Robin McKinley's Blog, page 54

KES, 84

 

EIGHTY FOUR

The trip back to the Friendly Campfire was uneventful except for the harpy and the flock of carrion crows with silver eyes and golden beaks shouting prophesies—no, no, I’m making it up about the crows.  And a good thing too, I couldn’t quite make out what they were saying, but I was pretty sure I heard ‘apocalyptic’ and ‘hellmouth’.

I kept glancing in my rear-view mirror—which I could see out of again, with the back of the van empty, although the window between the seat and the back was a little smudgy, like maybe a dog had been putting her nose against it—but Nilesh was always behind me.  Huh.  Coming back with me to make sure Serena knew about his heroism.  Maybe he didn’t trust me to be generous after the little episode with my new neighbors.  (I was only renting.  If they really were breeding orcs I could probably break the lease and move again.  Hayley would believe me about the orcs.  I wasn’t sure about Sally.  And then I thought about the five hundred and eighty-six book boxes.  Maybe I could stick it out with the orcs.)  Maybe he wanted to get his version of the little episode with the neighbors in first.  Maybe he wanted to reassure me that harpy sightings in this area were really rare and I shouldn’t worry about it and prophesying carrion crows never got this far north.

We bumped a little too springily up over the curb into the Friendly Campfire parking lot.  The van, not in the first flush of youth generally, maybe needed new shock absorbers.  It wasn’t only the last few days, was it?  I’d bucked slowly through all the potholes, really I had—especially now I had a dog to think about.

I pulled up in front of cabin number seven next to Merry and stopped.  There wasn’t room for Nilesh too, who pulled into the gap between seven and cabin eight.  The three large deviant vehicles together looked like a convocation of those people your mother warned you about.  I climbed out of the van to admire the view better, looking around anxiously for impressionable children or easily frightened old ladies.   I didn’t see any, but I saw Mike step down from Nilesh’s cab and walk toward us—that is, Merry, Sid and me.  I didn’t know Mike at all well, but it seemed to me that he looked maybe a little tense, maybe a little awkward—and was he keeping his back to the Friendly Campfire office a little too deliberately?

Six-forty:  JoJo would be here any minute.  I’d better have a last sweep through the van for renegade dog food and deinonychus eggs.  “You okay?” Mike said.  He looked about as much at his ease as Sherlock Holmes at a Tarot card readers’ convention.

“I was about to ask you the same thing,” I said.

The office door banged.  Mike flinched.  I found myself trying not to laugh.  Well, it made a change from being the spurned ex-wife.  I didn’t even know if Gelasio’s floozy was pretty.  As well as being smarter than Euclid and Garry Kasparov put together.  Maybe he really was marrying her for her brain.  Did she ever wear All Stars?  Did she ever shop at Trash & Vaudeville?  Was she tall or short?  Fat or skinny?  What did she do with her spare time?  Run marathons?  Write sonnets?  I hadn’t wanted to know anything about her.

I didn’t want to know anything about her.  I fixed my gaze firmly on Serena, who had a sort of Henry Thoreau at a cocktail party look, rather similar to the Sherlock Holmes hanging with Tarot readers look.

“Hey,” said Serena.

“Hey,” I said, and shut up.  Mike was turning around like the old bounty hunter in someone else’s sights at last, wanting, as his last gesture, to see who’s going to drop him.

This was as good as a play.

“Hey,” said Mike.

They stared at each other. Pyramus and Thisbe.  Hero and Leander.  Buffy and Angel.  Katherine Hepburn and Spencer . . . no, I wasn’t in the mood for adulterous husbands.

I had been planning to lead with the neighbors, but I didn’t have the heart.  It would be like kicking a puppy because it barfed on your shoes.  It had been cute a minute ago.  It’ll be cute again.  Next time don’t let it loose in the long grass where you can’t see what it’s up to.  Next time insist on meeting the neighbors before you sign the lease.  “Mike’s been carrying several thousand books up the outside stairs at Ro—at my new ho—uh.”  Fortunately they weren’t paying attention to me.  I couldn’t say either “Rose Manor”, which sounded like somewhere Sheila Lanchester might live, or “my house” out loud with an ordinary possessive tone and deportment.  I was so lacking in normal grown-up human expertise.  Maybe I could practise.  “Rose Manor” was probably pushing it, but surely I could learn to say “my house.”  It was just unfamiliarity.  We hadn’t called the penthouse anything.

Yes we had.  We’d called it “home.”

Other People’s Roses

 

I bundled the full complement into Wolfgang this morning and after we delivered poor starving Pav* to the (ordinary) vet for some follow-up tests** hellhounds and I went on to Mauncester and had a hurtle there.  This was less about getting out of our standard-walk rut and more about roses.  I’d been in Mauncester about a week ago and thought I HAVE TO COME BACK WITH MY CAMERA.  SOON.  Fortunately hellhounds are pretty patient with me in the clutches of Photo Mania.***

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 * * *

* ‘No food for twelve hours’:  She missed not only breakfast but last night’s bedtime snack as well^—and there was no kibble waiting for her in the back of her travelling crate.  I’m sure her stomach was sticking to her spine.  When I retrieved her this afternoon she went into her travelling crate like a rocket launcher, since there was kibble in there now.

^ And our bedtime snack ritual is interesting.

** The first thing is that I’m very grateful for all the sympathy and support I’m receiving in response to my hellcritter situation.  It really does make a difference, as anyone who’s been in a bad beleaguered spot will understand:  it goes with the territory that your default belief is that you’re All Alone in the Universe and reminders that this is untrue are like . . . oh.  Um.  Reality check.  WELL THAT’S A RELIEF.

But . . . before you decide to offer advice, please remember I’ve been coping with the hellhounds’ alarmingly erratic digestion for seven years—and I’ve seen a lot of vets and talked to a lot of people and read a lot of books and articles about canine health and manifestations of its lack.  I also have several good friends who are either professional dog people (like Southdowner) or have merely had lots and lots and lots of dogs in their lives—or are medical-research junkies.  The basics are very well covered, frequently several times.  And while over these last few months as whatever-it-is frelling snowballs I have often been stressed and sleepless past coherent thought—Peter and my friends aren’t, and they’re keeping an eye on me.  Okay?  Thanks.

*** As long as I don’t indulge too often.

 

Etc

 

 

Blah blah blah blah hellcritter digestion blah blah blah aaaaaugh blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah moan blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah whimper blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah despair blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah  blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah AAAAAAAAUGH blah blah blah blah blah blah nothing to say anyone would want to read blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah have to get up crack of dawn tomorrow to get Pav in for another test. . . .

Aaaaaaugh.

Moan.

Whimper.

Despair.

Another short post tonight.

Oppression of Spirits ‘r’ Us.

 

One of the results of Pav’s blood test is dubious, so she has to go in for more tests on Friday. *

Chaos, historically the more internally stable of the two hellhounds, is streaming** again.

And remember the Saga of Wolfgang, that I didn’t get round to telling you?  The one thing that went right the ghastly week I had off the blog thanks to my FABULOUS MODS?  The general drift was that I was facing one of those do-I spend-all-this-money-on-an-old-car decisions and I cannot afford a new car.***  I occupied the four or five days till the garage could look at him wondering what to do and what I could live with . . . and then they fixed him in an afternoon for £100 labour and a new rubber gasket.  Yaay . . . except that it hasn’t stayed fixed.  In less than a fortnight it’s all starting to go wrong again. . . .

* * *

Well.  We’ve just upgraded to geysering.  As I’ve said before, whatever this is, it’s getting worse.

It’s a short blog tonight.

* * *

* If this is significant, however, which I doubt from the description, and the vet even says it’s probably a one-off anomaly, it would be about Pav herself specifically, and nothing we could generalise usefully about the hellhounds.   While I still insist that it is completely counter to any kind of sense or logic that my puppy, six years younger, unrelated and an entirely different breed with no common ancestors till the dog equivalent of Lucy, should have the same frelling variety/expression of IBS^ that the hellhounds have . . . it seems to me totally possible that I could have the kind of luck which provides me with two entirely separate resident canine gene pools each of which has something wrong with them that manifests in IBS-type symptoms.

^ IBS/IBD—IBD seems to be the preferred British style—Irritable Bowel Syndrome or Irritable Bowel Disease.  There’s also Inflammatory Bowel Syndrome/Disease which we’re not talking about.

** It’s a four-tier system.  Bottom level is the trots, which barely get a mention in this household.  Next up is the runs, which do start to make me nervous.  Next up yet is streaming, aka rivering, which is Very Bad.  The pinnacle of horror and despair is geysering.  We have not yet reached it in this instance.  We are still hoping not to.

*** Especially when I’m spending all my money on vet bills.  I’m going to shoot over the edge of what my insurance will pay—assuming it does pay and, as I’ve already said, I am dead meat if it doesn’t pick up the tab on the £500-to-walk-in-the-door specialist—and meanwhile I’m haemorrhaging money on ordinary vet bills.

Other People’s Gardens, continued

 

Sunday’s garden was the not-exactly-insignificant remains of a truly GIGANTIC estate.  GIIIIIGANTIC.   You get used to this kind of thing, visiting gardens in England, but every now and then one whacks you all over again.  This was one of those for me, although as a garden it was not all that impressive.*   But it’s in a village about a stone’s throw from here.  Well, maybe two sequential stone-throwings.  It’s out Fesca Fenestra and Bindlefugg way, and although this is a wealthy area generally, it’s worse in that district.  One can feel one’s plebeian’s lungs struggling with the thin aristocratic air.  So while the village is maybe ten minutes from here . . . it’s another ten minutes up the driveway.

 

An imposing wall. And a strangely familiar gentleman.

 

Wisteria avenue indeed. Jeepers.

 

This is the ROSE GARDEN. And there are NO ROSES.

Well, they aren’t out yet.  Everything is late because this winter went on and on AND ON and while us in town are having midsummer more or less in midsummer, things having rushed into bloom in haste, out in the countryside . . . no.  And I’m like, NO ROSES???, so, why did I come?  Some bloke just started talking to me about the ABSENCE OF ROSES and I’m all, yo, bloke, why me?, but in fact I was incapable of resisting an opportunity to talk about roses.  We agreed in a superior manner that while it was very disappointing the roses weren’t out, by the look of the beds it wasn’t a very interesting rose garden.  Georgiana and Peter had wandered off, leaving me to my grumble, and the woman the bloke was with was standing there with ‘I’m here because HE wanted to look at the ROSES and there AREN’T EVEN ANY ROSES’ stamped on her face.  Poor woman.  I hope he ordered her a glass of champagne at the pub.  But after we parted I was still thinking, I wasn’t talking out loud to myself about LACK OF ROSES–was I?–I’m sure I wasn’t.  It’s true I was wearing a shirt with a ROSE on it but . . . I could’ve just been wearing a shirt with a rose on it.  I guess us rose nutters just find each other.

Your very own lake. Isn’t that special.

 

Another fetching bridge. Which fetches you from nowhere and deposits you nowhere else. But attractively.

 

It’s a FOLLY. Yes. Somebody sometime built this thing for LAUGHS. To amuse his girlfriend or his children or something.

Ordinary people, you know, take their children or their girlfriends for a nice walk or a picnic or similar.  NO.  WE ARE GOING TO HAVE A FOLLY.  A CASTLE FOLLY.  That’s what it’s called on the map:  Castle Folly.  Good grief.

 

Mine. I’ll have it, thanks. You can keep the wisteria avenue and the boring rose garden.

 

Someone’s folly is easily as big as the cottage and Third house combined.  Also, although I ran out of photo space here, there’s a great door in the back wall that opens twenty feet up on nothing.  For those guests you don’t like much.  Bye-bye.

Mistress of all I survey. Cough. (Folly is just out of frame.)

 

They do have a Mme Gregoire. I’d recognise her anywhere. Also, she’s always early.

 

BUT MINE’S BETTER. My Mme Gregoire.

Hee hee hee hee hee.

But lest you think the afternoon was a waste, the cakes at the tea shed were excellent and I bought another frelling tender abutilon at the plant sale table arrrrrrgh.  One more thing to bring indoors next winter.

* * *

* Hint:  a serious insufficiency of roses

Other People’s Gardens

 

 

I was going to run this last night, till I discovered that the White Screen of Death had disappeared all the blog’s admin.*  Peter and I, with an assortment of friends and relations, have been to two, count ’em, two, other-people’s-gardens over the weekend.  You’re spoilt for choice, this time of year, and we settled on these two as much for convenience of meeting other people at as the elected spectacles’ inherent attractions.  This time of year all gardens are attractive.**  So one garden on the blog tonight and one tomorrow.  But I was thinking that Cat with Buddha Nature and Daisies is clearly a garden, so tonight is already Other People’s Gardens, continued, and tomorrow night will be Other People’s Gardens continued 3.***

The (ex-) working mill side.

 

Because WordPress hates me, and because it’s changed its arglefarging media-handling around again just for something to do this photo, which is supposed to be second jumped the queue into the photoless space at the beginning of the photo-blog templates Blogmom makes for me (because WordPress hates me).  So this one was supposed to be second and the second one was supposed to be first.  I’m not frelling around with it any more.

 

Mill house

See previous.  Grrrrr.

 

Wandering away across a field, looking back over my shoulder.

 

Heron. But your goldfish are safe.

One of the friends we were with told a funny story, with appropriate gestures, about visiting a garden with another heron statue.   Oh, these have got so boringly common, said someone, it’s time garden fashion moved on.  Whereupon the heron gave them an injured look, and flew away.

Baby wisteria

This is what you do when you suddenly fancy a wisteria and you own about forty-two acres.  You just find an empty space and build it its own little roofless wall-less house.  There’s another one of these neat structures beyond this where the wisteria hasn’t really got going yet.  But . . . a wisteria avenue.  Fie.

One of our friends is a serious photographer. There are trout in that stream.

 

Other people’s roses.

Gloire de Dijon, I assume.  It usually is, but I forgot to check for a label.

Etoile de Hollande

I did check the label on this one, since I was kneeling on it to take the photo, but chances were good it was Etoile anyway.  She’s one of the best old amazingly fragrant dark red roses–but she’s also notorious for her weak neck, so one of the reasons everyone grows the climber and not the bush is because standing under a twelve or fifteen-foot climber with all the highly scented blooms pointing down straight at you is charming.  Lying on the ground to enjoy her flowers if you have the bush is not so charming.

The mill race

 

The bridge I took the first photo from. No, second. The one that was supposed to be first.

 

 

* Blogmom works Sunday nights.  She might as well be a free-lance writer.  Ha ha ha ha ha.

** Even small crammed untidy town gardens.  More photos of mine soon.

*** Unless of course something really exciting happens like I ring a quarter of Stedman Triples^ or I get the lab results back on Pav and WE HAVE A DIAGNOSIS.^^  A nice well-defined diagnosis with a clear prognosis and established treatment plan with a 100% success rate.^^^  I would prefer that this latter not include Beluga caviar or a butler.

^ I am going to try to go to Fustian practise tomorrow night.  But it’s been so long since I’ve been near a bell rope I’ll probably have forgotten which way to hold it.+

+ And I finally got back to St Margaret’s last night too.  And I was glad to be back and hear the sermon live and all—they record them so you can sit at home with your knitting if you prefer—but absence from that yucky music-substitute drivel has not made my heart any fonder at all.

^^  Isn’t there a Far Side cartoon where a doctor is telling a patient with cow heads sticking out of him, ‘I’m sorry, Mr Thing, but it’s cows’?

^^^ I won’t say my voice lesson was a disaster.  ‘Disaster’ is maybe a little strong.  I had warned Nadia that the stress level was high and that I sounded like a rusty hinge, and that what I wanted her to do was reset me so I could sing.  She did that.  So it was a practical success even if in an absolute sense it . . . was a disaster.  Sigh.

No post tonight – Blogmom

Blogmom’s blood pressure is slowly coming down after wrestling with a technical problem on the blog.

A calming photo of my cat Joe Boxer.

Joe has Buddha nature.

 

KES, 83

 

EIGHTY THREE

Oh.  Great.

I was going to have Mike’s head on a platter, four hundred and thirty one boxes of books (and three rose-bushes, one of them in a pot made of the off cuts of a supermassive black hole) or not.  Although maybe he’d done me a favor—after screaming skulls, Merry would look positively modest and cultured.  Wait, I hadn’t actually bought Merry yet.  I could still ask Hayley to take me to—to—whatever the name of the town was.  Summer Blizzard.  Freezerton.  Where there was a used car dealership that wouldn’t necessarily sell me a homicidal Plymouth Fury.

I stopped at the end of the road and got out of the van.  Mike pulled in behind me and leaned out his window, grinning.  “That was amazing,” he said.  “That was way better than I hoped for.”

“I am going to tell Serena you have loathsome habits,” I said.  “I’m going to tell her that your two favorite movies are Faster Pussycat Kill Kill and Battlefield Earth.”

“Oh, hey, there’s some good dialogue in Faster Pussycat,” said Mike.

“—that you put ketchup on steak,” I went on inexorably.  “That you like fake maple syrup.  That you play bingo so you can cheat little old ladies out of all the best prizes, the denture cleaner and the chenille bed socks.”

“My mom plays bingo,” said Mike.  “If I went near the hall she’d throw a chair at me.  If you said ‘denture cleaner’ to her she’d throw a chair at you too.  But that hurts, about the maple syrup.  We’ve got a camp upstate, and tap our own trees.”

“In that case I hope all your trees have rose blight or rattlesnakes or moles or something,” I said, my professionally vivid imagination replaying the sight of Sheila Lanchester fainting into her husband’s arms for about the six hundredth time.  At least I hope he caught her.  If Sheila made a habit of this kind of behavior maybe they’d had the floors padded.  You couldn’t know what unspeakable abominations might stroll up to your window when you lived in the back of beyond, and better safe than sorry.   If they were drinking gin and tonics the contents of the dropped glasses shouldn’t stain either.  Did anyone drink G&Ts any more?  I was out of the loop.  I was only interested in tea and champagne.

“Yeah, if I lived next to Sheila I’d be a little twitchy too,” said Mike.

“Hayley told me they were never here,” I said violently.  My instant replay was up to 1,014.

“They aren’t here much,” Mike said judiciously.  “It’s just that when Sheila is around the whole time-space thing gets weird.  I think your dog is worrying about you.”

I turned around and saw as much of Sid as the cat’s-cradle would allow hanging out the driver’s side window.   “Oh, honey,” I said.  “I’m not going to kill him.”

“That’s a relief,” said Mike.

“They might put me in jail and you wouldn’t like jail,” I said to my dog.

“You know,” said Mike, “you were going to have to drive out past Isengard in that death metal van of yours whether I was here or not.”

“Isengard?”

“Nobody else in this area has green grass that already needs mowing, this time of year,” said Mike.  “Gotta be sorcery.  Also, no one I know has ever actually been inside that house.”

I resisted remarking that it might have something to do with the company he kept, but even if I never saw him again I liked Serena, and was immediately outraged on Gus’ behalf that he didn’t have this year-round grass gig.  Motorcycles and class trips were expensive.

“It was as big as your pile when they bought it,” Mike went on, “and they put up a whole new wing out back.  For two people?  They’re breeding orcs.”

“Maybe it’s a ballroom,” I said, “For all the people you don’t know.  And,” I said, returning to my theme, “I wouldn’t have been driving slowly”—except for the potholes.  Sheila couldn’t possibly bear a pothole on her road, could she?  Maybe she could make herself useful by fainting at the local highway department—“and I wouldn’t have been looking.  I drove in here without noticing anything.”

“I think they’ve only just arrived,” said Mike.  “There were suitcases on that lawn when I came.”

“I hope you waved,” I said with biting irony.

“Of course,” said Mike.  “I’m a friendly kind of guy.”

Four hundred and thirty-one book boxes, I thought, and he got Caedmon going.  I sighed.  I shuffled back to the van.  I heaved Sid back to her side of the front seat—with difficulty, but if she sat in my lap I wouldn’t be able to see over her sticky-out-hairy head—I turned the van on.  For maybe the last time.  I hadn’t noticed before that its engine at idle sounded kind of like manhattanmnhttnmnhttn.  I put it in gear with an easy, practised gesture (CLUNK) that had developed over the few days of our brief relationship.

As I pulled back out into the road again I looked in the rear view mirror.  I saw Nilesh, but no orcs.

June

 

BAG THE MELODRAMA.  IT’S MIDSUMMER.  LET’S HAVE SOME GARDEN PHOTOS.

 

Gibber gibber gibber MECONOPSIS gibber gibber gibber gibber

 

I have NO IDEA why I have meconopsis–meconopsises?–this year.  I had more or less given up buying them;  they’re expensive and they keep dying.  I’ve never had one last more than a year, whether it flowered or not. *  At the same time I am a complete sap about not throwing things out even if they’re clearly dead or–since m. disappears over the winter–if a pot looks like it used to have something in it that might just disappear over the winter rather than have died, I’ll probably keep it intact too.  (Of course there is no label.  Don’t be silly.)  I’ve just had this behaviour spectacularly reinforced** by the fact that several apparently empty pots came out of winter hibernation this year producing little fuzzy meconopsis leaves.  Yeah, yeah, yeah, I have been saying, looking at them cynically, you’re just teasing me, right?  –What do I do now?

Poppy.

 

Non-meconopsis garden poppies however are so easy.  You just slap them in and ignore them, and they come in lots of variations on a theme of white-pink-red-orange-scarlet-salmon-maroon-plum.  They are rather terrible floppers, but you forgive them.  Sometimes they’re fringed.

The second tier beginning to unfurl.

 

But meconopsis–!  I have a second tier.  I not only have a meconopsis that is not dead that is producing a blue flower it is producing more than ONE blue flower.  Tiers!  What a concept!

 

Sunlight? Really? Is this some kind of hellhound-tormenting joke?

 

 

I could get used to this.

 

 

Dreaming Spires. No, that’s the name of the rose.

Have I told you this story?  I put Dreaming Spires in the first or second year I was in this house (and this garden).  She struggled for a bit and then appeared to give up.  Well, she’s in a terrible spot, buried behind the apple tree and getting almost no sunlight.  Poor thing.  The ratbag of this however is that she’s becoming rather obscure and was not going to be easy to replace and furthermore where else could I put her in this tiny crowded space that would be any better?  See:  failing to throw things out that are clearly dead.  A year or two later I finally looked up and . . . she’s flowering away like mad at the top of the apple tree.  Sigh.  I could get a ladder . . . and at least she’s alive.  And happy.

Mme Alfred, beginning to forgive me for cutting her back hard last year.

 

The second tier!!!!!

There are actually three huge open flowers, plus that half-open one you can see.  YEEEEEEEP.  –Nongardeners may be finding this all rather obscure.  But meconopsis-worship is fairly common.  And the flowers genuinely are an astonishing shade of blue.  No photo really comes close.

 

See those little fuzzy yellow spots?

 

So eight years ago when I moved into town from a two and a half acre garden to a plot of ground the size of a large bathtub or a small swimming pool, an image that perhaps comes to mind because of the all the plumbing in Hampshire running under it problem as well as the large round brick well head taking up about a quarter of what there is of it, I thought of all the gigantic house-engulfing roses I could no longer grow.   And I decided that I had at least to have rosa banksiae lutea.  THIS IS THE FIRST YEAR SHE HAS FLOWERED. ***

YAAAAAAAAAY.

The clematis is that hoary old faithful Nellie Moser.  Those with taste tend to scorn her.  I wasn’t planning on having her here but . . . sometimes, when you’re a crass vulgar American and you live in the polite end of town you just have to manifest your individuality.

MORE PHOTOS TO FOLLOW.  Of course.  I have barely begun.  Oh, and it’s going to rain:  Souvenir de la Malmaison is cracking open.

 * * *

* Some people will tell you you mustn’t let them flower in the first year.  I say if they’re going to die anyway at least get a few flowers out of them if you can.

** I also went to throw something out that was VERY CLEARLY DEAD and discovered underneath quite a healthy-looking root with a little bulge at the top that looked like a sprout.  Oops, I said, pardon me, and stuffed it back into its pot.  It’s a hosta.  Quite a nice hosta too.

*** There’s kind of more to the story than this.  I’ll tell you some other evening.

Even more vets

 

I got lost today too.  Yawn.  I’m so predictable.

I knew I would get lost yesterday—that’s why I brought Peter, to scrape me off the roof of the car, muffle my screams and find someone to ask directions—but that vet is over in darkest Suffix, for heaven’s sake, where you can drive for miles without ever seeing anything but sheep, trees and the occasional motorway overpass.  Today’s vet is only in Steep Dribbling, where I’ve been several times to ring bells*, although it’s out of my usual range.  Steep Dribbling is small.  It has a church, two pubs, an actual functioning village post office which makes it rare and favoured, and the widget factory.  It’s a very top end widget factory—these are not your cheap everyday plastic widgets—and it has grounds.  You can’t even see the factory from the road, only the lavish swirl of drive** and more trees (no sheep though).  It’s just that once you’ve taken over your small village to build your widget factory, there’s not a lot of village left.  To get lost in.  I managed.

The British habit of burying entire small city-states behind the confusing nomenclature of ‘industrial estate’ is not popular with me, multiple-PhD-holder in the Art of Getting Lost that I am.***  At least when the street address includes ‘Unit 5617’—as it was concerning a yarn shop Fiona and I visited not too long ago—your suspicions are aroused.  When the street address is merely, say, Destroyer Avenue, your first thought probably isn’t that this must be an industrial estate based around naval battles of World War II† and you may just drive straight past a large sign by the side of the road saying GRAF SPEE or BISMARK without the faintest inkling it has anything to do with you.

Fortunately I’d left with plenty of time to get lost in.††

. . . And at this point I had better perhaps have a sudden attack of discretion.  I have a little problem with authority anyway, and I have a long sordid history of HAAAAAAAAATING doctors who know better than you do merely because they’re the ones with the ‘MD’ after their names.  Or possibly DVM.   Diagnosis, I say to myself.  We’re hanging on in the hopes of a diagnosis, or at least of eliminating all the possibilities that the current cutting edge of technology††† can examine for us.

At least herself didn’t bite anyone today.  She really was badly out of it on Monday night, because they put needles into her today and took blood and all sorts of indignities, and I was told she behaved very well.  (I did warn the vet I spoke to that Pav had been having a rough stretch in more ways than one.)   She was glad to see me again, but she doesn’t appear to be too traumatised.  Yaay.  I won’t hear any results—other than that the sonogram didn’t show anything that shouldn’t be there—till next week some time.  And if she still has the runs, which she does, I can take yet another faecal sample in to have it re-re-tested for everything tomorrow.

She was absent from us for about eight hours.  We missed her.  I stopped in Mauncester on the way home first because I had something to pick up that had probably grown cobwebs waiting and second because I needed cheering up and what better way, barring chocolate and champagne, than to spend most of an hour pawing through the used sheet music at the back of the little music store?  But when I got home hellhounds were all, But where is that blasted puppy?  And I was, whimper, whimper, I’ve left her with STRANGERS and they’re DOING THINGS TO HER.

The urge now to get horizontal with the three other critters in the room is becoming overwhelming.  I went to bed beautifully early last night, went to sleep instantly and . . . was woken at about 5 a.m. by Pav doing her Protecting Us from Burglars and the Scum of the Universe thing.  I so was not expecting her watchdog facility and have not yet learnt to turn over and go back to sleep, especially when I’m a little farther along the anxious and distracted spectrum than usual.  So if you’ll excuse me. . . .

* * *

* Note that I can’t even remember the last time I was in a bell tower.  Moan.

** Which sweeps up from the main road through two large square blocks of brick-and-flint wall.  This makes me chuckle nastily.  Having just paid for half of a comparatively small block of brick-and-flint wall I know painfully how much the frellers cost, brick by brick and flint by flint.  And it amuses me that even a high-end widget manufacturer decided not to do anything more impressive in the local traditional building style except a pair of a kind of quadruple-sized gateposts.

*** Peter says he’s going to buy me a SatNav.  Oh good.  Another piece of technology to be gotten the better of by.  I have very mixed feelings about Fiona’s, which is the only SatNav I have much experience with.  Maybe I’ll make it laugh and it will feel sorry for me.  That could work.

† You may instead think that it’s to do with a 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 word fantasy series you don’t want to read.

†† I did yesterday too.  We were still late.  But we were whizzed in the blender of the gods twice yesterday, first when both Google maps and the frelling road atlas were behind the times in terms of recent re-laying-out of roundabouts and crossroads and slip roads to superfluous industrial estates and so on, and second when we FINALLY got to the correct frelling village—which I think is in southern Italy, which would explain a lot—we had another occasion where the big roadside billboard is blaring MADAME TUSSAUD’S WAX MONSTROSITIES so you stamp on the pedal to go faster, and the sign you want is about the size of your hand, painted dark green, and hidden under a tree.

††† Five hundred bleeding quid to cross the threshold—that’s before they’ve done anything except give you an appointment—and leave your pound of flesh in the bucket by the door.  And if my insurance doesn’t pay for at least some of it I am so screwed.