Robin McKinley's Blog, page 41

Hastily

 

It’s frelling tipping it down out there—no, hurling, smashing it down.  Anyone who either lives here or likes following global weather will know that the south UK is in for a hammering tonight.  The weather guys are permanently twitchy since the seriously under-predicted storm of ’87 that pretty much took out the south of England* but they’re rolling out ‘worst storm since ’87’ warnings now, although maybe that’s only foolish young reporters who were still in grammar school in ’87.

The storm wasn’t supposed to start till later but I’ve just had an undesirably exciting time driving back from church** where there’s so much water on the roads in some places that you’re effectively fording, with a bow-wave higher than your bonnet/hood and the water showing a deplorable tendency to slash across your windscreen and there’s enough rain there already thank you.  And you’re white-knuckling the steering wheel, which wants to sashay with all that water slamming into the wheels, and KEEPING YOUR FOOT DOWN on the ‘go’ pedal because if you get water up your tailpipe you will stall and then you are there till someone with a tow-chain rescues you, which is not a good position to be in at the beginning of a major storm.

So I’m going back to the cottage early and posting what in my case passes for early and short here before I leave because I’m expecting the internet to go belly-up any moment, and probably at the cottage first.***  Very possibly followed by the electricity.  I should be able to find torches/flashlights, candles, oil lamps and matches in the dark but I am so not looking forward to trying to convince an assortment of hellcritters that these are the current conditions, and the sooner they get on with things the sooner we can all go back indoors.

I’m supposed to have my voice lesson tomorrow morning. . . .

* * *

* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Storm_of_1987

When I moved over here in ’91 it was still practically speaking recent because you can’t regrow old gardens and forests that fast.   I saw a lot of what it had done in Hampshire and Kent.^  And as the Wiki article tells you, that the meteorologists missed it has become a standard British joke.

^ And am in the process of remembering the storm itself, like I now remember the ’40s well as a result of being married to Peter.  The really weird thing is that I remember the American forties.

** Having had a pretty undesirably gusty drive to ring afternoon service at Forza with Wolfgang bucketing over the road like a cold-backed horse.^

^ The ringing wasn’t much better.  But for once it WASN’T ME.+  I held my line through most of my feeble repertoire of methods—there were only eight of us at full strength—while not everyone else successfully held theirs.  This might be more satisfying but in the first place it’s a lot more fun to ring in a good touch than a bad touch as well as less nerve wracking since there’s always the (in my case dreadfully justified) fear of someone falling off their line dragging you with them.  And in the second place you always feel crummy ringing badly for service, especially when it’s something the band ought to be able to ring, which it will be or you wouldn’t be trying to ring it for service.  AND IN THE THIRD PLACE while it wasn’t my fault, I’m an erratic enough ringer that things are more likely to go wrong—and less likely to recover—when I’m on a rope.  Good ringers can hold their rhythm as well as their line when other parts of the row are falling apart.  I can sometimes hold my rhythm on six bells just because I’VE BEEN DOING THIS FOR NEARLY A DECADE and most of that time has been on six bells.  On eight bells, forget it.  If the person I’m supposed to be passing or dodging with has drifted astray all I can do is go clang and look for my next victim, and hope that I’m not now so far out that we will fail to find each other too.  Sigh.  One so wants to be on the side of the angels, instead of the side of the bodgers—the side that finds itself using safety pins on its hems because it doesn’t have time to find a needle and thread, the side that finds itself making chocolate apple cake because it discovered after the shops had shut that it’s a little short of both chocolate and flour but it has lots of apples . . . the side that sets out to write a short story and finds itself writing a frelling trilogy.  I am a bodger through and through.

+ It wasn’t I, either.  This blog tends to be pretty colloquial.

*** I am so tired of living with wiring made of pipe cleaners and chewing gum.

KES, 102

 

ONE HUNDRED TWO

While the peppermint tea was steeping I ventured uneasily upstairs.  There was a closet on the ground floor with a toilet, half a sink and an extractor fan in it, but I wanted a real bath.  The bathroom was the size of an archery range and the bathtub was big enough for me and six friends.  You could wash your elephant in that bathtub.  I doubted that hot water was included in the rent.  Were there bathtub inserts, like the water-containing version of the insoles you put in a too-large pair of shoes?  Maybe I should just buy a small wading pool and set it up with a siphon next to the tub.  There was plenty of floor space.

The parlour looked like an explosion in a department store by the time I finally found a usable bath towel.  The ones in the bathroom linen cupboard were so worn they looked like cheesecloth and their original color could have been anything from fuchsia to that bad one out of space.  If it was the latter I was glad it had faded to imperceptible.

Sid found the prospect of a human being having a bath uninteresting, and retreated downstairs again.  The hob’s scrambled eggs had obviously been satisfactory:  the water was hot.  Once I was submerged I had to hold onto the sides of the bath:  my feet didn’t touch the far end.  I sang while I was in the bath too—the acoustics in an empty tiled room the size of a skating rink were not tremendously warm and friendly, but they were better than wondering if I could hear the madwoman in the attic who was only one flight of stairs away from the bathroom.  I put my nightgown on and a huge woolly sweater over it.  The sweater had been providing padding in one of the kitchen boxes.  It had begun life as Gelasio’s but he’d ceded ownership after about fifteen minutes:  purple wasn’t his color.  That was sixteen or seventeen years ago.  I had decided I could claim it as mine.  Even if I did have to roll the sleeves up.

I padded downstairs warm and clean and ready for peppermint tea and chocolate.  (Of course I’d found the chocolate.  That box had been very carefully labelled.)  Sid had made a large messy nest of all the discarded towels and other snuggly things in the middle of the parlour floor.  I was pretty sure she’d done some diving in open boxes on her own initiative.  “You are an evil, wicked dog,” I said.  She opened her one visible eye halfway and gave her tail an absent-minded thump.  All dogs do becoming one with the furniture with admirable conviction but there is nothing more emblematic of perfect, boneless relaxation than a stretched-out sighthound on a bed of her own devising.

I had to steal some of it back to make up our bed in front of Caedmon.  There were groans of protest but Sid followed me into the kitchen to see what I was doing with my spoils.  The bath had sufficiently restored my feet that I managed to finish pumping up the thrice-blasted air mattress (mostly) without too much more whining and snarling.  Then I had to figure out how to create a bedhead/wall equivalent so I could read in bed for a while before I turned the light out—without setting anything on fire, that is, since leaning against Caedmon would probably be ill-advised.  And yes, of course I had to read in bed for a while before I turned the light out.  Silly question.  But this meant there had to be a bedside light as well.  Hmm.

As someone who doesn’t deal well in three dimensions, my eventual construction was rather clever, if I do say so myself, consisting as it did of three of the four forbidding parlour chairs and a layer of book boxes between them and the wall.  I plugged my designated bedside lamp—which I’d found while looking for towels—in with a flourish, and set it on the bedside-table-facsimile chair.  It made a better table than it did a seat.

I had brought my dirty laundry downstairs.  I would tackle the cellar and the washing machine tomorrow but I unloaded the contents of my jeans pockets onto one of the empty shelves.  I paused when I got to the pebble.  What—?  Oh.  Sid’s pebble.  I’d drop it in one of the ruts in the driveway tomorrow too and let it do its infinitesimal best to prevent us from falling into another universe.  Tonight it could spend on the table, out where I could see it, to remind me that it had a purpose.

It was faintly shiny.  Mica or something, I thought vaguely, but this reminded me of other shiny things, and I groped for the bigger, bulgier pockets of my leather jacket, hanging on the back of the one remaining chair, and thrust my hand into the nearest and bulgiest.

Various. Or possibly variable.

 

 

Katinseattle

. . . It’s that communication problem again. . . . I thought the comment about engineering texts was funny. But I did feel dumb about my shock over the empty dish. Of course I knew the hob was there. . . .

It must have been good writing.

YES.  DEFINITELY.  IT WAS DEFINITELY THE GOOD WRITING.  Also may I say you’re reading it in the spirit in which it was intended.  If you give a story its head and let it run away with you, you will be surprised at the things the story wants you to be surprised about.  It doesn’t have to be a big surprised.  Just a little ‘you’re the boss’ surprised.  When you close the book (or the ereader-of-choice case) you think, why was I surprised about that?  Of course the villain was going to tie the hopelessly wet heroine-facsimile to the railroad tracks.  And of course her dishy true love is going to arrive in time and untie her . . . and whap the villain up longside the head while she’s at it, and then order her hopelessly wet girlfriend to take those frelling self-defense classes.  Of course.  You’d have seen it a mile away, if you hadn’t been letting the story have its way with you.  Which is a very nice thing in a reader.  Just by the way.

As for ‘seventy is the new fifty,’ a cousin blithely emailed that to me. A much younger cousin. I growled back at him, via email. I’ve spent seventy years growing up. I’ve left a number of difficulties behind and collected more that I’ll never leave behind. I want to now say, “I’m 70, I can’t/don’t want to/won’t do that anymore.” Don’t tell me now I have to wait another twenty years.

YES.  I COULDN’T AGREE MORE.*  Granted I’m only sixty (-one) but the principle has been manifesting itself in my life for some time.  I’m not crazy about the wrinkles and the horrible squidgy sagging skin—I’m especially not crazy about the skin, but I’ve had awful skin all my life**, why should it change for the better now—and the memory that makes a snapped rubber band look like the much-desired steel trap, and the stealthily accumulating assortment of aches and pains.  But they absolutely beat being young and clueless and having all those frelling mistakes yet to make.  Granted some people make fewer mistakes than others . . . some of us make LOTS AND LOTS MORE than others . . . but everybody makes some.  And I made a few that it’s worth being thirty or forty years older to be thirty or forty years away from.  And a lot of that thirty or forty years has been pretty interesting in its own right.

Nat

When I have ‘What the?’ moments, I just think, why SHOULD I expect to understand everything?

Everything?  I don’t want to understand everything because then I’d be God and I have enough trouble being responsible for three hellcritters.  I wouldn’t like reigning over all of creation at all.  But it would be nice to understand one or two things occasionally.  And I feel the labelling and signposting system could be expanded a good deal.

. . . BTW- are there publishing rules on having the same exact title as another author?

Ah yet another query about my life’s work that I can’t answer.  Generally speaking, however, no.  I imagine that if you named your book Qzhhgorgum because it was about a race of creatures called qzhhgorgum which you invented, you’d have some kind of copyright protection against someone else calling their book Qzhhgorgum:  the Doodah, or possibly even Qzzhhgorgim:  the Semi-Original, as well as the line of merchandise including the fuzzy earmuffs (qzhhgorgum have four ears) in a range of exciting decorator colours and the frying-pans with the specially adapted handles (qzhhgorgum have four fingers and four thumbs) and . . .

. . . Ahem.  But—still generally speaking—you’re going to avoid, if at all possible, having the same title as somebody’s else book for all the obvious sales and marketing reasons.  It happened to me once:  ROSE DAUGHTER started life as ROSE COTTAGE.  And then Mary Stewart came along in the same frelling year and from the same frelling publishing house.  I grant you that ROSE DAUGHTER is a much better title for my book*** than ROSE COTTAGE would have been, but at the time I was not at all happy when my publisher told me I had to change it.

Rachel

. . . I feel I need to stand up for linoleum. It is not anything to do with vinyl, but a wonderful floor covering made from naturally occurring substances. (The lino bit of the name is from linseed oil.)

I actually knew that about linseed oil.  But I didn’t google it first, and would have said if I were asked that it was probably one of those things that originally had linseed oil in it and the name was still being used, like ‘knitting wool’ may in fact be acrylic.  And I wouldn’t have been surprised if the linseed oil part was an urban myth and people who knew better fell down laughing if you said there was a floor covering with linseed oil in it.

 Its trendy new name is marmoleum.

. . . And I did not know it still existed.  I do know that my floor-installers got very huffy when I said lino, and insisted that theirs was the much superior . . . um, vinyl.

 Vinyl is a much easier material to install and is waterproof, but all the eco credentials are with lino.

Yes.  Sadly the vinyl pongs.  I want to believe that you stop smelling it not because human noses aren’t very good but because it stops off-gassing SOON after it fulfils its purpose and becomes a floor.

To find out more, can I recommend the fabulous linoleum museum at Kirkcaldy. (If you are not a lino fan, it also has an amazing collection of Scottish colourist paintings.)

Okay, now I am going to fall down laughing.  A small Scottish museum specialising in . . . lino and the Scottish Colourists.  I wonder if there’s a B&B in the area that takes hellcritters.  Several hellcritters.

Gwyn_sully

But I don’t like eating in a group and I resent being forced to do so…

Ah, my mistake. I misconstrued the problem. Preferring not to eat in groups is totally a different deal than dietary requirements. I can’t say for sure how I would deal with it, since we’ve always been upfront that dinner is part of what we do and I assume that people who don’t like to eat in groups join a group that is a better fit for them. . . .

It’s the Curse of the Talking Fingers thing again I think:  if we’d been speaking face to face we’d’ve had this sorted before we knew there was anything to sort.  I’ve never been a happy social eater but I’ve grown worse about eating in groups as I’ve got older and have less slack for making bad guesses about food—both what’s in it and if I’ll get away with eating it.  And I used to do a lot of cooking ESPECIALLY BAKING and I used to like feeding people, a select few at a time.  Any more, eh, well, putting together one of my gigantic mixing-bowl-ful lunch salads takes a surprising amount of time, even after Peter washes the lettuce.  Before I sound too pathetic, I miss communal food philosophically more than literally:  my life abhors a vacuum at least as passionately as Mother Nature ever did, and time that I might once have filled with baking brownies tends to silt up with other activities.†

There’s another thing to keep in mind:  I’m not at my best and brightest at (usually) mmph o’clock in the morning when I’m writing this thing and I hope none of you are at your best and brightest when you’re reading it and, if I’m lucky, making amusing/interesting/engaged comments on the forum.  It’s a blog.  It’s only a blog.  So we’re all going to misstate ourselves from not being awake yet/enough or because our minds are on the funny noise upstairs/the funny noise from the dog bed/whether or not to ask the cute cop for his phone number/whether or not to ask the cute cop for her phone number/etc.  It happens.  I hope we’ll all live.  Especially me, since odds are overwhelmingly that I screw up the most.

* * *

* Except about the good writing.  I agree even more about the good writing.

** Although if anyone had ever heard of dairy allergies forty-eight years ago I might have been able to miss out both the pizza-faced stage and a lot of by-the-time-I-figured-it-out, lifetime-established digestive mayhem, and focussed on the stunning variety of rogue rashes.  Yes I know I’m oversimplifying.

*** Thank you Peter

† Handbells, perhaps.  It was to laugh, tonight.  Gemma had brought her husband, who claims for some inexplicable reason to want to learn to ring handbells.  There were FIVE of us which was pretty amazing—especially wedged into my tiny cottage sitting-room—and trying to get five people properly rung in takes a while.  Niall finally had to leave in something of a hurry to go be ringing-master at the tower and didn’t have a chance to do his Diary Trick and browbeat all of us into another meeting.  The four of us remaining all sat around chatting^ instead of dutifully going along to tower practise. . . .  hee hee hee hee hee.

^ And eating brownies.  Just by the way.

Blondviolinist

Niall so has your number.

Yep.  I expect the insinuating texts to start up any minute.

I’ve been Nialled

 

The last few weeks . . . months . . . have not been splendid in every way.  You hear about most of the bloggable stuff*;  I assume it will not surprise you that quite a lot of screaming, throwing things and hiding under the bed happens off line and stays off line.  Arrrgh.  I also make periodic attempts to yank my life into something more nearly resembling order** which always involves . . . less.  Less doing stuff.  Less running around.  Less overbooking myself because there seems to be white space in the diary.***  Less signing up for new stuff.†  Less acquiring stuff.††  Less less less less less.†††

Feh.

However.  In the scrum of failing to become organised, things get lost.‡  I’ve barely been ringing handbells all summer.  Initially I had made a laudable attempt to cut back on how much handbell ringing I did, not least because it’s seriously brain-draining and I do need to reserve a few of my easily-tapped-out brains for other purposes:  earning a living, for example.  But cutting back on handbells went a bit wrong.  Colin kept frelling going on frelling holiday‡‡ and then Gemma kept going on holiday‡‡‡ and then, I don’t know, I lost the plot.  I had some ME days, I had various eruptions like Ms OTP, my dogminder quit/fired me, and the Street Pastor training was rather involving.

And then we rang handbells for that wedding on Saturday and I was thinking, eh, handbells, and I looked in my diary and there was a small timid handbells?, with a question mark after in this week’s diary for today.  Thursday is the Colin-and-Niall day:  Colin and Niall who can ring anything, or at least anything I’ve ever heard of.  So on Monday I texted Niall.  And for some reason he thought handbells on Thursday was a good idea.  And—even more amazing—Colin wasn’t on holiday.

I haven’t rung anything but frelling bob minor and some teaching-type methods in yonks and here was my opportunity.  I decided I had three options:  I could brush up on my St Clements, my Kent, or my Cambridge.§  I threw Cambridge out at once.  It’s way the hardest, although it’s also the one I’ve spent the most time trying to learn and I was nearly there when life started happening in a handbell-unfriendly way.  I was a little wistful about Cambridge but I was sure this was the right choice for starting up again.

That left St Clements, which is really only a bob minor variation§§, and Kent, which is kind of the gentle approach to Cambridge.§§§  It was going to be fine.  I half-knew them both already, I just had to drag that half-knowledge out of the shadows#, dust it off, and start sticking it to its other half.

Or halves.  And therein lies my TERRIBLE MISTAKE.  I didn’t look at them together.  I did not look at them in relation to each other—a method is a method;  it doesn’t matter what some other method is—and I therefore didn’t notice that the beginnings of these two methods are as if malignly meant to confuse the living doodah-whatsit out of you.  Can I explain this in a way a non-handbell-ringer will understand?##  Three people ring six bells.  Each row consists of all six bells ringing once each.  Each bell can move only one place from one row of six to the next row of six.  So if in row one you rang in thirds and fourths place, your third-place bell can ONLY ring in either second or fourths next row and your fourth-place bell can ONLY ring in either thirds or fifths.  Or stay in the same place, which is also permitted.

I’m ringing the trebles, the first pair, which are the easiest pair in most ordinary methods because the no.1 bell has the easiest path through the method, so when you start ringing touches where the pattern gets messed up by the conductor’s calls, only your second bell is affected.  The first bell toils on doing what it always does and never mind how explosive the other five may become.

The problem for me was the first frelling leads of Kent and St Clements are like the evil antipathetic twins of each other.  Like that extremely subtle Star Trek The Original episode where these two guys really hate each other because one of them is black down the right side and white down the left and the other one is black down the left side and white down the right.  Kent is a treble-bobbing method which means the treble has a different basic unaffected line through the diagram than St Clements does.  And furthermore bell no.2 in both methods hangs around the front for a long time before it heads out to the back, but in St Clements its location in the row goes: 1-2-1-2-1-2-1-2 and in Kent it goes 1-1-2-2-1-1-2-2-1-1-2-2.

Okay, you have no idea what I’m talking about.  Let me be succinct:  AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAUGH.

By the time Colin and Niall arrived this afternoon I couldn’t ring anything.

But by the end of the afternoon I was ringing little tiny, and perhaps somewhat lumpy, TOUCHES of St Clements.  We even essayed a small bit of spliced, which is where you change frelling METHODS in the middle of a touch, and we did not crash and burn, which is to say I did not crash and burn.

It was fun.

Whereupon Niall got his diary out and said, well, we can ring major [eight bells] tomorrow, because Gemma and Jillian are both available.

I can’t do tomorrow, I said.

Can we meet here again? said Niall, staring at his diary.

I told Gemma at tower practise on Wednesday that I couldn’t do this Friday, I said.

I’ll text her, said Niall.  We start at 5:30, okay?

I thought about it.  When I cut back on my handbells, I said I was going to ring only once a week.  If I rang Thursday, I wasn’t going to ring Friday.  This Friday . . . I was supposed to go to a dog show.  Southdowner is still trying to convince me that it would be fun to take the hellterror to some breed classes.###

But I can’t go because I don’t have a dogminder to cosset hellhounds in my absence.

Okay, I said.  Five-thirty.

Niall smiled.  Evilly.

* * *

* Occasionally there’s so frelling much of it I don’t get around to all of it.

** Not very nearly resembling order.  In fact not nearly at all.  Just slightly resembling order.

*** Very misleading, white space in the diary.

† First Street Pastors duty night in a fortnight.  Eeep.

†† Fewer hellcritters, say.  Oops^.

^ And we’re not even going to discuss bookshelves.

††† More sleep would be nice however.   Which is to say when I manage to be in bed with the lights out and my eyes shut I should be ASLEEP.

‡ Just had an email from Merrilee reminding me of something I’d promised for a fortnight ago.  Something on deadline.  AAAAAAAUGH.  I don’t even remember which catastrophe derailed this, I emailed to her.  I know, she replied.  That’s why I’m here.

‡‡ What did he think it was, summer?  What did he think he was, retired?

‡‡‡ Who did she think she is?  A woman with a big family she wants to spend time with?

§ They’re METHOD NAMES, okay?

§§ You know, like the Hammerklavier Sonata is only a variation of Chopsticks.

§§§ And a partridge in a pear tree is the gentle approach to sending your true love round the twist by day twelve.

# I have a serious word-usage problem any more, with a hellhound named Darkness and a book named SHADOWS.

## Let alone care.

### Probably closely related to the fun of destroying your brain with handbells.

Short Wednesday! Really short!

 

 

I need something more nearly resembling a night off than my usual shortish Wednesday.  So I thought I’d give you someone else’s story.

http://tinycatpants.wordpress.com/2013/10/20/bad-maddy/

Someone tweeted me this a few days ago and I was avoiding work* or something and clicked through to read it.  I really liked it.  Don’t let the typos at the beginning put you off—as they nearly put me off—these things do happen, especially when you’re attempting to perform your proofreading late at night and you just want to hang the freller and go to bed.**

I like the way she’s taken a fairly ordinary things-that-go-bump-in-the-night story arc and made it real through her characters.  I like the way the characters aren’t quite what you’re expecting.  I like the seamlessness with which she makes her characters not quite what you’re expecting***.

There are more stories where this one came from on her web site, and she’s got a book for sale on amazon:  http://www.amazon.com/City-Ghosts-Stories-Betsy-Phillips/dp/145369983X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1382572476&sr=8-1&keywords=Betsy+Phillips+A+City+of+Ghosts

I haven’t bought it yet but the ebook is CHEEEEEEEAP and I’m sure I’ll decide it’s wasteful not to buy it.

. . . And just in case you need a Silly Animal Video:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-south-yorkshire-24622710

Although my informant says it’s gone viral so you may have seen it already.  I do feel that the human in question is a trifle naïve to have put that cat gym next to the door and then be surprised at the result. . . .

* * *

* Never!

** Ask me how I know this.

*** I may also be extra-disposed to like stories with porcelain-faced dolls in them at the moment because I’m reading ALCHEMY OF STONE.

 

It’s nearly 2 a.m. and I still have to write the blog

 

It has not been a good day.  I overslept—which at least has the advantage that I got some sleep—but I was racing around tripping over a puppy very anxious to be helpful trying to catch up with myself and failing, of course, does anyone ever catch up?*, and one of my split-second decisions was to leave the GIGANTIC HOUSE SPIDER perched precariously on a skirting board near the front door—he was too big and he didn’t fit, and was having to extend some of his supernumerary limbs around the corner and grasp the front of the bookcase—and finish throwing the last six animals and twenty-two knapsacks in Wolfgang and get down to the mews before sunset.

Which means he’s still at the cottage.  Somewhere.  Waiting for me.  Unless of course he’s found his beloved and they are experiencing marital bliss . . . somewhere.  You don’t seem to find pairs of spiders so I’m ASSUMING I don’t have to worry about the happy couple(s) once they are.  But it’s now definitively nighttime and by the time we all** get back to the cottage I’ll be tired and . . . I know it looks like a really dumb decision.  But there’s the additional factoid that neither of my spider catchers are actually up to the job of autumn-sized house spiders, the ones that are as big as your hand.  That Godzilla I posted photos of a couple of years ago is still a personal worst, but this time of year there are always several jolly little pony-sized arachnids that, like the cockroaches outside Charlie’s Coffeehouse, you can hear as they clatter across the lino’d*** floor.  Ugggh.  But I wonder what spider-catcher-inventors are thinking about when they design something big and strong enough to tackle a somewhat undernourished daddy-long-legs?  I have never used the box one on anything bigger than my thumbnail because I dislike cutting legs off, even of spiders . . . and I’m probably not going to bother with a spider that small anyway—I’m a sort of mutable arachnophobe—and the box-catcher, while it was sold to me for spiders, is useful for wasps and Other Things That Sting.

I have been put off forever using the bristle-brush catcher, where you plop the business end of this bushy broom thing over your spider and then run the handle down toward it so the bristles close over it, TRAPPING IT SECURELY.  Yes.  Indeed.  An autumn-sized spider says ‘hmm, indoor hedgerow, don’t like it’, bursts through the plastic bristles without breaking a sweat AND RUNS UP THE HANDLE TOWARD MY ARM.  Exit screaming.†  I may have told you this story before.  The memory lingers.

Katinseattle

. . . I thought this early story-arc of the hob was dead obvious. Dead obvious isn’t necessarily bad—see previous response: OF COURSE I’m going to feed a friendly hob—but it’s usually, erm, obvious. You must read too many engineering texts or something and your eye has got out for fiction.

Well, yes, looking back, it was obvious. **defensively** I’d just turned 70 the day before. I was rather shaken by the idea that my extended middle age is over. 70 is undeniably old.

I seem to have left a piece of my brain behind. But, hey, I’m 70; I have an excuse. Right?

I’m sorry!  ::Grovels::  I meant to be teasing you.  —It goes on being a problem, this communication thing, even after 1,000,000,000,000,000 years of evolution from space dust or sea-bottom slime or whatever††, and email and the internet have just super-extended it into eleventy-seven new dimensions.  You get so used to talking with your fingers that you forget how many of the traditional social cues you’re not picking up.

Er . . . happy birthday?  I had a friend commenting when she turned seventy several years ago that everyone was telling her that ‘seventy is the new fifty’.  No it isn’t, she said.  That would make sixty the new forty, and I can vouch that sixty is not forty, new or otherwise.

Nat

. . . Best insomnia cure for Christians: Read Leviticus.

::Shudder::  Not for me.  Leviticus is too full of horrors.  You’re supposed to do what because of what?  Noooooooo.  Not to mention killing all those poor critters and splashing their blood around.†††

Gwyn_sully

I cook for my home group regularly, and we have some people with very restrictive diets. I would always rather know as much as possible as soon as possible (within limits of what they are comfortable telling me, of course). For me, hospitality is a big deal. So if someone does have a limitation and they don’t tell me, I always feel bad that I wasn’t allowed to provide them what I provided everyone else with (or at least the equivalent). It makes my hospitality feel incomplete. I would say I do feel like you would be ministering to me by telling me because it would relieve me of the guilt I would feel for being inconsiderate of someone else’s needs, even if it was unintentional. . . .

Sure.  And I have emailed the organiser.  But I don’t like eating in a group and I resent being forced to do so.  I wouldn’t join a home group that required me to accept the food hospitality of the organizer as part of the regular meetings:  if this Alpha course began every meeting, instead of just the first one, with a group meal, I wouldn’t sign up.  Hospitality, and providing for your guests, is your big deal.  What if one of your guests has a big deal of being able to eat in private without someone’s need to be hospitable looming over them?

Diane in MN

. . . hellhounds are, erm, undesirably reactive to rabbit and venison and they won’t eat any of the other within-my-price-range options.

If you haven’t already tried it, you might look at turkey as an alternative to chicken. The taste is similar but the proteins are different (I was allergic to chicken, but not to turkey), and if it’s a new food they might not be sensitive to it. That’s assuming turkey is as commonplace in your markets as it is here, of course.

Turkey is available over here at Christmas, at £1,000,000,000 per carat.  If there are other turkey options I haven’t found them, although I admit my google-fu is poor.  I’ve had other Americans suggest turkey—and duck, which is nearly as expensive although available most of the year in case anyone wins the lottery—and I’ve tried the dog-food turkey and duck, either 100% or at least grain-free, and hellhounds, of course, won’t touch it.  Fortunately Pav will so all those frelling tins aren’t going to be wasted.

Nickithomas

. . . I adore Bendicks Bittermints, they are not thin and squidgy but thick and solid with a really intense mint hit.

Yes, I remember those.  Before I discovered G&B, and before I was clobbered by the ME, I got through a lot of Bendicks Bittermints which are, as you say, excellent.  But the ME comes with a lorryload of chemical/environmental sensitivities/intolerances as well as the straightforward food issues and I’m pretty paranoid about organic.  And Bendicks, unfortunately, is not organic.  I admit that I wonder what kind of corners G&B may be cutting behind their behemoth corporate front, now they’re no longer independent.  And do things like disguise inferior new product in a superior old product’s packaging.

3rd dragon

Yeah, I’ve been VERY lactose intolerant for about a year now, and the thing that I hate most is how difficult it makes communal food (especially dessert). My church is making efforts to be better about labeling . . . but mostly in the direction of being accommodating to people with gluten sensitivities. . . .

Food allergies and intolerances are so common now—and commonly known about—it amazes me, not in a good way, how slow how many providers of public or communal food, including restaurants, are to respond in any useful way.  One of the things that used to make me crazy when I first moved over here is that any vegetarian option WAS UP TO ITS ARMPITS IN CHEESE.  It’s like the entire country had got stuck in the early Moosewood Cookbook stage.  It’s better now, but it’s still not uncommon to find the one ::trumpet fanfare:: vegetarian option on a restaurant menu to be three kinds of LOCALLY SOURCED!!!! cheese artfully woven through some risotto rice.  And if you’re dairy- tomato/potato/eggplant/etc- and gluten-intolerant HAVE A NICE LIFE.  Somewhere else.  If you can.  Fortunately I do—and can—eat meat‡, or I’d’ve starved to death years ago.

Restaurants are fun, too. Last night, for example, I found myself dragged along to an Italian place. And it’s not that I don’t like Italian food. But ALL ITALIAN FOOD IS BETTER WITH CHEESE. . . . If anyone has suggestions for what Italian food I should be ordering that would still be interesting without cheese or milk, I’m open to ideas.

Okay, I may be able to help here.  Back in the days when I was only lactose intolerant I discovered harlot’s sauce.  Most Italian restaurants have it and I never had a bad one—famous last words I daresay.  I can’t immediately find my recipe since it’s been retired and while I’m used to being dairy-free I still suffer lingering sulkiness about being tomato-free, but this one looks like the right stuff:

http://www.simplyrecipes.com/recipes/pasta_puttanesca/

* * *

* Don’t answer that

** The thirty-seven animals and ninety-eight knapsacks

*** We’re not supposed to call it lino any more.  Lino is scruffy and low-class.  I think it’s now vinyl.  I have a very nice floor, whatever it calls itself, except for the muddy spider footprints.  The hellcritters and I all wipe our feet carefully.  Yes.

† Pav is extremely fond of the bristle-brush spider-catcher, although not for the use for which it was intended.

†† And the hand of God, but in one of his obscurer moments.  Although on a bad day I think the entire Bible is one long, gruesomely over-extended obscurer moment.

††† Definitely an obscurer moment.

‡ AND LOTS AND LOTS OF (mostly raw) VEGETABLES AND FRUIT.  I’m so Paleo.  I’m probably healthy as **** and will live forever.^

^ Well, if I am healthy as **** it’s nice idea. . . .

Chirp chirp? Maybe?

 

The ME, dazzling ratbag that it is, decided to give me a few hours last night off.  This is one of its favourite tricks—I’ll feel my energy reservoirs, empty as the hob’s bowl, suddenly and without warning beginning to refill—a sort of counter leak, with energy seeping in, as if some kind of risky, unreliable guerrilla rescue.  I got all excited—as one does—and did a bunch of stupid, low-level stuff like folding laundry that I have not been getting round to* because I’m genuinely tired by the last few weeks AND because you, or anyway I, do not want to do anything too demanding when I’m hoping** to SLEEP soon.  However, by the time the laundry was folded, all the houseplants watered, the trove of puppy toys hoicked out from under the kitchen cupboard*** and various other domestic chores too embarrassing to admit were accomplished, it was well after mmph o’clock and I was still much too buzzed to sleep. . . .

STUPID STUPID STUPID STUPID

. . . which is either the system, or how I’m feeling, on two hours’ sleep† and a lot of gaudy hallucinations, or both.  Probably both.

Monday is, however, my voice lesson, and very little can get between me and Nadia.  Also . . . considering the boiling-crap level of life generally it’s been a surprisingly not-bad week for singing.  One of the most frustrating things about being, well, terrible, with very little voice to begin with and what there is of it tied up in barbed wire so any movement causes a thin desperate squealing, is that it takes so much frelling effort to unwind enough of the barbed wire to make some kind of singing-facsimile possible that you’re tired, cranky and demoralised before you’ve got past your frelling warm-up exercises.  I do keep reminding myself how much more voice I have now than I did two years ago when I started with Nadia†† but it’s like the difference between a molecule and a mitochondrion—yes, in terms of percentage, huge, but no one without a microscope is going to notice.

I’ve got round the hideousness of beginning warm-up by singing folk songs††† but there have still been days/nights when F looks like too great an effort—I admit rarely any more—but beyond F there is G and then A . . . or the occasional whapped-by-an-angel frelling B.‡  And I never know.  Some nights are still hideous.

But this week, despite all, it hasn’t been too bad.  I start off with enough noise to do something with, and practising a new song is less like bending wrought iron with my bare hands than sometimes.  And this week the new song was Voi, che sapete which I ought to know instantly since I’ve been playing Marriage of Figaro about five times a week for the last forty years . . . but as many of you out there know, performing something is always a tiny bit more demanding than listening to someone else performing it.  I went in today nervous because I had a new song, still . . . it was a familiar new song, and I’ve mostly been able to sing it this week.

I think my bottom-line set point has moved up a fraction.  This is the second week in a row that we haven’t had to spend half the lesson winkling my voice out of hiding, so we got going on a song sooner than usual.  And I was way more out there than usual—I’m not sure what to call it because it’s not just volume;  I’m capable of being (relatively) loud in that small room;  this was something beyond that.  This was . . . my voice trying to become itself, to be, you know, distinctive, as I said last week.  I can hear this.  And, if you want to know, it’s frelling scary, being out there, even if only Nadia can hear me.  It has fresh drawbacks too:  there is a much greater graphic reality to the fact that I’m not Marilyn Horne or Janet Baker or Joyce DiDonato.  I don’t know how to explain it:  it’s better and worse at the same time . . . but it’s a bit exciting.  And while I’ve spent the last two and a half years being a good little dweeb about not listening to Real Singers on YouTube I’ve also thought it’s kind of a joke because I’m not capable of trying to sound like someone who knows what she’s doing . . . I’m starting to stumble over the line where I might.  I might try to do one thing rather than another.  It’s about to become significant, down here at mitochondrial level, that I learn to find my own distinctive way rather than pick up someone else’s.  Maybe.

What’s the next level after mitochondrion?  Golgi apparatus?

* * *

* Sorting and then putting the laundry into the washing machine and turning it on was challenge enough

** Against both history and reason

*** To the great joy of the puppy.  I must remember to ask Atlas to plug the frelling gap the toys disappear through, which of course was created by the puppy in question doing her ricocheting trick.  Southdowner had warned me about the hucklebutting and the high-speed end-swapping.  She hadn’t warned me that a bull terrier, being made of case-hardened steel as they all are, is perfectly happy to do this through or in spite of trees, furniture, you (ow),^ other dogs^^, etc.

^ I have a new theory that bullies are dogs for young people.

^^ Darkness runs away.  Chaos, however, does this folding-his-legs-under-him-and-floating trick like a kind of furry, fawn-coloured Yoda till she caroms past him.

† I got up when I heard Pooka ringing—despite the fact that she was turned off.  If you are so not asleep that you can hear the faint burring noise a turned-off iPhone makes when it rings, you might as well get up.

†† Two and a half, minus maternity leave, I think.

††† And old gospel thumpers.  I’ve told you before that one of the sillier bennies of this conversion shtick is the excuse to sing When the Roll Is Called Up Yonder and Shall We Gather at the River etc at top volume, doing the washing-up, behind Wolfgang’s steering wheel, and frequently when out hurtling hellcritters.  This also has to make up, however, for the tosh we sing at St Margaret’s.  I’ve pretty much given up singing.  I drop down into unreconstructed chest voice and bellow.  I have a few musical friends, including Nadia herself, who say that they keep themselves from going mad under such circumstances by singing harmony, but I’m mostly not steady enough for this—yet.  It’s on the list.  I’m still half-plotting suggesting to Buckminster we have an occasional real hymn-singing evening—but Eleanor says I’d have to be ready to go through with it, which means run the freller, because Buckminster would say ‘yes’ instantly because he likes his congregation to feel involved.  Eleanor says she’d help.  Hmmm.^

^ Yes.  Think of the blog material.

‡ Eh.  I should have a piece with a high B in it to sing when it’s visiting.  Might encourage it to stay, or at least come back oftener.  It’s always such a shock when it drops in it’s like whoa what do I do now.  And then I don’t do anything and it decides it’s not appreciated and goes away again.

More about KES. Also handbells.

 

If you’d asked me a month ago I’d have said KES PART ONE won’t make it to episode 120.  If you’d asked me a fortnight ago I’d’ve said it would be over by ep one-twenty.

I’m writing one-nineteen now.  It’s not going to be over by one-twenty.

IS ANYONE SURPRISED IT’S RUNNING LONG?  ANYONE?

I didn’t think so.

Siiiiiiiiiiigh.*

Shalea

Perhaps it’s still a bit too early to say this, but I was rather fearful that Kes wouldn’t actually make it inside Rose Manor, and that she’d instead end up elsewhere.

IT’S TOO EARLY TO SAY THIS.    Mwa hahahahahahahaha.

B_twin_1

It’s only her first night. They’re letting her off the hook (sorta). Second night… anything could happen (and probably will at this rate. LOL)

The SECOND night?!?  Are you kidding?  The first night has barely BEGUN.**

Blondviolinist

Besides, the poor hob needs his milk. (Her milk? Its milk? Are hobs generally male?)

The only ones I’ve felt a personal connection to (chiefly William Mayne’s and Katherine Briggs’) have been male.  That said . . . erm . . . and some day I have to dig my Tam Lin retelling out again.  That has a hob in it too.  Of (currently) unknown gender.

Leeanne

…I’ll be on pins and needles for poor Kes till the next chapter!

Depending on how you’re defining ‘chapter’, I suggest you figure out a way to get comfortable. . . .

EMoon

When I moved here, I moved alone because my husband was still working where I’d come from . . . Slept on the floor. Woke up the next morning to the town-wide news that the town had, overnight, its second murder in its entire existence.

SNORK.  Sorry.  One shouldn’t laugh at murder but . . . only you, EMoon, would have a story like that about a first night in a new house.  Have you ever considered writing fiction?

Blondviolinist

The hob’s milk was gone.

::happy sigh::

 (I’ve only been worrying about the poor hob getting fed since he (or she) first helped out with the faucet.)

Hey.  This is a MCKINLEY story.  What did you THINK would happen?!

Katinseattle

The hob’s milk was gone.

 This isn’t a cliffhanger. I feel like I came right up to the cliff and dropped over it.

You do?  Golly.  I thought this early story-arc of the hob was dead obvious.  Dead obvious isn’t necessarily bad—see previous response:  OF COURSE I’m going to feed a friendly hob—but it’s usually, erm, obvious.  You must read too many engineering texts or something and your eye has got out for fiction.

 I love this story. I don’t think I want it to go any faster. I don’t want it to end.

OH GOOD.  Since we seem to be headed in that direction.***  Pacing and storytelling speed are funny things.  I like leisurely, filling-in-the-background storytelling as a reader† so it’s not surprising that those are the kinds of stories I tell as a writer.  But there are people out there who would rather things happened a little faster.  Sorry.

Very glad there seem to be enough of you dilatory types to keep me and the hellcritters in munchies.  Very glad.

* * *

* Also, speaking of siiiiiiiigh, this being so tired I could die thing HAS GOT VERY OLD.  VERY, VERY, VERY OLD.  Also the insomnia, which probably has a little something to do with the tired.^  Also the thrice-frelling aches and pains.^^  I can see all you other victims of chronic auto-immune syndrome ratbaggery nodding sympathetically.  Arrrrrrrgh.  You only get one life, why do you have to mess with—or be messed with by—this kind of superfluous crap?

^ I know I’ve ranted this rant to you before but it continues to be so flapdoodling apposite.  I’m an alternative-medicine adherent and barring broken bones and/or bleeding to death I’m pretty much a keep-away-from-me-with-that-thing anti-adherent of conventional medicine.  But as I read my alt books—chiefly but not exclusively homeopathy—I keep tripping over some form or other of the ‘wisdom of the body’ philosophy.  SNARL.  If the frelling body were so frelling wise it wouldn’t wind itself up into paroxysms of insomnia when it really really really needs sleep.+

+ Valerian doesn’t help me sleep and gives me a vicious hangover.  Chamomile tea tastes pleasant but doesn’t do anything, and I’m rather conscious of the fact that ODing on chamomile makes you crankier.  There’s only so much cranky one mortal frame can contain.  I’m allergic to milk, warm or otherwise.  I’ve been through meditation and yoga, and while that was before the ME took up residence, I’ve had spells of insomnia all my life and neither technique did anything about it.#  When the insomnia is bad I am rather prone to nodding off in the prayer-space however, which shares certain things in common with the meditation-space.  At the monks’ this is embarrassing and at home I just wake up again.

# Although I’ve been meaning for twenty-two years to start doing yoga again, since that’s one of the things that got (inadvertently) left behind in America.

^^ Since you ask, ringing handbells for the wedding yesterday went very well, thank you.  I think ringing the wedding party out of the church with the organ blasting away was probably mostly a wasted effort+ but they had a sort of pre-reception reception in the big glamorous church hall after, so Gemma, Niall and I went and stood in a corner and were the romantic string quartet substitute.   We were a little more audible in a corner of the hall++ and this was a startlingly polite and/or intelligent group.  People only asked questions when we weren’t ringing.  Gemma has very classy friends.  Gemma, by the way, did amazingly well.  She had a bad five-second brain blank at the very beginning and after that, except for worrying—and some nods and winks from Niall—she was fine.  I saw her today at afternoon service ring at Forza and she said she had lots of very nice comments about us.+++

As were my stupid hands and arms fine, more or less.  I was thinking about this, as one does, that my arms and hands were hurting when we started and the first thing that happened was that they instantly got worse, and I was standing there gritting my teeth and thinking shut up and COPE . . . and they did.  By the end they were very little worse than when we’d started, and half an hour ringing Sunshine’s-cinnamon-rolls-sized handbells is a lot of big handbell ringing.  This is the kind of thing that gives a lot of the murky auto-immune, poorly defined and even more poorly understood diseases/syndromes a bad name.  If whatever is wrong with me is plain ordinary straightforward strain/inflammation/doodah it should get worse from rapidly raising and lowering several pounds of bells—with enough of a wiggle every stroke to make them sound crisply—for half an hour.  Mind over matter is film at eleven, Elvis Ate My Dead Alien Baby, stuff.  It’s not that it doesn’t happen, but it doesn’t happen like this.

+ Although Oisin keeps saying that organ is underpowered for the size of the church, and having now heard it in full roar I’m inclined to agree.  It’s still a lot louder than six handbells.  Even six big handbells.

++ Although not as audible as a string quartet would have been.  We were also what passes in the bell-ringing community for well paid . . . although still not in the string-quartet category.

+++ Great.  Hire us.  We’re cheaper than a string quartet.  We’d still be cheaper even if there were four of us.

** Mwa hahahahahahahaha, etc.

*** Muffled siiiiiiiiiiiigh.

† Especially in F&SF.  Both because you can’t make assumptions and because it’s interesting.  Or it better be.

KES, 101

 

ONE HUNDRED ONE

“You’re welcome,” I said out loud in a voice I hoped wasn’t shaking.  Chipmunks, I was thinking.  Squirrels.  Rats.  Skunks.  Skunks were one of the reasons I had always known I didn’t want to live in the country.  My Adirondack-cabin-owning friend told stories about the spring her parents had gone up to get the winter shutters off and do whatever else it is you do when you have a summer cabin and discovered a family of skunks in the cellar.  It was a wild and thrilling tale.  I’d rather the current situation involved Murac than skunks.  Almost rather.  No, Murac wouldn’t drink milk.  He’d definitely hold out for whisky.  I didn’t know what skunks preferred.

I took the empty bowl the two steps back to the kitchen and Sid met me at the door again.  I held the bowl out toward her and she gave it a polite sniff . . . and then came sharply to attention like a cougar scenting rabbit (or possibly a rabbit scenting cougar) and sniffed it very carefully.  I decided to feel comforted that her tail start to wag, and firmly ignored my mother’s voice in my mind saying, tail wagging means excitement or interest, it doesn’t necessarily tell you what kind of excitement or interest. . . .

I put the bowl in the sink and stared at it.  The milk had disappeared really fast.  It was only a few minutes since I’d put it out, and the bowl was dead empty, not so much as a shiny spot in the bottom.  I tried to remember what I used to know about hobs—my area of expertise, after all, and I wasn’t fussy about cultural origins, Celtic, Arabic, Punjabi, Shinto, I was an equal-opportunity scrounger of intriguing supernatural features—maybe he was hungry?  Some cool, detached part of my mind observed that I seemed to have decided that there was a hob.  Was I sure it was a he?

What did hobs do when no one lived in their houses?

I added two more eggs to the egg bowl.  I didn’t need another mouth to feed but I didn’t like the idea of anything local going hungry.  Local and friendly.  I owed the hob for the water coming out of the tap.  A bowl of milk and two eggs was a lot cheaper than a plumber.  The butter in the pan was turning brown—perfect.  And the water was boiling—oh hurrah, it was boiling!  I hadn’t really believed in this wood-stove hustle.  Scrambled eggs are pretty forgiving, but if you want to steam your broccoli you need boiling water.  I was nearly singing when I put the broccoli on.  How pathetic is that?  Boiling water and suddenly I’m chirpy and jubilant.  “Caedmon, you splendid creature,” I said.  “My knight in shining armor.”  Did the hob need a name?  Wait.  Wasn’t there some kind of deal about naming a hob?  I’d google it later.

How much did a hungry hob eat?  My landlord would pay for a plumber.  I doubted I could convince Homeric Homes to invoice him for feeding a hob.

There was, however, a trick to toast, and I didn’t have it.  I produced two slabs of hot, slightly charred bread, but the eggs were exquisite and the broccoli was crunchy and reassuring.  Broccoli is one of my basic food groups, with chocolate and tea and popcorn and champagne.  I know.  Shoot me.  If it weren’t for my broccoli addiction I might be writing great literature instead of Flowerhair the Foolhardy.  I gave Sid her eggs on kibble, with a glob of canned Delish-o-Lamb on top.

The hob got the second slab of hot bread and a two-egg dollop spooned over.  I put the reloaded bowl back on the corner of the window seat, and did the rest of the dishes, making a lot of splashing noises and singing folk songs.  I’d used to sing a lot but after a year or two of Gelasio’s money making a subscription at the Metropolitan Opera possible I’d developed a complex about the fact I would never grow up to be Violetta or Rosina and mostly stopped.  It was kind of nice to be singing again. . . .

I’d found my old tea kettle too, and started heating water for tea.  I had a few good pieces of kitchen gear, including the copper pot and the tea kettle, compliments of my father, who was a terrific cook and thought I only needed inspiring to follow in his culinary footsteps.  Now that I was living outside the magic pizza-delivery circle maybe I’d try harder.  It was surprisingly cheering having just a few of my things scattered around this strange, too-large (and too shadowy) kitchen.  Once I’d liberated a few boxes I was going to pack up all the grim thrift-shop rejects and put them in the cellar.  Maybe Yog-Sothoth could use them to serve tea and crumpets—or blood wine and pickled heads—on the next poker evening.

I barely flinched when I checked the hob’s bowl and it was again empty.

Performance opportunities, various

 

Other authors jet around the world, climbing on a new airplane every day and swanning into the Excelsior Suite where they will be tended lovingly by squads of specially trained steward persons*, disembarking at the next flashy new city into the arms of a platoon of swanky minders who will whisk them through security** and on down a swirl of yellow brick road in a Rolls-Royce Ghost to the twenty-star hotel with the gemstone mosaic check-in desk, the extra-large lift containing the cocktail pianist and her baby grand—if you want to keep your twenty stars, live elevator music is a must—and the gold lame shower curtains.  Where they*** will rest and freshen up before the day’s performance.

Well, I’m going to be part of the live performance tomorrow too.

It’s that handbell wedding I mentioned on Wednesday.†

And I have to wear a frock.††

That’s the big problem with public handbells:  you’re visible.  I can’t remember, and while I’m sure it’s on the blog, the archives of this thing are scary and I’m not going to try to look it up, how Niall inveigled me into ringing my first handbell wedding.  They don’t happen that often and the memory, especially the post-menopausal memory, fades, so when the next handbell wedding opportunity comes along you think, oh, sure, whatever, I didn’t die last time.

I did know that it was Gemma’s friend’s daughter getting married, and I did know that it was happening at St Colossus.  I also knew that this is Gemma’s first wedding with a set of handbells in her hands—and that she hasn’t been doing it as long as I had been when I rang my first, nor was it my best friend’s daughter I was doing it for.†††  Gemma, however, while not without nerves, is a much more sanguine personality than I am, and she’ll (probably) be fine.  But I am aware that Niall and I exist in this case to support Gemma. . . . And meanwhile the ME is not folding its tents and silently stealing away, it’s doing its big fat toad imitation in the middle of my life.‡

All of this suddenly got very real and dramatic and in my face this afternoon when we met up for the wedding rehearsal.  Niall’s usual bells are small, and even when the ME is bad I can usually ring them for a while.  But we are frelling swamped in St Colossus, so we’re going to be ringing—or at least we’ll be trying to ring—suitably colossal handbells, approximately as large as Sunshine’s cinnamon rolls‡‡.  And they WEIGH.  Gorblimey do they weigh.  And Gemma’s on the trebles, the littlest pair, because they’re what she knows the best, so I’m on the middle pair, whiiiine.  Today we kept swapping off between the big bells, because being familiar with the actual bells you’ll be ringing is a very good idea for something like a wedding when you’re going to be both nervous and distracted—people will come up and stare at you and say things like ‘oooh’ and ‘how long does it take to learn?’ while you’re frelling ringing. . . . Anyway.  We swapped off between the big bells so we’d know what they feel like and Niall’s little bells to save my blasted wrists and arms.  I’ll push it tomorrow but if I push it today I won’t have anything tomorrow to push with.  If we were ringing with Colin we’d do a once-through for what it’s going to sound like in all that space—I think I said on Wednesday that you tend to ring handbells at ye olde quainte littlee countrye churche, and even then the organ wins—and go for a beer.  But Gemma’s a bit out of practise . . . and she was kind of realising what it’s going to be like tomorrow. . . .

I have to go to bed early.  It’s a morning wedding, WHYYYYYYY?, there ought to be a law against morning weddings.  I have to get up early enough not only to sprint my hellcritters, but to figure out what I’m going to wear.  Gemma is going to be dressed for going-to-her-best-friend’s-daughter’s wedding and I don’t want to let the girlie side down.

* * *

* Note that I don’t envy this part of the deal at all.  Getting on a plane every day is never a good time.  Even business/first class isn’t always worth much.  As I say on this blog at regular intervals, my last proper tour was for SUNSHINE.  I already had ME, so one of the things my publisher agreed to do for me is that any flight longer than x, and I forget what x was, but a few hours, they’d guarantee me business or first class.  This doesn’t amount to a lot when ‘first class’ means the first several rows of a cattle-car plane and you get the same legroom and the same food as everyone else although they’ll give you an extra little packet of interestingly multi-coloured snacks, plus the plastic flute of warm prosecco.

** Ha ha.  Every time I start feeling guilty about refusing to go anywhere I think of airport security.  No way.  No frelling, fruitlooping, huzzahing dingleblatting way.  And now I’d be fighting the knitting needle battle as well, which as I understand from dispatches from the front, still involves Airline A agreeing that bamboo needles are okay but aluminium are not, Airline B refusing to have bamboo needles either but plastic ends on circulars are permitted, and Airline C being violently allergic to any twiddling with string whatsoever, including cat’s-cradles on your fingers to amuse the children.  And you won’t know this till you’ve already checked your bags and are stranded with your carry-on.

*** The authors.  You haven’t forgotten this is about authors, have you?

† Ringing handbells for a wedding, okay?  Stop interrupting.

†† Authors do not necessarily have to wear frocks, of course, even female authors.  But I’m sure I told you I eschewed the pink All Stars and black leather jacket to buy the First and Probably Only Power Suit of My Life for the SUNSHINE tour because I was not getting into vampire chic in any form.  Not.

Say.  Maybe I’ll wear my power suit tomorrow.

††† Unfortunately I will probably not have the opportunity to ring handbells for Hannah’s daughters’ weddings.  Sigh.^

^ I don’t have to remind anyone here that we ring ENGLISH CHANGE-RINGING METHODS not TUNES, do I?

‡ Yes.  Mixed metaphors alert.  The ME eats your brain.

‡‡ As Big As Your Head, if anyone who reads this blog hasn’t read SUNSHINE.