

# Because any excuse will do.

## And having spent 90% of that hour stiff with outrage/misery/disbelief/despair, despite the comfy nest of towels at my feet and the fact that all appearances to the contrary notwithstanding, if obliged by circumstance she is quite a good sleeper . . . upon release she spent ten minutes racketing around the house like an extra-large rhinoceros in a china shop . . . and is now completely crashed out on my lap, which practically speaking is a lot less comfy than the towel nest.

**  Handbells are quite a useful way of keeping track of the passage of the days however because of the texts from Niall.

*** If I wear it for ringing handbells my left arm will become twice as large and muscular as my right.  I suppose I could swap wrists to a carefully balanced schedule.

† Whoever said I’d have trouble finding one . . . you’re right.  WHY?  There must be other people out there who’d like to choose their own Words to Live By.

†† Bratsche, I’ll post a photo of my dress TOMORROW.^

^ If I forget, nag me.

 

Niall the Evil

 

I had another of my Stupid Bad Nights last night, which is to say that I got back to the cottage at a not-unreasonable hour as time goes with me and then got involved . . . in what I was reading* and in finding a certain item of tricolour wildlife absurdly charming and being reluctant to lock her up in her crate for the night when she’s being what passes in her case for good.**  So I got to bed stupidly late . . . and woke up stupidly early and plunged instantly into worry mode which is not only splendidly useful but SO ENJOYABLE.

Snarl.

So by the time I was staggering around with my eyes one-quarter open waiting for my extra-super diabolically*** dingdong† blaaaaaaaack tea to steep, turned my phone back on and checked for any missed texts telling me I would have won £1,000,000,000 if I’d responded by x o’clock which is now two hours ago, I already knew that I was going to be too tired to drive to Fustian tonight, let alone ring bells when I got there, let alone drive home again after.  I was due to have a relentlessly dashing-around day anyway, including a lot of driving, and it’s well within possibility that even if I were having a good day I wouldn’t have made it to Fustian tonight.

But I was in Ignoble Victim mode when I turned Pooka back on and while I did not find any YOU JUST MISSED £1,000,000,000 messages for which I am very grateful because they would not have improved my mood, I did find a text from Niall:  was I available for handbells this evening?

The correct answer is NO.  But I was in Ignoble Victim mode.  And Niall is local.  I texted back:  I’m tired and I have no brain.  What did you have in mind?

Niall replied:  It’s only Caitlin and me.  Maybe Colin.  Nothing too arduous.

I answered:  If you need the third so you can ring, okay.  But if Colin shows up I may go home early.

Niall said:  We need you!  Thanks!

I reiterated:  Remember:  I have no brain.

I then had my high-speed day.††

Hellhounds ate dinner so I proceeded to Niall’s in a slightly better mood than earlier.†††  Caitlin was late, so Niall and Penelope and I sat around talking about opera and chickens, and by the time Caitlin arrived I was feeling positively relaxed.  No more intelligent, but definitely more relaxed.

I picked up my bells.  Shall we start with bob minor? said Niall, all innocent.

The first touch disintegrated fairly quickly.  Not a big deal.  We started again.  This one went on.  And on.  We were ringing a lick and I’ve never learnt to be fast and since I spend most of my handbell time any more ringing for beginners to bounce off of I’m way too accustomed to ringing slowly.  I made a lot of dinky stumbles, any one of which could have blown the whole shebang if the other two hadn’t held fast, but I was TIRED and I had NO BRAIN.  I had TOLD Niall I had NO BRAIN.

Fifteen or so minutes in to this touch of bob minor I thought, that ratbag.  That ratbag.  He’s trying for a frelling quarter.

Two leads from the end Caitlin stumbled badly.  We had an entire lead of CLANG.  CRUNCH.‡  At this point I did not want to lose the thing and by golly I held my line while Niall performed a rescue operation on Caitlin.

Caitlin found her line again.

We got the blasted quarter.

I had to crawl to the sofa for a cup of sustaining rooibos tea and a slab of Penelope’s admirable banana cake.

And I am going to bed.  Now.‡‡

* * *

* Get away from me with that YA dystopian^ frelling novel, I don’t care how good it is.  But someone frelling sends you a copy and it sits on your shelf looking hopeful and . . . It’s always an interesting reading experience when you’re about equal parts irritated and absorbed.  This one is the beginning of a frelling series, so get away from me with that dangblatting YA dystopian novel several times.

^ I didn’t like dystopias even before they got fashionable.  And no, I don’t think any of my alt-mod novels count.  Sunshine’s, Jake’s and Maggie’s worlds are merely each screwed up in ways directly relating to the structure of that world.  Sunshine’s has Others, Jake’s has dragons and Maggie’s has cobeys.  They all have corrupt and/or clueless politicians and major thugs and losers in important decision-making positions.  Which would make them a lot like ours as well as each other’s.

** This is somewhat more enforceable when she’s in your lap, but I think I have told you that I tend to sit on a stool in the kitchen next to the Aga at the cottage, and the only way to keep her in place is to wedge her up against the kitchen counter and you still need at least one arm for support.  This limits your choice of reading material to things that lie flat and/or don’t need a lot of management.^  Last night’s tome was of the doorstop persuasion so the hellterror had to amuse herself by nesting in the dirty laundry and bouncing off the new, Perspex-refronted bookcase by the door.

^ Your critter-free hand up, how many of you out there bought ereaders because you live in a lap-based critter household?

*** Well, I am the hellgoddess.^

^ Yes.  Turning Christian does complicate matters.

† As in, this’ll kill any old mere witch.

†† The high speed was not, strictly speaking, entirely mine.  Wolfgang needed petrol so hellhounds and I drove out to Warm Upford and on the way back had the most colossal off-lead hurtle across some empty sheep fields.

††† After lunch, for example, which was not eaten, except by the hellterror, who would have been happy to make all those other bowls empty too, but I have a strange dislike of the idea of needing to tie a roller skate around her middle to carry her tummy.

‡ If kongs were made of metal, this is what the hellterror eating would sound like.

‡‡  Well . . . I do have an adorable hellterror in my lap at the minute. . . .

Semi-alive person

 

I don’t know why I’m quite this tired.  It can’t still be the champagne?*  It’s probably the Facing Down of Personal Demons which I do find quite extraordinarily tiring.  Monday voice lesson but I had a couple of shocks to the system this last week of the sort that don’t get on the blog which made my voice shut up shop and go into hiding . . . it’s been frustrating for the last two and a half years not to have any voice, but I don’t know but what it’s even more frustrating to have uncovered and then unshackled a little of a hitherto-unsuspected voice-like capacity and have it go away**.

I went in to Nadia today saying heeeelp meeeeeeeee . . . and she did.  But persuading your voice that it’s safe to come out means confronting whatever made it run away—and I do fear REALLY WELL.  Fear is a great closer-down.  Drat it.  Your body is your instrument, why didn’t I stick to the piano?***  Anyway I came away this afternoon after my lesson relatively well re-hooked-up and re-expanded into the necessary resonant spaces and the only reason I’m grousing on about this is that I have a thrilling new assignment!!!!  Regular readers may remember that Nadia forbid me to watch/listen to You Tube for anything I’m working on, because I might unconsciously pick up the way someone else sings it.  She knows that I listen a few times when I have just started something new—especially if it isn’t something I already know well from listening to other people singing it—but as soon as I’ve more or less got the tune down and am willing to risk relying on my piano playing [sic] I stop.

I have obediently followed these orders but I have also thought it was pretty funny since I’m not capable of trying to imitate someone’s delivery—just squeezing the notes out of this tight throat and making a little squeaking noise has been my limit.  Till recently.  Sort of.  In the first place, my ‘voice’ is still relative to no voice, not to Janet Baker or Joyce DiDonato.  In the second place, I’ve told you about the moving from the 14-hand pony to the 15.3-hand horse and having NO CONTROL.  At my best I can just about make a real noise.  Doing something with it—you know, that ominous word dynamics—is alligator wrestling.  I was going to say it was like teaching the hellterror long down or to sit still while raising her forefeet one after the other to have her harness put on . . . but in fact she’s a lot better at both these things† than I am about wrangling my voice into anything more complicated than trying to stay on pitch.  I’m not always successful even that far.  But . . . it’s coming.  Something is coming.

There is progress being made . . . even during weeks like this one.††  I’m singing Voi Che Sapete all the way through.  I’m only semi-mangling the Italian.†††  I’m mostly hitting the (right) notes.  And Nadia said that this week, give myself a couple of days for bedding myself back in, so to speak, after the deviations of last week, and then go on You Tube and find a couple of PROFESSIONALS I like singing it and PAY ATTENTION.‡

YAAAAAAAAY.  This is like being a real student, where you get to study the experts in your field of endeavour.

* * *

* Even if it were, it was still worth it.  But I’m just as glad we don’t do that every night.  I wonder sometimes, reading about the excesses of the courts of certain monarchs and similar, how did they stand it?  I don’t want to be the kind of peon who has to sleep with her chickens to stay warm, has chilblains nine months of the year and is always hungry . . . but I’ll rather be a peon with a duvet and the chickens in another room than one of the Sun King’s or Elizabeth I’s^ courtiers.  All those banquets.  All that chatting.  Dunno what life at Buckingham Palace is like now, but I bet there still aren’t enough green veg.

^ Although she was a famously bad eater, and didn’t drink alcohol because she didn’t want anyone getting the best of her while she was temporarily off her face.  Poor woman.  There’s always this extraordinary list of her physical ailments and semi-respectful speculation about what was really wrong with her.  How about STRESS??

** Like a hellhound going off his food.  Again.  Snarl.

*** And yes I do know that you do have to communicate something dangerously personal to be effective on any musical instrument^ . . . but it’s WORSE when the body of the instrument is you.

^ Indeed I had exactly the same problem on the piano

† I had one of those STUPID STUPID HOW MANY PUPPIES HAVE YOU HAD IN YOUR LIFE?? moments when I realised that consistently asking Pav for her left foot first made a tremendous difference.  I’ve known she was left-handed/pawed for MONTHS.

†† I am hoping that the exhaustion factor of Making a Real Noise when I sing will wear off.  I think it’s more Personal Demons again than literal muscular strength or physical stamina.  YAAAAAAAAH THEY CAN HEAR ME NOOOOOOOOOO.  Do people who were born with glorious resonant open voices that people gladly listen to still have to go through this nonsense?  Probably.  It’s probably just the aural version of keeping your great novel in a drawer/computer file because you can’t bring yourself to send it to a publisher/bodge it up on amazon.

††† I’ve more or less stopped singing l’alma avvampire instead of avvampar, for example.

‡ Especially to the Italian (ahem), and to what she referred to as the ‘late Baroque tidiness’ of the rhythm, which any of you Mozart fans out there will comprehend at once.  Ah, but can you sing it?^

^ No, neither can I.

The day after

 

I’m a little . . . slow today.  I almost never drink alcohol any more which means that when I do, um, the earth moves.  So to speak.  And I had three glasses of champagne last night:  my LIMIT is two.  Well it wasn’t my fault.  Peter barely drinks any more either, so we asked for one glass of champagne and one empty glass, in which we would decant a few mouthfuls so that he could toast me*.  They brought us two glasses of champagne and then made Peter’s complimentary when we explained they’d made a mistake.  Well I couldn’t waste it, could I?  The problem being that it was already there, and later on, when they came around and asked me if I wanted a second glass . . . the answer had to be yes, didn’t it?

This is why taxis were invented.  It’s also why we only go out seriously about twice a year.

I realised the enormity of my peril tottering out to the taxi, which involves stairs down from the restaurant door.**   So hellhounds got a rather brisker and more elaborate final hurtle than usual and I drank a double potful of peppermint tea.  And I don’t have anything tacky and vulgar like a headache today but I am . . . a little slow.  Although I nearly survived a touch of Stedman Triples on the two this afternoon.    I assumed we’d ring a plain course since I am even less safe on the two than the treble, and then frelling Frelling called a bob and I got through it and someone else went wrong.  Fine, I thought, it’s Sunday service, if we try again this time it will be a plain course.  NO.  WRONG.  And I got through two frelling affected bobs this time before . . . I came unglued making the bob and forgot to go in slow.  RATBAGS.  I ALMOST DID IT.  But even almost, when you’re talking about a touch of Stedman Triples for service and especially the day after your birthday when you’re feeling a little slow . . . is worth celebrating.

Or that’s my version.

 * * *

* Only toasts in champagne really count.  Even a good red wine is not an acceptable substitute^.  Anything but champagne is like ringing a false quarter [peal]^^.  Even if the method was flawlessly called and struck for the entire duration it doesn’t count and you don’t get to send it in to be published in THE RINGING WORLD.

^ Peter’s thing is big fat leathery Rhone wines, and when I still drank enough ever to be willing to waste a few alcoholic tokens on anything that wasn’t champagne I liked it too.

^^ You can ring a false peal but that doesn’t bear thinking about.  A quarter is only forty five minutes or thereabouts which I think is quite long enough AND I WANT IT TO COUNT.  A peal is three hours, frequently plus,+ and three-plus hours of intense concentration, not to mention the standing up and yanking on a rope part, and it doesn’t COUNT?  I would totally take up bungie jumping after a disaster like that.

+ I’ve said this before:  I don’t plan ever to attempt to ring a full peal:  I haven’t got the stamina.  Fortunately I don’t even want to.  It’s funny though, one woman’s manifestation of madness is another woman’s achievement and satisfaction.  I imagine there are a lot of peal ringers out there who would consider Street Pastoring a completely bonkers way of ruining your circadian rhythm.#

# The perils, speaking of perils, of being a Christian.  I’ve also told you that at St Margaret’s evening service, communion is passed around.  The priest starts the basket and the goblet at one end of the front row, and then that person turns and offers it to the next person, and so on.  But you break the bread for and offer the goblet to your neighbour, and you say a few words—these tend to vary but I think everyone says something—as you do it.   I don’t actually like this system;  communion is SERIOUS~ and I want a professional in charge, not us kittle cattle.  But the saying of a few words as you pass the wine is somewhat dependent on the bread having NOT instantly adhered to the roof of your mouth with a superglue-like tenacity.

Tonight it barnacled on like it was going for the Olympic gold in attachment.

Fortunately you’re not expected to mumble your words very loudly and of course I have a funny accent.

~ Although at least us Anglicans don’t have to believe in transubstantiation.  Brrrrrrrr.

~~ Although there may be something in the trans-something theory because I have noticed that all bread used for the Eucharist takes on an uncanny genius for cleaving valiantly to the roof of your mouth—the Wonder bread squares of my generic Protestant childhood, the standard tasteless church wafers and the somewhat variable productions of St Margaret’s.  I’m sure there’s an important theological point here.

**  Aggravated by the ninety-seven yards of skirt on my dress and the fact that my lady shoes did, in fact, have teeny-weeny heels, although everything has heels if you wear All Stars all the rest of your life.

The dress with the extreme skirt is my favourite dress in the universe and I haven’t worn it in two years because . . . the moths got it.  I won’t use standard laboratory-made toxic chemicals for anything if I can help it, partly for green reasons, partly because of the ME, and cedar oil does work against moths but you have to keep topping it up, and there are no balls in my life that I don’t take my eye off some time, and this includes the generously reapplying cedar oil to the animal fibres in the cottage attic ball.  It’s still my favourite dress, however, even with moth holes, and I finally thought FRELL it, it’s pretty dim in the restaurant and if we pay the bill who cares if the old dame’s dress had moth holes?  Very Ms. Havisham.    So I wore it.  And I was thinking, next time, Doc Martens and then it becomes a look, especially with my getting-on-toward-disintegration black leather jacket.  I’ll have a thoughtful stare at my All Stars shelves but I think for this purpose I need proper stomping boots.  I have some flowered Docs that I think might do the trick. . . .