Robin McKinley's Blog, page 42

Green & Black’s are ****, ****-******** *******

 

I’m not sure what the libel laws are.  But here’s the truth. You will remember that my life was ending because G&B was stopping making the mint fondant dark chocolate that is my reason for getting through the days.  It was becoming less and less available although I never saw any puffery about its disappearance and the (in advertising-speak) fabulous new improved mint chocolate that it was going to be replaced with.  Well, I already knew that I wasn’t going to love and delight in the new mint chocolate because I think peppermint oil in the chocolate is a waste of time, with or without vaunted crunchy bits, as described by the store that had to tell us they couldn’t order the old peppermint fondant chocolate any more.

And then recently—still without any noticeable promotion, and while there may have been some somewhere they certainly haven’t been plastering the walls of the internet with the news, I may be dozy and clueless but I’m very interested in chocolate—I’ve seen G&B mint for sale again.  Well hallelujah—miserable fool that I am, I hoped that they’d changed their minds and put the fondant chocolate back into production.  Because IT LOOKED JUST LIKE THE MINT CHOCOLATE I’VE BEEN EATING FOR YEARS.  And therefore I ordered some.  In fact, I ordered a lot, thinking that alternatively this might be some kind of final warehouse clearout.  Now, I freely grant you that I’m a fool but hey.  Listen to me carefully now.

They haven’t changed the packaging for the new, peppermint oil and crunchy bits version.  They haven’t changed the packaging at all. 

 

Spot the imposter.

If you were buying it in a store you might notice that the new bar is thinner.  I finally twigged because the box containing FIFTEEN new bars—that a box of G&B is fifteen bars hasn’t changed—is thinner.  What? you think, turning it around in your hands in a puzzled sort of way.  Oh.  Um.  And then the truth sinks in.   Sh*****t. . . .  But looking at the new bar on line?  Do you have a prayer of noticing anything has changed?  Well—depending on how good your praying is, maybe.  Mine isn’t that good.  And something else?  The organic on-line grocer we use still has the photo of the old bar up.  It doesn’t just LOOK like the old bar, it is a PHOTO of the old bar.  Because when you finally, despairingly, look closer, the old one says ‘filled with a peppermint fondant’ . . . whiiiiiiiiiine . . . and the new one says ‘infused with peppermint oil for an intense mint taste’.  A close-up of the photo on that grocer’s site says ‘filled with a peppermint fondant’—and you don’t have to click through for more info to order a box of them.  If you do click through, the text is correct for the new one.  But I didn’t see that till today.  After this week’s order arrived.  Including a box of G&B’s mint chocolate.  And just by the way . . . the new one is 60% cocoa.  The old one is 70%.  I don’t have to annotate this, do I?

I don’t think I’ll be eating Green & Black’s chocolate very much longer.  I will certainly be eating it for a while longer because I have kind of a lot of the new [expletive] bars to grind through, even with Peter (who isn’t that keen on mint) gallantly helping me.  Did G&B’s think we weren’t going to notice the changeover?  Or that we weren’t going to care?  WHAT?

But am I having a bad day?  I’m having a bad day*.  Arrrrrrrrrrrrgh.

* * *

* Although both hellhounds ate both lunch and dinner.  In Chaos’ case, eventually, but eating is eating, when you’re dealing with hellhounds.^

^ Did I tell you about my attempt to get them off chicken, earlier this year?  I had several people point out, or re-point out, that chicken too is a potential allergen, just like rice, of the old base-line bland diet, chicken and rice, which is, on the contrary, a guaranteed disaster with critters allergic to all cereal grains.+  I tried becoming a chicken-free hellhound owner once before, years ago, and I don’t remember the details except that it was not a success.  When I tried again recently. . . .  hellhounds are, erm, undesirably reactive to rabbit and venison++ and they won’t eat any of the other within-my-price-range options.  Arrrrgh.  Hello chicken, my old friend.

Next time I start wanting new domestic wildlife I’m going for the dead parrot.  I believe you get a certified guarantee of no food intolerances with a dead parrot.

+ Since food intolerances are an ever-mutable and mutating poisonous swamp, and I should know because I’m stuck floundering in it myself#, it may not be that they are precisely allergic to all cereal grains.  But any contact with cereal grains PROVOKES CALAMITY and that’s a good enough practical definition.

# Have I told you I’m starting on an Alpha course~ next month?  I’m looking forward to it except . . .   frelling Christian fellowship.  The first meeting starts with you all frelling eating together.  I loathe and dread group beanfests:  we had one last Saturday for the Street Pastor training.  I sat in a corner eating apples and tortilla chips~~ and pretending to be invisible till the initial rush was over and I could mosey on back and have a cup of tea with the rest.~~~  This is not going to work in someone’s home—where this Alpha is happening.  I haven’t emailed the organizer yet.  I don’t want to have this conversation again.

~ http://www.alpha.org/try

~~ http://www.rwgarcia.com/products/veggie/

Mind you, these are fabulous, even if you’re normal

~~~ Maxine asked me later if I’d brought something I could eat.  I didn’t want to ask you before, she said, in case it was a bad question.

++ Rather like me, in fact.  I don’t like even being in the same room with venison.  Although I ate a lot of it when I was a kid in Maine.  Speaking of mutable.

Short Wednesday again

 

I’m better.  But I’m not enough better.  Although this may be a good thing because I cancelled my dentist’s appointment for tomorrow—three hours, no lie, and at £300 a minute I’m expecting my entire mouth to be gold-plated with cabochon diamonds generously studding all the teeth that show when I smile.*  If I ever smile again after paying the bill.  Anyway.  I was supposed to go in and be hammered and excavated and shot full of creepy toxic dental anaesthesia tomorrow, but I don’t dare so soon after a major ME shut-down day.  I’m not actually thrilled with putting it off—now I have to go through the Approaching Dread phase twice—but because I am a clueless la-la-la brain I’d managed not to notice I have a handbell wedding—that is, a wedding I’ve agreed to ring handbells for—this Saturday.  The three of us, Niall, Gemma and I, are finally only getting together for a practise run-through this Friday, the day before—and the day after I was supposed to spend three hours at the dentist.  If I’m very polite the ME will probably let me do this:  I have no negotiating skill with dental anaesthesia hangovers.  So it’s kind of just as well it’s turned out this way.  I cautiously went to tower bell practise tonight, which was not a total disaster although the brain was definitely deliquescent by the end, and Gemma was asking anxiously about the wedding (it’s her friend’s daughter who’s getting married).  The worst that happens is that we’ll have to ring plain courses, I said.**  And I may have to sit down occasionally.  And we may have to shift to smaller bells*** if my wrists give out.†  ME is just one big fat frelling har-di-har-har after another.  Arrrgh.  Anyway.  I’m better.

Meanwhile it’s still short Wednesday.

A friend send me this a few days ago:  http://www.matthaig.com/some-fucking-writing-tips/ ††

The link’s address gives you fair warning about the one thing you need warning about.  If bad language bothers you, don’t go there:  he does say going in that he’s just coming off a long gig where his only directive was that he couldn’t swear, and he had a lot of catching up to do.†††  But the writing tips made me laugh and laugh.

Although this one made me laugh even more:

http://www.matthaig.com/10-reasons-not-to-be-a-writer/ ‡

Haig also writes very good, very funny books.  I even blog-recced about TO BE A CAT.  I admit I am shamelessly waiting for THE HUMANS to come out in paper.  I could buy the e version . . . but I don’t want to.  I want to be able to drop it in the bath when I laugh.

* * *

* Supposing there are cabochon diamonds, but I don’t fancy scratchy facets against the inside of my lip.^

^ I think tongue, cheek and lip piercings look painful.

** I ring methods on handbells, remember.  Not tunes.

*** It’s a big church.  Even big handbells are going to be kind of lost.  Maybe we could stand on a large box with a megaphone.  Handbell weddings I have attended previously have been at seriously quaint old rural churches, not some frelling urban monster which except for the exigencies of church hierarchy which I don’t understand ought to be a cathedral.

† One of the oh so terribly amusing things about Growing Old with ME is that you have no idea what’s frelling causing anything.  Do my hands hurt because I’m having an ME flare or a rheumatism/arthritis flare?^  Discuss.  No, don’t bother to discuss.  Have a cup of tea and think about something else.

^ I read somewhere recently that almost everyone has at least some arthritis by the time they’re sixty.  So I have lots of company.

†† I especially commend #1 to your attention.  All of you who think being a writer is some kind of glamorous.

††† And—ahem—on a bad day I sound just like this.  On a day when the hellhounds aren’t eating, the hellterror has just eaten another blanket,^ PEG II is dead in the water, it’s raining and the right-colour All Stars have a hole in the bottom, the house is full of spiders and my singing voice is full of crackly splinters I SOUND JUST LIKE THIS.^^

^ She has MILLIONS of toys!  She’d rather shred her bedding!  ARRRGH!

^^ If I can’t sing I might as well shout.

‡ Although #3?  Feh.  He’s a Brit, he can find a bell tower to join.  And #9 made me laugh so hard I nearly threw up.  You might not want to be eating when you read it.  Or maybe it’s just I’ve heard from JesusRainbowUnicorn too.  Although I’m pretty sure it wasn’t Idaho.  Possibly Yorkshire.

Death on Toast, revisited

 

Stale toast.  And it wasn’t nice bread to begin with.  Is what I feel like.  Ugggggh.  I’ve been praying [sic] if I can just get through this past weekend before the ME floors me—which it has been going to do, roughly since Ms OTP, but she’s had help—then I’ll try to disintegrate graciously.  And I did—get through the weekend, I mean, and I even made it to my voice lesson yesterday*, although to the extent that this is Headquarters interfering with my life that may be because I stopped on the way to take that paperwork to the Street Pastors office,** and Headquarters seems very hot on this idea that I join the SPs.

But today . . . unnnh.  I’m not so good at gracious but the disintegration went expeditiously.  Well I got another inch of leg warmer knitted.  Winter is coming.***  Which means I had maybe better start seaming up the six or eight leg warmers I’ve knitted since last year.

* * *

* Started learning Voi Che Sapete last night.  It’s mostly just learning the frelling Italian and slightly about what order the bits come in because I’ve listened to it at least 1,000,000,000 times and ought to know it off by heart first try.  The drawback to this is similar to the one about having to sing after Nadia:  I have Frederica von Stade and Joyce DiDonato and Cecilia Bartoli in my mind’s ear;  following that lot is not good for morale.

** One of the unexpectedly enjoyable things about not having a dog minder any more is that I’ve been taking hellhounds along on Mondays to my voice lesson and stopping somewhere, usually on the way home, to have a hurtle in an unfamiliar area.  The usual paranoias apply about other people’s dogs, but Nadia is backed up against some genuine countryside and there are some good footpaths.

The disadvantage to this system is that I can’t stop to do errands, at least not anywhere that doesn’t allow dogs, which unfortunately is most wheres.  I am totally, meltdowningly deranged about leaving dogs in cars any more—I’ve told you that dog theft is up by pushing 300%, depending on who you read, since we had the whippets and used to leave them in the car in the shade with the windows cracked open.  Ah the innocent days of yore.  This meant that leaving hellhounds for the ten minutes necessary to have Maxine’s and my papers examined was TRAUMATIC.  I was telling myself, it’s a church!  It’s a church car park!  I’m sure there are thieves Operating in the Area, but I doubt they bother much on a weekday afternoon when only a few beat-up staff vehicles are on show.^  As it happens there was a huge, extremely beat-up red van parked in a nice shady corner so I parked in its shadow, Wolfgang’s beat-up redness looking a lot like a strange extension, a sort of four-wheel version of a motorcycle and sidecar.  There was a hedge behind us and with hellhounds lying down no one would even know they were there.  Except for the staying lying down part.  They popped up again as soon as I got out of the car leaving them behind.

The point however is that they were still there when I came back out of the church again at a dead run—smelling of the friendly resident dog, to the hellhounds’ great interest when I greeted them.^^    And there were no strange scratches around Wolfgang’s doorlock.^^^

^ Let ’em wait till Sundays when the car park fills up with well-off parishioners.  I’ve been to this church;  it has ’em.

^^ You could see the thought-bubble forming:  we knew you were going off without us to have an interesting time.

^^^ And while I’m still officially on probation till I’ve survived, including that my teammates haven’t killed me, my first four SP patrols, I’ve got my posting:  second Fridays.  Us fresh post-trainees have also already been added to the mailing list—just received the first general request for a swap by someone who can’t do his usual scheduled night.  Eeeep.  It’s all getting increasingly real.

Since I haven’t been good for much else today+ I’ve been researching heated waistcoats, heated insoles, waterproof trousers, and . . . something to do with my hands that isn’t gloves and doesn’t involve keeping my hands in my pockets, which isn’t allowed.++  I’ll think about this again one of these days when I have a brain.

+ It’s a very good thing that the hellterror is self-exercising.  She’s been out caroming off the walls most of the day.  A few toys and the occasional interaction with a hellgoddess# or a hellhound and she’s happy, as well as in perpetual motion.  How did anyone survive bull terrier ownership before crates were invented?

# Generally of the No you may not eat the dustpan/brush/All Star/walking boot/mini collapsing snow shovel/feather duster/hellhound blanket/rug/furniture variety of interaction.

++ We’re also required to wear only navy blue and black.#  This had better not include All Stars or I’m in serious trouble.

# The official SP kit is all navy blue.  And dead boring.  Just by the way.  I am a frivolous person.  But you knew that.

*** I saw my first Brussels sprouts for sale today.  Winter is here.  I like Brussels sprouts.  Brussels sprouts are reasons to view the coming of winter in a positive frame of mind.

My birthday, and the aquisitive aspect of Christmas, are also good things to remember while the days get shorter and shorter and shorter.  I still haven’t chosen my SatNav.  Peter has also said he’ll buy me a wristwatch—it is just a trifle tiresome having to fish Pooka out every time I want to know what time it is—but I haven’t seen The Wristwatch yet.  I thought, briefly, that I had, flicking through a free magazine bundled with one that I actually, you know, buy.  Oh, that’s a really pretty watch! I thought, and looked at the caption.  £19,530.   WHAT?  What’s it made of, roc’s entrails?  . . . The search continues.

Singing distinctively

 

Nadia was off sick last week so today was my first singing lesson in a fortnight.  I wasn’t at all sure how it was going to go;  I tend to slide farther and farther off the beam without my weekly reset and it can get pretty ugly.*  I also told her about Ms OTP**, not only because Nadia’s become a friend and all singing teachers become involuntary psychologists***, but because I did some rather cathartic singing right after that interesting experience happened and while the noise I was making was not particularly beautiful it was real in a way I don’t manage to access very often and I was hoping it might have left a trail of breadcrumbs so I might find where real lives and visit it more often. †

I didn’t locate real but I did find a few suggestive breadcrumbs.  I also made a much stupider mess of Arne’s Blow Blow Thou Winter Wind than I was expecting by the simple fact of Nadia’s playing the accompaniment arrrrrrgh and basso continuo (I think that’s what I mean) floors me every time.  I remember this from Purcell’s Evening Hymn.  I also whacked poor old Frellingsgrrrrr around some more, sulkily said I wanted to sing some more Italian and was told to reapply myself to Voi che sapete.  Yaaaaaaay.

But the thing that was really cheering . . . I’m used to hearing Nadia sing, and when I’m making an unholy ruin of something she’ll sing along to give me something to flail at.  Sigh.  I’ve even got used to her singing a new exercise for me to copy, and then having to open my mouth and listen to my voice after hers.  If I were ever going to throw it in and take up the violin or clog dancing it would be at one of those moments.  I can deal with the fact that she has a professional-level voice and I don’t and never will;  what is really demoralising is that my voice has no character.  It just sounds like random weedy colourless soprano meh.  It’s the characterlessness that is so discouraging.

Every now and then, however, when I sing after Nadia, I don’t sound quite as colourless meh.  I sound like . . . another soprano, singing.  I don’t sound very good, and I sound rough and inadequate and defective after Nadia, but I also sound . . . well, you know, almost real.  I’d go quietly [sic] about rough, inadequate and defective if I could have distinctive and un-meh too.

I had a couple of un-meh moments today.

* * *

* Also at the commissioning service^ last night I was standing next to a very large man who sang very flat.

^ AAAAAAAAAAAUGH.  I can’t remember if I’ve told you that Maxine and I are going to do a form of job-sharing.  She has her kids every other week—changing off with her ex-partner—by a custody ruling that doesn’t match up very well with the SP once-a-month schedule of ‘every first Friday’, ‘every second Saturday’ and so on .  So on the months it doesn’t work, we’ll swap.  Which is a little additionally complicated for Llewellyn doing the designating, and the team leaders involved.  Today Maxine and I got a couple of emails about it and I’m like WILL YOU PLEASE JUST ASSIGN US AND GET IT OVER WITH.

I did take all of my, and the bits she’d forgotten of Maxine’s, paperwork in to be scrutinised today, on my way to Nadia.  We’re getting away with it.  They’ve somehow missed the outstanding Interpol warrants and passed us.

And no I don’t (yet) know what they do about the occasional fifth something in a month.

For knitting on airplanes, laughing at politicians, and eating the last cookie on the plate.

** ExStock

I have enormous sympathy . . . on the attack from Ms. Off the Planet. Okay, well, I don’t know any of your details, so the situations may not match up at all, but I’m definitely reminded of my own current mess. . . .

 …and I’m trying SO hard to forgive her. . . .

 So, I’ve been praying a lot about it, about the fact that I’m determined to find a way to forgive her but it’s hard work. . . .

Zerlina

The thing with forgiveness is it takes time. Just because you forgive someone doesn’t mean you have to talk to them again. Sometimes it’s better for you not to.

Well, chance would be a fine thing.  The problem is that most worlds are small worlds, one way or another, and generally speaking you only make proper enemies from the relatively small group of people who know you well enough for you to get on their nerves (and vice versa).  These are also people who know you well enough to know where to stick the knife in.  And it’s usually awkward if not downright impossible to excise them neatly from your life.  So you need a plan for the next time (for example) someone emails you, hey, how’s [Ms OTP] doing?  Do you suppose she’d like to do a project for me?  —Since setting fire to your computer is probably not your best option.^

I also just want to mention that for anyone who hasn’t tried it, while prayer is amazing and makes all the difference between sitting in a corner and going bleeg bleeg bleeg bleeg^^ and getting on with your life with hope for the future and most of your brain still intact, it’s not an easy option, or anyway it isn’t for me.  You also find yourself sometimes in some rather strange postures, folded up on your zafu with your prayer-list in front of you:  [Ms OTP] IS BRLGKKGGUGGNNXXXX*&^%$£!!!! . . . but I know God loves her.  Hold that (latter) thought.

^ One of the things that frelling bites me is if she wanted to work fewer hours why didn’t she SAY SO?  I assume that every time a freelancer says ‘yes’ to an offer of work she wants the ratblasted work and I have this now-proved-idiotic idea that us freelancers need to stick together.  Cue hollow laughter.

I have a similar feeling about my ex dog minder.  I was so determined NOT to make the same mistake I’d made with the previous one.  SIIIIIIGH.  The rich, redolent irony is that I may start having cash-flow problems soon, which is to say that barring something unexpectedly fabulous in the financial line, I’m going to run out of the money from SHADOWS before I get PEG II turned in.  I’d have been glad to cut back on both Ms OTP’s and Ex Dog Minder’s hours.  Ha ha etc.  Very very too late now.

 Peter says I’m allowed to put it on the blog that the reason he doesn’t—and I don’t ask him to—step in the dog-minding breach is because he’s terminally absent-minded.

^^ Not to mention hurt feelings.  I was talking to someone who had had something very similar happen to him, and one of the things he said is that aside from truth and justice and the not-only-American Way it simply hurts to have someone think ill of you.  Yes.

*** I suspect most one-on-one teachers of anything become involuntary shrinks, but I guess singing teachers must have it particularly bad because of the frelling misbegotten ‘your body is your instrument’ thing.

† If I did the whole sordid imbroglio might almost be worth it.  Almost.  ONLY ALMOST.

Too Much Blog Material (Again)

 

Last Street Pastors training weekend this weekend.  What I hadn’t got around to telling you because THERE’S BEEN SO MUCH GOING ON is that my dog minder quit without warning a few weeks back.*

The first two SP training weekends had long Saturdays and Sundays—longer days than I wanted to leave the hellpack for.  Pav is still a puppy and she has to be crated when I’m not there frelling SUPERVISING and being shut up in a crate all day is not the stimulation a manic hellterror needs—and We All Know about the hellhounds’ interesting intestinal challenges.  I pulled out the training schedule for weekend three and discovered . . . Sunday ended early.  Faint hope dawned.  It was not ideal, but this meant I had only one day I absolutely had to make emergency arrangements for. . . .

I’ve told you Southdowner has family on the south coast, which is her excuse for coming through here to check on Pav occasionally.**  And so I threw myself upon her mercy.***  Don’t you feel an OVERWHELMING URGE to visit your family the second Saturday in October?  And then you could stop on the way and . . .

Southdowner, who I would bet money had no intention or desire to visit her family on the south coast the second Saturday in October, and whom I am planning to recommend for sainthood on the next intake†, said yes.

So that was Saturday sorted.  But I thought I’d better check about the short Sunday.  So Friday night while we were milling around waiting for everyone to show up, I asked Llewellyn about it.  Oh no, he said, it’s only the training that stops early.  After that there’s the commissioning service.  What with one thing and another, that’ll be about two and a half hours. . . .

TWO AND A HALF HOURS??  THAT MEANS SUNDAY IS GOING TO BE LONGER THAN USUAL.

I fell down in a heap and gnawed on the carpet.  Llewellyn looked at me in alarm.  Well, if he decided I wasn’t suitable SP material anyway that would solve the problem, wouldn’t it?††  But he didn’t.  We’re a small group of trainees this time.  He probably didn’t feel he could afford to lose anyone.

Saturday was fine††† although I suspect Southdowner of supplementing Pav’s lunch a little since there was half a bag of dog food missing and Pav’s belly was dragging on the ground when I got home‡.  Maxine, who has child minder problems, had also been looking forward to the short Sunday, and we had discussed what to do.  The official consensus seemed to be that the commissioning service was first and it was chiefly social milling around and whatevering after‡‡, so we decided we’d do a runner as soon as the Holy Panjandrum had finished the panjandrumming.  And I decided that I was going to tweak the hellcritter feeding schedule‡‡‡, grit my teeth, and hope for the best.

So this afternoon I had already grappled myself together and shot out to meet Maxine§ when Pooka chirruped.  Text from Maxine:  her car had died.  She’d already left to fetch me and . . .

Waiting for the AA§§ or Someone Like Him.§§§  Loooooong.  Paaaaaauuuuuuusssssse.

. . . her car is really dead.  AAAAAAAAAAAUGH.  Now what?  A flurry of texts later—including to Llewellyn to tell him we were, at best, going to be late—and Eleanor, whom I am also nominating for sainthood, was climbing in her car to fetch Maxine and then pick me up.#  Eleanor and her car has been my back-up plan from the beginning of training## and she’d already told me that she and her husband### and the other St Margaret’s Street Pastor, Jonas, were going to come to the commissioning to wave our local banner a little since we were on Lesser Disconcerting’s territory and they outnumbered us better than twice over.~

The hellpack got another hurtle while all this was going down, me stopping under trees in the still-pouring rain to answer and send more texts~~.  Corey, bless her, swapped the training sessions so that Maxine and I missed the one that was less applicable to us~~~ and were there for the final ‘street craft’ session.

And then we were commissioned.&

. . . I’m a fully functional, qualified, signed, sealed and delivered Street Pastor, Llewellyn will give me my new team posting next week AND I’M TERRIFIED OUT OF MY TINY MIND.

* * *

* I lost my previous dog minder by using her too little.  I appear to have lost this one by using her too much.  I’m considering never leaving home for more than four hours at a stretch^ ever again.  It seems so much simpler.^^

^ Hellhounds have amazing ability for keeping their legs crossed when they’re not in digestive mayhem mode.  It’s just you never know when digestive mayhem mode may return.  I don’t know what Pav’s limits are or may eventually become since whatever they are they tend to be subsumed in worrying about hellhounds.

^^ All right, I’ll be gone for six or seven hours once a month SPing.  But that is the middle of the night into the small and medium-sized hours, and the hellpack should be willing to sleep through it.

* I’m reasonably sure she doesn’t mind hanging around for knitting, chat, hurtling, monks and/or roast chicken^ but it’s not like I don’t know she comes for Pav.^^

^ Serially

^^ I also think Olivia gets on the phone to Southdowner and starts panicking.  All right, all right, first bull terrier, steep learning curve, blah blah blah blah, we’re both still alive, okay?  And so are the hellhounds and Peter.  And the only scars are from tripping over her.

*** The thing is that both the hellhounds and Pav are . . . a bit of a handful, in their various ways.  I’ve had a few, you know, ordinary friends offer to fill in, but I would fear for their sanity if not their lives.

† This Street Pastor gig ought to be good for something.

†† The training has been fascinating.  Never mind the going out on the street part.  The training has been FASCINATING.

††† The drawback to the fascinatingness of the training is that much of it is, inevitably, about various of the common ways people screw themselves up or are screwed up by others.  Maxine reached her nadir of confidence about SPing with the paramedic last weekend.  I reached mine Saturday afternoon with the presentation on child sexual abuse.  SPs are only out there to provide lollipops and a listening ear, but the more we know about what we are or may be looking at and when to call the professionals the better.

‡ You may recall I’m supposed to be fattening her up so Southdowner can show her.  I AM fattening her up.  She’s four pounds heavier than I think she ought to be, which is a lot on something that is about the size of a large shoebox on legs.

‡‡ The whatevering included cake but maybe we could snag some on the way out the door.^

^ Note:  yes.

‡‡‡ Which chiefly meant feeding Pav an ENORMOUS breakfast, running her around for optimum through-put, and giving her a minimal lunch.  Hellhounds, eh, they’re only too happy to miss lunch entirely, and they don’t eat breakfast anyway.  Also, Sunday training starts and runs later than Saturday training, which fits in the hellcritters’ cough-cough normal hurtle schedule better.

§ In the pouring rain.  At least this means I don’t need to water the garden.

§§ Automobile Association.  Not Alcoholics Anonymous.

§§§ Any other Firesign Theatre fans out there?

# Aside from any question of suggesting giving normal people a lift in Wolfgang, who is health-and-safety-alertingly full of dog hair, spare leads, spare harness, spare towels, a bottle of water and a bowl, emergency Pav-retrieving rations and so on, there’s the question of a normal person driving him, since going with Maxine started because I can’t do the commute and the training.  Cars have come a long way in the seventeen or eighteen years since he was new.

## This was her offer, mind you, but I do keep reminding her that this is all her fault since it was her presentation at St Margaret’s about the Street Pastors that made me think, Oh!  They take old ladies!  She keeps trying to shift the blame to God.

### Who, when you ask him if he has any thought of becoming a Street Pastor, blanches violently before he says no.

~ Plus one random trainee from Smite-the-infidel, who has really been putting the miles on his car.

~~ Situations like today . . . I am totally on board with all this frelling modern technology.

~~~ We don’t SP schools—yet—which Lesser Disconcerting does.  We will, though, if Jonas has his way.

& It was a pretty much a church service with extra bits in.

KES, 100

 

ONE HUNDRED

I carried the Majormojo bags into the kitchen.  Briskly.  A householder going about her normal household business.  There was a biggish pantry and various shelves and cupboards.   Even after I unpacked my paltry kitchen gear there was far more space than I had stuff to fill up.  Maybe I should start collecting something.  Lake pebbles—once I found out where the lake was from here.  Fossils.  I had a vague idea a lake shore would be a good place for fossils.  Feathers.  Maybe the odd empty birds’ nest.  Trophy deinonychus skulls were probably not practical for a number of reasons.

I took one of the sordid rental-property bowls down from its shelf, nervously turned the tap on—nothing happened, except that water flowed mildly out—gave the bowl a good scrub, and filled it with milk.  After a moment’s thought I took it into the parlour and put it on a corner of the window-seat, next to the last rose-bush.  “I hope you like milk,” I said softly.  If the hob wanted whisky I’m not sure how he—she?—was going to get the point across.  I didn’t think you borrowed shots of whisky the way you borrowed cups of sugar from your neighbors.  Aside from the unlikelihood of borrowing anything from the Lanchesters.  Anything I’d want anyway.

Sid was standing in the kitchen doorway:  silhouette of dog.  “You wouldn’t drink the hob’s milk, would you?” I said.  She lifted her head as I came past her and gave me a would-I-stoop-so-low look of outrage.  “Of course not,” I said.  “Forgive me for asking.  I’m—I’m not myself.”  A great dark unbalancing surge of something washed through me as I said I’m not myself and I put out a hand, found a chair, and sat down.

This wasn’t going to get supper scratched together or a bed-substitute invented.  I got up again.  The bedding boxes were relatively easy to find:  there weren’t very many of anything that wasn’t books, and these were labelled KITCH, BED, CLOTH and MISC.  Once I’d used my few towels to wrap an equally few fragile items there wasn’t enough to make up a box labelled BATH and the only obvious potential living-room item was the little sofa.  Two of the towel-wrapped articles were lamps, but one was my desk lamp and the other one was earmarked to become a reading-in-bed lamp.  At the penthouse there had been wall lights above the bed head specially put in for this purpose, with clever shades to focus the beam so no one sharing the bed with the reader would be disturbed.  I’d have to hope Sid wouldn’t mind the low-tech system.

I carried the bedding boxes to Caedmon’s niche and opened them.  Please the gods or the hob or anyone with a good workaround for fate’s whimsy, let my air mattress be in one of these boxes. . . .

It was.  I pulled it out, stifled my memory of just how annoying pumping it up with its tiny built-in foot pump was, and started pumping.  I could have bought one with an electric pump—back in the days when I had Gelasio’s money to spend—but this one was cuter.  It had red roses stamped all over its grey vinyl skin.

When my foot got tired I considered dinner.  First I considered a ham sandwich and then I thought no, damn it, I live here.  Scrambled eggs and broccoli.  Cooked broccoli.  Supposing I could find my steamer.

By the time both feet were aching and the festering air mattress was a good three-quarters inflated I had found my steamer, washed, peeled and cut up my broccoli, and beaten six eggs in one of my own bowls.  I was assuming Sid would also eat scrambled eggs.  There was a gratuitously icky skillet next to the sordid bowls on the shelf, but I had also found my glorious and beautiful all-purposes copper-plated stainless-steel pan, which weighed a ton and a half but all was forgiven because of the way it made even me look like a capable cook (sometimes.  Almost).  The icky skillet, with its gouged non-stick coating and half-broken-off plastic handle that furthermore looked a trifle melted, was clearly kin to the gas stove.  I rather thought if I put my magnificent copper pot on the latter it would collapse into a pile of fragments, which would be fine in terms of insisting it be taken away, but not so good in terms of the possible leaking gas line.

I lobbed a chunk of butter in the pan and went hopefully toward Caedmon.  Probably you learned where the hot and hotter spots on the surface were.  Holding my hands over it . . . it was all hot.   Well, let’s try . . . there.  I put my steamer down where it might be hotter, and my pan where it might be less hot, and went back to the air mattress.  Sid was snoring, the pump made a kind of feeble groaning whistle, and I was breathing a little hard myself, chiefly from annoyance.  But there were other noises too.  I stopped pumping and heard the murmur of water coming to the boil, and smelled hot butter.

I stood up.  There had been another faint noise from another direction, although it had stopped as soon as the pump had fallen silent.  I went into the parlour.

The hob’s milk was gone.

Late late late late late

 

It’s 1:30 in the morning as I begin tonight’s blog, I got home from Street Pastors’ training slightly less than two hours ago, and I have to get up early to hurtle before Maxine picks me up at 8:45.  I have a problem.  Well, okay, I have many problems, but the immediate one has to do with TIME AND A LACK THEREOF.*

I’m not sure why tonight ran two and a half hours over schedule.  We met up first to get our paperwork sorted and (ahem) several of us hadn’t got it sorted (ahem) and will have to go in next week to do so (ahem).  And then we had a tour of a police station** which was fascinating*** followed by a friendly cop sitting down with us and Answering Questions.†

Then we went on to the CCTV fortress and were hypnotised by all those flashing, flickering, recurrent street scenes.  You must learn to pick up what you’re looking for instinctively:  you’d have permanent brain damage if you had to pay attention to what every one of those gazillion cameras cycling swiftly through a wall-bank of screens was telling you.

And then it was after eleven o’clock and yaaaaaaah. . . .

I really have to go to bed.  Unfortunately this involves dislodging a sleeping hellterror, only held on my lap by having her butt braced against the keyboard. . . .

* * *

* I’m also trying to eat dinner^, and I’m getting very tired of washing my hands AGAIN after fishing the hellterror out of her latest contrivances.  I don’t mind her nesting in the dirty laundry^^, but I can hole out my own socks without help thank you very much.

^ Sic.  Which is not going to help the sleep factor.  At least I’m better off than poor Maxine who grabbed half a bag of jelly babies off her kids on the way out the door.  I had four or five (or six) apples off my tree.  Well, they’re little.

^^ Which is a good thing since I have nowhere else to put it.  Long-time blog readers may recall the Dwarf Appliances Beneath the Stair situation at the cottage.+

+ ::washes hands again:: Hellterror ARRRRGH hellterror.  The problem is that she’s learnt to untie the frelling laundry bags.  I could try knotting them closed but then she’d just eat the cord.

** Any of you ever see a holding cell?  Brrrrrr.  Totally enough to keep most of us honest.  Me anyway.

*** Note that Hampshire has POLICE DOGS.

† Including why cops standing around or ambling in that faux-idle way of cops always have their hands tucked into the armholes of their vests.  (Yes.  I asked.)  Because they’re not supposed to put their hands in their pockets and having their arms hanging at their sides may look sort of threatening or at least more official than circumstances may require.

I don’t think I ever told you about being followed home by a cop one Sunday night at mmph am?  This was a few months ago now.  I’ve had them several times drive past the mouth of the cul de sac, wait and watch me climb out of Wolfgang with an assortment of hellcritters, and then drive on.  I think dangerous criminals rarely try to escape accompanied by two hellhounds and a mad bull terrier.^

But in this case he actually followed me up the cul de sac, parked, and got out.  This was long before any notion of Street Pastors had crossed my mind, but I’m mostly disposed to like cops.  They have an increasingly thankless job and most of them are good guys, it’s just the ratbags get a disproportionate amount of the coverage.  If they keep books on this kind of thing, I’ve called in a few times on the non-emergency number at unsocial hours because I’ve seen something (while out with hellhounds at an unsocial hour) that made me a little uneasy, and presumably the cops that have followed me home but not stopped have logged that in too.

So maybe this was just the Next Stage:  engagement.  Whatever.  This young guy got out of his car and sauntered the rest of the way up the hill with his hands in his vest armholes.  He hailed me in a friendly way, commented that it was a bit unusual to see people coming home at blurg o’clock in the morning on a Sunday, and asked if I’d been drinking.  Snork.  No.  I’d been pathetically sober for weeks as I recall.  He didn’t challenge this and I don’t think he was close enough to smell the lack of alcohol on my breath but so long as your mother wasn’t frightened by a pair of All Stars while she was pregnant with you and given you an unreasoning suspicion of all wearers of this splendid footgear, I’m a pretty harmless-looking individual.  And the coppers seem to have stopped following me home since that night/morning too.

^ Or if they do they are by definition a lot less dangerous.

 

Book rec: OLD MAN’S WAR by John Scalzi

 

 

There was no way I was going to like this book.  It might be excellent of its kind—everyone says it is excellent of its kind—but it’s not my kind.  I knew a version of Scalzi’s rep—that he writes Guy Science Fiction.  Fine, excellent, great, get away from me with that thing.  And I’m allergic to Robert Heinlein and all his spiritual offspring—in fact don’t get me started on Robert Heinlein—and the big plug, from Publishers Weekly, on my paperback cover of OLD MAN’S WAR reads ‘Though a lot of SF writers are more or less efficiently continuing the tradition of Robert A. Heinlein, Scalzi’s astonishingly proficient first novel reads like an original work by the late grand master.’  Well that kills it dead.  Get away from me with that thing with tongs.

So when a friend, applied to for book recs, suggested OLD MAN’S WAR, I thought she’d lost her mind or forgotten who she was speaking to or something.  Ah er um, I said.  I don’t even know why I picked up a copy;  maybe amazon or Book Depository or something sent me a come-on when my friend’s recommendation was still fresh in my mind.*

And then it arrived, with the plug about Heinlein splashed over a jacket illustration of a planet that looks like a mouldy orange with a lot of implausible drone ships racketing off in all directions.  But hey.  It was also a (relatively) cheap mass-market paperback so I could read it in the bath.  Also I think I was looking forward to telling my friend she had lost her mind. . . .

I loved it.  Except for the part about how I don’t think I can tell you any of what I loved about it, on spoiler grounds.  I know, it’s eight years old, there are any number of spoilers out there if you want to click around for them.  I’ve just been having a few rather tetchy conversations about spoilers in the wake of SHADOWS’ publication;  is it so much to ask that spoilery discussions happen in areas clearly marked HERE BE SPOILERS?  A lot of us readers want to know as little as possible about a book beyond what made them decide to give it a try, like a recommendation from a friend despite its genre and reputation.**  Even an old book.  It’s a new book to someone who hasn’t read it before.

Okay.  This isn’t very spoilery.  The point about the ‘old man’s [and woman’s] war’ is that the CDF—Colonial Defense Forces—sign up old people.  They want age and experience.  But they also want high-class cannon fodder.  You can assume there’s going to some heavy rejuvenation involved.  There is.  Two things:  the, er, instructions for living in your new, rejuvenated state, are hilarious.  They’re a rip off of every piece of stupid advertising hype you’ve ever been blistered by in the real world—including the stuff that is telling you about something worth having.  And the second thing:  if you’re a bunch of old people who are suddenly effectively young again, what is the first thing you’re going to want to do?  HAVE SEX.  HAVE LOTS OF SEX.  This kind of thing is such a SF cliché.  Booooooooring.***  It’s done well here.  It’s funny and charming and human.

The bit that I REALLY want to tell you about there’s no way into.  I’ll just say it’s a scene near the end between the hero and a woman he meets quite a way into the book.  And that when I said . . . really no more than that to my friend, about a scene between the hero and the woman he meets pretty late in the book and it was so fabulous . . . she immediately knew which scene I was talking about.  It’s that kind of scene.

One warning:  there is a very high body count.  Given the set up there has to be.  It’s not gratuitous—in fact it’s poignant.  You know all these people;  some of them you’ve known from the beginning, members of the new wrinkly intake with Perry, wondering what the CDF wants with them, and what shape the rejuvenating so they can do it will consist of.

Here’s a bit of relatively harmless chat which may give you some sense of the style:

“So what the hell† is wrong with him?” Lieutenant Keyes asked Alan, about me, at the end of our post-battle briefing with the other squad leaders.

“He thinks we’re all inhuman monsters,” Alan said.

“Oh, that,” Lieutenant Keyes said, and turned to me.  “How long have you been in, Perry?”

“Almost a year,” I said.

Lieutenant Keyes nodded.  “You’re right on schedule, then, Perry.  It takes about a year for most people to figure out they’ve turned into some soulless killing machine with no conscience or morals.  Some sooner, some later.  Jensen here”—he indicated one of the other squadron leaders—“got to about the fifteen-month point before he cracked.  Tell him what you did, Jensen.”

“I took a shot at Keyes,” Ron Jensen said.  “Seeing as he was the personification of the evil system that turned me into a killing machine.”

“Nearly took off my head, too,” Keyes said.

“It was a lucky shot,” Jensen allowed.

There are some great aliens.  And the psychology of the Ghost Brigades is brilliant.  OLD MAN’S WAR is way better than Heinlein.††

* * *

* One of the rather good things about the alarming efficiency with which sites that you have bought stuff at figure out how to ply you with more stuff you might buy is that book and music sellers may actually send you come ons for old stuff.  As someone with a vested interest^ in older books remaining in print this is a very pleasing development.

^ Heavily vested.  There may be both chainmail and Kevlar involved.

** In my case I also want to know it’s not gruesome.  I don’t do horror at all, barring MR James, the original DRACULA, and a few odds and ends, and I pretty much gave up murder mysteries as the serial torturer-killer subgenre seemed to be taking over.

*** Heinlein, for example.  Spare me Heinlein’s ideas of free sex.

† Oh, bad language warning:  there’s a lot of it.  I think it works fine in this context, but it’s there, if anyone has tender eyes/sensibilities.  Personally I thought the scene when they’re all talking about naming their BrainPals was a hoot.

†† And I read a lot of Heinlein in my youth, when there was a lot less choice of F&SF.  I know whereof I speak.

Shortish Wednesday

 

Diane in MN

The Guardian article reminded me of a passage I read in an essay, or maybe a story intro, by Ursula Le Guin many years ago. She quoted someone who’d written something like “there was no technology in the Americas before Columbus” and commented that maybe he (yes) thought that pottery and baskets grew on trees. I assume she wanted to make a point about how one defines technology, and that’s why she didn’t also mention metalworking, irrigation, architecture, etc. I’d guess that it’s only since the Industrial Revolution that people have equated technology with machines, and the more familiar a machine is, the less “technological” it’s perceived to be. I would call a (printed) book perfected technology, but I’m probably in a minority. (Well, maybe not in this group.)

Has everyone here read Joanna Russ’ HOW TO SUPPRESS WOMEN’S WRITING?  If not you should give it a try.  I think anyone who is interested in the whole Girls/Women Who Do Things issue—and if you’re not, why are you reading this author’s blog?—would find it pretty riveting.  It’s from 1983 so it should be out of date, right?  Nope.  I reread it about five years ago—since the move into town, anyway, so less than nine years—and it’s still only too accurate.  It’s also very funny, if often in a blood-letting—or blood-curdling—kind of way.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_to_Suppress_Women%27s_Writing

I’m delighted Wiki has the right edition on display—click on the link and just read the cover, and see if you don’t immediately have to read the book.

I also totally agree about hard copy printed bound books being perfected technology.*  At this point I do read a lot on Astarte, but that’s convenience.  Pdf:  bring it on.  Mss:  give me the electronic version.  And if your iPad is in your knapsack anyway you don’t have to have any last-minute crises about what book you’re taking with you because if the hard copy you snatched up on the way out the door is the last thing you want to read when you arrive** then you have several dozen or possibly several hundred alternatives on your e-reader gizmo.***

But having always been a fidget—and learning that fidgeting isn’t enough either—I’ve started standing up more, especially at the cottage

Susan Orlean had a piece in The New Yorker a while ago about treadmill desks–which, as you might guess, are treadmills with desk bits in the front, so you can work while walking–that made me WANT a treadmill desk. There are manufacturers that make them, so you don’t have to cobble one together from abandoned exercise equipment and old furniture. Orlean said that using a keyboard while walking was easier than she expected; drinking coffee, not so much. Maybe not quite perfected technology . . .

Hmm.  The New Yorker has a hit and miss free-availability on line attitude.  I’m not sure if this is the full thing or not but it certainly gives you the idea:  http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2013/05/20/130520fa_fact_orlean

And again . . . hmm.  It doesn’t fill me with longing but where would I PUT the thing?  I work regularly at at least three different desk/table/kitchen island situations† ALL OF THEM TOO SMALL FOR A TREADMILL.††  If I hadn’t just read that article about how fidgeting isn’t enough I’d be dismissing this out of hand as for other people but maybe this is The Future of No Longer Sedentary Work.  And we’ll all live (nearly) forever, happy, healthy and productive.  Definitely a yaaay scenario. †††

* * *

* Even if they do frell around with glues and bindings and signatures and what the paper is made of and so on.

** Back in the days when I still travelled the books you took with you was a serious issue.  What you wanted to read in the departure lounge or on the runway varied with how many delays, reschedulings, being dragged out of the queue for extra searches, and the number of babies with colic in the immediate vicinity there have been so far—and the book you really want now is in your checked luggage.  On your way home again there will be a different constellation of frustrations, so even if you have that book in your carryon this time it will be the wrong book.  Although are you still not allowed to have any electronic devices on during takeoff and landing?  I know they keep changing their minds about this, like they keep changing their minds about knitting needles.  So you probably still need at least one hard copy volume with you.  As a symbol if nothing else.^

^ That would be LOTR then.

*** And then there’s listening to audible^ on your iPhone while you knit.  Which is one of the great pleasures of life and proves something or other about the positive aspect of the march of time and progress and learning new stuff and being open to new experiences blah blah blah blah blah.  Five years ago I didn’t knit or listen to audiobooks.

^ http://www.audible.co.uk/t1/SCH399_at?source_code=GRL30DFT1Bk90HFSH082312

If anyone who can get on line to read this blog can possibly not know about amazon’s read-aloud books subdivision.+  There are other read-aloud companies out there but ::shuffles feet:: I actually subscribe to audible.

Which reminds me, someone on the forum recently asked about Christian books.  I’ll still try to do a blog some day about my favourites so far but on the subject of read-aloud. . . . Aloysius had recommended Rob Bell’s LOVE WINS some time ago after I’d had a mini-rant on the more-or-less standard concept of hell, where if you screwed up in life you will be CONDEMNED FOREVER.  Nope.  Don’t buy it.  I don’t care what some people tell me Scripture++ says.  Love wins.  In some cases it’s going to take millennia but that’s okay.  God is patient.  And a good thing too.

So I tried LOVE WINS.  HAAAAAAAAATED it.

All those one-line paragraphs?

Pages and pages of them?

And pages?

How stupid does this boy think we are?

And lacking in attention span?

GAAAAAAAAARRH.

So I threw it across the room a few times and forgot about it.

And then we had a video one Sunday at St Margaret’s, and it was short and pithy and really good.  And it was Rob Bell.  Oh, I thought.  Hmmm.  So the next time I had to buy something on my subscription to audible, I bought LOVE WINS.  And listened to it.  And loved it.  It’s now one of my Best Books but only when read aloud.  If you look the printed version up on amazon you’ll see the one-line paragraph deal in the excerpt.  If it doesn’t make you crazy, fine.  If it does make you crazy, but you like the love-wins concept, try the audio.  Bell himself is doing it and he’s got a stand-up comic’s timing.  I had been so busy gnashing my teeth over the print edition I hadn’t noticed it was funny. . . .

+ Sorry about the ridiculously long address.  I was trying not to drop you in my account, which opens automatically if I go to the main opening page.  I’m sure you can log out but [computer] technology and I . . . well . . .

++ Besides, ‘Scripture’ is terrifyingly mutable.

† Four.  Okay, maybe five.  Not counting balancing it on the back of some sofa or other surrounded by hellcritters.

†† Not to mention convincing the hellterror that it isn’t Beelzebub and needs vanquishing.

††† And if this is the ME eating my brain at least it’s cheerful for a change.  ME hallucinations generally go for the post-apocalyptic.

Unnh, continued

 

AKA, Not a Good Day [5]

I got up this morning feeling a little more like a live human being than yesterday . . . but it didn’t last.  Well, we went to Tabitha today, for our monthly bludgeoning, I mean restful and inspiriting massage, and after these profound experiences even if I was healthy when I went in, I can just about make it home* before I de- or anti-morph into wet cardboard or an ihuman who has been allowed to run down to 1% battery.**  Another afternoon/evening on the sofa.  Playing that dangblatted iPad Boggle variant.

Anyone who follows me on Twitter knows what I’ve been doing the last couple of soggy, low-energy days:  catching up on old magazines, especially the Guardian’s Reviews, and tweeting the best articles.***  It will probably not amaze you to hear that the ones that appeal to me the most tend to be either about animals or—er—women, in terms of their lives and futures and opportunities and things.  So I will leave you with the one I just read, and that I haven’t got round to tweeting.

http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2013/oct/07/computers-technology-sewing-sexist-stitch-up  ‘Arc welding is almost exactly like icing a cake. . . . One might involve slightly more molten metal at 3000C and slightly less sugar, but they’re essentially indistinguishable.’

* * *

* Wolfgang knows the way, I just have to arrange my hands artfully on the steering wheel and make pushing motions with my feet occasionally.  Although it’s important to get the pushing motions right, which is kind of a nuisance.

** Yes, I think she’s worth it.  I’ve told you this before:  it was Tabitha, vitamin and mineral supplements and homeopathy that got me up off the sofa again when the ME first knocked me over.  I can feel the little lines and networks of spastic neurons firing under her hands as she gets out her meat tenderizer and whangs me with it.  It’s worth a certain amount of mild AGONY and a lot of cranky neurons to be a little more lifelike the rest of the month.

Tabitha is also a lifelong committed Christian, and was one of my cheering/praying section for the last x years, and since that particular prayer was answered thirteen months ago, and aside from her necessary attention to what’s been having an effect on my health since the last time I saw her, takes an interest.  I’m still working through the aftermath of Ms Off the Planet’s attack with the lightning bolt from headquarters I mentioned here, which was only about a week before that.  It’s a bit like having your stabilizers/training wheels taken off and finding yourself in the Tour de France next week.  YEEEEEEEEEEEP.

Most of this is nothing I want to put on a public blog, but for anyone who has ever had the indescribably delightful experience of someone violently and unexpectedly offloading a lot of abuse on you—the kind where even while you’re standing there bleeding you know it’s not about you, you’re just the poor plonker who was in the way—or any other similar wild, mind-boggling injustice, I do want to tell you that this prayer thing is the razzle-dazzle.  I’ve got my own anger issues, thank you very much, and I’m not big into forgiveness;^  and I’m not looking forward to employing my new skills in my first major post-turning-Christian row in which I am as much sinning as sinned against.  That’s going to be a whole other kettle of loaves and fishes.

But in the present circumstance—never, ever get into an argument with someone in fugue state who has identified you as the antichrist—prayer gives me SOMETHING TO DO AND SOMEWHERE TO GO WITH ALL THE RUBBISH.  When I’ve been caught up in insoluble messes previously one of the worst aspects is that there’s no way out.  There’s nowhere to go.  You just have to wait it out.^^  Prayer gives you a door.  Prayer gives you somewhere to go, something to do, progress, fresh air, forward motion.  It’s funny because the old ‘give it to God’ sounds so insufferably pious—it sounds like the sort of thing someone who is big into foregiveness^^^ would say.  But you can give it to God.  He’s a big guy.  He can cope.  You can give it to him twice:  you can give him the original lorryload of ugly crap, and then you can frelling well pray for the person who hurt you.  You can give her (or him) to God.  Yaay.  You’re on your way to freedom.

You should try it.  Fewer calories than chocolate too.  So it doesn’t matter how often you have to repeat the process.

^ This is actually a major tangent which I shouldn’t get lost on when I’ve only got about one-third of my brain available.  My problem with forgiveness as it’s usually presented is all those trailing incense clouds of condescension and the high moral ground.  I’m not going there either as forgiver or forgivee.  At the same time I certainly believe in letting go.  But I have a little difficulty doing this, mixed up in the old adage about Trick me once, shame on you, trick me twice, shame on me.  My life is littered with people I will never voluntarily have any contact with again . . . a substantial few of whom for cause I’m sure feel exactly the same way about me.

^^ And preferably not lose too much sleep over fantasies of running them through with your sword or merely pressing the point to their throat and listening to them gibber for mercy.

^^^ See footnote ^

*** The best articles that exist on line, that is.  I still don’t know why the Guardian hasn’t died yet, since almost all its content is on line for free, but I’m happy to take advantage.  And I’ll just have to tell you that the New Scientist ran a fascinating article last June called Are you sitting comfortably? Well, don’t, which says (um, roughly) that desk jobs kill you, even if you’re a gym bunny in your spare time.  Long stretches of inactivity—even if you get your correct amount of ‘exercise’ as mandated by the latest government paper/fitness guru/talk show fad—are bad for you.

Okay, wait.  Here it is, by another name smelling as sweet.  You only get a ‘preview’ on the NS site.  http://www.stuff.co.nz/life-style/wellbeing/8864907/Are-you-sitting-comfortably-Well-don-t  ‘People who watch six hours of television every day can expect to die five years earlier than people who don’t watch any.’  Well, I don’t watch any, but I don’t know anybody who watches six hours a day either.

But having always been a fidget—and learning that fidgeting isn’t enough either—I’ve started standing up more, especially at the cottage, to the hellterror’s disgust.  WHERE’S MY LAP? she says.   I swear she can get all four feet off the ground when she starts climbing my leg.