Robin McKinley's Blog, page 6

The occasional blog

One of the unexpected difficulties of writing this only occasionally rather than every day* is that since I live a life so fraught with incident and peril** it’s hard to know what to lead with.  I could, for example, tell you that my new blender arrived a few days ago and I’ve been afraid to unpack it in fear that it is not the answer to an elderly hag’s prayers, or possibly that it’s not what I ordered at all but—from the size of the box—thirty or forty more hand-held stick blenders that I don’t want.  And I could make a major saga out of finally opening the box today, because I finally got tired of it looming over me, and discovering that it is, indeed, what I ordered, but what I ordered is the size of a railway carriage or seven or eight wolfhounds and it gets bigger as you pry it, gasping with exertion and amazement, out of the box.  Which, despite said box being big enough to contain Wolfgang, is barely big enough to contain this dangerous and mighty object, which I am tempted to name Troll or Golem or Ben Grimm.  And is requiring that I ENTIRELY REARRANGE MY KITCHEN to accommodate it.  ARRRRRRRRGH.***

Or I could tell you that Fiona and I had our first Yarn Adventure in some months this week, and that the proprietor of our chosen shop% RECOGNISED us and said, salivating visibly, that we hadn’t been around in a while and was just saying to his wife, I wonder when we’ll see that American woman from New Arcadia and her friend from Crathie%% again?  Well I have to keep going back because I keep forgetting to bring my loyalty card and I have about twelve of them at this point.  And then, because sagas are how I live my life, I could tell you, with a lot of shouting and flamboyant metaphor, that it seemed like a perfectly fine thing at the time that the skeins of the [indie] yarn I bought are 400 metres long WINDING THE FRELLERS UP IS DRIVING ME BONKERS BECAUSE IT TAKES HOURS.  I try to tell myself that three skeins of 400 metres is no different than 12 skeins of 100 metres BUT THAT’S NOT HOW IT FEELS.%%%

Or I could tell you that the giant bailiff-sending admin giant suing me this week for non-payment is the city council, gleefully informing me that I am to be broken on the wheel as well as my autographed LOTR confiscated$, so I had another of my jolly afternoons going in to the city council offices and sorting that out, carefully sharpened knitting needles optional, which sorting will last for forty-eight hours or so, with plenty of time to go disastrously wrong again by next month’s council tax due date, which is to say that while I have the little paper ‘paid’ stubs in my hot little hand, the email confirmation has failed to arrive.

Well of course it has failed to arrive.  I remember, vividly, and without any haze of nostalgia whatsoever, the first time I received one of these billets-doux, a few months after the whole ghastly business of—arrgh, I’m sure I gave my inexpressible bank a blog name, but I was apparently too distracted to preserve it on my dramatis personae list:  so we’ll call it Feckless & Calamity for the moment, and I may adjust it later—the whole ghastly business of Feckless & Calamity shutting me down when they shut Peter’s account down, because they somehow misplaced the information that I was still alive and wanted my money available THANK YOU VERY MUCH.  The repercussions of which bankly error ARE STILL HAPPENING OVER TWO YEARS LATER$$.  Anyway, the first time I received a WE’RE SUING YOU BECAUSE YOU ARE A VILE MALINGERER AND/OR A SECRET OFFSHORE HOARDING THIEF AND AN OOZING CARBUNCLE ON OUR EXQUISITE, AND FAULTLESSLY ADMINISTERED, COUNTY’S FACE from the city council, including an appear-in-court date in heavy red lettering with an official stamp, I spent the afternoon throwing up, fortunately beginning only after I’d successfully managed to ring for a wedding.  Which I think I told the old blog.  I still get the adrenaline spikes—for which thank you with flourishes because an adrenaline spike means I’m overdone meatloaf for the rest of that day and a super spike will linger in a brain- and energy-destroying meatloafian manner for another day or two after—but I don’t throw up any more.  Small mercies.  Very, very, very small mercies.

I also really need to have been telling you stuff about the garden, because midsummer is already over and everything is getting AWAAAAAAAAAY FROM MEEEEEEEEE which is, I admit, what happens every year, but the ME has been so bad that there have been a lot of tottering days and tottering around the garden makes me feel like I’m doing something$$$, and you can totter through quite a bit of gardening if you’re just out there a lot, with the result that the garden is having rather a good year.£  I’ve even sat down to admire the view occasionally.  Admiring the view gives you an excuse to sit down, when you don’t want to admit to the tottering.

BUT NO.  I’M NOT GOING TO TELL YOU ANY OF THAT.  I’M GOING TO TELL YOU . . . ::BOUNCES IN A MANNER UNBECOMING TO A WOMAN OF HER ADVANCED YEARS:: . . .££

Tomorrow.  Or maybe the day after.  Because this is, after all, an occasional blog.  Mwa hahahahahahah.  And because I’m frelling well over two thousand words, which is not allowed, and I’ll be over three thousand if I keep going.  Besides, I like suspense.£££

* * *

* And, believe me, occasionally is the only option available.  Three years ago I wasn’t cooking everything from scratch and then turning it into soup.  Mind you, I have no memory whatsoever of what I ate the last four months of Peter’s life when he was in hospital and then at Rivendell, and I was going in to spend time with him every day.  Presumably I ate something.  But I also still had a working, if incomplete, set of teeth three years ago.

** Hellbeasts!  Demon computers!  Pogosticking blenders!  Gordian yarn-stash knots!  Bloodthirsty rose-bushes!  Abbeys at the End of the Universe!  Who needs enchanted swords and evil magicians?

*** Meanwhile I used the little old counter-jumper again today.  There may have been moaning.  Also I have to learn to USE the new thing and it has a dashboard like a frelling 747.  I think I probably need an experienced copilot.  There doesn’t seem to be one folded up^ with the instructions.

^Just Add Water

% And my favourite shop because of the frelling indie yarns;  you can always buy Rowan or Malabrigo on the internet, so you can put it back on a shop shelf.  Except of course when you can’t, which is what happened to me this time, because apparently Rowan’s Brushed Fleece is going out of production, so the colours I decided, having seen them in person, I MUST HAVE, are gone ARRRRRRGH.  Also, while one is TRYING to keep real-world shops open^, the point of going to an indie-specialist yarn shop is that you’re keeping both a yarn shop and some indie producers going,^^  So put the frelling Rowan back.  And think of all the money you’ll save when you can’t find it later on the internet.

^ WHICH?’s cover story this month is, Is it all over for the high street?  As a knitter who likes to squish yarn before she buys it occasionally, or flip actual paper pages of a book and read a bit in the middle before she decides whether or not to buy it , I hope not.

As opposed to ‘look inside’ on amazon which not infrequently consists of the acknowledgements, the dedication, the list of chapters, three lines of the prologue and nothing else.  Although if it’s a murder mystery and the first three lines tell me that I am going to be expected to read about the last few minutes/hours/days of the soon to be corpse, especially if this brief, as one might say bleed-on, role is a kid or a young woman, and we’re going to hear in detail about everything that now isn’t going to happen in their life and how horrible their death is and how ill and frightened they are and how they wish they hadn’t done whatever, then that’s as much as I need and I do not want the book.  I want the murder victim as a plot device, okay?  I don’t want a character.

^^ So double your virtue, which perhaps covers the days when your latest organic whole-foods order in user-friendly cardboard boxes is so frelling swathed in heavy plastic tape you can’t face peeling it all off and so shove everything in the non-recycle bin.  I want to have a little chat with the ‘reuse’ people.  If the cardboard is as limp as a Basset hound’s ears, aren’t you better off recycling it NOW rather than making it carry another load which will require the above swathing in PLASTIC?  Not to mention potentially losing a cranky customer.

%% Hey, Fiona is a Scots name.  So it’s a long drive.

%%% Indies never, ever sell you balls of pre-wound yarn.  They like to share the pain.

$ And for those of you fainting and/or fanning and/or fanning after fainting over the idea of an autographed LORD OF THE RINGS, yes, and it’s the Pauline Baynes single-volume edition so, if I may say so, very desirable.  I also bought it yonks and yonks ago when it was still Very Expensive for the time and for my pocketbook, but I wouldn’t even think about looking at the price tag of such an item now so I’m glad I don’t have to.  However, the jolly fellow who sold it to me, while I was doing the fainting-and-fanning thing over the fact that I was going to BUY IT and be able to HOLD IT IN MY HANDS ANY TIME I WANTED TO^, said to me bracingly, you realise that Tolkien only leaned on it for ten seconds while he wrote his name and then did the same to the next book in the stack?, and I said THANKS SO MUCH THAT’S VERY KIND, I HOPE YOUR HAIR EXPLODES.  You will notice that forty or so years later I still remember this.  I can’t remember why I went upstairs a minute ago—I get a lot of exercise going upstairs, finding I’ve forgotten why, going downstairs again, remembering, going UPSTAIRS again, forgetting . . . this can go on quite a while . . . but I remember without any difficulty whatsoever that the old book dealer who sold me my beloved signed LOTR was a jerk about it.

^ I’m certainly not going to risk its continued health and safety by reading it, but since I have 1,000,000,000 other editions of LOTR , this is not a big problem.

Including my very first ebook purchase

$$  As described in the previous post.  I told Alfrick about this, about the way it keeps on and on and on, and he said that this happened to the abbey some years ago, that when Feckless & Calamity has shut you down once, even when its their frelling error, it will go on shutting you down at erratic intervals la-la-la-la whenever it doesn’t have anything else to amuse it.  He solved the problem by going in and thundering, which worked for him and the abbey, but I suspect that being seven feet tall and looking like an Old Testament prophet, and accoutred in the long black flowing monkly robes, helped.  These attributes are not available to me. ^

^ Yes I could hire long black twirly stuff and something to wrinkle up as a wimple, try to arrange my visage in nunnish lineaments, and go in and quaver at them, but I don’t think it would have same effect.

$$$ Even if it’s not what I’m supposed to be doing, like ringing bells, singing in the band at St Margaret’s, meeting a friend I haven’t seen in thirty years for the day—that one, I tell you, really hurt—or even working to some length on DIARY.  However when everything else falls away, let me reassure you, hurtling hellbeasts and writing at least one or two words in DIARY remain.

£ And I’d much rather be loomed over by ten-foot rose-bushes that the catalogue said grew to four foot^, than by cardboard boxes containing blenders with jugs big enough to produce soup for the annual dinner of the Worshipful Company of Farriers, and farriers have big appetites.

^ Despite the blood loss aspect.  And yes, a ten-foot rose bush does obligate better than twice the blood loss of a four-foot rose bush.

££ And no it’s nothing like turning DIARY in and having it scheduled for publication by a delighted editor who furthermore wants to pay me a shocking amount of money for it.  Believe me, mere bouncing would be an inadequate reaction to that news.

£££ THE HELL I LIKE SUSPENSE.  I only like it when I’m causing it.^  ‘Suspense’ is one of those words on a book cover that make me put it down.

^ So an alternative reading is that I really am an evil carbuncle, just like the city council says, although the secret offshore hoarding?  I wish.

Small(ish) stupid blitz-ups

 

Here’s an example of the kind of real-world frelling frelling doodah that happens endlessly.  Had a street-mail envelope from one of my utility providers.  I opened it in an idle, not-paying-attention way, because I have all my utilities on direct debit so the whole diabolical payment machinery can happen without my interference.  I can be asleep or knitting or making soup or fighting ground elder in the garden arrrrrrrgh or anything else and there will be a faint clank of electrons* and the monthly or quarterly or biannually or every Tuesday when the moon is full-ly payment will be made** KA-CHUNG.***

The letter inside this anodyne-appearing envelope said WE ARE ABOUT TO CUT OFF YOUR ELECTRICITY****, SEND IN THE BAILIFFS FOR YOUR AUTOGRAPHED COPY OF THE LORD OF THE RINGS, AND SUE YOU FOR SABOTAGE, SEDITION AND NONPAYMENT OF OUR HOLY BILL.

Adrenaline spike!!!!!!!!&   

So, weeping with terror, I phoned this week’s Evil Corporation from the Eleventh Circle&& and to my amazement, was put through immediately to a real human being!!!!!  We will attempt to pass lightly over his nearly impenetrable accent.  He said (I think) that yes, he could see on the system that I had set up direct debits . . . however, he added, sounding faintly puzzled&&&, for some reason they are just sitting there without making any attempt to draw the money.  ARRRRRRRRRRRRRRGH.  Hence I was more than a month overdue and certainly some elderly hag living alone&&&& in a remote Hampshire village and whose idea of a hot evening is to curl up in a corner of the sofa $ and read hard copy$$ is totally worth prosecuting to the limit of the average evil corporation from the eleventh circle’s remit.

So I paid the blasted bill$$$.  And my electricity is still working.  And so is the blog.  I think.$$$$  Quick.  I’ll post this . . .

PS:  I have my new blender on order.  I think.@

* * *

* Here I am demonstrating my dazzling, visceral grasp of the way computers and on-line work

** And then at the end of the year I can find out that their electrons are bigger and nastier than my electrons and mine were bullied out of a 500% mark-up which are paying for the corporate electrons to have extended holidays on Manly Beach^, get a nice tan on their components and suck down the frosty pitchers of slow customers and gin.

^ Apologies, I’m sure the derivation is kosher+, but the name just cracks me up

+ My middle-aged British thesaurus suggests the Australian ‘ridgy-didge’ which would be pleasing in this context, but I don’t know from Australian slang and I’ve been saying ‘kosher’ for about sixty years.

*** A very electron-ic noise.

**** Which I thought was illegal, just by the way.  They can’t cut off basic necessities which, in the modern first world, includes the electricity you use to cook your food, heat your house and pump your water.  Mind you, my Aga is gas.^  But my water pump is clearly possessed by demons, possibly electric ones.  Since the plumber was here last time, when I turn the hot tap on upstairs it goes BANG BANG SQUEEEEEEEEAK BANG BANG THUD THUMP BANG, and the water comes out in little grunting, go-everywhere spurts, with each bang or other interesting sound effect.^^  I’m going to need a second guest bedroom for the plumber soon, since Raphael already has dibs on the one that exists. 

^ I do have an electric kettle.+

+ Also matches.  And, after a letter like the above, fiery language.

^^ Sometimes for added enrichment, it’s even hot.

& Which, just by the way, is really bad for you when you have ME.  I wonder if I could find someone to sue?  I could try the poor bereaved widow thing too—yes it’s been two and a half years but I still talk to him in the churchyard every day—and I’m not only a feeble ME-burdened old hag I’m a feeble old ME-burdened American hag and the arcana of British business is still totally obscure to me.  Never mind I’ve been here nearly thirty years.  Enculturation sticks very very slowly.  Very.  Black widow spiders and poisonous toadstools I can do.  British corporate shtick, not so much.

&& Yes I know there are only nine official circles.  That’s the point, innit?

&&& I’m guessing here.  Let’s say more accurately that the timbre of his indecipherable accent changed.

&&&& Plus hellbeasts, but they aren’t big electricity users.  Raw chicken is just fine with them.^

^ No, I don’t feed raw.  I started to, with the hellhounds, but their digestion started going doolally almost immediately+, and raw was just one thing too many—and my homeopathic vet even said it wasn’t worth it with these guys.  Thus Pav came into an established household of cooked.  But raw is so much easier now the next time I have puppies++ I’ll probably try it again.+++

+ Also, readers of the old blog may remember the story of the hellpuppies’ first raw chicken wing—which is what the experts said to start your puppy on—when Chaos swallowed his whole and started choking to death and Darkness, having dispatched his just as quickly but I believe there was a modicum of faster-than-light biting into swallowable-sized pieces first—started trying to get Chaos’ off him, and no I don’t think he was trying to save his brother’s life, I think he thought, Hey!  He doesn’t know what to do with it!  I do!

++ AHEM.  I remember wondering if the hellhounds were my last puppies.  This is probably one of those old-age-keeps-retreating-as-you-get-older things, but at the moment I don’t think Pav was my last puppy either.  Of course this may be the forgetfulness of increasing age too.  PUPPIES.  ARRRRRGH.~  Remember the adage, little warm doe-eyed baby things are adorable so you don’t kill them. 

~ I am having a luxuriously arm’s-length reminder of the toothy, hectic whirlwind of puppyness because Raphael/Blogdad has a puppy.  And is quite willing to send photos in response to shameless begging.  Whom he BROUGHT WITH HIM IN THE FOUR-LEGGED HAIRY FLESH yesterday.#  I’m almost disappointed to report that Dr Strange behaved impeccably for a four-month-old puppy, although Chaos had one or two things to say about it of the RAWR RAWR OWR, I am old enough to be your grandfather, now settle the doodah down variety.  I’m afraid I had to lock Madam up.

# I will have to add a crate to the guest bedroom.

+++ Maybe.  Once you’ve damaged my morale it stays damaged.  Meanwhile the hellpair get raw treats.

$ with hellbeasts.  Pav will first check all the corners for nonexistent crumbs, because you just have to, which is not as hard on the sofa as it would be if I didn’t have a heavy canvas-y outdoor tablecloth thrown over it^, and Chaos will hurl himself down with a sigh of perfect rapture and relaxation, knowing that I will never torture him with food there.

^ The current one is bright yellow and has big pink flowers on it.  So it’s all good.

$$ The global electricity monopoly megamegacorp has entered into a lucrative conspiracy with amazon so that using your Kindle drains your battery as fast as playing Super Spiffy Whizzbang Ultra Galactic Regiment Against Cthulhu Who Is No Longer Waiting Dreaming in R’lyeh and Wants Fresh Acolytes^ does

^ SSWUGR doesn’t have a chance

$$$ Fortunately^ I have my credit card’s number memorised, because both my hands and my eyes were shaking badly enough that I probably couldn’t have read it off the card, especially since in the greater wisdom of most credit card companies including mine, they print the numbers in teeny weeny type^^ on a purple or black background and furthermore since the numbers are punched in relief, over time and use the tops of the numbers get kind of frayed. 

^ ‘Fortunately’ is a mutable concept

^^ Not as teeny weeny as the expiration date numbers, however, which are usually also gracefully arrayed over some kind of further-distorting logo exactingly designed by the marketing department in hitherto unknown shades of forest-at-midnight-with-a-touch-of-nausea green and bottom-of-Marianas-Trench-impenetrable-blue.  Retrieving your expiry date is an exercise in good guessing.  Let me see, how long have I had this card?  Check the frayedness of top surfaces of the proud, that is to say lumpy, numbers.  Okay, fuzzy like cardboard.  So it’s probably due for replacement soon.  Now, when did I last receive a WE’RE GOING TO SEND YOU YOUR NEW CARD IN [indecipherable] WITH [indecipherable] FOR [indecipherable].  PLEASE USE IT OFTEN AND JOYFULLY.  MWA HAHAHAHAHAHA.  So . . . guess.  They want your money.  Janfebnov 2040 will probably do.

$$$$ Not that it does not continue to have its little ways.  Its current little way is that (a) it does not want to approve comments (b) having approved them it will de approve them when I’m not looking and (c) it certainly isn’t going to let me answer any.  So if any of you happen to be reading comments and/or replies when they start flickering in and out of existence . . . ARRRRRRRGH.

@ While I was waiting for someone or other at, let’s call it Jabberwocky Ltd, to get their finger out, I read up on the machine I’m failing to have replaced.  According to reviews by other unsatisfied customers, a number of these blighted machines have had what sounds like the same fatal electrical fault^ so I decided I didn’t want a replacement, I wanted a new machine with better wiring^^ and, while I was at it, a more powerful motor, so that producing raw applesauce doesn’t make it moan in a poor-little-me-at-the-end-of-my-strength way.^^^  As well as trying to jump off the counter.  When Jabberwocky Ltd’s latest customer service prat, I mean representative, finally made contact, and I explained this . . . oh but there was a weeping and a railing and a tearing of garments and an offer of seventeen pence toward the new machine.  ARRRRRRRRRRGH.  One of the things they teach in customer relations school is that if you act stupid enough most customers will say oh WTF, and fold.

^ I wonder if any of the other customers are having bailiff-and-nonfunctioning-direct-debit problems?  Even paranoids can be caught up in megacorp iniquity.

^^ And/or a higher resistance to megacorp iniquity

^^^ Which is why, in answer to a couple of comments and emails, a hand/stick/immersion blender won’t do.  I have one—indeed, I have two, since that’s what Jabberwocky decided to replace—and I certainly use it, but it’s not up to anything that fights back.  If there is an immersion wand out there that will do the job I still don’t want it, since I’d have applesauce all over the kitchen.  Do not tell me this will not happen.  My gremlins are multi-adaptable.

So how many things can go wrong simultaneously

. . . No, don’t answer that.  Don’t even think about answering that.  And really it’s not simultaneous, it’s a sort of malign entwined-tentacle serialism, if all that local negative horsepucky had been simultaneous the cottage, Lodge and surrounding territory would have been taken out by the lightning strike, the meteor landing and the gas explosion that all happened in the same moment, plus the six-lorry pile-up at the mouth of the cul de sac which would have accordioned up the hill and taken us out a few more times.  And before you tell me you don’t believe that little old New Arcadia has a multi-gimongous-lorry traffic problem LET ME ASSURE YOU THAT WE DO.  There are fewer letters to the editor about it lately because we’re all getting over-exercised about Brexit, speaking of accordioning lorries of disaster, but it is REAL and EARTHSHAKING and MIDDLE OF TOWN TRAFFIC SNARLING, the morons in the SUVs they can’t drive are enough for the traffic snarling necessary in all picturesque English villages without professional lorry-driver assistance, and ROAD SURFACE DESTROYING, you can see the ruts in the tarmac widening every time one of those eff eff eff eff (*&^%$£”!!!! lorries malfeasances around the turn at the head of Sheepdrove Road, because that turn is actually not doable by monster lorries, so it, you know, takes a while—remember what I said about traffic snarling?—and if you and your hellpair are on that deadly stretch of pavement which narrows just at the crucial spot where Sheepdrove Road T-intersections into the main street, known as Lordofthemanor Street on the right and Ladyofthemanor Street on the left YOU NEED TO RUN FOR COVER NOW.*  We already have the worst roads in southern England** . . . and yet this still does not reach the sanity-threatening hub of the matter which is the diabolically horrible tag lines and logos the regulars all revel in.***   In eight-foot lettering with optional flower fairies.

Where was I?  Oh yes.  Disasters.  So let’s say I’m starting over starting over.  Starting over.  With the blog.  Or starting-starting-starting over-over-over.  Meanwhile, I had the following all written just before the last tsunami of technological anarchy broke and by the time it had flooded through here and then torpedoed on to confuse Douglas Adams’ whale**** . . . I forget, but at the moment, for example, I’m climbing out of another vast frelling bog of ME, during which so many things haven’t got done it’s like, blog?  What the cheeseparing is a blog?  Go away.  I’m rereading LOTR.  Hey, it’s research.  For DIARY.***** 

But, keep scrolling.  An entry derisorily labelled ‘Return to Real Life’ begins right after the huddle of footnotes for this fascinatingly coloured intro . . .

* * *

* There is a special area in the churchyard reserved for those who did not run fast enough, and a petition gaining signatures that the lorry companies should be required to provide the funerals, which would involve large, slow-moving horse-drawn carriages that SNARL TRAFFIC but would at least fit the picturesque paradigm.  But of course the lorry company lawyers are all saying, it was not our clients’ lorries which mounted the pavement that took out the little old lady parking her Vespa, the stationary teenager with his earbuds drilled into his ears checking his iPhone, or the professional writer paralysed as if staring at Medusa by the sight of the tag line.

** I realise this is a much-competed-for honour.  A friend who lives in Kent was here not long ago and she said, wow, your roads are as bad as ours. 

*** Wallow is perhaps a more accurate verb.

**** Including Blogdad’s trip to the chiropractor to lever his ear away from his shoulder after all that time on the phone to various server-provider people^ who seemed to have an attitude toward their internet platforms for hire similar to lorry company lawyers addressing the public their clients have been mashing into puree.

^ Or, possibly, mechanisms

****** I don’t suppose anyone out there knows of a good American slang dictionary for the 1960s?  I’m going a little further mentally deranged trying to look up everything I can’t remember using when I was in high school, not assisted by the fact that Green’s Dictionary of Slang is far from the totally magnificent resource its reputation declares it to be.^  The huge on line Oxford is at least as good, even if it’s not specialising in slang, but one does have to hack one’s way into it every blasted time.  I belong to a participating library so I should have access, but OF COURSE IT’S NOT THAT SIMPLE.  One of its favourite things to do, after you’ve put your library card number in, is to tell you you have to choose your library from the list it offers you.  And your library isn’t on it.  If you click on some other library it, not surprisingly, rejects you.  But if you don’t click on any library it just sits there blinking at you till you scream in rage and frustration, close the flaming tab, and start over again. 

^ It doesn’t have meltdown.  How can a slang dictionary not have meltdown?  It doesn’t have hairy eyeball.  It doesn’t have get my/one’s head around [it].  It doesn’t have do your/one’s head in.  It doesn’t have spare me.  I could go on.

It doesn’t have ‘I could go on’ either.

*****************

Return to real life*

WHICH IS AS FAR AS I GOT a fortnight or something ago when I last went to write something for the poor already-neglected new blog iteration.**  ARRRRRRGH.  The short form is that there is way too much frelling doodah doodah doodah ratbagging blasted explosive real world crap going on and by the time I’ve hacked and howled through the day’s ration of pernicious piffle I’ve no energy*** for a blog post.  Not to mention that said blog crashed again, plus, as some of you may be aware, and although Blogdad has turned this undesirable widget off, it periodically times me out anyway and then won’t let me back in again till the stars have realigned and the proper sacrifices have been made, and for some reason I’m resistant to the idea that I need to sacrifice anything, except perhaps a few houseflies and a broken chopstick, to get into my own blog.  Also I’m just easily discouraged by technology.  Or you could say the blood-pressure headaches get old.

. . . Which is as far as I got the next time I tried to write a blog post, because Microsoft pulled one of its Hi!  We’re updating! tricks on me, which it is set to warn me about before they happen, only it didn’t warn me, and when I found out that it had closed everything down, oh, and?, it’s supposed to reopen all your on line tabs but it didn’t, it also simply ate the beginning blog post.  Which did not magically reappear in ‘Recover Unsaved Documents’ either.

Maybe I can make one or two other of these sagas of snafu . . .

. . . Which is as far as I got the next time I tried to write a blog post when I went to footnote ‘sagas of snafu’ in which I was going to promise to drop the alliteration thing soon when I found out that this ******* RAH RAH RAH RAH ***** ** **** RAGE RAGE RAGE RAAAAAAGE has deleted all those footnote symbols I spent HOURS putting in and carefully assigning keystrokes to.%

I HATE COMPUTERS.  HATE, HATE, HATE, HATE.  Which is awkward when you’re trying to run a blog.%%

I WAS GOING TO SAY THAT I WAS GOING TO ATTEMPT TO MAKE A FEW OF THESE . . . erm . . . ISSUES, YOU KNOW, FUNNY.%%%

Maybe I’ll just talk about the garden.$

TO BE CONTINUED . . . $$

* * *

* Whatever that is

** I kind of like ‘Days in the Life II’

*** and no suitable vocabulary

% And no, I’m not going to spend a whole lot more hours putting them all back in again until Raphael comes up with some kind of safety net.^

^ It’s under discussion.

%% Let alone earn a living by writing stories.   If vinyl is undergoing a renaissance, maybe they’ll bring back electric typewriters.

%%% Take, for example, my blender.

My blender died.

This is now a critical item because . . . one of the stories of bleakness and horror from year of infamy 2017 is about my teeth.  Nobody told me they had a use-by date of 2016 and they’re falling out.  This is not a trend that can be allowed to continue, except that when one of them fell out incompetently last autumn—shortly after Darkness died, so I wasn’t at my best anyway—and  I had to go to the dentist to have it extracted, I was terrifyingly ill from the anaesthesia afterward.  For weeks and weeks and weeks.  My herbalist friend—I don’t think she has a blog name yet?  Let’s call her Morag—said that this is probably because I’m living so pure and holy a life that my henwitted body reacted extra-extravagantly to something that it (correctly) identified as toxic, and it wasn’t listening to the ‘yes but necessary in this case’ caveat.  Oh that’s great.  If it has all this frelling energy why isn’t it putting it toward making me STRONG and HEALTHY?  Too logical I guess.  I was never any good at logic and clearly this continues on a cellular level.  So at present I eat an awful lot of soup to try and retain the teeth I’ve got left till the golden, and fabulously expensive, day some time in the future when I am all shiny and able-bodied and can start having all this frelling remedial work done.  Maybe I’ll get used to soup.^

HOWEVER.  Putting everything through the blender requires a blender.  And mine went futz over a month ago.  Well, turns out it’s still under guarantee, how fabulous is that . . . and I even found the right warranty numbers and all that, and the store in question accepted the validity of my claim . . . but don’t hold your breath, this charmed series of events stops there.  Which is to say that six weeks later I’m still waiting.  Customer service answers promptly, they just never say the right thing.  Over and over and over and over again.  And it’s always someone else, you know?  And whoever the present bozo is, they don’t have the Complete Case File in front of them and most of them give the impression that they have a target minimum or maybe get paid by the individual clocked-in client contact, mangling optional, and what actually happens as a result of said contact is irrelevant.

Meanwhile I have a tiny old blender add-on to an infuriatingly incompetent food processor, which is why it has been gathering dust on a shelf for over a decade, and which you have to hold down when you hit the button so that it doesn’t leap off the counter^^ . . . but it does slushify what you put into it.  After a certain amount of persuasion.  I do not feel that blender design shows human ingenuity at its best.  Maybe they could rip a few superfluous engineers off endless computer updates and set them to redesigning blenders.  Hmm.  No, that’s not going to work.  The pointy dorkheads who invented blenders in the first place are no doubt the gene pool responsible for the multiplicity of Gordian knots that is the present state of computer life.  I had ANOTHER update today which cheerfully said, oh, this is going to take a while!!, took FIFTY MINUTES with no warning of anything whatsoever, and ended with a gigantic scroll of ‘hi, we want to suck up all information about you and sell it to Cambridge Analytica and Russia!  And we want you to tell us that’s fine with you, because you’re a citizen of the world and you believe every word Mark Zuckerberg says!’, cut up in small bite-sized, or I suppose byte-sized, pieces, like, we want to use your LOCATION!  We want your name, current sexual orientation and percentage of gender fluidity, your favourite brand of chocolate and your passport number!  We want to be able to TARGET you with advertising!  And we mean TARGET!!  We have new definitions of target  and computer-generated algorithms that will SCARE YOU TO DEATH!!!!  Mwa hahahahahahaha! We want to know the name of every other person!!! in that Communist party cell you belonged to in the ‘50s!^^^    Uh.  No.  The timing of this onslaught on our dwindling privacy seems to me perverse in the extreme, and as I try to labyrinthine my way out of the inexplicability of it my native paranoia about Large Corporations, which is already a little jumpy due to recent events, threatens to take over my universe, at least, if not Microsoft’s.  I WANT MY ELECTRIC TYPEWRITER.  Although I’ll have to get used to commuting to London for the hardcopy libraries.

^ Most of my soups are pretty frelling good because I make vats of my own chicken and vegetable stock.  These are separate vats, you understand.  The Chicken Stock Vat.  The Vegetable Stock Vat.  I keep trying to crank myself up to make Bone Broth but all those gigantic beef bones take up A LOT OF SPACE IN YOUR TINY REFRIGERATOR(s).  Or your even tinier (single) freezer.  Chicken carcasses squash nicely and I eat so many frelling veg that it’s hilariously easy to put together a huge stock pot of odds and ends.   But you can drop almost anything in home-made stock and it comes out tasting like you knew what you were doing and meant to do it that way.  If you like soup, that is, and relentlessly unadulterated organic ingredients.  Really I’m the wrong person to ask.  I’ve been eating this way for so long now I don’t trust myself to know what acceptably normal food is and when people come to visit I prefer to take them to the pub.

^^ Probably onto a sleeping hellbeast.  Although Chaos doesn’t like the noise and will probably slink away, Pav figures there’s food happening and is not going anywhere.

^^^ I was a precocious political rogue.  And I only remember my name because I can read it off my passport.  Although it’s changed a little since 1952.

$ And yes, I have 1,000,000 Ask Me a Question(s) to answer.  The thing is . . . either my technology has to settle down or my health does.  Meanwhile there just may be long echoing silences in Days in the Life II, for which I apologise.  ARRRRRRRGH.

$$ Yes!  Really!  I’m just not saying when!

 

Blogdad

Some of you are still having problems getting to this blog—which makes me want to chew the carpet and SCREAM because what am I wasting all this time for if people can’t read it?!?!  Please don’t write to me about it, which only makes me chew the carpet and scream louder, because there’s zip-all I can do about it, except forward it on to Blogdad.  I have the tech brain of a trilobite.  A slow trilobite.*  There is now a Blogdad button at the bottom of this page.  Pleeeeeeease use it for any tech issues.

Now as to the specific problem or problems of being deflected or diverted to spam sites—we, which is to say Blogdad, isn’t getting anywhere with that because he can’t reproduce the problem, and as Blogmom taught me years ago, you can’t change anything you can’t look at, and prod for weak places.  He’s been on the phone to everyone responsible for everything our end and they can’t find anything either.  Which presents the possibility that it’s not at our end.

Some of you have discovered the Blogdad button, and you may having crunchy high level  electronic conversations full of words I don’t know like gjzlurmjam and transsuperblinkdinglewhammy, about the unpindownability of internet misbehaviour.  The tweets and emails that come to me are all saying ‘hope you and Blogdad fix the problem soon’, which is exactly what I’d be saying in parallel circumstances, but I wish to suggest that you do any checking at your end that you, your tech person, or your next-door neighbour’s cat knows how to do please?  Because it may be a weirdness cloud that has, doubtless among many other unfortunates, tentacled on to you, some hitherto undefined subgroup of Days in the Life readers.  If we could figure out any common denominators . . .

* * *

Meanwhile.  It’s been a stupid day, and I was supposed to be spending it getting ready for Clothilda’s** arrival tomorrow.  So I have a GUEST ARRIVING TOMORROW, right?  And the first thing that happened is . . . I buy most of my cupboard-staples type organic food in bulk because you can get 10-15% off that way, and at organic prices this is worth it.  I had two big orders with two different companies, one from about three weeks ago and one from about a fortnight ago.  Both of them have been hanging fire waiting for some final item that wasn’t in their warehouse.  BOTH OF THEM ARRIVED TODAY.  So I have three GIGANTIC cardboard boxes sitting on various bits of otherwise unoccupied floor and I mean bits as in small.  Very small.  So when Chaos does his Standing in the Middle of the Floor Waiting for Something to Happen trick I can’t get around him without moving a large cardboard box.  Furthermore, the Lodge is my cupboard space*** . . . and it’s raining.†  And I somehow don’t feel like carrying large cardboard boxes through the rain.††

And the second thing—you remember I have a GUEST ARRIVING TOMORROW?—I’ve been blistering through the garden††† and had pretty well filled up all available containers against Atlas bringing his trailer today and trundling the lot off to the dump.  The local dump that there was an ENORMOUS public brouhaha to keep open a few months or something ago, okay?  Where our tax money goes etc etc etc we want to KEEP OUR DUMP?  Yeah.  Atlas was back much too soon this afternoon saying ‘they’ve changed the rules and they won’t take any of it.’  WHAT?  One of the things that a seriously pot-bound gardener does is periodically empty out all that compost because eventually feeding it doesn’t enliven it sufficiently any more, and replace it with fresh compost.  I don’t do this often enough, but I do it.  So along with vast swathes of weeds and a good fair few rose prunings, there was a lot of old tired compost.  Well, the dump doesn’t take ‘soil’.  It’s NOT FRELLING SOIL, it’s COMPOST.  Well, it looks like soil.  THAT’S THE IDEA.  IT’S SUPPOSED TO MAKE THE PLANTS HAPPY.  I’d bought quite a lot of that compost there at the dump—I don’t know how the system works, but all the local dumps pool their green garden waste and put it through the commercial process at some big industrial site, and then divide up the spoils and bring it home and sell it to their locals.  BUT THEY WON’T TAKE IT BACK ANY MORE.  And while I’m being gobsmacked, they don’t take SOIL?  Which you might think, on planet Earth, is kind of the ultimate recyclable ideal??  Gaaaaaah.

Also, while it was now irrelevant since they weren’t going to take a lot of garden rubbish with ewwwww nasty soil-like stuff in it, but the size/diameter of sticks and branches they’ll take keeps getting smaller and smaller, so it could be they don’t take rose prunings any more either.

Disaster was more or less averted:  Atlas hauled the lot off to distant Mauncester, but he had to go home first for the necessary tiedowns to keep the load IN the trailer.  And there they started to give him a hard time about the soil . . . but relented.  Maybe he stabbed them in the foot with a (garden) fork.  He’s very mild-mannered generally, but even he was feeling a little exercised about the situation.  I’m feeling prospectively very exercised about the next time I want to clean up my garden(s).  Today it meant I had no Atlas to do other garden-tidying-up things this afternoon.  And I had been going to do a different kind of hauling away:  of 1,000,000 books off to Oxfam, so Clothilda and I might conceivably get into the sitting room.  Which didn’t happen either.  Which means at present there is no floor space anywhere downstairs at the cottage for a normal-sized human being to put both feet down at the same time.‡

. . . And I have to have gone to bed over an hour ago.  ARRRRRRGH.

* * *

* And I am also sweating the frelling maths thing several of you have commented on, that Blogdad has installed to foil various internet monsters, because it sometimes asks me to add two double digit numbers together.  I can’t remember two frelling columns, and if I have to carry, like 14 + 17?  FORGET IT.

** Readers of the old blog may remember Clothilda.  She’s young, American and a children’s librarian.  Last time she was here I took her to the local Waterstones and made her show me all the good picture books she could find on their shelves.  I am shamefully out of practise with picture books, since the grandchildren got too old and then various events intervened, and so many picture books are . . . not good, and a person can become dispirited.  I came home that day with about ten new picture books and was very happy.  Since of course we will be caroming through a variety of bookstores this visit perhaps she can do it again.

*** And the shelves look very strange containing as they do six of everything, six bottles of raw apple cider vinegar, six jars of artichoke hearts, six jars of almond butter, six jars of ghee . . . and about twenty packages of vacuum-packed roasted and peeled chestnuts because they’re mostly only available at Christmas and I eat them all year long.  If I can get them.

† Wasn’t it SUMMER a few days ago?  We’re back to woolly jumpers and cold rain.  However, this is a good thing, because it means the bluebells should last till Clothilda arrives.  I hope she’s brought her wellies and a raincoat.^  But the bluebells, having been sitting with their little green arms folded saying ‘I’m not wasting my flowers on this’ while we had blizzards and tornados and things, came out BANG like tiny flowering volcanoes in the hot weather.

^ I can loan her a woolly jumper.  Although it will go around her twice and fall to her knees.

†† I know.  Most people live in one house.

††† Not that it’s tidy even now.  A garden is always a work in progress, the kind of work in progress that makes you go AAAAAAUGH every time you look at it.  The people who can sit down and relax and enjoy the view in their gardens fascinate me.  Of course these people probably spend more time steadily and soberly employing a trowel than I do.  Not more time, more time steadily and soberly. 

‡ There hasn’t been space upstairs at the cottage since we finished clearing Third House.

Yes! Question three! Read all about it!

 

Question three:  please, please, please, you ARE going to finish PEGASUS, aren’t you?

Yes.

I both kind of know and kind of don’t know what happened to PEGASUS.

When I started to write it I thought it was only one book.  There’s always a place where a story starts.  I suppose I might have suspected I was in trouble when PEG seemed to have two.  The first is the scene the evening of Sylvi’s birthday, after she’s met Ebon for the first time.  [Note lack of spoilers.  You have to read it.]  The second is when Sylvi and Ebon get back together.

Yes.  Of course they get back together.  I wouldn’t do that to my readers.*  Although I don’t guarantee Technicolour sunsets and perfect harmony all around and the kind of happy ever after that sounds like a bad Sunday-school version of heaven.  I was more or less guilty of that in my first book** and while that’s the way that story goes I’ve never quite forgiven myself.***   Which is also to say I guarantee a lack of Technicolour, in sunsets or otherwise, for the true, final ending of PEG II, III or MCVII.   But Sylvi and Ebon DO GET BACK TOGETHER.  ABSOLUTELY.

Also I realise that my readers don’t know as much about a story I’ve written as I do—ahem—but I assumed, which was stupid of me, that it would be OBVIOUS the end of PEGASUS is not the end of the story, and I apologise for not having an ‘end of part one’ or some such on the last page.  I also apologise for not frelling getting on with the story sooner, but that’s not under my control SIIIIIIIGH.

So what I know of what went wrong is, first, I was completely freaked out that PEG was going to have to be at least two books.   And then it morphed into three.  AAAAAAUGH.  At which point I basically ran away and hid.  I don’t know how to write stories that long!†  I can’t keep that much straight in my head!†† Lately I’ve been sort of oiling around the perimeter and wondering if I could possibly squash it back down to two . . . after all there were only two story-seed-starting places. . . .

The other thing that I know about that went wrong . . . I’ve always had a depressive streak, but till I hit menopause I could always banish it with cookies or a long walk or a self-inflicted whap up longside the head.  Then menopause, when your hormones go berserk anyway, and I couldn’t do that any more.  Plus having recently moved out of the old family house, which by then felt like my old family house too, because Peter was feeling his age;  and watching Peter feel his age more and more—I know I keep bringing this up, but it was such an oppressively big part of our life together because it started so soon.  The first part of EBON pretty well sank like a stone in my own emotional swamp.  Bleauurggh.  Sylvi is having a rough time:  the loss of her pegasus is a crippling wound—the ritual bonding is not just some little hey-presto doodah, plus their relationship was unlike any other—and her country is going to pieces around her.  I know what has to happen, but writing it . . . well.  I’m not ready to write it yet, even now, but I can feel myself getting ready.  Which I can tell you was not true two and a half years ago.

But the short form is:  yes.  I will finish the PEGASUS story.  And yes, Sylvi and Ebon get back together.  And yes it has a happy ending if you don’t require Technicolour.

* * *

* Well . . . I might be tempted to do it to the readers who get in my face—mostly electronically, any more, since I don’t go to conventions—and tell me how to write my stories.  Especially when they’re telling me how to write my stories from a perspective of not liking the McKinley stories they have read for not being the stories they wanted to be reading.  But they are in the MINORITY.  The infuriating minority, but still the minority.  I wouldn’t do that to my GOOD READERS.^

^ Also, I need to earn a living.  This requires that I deliver product that strangers will pay money for.  And, given the current economic climate and royalty rates, that lots of strangers will pay money for.

** BEAUTY.  In case any of you aren’t 100% up on your McKinley.^

^ I’m not.  Just by the way.  And, also just by the way, in answer to some commenter (or it may have been an email to ASK ME A QUESTION), if I would consider a collection of just the Luthe short stories:  there aren’t enough of them.  I don’t think.  I may be forgetting something.  See:  not 100%.  Sigh.  But even if I am forgetting something, I’m not forgetting enough.   I would consider it, I think it’s a good idea, but I’d have to write probably a couple more stories first.  SIIIIIGH.  Add it to the frelling list.

There is at least one Luthe (short) story I know about that I want to write—about how he and Aerin finally come back together.  DON’T GET YOUR HOPES UP.  In the first place, long-time readers will be aware of my near-100% failure, speaking of 100%, to write what I think I’m planning to write, and in the second place, even if this story wanders close enough for long enough for me to stamp the sucker on paper. . . it’s not one of your cheerful, upbeat stories.  Nothing on DIARY, mind you, but still not cheerful.  The trauma isn’t on the scale of DEERSKIN (or DIARY) but those of you who have read it, you know how DEERSKIN ends on a teetery, uncertain, modified happily-ever-after—personally I know that Ossin and Lissar will stay together and love each other for the rest of their lives, but what has happened will never NOT have happened and the past casts a long shadow.  And some scars never completely heal.

Well, now think about Aerin and Luthe:  the two of them getting back together is predicated on Tor dying and Aerin, as no-longer-quite-mortal, giving up, having to give up, everything she has ever known and worked for in her life, including the husband she really, really, really did love, who had been her best friend all her life . . . and whom she will miss every day she is with Luthe  Which Luthe knows.  As well as all the other friends she will lose, because they are mortal.  As well as the burden she now carries with Luthe, the responsibility due to or by her no-longer-quite-mortalness, to try what she can to sort out her messed-up world.

No I’m not frelling political, and I didn’t ‘make’ Damar messed up—I can’t make my stories do anything—because our world is messed up.   But I am very invested in the reality of human beings and what shapes their lives, and the stories that come to me know that or they’d go to someone else.

*** Warning:  do not, on pain of being hunted down and turned into a flower fairy and forced to wear foxglove bonnets and live under toadstools forever^, tell me how much you love BEAUTY especially the happy ending, and you wish I’d do it again.  I’m never going to do it again.  Among other sins, I was very young when I wrote BEAUTY, and even at twenty-four I thought the ending was a bit much.

^ and if this fate doesn’t fill you with horror, please go away, this blog is not for you.

†  Look, look!  I’ve FINALLY imported some footnote symbols!!!!  And I can hardly wait to find out which ones the current WordPress won’t support.  It had hissy fits all over the (symbolic) landscape last time, and there were all kinds of glorious squiggles I couldn’t use.

ANYWAY:  Some of you may remember reference to One of the Many Third Damar Novels^, KIRITH.  That was, I think, the first to be third, if you follow me . . . and one of the things that went wrong with it is that it wanted to be more than one book and I freaked out and botched the first volume—and my publisher turned it down.  Sigh.  It’s still in a box under my desk.

^ Ah.  And while we’re on the subject . . . Damar was NEVER a trilogy.  NEVER.  Make a note.  Some culpable fu—I mean di—I mean sh—I mean . . .  idiot at my publishing house decided that it would punch up the advertising to call it a trilogy, and if I knew who it was I’d’ve turned him+ into a flower fairy and then sent a large hungry Gila monster down to his end of the garden decades ago.  Some poor commenter who is now, reading this, deciding to take a profound interest in Early Renaissance poetry and leave the modern fantasy thing alone, asked after ‘the long delayed third of the Damar trilogy’ recently.  ARRRRRRGH.  I used to say that Damar was a series of indefinite length . . . which I suppose, at two books, it is . . . but that was when I still thought I’d be writing a few more before its first readers grew up and became grandparents.  I’m still planning on writing more about Damar, and if I wrote all the Third Damar Novels I have notes on . . . it wouldn’t quite be GAME OF THRONES but it wouldn’t be short either.

+ Of course it was a him.  Mutter mutter mutter mutter.

†† The Damarian Series of Indefinite Length would have gone on^ as it started—hopping around both in time and territory, and with some but not a lot of unpredictable overlap of characters.  Luthe, I think, is the only one who would have turned up at all regularly, and never as much more than a prod to move story or current characters in some other direction.  So it still wouldn’t be a proper series.

^ Or will go.  You never know.  I never know.

Weather

 

When we were all saying a month ago that we objected to blizzards in March and wanted spring, we were not asking for a frelling heat wave in April including the hottest April day in seventy years.  Arrrrrrgh.* 

I was going to start this saying WHERE DOES THE TIME GO because I’ve been starting the next blog post for days and then don’t finish it** but I know where the time goes:  at the moment, it goes, somewhat frantically, in the garden, where things are shooting up with a HURRRAAAAAAAAAH . . . and everything needs WATERING, like, now, and an hour ago and again in another hour, a situation fiendishly exacerbated by my Pot Habit***, including pots in pots and occasionally pots in pots in pots.&  The tiered effect.  This usually looks really nice for about fifteen minutes, before the bricks you have things balanced on turn out to be different heights, even though you checked really carefully, and the compost settles unevenly and the plants, very carefully placed and arranged, start growing in all the wrong directions.  Or don’t grow at all.  And any gardener will tell you that the fifteen minutes of perfection never happens when there’s anyone around to admire all your hard work.&&

But the wedged-in method is the obvious choice when you have a small town garden and long for that desperately out of control feeling of a big country garden—what Peter used to call empire-building.  As soon as you have one territory under control some vassal state on some other border is revolting, and you have to go quell that uprising.  And then . . .  It’s true I have fewer triffids here than we had at the old house but I do have an eight-foot camellia in a pot that keeps throwing herself off the little retaining wall that is there to create ‘interest’ by dividing the smaller back bit of garden from the larger front bit—and I can’t figure out why.  Not why my predecessor put in a retaining wall—I think it probably does create interest, since I line it with a crenellation of pots—but why this camellia keeps trying to pick up her skirts and dance.

But there’s always a way to reproduce uproar and riot if you’re determined.  Also, if you keep buying more plants&&& and have to put them somewhere. 

Oh God I’m doing it again.  APOLOGIES.  I AM A HORRIBLE PERSON.  I’m halfway through the answer to Question Three and I’m waaaaay over word limit, because I spent too much time/wordage blithering on about the garden,% and yes, of course, I could finish Question Three and post that instead, but see footnote **.  If I do that the temperature will plunge and it’ll rain tomorrow.  I PROMISE%% that the next thing I write for the blog will be the COMPLETE%%% answer to Question Three.$

* * *

. . . And so I didn’t get this posted last night as planned, and guess what?  IT RAINED TODAY.  In fact it rained, hailed, snowed$$, and thundered and lightninged, the radio went off the air, Chaos tried to hide under the bookcase by the front door, which has a clearance of all of six inches and which so-called gap is full of All Stars$$$, and Pav planted herself in Full Protective Mode by the kitchen door and barked any time a fractious lightning bolt dared show itself.  And the electricity has been so gonzo I haven’t posted tonight, either, and it’s now tomorrow . . . again . . . but only by a few minutes . . . so far.

* * *

* Although it does make my hair frizz in a slightly more uniform manner, which is a good thing.  With thanks for all the suggestions various commenters have made about hair control.  Even if some of them do send me off in fits of the giggles.  You have no idea how resistant I am to any idea of upkeep.  I like clothes—I like messing around with colours and patterns and textures—and being broomstick shaped means it’s mostly easy to find things that hang or drape and almost impossible to find things that, you know, fit, so I don’t bother, which simplifies matters, if you want to call it simplifying when it removes a good reason to put it back on the shelf instead of proceeding to checkout.  So while I have way too many clothes^ the body underneath gets fed and washed and that’s it.  Also, rubbing or brushing oil into your hair, however tiny the amount, doesn’t it get all over your CLOTHES?  I like clothes, I do not like being a slave to my washing machine.^^ Not to mention your bedding.  However, I am doing the water-reset thing and that works pretty well, so long as I continue not to mind looking like a mattress-factory explosion.  Which I don’t.  But wetting my hands and running them through my hair a few times in a fluffing sort of way—although I need to remember to do this a good while before I’m desirous of being seen in public without scaring small children—means that, still slightly depending on the weather, my hair may possibly cough-cough settle down cough-cough in a manner that might pass for style in a mad old hag who talks to her dead husband in the churchyard every day.

^ I’ve been decreasingly the same size for forty-plus years and stuff that’s too big will still hang on the bony frame, and I never throw anything out.

^^ Or machines.  Which I am.  Dog bedding.  Arrrrrgh.  And my apparently immune-to-common-sense habit of deciding that I’m only going out into the garden for a minute and don’t need to layer on the protective clothing.  Also, aprons.  I’ve finally almost learnt to wear an apron in the kitchen, and it’s perfectly true that adding turmeric to anything, which I do a lot , gives the anything a pogo-stick quality and almost everything I own is now adorned with yellow polka dots, including the hellbeasts and all my aprons.  But there’s no malice to turmeric, it’s just lively and likes to jump around in a gay and abandoned manner.  Stuff in the garden mugs you and laughs at aprons, so unless there’s time also to put on the dedicated garden shirt and the dedicated garden chaps as well as the apron, eh, it’s hopeless anyway.

It’s all kinds of good for you.  For me with ME, it’s anti-inflammatory and anti-oxidant.

Chaos gets turmeric and Darkness did too.  In fact turmeric is one of the things that gave Darkness some quality of life back.  He’d had to stop going upstairs because he was too stiff and coming down hurt.  About a fortnight of turmeric and he was very nearly bounding up and down the stairs again.#  Have I told you this?  My office—upstairs—was his favourite place.  Siiiiiiigh.

# Although when I went up to fetch him—selective deafness, everyone who has critters knows about this—I used to come down the stairs backwards with my hands held out, keeping an eye on him, just in case.

** And one of the big drawbacks to the ‘days in the life’ system is that it’s really hard to pick up something that was immediate when I started writing it and is now old news without making it sound lame and wonky.  I should work on this.  In my copious free time.  I mean, if it’s something I’m still outraged about I can get the groove back.   But if it’s just . . . days in the life, not so much.

Stupid opera productions, for example.

*** Do I have to make a marijuana joke here?  Or is it only people who were alive in the ’60s that call it pot?

& Although I am slowly moving over to mostly tacky plastic pots from terra cotta and ceramic or those gorgeous patterned—resin?  Fibreglass?—pots that cost a FORTUNE and last . . . about three years.  I notice they aren’t as ubiquitous as they were when they were first produced and all of us fell on them with cries of delight and . . . dismay, as soon as the price tags were examined.  Terra cotta and ceramic don’t last worth a damn either if you have anything remotely resembling winter weather.  The usual advice is to put them up on little feet—you can get adorable little matching terra cotta or ceramic feet, spare me—which is mainly the most ENORMOUS faff, and the blasted pots will crack in the winter anyway.  I have several Frankenstein pots, created by putting together the curved bits of several broken pots till a pot-semblance is achieved, whereupon I fill it up with compost really fast because the weight of the dirt will hold the shards in place.  This is satisfying in a perverse sort of way.  You can also use smaller shards as feet for pots you’re still obstinately attempting to nurse through a few more winters.  It’s all Peter’s fault.  I wasn’t a gardener till I met him.  Although I invented the Frankenstein pot.  Anyway . . .  plastic pots are cheap, they survive dramatic weather better than anything else does AND THEY DON’T DRY OUT AS FAST IN THIS HEAT.

& And lunacy.  Hey, practical, hands-on lunacy.  Look at these blisters.

&&& Did I hear someone say ‘roses’?  I’m just humming a little tune here.

% I haven’t even told you about the Fascinating Hellbeast Interaction that happened yesterday^.  And I haven’t told you anything about the epic endeavour that trying to find a sighthound to keep Chaos company on our long country walks^^ is turning out to be.

^.  For people who find critter interactions fascinating.  I doubt anyone who doesn’t stays with this blog for long.

^^ Pav is not interested.  Also, one sighthound about the place is just too few, while one bull terrier is like six bull terriers.

%% Well . . . let’s not get silly or anything.  Probably I promise.  Sort of.

%%% The same caveats apply.  Probably the sort of complete.

$ Who knows?  I might even throw in the answer to Question Four in the same post. 

$$ Although so far as I know, only at the Abbey at the End.  It’s like that there.

$$$ We Do Not Waste Space in This House

In which . . . er . . .

 

I know I need to get on with Question Three.  But I want to tell you about the opera last night*, or bell ringing today**, or about what’s happening in the garden*** . . .

. . . And I’ve run out of post-space again.  I’m about to break 2000 words. Which is not allowed.&

Um.  I really am going to answer questions three and four.  Really I am.  Just not tonight.  Um.  Not tonight either.

* * *

* which I enjoyed, which was both pleasing in itself^ and was a tremendous relief after being hammered mercilessly, with infrequent and inadequate breaks to listen to Anna Netrebko sing, by Macbeth a week ago.  This one was Luisa Miller, another early-ish Verdi, although not that early, he was about roll into his Rigoletto-Trovatore-Traviata run.  It’s funny about Luisa, maybe it’s only because I don’t know it very well—it’s not one of the famous ones—but it feels earlier than it is.  It sounds like Verdi, but it doesn’t sound any more like Verdi than, say, Macbeth does, which is earlier still, and Luisa is closer in years to the R-T-T explosion of amazingness, after which there’s pretty much no holding him and it’s one flamingingly breathtaking thing after another.

The three or five, depending on how you’re counting, lead singers were all terrific, although the fact that the evil Count looked like a slightly distressed schoolmaster to whom one should offer a cup of tea and a sit-down, and was totally outevilled by his henchperson who was definitely evil, was a little distracting.  And for those of us who grew up with Placido Domingo it’s fascinating watching him morph into . . . whatever this decade’s persona is, which happens to be playing the baritone dads in the same operas he played the tenor true-loves in a while ago.  The man is a phenomenon.  Also, he can sing.  I grant you his baritone hasn’t the tingle-making sweetness of his young tenor, but he’s not a pity vote either, and the dad roles he’s doing now are often the better for a little roughness.  He’s playing the detestable dad in La Trav next year and yes, I’m going.^^

I could of course do some carping.  Let’s start with the libretto.  AAAAAAAAAAAAAAUGH.  I don’t know if, again, it’s because I don’t know this one that well, whether it’s the surely unnecessary clunkiness of the subtitle translation, or whether it really is more ridiculous than usual BUT IT’S PRETTY RIDICULOUS.  I mean, it’s very ridiculous. ^^^  And while the production was the nice old-fashioned kind where what is going on more or less matches what the subtitles tell you is going on^^^^ and it’s well enough lit that you can see what’s going on . . . if that’s the Millers’ sitting room, why does it look like a PUB?  And if Luisa is the village schoolteacher, why do the posters of the alphabet on the wall stop with W?^^^^^  And—no spoilers here or anything—why is she wearing her nightgown to kill herself in?  And, furthermore, wearing it in her front room with ALL the villagers present who might conceivably wonder why she’s invited them all over to hang out while she’s in her nightgown?^^^^^^

Oh, and she doesn’t kill herself.  That would be so obvious.  No, someone else does it for her.  Which is also pretty obvious.  But it can’t end well.  That would be unthinkable.   But she and her true love have been clutching their dire secrets to their breasts for so long there is a slight feeling from certain audience members of ALL RIGHT ALREADY.  GET IT OVER WITH, WILL YOU?

^ Especially at the PRICE.  Good grief.  You could get cheap seats in the Met theatre itself for less than it now costs to slouch in the cinema several thousand miles away and watch the singers make horrible faces in close up.

^^ One of these posts I’m going to do a rant about the unspeakableness of the local cinema’s web site.  A RANT.  A RAAAAAAAAAAAAANT.

^^^ STOPPING NOW.  I DON’T HAVE TIME.  But, you know, I could do it so much better.+  I’m fine with melodrama!  I love melodrama!  I just like melodrama when people act like they’re seized by emotions beyond their control, not that they’re jellyfish from Alpha Centauri dressed up in human suits and have all lost their handbooks++ on human behaviour!

+ I have the same feeling about a lot of the Book of Revelation.  Alfrick has got me started on Universalis which gives you not merely daily readings but an assortment of daily readings# because I was complaining## about my haphazard prayer-and-Bible-reading habits.  I sometimes think that coping with Universalis is the 21st-century version of the sackcloth and self-flagellation . . . but I digress.  The other day we had the bit where the critters with all the eyes praise God ceaselessly, and every time they do, the elders prostrate themselves and hurl their crowns at his feet.  Um.  Okay, and then what?  Does an angel come by with a broom and sweep this lot of crowns into the Endless Fire, in which case where do the next lot of crowns come from and how quickly, if the critters with the eyes are praising God ceaselessly?  And if it’s ceaseless, how do the elders know when to interrupt by the prostration and the crown-hurling?  Or maybe, in the interests of beneficial heavenly ecology, they reuse the crowns.  I think it sounds undignified for a lot of elders to go scrabbling around on the floor, groping for crowns.###  Will any crown do for any elder?  Do they all have the same size head?  Do they play nicely together?  Or maybe there are aisles, like for bowling balls, and the crowns slide down the aisles and then pop up again where the elders are now picking themselves up for the next round of prostrations.

I could do it better.

# Supposing you can frelling manage the frelling web site.  Frelling.

## Never complain to your spiritual advisor.  Spiritual advisors are trained by ninja angels to drop you in your tracks the moment you show weakness, fingerprint you with holy oil and rope you up in rosaries.  And web site addresses.

++ or possibly tentaclebooks

### Also they’re dressed in white.  I hope the housekeeping staff is vigilant.

^^^^ I think it’s supposed to be contemporary, so mid-1800s.  It has that historical costume drama look to it anyway.

^^^^^ Unless there’s something about the Italian alphabet I don’t know.

^^^^^^ Also, her best friend offers her some food, telling her she has to keep her strength up.  Which she pushes away.  Which is not the least surprising since the bowl looks like it’s full of very, very, very overdone roast potatoes.  Production really has to remember about close-up camera shots.

** I told you I’d been nailed by Felicity to ring at an invocation this afternoon.  I had vaguely registered that Wild Robert was going to be leading the occasion, but I hadn’t really focussed on this fact, which was foolish of me.  I told you, I’m kind of out or practise.  So rather than doing call changes and maybe a plain course or two of something easy, which is the usual Crabbiton drill for events, Wild Robert lashed us through twenty minutes of frelling Grandsire with a frelling call nearly every lead—which isn’t going to sound like a lot to any even half-experienced bell ringer out there, but when it’s a ground floor ring and a frelling packed out assemblage of the great and good and you’re out of practise and it’s too hot—because spring is here for forty-eight hours and the central heating [sic] was still on—AND THERE’S A FRELLING CALL NEARLY EVERY FRELLING LEAD, twenty minutes is a very long time.  And then we’d barely stood our bells when we were off again . . . to ring April Day, frelling spare me, which we’d only rung for the first time this Thursday.  Now anyone who doesn’t know April Day will be rightly aghast at ringing a brand-new method at an event—at least a brand-new method with a band that contains me—but anyone who knows about April Day, which is to say April Fool’s Day, will say, oh, piffle, it’s just bob doubles with Grandsire singles.  DO YOU HAVE ANY IDEA WHAT IT MEANS TO YOUR MELTING BRAIN WHEN YOU’RE RINGING ONE METHOD—even if it is the first and easiest method that anyone ever learns—AND ARE TRYING TO RING THE CALLS TO ANOTHER METHOD, even if it is probably the second method anyone ever learns, AND STILL FIGURE OUT WHERE YOU NOW FRELLING ARE IN THE METHOD THAT YOU’VE JUST EMERGED FROM THE WRONG CALL BACK INTO????

I could barely drive home.  I did not sing at St Margaret’s tonight, as I was supposed to.

*** Yesterday we had a GLORIOUS WARM SUNNY DAY.  No, really.  The first one since . . . August, I think.  Maybe July.  And I had to stop early to go to the frelling opera.^   Today after ringing, and after I’d finished fanning myself, moaning, and drinking strong green tea, I tottered out into the garden, where it is still warm but is now raining, because it would be bad for our characters to have two sunny days in a row, to transfer a few more tiny baby plants into trays and pots and . . . I think it was three days ago I was reaching for another baby-plant tray and there was a sudden EXPLOSION of feathers, and a blasted robin was rocketing around the little greenhouse doing that awful panicked-bird thing of banging herself on the glass.  I hunkered down on the (dirt) floor till she figured it out and flew away and . . . arrrrrgh.  Ever since the [seven foot, brick and flint] wall fell down [sic] for which the resident robins seemed not to have forgiven me, I’ve wistfully kept a couple of previously-favoured nest-gaps clear, which in my greenhouse is heroic, which, furthermore, are on the house-wall side, not the falling-down-garden-wall side.  This, however, is apparently the new generation, and they’re not going to use some dreary old shelf their parents have used, they’re going to create a ramshackle even by robin standards nest on top of the tin that holds green wire and dibbers.  Which is about as unsafe as you can easily imagine, unless I stood there holding a pole with a plate spinning on top of it and they put their nest on that.  So I looked in horror at the tiny naked red baby robin flopping feebly in the mess mum had left behind, shoved the whole catastrophic jumble back behind the fence of green wire—it’s early in the season, I’m not really green wiring a lot at the moment, I can go buy some more—and thought, well, I’d been here over an hour before she took exception to my reaching for a tray on the wrong stack, maybe she’ll be back.

Next day.  She was back.  I saw her just long enough for her to jump up and flee again.  Sigh.  How much time can mum spend off the nest at this stage and the babies survive?  Not long.

Today . . . she was back.  And I’ve figured something out.  Who knew?  She’s okay with me there.  But when I look up and see her, that’s when she freaks out.  If I’ve killed this brood of baby robins I’m very sorry, but why does she recognise my face and my eyes?!?  Cross species communication, let’s not.  Now I’m going to have to crouch and hang my head through the frelling greenhouse for ten days or so till I either hear frenzied FEED ME!  FEED ME! chirping, or . . . I don’t.

^ Because I’d been gardening up till nearly the very last minute, when I got home at about 10 pm I took Chaos for his hurtle then.  We were nearly to Ditherington and he was like, oh, why are we turning back already?  Um, because it’s dark?  And this is a small enough town that you run out of streetlights long before you run out of inclination to hurtle.  So I got out my (pocket, electric) torch and we had quite a good hurtle after all.  I didn’t even fall down.

& And I have broken 2000 words.  Sigh.

In which I am distracted from questions 3 and 4

 

In answer to what is, somewhat mysteriously, the fifth most asked question . . . yes I am still bell ringing.  The things people want to know.*  I went tower ringing last night and handbell ringing this afternoon.  But really I’m horribly out of practise.  As I used to moan regularly in the old blog, my brain is the wrong shape to learn bell method patterns;  and when the ME is bad, my brain is no shape at all.  The problem at present is I am also still relearning the discipline of writing every day:  my brain is already ravaged on a few pages of DIARY and I take it BELL RINGING?  Nooooooo.  Let’s sit in a nice corner and knit.**  I hadn’t been to Crabbiton in yonks, and when I turned up last night the tower captain fell on me like a plague of locusts and asked online pharmacy india viagra scams what I was doing Sunday afternoon?  Having a nap?  Writing a blog entry?  Listening to the YouTube versions of what I’m going to be pretending to sing that evening at St Margaret’s?*** Um?  Not this Sunday.  I am ringing an invocation or an insubordination or an incantation or some such item.  They’re going to loan me a shirt with the local district logo on it of the correct tower colour, but I have to wear dark trousers.  But I haven’t got any dark trousers!  I don’t do trousers!  I can wear black jeans!  The tower captain blinked once and said fine.

And this afternoon we were ringing . . . sort of . . . plain bob royal, and several of us were having trouble counting up to ten.&  Next week there’s only going to be three of us so Niall barked at me, Oxford minor!  Be ready!

Whimper.

I’m going to stay home more.  I could write more blog entries.  Like, for example, the one answering Most Asked Questions # 3 and 4.&&

* * *

* A very, very long time ago I used to say that I would answer almost any question but ‘what did you have for breakfast’ and ‘what colour is your typewriter.’  The latter tells you just how long ago that was.  It was of course also long before the internet and before a lot of years doing author tours and library visits and finding out just how . . . um, creative reader questions could be.^

^Somewhere I still have my beloved IBM Selectric I.  And I still want to gild her.+

+ A few weeks ago—shortly before this blog went live again—I had a spell of having no working laptop at all.  I still have the desktop upstairs, Repository of All Things, but I spend practically all my working life down here in the kitchen, next to the Aga, on my laptop, taking up the only half-decent stretch of actual counter space in this tiny kitchen.  The desktop serves as a kind of library—you pull something off the shelf and you may curl up cross-legged on the floor while you check that it’s what you think it is and what you want, but then you take it away with you to wherever your workspace is.  I don’t remember now how I migrated down here, but hellhounds#, food and a central-heating-sparing heat source were sufficient reason, and Pav has been up there so rarely she finds it WILDLY EXCITING which is not great when the floors are still stacked with tottering piles from Peter’s office.  Not to mention knitting magazines and homeopathy journals.

. . . Erm, where was I?  Absent a laptop.  I’ve had such a bloody sodding awful year with laptops—this last one was the replacement for the mouldy lemon I bought shiny-new about a year ago, and it, the replacement, exploded, which was exciting, especially the part about it doing this without warning while I had DIARY open and unsaved, and hadn’t sent myself an email attachment of it recently—which would then be on the desktop, this is my idea of high tech##—so I did a certain amount of exploding too.###

But finding a replacement replacement took a little while, especially since I have this habit of declaring I will never, ever buy another of Brand X after a more than commonly spectacular feat of technological perversity.  Since the frelling industry is monopolised by a short handful of manufacturers, and even fewer of them produce what I want, Raphael was a trifle constrained by the fact that I’d bailed on both the obvious contenders in the last year.  As I recall the final conversation about this creature I am typing on now went something like this.  Raphael:  Here’s one that looks okay.  I’ll send you the specs.  Me:  DON’T.  AND DON’T TELL ME WHAT IT IS EITHER.  JUST ORDER THE THING.  Please.

I don’t quite have the logo taped over . . . but I do avert my eyes.

Meanwhile, I was back to handwriting on yellow pads.  Can you still buy yellow legal pads in the States?  Apparently you can’t over here.  You can at least buy yellow lined pads that are not notebook-hole-punched, which is better than nothing, but the true experience is legal pad size.

And I remembered that first draft written on paper has its advantages.  So, I may add, does second draft on a typewriter.  So just for laughs I had a whistle around google for electric typewriters.  They don’t exist any more.####  However.  I’m more than a little tempted by the basic Nakajima:  the bottom of the line one, without icky superfluities like memory.#####

# Hellhounds, as some of you may recall, have had Insalubrious Digestive Issues all their lives, and the immediacy of the kitchen door has frequently been a boon, as has the fact that the kitchen floor is lino.  At the moment both the hellpair are tucking into goosegrass like the sixteen-year-old me tucking into a Friendly’s hot fudge sundae.  I’ve always tended to drag the hellhounds off anything that hasn’t been pathologically pre-examined by me, and probably boiled, sieved and examined under the microscope while I’m at it.  But I’ve expanded, or possibly oozed, beyond homeopathy-only into some of the other alternatives, and have read quite a bit, in my random and unpredictable way, and in my copious free time, about herbalism.  And suddenly remembered, as I was about to grab Pav’s harness and lift her bodily out of her favourite dense thicket of the stuff, that goosegrass is also cleavers, which is a terrific detox and in fact I’m on it in tincture form.  So Pav, whose digestion is rarely nightmarish~, is allowed to indulge with only a little suspicious muttering from my end of the lead.~~  Chaos I watch apprehensively.  Because he will come home and throw up on the kitchen floor.  At least then I know it was goosegrass he was eating, and not magic mushrooms.~~~

~ But when it is, it’s worse, because she hides it in her crate and BURIES IT IN HER BEDDING.  The hellhounds have always rushed to the back door, whether they make it or not.

~~ Because of the WHEN IT IS NIGHTMARISH.

~~~ I do wonder sometimes.  Because dogs are nuts.  Maybe it’s the company they keep.

## And a lot easier than backing it up on a dongle because modern laptops don’t want you to have plug-in thingies, so you have to have a plug-in port to plug the frelling dongle into AND HAVE I MENTIONED THAT THIS IS ALL HAPPENING ON A KITCHEN COUNTER?

### It’s okay.  Raphael, before he was Blogdad, saved DIARY, and took the detestable laptop-shaped object away with him before I broke any more teeth biting it.

#### I only retired Nellie when the typewriter shop . . . by then expanding unwholesomely into computers . . . could no longer get parts for her.

##### And where am I going to PUT IT?  http://salutedelluomo.net/articoli/una-storia-vera-come-stato-inventato-il-viagra.php On the Aga?

** People are so rule bound.  They keep asking me what I’m knitting and I keep saying, I haven’t decided yet and they look horrified.  It’s the back, okay?  It’ll either be a pullover or a cardigan.  I haven’t decided yet. 

*** Which is TOTALLY an exercise in frustration since we don’t sound like Hillsong.  Not even frelling close.^

^For one thing, all us regulars are old and gnarly, and for another, none of us can sing.+  Although the level of not-singing varies.

+ canadian drugs online viagra Okay, the only one who can sing, and who in fact fronts his own band, reads this blog.  So I just thought I’d better mention that he can sing?  Oh.  He’s not old or gnarly either.  NOT.  NO.  THE FRELLING FLOWER OF BRITISH MANHOOD.  TOTALLY.  And he can play his guitar.  And bass.  He even occasionally wears All Stars.#  ::wipes brow::  Has anyone ever asked any of those unappreciated-in-their-own-country prophets if they minded?  Obscurity has its pleasures.

http://shopmedssavemoney.com/buy-yasmin-online/ # Not often enough though.  And they’re never pink.

& I actually like bob major, eight bells, but ‘seven’ should not have been allowed to have two syllables.  To keep your rhythm you have to go ‘sen’^.  Or, if you’re agile, sven.

^ silently in your head.  Although, like a bad reader, I tend to count with my lips too.

&& Only fair to warn you it doesn’t look good for tomorrow night.  I’m going to see another opera . . .

And the four most asked questions are . . .

1.  Are you WRITING ANYTHING?* And if so, WHAT?**
2.  Are you ever going to finish KES?  Is it ever going to be available to buy, either finished or unfinished, but maybe preferably finished?***
3.  Are you ever going to finish PEGASUS? I know you don’t do sequels, but surely the ending of PEGASUS isn’t the end.  Please say yes.


4.  Is there a sequel to . . .

 

Here’s the short form:  Yes, yes, yes, no.

Here’s the slightly longer form&:

[NOTE THAT SODDING WORDPRESS HAS AN AUTO-NUMBERING DOOHICKEY THAT I CAN’T FIGURE OUT HOW TO TURN OFF WHICH FURTHERMORE EFFS UP THE TYPEFACE AND IT IS NOT AN O’CLOCK THAT I CAN ASK BLOGDAD, AND YOU DON’T WANT TO WAIT TILL TOMORROW, DO YOU?  SO NUMBERS IN THE FOLLOWING WILL BE WRITTEN OUT, AND IF I COULD DROP-KICK WORDPRESS OFF THE FRELLING PLANET I WOULD.  I HAD ENOUGH TROUBLE FINDING AUTOCORRECT IN WORD TO STOP IT WITH ITS FRELLING AUTOMATIC FRELLING BULLET LIST HELPFUL PIECE OF ARRRRRRRRRRRRGH.]

ONE.  Yes.  I’m writing something.  Its working title is ONE YEAR DIARY.  But . .

I don’t know when I’m going to finish it, although by my standards I think more like sooner than later—but ‘sooner’ may mean 2020 rather than 2030.  This is McKinley.&&  Sigh.  I would write faster if I could.&&&  And a much bigger but . . . it’s a hell of a grim story.  It’s not like anything I’ve written before.  It’s not something I want to write, but it’s what is presenting itself to be written, and that’s the rule of my universe:  I write what wants me to write it.  I think it’s worth writing . . . I’m not sure what I’d do if the History of Twinkies or The Saga of the Purple Unicorn or something presented itself . . . but it’s not a jolly groovy good time with chocolate sprinkles.  Or unicorns.

But I’m so glad to be writing again.  I can’t begin to tell you.  A writer who isn’t writing isn’t alive.

Why this or any story is presenting itself to me now . . . well, as previously observed, it hasn’t been a good few years, including for my writing.  SHADOWS came out in 2013, a few months before Peter’s first stroke, and I kind of shut down.  Peter was himself to the very, very end, but he was an increasingly sadder and quieter himself and I . . . didn’t cope very well, either privately or professionally.  I managed to keep going with KES a little longer because of the gonzo relative freedom of doing it for free in 800-word chunks that got pinned up in public before I could get too obsessed with rewrites or story arcs or continuity or any of that sober professional writer stuff, but even that mail slot from the story council eventually stuck closed.  I haven’t written anything worth mentioning in over five years.  I’ve got frelling notebooks of fragments%, but nothing that would stay and play with me.%%   Just many splitting headaches of staring at an empty screen.  Till DIARY.  Two years since Peter died:  I started coughing out bits on the computer in December and waiting desolately for this story to leave me too . . . but it hasn’t.  It’s put down roots and started demanding increasing amounts of attention.  Yaay.

DIARY will also be the first story since DEERSKIN that Peter didn’t read first.  His fingerprints are all over my subsequent books—there isn’t a one that he didn’t have perceptive comments about—and some of you may remember that he came up with the title ROSE DAUGHTER, for example, and SPINDLE’S END would be some other book entirely without my frequently-baffling-to-an-introvert-only-child encounters with the Dickinson clan.  But it’s not even specific suggestions%%% or experiences so much as being able to rely on him to read honestly—knowing too that he believed in my writing and was coming eagerly to any new thing I offered him—and to give me his viewpoint as someone who really got my work but saw it from a fully, wholly, thoroughly different perspective from my own.

I’m not looking forward to doing without that this time.$

TWO.  Part One of KES . . . is FINISHED.  Really.  When I said a paragraph ago I haven’t written anything worth mentioning in over five years . . . well, I did manage to dodge around all the slavering, multi-fanged anti-writing monsters with small handfuls of KES words.  Lots and lots of guerrilla-dashing across monster-patrolled borders.  These literary [cough cough] spoils I then set up on safe ground, stuck together and gave a brush and polish.  And KES will be PUBLISHED.  Details are still being worked out but watch this space.  I think what will happen is that I will hang a few sample episodes for people who either didn’t read it the first time or need a little refreshing and reminding of the particularities of that lunacy, and then add one or two or three new episodes which leave our heroine in an EVEN WORSE situation than she was in the last episode on the old blog MWA HA HA HA HA HA. . . and then if you want to know what happens YOU WILL HAVE TO BUY THE BOOK.$$

At that point I’m hoping to get started on Part Two . . . it’s not a sequel!  There’s no sequel about it!  It just goes on!  Because, you know, the end of Part One is a little . . . disturbing!

Which is an excellent, evil-cow sort of way to end Part One of Answering Ask-Me-A-Question(s).  Because, of course, the answers are taking me longer than anticipated . . .

* * *

* Besides the blog.^

^ Listen, I wouldn’t have started the blog again if I weren’t writing something.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.#

# Footnotes are like that.

** I could count this as two questions.  But I’m not going to.

*** It amazes me the number of people who are apparently willing to spend money even if I don’t finish it.  You are wonderful, kind, gentle, generous people and are too soft to live, and I worry about you.

& I know I’m a cow, but even I’m not that big a cow.

&& This is McKinley running out of money.  It better be sooner rather than later.

&&& I’ve been saying this for forty years.  BEAUTY came out in 1978.

% Including a second Miri-and-her-hellhound story, speaking of not doing sequels.

%% I’m hoping that DIARY is opening things up generally, and some of those fragments will play with me later.

%%% Which I mostly ignored anyway, as suggestions.  It’s one of those things we totally got about each other:  the UTTER REJECTION of an actual suggestion . . . but the critical boost or twist or tickle of something someone you trust has said, that you think . . . No.  Wrong.   But . . . um . . .  I can use that.  I’m not sure how yet, but I can use that.^

^ He could also be an appallingly bad reader, as he would be the first to admit:  I read it too fast, he’d say.  I had to know what happened.  But then he’d read it again.

$ I have a large articulated lorry-load of stuff to take up with God about this when I get to heaven.^   The simple version is that there should have been two Peters:  the one that married his first wife and had four children, and stayed married to her because she didn’t fall ill and die AND the one that I married who was my age so we had some hope of going out more or less together, or at least having more than twenty-five years together, or, more importantly, more level playing field years together, because he started getting old a lot sooner than either of us expected.  His first wife had thirty-five years of Peter at the top of his game.  I used to tell him he owed me thirty-five years too—and before this became too much like reality I used to tease him that if that meant pushing him around in his wheelchair I could do that too.  So what’s the frelling doodah deal.  Why was it this way?

^ Remember:  we all get there, it just takes the axe murderers longer.  I’m not on the fast track, but I’m not an axe murderer either.

$$ Which I’m hoping will keep me in books and yarn and hellbeast food and organic olive oil for the inner and the outer me, till I get DIARY done.

An event

 

I’ve had three events in the last three days.  This does not happen.  I don’t allow it to happen.  But the scheduling fairies gang up on you sometimes.  It occurred to me a little late on Tuesday that the reason I had been planning to do a first round-up Ask Me a Question answer blog is because I was about to have three things in three days but, you know, I sat down to write a blog and I got distracted . . .

AND I’M NOT FINISHED BEING DISTRACTED, because I want to complain about the Royal Opera House’s Macbeth, which was Wednesday’s event.  This is Verdi’s take on Shakespeare, and I’m totally into opera-libretto versions of Shakespeare because they’re shorter.  And of course I’m heavily into Verdi full stop.*

However.  In the first place it was another insanely ugly production.  Black on black, mostly, which is going to be even more splendid in the live theatre where you’ve paid major money to not be able to see what’s happening on stage.  At least you get (frequently unfortunate**) close ups in the cinema so you have some clue what’s going on . . . although that’s not all that much help here since . . . what IS going on?  Surreal is overrated.***

And let me get something else out of the way.  I am SO TIRED of people prating on about what a strong woman Lady Macbeth is.  She’s not!  She’s an evil nag.  Full points for naked amoral ambition, but what does she actually do besides embody a perfect male fantasy of the nightmare wife?  And she’s barren.&  It doesn’t get any more misogynistic.  She’s a terrific character, and Verdi does give her lots of wicked ranting . . . but she isn’t the one that kills the king.  She smears a little blood on the guards, big freaking deal.  Macbeth orders all the other deaths, with her gnawing his backside no doubt, but she’s still only active through her husband.&&  And Macbeth is the one who says, oh freaking doodah Birnam Wood&&& I can at least go down fighting, and Lady Macbeth is the one who goes meshuga and offs herself.%

. . . I’m already over my standard blog-post word target and I haven’t got to what I came here to say.  Arrrrgh.%%  Which is:

Anna Netrebko, as Lady Macbeth, basically blows everyone else off the stage.

I don’t know what kind of an actor she’d be if she only had words to say.  But that embodying of the music—she does that superbly.  She’s got a voice to kill for anyway—erm, in the circumstances let’s say to swoon for—and it’s been interesting, over the years, listening to it evolve.  She started out a very high, fancy, twiddly soprano—she did a mad scene as Lucia [di Lammermoor] to chill the blood%%% for example.  I love the opera but loathe the character, even as wet useless opera heroines go she’s extreme, but you have a soprano like Netrebko investing all that musical strength in that madness, and it, she, you, the opera, flies.

As here.  I don’t think I’ve seen Netrebko play evil before, and she may not have had the darkness in her voice to do it till recently:  but she does it here.  I found her riveting.  While she’s centre stage I forgot how idiotic that stage was.

And nobody else comes close.  Which, particularly when the production is as big a sack of lame monkeys as this one is, is a problem.  The cast all have the voices, but only Netrebko has the authority, the conviction, the commitment, the belief.  The blokes are all guys with nice notes who have competently memorised the score.  Macbeth, during his mad scene, now granted the staging of the dinner party is a haphazard mess, but he’s just a flabby middle-aged guy rolling around on the floor.  As the friend I was with said, he doesn’t draw you into his madness. Netrebko does. Banquo has some presence but he’s killed too early to add much gravitas, and almost anybody can look effectively ominous as a silent ghost stalker.

And Macduff . . . Macduff is a problem in the original play because you don’t see enough of him, or early enough;  he’s kind of a plot device who’s dragged in to be the big villain’s nemesis.  And he’s a similar problem in the opera.  I think if it had been staged sensibly$ you’d at least have been able to pick him out of the murk;  I found myself thinking, Macduff must be around here somewhere . . . okay, probably that guy, because we’ve seen the babe he hangs out with and her kids up front a lot.  As I have said many, many, many times$$, I’m not one of Shakespeare’s biggest fans.  Cough.  Cough.  But . . . when Macduff hears his family is dead . . . of course he’s been set up against cold-hearted Macbeth, but even so.  ‘All my pretty ones?’ will, or should, break your heart.  And Verdi and Piave have given him an aria, with fresh words, that will break your heart even better.

Except that this guy . . . lovely voice, very prettily, lyrically sung, no tragedy whatsoever.  He might be some perfumed lover rejected by a flirtatious damsel.  Feh.  Oh, and?  The great confrontation with Macbeth:  no man of woman can slay me!  —I was not born, untimely ripped from my mother’s womb was I!

Thrown away.  TOTALLY thrown away.  It has all the force of hey, who ate the last doughnut?  —Sorry.

I feel a little guilty for trashing this production quite so comprehensively.  But two things:  the staging sucks dead bears.  And Netrebko wipes the frelling floor with the rest of the cast.  I hold the ROH fully responsible for the first.  But I hesitate about the second.  Singers who can do the embodiment thing are rare.  And not even every singer who can do it at all can do it for every role.  And any opera is such a nest of snakes for anyone trying to put one on:  how do you negotiate all the necessaries—and we haven’t touched the orchestra, which can (and sometimes does) make or break a production—and end up with something that will not only reasonably please the already opera-prone, but pull in some new audience members who will like what they see and hear well enough to try it again some time?  Because opera is an expensive sport, and we need wallets.

* * *

* Except Falstaff.  It’s another Cosi for me.  I hate all the characters.  That bounder, Falstaff.  I know he’s supposed to be!  I don’t care!  He’s a big fat unfunny joke!  I try hard not to know what’s going on so I can listen to the glorious music.

** Is there frelling training for camerapersons filming/streaming opera?  You hire singers for their voices first and last and while the ‘stand on the “x”, wave your arms and sing’ style of non-acting has pretty much disappeared and you do really need someone who can not only put it over with his or her voice, but back up the voice with the rest of the body, posture, gestures—and more about that in a minute—but relentless close ups don’t do opera singers any favours.  Even the ones that will pass as normal on the street tend to look like crazed gorillas on stage singing:  those bonkers faces they make are about making the sound both thrilling and accurate.  They can’t help it!  And that’s aside from unfortunate accidents like enormous balls of snot falling out of noses and drooling saliva all down their fronts.^

^ I’m sure both the occasions I’m thinking of, famous tenors both, are available on YouTube but I’m not going to make it easy for you.  My sympathies are with the poor blokes.  I’ve never had anything quite that appalling happen to me live on stage, but then I’m not a famous opera singer contorting my face for the millions either.  No one but a few librarians are going to notice or care if I spill my tea or not.

I first wrote ‘bored’ librarians and then I thought, No!  Not bored!  Please not bored!  And not bored before I spilled my tea!

*** Also, producers with ideas should check that their frelling ideas match the subtitles.  It was easier for producers to go doolally when no one knew what was supposed to be happening.^

^ I know a few operas well enough to not need sub/surtitles, but only a few.  Carmen would probably be one of them, but we saw another perverse production, this time of Carmen, a few weeks ago, where there was so much stuff wrong I’m not going to start, but it memorably includes the battle between Don Jose and Escamillo which is supposed to be with knives, and the subtitles are up there talking about knives, with them shoving each other like boys in a playground.  This throws a paying-attention opera-goer right out of the story.

& I know there’s some debate about this.  But all that milk into gall stuff?^  It’s been hammered into generations of Shakespeare readers, who are a global population, that Lady Macbeth suffers from thwarted maternal urges which are probably why she’s gone regicidally round the twist.  Us women, we’re so frail, we have little tiny brains and great big hormones.

^ Which isn’t in the libretto, I don’t think, at least I can’t find it:  her aria about rousing him to do the deed—kill the king—is just about whether he’s ‘bold’ enough.  Thank you, Verdi/Piave.

&& And speaking of production values, I couldn’t believe it when Macduff’s army picked up a lot of long poles.  Nobody is going to mistake a bunch of people carrying poles for a forest on the move!  It looked like Monty Python!  All it needed was some galloping coconut shells!

&&& And the subtitles vs. what’s going on on stage?  The banquet scene when Banquo’s ghost appears, and all that sitting at table stuff?  There was no table and there were no chairs.  There’s this sort of cage thing . . . and a bunch of milling-around people.  Macbeth could be forgiven for being confused when his wife tells him to sit down.

% And further on Lady Macbeth, far from a strong woman, being essentially a nonperson:  this popped up at the top of the page when I was googling her.  It’s from Wiki, which I try to avoid using, but this is rather eye catching:  ‘In the First Folio, the only source for the play, she is never referred to as Lady Macbeth, but variously as “Macbeth’s wife”, “Macbeth’s lady“, or just “lady“.’

%% So, like, next time I write a post I’ll answer some questions . . .

%%% Or curl your hair, if your hair needs curling

$ And a great big yuck for the witches’ scarlet-orange headgear, that makes them all look like John Hurt in full make up for the Elephant Man.

$$ And will doubtless say many, many, many more