Robin McKinley's Blog, page 5

Bring back the IBM Selectric

It’s not the grey(ing) hair & the wrinkles that make me feel old. There’s an easy workaround to that: don’t look in the mirror. & as long as I continue to keep up, more or less, with my over-rocketlauncher-powered & overpowering dog* I figure I’m still functional.** Physically anyway. Mentally . . . 

It’s technology. It’s technology that makes me feel a good deal older than any hill you care to specify. I acknowledge that the general purpose of this blog is to give me a forum to rant about this or that, a this or that which is most often possessed by demons, but I’m getting a little tired of ranting, in an almost unbroken shriek of invective, about technology.

& the Disappearing Document thing with the new Microevilratbag is frelling ruining my frelling life. Is it really too late to change careers & become a . . . . . . a . . . 

But I like being a writer.*** But any story I’m writing is gonzo whacked out bughouse enough, that’s part of the Creative Process, I want a nice, plain, straightforward, stolid, RELIABLE recording medium.  Bring back the IBM Selectric.†

& so today our regularly schedule programme has in fact not been interrupted to bring you . . . ARRRRRRRRGH. 

Somebody tell me why my footnote symbols, carefully collated & assigned, de-assign themselves? Some of them. Not all of them. After having worked just fine for however long it’s been since I started this blog scam again.†† 

The dagger shortcut key scarpered, taking that day’s limited ration of sanity with it†††, & presented me instead with some yelping menu offering me electrowhizzy entrees I’ve never heard of & don’t want to hear of & which furthermore wanted to override & unseat the relatively harmless, relatively familiar toolbar dangling at the top of the screen . . . but because that’s not nearly amusing enough to whomever is doing this to me‡ the double dagger shortcut key still worked. So did the squiggle.‡‡ Further interesting innovations include that both the infinity sign & the sun insisted that their shortcut key is the same thing. In a spirit of rational discovery‡‡‡ I returned to this document & pressed said shortcut key . . . & got a bunch of numbers. What’s even more interesting§ is that when I pressed the shortcut key again THE NUMBERS DISAPPEARED. At this point, fearing that Genghis & I had slid into an alternate universe§§ I tried shortcut-keying the double dagger & the (reinstated) single dagger . . . & when I shortcut-keyed them again, I merely got two of them.  Which should have been reassuring. It wasn’t. In a world where close personal engagement with Microevilratbag is inexorable fate§§§ I have exchanged my faculty for being reassured with paranoid cynicism, a much more survival-oriented option. 

Oh yes & a few days later the double dagger shed its shortcut key & bolted.

The latest fatality is the yen sign.☼ Which I had adopted as another of my Footnote Tree symbols since unfortunately I doubt I will need it as a yen sign any time soon. Instead of a yen sign I get another berserk menu of stuff I don’t want & have never heard of☼☼ & which, furthermore, again eliminates the ever-more-stupidly-overcomplicated tool bar I’m used to & can somewhat use. For things like bold& italic. 

FURTHERMORE IF I GO TO THE SYMBOLS PAGE, THE YEN SIGN STILL DISPLAYS THE SHORTCUT KEY THAT I INSTATED, EVEN THOUGH WHEN I USE IT IN A DOCUMENT IT DOESN’T WORK. 

I HAAAAAAAAAAAAATE MICRODINGADOODAHLING. Um. Squelch. 

* * *

* I think he is the irresistible force and the immovable object all rolled up in one single terrifying hitherto-unknown-to-science organism. The way he eats, he is definitely an organism, not a mere cosmic entity. 

** What’s the occasional crashing to the pavement ow ow ow among friends?^

^ I wish I could teach him to mend blue jeans. Where are opposable thumbs when you need them?

*** Sometimes. Not so much when I HAVE NO FRELLING IDEA WHAT I’M SUPPOSED TO BE WRITING . . . or when somebody wants to know what I do for a living. Okay, here’s a good thing about getting old & wrinkly: people ask you that less than they used to because, obviously, you’ve retired. They can still ask you what you used to do for a living however. Lab rat cage cleaner. Uncorker of Ocean Bottles.^ Plougher & gritter of roads around a small town in NE Scotland. Lot of free time with that one. Does anyone else remember reading the story somewhere that WH Auden had, I think, ‘accountant’ on his passport so people wouldn’t talk to him? I hope it’s true.

^ https://tinyurl.com/35p3wayu+

+ with thanks to Orli, my over-achieving librarian friend. Chances are you will hear about her again on these virtual pages.

† Is there an echo in here?

†† Maybe there’s some fine print in the contract that says, This selection will only work for two/three/four weeks, because we don’t like your face & we think this is a silly shortcut to assign to this symbol but we like jerking you around. Who knew there was fine print?

††† See: gonzo whacked out bughouse. I love the idea of a creative process. 

‡ I think I must be the particular assignment of some young aspiring Borg. A sort of modern techno Screwtape situation. 

‡‡ This: §. Its official name is apparently ‘section sign’ which is boring & insufficiently descriptive.

‡‡‡  Not that I would know the concept of rational discovery if it bit me. Hey! Stop biting me, you—thing! 

§ & not, I would say, particularly rational but that’s just me

§§ Since he’s sharing our bungie-corded pair of chairs with me, which is to say he’s wedged himself down at MY end—there’s most of an empty chair NEXT to me—& I am barely managing to keep my bony butt on the inch or two spare unpadded frame he’s left me—I am ASSUMING that if any sliding is happening it’s happening to him too.

§§§ Don’t even think about hymning Apple at me. I have an iPhone & an iPad & they are merely possessed by different demons. If Microdumdum is run by the Borg, who is behind Apple? The Dominion possibly? Ricardo Montalban would be a contender—all the glorious scenery eating, go Ricci, but that man-boob-revealing waistcoat is a way big yuck—but ‘Khan Noonien Singh’ is not a name I want to flail around a lot in current reality, &, speaking of names, I certainly don’t want to encourage something called Skynet.

☼ Why don’t they ever offer you something you want, like a fresh hot cup of tea on demand? Settings would include that you heat the cup first & that you only use loose leaves. But the Borg would be totally capable of remote finicky tea making. & while I’m woolgathering in my standard clueless way, I want a small precise hoist that will bring me my cup of tea just long enough to drink some of it & then winch it carefully back to the Aga to keep warm. I loved my tiny CRAMMED cottage back in Hampshire, but for most things this house is the clear hands-down winner. However at the cottage I was sitting arm’s-length from the Aga. Here I actually have to GET UP OUT OF MY CHAIR & TAKE THREE STEPS for another hit of tea. Feh. 

Never mind all the shattering collisions of fact-dependent reality in the following:  I sat on a stool by the Aga back in Hampshire because there wasn’t room for one chair let alone two bungie-corded together so your German Wire Haired Pointer can join you. The hellhounds had to wait for me to go sit on a sofa, but they had each other. When the hellterror became an only dog we moved to Scotland & she . . . started sharing my chair. Which made much better sense with something her size. But this is probably where I developed the habit of dog as hot-water bottle.

☼☼ If the sharp-eyed among you wondered why there was a four-squiggle footnote at the end of the last blog post when I try to stop at three per symbol^ that’s why. It was late, I was tired, I was NOT in the mood to go squirrelling around in sinister subterranean techno interstices. & if anyone did notice, you should be applying that heroic & supernatural focus & discernment to something useful like solving global warming or reducing the energy level of German Wire Haired Pointers.

^ this was a suggestion from several readers on the old blog who struggled with the Footnote Tree

Genghis the Mongol Horde

My last dog died two & a half years ago, in the middle of the first, worst covid lockdown over here*.  I nearly went with her out of sheer despair.  I’d only moved up here a little over a year before, I’d moved into this house less than six months before, & the renovations, furthermore, were stalled somewhere between oh well, the roof doesn’t leak, & but ALL the windows leak & they were SUPPOSED to be replaced LAST AUTUMN BEFORE ALL OF THIS STARTED.  Also, Peter.  I know different people process grief differently but some of us go on feeling that we’re somehow thinner on the ground than we used to be.

It had been a bad year for dogs on my street.  My neighbour on one side had lost their Alsatian the summer before, & my neighbour on the other side had lost both their pugs, one shortly before mine & more or less expected, the second shortly after mine, & not at all expected.  So there was a fair bit of socially distanced sympathetic moaning over fences. 

Meanwhile it was almost impossible to find a dog to beg, buy, adopt or steal from an alternate universe.  Lockdown meant that all those people who had had airy fantasies about owning their own dog had descended upon & cleared out shelters & kennels & breeders & all other repositories of furry dog-shaped beings.**   This is a big house.***  Even with 1,000,000,000 books for company it was empty without a dog.†

I was talking to my ex-pug†† neighbours about what kind of dog we wanted next.  Mr Ex-Pug said that the pugs had been his wife’s idea & that it was his turn again, & he wanted a German Wire Haired Pointer, or at least something in that family, Weimeraner, Viszla, whatever.  I laughed & said, I wouldn’t touch one of those things with a barge pole.  They’re all hysterical perpetual motion machines.  Mrs Ex-Pug wrinkled her nose & said yeah, they’re all mad.  Mr Ex-Pug grinned.

Those of you who’ve read the new About Me on the (new) web site know where this is going.

Maybe three weeks after this conversation someone knocked on my door (&, it still being lockdown, sprang back smartly when I opened it).  It was Mrs Ex-Pug.  A friend of ours just rang, she said.  He’s starting a new job & he has to give his dog away.  It’s too soon for us, she went on, but we thought of you?  Because this is a dog that needs a lot of exercise & can’t be left alone all day.  & we knew you are really longing for a dog.  We told our friend about you, that you work from home even when it isn’t lockdown, & that you believe the purpose of dogs is to take you for long walks.  He said, GIVE ME HER PHONE NUMBER.  Mrs Ex-Pug said, we wanted to check with you first.

Yes, I said.  Yes yes yes yes yesyesyesyesyesyes.

She added, not meeting my eyes, oh by the way, it’s a German Wire Haired Pointer.

Of course it is.

IT’S A DOG.  I WANT A DOG.

I admit I quailed slightly at the prospect of a GWHP, & negotiations did not get off to a good start when my dog’s about-to-be-previous owner rang up & I COULDN’T UNDERSTAND HIM because Scottish accents, well.  But we hacked our way through to an understanding that he would bring him round to meet me & we’d go for a walk together so I could see how he behaved.†††

& while my fate was pretty much sealed the moment Mrs Ex-Pug said there was a dog that needed a home, my fate was absolutely sealed when, on the afternoon I was to meet him, I was pacing like a caged lion up & down the front windows of the plastic excrescence that used to be the cough cough cough conservatory stuck on to the front of my beautiful old house§, & saw this hairy, eager, interested dog-face thrusting up the last step of my outside stair.   & I totally knew.  I also knew that Mr Soon-to-Be-Ex-Owner was struggling to make it look like my riotous new destiny had, you know, manners, & failing.§§  

But I was about to have a dog. 

I’ll tell you about his name next time.

* * *

* The Only Thing Really Wrong with Dogs Is that They Don’t Live Long Enough, as many people have said, including me.  I have no idea who said it first, & if I ask on line all I get is a lot of hits of people blogging about their dogs dying.  I’m not going near any of these. 

In this case my last dog died way way way too young.  She was supposed to help me pick out the next generation of hellhounds^ & oversee their puppyhood, which is to say boss them around mercilessly, which, since she had a good sense of humour, I think we all would have enjoyed.

Sigh.

^ She was a hellterror.  When Peter died I had three dogs.  Two middle-aged hellhounds & a young hellterror.  Life goes on blah blah blah but there are years when I feel death is winning.

Siiiiigh.

** I hope at least one person per family of all these people bought a good dog book & read it first, especially the parts about how much TROUBLE dogs are & you have to really WANT ONE & COMMIT TO THE EFFORT.

*** Four bedrooms.  Not big for a family.  Big for one silly person with a lot of books.

† Caroming into the furniture, knocking stacks of books over, sweeping jigsaw puzzle pieces off the table with a casual turn of the head, shedding THICKETS of dog hair, breathing stentorianly in your ear while you’re eating something interesting, having raucous & exciting dreams when you’re trying to sleep etc

†† No, pugs aren’t my dogs of choice either.  But they’re bigger than a guinea pig—one of the things I would not like about having a Yorkie underfoot is that I’d be too likely to step on it—& I’m basically a drooling sap about dogs, & anything that flattens its ears & wags its tail at me is my friend forever.  Their dogs were perfectly nice ear-flattening, tail-wagging dogs, & they hadn’t been so overbred for smushed-in faces that they sounded like every breath was their last. 

††† The dog not the man.  Although one of the first things I noticed about the man is that he takes those little stiff musclebound steps that say that he played too much rugby in his youth.  I hoped this not did mean that a necessary coping mechanism for a GWHP owner were aggressive rugby tackles.

§ I have a new sunroom.  It’s a saga.  I’ll tell you later.  I will mention in passing that it cost over twice the estimate, due to circumstances beyond either my or my builders’ control, & I had better sell something soon.^

^ Fortunately I don’t even want to retire, because I can’t afford it.

§§ I should say that Mr Ex Owner in fact put a lot of time & effort into my dog, but he was a full-grown rescue when he got him & GWHPs are not the most, ahem, malleable dogs out there.

Strange Pedestrian Encounters

It’s teeming down rain here, cats, dogs, budgerigars, moose, tarantulas, snow leopards, naked mole rats, other creatures hitherto unknown to humankind, hammering against the windows & thundering on the roof, & in fact it has been teeming down here for days, in fact days & days, which is very embarrassing because I like to say that northeast Scotland is a well-kept secret, we don’t have Scottish weather here.  Well sometimes we do.  & the GBH* rain isn’t enough, we also have wind that would like to wrap your long uncontrollable hair (I put a stretchy pony-tail thing on it, I did) around your throat & strangle you, or swoop with malicious intent under your extra-long raincoat, which despite its length is nonetheless failing to keep you dry because, you know, walking, your legs keep emerging from the slit in the front below the zipper & the storm flap at the back because legs gallumph out to quite a remarkable degree when you are walking at EXTREME SPEED on account of the eager hairy four-legged Mongol Horde you are trying to keep up with, anyway, the wind ROCKETS up the inside of your coat & attempts lift off to carry you away to Oz.  Although the Deadly Desert would look pretty good to me right now.   

So I was, you know, pelting [sic]after the Mongol Horde** & we met, coming (perilously) toward us, a little old lady & a little old man.***  The man was carrying a vast & magnificent umbrella, which fascinated me.  It was going either to turn inside out & become something that looked like, & was about as useful as, a tent struck by lightning, or it was going to achieve lift off & carry him away to the Deadly Desert†.  As we slowed†† to pass, the man said to me disapprovingly, I wouldn’t take a dog out in this weather.†††

Um?  What?  Fortunately inertia, which is to say Mayhem on Four Legs, was carrying me relentlessly onward, because any further exchange might have been unfortunate.  What am I supposed to do, teach him to use a toilet & a treadmill??§  This is the Curse of the Dog Owner.  You have a dog, you go out, whatever the flaming-doodah weather. 

& once you’re used to it, you may not want to admit it, but your own body would start getting all restless & cranky if you kept it indoors all day.  It might even start whining.  At least with a dog you have an excuse.§§  & something the size of a Mongol Horde is quite helpful for keeping your own feet on the ground when the wind is trying to rip you sideways.  There have been a few times recently when the wind has literally brought me to a standstill—which is also a semi-inadvertent signal that if hairy dog-butt is planted next to standing-still human, another dog biscuit will magically appear.  In this case, once the crunching has stopped, I wrap my hand around his collar & he drags us through the bellowing gale.  The history books tell you, the Mongol Horde was unstoppable. 

* * *

* This is Grievous Bodily Harm in the UK, what the cops charge you with if you beat someone up, not GBH as in American NPR radio stations

** Don’t worry.  I will introduce you in the next blog post.   

*** I am a little old lady.  The term, when I use it, applies to people who walk slower than I do.^  That is most people.  There are a lot of little old ladies & gentlemen out there who are forty, fifty years younger than I am.

^ My next dog is going to be a Yorkie.+  Weighs two pounds & has very short legs.

+ No it isn’t.#

# I had one of those conversations you don’t want to think about too hard with a very nice lady who was a neighbour when I first moved into this house.  She was a good deal older & littler than I am & she had a Yorkie.  She said that her last dog had been a Labrador, that she’d had Labs all her life, but when he died she felt she was too old to get another one.  But she found she missed having a dog around so much that she … got a Yorkie.  Hers was really a nice little dog, although he objected strongly when the Horde moved in, but I’ve seen bigger guinea pigs.  & obviously I am thinking about it or I wouldn’t still be remembering it almost three years later.  I’m planning on dying in my sleep at 121~ having gone for a ten-mile sprint with the current monster hounds that afternoon. Oh & it wasn’t raining while we were out there sprinting & the wind was a mild-mannered zephyr.   

~ Possibly 127.  I like prime numbers.  Although being divisible by 11 is also very cool.

† LUCKY HIM.

†† This is an interesting process with the Horde.  He will do anything for food^ & to prevent him mugging people he has learned to come RUSHING back to me, smack his butt down & eagerly wait for the dog biscuit.  This does mean less collateral damage to innocent passersby, but we get through a lot of dog biscuits.  I then hook my hand firmly through his collar & we eeeeeeeease past the other people without the Horde having the opportunity to throw himself on them & search their pockets for dog biscuits.  Don’t most people carry dog biscuits in their pockets?^^

^ including licking unknown substances off the pavement, a habit I discourage without notable success+

+ for those of you who may remember the old blog, this makes a startling change.  The hellhounds thought food was optional & not terribly interesting, & found the idea of either doing something or stopping doing something because they were offered a dog biscuit demonstrated a puzzling lack of logic on the part of the fool with a biscuit in her hand.

^^ There’s a man well known to all local dog walkers who appears to spend his days cruising the roads around here looking for dogs.  When he spots one he slides to a halt beside the human at the other end of the lead, lowers his car window & hands the human a dog biscuit saying, It’s not for you, you know. 

I’m kind of grateful he is doing this from a car.  If the Horde started receiving dog biscuits from random walkers it would probably be all over for any possibility of human control.  As it is I’ve gone up a shirt size wrestling with the Mad Hound of Scotland.  No, really.  All those articles telling you about aging gracefully that take as a starting point that it’s all about loss & trying to slow the inevitable deterioration of, say, muscle mass?  No.  Wrong.  All you need is a large boisterous dog.

††† Well in weather like this I wouldn’t take an umbrella out. 

§ In weather like this it’s an appealing thought but I think it would not end well.

§§ Although the truth is I’ve been keeping myself (relatively) sane by going for long walks most of my life.  When things are seriously AAAAAAAUGH I take myself out, whatever the flaming-doodah weather.

Announcement

******** IN MEDIAS RES.  I’m not a linear thinker at the best of times, & just to get going again I’m writing these first posts from where I am now.  I promise to catch you up********

Happy Birthday Chaos*

 

Chaos is twelve years old today.  Darkness is too, of course, but he’s not around to enjoy his roast chicken.  Sigh.  Chaos, Pav** and I went on one of our standard local walks today, up the hill in Old Eden with the fabulous view—of, among other things, the mews where Peter used to live.  Birthdays mug you as you get older, I guess.  I couldn’t stop thinking, today, that a year ago there were four of us and three years ago there were five of us.

Well.

Chaos’ eyes just about stood out on stalks when he saw the size of the bowl of fresh roast chicken he had for/after supper tonight.  I think he’d forgotten it was his birthday.  We have a bribe system about meals.  He’s a terrible eater anyway, always has been, just like his brother, and he’s now on kind of a lot of immune system/kidney/old dog/person support stuff which don’t smell bad to me—I’m on a few of them myself—but they certainly smell, and if it’s not fresh roast chicken Chaos is pretty much not interested.  There has been LANGUAGE when he began refusing and now continues to refuse the WILDLY EXPENSIVE*** fresh raw dog food that a local organic farm produces and that I bought quite a lot of (frozen) after initial reactions were positive.  Feh.  This smells totally like food to me and Pav, of course, is climbing my leg in a passion to assist in making my expenditure worthwhile.

So the system goes that I put all the icky stuff in some dog food and Chaos and I argue about it.  I win because I have to, but it’s not a pretty sight.&  AND THEN HE GETS HIS CHICKEN.  Occasionally laced with fresh fish and tiny, non-system-straining scraps of fresh liver and goat-or-sheep cheese.  The things we do for love.&&

I can see all your eyebrows rising from here but I’m still planning to get back to putting a blog post up, let’s say, twice a week.  Meanwhile things, which is to say shit, keeps happening.  The really big current pile of faeces is that a very dear friend went into hospital for emergency surgery the beginning of the week.  Very much worse on his family, of course, but I’m in shock, and any of you out there with a predilection for prayer or other positive supernatural intervention, all prayers and supplications welcome.  If you’re like me and want a name to pray for even if it’s not the person’s real name, we’re going to call my friend Ethan.  We’re not going to know how he’s doing for a while yet so we want to keep him on God’s active list.

And down here in the mundane world . . . I had another fly attack.  And this one was worse.  Last time it lasted a day, this time it lasted about a day and a half, last time I killed hundreds of flies . . . this time I think I must have broken a thousand of the revolting things.  My strike rate was up to 4-5 and occasionally 6 flies per tissue and I went through over a box of 100 again—but I also added chicken-stock drowning traps this time, three of them, and I was dumping them out and refilling them&&& when they turned black with disgusting corpses.  I was really feeling I was losing my mind, the way it went on and on and on.  I’d read online that a pomander made of a citrus fruit stuck with cloves would keep them off, so I made one thinking to clear a tiny space so I could eat, and I’m here to tell you that a frenzy of flies couldn’t care less about your fresh pomander.

So what I’m thinking now is, does this mean I’m due a third assault in another fortnight, which will be worse yet?  And I still have no idea where they can be breeding!  This is, granted, an untidy, make that an extremely untidy house, but the stuff that gets wedged in corners is mostly books, leavened with tins of dog food, bought in bulk online because it’s so much cheaper.  The garbage is taken out at least twice a week . . . and why isn’t there a SMELL?  Don’t flies breed in . . . things that SMELL?  I am going to drag everything out of the Dog Food Corner on the possibility that something ruptured, or arrived ruptured, without my noticing.  And when I can’t find anything I don’t know what I do.  Sit in the middle of the floor and cry, probably.  Prospective whimpers.

OKAY.  FRELL IT.  LET’S HAVE SOME GOOD NEWS.  The blasted weather did finally break—dropped thirty flaming Fahrenheit degrees in about twenty-four hours and it’s even rained properly a couple of times.  I have the Aga back on!!!  Yaaaaaaaaaay! 

But here’s my real news.  I KNOW ABOUT A HUNDRED KANJI.  HOW THE HOWLING DOODAH DID THAT HAPPEN??  Mind you I can’t do anything with them but point to a flash card and say, Five!  Eight!  Fire!  Water!  Woman!  Man!  Horse!  Dog! Village! Talent-ability-years-old!%  I’m not even sure how it has happened, all this kanji learning, except that as I had been pathetically telling Sophia, it’s worth it to me to keep having my lessons even in the appalling heat when I had No Available Brain just to spend time in the Japanese space she provides, and I think I was just READY TO LEARN SOMETHING when the weather finally let me.  Let me emphasise that while this certainly counts as a beginning, it’s utterly impractical:  I can’t read street signs or menus with the weird selection of kanji I’ve picked up—I’m not interested in reading street signs, so the textbooks that quite reasonably start by assuming you want to order food in restaurants and take the right train don’t compel me at all—I have no structure (YET) to slot my kanji into.  I’m very roughly following the flash card order, which is also roughly the Japanese government list of kanji for schools, but what I’m more doing is a magpie thing of Oooh!  Pretty!, as I leaf through the card stack, or the pages of one of my books.

But the big thing I need to start doing is learning the ‘readings’ to the kanji I have for some mysterious reason learnt.  Which is to say learning the Japanese for five, eight, fire, water, woman, man, horse, dog, village, talent-ability-years-old, the problem being that pretty much every kanji has several readings, and as in talent-ability-years-old they may not all mean the same thing AND the SAME readings VERY OFTEN SHOW UP IN A LOT OF DIFFERENT KANJI. So you have the kanji for ‘evening’ and the kanji for ‘stone’ and both first readings are ‘seki’.  Evening only has one more, ‘yu’, although stone has SEVERAL, shaku, koku, ishi . . . they all mean stone.  In context.  Sort of, since ‘seki’ is also used (for example) in the word for petroleum.  And sometimes seki means evening . . . AND OF COURSE everything changes depending on the context, and what other kanji may be hanging around.  Or how about the kanji for right-just-principal-positive and the kanji for blue-green-unripe-inexperienced, which have the same two first readings:  sei and sho.   Are you confused yet?  I am.  Very.%%%

But remember Sophia telling me, my second lesson, that she used to just read her kanji book and having initially thought that I was consorting with a dangerous lunatic I discovered I kind of knew what she meant?  Yeah.  I think it’s the pictograph aspect that makes them so interesting—most of them, well, the kanji for ‘dog’ is an upside-down Y with a stroke through the central stem, plus a tiny stroke drifting off to the right.  Hmmmmm.  The horse kanji does at least have four little dots at the bottom that might be legs.  But then you get a really clear one like the kanji for ‘man’ which is actually two kanji:  the kanji for ‘power, strength’ and the kanji for ‘rice paddy’.  Hey.  Cool.  Not that the kanji for ‘power, strength’ makes any particular sense, however, since it looks like an ‘h’ with a problem, although the rice paddy is at least a nice square box with two lines running through it making four nice neat little paddies.  But kanji are still all pictographs at source, like blokes toiling in the fields, and that makes them story-telling:  which is my language.  Pity about the frelling readings . . .  I’m also not getting anywhere very fast with the equally frelling syllabaries:  that’s my other task this week:  hiragana.  I haven’t even started katakana.  Bad me.  Learning kanji is fun.$  I have to get serious. 

But, you know, a hundred kanji!  Only TWENTY NINE HUNDRED to go!$$

* * *

*An interesting heading to catch the eye of anyone cruising for reading material who is unacquainted with my domestic arrangements^

^ Also, it’s yesterday by the time I get this hung.  It’s still today to me, the 17th, Chaos’ birthday:  I haven’t been to bed yet.

** Pav’s sixth birthday was a little over a week ago.  She is so easy to please.  Would you like some dog food?  YES YES YES YES YES.  Would you like a nice dog treat, like some crunchy fish skin?  YES YES YES YES YES.  Would you like the slime out of the bottom of the trash can?  YES YES YES YES YES.  Oh.  Well.  Here, have some fresh roast chicken instead.  She does very well on the fresh chicken front because she is very alert to what Chaos gets.  I admit she receives a percentage less chicken and more dog food, but it’s really GOOD dog food.  ANY DOG would be HAPPY to eat this dog food.  Chaos, of course, is not a dog, he is a hellhound.  Possibly if there was a crispy demon parts flavoured dog food we’d get somewhere.

*** But not as expensive as fresh roast chicken

& One of the things we’re both on is a herbal thing that soothes the gut.  It’s also very, very gluey.  I swallow mine straight to get it over with, but it performs the useful function of making Chaos’ despised dog food stick together which means that if I seem to be losing the argument, it’s a whole lot easier to sweep up globs and throw down his throat.^  The thing I do not understand is that he absolutely knows what the system is:  he gets his chicken only after he’s embraced his dog food.  Day after day after day—as I’m fond of telling him, I will stress myself to breaking point trying to keep him alive with some decent quality of life attached, but three times a day, which is to say at every meal, I am ready to kill him with my bare hands—he will not eat his dog food until the comfy chair comes out.  In this household we do expect the Spanish Inquisition, it arrives like clockwork three times a day.  ARRRRRRRRGH.  And as soon as that’s over with he’s all shiny eyed and perky and under my feet, waiting for his chicken.  ARRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRGH.

^ I’m usually getting in my own way however by doing things like drowning the dog food in fresh home made chicken stock , which does, sometimes, work.  Sometimes it doesn’t.  And the gluey stuff can only do so much.  I haven’t yet used a baster to get Chaos’ food down his throat, but that’s probably only because I can’t remember if I still have one, and if so, where it is.

I make chicken stock by the GALLON.  Sometimes I even get a little.

&& Any of you with critters know exactly what I’m talking about.  I do my final prayer-sit very last thing every night before I go to bed, sitting on my zafu in front of the fireplace in the sitting room, and Chaos usually comes in with me, and very often arranges himself in such a manner that some elderly human joint or other is being compressed in a way it doesn’t like BUT IT’S TOTALLY WORTH IT AND I WOULDN’T DREAM OF MAKING HIM MOVE.^

^ Also, one of those slightly woo-woo things about many domestic animals, he seems to know as soon as my evening prayer list hits Ethan.

Pav, however, is a rather unrestful prayer companion.  She finds the sitting room stimulating for some reason.  All the books possibly.

&&& An appalling misuse of my lovely home made chicken stock

% No, really.  There’s a kanji that means talent or ability . . . or years old.  It’s not like it’s straightforward.  It’s a language, isn’t it?  When was a language ever straightforward?  And Japanese doesn’t do round.  The kanji for round is a divided rectangle on legs.  Certainly.  I get that.  And ‘eye’ is a rectangle standing up on its narrow end with two horizontal strokes through it:  if it were at least lying down it would look a little like an eye, with its iris marked out.  However Sophia was telling me about Russian noun declensions to make me feel better AND I FEEL A LOT BETTER.  I AM SO GLAD I AM LEARNING A NICE (RELATIVELY) STRAIGHTFORWARD LANGUAGE LIKE JAPANESE.  WHAT’S A FEW (THOUSAND) KANJI AMONG FRIENDS AFTER ALL.

%%% I’ve only just now discovered, or comprehended the fact of, the readings index in my big fat 2000-kanji book.  There are eighteen ‘seiki’s!  There are THIRTY FIVE ‘sei’s!!!  Waaaaaaaaaaaaaah!

$ I am a dangerous lunatic

$$ And a few readings!

Rain

 

Rain.  What a concept.  You may have heard of it.  Water falls from the sky.  No, really.  Water.  Falls from the sky.  Makes you and the landscape wet and everything.  This would be brilliant in hot weather, like, you know, now.  Rain is a very popular myth in many societies.  Some communities try to attract rain by certain signs and rituals.  The raincoat, for example.  A raincoat is a coat made of a waterproof material.  Depending on what culture you are from you either believe that leaving your waterproof ritual object at home will encourage the rain spirits to piss all over you when you’re on your way to a first date with a hot prospect and your waterproof ritual object is old and tatty because who has the spare cash to spend useless* items?**, or, that if you want rain you should go outdoors flaunting your waterproof ritual object, waving your arms, dancing, and singing a little rain song.*** Now, lean in closer and listen to me carefully.  I know a lot of you are not going to believe me, but would I lie to you?%  We had rain here for several hours a few days ago.  We all ran outdoors and stared upward%%, wondering what this extraordinary manifestation was . . .

It’s hot again.  Mid-80s today.  (Just about or just under 30 C.)  It’s going to be hotter tomorrow.  And if you look at the long-range forecast, more of the same for at least another fortnight.  Nor any of that mythological wet stuff anywhere.

I AM SO HOT.  AND SO SICK OF WATERING.  MY POOR GARDEN, who can’t even come indoors and pretend to cool off in front of the fan.  And yes, we did have several hours of the water falling from the sky thing, and it was nice steady moderate rain which is what you want when the ground is somewhat more rock-like than mere rock and getting on toward resembling titanium . . . but it didn’t last anything like long enough to do anything very productive like water all the gasping things with roots in the titanium soil.  It actually did do my garden some good, but that’s because I’m out there frelling watering every day and the ground hasn’t forgotten what water is, and will take a drink if it’s offered.  Elsewhere, even though it was nice moderate rain, we had wild run-off because the titanium says I rule here, begone you wet stuff, so you’re looking at the crops dying in the fields next to the road while you’ve got a bow-wave on your car in one of the standard flood spots because the storm drains are all full of dust. 

So my dahlias are blooming . . . but the veg I want to eat are running frantically to seed in the farmers’ fields, trying to reproduce before they die.  And . . .

All right.  I’m not writing an op-ed piece for the GUARDIAN.  Stopping now. %%%

So, personal bottom line.  I hate heat.$  And it’s hot.$$

I’ve decided to move to Inverness.  It’s COOOOOOLER, real estate prices are a lot cheaper than the frelling south of England, and I believe there are bells there.$$$

* * *

* Useless is, of course, in the eye of the beholder.  My house(s) is/are crammed with items the general public would consider useless, but they all perform the critical function of keeping me amused.  William Morris, who, I believe, was not celebrated for his sense of humour^, didn’t get his famous dictum quite right.  It should read:  Have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful, believe to be beautiful, or that keeps you amused.  And if it’s a competition between useful and amusing and there’s only space for one of them, lose the useful.

^ On the evidence of his fiction, he wouldn’t know a sense of humour if it bit him on the leg.

Clearly no one ever tried the experiment of tying a piece of chicken to his leg in the immediate vicinity of a bull terrier.  Bull terriers have an excellent sense of humour and I know one who would have comprehended this situation instantly. 

** These cultures belong to the philosophy that we live in a hostile universe.

*** These bizarre cultures believe that we live in a friendly universe, and that God didn’t make a lot of really stupid promises about self-definition and non-interference when she set the whole show up arrrrgh.  Just by the way, the friendly-universe cultures never last long so no one has had a chance to study whether their approach to attracting rain works any better than leaving ritual waterproof objects at home, cursing, cancelling the marquee for the wedding reception to spend more money on flowers and food because it has never rained in the memory of anyone’s grandparents, etc.  Even friendly-universe cultures must get a few things right.

% I only lie by omission. And I rejoice to make proper nouns improper.  Which is to say aliases.

%% Some of us got rain on our glasses, which kind of defeated the purpose, but in extraordinary times for which one has no common usages, one may behave disadvantageously.

%%%  Speaking of dahlias in drought:  Dahlias wilt amazingly fast.  Not really surprising, they’re effectively annuals—that is they start from scratch every year—and they produce great big plants and lots and lots of flowers.  But golly don’t they drink.  Roses on the other hand are mostly pretty tough despite their reputation, even first-year ones that don’t have much infrastructure yet.  Their flowers may shrink a little, but they still flower, and if the drought is too severe^ they start losing their leaves, but they will probably survive.  They may even forgive you.^^  The little green thing that fascinates me is the snapdragon:  grow a bought-at-garden-centre one in a pot and it takes more water per tiny snap-bud than anything and is the first frelling thing to wilt when wilting is on the schedule—but volunteer snapdragons grow in cracks in the pavement and furthermore they spread—and they’re all from seed thrown around by bought snapdragons in pots.  My predecessor was, as readers of the old blog may remember, a proper gardener, and proper gardeners don’t go in for coarse, loud, vulgar things like roses and dahlias and snapdragons, and there were no snapdragons growing in the pavement when I moved in.^^^  I have frelling walls of volunteer snapdragons now, and it’s a little tricky climbing the steps to the front door of the cottage because there are so many tiny determined snapdragons growing out of invisible crevices in the brick.  This is also my excuse for not sweeping my front stairs.  The Lodge, at present, is volunteer-snapdragon-free.  This will change.

^ Which it isn’t, in this garden, so the madams among them are busy clutching their smelling-salts and having the screaming abdabs because they can afford to.

^^ Although dahlias have their moments.  This spring when I was having a Good Season and was going to produce a garden this year for the first time since Peter died, I discovered, at the bottom of some noisome heap in my greenhouse-shed, to my horror, a box of dahlia tubers from last year that had never been planted.  Nooooooooo.  And, furthermore, although the tubers themselves were shrivelled pathetically—you know what dried mushrooms look like?  Yeah—but more or less intact, the labels had all been eaten by mice or slugs or something so I have no idea what they are.  I plonked all four of them in pots, knowing they were all dead . . . and two of them decided to live although they got off to a very slow start.  They’re even going to flower soon and I can’t wait to start guessing what the jolly doodah they are, I don’t remember ordering anything that looks like that?!?

Medals for gallantry follow

^^^ If she still has friends here and comes to visit, which I know she did at the beginning, and still comes round her old house to have a look, she’s been having the screaming abdabs herself.  The front steps are particularly gaudy this year.  I had a good spring, as I said . . . and now I have LOTS AND LOTS AND LOTS of mostly-still-madly-flowering petunias, sweet peas, dahlias, cosmos, pansies, geraniums . . . all which need watering.

$ And watering.  Watering is boring.  I haven’t done any gardening in months.

$$ And just keeping up with the important events in the life of McKinley, I had a slight recurrence of housefly hell.  Only about fifty of them this time, but that was way more than enough.  I dutifully killed as many as possible.  If this is a geometric de-progression I should barely notice the next assault.  We live in hope.

$$$ I haven’t rung tower bells in months because in that seven-to-nine-thirty-ish slot I’m watering and risking taking the hellpair out in the evening sun.^  Handbells however are happening at least erratically.  I don’t think I told you about my latest accidental quarter peal—weeks ago now.  Niall is responsible, of course.  I’d agreed to ring at all only because he was short of pairs of hands—people go on holiday this time of year:  I hope they’re going somewhere cool—so it was just Niall, Fairhold^^ and me.  I’d frelling studied Oxford as assigned, but I asked if we could begin by ringing plain bob minor to rub a little of the rust off my handbell-ringing cogs.  And so we started off . . . to ring a few courses of plain bob.  I’ve told you that a plain course of a method usually doesn’t last that long?  So to keep it going your conductor calls.  Calls mix the order of the bells up in certain acceptable-to-the-whole-ghastly-perverse-and-insane-bell-method-system^^^ ways, and mean that you can keep ringing without stopping.  Which is supposed to be a good thing.  If your conductor keeps calling, and none of the ringers makes any destabilising mistakes, and if, furthermore, your conductor is an evil sneaky so-and-so wretch, rather than calling a mere touch, he may be calling what is hilariously known as a composition, with the result being that you could end up with a quarter peal on/in your hands, thirty-five minutes or something later.^^^^

Niall kept calling.

And calling.

I’m pretty stupid, even though I should know better with Niall, and I’m also extra stupid in this heat, which is why I’m mostly NOT RINGING HANDBELLS, which make my brain hurt even when it’s cool, and we were maybe as much as fifteen minutes into the freller before I thought:  DOODAH DOODAH FRELLING, HE’S GOING FOR A QUARTER.

We got our quarter.  And I was shattered for the rest of the evening.

But Niall’s depravity doesn’t stop there.  I also rang a public gig recently because Niall had some frelling fairy tale about needing a local band.  Which of course explains why Fairhold, who lives in, like, Dorset, was one of the other ringers.  You’d think I’d learn.

^ Chaos is not enjoying the heat either.  I got worried enough about him I rang the vet who said cheerfully, oh yes!  In weather like this old dogs are dropping dead all over the place [graphic details omitted]!  I responded:  THANKS SO MUCH.  THANKS.  SO MUCH. 

^^ According to my dramatis personae list you haven’t met Fairhold before, which is deeply remiss of me.  And I’m going to name him Fairhold DESPITE the fact that it seems only to exist in one of my name-your-baby books and nowhere else, but I am too tickled at the idea of calling a handbell ringer Fairhold I’m not going to give it up.  Our Fairhold is a very good handbell ringer, and, crucially, easy to have around, which unfortunately is important to me.  There are yonks and yonks of ringers I won’t ring with because they aren’t.

Despite having got that stricken look, the first time in the cottage’s sitting room, and commenting in a suppressed sort of voice that he’d never seen so many books outside a library.  The whole house is like that, I replied breezily.  And truthfully.

And no, it wouldn’t surprise me at all if many of them say the same about me, and although generally speaking I try to avoid outright confrontation, the zigzags of pissed-off energy spiking around me may give the game away slightly.#

# Slightly in my defense, I’m not a good ringer, and am easily put off by frellingness in fellow ringers.

^^^ No.  I have never figured out why I like method ringing.

^^^^ There are also full peals.  These will never happen to me.  Can’t remember if I told you, Niall managed to talk me into trying for a full peal once . . . and the conductor stopped us halfway saying I rang too slowly.  This is one of those conductors who can think, you should forgive the term since we were sitting down, on his feet, and he did something to his composition so we ended up with a recordable half peal.  Gah.  Even Niall hasn’t been nagging me to try again.

Fly Zone

What the GIGANTIC flaming doodah.

I have not been having a great time lately, as you will/could/may have surmised by my lack of blog posting*, first there was THE HEAT and then there was MORE HEAT and then when the heat slacked off a little last week I had stomach flu which of course brought the ME back again full roar, with teeth and hobnailed boots.  And now it’s hot again, and it’s due to be hot all week.  JOY.  LACK OF JOY.**  And then . . .

Yesterday was the first morning [sic] I woke up feeling that I might have a little energy again.***  As I leaped lightly out of bed% I heard a strange buzzing noise.  I hope that’s happening outdoors, I said to myself, applying a double handful of water to my hair and then running my fingers emphatically through it in an attempt to make it behave.%%

The buzzing noise was not happening outdoors.  I came downstairs to HUNDREDS of houseflies battering themselves against all my ground-floor windows and entwining themselves unlovingly in the dishtowels, the pot and pan handles, houseplants, furniture legs, backpack straps, and anything else entwinable.  HUNDREDS.  I AM NOT JOKING.  HUUUUUNDREDS.  IT WAS DISGUSTING.  Also scary and overwhelming.  Even houseflies are scary if there are enough of them.  And I have no idea where they came from.%%%

I killed I don’t know how many and then went screaming off to the ironmongers/hardware shop for anything they had for houseflies, and they said oh, that’s interesting, several people have been in today with exactly the same problem.  I can’t decide if this is reassuring or not.  Well, yes, it is a little reassuring, it suggests that my personal non-Egyptian plague is not because I am a Limb of Satan& and attracting his creatures&&, but then I just shift mindset into wondering what’s going on with the world.  Climate and global warming and malaria in southern England etc.  And housefly explosions aren’t restricted to New Arcadia either—I wrote an email to a friend in Broceliande about other business and included mention of my hideous domestic assault and she wrote back by return electron saying OMG THAT’S EXACTLY WHAT HAPPENED TO ME TODAY.  And Broceliande is ten or so miles from here.

So, you’re saying, hundreds?  I can hear your lips curling.  NO.  I AM NOT EXAGGERATING FOR EFFECT.&&&  There mostly isn’t room to swing a swatter in this house, which is small and ahem ahem ahem crowded$, so I do most of my target-and-destroy with tissues, and I am telling you my strike rate is very good, especially for a crazy old lady shaking with fury/terror at an ugly crawling dystopian susurration of frelling houseflies.  I get three or four flies per tissue$$.  I started yesterday with a box of 100 tissues over half full;  by the end of the day I was over halfway through a new box.  Plus the twenty or fifty I killed with the swatter—the dozen or twenty I frelling stepped on—the additional twenty or so tissues, at three-four corpses per, which I grabbed from other boxes around the house in my mad frenzy—and the twenty or thirty of the enemy that the nearly useless rubbish I bought at the ironmongers caught.$$$  You do the maths.

And . . . any readers of the old blog who might conceivably be thinking, there was an unusually hot dry summer a few years ago@ when, don’t we remember, there was an indoor invasion of BATS?  YES.  NOW SHUT UP AND THINK HAPPY THOUGHTS ABOUT RAIN.@@

* * *

* And for which the usual apologies with a few extra curlicues to add interest.   I really AM going to get back to posting REGULARLY—really I am—but if this weather is a forecast of summers to come I may have to double up over the winter and take the summers off. 

** So, you know, anyone who has been wondering if maybe I’m not posting because I, perhaps, ran off to Japan, where it’s true it’s even hotter but everywhere is AIR CONDITIONED, and have been having a little difficulty setting up my on line life because I don’t speak the language, um, no.  I don’t actually like air conditioning, and while if it’s either that or death by rays it’s the obvious better choice, I’d rather just live somewhere I can survive in the real world.  Which I admit is looking a little dicey in southern England.

*** My Japanese lesson this week, tomorrow, is going to be frankly embarrassing.  I should be studying right now, but while the brain is enough back on line to write a blog post—well, I think—the Memory for New Things is not working at all.

% CRASH.  OW.  I wake up slowly with optional bruising.

%%  The air is as dry as Palaeolithic bones buried in the desert and my hair IS STILL STANDING ON END.  One of the additional reasons I liked the old, cool, damp, mizzly England is because damp made my previous hair fuzz up in a semi-semi-semi-Pre-Raphaelite way.  I’m afraid to think what the new hair^ is going to look like if we revert to damp and mizzly.^^  It is settling down sort of as it gets longer, but it gets longer very slowly partly because it keeps insisting on corkscrewing at the ends.^^^

^ About which there is NO TRACE of Pre Raphaelite influence, even in my imagination.

^^ WHATEVER.  IT’LL BE WORTH IT.  COOL, DAMP AND MIZZLY, PLEEEEEEEZ.

^^^ Which curled-up knots I keep seeing out of the corners of my eyes and thinking OMG I HAVE BUMBLEBEES LIVING IN MY HAIR.  But it’s still frelling long enough that today when Atlas has been painting the door frame and I went out the door very carefully, but, partly because I still haven’t adjusted to the new hair standing on end sideways, when I turned my head to shut the door behind me MY HAIR SWUNG OUT AND CLANGED INTO THE WET DOORFRAME ARRRRRRRGH.  Also ouch as I ripped free.  Never mind, a thread of white, even if it’s doorframe paint, is not going to be noticed in this elderly mixed-media briar patch.   The door frame is fine.

%%% We used to have dramatic outbreaks of those big horrible bluebottles at the old house, which always meant that something had died in one of the chimneys and we hadn’t noticed.  In a house that size, when we only lived in part of it, it was easier than you think to miss a dead jackdaw in a chimney, especially when the bottom is blocked up and you thought the top was also blocked up.

However I have a special memory of picking up the phone one Saturday to hear the somewhat stressed voice of one of Peter’s daughters-in-law^ saying, we have a sudden eruption of big nasty bluebottle flies, do you have any ideas, and I said promptly, look for something that’s died, for example up an unused chimney, and she said I knew you’d know. 

But in a house the size of this cottage, I would know about something that had died in the chimney, there being only one chimney, and it centrally located, included an un-blocked-up—except by a large chest of drawers because there’s nowhere else to put it—hearth in my bedroom.  And these aren’t bluebottles—they’re ordinary gross little buzzy houseflies.  Gazillions of them.

^ I do often call Peter’s grandchildren my stepgrandchildren—the last four were born after I joined the family after all—but his kids and their spouses are way nearer my age than I am Peter’s.  His eldest is a year and a half younger than I am, and his youngest twelve years younger.  I think I sound like a dork calling them my stepchildren, so I don’t.

& Readers of the old blog may remember that I have been termed such by the Right Wing Christian Loony division.  More than once.  And while I think they’re off their collective rocker, it’s still unpleasant and uncomfortable and unsettling.  Including worrying about how they’re raising the children who are forbidden to read my books because I am a Limb, etc.

&& Mostly I don’t kill things if I can help it.  There are a few exceptions.  Houseflies.  Mosquitoes.  Cockroaches, but you don’t get those outside of cities—yet.  Although I’m starting to sweat the wasps:  I’ve just put my third in two days outdoors.  My lovely new Waspinator isn’t working this year, unless the wasps are more reckless than usual because of the weather?  I wouldn’t blame them.  But I still don’t want them indoors.  Whimper.

&&& Given my somewhat regular use of vivid language, you would be forgiven for thinking I might be.

$ I was telling Hannah this story last night and at that point she laughed.^

^ Also Chaos doesn’t like the noise the swatter makes.  It makes him creep into his crate and look at me reproachfully.  He can cope with the imprecations that are a necessary component to fly-squashing but not that whistling thwacking noise.  Well honeybun you could help.  Darkness used to catch flies.  Good protein source, he’d say, licking his lips, I have the stomach enzymes to cope.  And Chaos used to catch a few, apparently because Darkness did.  He doesn’t any more.  And all the frelling hellterror does is wag her gorblimey frelling tail when I kneel on the floor, tissues poised for attack, next to where she’s toasting herself in the extreme sunlight crashing through the kitchen door, because those bottom panes are favourites with bombinating plagues.#

# Also, where are all those frelling spiders one had lovingly saved from drowning in the bath, when one needs them?!  The only one I saw all day in this spider-prone house was hanging dead at the end of its own frelling web thread.  Arrrrrrgh.  Spider history does not record if it died of horror, as if the hamburger on your plate rose up, cloned itself a gazillion times and came after you, or of joy, lost in a mansion made of brownies and lemon meringue pie, and all its architectural struts glasses of champagne.

$$ I got to six once.  Not seven.  But then I’m not a tailor and can’t make myself a belt, and besides I don’t want to marry a princess, so that’s okay.^

^ I suppose it depends on the princess.

$$$ I know that flypaper is useless, but it seems like such a good idea, till you watch the flies ignoring it.  I also bought two kinds of toxic ick, that you put on your windowsill or stick to the windows, but since I’m not seeing any belly-up flies on the floor that I didn’t put there by my swift and deadly hand, I’m going to take the lot down again.  I don’t like using poison, I was just frantic. 

@ Although I wish to point out not nearly as long, hot and dry as this one

@@ Anyone reading the weather reports knows this is seriously not a joke.  As an organic junkie who furthermore tries to keep her stomping-the-planet footprint small, I’m wondering what’s going to happen to food availability when this summer settles down into whatever autumn is going to be.  The standing crops around here are not only half the height they should be, they’re white-gold rather than gold-brown—very pretty, but I can’t believe there’s any nutritional value in them?—and a lot of them have already been cut and baled, which shouldn’t be happening for a month yet.  We had a big field fire near here a week or so ago and there is way too good a likelihood of more, and if we have more than one at a time, we’re not going to have the firefighters.  And that doesn’t address food prices next year.  Prices for some of the luxury seasonable veg are already off any chart my bank balance can follow.  And think of the poor wild critters trying to survive—and I assume some of the domestic-fodder ones that are going to have to be slaughtered early.

The kanji, the kanji

 

I’ve hit the wall with this wretched blistering weather.  Go back to Equador/Brazil/Kenya/Somalia/[seven more equatorial countries] where you belong!  Our beautiful breeze died, yea verily, even here on top of the hill, and I therefore had to turn the Aga off* whimper but I still feel like an old floor mop.**  I cancelled going to the abbey Saturday because driving was not happening *** and cancelled lunch with a friend Sunday because I couldn’t promise to pick her up at the train.

What day is it again?  What am I cancelling today?  Tomorrow?

It’s not really the heat however.  It’s an overdose of kanji. 

Years ago, when I was struggling with my half dozen incorrect words of Japanese for SHADOWS, I bailed almost immediately about the Japanese alphabet(s).  I was already going to fail with romanji—Japanese words written in our alphabet—no reason to make it any worse, since SHADOWS was only going to be printed in the English alphabet.  But even then—and I probably blogged about it at the time—this felt more like a failure of nerve than a practical decision.  Well, it was a failure of nerve—as well as a practical decision—but I don’t actually blame myself for it.  There are people out there who do things like teach themselves fluent, accurate Japanese all by themselves from books and CDs and the internet, including learning all the squiggles involved in reading and writing it, but I’m not one of them.  When I couldn’t find a teacher, that was that.

I’m not going to do that this time. BECAUSE I HAVE A TEACHER. If I’m going down again, which I probably still am, I’m going to go down in truly spectacular flames.  I will light up the sky!  The astronomers will say, good heavens, what ever is that?  And someone with their eye to a telescope will say, oh, it’s just some elderly fruit loop westerner exploding on contact with too much kanji.

My new teacher, whom we will call Sophia, had told me by email that we could start with a book that she would bring.  When it was laid out in front of me I thought it looked a bit familiar, especially the ‘useful phrases’ page which contains the immortal words Chotto matte kudasai which means ‘wait just a moment, please’ which is more or less the story of my life%, except that ‘just a moment’ is optimistic.  I didn’t remember anything useful, staring at my new Japanese textbook, either from six or from fifty-six years ago, but it was nice just being there, in some kind of Japanese space, and it was glorious to hear someone speaking it—someone who wasn’t me, that is, someone who could.  Sophia.

I went home with my head slightly spinning%%, climbed on the back of the sitting-room sofa and started tearing through the top shelves where I had bundled my inadequate-because-I’m-not-up-to-the-job books on Japanese, after SHADOWS.  And yes, there was a copy of the same book I’d been looking at that afternoon.%%%  So I got it down and started poring over it in the standard Robin-in-the-clutches-of-a-new-craze manner and . . . well, it has some of the squiggles.&  It’s not just nice phrases in romanji.  Although it only makes a polite bow in the direction of the kanji—which are the really scary Chinese characters—it does immediately present you with a chart of the hiragana and katakana syllabaries and the text that accompanies this is the first occasion in the last fortnight that some clueless brute with a brain resembling a computer and hard drive containing 1,000,000,000 megagigabytes tells me carelessly oh, you just learn a few squiggles&& a day.  The English alphabet has 26 letters, right?  And most of us laboured and floundered just a trifle to learn even these back in first grade?  There are something over 200—nearer 250, I think, although I admit just counting them is confusing—of these frelling squiggles in the basic syllabaries, which are really only dabbling in written Japanese, and are wholly subservient to THE KANJI.

Whimper.

I’m trying to learn the first few rows of hiragana.  That’s trying.  I’m working on the second ten, although the first ten is still what you might call wobbly.  TEN.  OUT OF TWO HUNDRED AND (MAYBE) FIFTY.

But after the first few days of staring hopelessly at the chart I realised that I never was going to learn it that way, whatever motor-brained clueless brutes tried to tell me, I was going to need to write the squiggles down, over and over and over and OVER AND OVER AND OVER.  Which meant I need to know how, as in, you know, stroke order, and how you get those dratted little dollops on the ends of certain lines ARRRRRRGH.  Sophia has now emailed me a lovely sheaf of practise pages which I can print out over and over and OVER AND OVER AND OVER . . . sigh.  But that’s this week.  Last week I reapplied to the shelf over the sofa.  And there to my considerable amazement is a book from fifty-six years ago—why I hung onto this when I apparently unloaded useful things like dictionaries:  I have a couple of these, but they’re from six years ago—entitled READING AND WRITING JAPANESE.  And it has the syllabaries in the back with a stroke order-and-direction chart.  Yaay.

But the rest of this not-terribly-large, demure-looking book is the first eight hundred and eighty—and you’re going to have to get up to NEARLY THREE THOUSAND KANJI CHARACTERS YOU KNOW&&&—of the frelling kanji, page after blinding page of them, in neat little boxes with definitions and instructions for writing them and examples of their use in combining forms.  I took the book in with me for my second lesson this week to check that nothing too dramatic has changed in the syllabaries since 1959, which is its copyright date, and Sophia said, no, that’s fine, you can certainly use this . . . in fact this book is very like the one I started with.$  And she sounded positively wistful as she turned it over in her hands, leafed through a few of the kanji pages, and said, I used to just read it. . . .

I looked at her as if one of us was from some other galaxy.  And came home feeling even older and stupider than ever.$$  But you know . . . after frying my small mushy brain on the first two/four rows of hiragana, I decided to read the introduction to the rest of the book and just glance at some of the kanji.  I want to kind of get used to the idea, you know?  See:  spectacular flames.  And while at least these bozos—you can find more of them on line—who are freely assuming that you’ve sucked up the entire syllabaries in a week or two—do admit that the entirety of kanji is a bit daunting—which is a bit like saying oh hey that tsunami is going to get us a bit wet—they seem to think there are ways to make learning it at least possible.  One of the ways is to learn where the squiggles came from—they started life as pictures, you know?  And a lot of them tell stories.  And I’m a sucker for a story.

It’s still hopeless, you know.  Spectacular flames.  But I’ve been reading my flipping kanji book.  And I do kind of see what Sophia is talking about . . .

* * *

* Which is a saga in itself.  She’s my dish-drainer, for example—I have a dish-drainer, but have I mentioned in the last twenty minutes or so that this is a VERY SMALL KITCHEN?  So I have a very small dish-drainer.  Anything bigger than a side plate goes on the Aga, and certainly all the pots and pans do.  So I’m all, Why isn’t anything getting dry?^  Socks that got soaked because one of my watering cans is an old plastic one that I think furthermore was sat on by a hellterror or a panther^^ and its top is so cracked and bits-broken-off that it waters me as much as it waters the plants—socks do not get dry in time for the next adventure in wetness, hung over the Aga rail.^^^  I CAN’T KEEP MY TEA HOT.  I DON’T CARE ABOUT THE WEATHER, I WANT MY TEA HOT.  I do not have an immediately available, already turned on oven.  In fact, I don’t have an oven at all, since the Lodge oven is not to be thought of unless you want to roast a gorilla.  You don’t want to roast a gorilla, although you might be tempted to roast a poacher, of gorillas or elephant ivory or rhinoceros horns or tiger pelts, or what-have-you, but even to support global justice I don’t want to do it in this weather. 

Therefore today’s EXCITEMENT, in my limp and gasping way, has been finding and ordering a little electric plug-in oven to keep my little one-burner plug-in hob company in these dark times.  The problem is that the freller cost about half what my potential hot bin would cost, which puts the hot bin off for the moment, barring storks flying down my chimney carrying bouncing fat rolls of money.  And yes, in response to some commenter who already has one, I’m aware that I need to put my future bin somewhere I can—ahem!—unload the compost, and my garden doesn’t exactly specialise in clear flat spaces, so delaying that particular gnarly decision is no hardship.

^ I don’t believe in, you know, tea towels, except for decorative value.  Mottisfont roses.  Keep calm and drink tea.  The Big Apple.  One Prosecco, two Prosecco, three Prosecco, floor.  The last from a previous life, sigh, but it’s a very nice lavender tea towel and I’m certainly not going to give up using it.  Decoratively.

And, you know, letting things air-dry is much more hygienic.   Unless you want to devote your life to doing laundry.  And washing your hands before you hang it up.#

# Long-time readers, somewhat over acquainted with my domestic arrangements, will know that I have an air dryer.  It hangs from the bathroom ceiling, and you hoick it up and down like a flag.  And it doesn’t work as well with the Aga off either, because the Aga heat shoots upstairs and embraces the wet laundry hanging from the airer rails.  Meteorological heat is just a thug.  It doesn’t dry things nearly as well, it’s too busy twirling its moustaches and oppressing you.

^^ These are, of course, very similar creatures, in terms of likely damage on impact with mild-mannered domestic implements.

^^^ Yes.  Socks.  I hate the feeling of muddy feet in sandals so I put shoes on when I water, when it’s too hot for wellies, and the very idea of wellies in this weather risks dangerous prostration.

** And look rather like one too.  I was scrabbling dry rose petals out of my hair-facsimile the other night after a watering exploit, encountered resistance and thought, frelling frelling, when’s the last time I brushed my hair?, and realised I wasn’t pulling out knots, these were curls.  Trying to learn new hair at my age is very challenging.

*** To Chaos’ great disgust.  If I can’t do something about the weather I could at least put him in Wolfgang and drive us out of town into some countryside where the quality of the heat is superior.

% It must appear in SHADOWS somewhere, but I don’t remember.  Maggie is another disorganised non-maths person but I think she’s probably more together than I am.  Most people are.

%% But that could be the frelling weather

%%% Sophia apparently believes in the softly, softly approach and emailed me politely that if I wanted to do some homework, the details of the book we were using were blah blah blah.  I’m giggling slightly helplessly and thinking, what kind of students are you used to, ma’am?  The kind that can LEARN ANYTHING in an hour a week?  That would not be me.

& Speaking of old crazes—and the probably forlorn hope that Japanese might be the last new one, if I want to get anywhere with ANY of the rather too many I am already engaged with—I have found myself standing up, staring into the middle distance and somewhat frantically knitting a row of some current dead-easy plain knitting project when the squiggles start rising off the page and gibbering at me.

&& For some reason these overbearing gits never seem to employ the extremely useful term ‘squiggle’.

&&& And that’s still only the beginning, since EVERY FRELLING CHARACTER has at least TWO READINGS.  And . . . and I may be getting this wrong because I’m still in the early dumb you’ve-got-to-be-kidding phase and am balking at taking in the full horror . . . but depending on the reading, which you somehow have to recognise by context?!, I have no idea, your disastrously complex rune has a different pronunciation, and it will furthermore have a different pronunciation—I think—as a single word/syllable than it has as a combination—also, I think, dependent on the original reading.  WHAT?!??!?  ::wild weeping and throwing of self on ground and rolling around in agonies of despair::  What was I saying about spectacular flames?

$ No she’s not Japanese.  I can’t decide if it’s a good thing that she knows about having to learn it from a basis of some other language or a bad thing because she must therefore have the computer brain with the hard drive and in a few months will despise me.  I hope she’s already taught a lot of old people with saggy brains.

$$ BUT THAT MAY BE THE WEATHER

 

 

 

 

 

 

It is. Too frelling.

 

IT. IS. TOO. FRELLING. HOT.  I have hellbeasts all over the kitchen.  I would swear it’s a hellquintuplet when I look at the amount of floor space they take up.  And domestic animals, in my experience, ALWAYS prefer to occupy passages and crossroads if they can.  In this small wedged-in kitchen everything is a passage or a crossroad, but there are crisis points, like the narrow gap between the island by the Aga, where this computer lives, and the under-counter-sized refrigerator beneath the bulge of the stairs . . . which is a WEENY EASILY FILLED INTERSTICE . . .  frequently occupied by a hellbeast wishing to draw attention.  OKAY.  YOU’VE GOT MY ATTENTION.  NOW GO AWAY.*

Chaos, even in this weather, kept dragging all his bedding from his HUGE two[SIGH]-hellhound crate out onto the floor in front of the kitchen table, which has, as a result, become only theoretically floor since it is ENTIRELY hellhound bedding—and I gave up and put new blankets in the crate, because he’d go in there and crouch pathetically on the one flimsy little polyester throw left—OF COURSE he can’t possibly drag the blankets he’s dragged out of the crate back in again.  Nooooooo.  What are humans for?  And while I have lived for nearly twelve years now with a vast, bruising appreciation for just how large a moderately-sized hellhound is spread out to full stretch on the floor . . . even the little short-legged box-shaped hellterror turns into a great sinuous monster when she’s stretched out not just on but all over the floor.  The tail in particular grows about a foot, the better to wind around your ankle when said tail goes into frenzied wagging mode while you’re trying to STEP OVER HER.  Hellhound tails don’t thump furiously, they curl gracefully and uncurl again.**  Hellhounds are subtle.  Even standing in the middle of a one-beast-wide pinch point is done with such careless poise that the hellhound at least believes he’s being subtle.  HELLTERRORS ARE NOT SUBTLE.  NOT.  HELLTERRORS DON’T BELIEVE IN SUBTLETY.   HELLTERRORS THINK SUBTLETY IS A WASTE OF OPPORTUNITY TO MAKE SOMEONE CRAZY.

They both*** like to go out into the garden, lie in FULL SUN till their fur is too hot to touch by mere human hands, and then come indoors and flop down panting somewhere (inconvenient) on the kitchen floor.  Chaos at least comes in and lies on his MOUNTAIN of bedding on the far side of the kitchen island, which is relatively protected from the sun BEATING IN from the back garden% and the Aga.%%  I have decided the hellterror is actually from equatorial Africa, which explains a lot.  If her forebears were bred to face down lions and leopards%%% SUDDENLY I UNDERSTAND EVERYTHING.&  But when she comes in from lying outdoors till her fur starts smoking, she lies right inside the kitchen door STILL IN THE SUN.  When the little wildfires begin snaking up from the tips of her ears she will move to the edge of the sunlight, but still as near the door as possible, till she stops charring, and then she moves back into full sun again.  Gah.  Many insanities I possess myself, but this is not one of them.

And God forbid that I should try to let the heavy curtain down to cover the door.  She could lie between it and the propped-slightly-open-for-cross-ventilation door, but she doesn’t want to, and the beady little eyes of your domestic animals, as many of you will know, have a proper laser beam to them when they’re trying to get their message across.  We compromise on the door curtain:  I drape it so it covers the top half of the door, and she can sprawl at the bottom.  There’s bedding there too of course—it is a rare hellbeast who will lie on the naked floor, even in hot weather—which means that GETTING IN AND OUT THE DOOR if you’re, you know, human, is a major undertaking, especially because the kitchen trashcan is involved&& AND the moment I go outdoors to start watering, the hellterror rearranges for optimum blockage.  SIIIIIIIIGH.  I remind myself that I like having hellbeasts around.  Didn’t I just say something about multiple insanities?

I’M NOW OVER 2000 WORDS AGAIN AND I HAVEN’T EVEN TOLD YOU ABOUT MY FIRST JAPANESE LESSON.  Yes.  I survived.  So, crucially, did the teacher.  And I have my second one tomorrow.   But there have been other excitements this last week which have gotten in the way, rather like a hellbeast in this kitchen, of my writing blog posts about any of them.  STAY TUNED.  Mwa hahahahahahaha.&&&

* * *

* Certainly.  After you pet me.  After you feed me.^  After you tell me how wonderful and beautiful I am, especially accompanied by petting and (desirable) food.  Also, ISN’T IT TIME YOU TOOK ME/US FOR A HURTLE?  MAKE THIS STUPID HEAT GO AWAY SO WE CAN HAVE A HURTLE.  In the last named, it’s only ever Chaos, and having made me trip over him, usually arousing language which ordinarily he creeps away from but when he is Stalwart with Righteousness he only views me pityingly, he will go stand by the front door, staring at me meaningfully over his shoulder.

^ This is a generic demand with the hellterror.  Chaos is only interested in the next round of roast chicken/raw liver/goat cheese/fresh fish skin, which he is sure is overdue.

** Which I find adorable.  Just by the way.

*** or all five

% And I mean beating:  it’s 88 degrees out there^ which I do not consider a temperature appropriate for the healthy maintenance of human life.

^ ::fumbles for Pooka and her conversion app:: That’s 31 C for you moderns.  And yes I know it’s worse in London.  London has AIR CONDITIONERS.

%% Yes, all right, guilty.  I still have the Aga turned on.  She’s my only cooker!  And every year living at the cottage full-time and eating this insane way I do eat, having a proper cooker is MORE IMPORTANT.  My emergency one-burner mini stovetop is a total blessing when I have to turn the Aga off, but I WON’T till I’m on the edge of having to ring the ambulance for heat prostration.  The Aga heat is in fact surprisingly bearable—till she suddenly ISN’T—but I acknowledge having her on in this weather is not exactly sensible.  What I really need to do is get the stupid gargantuan restaurant cooker at the Lodge replaced with something, ahem, SENSIBLE.^

The thing about the cottage is that I’m on the top of the highest hill in New Arcadia, and if there’s any breeze, I get it.  Also, when there is a breeze, it’s usually east-west, and the cottage is built east-west:  I have only ONE north-south window^^, and that’s in the attic, and my south side is where I’m attached to my neighbour.  The Lodge is north-south, downhill, and facing immediately onto Ladyofthemanor Street, and it heats up a lot worse.  Turning that frelling monster cooker on in this weather with no good way of cooling the poor Lodge off again is just not, as you might say, on, and I can only think that previous tenants did Chinese take out in hot weather.

^ Did I just say sensible?

^^ All right, two.  But since the second one is effectively bricked up by bookshelves it doesn’t count.  And while I ADMIT I’m a little less than SENSIBLE about stuffing bookshelves in anywhere they’ll go, and frequently where they won’t go, this frelling window is on the sharp bend of the cottage’s steep treacherous stairs and even spider-monkey-limbed I would need major mechanical assistance in getting the frelling thing open and shut so I MIGHT AS WELL HAVE BOOKSHELVES.

The steep treacherous stairs I need to remain spry and lively to be able to continue to negotiate#

# And we AREN’T DISCUSSING the ladder into the attic

%%% And tigers for the branch of the family that moved to Bengal

& I just wish I could convince her she lived in England and Labrador retrievers are not lions.^  Okay, I understand she’s having trouble believing in England in this weather.  I’M HAVING TROUBLE BELIEVING IT TOO.

^ Sometimes I’d rather have lions.  And speaking of things we’re not discussing:  DAMIEN.

Who, for new readers, looks like a Bichon Frise in this incarnation, and unfortunately lives next door to the Lodge.

&& Some of you may remember I had an indoor wormery.  I kept chucking stuff into it and it kept rotting down, and it always smelt like nice healthy compost so I assumed that all was well.  I finally decided that two years is enough—the bumpf that comes with the bin and the worms claims you can start harvesting after about nine months—and I discovered about TWO INCHES of—granted, beautiful compost, but TWO INCHES??—under the still-rotting-down stuff.  After TWO YEARS???  So I spread the beautiful compost, and the worms, at the feet of a few select rose bushes, and I’m now saving up for a hotbin.  https://www.hotbincomposting.com/compost-bins/hotbin-composting-extra.html

Note the price.  Which is why I didn’t rush to order it immediately.  But I hate the frelling waste—if you eat organic and raise your roses organic, the rest of it kind of comes with the territory, and I’m a wet knee-jerk liberal from way back.  Also, when I take my kitchen-and-garden leavings to the dump^ and buy the resulting compost there—it’s not organic because most of the other people whose garden rubbish is involved aren’t organic.  Which is one of my excuses for not raising veg:  organic fertilizer is thin on the ground, so to speak, and expensive.  But the real reason I don’t is that it’s too much like hard work.  Roses are hard enough. And I’ll worry about how the hotbin is going to ruin my life by forcing me to grow healthy shiny organic veg after I buy it.

So . . . I now have an EMPTY SPACE under the computer-side table in the kitchen which is VERY EXCITING^^ because all gaps in this house are urgently exciting because they’re a good deal rarer than mere hen’s teeth and who wants hen’s teeth anyway?!  Somewhat less exciting is trying to figure out where to stuff a hotbin in the back garden.  ARRRRRRGH.  Atlas is not helping.  He’s also a glutton for punishment since he’s the one has to negotiate the rose-and-other-giant-things^^^ jungle out there, replacing the hellbeasts’ courtyard fence.  He was complimenting me today on keeping the whole thing going, which is to say I’m out there WATERING FOR HOURS every frelling evening and suggested, because he is very good at ducking and weaving, that he was sure I could squeeze a few more things in, now that we’re into plant-nursery-summer-SALE season.  Well yes, now you mention it, and a few lavenders, for example, which like HOT and DRY, are a lot smaller and cheaper than a hotbin. . . .

^ When it’s in the mood to receive visitors, and when you’ve chopped up all your branches into .0001” diameter bits, wiped your shoes and put on your humble hat.  To be fair, which I don’t feel like being, the dump can’t cope with anything that’s going to attract rats, and while I take pea- and broad-bean pods, the dump doesn’t actually do kitchen waste at all, so the hotbin is still a big winner.  Except for the growing my own veg part.

^^ Meanwhile I now have to find some other compelling use for the ex-wormery.  Never mind waste, it’s HOT PINK.  I’m not going to allow something hot pink not to have a brilliant part to play in the household economy.

^^^ Dahlias, for example.  Good grief.  I try to specialise in the short ones, but the ones that come to me frequently didn’t get that memo.

&&& You may not realise it but you really aren’t looking forward to my ranting on and on and on and on about learning Japanese.  You can tell yourselves that I’ll be over the Early Bananas Joyful Frenzy stage soon enough and will subside into the awful slog and angst and frustration and hopelessness stage, which I will be too busy enduring to want to write blog posts about it.^

^ One of the problems with my tendency to ENTHUSIASMS is the way a new one drags the other ones along in its wake.  I really miss my singing lessons, for example, but Nadia is now slightly too far for me to be able to drive there reliably, and I haven’t really got my head around this yet.  BUT I WILL.  Maybe I can learn some Japanese songs.  Mind you, if you google, or rather if you duckduckgo, ‘Japanese songs’, 90% of what pops up is variations on Sakura .  But it’s a place to start.

And I’ll tell you a Sakura story next post. . . .

On bucket lists and never saying never

BUT FIRST.  A DIGRESSION.*

With ref to recent comments:  I have never seen nor heard of a yarn shop that winds your yarn for you.  I sit here having a brief dizzy moment of thinking that maybe if, post-Brexit, the current government-facsimile** decides to follow up by expelling all citizens of the country that elected*** that fat ugly evil narcissist blowhard son-of-an-ebola-epidemic bastard%, if America has shops that wind your yarn for you, it might not be so bad . . . No.  It would be that bad.  I can’t deal with a life that doesn’t include striding over the Hampshire hills with a hellhound or three.  But the idea of a yarn shop that winds customer skeins does give me a moment of vacillation. 

And yes, I do have a swift, as readers of the old blog may remember, since I posted PHOTOS.%%  It is a beautiful object, and, furthermore, it prevents me from hanging myself in unwound skeins.%%%  I do not have a winder however because they’re scary.  I think I’d manage to hang myself after all, trying to use a winder.  As it is I’m remarkably inept with the swift.  It has a lovely rotating thingummy in the middle so you should be able to keep winding and it’ll spin around as you take up the yarn.  No.  If I do it that way I end up stretching my nice chunky 6 mm yarn down to cobweb laceweight.  If I stand over the swift I can probably make it spin more lightly but I don’t stand well, and winding yarn TAKES FOREVER.  Especially when your freaking skein is 400 metres.$  So I sit down comfortably, unwind a few spins onto my lap, and roll them up.  And yes, I regularly have to undo the KNOTS that somehow create themselves in my lap.  But at least I don’t—ahem!—wind up with—1,000,000,000 miles of laceweight.

* * *

And so . . . the insurmountable problem, even to a writer as creative as I am, is that this is my bucket list and my educational experience in never saying never, and there’s no way I’m going to be able to put it over for you in the mind-blasting manner it happened to me.  So you’ll just have to allow me some, er, rope here, or perhaps a very long skein of yarn . . .

How even to begin, for maximum impact?

I was at the Mauncester library last week.  I complain about the new library being mostly café, art gallery, local shows of something or other$$ and internet connections, but grudgingly admit that sitting in the caff and working one’s way through a pile of books one has pulled off the shelves—because there are still some shelves of books—and deciding which ones to take home is highly enjoyable, not least because the whole free book thing never gets old.$$$

The only drawback is that a lot of high-school-level tutors meet their students there and sometimes the noise level gets a little extreme.  Usually it’s fine and occasionally I kind of get off on listening to some poor bloodless-faced& teenager trying to find their way through thickets of algebra or chemistry.&&  These are also the pairs that tend to get a little loud as the tutor loses confidence and the student loses consciousness.

Last week I was reading the first few pages of a murder mystery and I overheard someone speaking Japanese.  I can still pick up the sound of Japanese—I mean from any of the other Oriental languages that might sound something like it—but we get yonks of Japanese tourists here every year, so no big.  Except that . . . I looked up.  And there was a woman talking to a teenager with a book and an open laptop between them.  They didn’t look at all like tourists.

At this point, background, for all of you recent readers of McKinley, either blog or book, or, possibly, revision, for those of you with better things to do than remember author histories.  I was a military brat, my US Navy father was posted overseas, we spent five years in Japan when I was a kid.  One of the great shaping experiences of my life was coming back to America at the end of that five years and discovering it was no longer home.  I was gaijin, I didn’t speak the language, and with curly blonde hair and hazel-green eyes I couldn’t begin to pass even if I kept my mouth shut and wore a hood . . . but Japan and the Japanese and Japanese culture had totally got under my skin, and have stayed there.  I’ve fooled around with the idea of taking Japanese language lessons any number of times over the years but circumstances, finances and courage have never successfully combined in the same place at the same time—Japanese is not one of the usual adult-ed catalogue offerings and I have NO gift for languages, make that NO NO NO gift for languages, and it’s taken me a lot of years to resign myself to the fact that I seem to be most drawn by the things I have NO GIFT FOR.  Feh.&&&

And readers of the old blog will remember that I sweated a lot over the half-Japanese character in SHADOWS.  At the time I even looked seriously into Japanese language lessons—but they aren’t to be had in the wilds of Hampshire, are they?  They aren’t.  And I have neither the time, stamina nor money to commute to London for the privilege . . . and also, speaking of courage, I quail at the idea of going to that much effort to attend a class I will be the bottom of.  Sigh.  And I thought I could probably get away with the few sentences of Japanese that Taks says because he hasn’t spoken it in several years.  And—as I told the old blog—I didn’t, quite.  I had a few emails from real Japanese speakers saying, er, um. . . . Before I started writing SHADOWS, and Taks showed up, because, as I keep telling you, I don’t make up my stories, they come to me to be written, and the Story Council was really, ahem, pushing the envelope sending me a character who needed to speak Japanese—before then I had mostly figured out that taking Japanese language lessons wasn’t going to happen in this life.  And since I never write sequels, the fact that I can’t write a sequel to SHADOWS unless I have a proper Japanese speaker to help me DOESN’T MATTER.

It’s even become official.  When I talk about stuff that isn’t going to happen in this life, one of the examples I use is learning Japanese.

You see where this is going.  You see where I hope this is going, since it hasn’t quite got there yet.

So, sitting in the library last week, I decided that I was imagining that the woman was speaking Japanese in a tutorial manner to someone who certainly looked like a student.  I know perfectly well what Japanese sounds like.  But because I was about to have an assumptions-shattering experience it was easier to decide I was hallucinating.  But I went on listening, and I heard her say ‘Tokyo’ and ‘samurai’.  IT HAD TO BE JAPANESE.

Now try to imagine how enormous a twit I felt, when the student packed up to leave and the woman stood up to (as it turned out) fetch her next student and walked past me and I squeaked, Excuse me?  I had to squeak it twice because I made so little noise the first time, but she may have been half-expecting me to say something to her because she’d also been telling her student (in ENGLISH) about the earthquakes, living in Japan—and I’d looked up and caught her eye and smiled—I remember the earthquakes:  I hated the earthquakes.  You had them at least once a week and about once a month they were severe enough you ran outdoors.

So she stopped, politely, and I said, er, um gulp gah oof, pardon me for listening in, do you tutor Japanese?

Yes.  She does.

In Mauncester.  In the wilds of Hampshire.  She lives only a few villages over from New Arcadia.  And she can apparently face the prospect of an artery-hardened, brain-cell-losing sexagenarian as a student.  Makes a change I suppose.  She gave me her details.  And I emailed her that night . . . before I lost my waning little smoky whiff of courage.

I’M HAVING MY FIRST LESSON IN JAPANESE ON WEDNESDAY.  That’s tomorrow.  EEEEEEEEEEEEP.

I am sixty five years old.  I have ME.   I am crazy.££  And it may be a disaster.  Probably not tomorrow, but next week.  Or the week after.  Or . . . But . . . but I’ll have tried, you know?

Get out your bucket list and look at it again.  Never say never.£££

* * *

* How surprising.  How unprecedented. 

** The shrieking gormless circus at present can hardly be called a government

*** Not me boss!  Not me!

% I hope I am making myself clear

%% Which include having put in the yarn-holding pegs backwards because I thought . . . ahem . . . they looked prettier that way.  Some practical reader pointed this out to me.  Sigh.

%%% AJLR totally has the right of it here.  I will just add that two years, I think, ago, I had a mad idea of knitting fingerless gloves, since amusing ones seem to have gone back out of fashion and I have NO INTEREST in olive drab that leave my fingers clear for the triggers of my shotgun.  Fiona and I went to a yarn shop that—horrors—has a café attached, which means you never leave, you know?^  And I was so IMPATIENT to begin that I started the wrist of my first glove without having wound my skein first.  With the result that—two years later—it is still hanging on a cupboard door between me and the Aga.  It adds to the decorative appeal of my kitchen of course^^ but it’s getting a little dusty.  And no, I haven’t knitted any other fingerless gloves either and no I haven’t found the other end of the cupboard-door skein and wound it up backwards.  I have actually tried to find the mythic other end, and of course since I’ve already started knitting the obvious end, I can’t find it.  It’s quite thick yarn, and, you know, dazzlingly and confusingly coloured.  And with the wrist of a glove dangling off the known end even if I did find the spare end I probably couldn’t use the swift.

^ If it also had a bookshop we’d still be there.

^^ COUGH COUGH COUGH COUGH

$ And to Marion:  it’s your own fault for buying laceweight.  100g of frelling cobweb is going to be London marathon long.

$$ Knitting, for example.

$$$ Since I felt this way sixty years ago, I assume I do not have to put it down to being a poor old thing with no sense of adventure.

& Going out on a political-correctness limb here, Asian skin certainly can noticeably pale with dread and despair, and I’d say most black skin that isn’t actually black gets a little grey.

&& It’s not all bad, being old.

&&& Riding horses.  Bell ringing.  Singing.  Playing the piano.  Knitting.  I can draw a bit, but I need put a lot more time into it.  And my idea of gardening is you plonk a plant in a pot or in the ground, feed and water it, and expect it to get on with things.  I do not do the rocket-science form of gardening.  I do not grow difficult plants.^

^ Well . . . roses.

£ Yes.  I told her about the ME.  She has a friend who has it worse than I do.  She’s still taking me on.

££ But we already knew that, right?

£££ And even I know that the end of SHADOWS looks like it ought to have a sequel.  That wasn’t my idea!  It was the way the frelling story came out!  Bad Story Council!  BAD Story Council!!!