Robin McKinley's Blog, page 59

Venice, the city — guest post by CathyR

 

Some more general photos of Venice.

St Mark’s Square in the sunshine.

 

The Bridge of Sighs links the law courts with the prisons. It’s so named because of the sighing of the prisoners as they headed towards their cells.

 

Laundry is strung out everywhere, beneath windows and between buildings. There must be some sort of arrangement with the residents of the building opposite as to who gets to hang their laundry out at what times!

 

I was rather surprised to see the weather announcer in a rather severe looking uniform.

 

One of the personalities of the fish market! I wasn’t the only one taking photos of this guy dealing with horrible looking black squid (or maybe cuttlefish).

 

Some serious knife action – and all whilst talking nineteen to the dozen!

 

Fruit and veg traders in action. Markets are great places for photos, I wish I could have done it more justice.

 

Smartly dressed for shopping.

 

Traghetti (gondola ferries) are another form of public transport. Nothing fancy about them, they’re not like the tourist gondolas. No padded seats, so most passengers remain standing for the minute or two it takes the two gondoliers to ferry them across the canal. This one operates from the fish and veg market.

 

More wonderful windows. Almost every window has a wide outside sill, with a brightly coloured pot plant on display.

 

In the Jewish / Ghetto quarter.

 

This square in the Jewish / Ghetto area contained a striking, and quite disturbing, memorial to the victims of the Holocaust and the concentration camps.

 

One of the panels forming the memorial.

 

And another. There were about eight such panels in total.

 

The “HIgh Tide” bookshop. Doesn’t that look just SO inviting!?

 

I went running a couple of times in the early morning, and this was part of my route. Right on the point you may be able to see a white statue of a young naked boy holding a frog in his outstretched hand. No, I have no idea either! Obviously an important work, though, as it was encased in a perspex box overnight or when there was no uniformed guard nearby.

 

More splashes of colour, more narrow alleys to wander down. One of the great pleasures of wandering around Venice is simply getting lost – and then finding a cafe with the most wonderful cakes – and hot chocolate To Die For!

 

And finally, no collection of photos of Venice would be complete without one of a mask. In displays ranging from cheap and cheerful outdoor stalls, to lavish and expensive shop windows, these were everywhere.

 

 

 

KES, 77

 

SEVENTY SEVEN

Key rings the size of small kitchen appliances are at least relatively hard to lose.  I’ve seen toasters smaller than my ring of keys for Rose Manor.  I dove for my jacket, which was hanging drunkenly off the back of one of the chairs from the weight of the keys in one pocket.  Now all I had to do was figure out which marlin-sized key opened the kitchen door. . . .

Thunk.  Gotcha.  I opened the door.

Mike came in, looking rather the worse for wear.

“Cobwebs?” I said.  “It’s true I’m a terrible housekeeper but I haven’t had the van long enough . . .”

“Not the van,” said Mike.  “Under the house.”  He went on past me, and dumped his filthy armful on the already-less-than-pristine floor.  I winced.  I was going to have to find the broom before tomorrow night.  Even if Hayley managed to wear jeans I was willing to bet her sneakers would be so clean it would hurt to look at them.  I doubted white-gloved, chignoned outrage at the state of the space under the porch would become me.  Even if I had a pair of white gloves, or knew how to make my erratic hair lie down in a chignon.

“Logs,” said Mike.  “Nobody with a Guardian is not going to use it, so I thought it was worth a look for what the last guy might have left behind.  I’ve got a hatchet in Nilesh.  Hang on.”

He was back before I was finished staring.  Sid was only mildly interested, although sighthounds are mostly only interested in things that run away, and the logs were all lying low.   Mike fumbled with his treasure trove and pulled out something that looked more like an exploded muppet than a piece of firewood.  “Think something’s been chewing on this one,” he said.

“Yeah,” I said.  “That’ll be deinonychus.”

“Or orcs,” he said, not missing a beat.  He stood the muppet on one end and began chipping at it with his hatchet.  Don’t do this at home, kids.  I hoped Mr Demerara was going to be understanding about the new hole in his floor and the bloodstains.  I hoped Mike had a brain-surgeon license for his hatchet.  “This stove’ll also burn coal, but around here wood is cheap and easy, you have plenty of space to store it, and a stove like this, you can burn exactly as fast or slow as you want.”  A little pile of shreds was building up and the blade of Mike’s hatchet hadn’t hit the floor once nor even glanced off a finger.  “You got any scrap paper in any of those boxes?  That I can burn?”

I turned to the nearest book box, peeled the tape off with a noise like a sensitive neighbour catching her first sight of a van emblazoned with screaming skulls, and pulled out several pages of last week’s New York Times.  Wallaby found in Riverside Park, said the headline uppermost.  And the giant rat of Sumatra lives in the East Village, I thought, I used to see him there often.  LEATHER SALE headed the top of the second page over a photograph that was trying to look like Robert Mapplethorpe on one of his less controversial days.  Gelasio had asked for my phone number at a Mapplethorpe retrospective.  To my horror my eyes filled with tears.  I gave a giant sniff, like I was trying to inhale my nose back into my face, crumpled the LEATHER SALE and gave it and the wallaby and several more pages I was careful to avert my eyes from, to Mike.

“It looks pretty clean,” said Mike, “but we’ll just check for birds’-nests.  Or pterodactyls.”  I looked at him sharply but he was twisting the New York Times into a torch.  He flipped a lever on the chimney pipe, snagged the box of matches off the back of the dorm reject, lit his torch, and held it at Caedmon’s gaping maw.  There was a roar, and the darkness sucked at the fire, which went streaming up into invisibility.  “Great,” said Mike.  I was thinking of dragons, which might very well enjoy breathing a little light refreshing fire through a chimney pipe the way the rest of us might slurp a milkshake through a straw.  Or maybe Cthugha lived in my chimney.

Mike dropped the remains of his torch on a neat little pyre that he must have built while I was having my historical moment.  The fire blazed into life and crackled wildly.  Mike fiddled with the pipe lever and the fire settled, like a dog that’s just been reminded of the end of its lead and is thinking oh well.

“There,” said Mike.  “You’ll be warm tonight.”

“Um,” I said, feeling urban and pathetic.  “I don’t know what to do.  You have to put logs in and stuff, right?  And you have to put them in the right way so you don’t set fire to the neighborhood.  Preferably.  I assume.”

May

 

 

It’s the third of frelling May and I am planting stuff out.  And we’re not going to have any more frosts, okay?  Yes?  Okay?

I’ve also taken the plastic sheet off the Winter Table over the hellhound crate in the kitchen, and I’m going to ask Atlas to take it DOWN on Monday.*

Sweet peas. PLANTED.

They have seriously not liked the last fortnight or so of still being stuck in their potting-up pots.   I am hoping they won’t waste a lot of good growing time sulking.  I bought a different range of sweet peas this year and I’m going to have no idea how they measure up against previous standards because it’s been such a weird, not to say bloody-minded, year so far.

More sweet peas. In three of the pot’s four corners, although you can’t see the far one. Some less desirous of embracing passing strangers fondly plant will go in the inside corner.

The clematis they will be climbing through is just old basic durandii, but some of the old basic ones of things are the best.  She is herbaceous–not clinging–so you do have to give her string to drape herself over, but she produces cascades of that clematis dark indigo-purple coloured little curly flowers.  Although this brings up a little problem with the sweet peas.  There was a Terrible Accident soon after delivery and while I know what sweet peas I bought I have no idea which is which.  This year’s colour scheme may be a trifle unusual.

Even more sweet peas.

You can’t tell much from the photo but since it’s me you might hazard that the long bare stem in the big round pot is a rose.  Yup.  Mortimer Sackler and she’s almost as good as her hype.  She might possibly do with more leaves however (I mean even after she gets going) and last year was adorable with sweet peas climbing up her.   Barring accidents of a colour variety, as referred to above, I hope to repeat the effect this year.  The clematis in the pot at the back is Fuji-musume and has the most amazing big flat blue flowers:  the catalogue description is ‘Wedgewood blue’.  I’ve never seen anything like it on a clematis.

Botanical cuteness in spring. Yellow primroses.

I love double primroses, of course, because they look like rose roses.   I have a lot of doubles.  I also have a million volunteer cowslips, including, this year, two rusty-red ones.  I thought wild volunteer cowslips were always yellow.

Primroses are so great. Even the fancy bred-up gardeners’ primroses, like all the doubles, don’t ask much. You put them in, they grow.

And if you have to move them, or if you just think to dig them up, you can break them gently in pieces and have several primroses.  I’ve got half a dozen clumps of yellow around the garden and they’re all from a single original.   Oh, and the naked (rose) stem in this picture is the Herbalist.

PINK. New this year. I am going to try to remember to break this one up and plant a few round about.

 

More of my lovely hellebores, and blue lungwort. I also have PINK lungwort (and white) but it hadn’t disposed itself so well for a photo.

You may correctly gather that barring frelling roses I do tend to have a lot of what is happy to grow around here.  Although this is considered a good rose-growing area, roses may always take some persuading. 

Camellia. Pink. Ahem.

Berenice Perfection, if you’re counting.  Camellias are an enigma.  I treat them all the same, and they either thrive like mad or die.  I have no idea.  I do know that if you have a dry end of summer you’re likely to lose a lot of next spring’s flowers, but I’ve usually forgotten by next spring.  It must have been okay last August because most of my camellias are flowering exuberantly.  I’m going to try to get a few more pictures, but thanks to the beastly weather a lot of the flowers  have been frosted.  Berenice happens to be both huge and in a corner so she has more flowers and more shelter.

Markham’s PINK. No, really, that’s her name.

We had this one at the old house and she’s one of the first to flower and I always loved her but I got the idea that she was hard to grow and I dithered for years before I bought one.  This is her third year and she . . . looks pretty happy.

Miss Pink Markham. Or Ms.

And because I have one photo slot left, let’s have another Markham’s Pink.   (Note that she is a very purple pink, but she is definitely pink.  Pinker than these photos.)  Looking at her and primroses and unfrosted petunias** and sweet peas makes me smile.  It’s a good day:  both hellhounds ate dinner.

* * *

* Although this also has to do with hoping to find a better hellterror solution at the cottage than what I have at present.  She should have a view.

** Next photo post.  I planted some of them out today too.

Dead Battery

 

I actually am going to bed (somewhat) earlier and getting up (somewhat) earlier.  It doesn’t seem to be working.  The frustration just moves around a little.  This reminds me of those dingdongs who say that Daylight Savings Time gives you more hours of daylight.  NO IT FRELLING DOESN’T.  IT JUST GIVES THEM TO YOU AT DIFFERENT HOURS.  I mean, duuuuh.  Twenty four hours is twenty four hours, more’s the pity.  And this time of year I’m seeing dawn occasionally, not in a good way, in spite of being able to have the afternoon hurtle any time up to about eight o’clock—it’s still afternoon because it’s still daylight.  You see my problem.

Anyway.  I yanked myself out of bed BEFORE NINE O’CLOCK* . . . I swear there really is a hole in my life where time leaks out.  Although today was additionally depleted by another live** baby-plant tray delivery . . . of the wrong plants.  They were, however, gasping to get out of their useless little plastic containers, so I’ve potted the frellers on while typing (okay not quite simultaneously) a sardonic email to the nursery in question***.  I now have three outstanding queries in to plant nurseries about botched deliveries—all three have sent me robo letters telling me My Inquiry Is Important To Them and they will respond as soon as they are able.  One of these nurseries is one of these specialist bozos that go on and frelling on about being a family business through seventeen generations and how dedicated they are to customer service . . . and their dratblasted advertising always comes with a photo of some smiling family member with a phony signature scrawled at the bottom.  They not only sent their robo letter a week ago but I’ve had both a street mail catalogue and an email from smiling family members since AND I THINK THEY SHOULD PAY LESS ATTENTION TO FORM AND MORE TO FUNCTION.

The point is that despite having all these HOURS this morning I was still late getting sixty-seven hellcritters and an awful lot of stuff † into Wolfgang for the outgoing journey to the mews.

I turned the key.  The radio came on.  Nothing else happened.  I stared at the dashboard in disbelief.  I turned the key again.

Nothing continued to happen.

AAAAAAAAAAUGH.

I sat in my dead car and punched in the phone number of the RAC on Pooka.  Forty-five minutes, they said.  At least.  I sighed heavily.  I brought everybody back indoors again.  I sent out an emergency lunch bulletin to Peter—I have critter food at the cottage, but I require daily injections of several gallons of lettuce, most of which are consumed at lunch.  I had barely got my hands covered in greasy chicken carcase shreds††, the hellterror was just warming up for flinging herself frantically against the sides of her crate . . . when there was a commotion outside, which was one of my neighbours having her ingress blocked by a large orange RAC van.  YOU AREN’T SUPPOSED TO BE HERE FOR ANOTHER THIRTY FIVE MINUTES.  AND YOU WERE SUPPOSED TO CALL ME FIRST.

Other than that, the service was exemplary.  Although I was feeling a little cranky about my neighbours all queuing up to tell me I needed a new car.  Hey!  It’s a frelling dead battery!  Any car can have a dead battery! —And this battery is several years old, although I feel it would have been polite if it gave me a little warning that it was about to pop its clogs.  Phineas said that he’s amazed every time Wolfgang starts and I drive away anywhere.  The neighbour whose ingress was blocked was so busy laughing she could hardly get the words out:  Robin, you need a new car.  —I DO NOT NEED A NEW CAR.†††

And to support this attitude I bought a battery that is guaranteed for five years.

* * *

* Yes, in the morning.  Very funny.  Ha ha ha ha ha.

** You hope

*** And they had better not tell me to return them.

† It was a big day for deliveries.  I also took delivery on a GIGANTIC box of non-perishable groceries . . . only the heavy items of which had to come down to the mews.

At least I was there when they delivered it.  I have yet to be home when the Gold Standard Kibble boxes arrive.  You have to buy two of the extra-large size to get free shipping and at these prices IT’S WORTH IT.  But it means that every few months I find myself grappling sixty-plus pounds of large rectangular shipping box down a perilously steep flight of stairs from the back of the greenhouse which is where deliveries are left^ and then back up the less steep but equally perilous steps to the front door aaaaand then through the pit-and-pendulum arrangement of stable-style (front) door, permanent puppy gate^^, chimney breast with coathooks bearing far too many coats, and the grandfather clock.  And possibly some hellhounds, who enjoy the pranks the hellgoddess gets up to to entertain them.

The latest consignment arrived two days ago.  I swear the deliveryman hides around the corner and waits till he sees me leave with some assortment of hellcritters or other and then nips in and deposits the by-this-time-starting-to-disintegrate cardboard box full of tungsten chips.   He’s going to have to heave it up some stairs or other, and this way he can luxuriate in the awareness that the customer gets a double shot.^^^  All of this rant I am pretty sure I have ranted at you before.  However I was thinking, this time, as I tried not to destroy anything, like an ankle or a pot of pansies, that I don’t know why I’m complaining, it’s only like carrying two hellterrors.  I’d rather carry two hellterrors.  Which may give you an idea. . . .

^ Except when they weigh more than half what you do, this is a sensible place to have things left

^^ which has been there since the hellhounds were puppies, and very glad I am to have it, except when wrestling annoyingly large parcels

^^^ And trust me, this is still better than trying to negotiate the greenhouse and the kitchen door, even though there would be no stairs involved.

†† ‘Chicken carcases’ are what’s left after butchers have cut all the separately-packaged bits off.  They’re CHEAP and they’re CHICKEN but they are a pain to deal with.

††† And aside from the sheer fact of his advanced age, Wolfgang looks worse than he is.  There are kind of a lot of dents.  Er.  And most of the chrome strips have been ripped off.  And the bumpers may dangle slightly.  And some of the headlight housing is missing.  And the taillight housing leaks.  And some of the doors work better than others, and let’s not talk about the frangledrabbing electric windows at all.  Other than that  . . . well, other than that I never wash him.  I could do that.  I could give him a nice bath.  The once a year I do this I’m always surprised at how much better he looks (in spite of the dents).  Poor Wolfgang.

Darkness

 

Yesterday evening when Fiona and I took my assortment of hellcritters out for final pre-prandial scrambles Darkness produced a crap that Did Not End Well.  My heart sank to the centre of the earth.  Twice in one week?  What on, in or beyond earth is the matter?

When we got home I whacked some Ars Alb into him immediately—the classic food-poisoning and Montezuma’s revenge remedy—which is my first line of defense with the hellhounds’ digestion, on the presumption that when it goes wrong it’s probably because the hellhound in question found a sandwich-end in a hedgerow when I wasn’t looking.  The thing is that I am pretty well always looking, especially the last couple of months when everything is pretty dire hellhound-wise, and since last Thursday night I can barely blink for watching Darkness.  Which raises the appalling spectre of the possibility that whatever is wrong with their digestion, at least Darkness’, who is the worse, is coming loose from being a specific reaction to a specific allergen, ie the sandwich-end.  This does not bear thinking about.

He seemed all right the rest of the evening.  He ate dinner* if with less than overwhelming enthusiasm, but we haven’t seen enthusiasm toward food in anyone except the hellterror in months.  He crashed out in the dog bed as if he hadn’t a care in the world.**  Usually when he’s bad there are signs:  you know your own dog.  But he sure caught me out last Thursday.

So last night when I let them out in the mews courtyard again I didn’t merely go out with them—which I always do, I was just really, really unlucky last Thursday—I went out with their leads.  Not really expecting trouble.  He can’t have found a sandwich-end without my noticing.  He can’t.  I was not expecting trouble enough that I wasn’t wearing my coat.***

Darkness set off briskly for the archway.

Oh, no.  Nooooo.

He stopped long enough for me to get his lead on, and Chaos’.  All hurtles are fine with Chaos.

We were out about half an hour.  And golly we were moving.  We probably almost got to Turpitude again.  It was not pretty.  But I kept thinking I am SO GRATEFUL he wasn’t gone HALF AN HOUR last Thursday.  I’d probably have exploded or something.  I don’t know if he heard me screaming, or didn’t like being out on his own, or what.  But he came back.  Last night he had Chaos and me with him so he could, I don’t know . . . ‘relax’ seems singularly inapropos in the circumstances.  But I’m the one finally turned around—I was freezing to death† and he couldn’t have anything left to lose. . . .

I was also whapping myself up longside the head, or I would have been if I hadn’t had my hands full of leads.  Ars Alb works pretty well—but one of the basic rules of homeopathy is that you stop dosing when there is improvement.  How are you supposed to know if there’s improvement?  He hadn’t been restless or visibly unhappy or any of that.  I should have kept giving him Ars Alb all evening—BUT HOW WAS I SUPPOSED TO KNOW?

Instead I gave him Ars Alb all night.  I’m a little short of sleep . . . again.  Last night however I decided I was tired of lying wide awake in the dark worrying, and I wasn’t really in the mood for fiction†† so I’ve been tearing through my homeopathy books looking for ideas.  You can’t cure something like a violent allergy, I don’t think, but you can strengthen the system . . . if you can find a good enough match for the system in question.  People are hard enough††† to find the exact remedy or remedies for, and they, at least, will answer questions‡.  A dog . . .

Darkness has been fine today.  Jolly, even.  I’m a wreck.‡‡  I took him along to the vets‡‡‡ this afternoon:  I want informed input, and maybe a few big guns.  Homeopathy is a precision instrument:  sometimes if you can’t see what you’re doing what you want is a sledgehammer.  The vet looked back through the records and pointed out that Darkness had tested positive for campylobacter six or so years ago when both of them were streaming almost nonstop and we didn’t know why.  Campylobacter is something that doesn’t go away, and may flare up for no reason—with reference to my terror that whatever is wrong is widening its range.  He also said, and while he said it with great plausibility, well, he would, wouldn’t he, that these awful bouts may look worse than they are—one of my bottom line fears, especially strong at 4 am with an eyestrain headache and surrounded by homeopathy books, is that hellhounds are going to be seven in August, and that’s getting on for late middle age in a dog.  How much abuse can Darkness’ gut take?  The vet said, you can’t know without a biopsy, but his guess is—the additional damage is less than I think.  Although since I’m sitting there with the kind of all-over bad hair day that comes of very little sleep and lots of worrying ‘less than I think’ may not be all that reassuring.

Still.  So we’re going to re-test for campy, and I have a big gun to try:  Buscopan.  This is based on my sense that it’s not the runs per se that trouble Darkness, and which the Ars Alb will usually deal with, but the unpleasant kaleidoscope of effects I call ‘colic’, and which may make a bad stretch a great deal worse, especially because of the speed an ailing hellhound goes downhill.  If I knew this, I’d forgotten, but the vet said that sighthounds are like this:  they are pulled down really quickly, their coats get stary and they look like death’s door.

Roll on not needing to find out if Buscopan works.

Oh, and the hellterror is slightly constipated. . . .

* * *

* I’ve said before that if I starved them every time their guts went a little ropy—the classic advice about dealing with diarrhoea—they’d’ve starved to death years ago.

** And lay on his back with his legs in the air, to Fiona’s considerable hilarity.

*** It was about forty degrees—four Celsius.  You would want your coat.

† Adrenaline does help keep you warm.  Warmish.

†† Although I can feel a Georgette Heyer/Diana Wynne Jones fit coming on.  No, not Peter Dickinson—his underlying view of humanity is way too bleak.

††† I’m sure I’ve said this before:  I believe homeopathy does have all the answers.  The big steaming problem is the delivery system—the homeopath.  The set up as it now is, it seems to me, expects the homeopath to be superhumanly intelligent, preternaturally intuitive, prodigiously well-read in the relevant literature, and divinely observant.  Not too many homeopaths live up to this standard.  There are excellent homeopaths out there—but there ought to be more and there ought to be better.  I think we’re missing a crucial step/stage/link/trick in the study and practise of homeopathy.  I just don’t know what it is.

‡ Or if they don’t, that’s a clue.  Homeopathy is about the entirety of a person, and not answering questions totally counts.

‡‡ I went to abbey practise tonight.  Speaking of things that aren’t pretty.  But at least I went.

‡‡‡ The conventional vets.  There’s a homeopathic vet in this area I haven’t tried, and am beginning the long grim phone-tag process of trying to get hold of an independent consultant who is at different clinics in different towns on different days of the week and doesn’t have a secretary-type person keeping the bits plugged together.

Yarn Shop Follies

 

 

I am going to amaze you.  Sit down and take a deep breath.

We got LOST on the way to the yarn shop.  There.  You’re amazed, right?

Have we ever not got lost on the way to the yarn shop?  Whichever yarn shop is on offer on a day Fiona and I are loose, together and dangerous?  Barring the little one which I have to go out of my way not to walk past on the way to the abbey*, so even I would probably have some difficulty failing to find it.  Fiona could try putting a bag over my head and spinning me in a circle. . . . That would probably work. . . .

I do feel that perhaps Fiona went out of her way to ensure we got lost today.  We’ve been to this shop before** and we both know it’s sort of  . . . that way.  Fiona apparently decided that this was sufficient.  I was a trifle taken aback that she hadn’t turned her possessed-by-demons—I mean her excellent, tactful and reliable satnav on but . . . the driver is god.  And I’m way too happy not to be driving.  And if there was a paper atlas in the car . . . when the ME is gnawing on me you really don’t want me navigating for you.***  So we set out for Opprobrium.  Turpitude is just beyond it.  Sort of.  It’s sort of suspended between Opprobrium and Prinkle-on-Weald in what is a very unhelpful manner†, rather Tir-nan-Og-like, there not really being any roads between here and there.  You have to kind of sneak up on it while whistling a little tune and looking in another direction—a bit like catching a slightly tricky horse in a too-large field.

So you are approaching Opprobrium and there are like fourteen roundabouts in the space of about fifty yards, each of which is bristling with sixty-seven road signs saying things like Tibet * —>5000 miles and London—>you want to turn around and go back the way you came and town centre—>MWA HA HA HA GO HOME.   There was a sign for Turpitude, but there were poisonous snakes and a lot of guys with swords, and we lost our nerve.  We took the town centre option.

Now I know Opprobrium a little, and I was under the semi-erroneous impression that Turpitude was roughly on the other side of it to the right, and that when we came out the other end there would be another sign indicating a road to Turpitude, and maybe this one would be free of poisonous snakes and big ugly guys with swords and maybe there would be fewer than nine-hundred-and-thirty-seven other signs to confuse us.††

No.  No sign.  No sign at all except to things like the recycling centre and Greater Footling which we knew we didn’t want.  We were most of the way to Surfeit by the time Fiona folded, pulled into one of those extremely dubious-looking parking areas off the motorway where you’re sure poisonous snakes and big ugly guys with swords and a bad attitude hang out, and turned her satnav on.†††  The worst of this is that when we did, in fact, get to Turpitude, and blasted Billy comes over all smug and says that we can thank him now because it was only possible with him and without him we would have been hopelessly lost, rather than throwing things at the windscreen we had to say YES BILLY WE KNOW BILLY SHUT UP BILLY.‡

And the yarn shop?  Because we wasted so much time on the road I didn’t have a chance to get into NEARLY ENOUGH TROUBLE.‡‡

* * *

* Fortunately it’s usually shut at standard bell ringing hours.  Woe for daytime weddings and other one-offs however.  And it’s even worse than that:  this little yarn shop likes dogs.  I’ve taken both hellhounds and hellterror ALTHOUGH NOT ALL AT THE SAME TIME in there and they smile and croon and whip out photos of their hellcritters.  So you can be having a perfectly straightforward alternative hurtle on a beautiful day when you felt like getting in the car and going somewhere else, maybe looking for otters on the river^, and suddenly, on the way back to the car park . . . yarn fumes.  And your hellcritters can’t save you.

^ Which seem to be pretty blasé about tourists going oooooh, and whose den or nest or lodge or what you call it is out of reach.

** We’ve been to pretty much every yarn shop in Hampshire at this point and may be forced to widen our range, perhaps into Doorstep and Suffix.  We particularly have our eye on Smite-the-Infidel in Wiltingshire, where there is a rumour of three yarn shops.  Be still our hearts.  Be terrified our credit cards.

*** Pride or, if you prefer, vanity, insists that I insert here that when I’ve got a few neurons firing I’m not at all bad with a paper map.

† I realise, having now got home again and looked at a paper map.

†† 67 x 14 – 1 = 937.  I think.  I hadn’t regularly done arithmetic in decades . . . till I started frelling knitting.  Now it’s like um, yardage?  Um.  How many?  Um.  If Wicked On Line Yarn Shop is having a sale of 17.5% off but the frelling skeins are only 82 yards long so I need a lot of them, how much is it going to cost to make that car cozy?  AAAAUGH.  Maybe I could knit it on bigger needles.  Better drape. . . .

††† We could have just gone to the yarn shop in Opprobrium.^  Or we could have taken a slight sideways sidle and gone back to the one in Frellingham.  But noooooo.  We had decided on Turpitude^^ and Turpitude was what we were going to have.

^ Yes we have.  I’m sure I blogged about it.  Opprobrium also has two old-books shops and we DROVE PAST ONE OF THEM today and Fiona with a swift, sure gesture hit the central locking on the car before I could get out.  Hey!  I bought TANGLEWRECK there!  It’s a good shop!

^^ sic

‡ I think I have told you Fiona’s satnav speaks in Billy Connolly’s voice.  I’m here to tell you that even a Scottish accent only gets you so far.

‡‡ Fiona did though.  Fiona has an amazing talent for yarn trouble.  And I did manage to buy a pattern for some yarn I’d bought a different pattern for and decided it wasn’t what I wanted but I really liked the yarn, and you yarnies out there will know how this story goes:  I’m one skein too short for the new pattern.

* WORDPRESS I BLOODY HATE YOU.  I have a beautiful arrow sign here and frelling WordPress is giving me a frelling a with an accent grave over it.  GO. AWAY.  So I guess I have to replace all my lovely arrows with stupid dashes. . . .^

^ Okay.  I may have recreated ARROWS.  ::holding breath::  ::punching PUBLISH button::+

+ Well . . . they’re not nearly as good as the original arrows. . . .

A question of bedtime

 

Last night at St Margaret’s the vicar, fresh from a ‘retreat’ with his Leadership Group, attempted to light a fire under the rest of us—possibly slouched down in our seats praying for the strength to keep our eyes open*—about what one thing we were going to start doing this week to deepen our relationship with God, make the world a better place, or generally become a bigger, gobblier holier-than-thou turkey.  And in our groups people were talking soberly about being more organised** about time for prayer and volunteer work and this or that course they have been meaning to go on*** and when it was my turn I said, Go to bed earlier.  So I don’t hit the floor already in a panic of lateness the next morning.  It’s a whole lot harder to do the contemplative prayer routine when the monkey mind is gibbering like a whole treeful of monkeys.

I got to bed early enough last night to be talking in nearly complete sentences by the time Atlas showed up to finish nailing the shelf up in my greenhouse this morning.  And I totally have to go to bed early tonight because Fiona and I are going to have a YARN ADVENTURE tomorrow.†

* * *

* Fortunately I’d caught a ride with Minnie.  Even Wolfgang might have found it a bit challenging keeping me on the road by yesterday evening:  I’d had a rotten night for sleep even for me, worrying.  It wasn’t all bad:  I finished another book for the Book Recs list.^

^ I kind of wasted that last hundred pages of LOCKWOOD by reading it in the bath, with all the lights and the radio on, hellhounds snorting in their sleep round the corner in my office and the hellterror moaning about injustice downstairs .  It would have been much more effective if I’d been reading it Saturday night tucked up in bed with everything turned off but the bedside light and the demented robin singing to the streetlight outdoors.

As soon as ‘go lie down’ conveys meaning, the hellterror will be allowed upstairs.  It will be a while.  It will be a much longer while before she’s allowed upstairs while I’m in the bath and at a disadvantage.  It is interesting, however, watching the Development of Relationship.  Puppies are adorable, as we all know, so we don’t kill them, and you have to hope that you develop a relationship before they stop being murder-resistingly adorable.  Ahem.  I’m also not so hot on the formal training thing—I can get away with this (mostly) because I’m home all the time and can encourage or mercilessly crush certain behaviours.  An awful lot of relationship is just being there.  And sometimes you get a break you not only didn’t earn, you had no idea what you were going to do if the problem didn’t just magically disappear.  I had no idea how I was going to oblige hellhounds—hellpuppies at the time—to LIE DOWN in their box in the car.  When we’d had the three whippets# both of us were still driving, and Peter drove and I Suppressed, till they got the idea.  Hellhounds just . . . lay down.  It was never an issue.  I have no idea.  Thank You God.

Hellterror is either going to learn not to gnaw the short strap that attaches her to the seatbelt or I will buy a few short lengths of chain.  I’m not, perhaps foolishly, anticipating a huge problem about this.  She’s not actually a big chewer, although she likes her thighbone of mammoth.##

But she is still the possessor of hellterror jaws.  And when you need to get something away from a puppy you generally need to do it fast, and unless you are carrying desiccated liver in your mouth, which I am NOT,### you don’t have time for fancy swapping routines, or let’s be blunt, I don’t have the coordination.%  So I was getting bitten and IT HURT.  Not to mention being bad for hellgoddess/hellterror relations.  Speaking of relationship.

Well, I did get a bit cleverer about tactics for getting stuff away from her, and, when there’s time, she is ALWAYS open to a bribe—and once she’s learnt that bribery is a possibility, she will often meet you halfway.  But I realised recently that she seems to have decided that I’m allowed to take stuff away from her.  There is sometimes a trifle of resistance.  And she can stab you with a look out of those little beady eyes that would bore through cement.  But if I am wearisomely DETERMINED to get something away from her . . . she lets me.

THANK YOU GOD.%%

# Which were, all three together, small enough to fit in the box.  That was sixty-maybe-slightly-plus pounds of dog.  Two hellhounds are eighty-definitely-plus pounds of dog.  Even if the hellterror were a model of decorum~ there isn’t room for her in the box.

~ And not in season

## All those fancy expensive guaranteed-your-dog-will-LOVE-them Kong toys?  She spurns them.

### All other things being equal, which they are not, I need my mouth immediately available for yelling, which I suppose is not a show-dog-handler’s first priority.

% I’m frantically fishing in the wrong pocket anyway

%% It’s probably connected that she’s a surprisingly tactful accepter of treats from your bare hand.  You can give her a tiny fragment of kibble and she nails the kibble but not your fingers.  I hadn’t thought about this till I was giving her infinitesimal scraps of chicken the other night, having misjudged the amount of chicken available—all three hellcritters get a bit of neat chicken as dessert—and despite the significantly higher frenzy level for chicken as opposed to mere kibble—she was snatching the chicken without nicking my fingers.

I wonder if all that screaming when she play-bit me when she was tiny has an effect here?  It was a different situation with the hellhounds—they mostly taught each other how hard (not) to bite, and sighthounds are bred to bring things down, not to mangle them, as a fighting dog is (presumably) encouraged to do.  I also don’t have a problem with a dog mouthing me so long as there’s no pressure behind it, so all my hellcritters are somewhat accustomed to having bits of me casually in their mouths.

** ::weeps::  I was so standing behind the door when they passed out organizational skills.

*** Minnie’s taking one on teaching Sunday School to the tinies

† God created everything.  Therefore he created yarn.

Book Rec: Lockwood & Co: The Screaming Staircase by Jonathan Stroud

 

This is a hugely enjoyable fantasy-adventure page-turner and first-rate post-flu cranky-convalescent distraction.  I hesitate to call it ‘horror’ since the squick factor is pretty low—low enough even for me—but it does have some very unfriendly ghosts.  Being murdered can do that to a person.  And on the subject of page-turning, I recommend you set aside enough time to read the last hundred pages in one go.  Once our intrepid ghost-stalkers enter the Red Room at Combe Carey Hall, the most haunted private house in England, you are not going to want to put the book down till the end.  I was given an ARC:  I notice the book’s not actually out till August.  But you can still put it on your TBR list.

The England of Lockwood & Co has a Problem:  ‘. . . Something strange and new did start happening around fifty or sixty years ago, and no one’s got a damn clue why. . . . you can find mention of scattered ghostly sightings cropping up in Kent and Sussex around the middle of the last century.  But it was a decade or so later that a bloody series of cases, such as the Highgate Terror and the Mud Lane Phantom, attracted serious attention. . . . At last two young researchers . . . managed to trace each haunting to its respective Source . . . and for the first time the existence of Visitors was firmly imprinted on the public mind.’  So far so conventional.  But (as I keep saying when I’m wearing my author hat) there are no new stories, only good, bad or indifferent retellings of old stories.  This is a good retelling.  The world-building does that excellent thing where the out-there goofballery of the set-up leads to clearly sensible and practical applications:    ‘We ducked out across the road, stepping over the open drain or “runnel” of running water that separated the pavement from the tarmac.  The wandering dead were known to dislike moving water;  consequently narrow runnels crosscrossed many of the great shopping streets in the West End, allowing people to walk in safety well into the evening.  Earlier governments had hoped to extend this system across the city, but it had proved prohibitively expensive.  Aside from ghost-lights, the suburbs fended for themselves.’ Lockwood & Co are three kids—you’re washed up as a ghostbuster field agent by the time you reach voting age—Anthony Lockwood, the narrator Lucy Carlyle, and George Cubbins the library geek.  (This ‘modern’ London has electricity and telephones, but no computers and no internet.  If you want to do research, you go to the library, and Lockwood & Co’s records are kept in box files.)  And they have the Talent.

But things keep going wrong for them:  ‘Yes, the Mortlake Horror was driven out, but only as far as Richmond Park. . . . Yes, both the Grey Spectre of Aldgate and the entity known as the Clattering Bones were destroyed, but not before several further . . . deaths.’  Which is why Lockwood decides to accept an obviously crooked commission from the extremely wealthy and also extremely creepy owner of Combe Carey Hall.    And then of course things go even more wrong. . . .

 

KES, 76

 

SEVENTY SIX

Go Caedmon, I thought.  The kettle was making a tired little squeaking noise.  I poured almost-boiling water in the pot, swished it around, and then twiddled with the gas fire, trying to make it burn a little more enthusiastically.  Mike was clanking heavy cast-iron doors and muttering to himself.

“I’d ask you to show me how to use it only I don’t have anything for it to burn,” I said.  “Hayley’s coming out tomorrow night with—logs and stuff—whatever—and she’ll get me—it—the stove—started.  Tonight, eh.  I hope I find the blankets.”  And the pillows.

“Hayley?”

“From Homeric Homes.  Who rented this monst—I mean, this house to me.”  This dementedly way too dratblasted large house.  Complete with neighbor from the darkness beyond the stars.  What was I thinking of?  My eyes fell on Sid, who had finished her second helping of dog food and was thoughtfully contemplating the remaining fragments of the loaf of bread.  If I hadn’t stuck a pin in a map Sid might still be living rough.  I offered her the last half-slice of bread.  She took it daintily, swallowed it in a single savage gulp, and then started examining the corners of the kitchen.

Mike looked amused.  “Yes, I know Hayley.  My little sister went to school with her.  She was famous for ironing her gym uniform.  You’re supposed to, but she’s the only one who ever did.”

That sounded like the Hayley I had been dazzled by.

“She’s from around here so she has to know how to run a wood-burner but I wouldn’t have guessed she’d admit it, you know, to teach someone—er—from not around here.”

I wondered briefly what the local term for outlander was.  “Hidden depths, our Hayley,” I said blandly.  “Besides, I’m sure it would be bad for Homeric’s reputation if one of their tenants died of exposure.”  I wondered what Mike read in his spare time.  Car magazines.  Or Proust.  And Tolkien, of course.  Sid didn’t like any of the available corners and was making another circuit.  I’d better let her out.  What had I done with her leash?  I did not want her making unscheduled acquaintance with the neighbor.

“Hidden jump shots,” said Mike.  “Hayley was top scorer on the girls’ basketball team, junior year.  Really pissed my sister off, who is nearly a foot taller and only came second.”

I laughed.  Flowerhair now and again rescued one of those magical Keeper of Great Power objects stolen by the other team.  This kind of commission happens rather often in a serial-fantasy mercenary’s life.  She’d succeeded once by passing the (mummified) Heart of the Possum That Carried The World in Her Pouch among herself and her three confederates, as they ran like sixty down the long cavern where the thieves were celebrating their success by being off their heads with the local hallucinogen, which is why Flowerhair and her friends got away with it.  I’d been writing that one year when the Knicks were doing really well and every time I went over to Norah’s I had to listen to her husband, Jephthah, go on about it.  Jeph was mostly a really good guy but he had his blind spots.  I’d named the dumbest of Flowerhair’s accomplices Hpej.

Sid lay down, stiffly and bolt upright, looking like a cranky Anubis on a really bad hair day.  Okay.  Got it.  Someone else voting for blankets and pillows.  I hadn’t thought to buy a dog bed.  If I had we could both have slept in it.

“Do you have a flashlight?” said Mike suddenly.

“Huh?” I said, dragged out of remembering the walls of that cavern, decorated with extremely detailed illustrations of what the locals did to people who annoyed them.  Flowerhair, who hadn’t planned to grow up to be a mercenary, had had nightmares for a week, but at least that time she’d got paid.  “Not that I can—oh.  There’s one in the van.  Has something died in there?”  Mike was still standing in front of Caedmon.  He had one of the doors open and seemed to be staring into it disapprovingly.

“Hope not,” he said, grinned at me, chunked the iron door closed and left at some speed.  I heard the house door bang.  The ham sandwich must have been either really good or really bad.  I was thinking:  he carries book boxes without complaint and he has a great smile.  Serena, what’s not to like?

A few minutes went by and no more book boxes appeared at the top of the outside stairs.  Uh oh.  The ham sandwich had been really bad and he’d run away.  What was that noise?  A sort of thumping, scraping noise.  Oh, heartburn and dung beetles, here we go with the funny noises again.  Bang.  Squeak.  Thud.

Sid went and stood at the kitchen door, looking interested.  This was okay as far as it went, but we hadn’t actually met any cosmic horror yet (unless Mr Melmoth counted, which he might), so I couldn’t be sure I was reading my dog’s reactions correctly.

And then Mike appeared at the kitchen window.  He was carrying something.  It was definitely not a book box.

Fun with your dogs

 

So yesterday evening hellhounds spent crashed out as usual in the mews dog bed.  The system is that I then scrabble everything back into my knapsack and canvas briefcase-shaped object, let hellhounds out for a pee in the mews courtyard—they’ll have their final hurtle from the cottage—schlep knapsack, canvas object, and anything else that may have silted up over the course of the day into Wolfgang’s front seat;  encourage hellhounds to leap into the hellhound box in the back, having first removed Pav’s abominable falling-apart plastic carrying crate;  encourage hellhounds to get all eight feet into the box so I can get the crate back in, replace crate, fetch hellterror, encourage her to relieve herself, bribe her into nasty plastic crate with small handful of kibble, pick up anything hellterror may have produced, lock up, drive to cottage.  Reverse process. . . . **

We have one of our organic-grocery deliveries on Thursdays.  I let hellhounds out, had a fast look around for cats or rabbits or any other untoward distractions, and went back indoors to load my week’s fresh fruit into a carrier.  This took . . . maybe a minute.

When I went back out to put the fruit bag in the front seat with the rest of the stuff . . . there was only one hellhound waiting for me.

One hellhound.

One.  Hellhound.

I looked around.  It took me a good five seconds to panic.  I trotted down toward the archway and called Darkness’ name.  Nothing.  I trotted—rather faster—back to Wolfgang and Chaos, still standing there looking rather bewildered.***  I put Chaos on lead, picked up Darkness’, and pelted down the driveway toward the main road.

Last few times Darkness has been double-ended geyseringly ill, he has lit out for strange parts as soon as I put him out—but hitherto I’ve already been keeping an eye on him, and have managed to get a lead on him and go along when he sets off.  I’ve always had WARNING.  With one—appallingly notable—exception, he’s always been able to give me warning, ie to get him outdoors NOW.  Last night . . . he had eaten only two thirds of an already minimal dinner but, so?   He hasn’t been eating enough to keep a chipmunk alive for weeks†.  There was nothing about last night to make me take notice.

Till he disappeared.

I’ve never lost a hellhound before:  I’m paranoid, and I know how fast they are—and generally speaking their recall is pretty good, and I’m careful not to strain it.  I hadn’t allowed for Darkness having a geysering fit come on without giving me any SIGN.

Chaos and I were wandering around helplessly only a few minutes.  Probably less than five.  Well, maybe five.  I was by this time crying and screaming.  It was after midnight, it was dark, at least there was no one else around—no other dog walkers, no juggernauts on the roads—and that stretch of the main road is mostly parkland on either side, so my screaming was probably not heard by anyone but owls.  I had just turned to go back to the mews courtyard.  This is one of the basic emergency drills of a sighthound owner—your runaway will come back to where he last saw you to find you again.  So long as you keep your nerve and stay there.  Chaos and I had turned to creep back to the mews courtyard . . . when a bit of darkness detached itself from the rest, slunk through the gate ahead of us, and turned around to throw up at my feet.  At least that meant he stood still long enough for me to get his lead on.

Adrenaline spike?  If any of you saw a strange bright burning light in the sky last night emanating from a southern-Englandish direction, that would have been me, having an adrenaline spike.

Today has not been a very lively, awake day.  The hellterror’s more dramatic difficulties seem to have lessened, although she’s not entirely enjoying coming on heat.  She’s still showing no signs of flirting, but she’s licking those Weird Swollen Parts a lot in a kind of LIE DOWN AND LEAVE ME ALONE manner, and while she still wants her tummy rubbed I keep stopping to check that all those tiny but stiff little nubbles are only her nipples, and there are no ticks involved.  Hellhounds are . . . hellhounds, although there has been no further geysering.

I’m about to have to attempt to feed hellcritters for the third time today.  Whimper.  Score so far:  Chaos, one third lunch, one third dinner.  Darkness, no lunch whatsoever, all of dinner.  Pavlova, I’M FINE, CAN’T YOU SEE I’M FINE.  I’M ALSO STARVING TO DEATH.  YOU CALL THIS A MEAL? 

* * *

* We have in fact had a try with the clip-your-dog-harness-with-dog-in-it to the seatbelt apparatus.  It works fine.  Except for the part about the hellterror setting to with a will to chew the seatbelt apart.  Those hellterror jaws, crikey.  I’m surprised miners and engineers and things bother with rock drilling tools.  Put a bowl of dog food on one side of the mountain and a hungry bull terrier^ on the other and . . . stand back.  Gnar gnar gnar gnar crunch crunch crunch crunch. 

^ Bull terriers are of course always hungry.  It’s part of the breed standard:  little beady eyes, prick ears, roman nose, hungry.

** Yes.  I hate my commute.  It’s always been way too complicated^ but a manic hellterror and a hellhound is still hoping he’s going to wake up one morning and she’ll be gone complicate matters.  The sheer logistics are a big fat pain—in both arms, shoulders and back, chiefly.  It would HELP A LOT if hellhounds could jump in from the other side, but that means making the extra height over the side of the box, and Darkness doesn’t always want to leap to seat level.^^

^ It’s a daily version of—you know how that last t shirt/woolly jumper you threw in your suitcase on a whim and that last book you threw in your carry-on before you got on the plane are the only things that prevent your journey from being an utter misery?  Yes.  Now imagine making those same final forty-six decisions every day.

^^ And thank you, Judith and Diane in MN and anyone else I’ve missed, for those links to Dog Travelling Strategies.  I’m looking very thoughtfully indeed at the folding stair.

*** Although ‘bewildered’ is one of his standard expressions.

† Although I believe all those small rodenty creatures have very high metabolisms.