Robin McKinley's Blog, page 65

A frelling day

 

I am culpably absent-minded, especially considering that I know I’m absent-minded and SHOULD LEARN TO BEHAVE ACCORDINGLY.  For example.  I have this deeply unintelligent habit of not looking at my diary for the week because I never do anything* except sit around at home with the hellcritters.  Oh, and, yeah, there’s like . . . bell ringing**.  But I know when bell ringing is.  Mondays, some Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Thursdays, Fridays, usually not Saturdays unless there’s a wedding, and twice on Sundays.***  I don’t have to look it up.†

And Monday afternoon is my voice lesson so with ringing in the evening too nothing is ever happening on Mondays.  So I don’t have to bother looking in my diary.††

This means I frequently don’t look at the week ahead until . . . Tuesday.  I may, furthermore, not have my mind [sic] on what I’m looking at even when I do finally turn that page because I THINK I REMEMBER ANYTHING IMPORTANT BECAUSE SINCE I NEVER DO ANYTHING I HAVE PLENTY OF MEMORY SPACE TO REMEMBER STUFF IN.†††  This week, for example, I remembered that Fiona and I are playing hooky on Friday and that my second official zazen sit with Aloysius was Wednesday afternoon before the daily Lenten prayer service.‡

I did not remember that Peter and I were going to be thumped and squidged by Tabitha this afternoon.  Tabitha is in one direction and Aloysius is in the other.  Oops.

I didn’t waste any time engaging my brain.  I rang up Tabitha to reschedule.  She’s only one person, she’s not a clinic:  she can’t fill holes at the last minute.  Oops.  Frell.

But she said she could take us earlier.  Gleep.  Okay.

I am not at my most clear-headed and active after an hour on Tabitha’s treatment table.  We roared home—Wolfgang knows the way—and I made hellhound lunch in record time . . . and for a wonder they ate it without fuss.‡‡  Whereupon I leaped back into Wolfgang‡‡‡, who is learning the way to St Margaret’s, and roared off in the other direction.

I got there as Aloysius, on his ecologically holy bicycle, turned into the car park.  Yaay.  It was still frelling cold in the lady chapel.  And the swirls on the carpet are no less hypnotising, but maybe that’s a good thing.§  After an hour with Tabitha it’s hard even to sit up.

So I tore back out of St Margaret’s, leaped back into Wolfgang§§ and raced home again to get two frelling shifts of hellcritters hurtled before I went to the abbey tower practise.  Pant, gasp.

I was sitting KNITTING in a corner and wondering how bad an idea coming at all was, given the day I had already had, when Scary Man told me to come ring some Stedman Triples.  A touch? he said briskly.  Um . . . we could risk a touch I think, I said.  Nervously.

Fortunately before anything too horrific happened Alfred materialised out of blank space and stood by to be my minder.  Unfortunately I needed him.  But  . . it was actually not too bad.  I knew what I was trying to do, I just occasionally got a little overexcited and started pulling in too hard and going clang.  But.  Stedman Triples.  Yes.  I am going to learn this . . .

And then I made a PIG’S EAR of ringing the frelling treble to bob major, which is like running the marathon in two and a half hours and then breaking your ankle tripping over a roller skate.  ARRRRRGH.

So I’m tired.  I think I’ll go to bed.

* * *

* Stop that laughing

** MUST look at Kent some more tonight.  Niall and Colin are going to be expecting me to ring the wretched method tomorrow.  And, speaking of handbells, Gemma opened her big fat mouth at the AGM last night, asking—innocently—if anyone ever uses the glamorous set of handbells impaled on the abbey ringing chamber wall.  Everyone looked round hastily at everyone else:  not me boss.  Which probably leaves Gemma, me, Alfred and Leandra.  So we may be going to try to wedge in another hour of handbells before or after some tower practise or service.  Because we all have so much free time.  We all sit around at home with our hellcritters waiting for the phone to ring.^

^ I don’t even have that excuse.  The landline at the cottage only works when it feels like it and it doesn’t feel like it very often, and I don’t give anyone my mobile number.

*** I was having an unusually bad spell of Why Am I Bothering recently, because it’s clear I’m going to go to my GRAVE with some ringing master’s epithets reverberating in my ears, and I don’t mean the good kind of epithets, and I thought, imagine the amount of EXTRA TIME I would have if I stopped ringing.  Well, cut back seriously on ringing.  Like one practise and one service ring a week, like a normal ringer.^  Brrrrr.  The very idea gives me a palsy of withdrawal.

^ There are no normal ringers.  That’s one of ringing’s attractions.

† Mostly the thought goes like this:  I’m breathing.  I must be ringing tonight.  . . . I ought to IMPROVE for pity’s sake. I OUGHT to be ringing Turgid Taradiddle Doohickus Supreme by now.  All right, stop that.  I’ve already rejected the idea of pretending to be normal.

†† Note that this attitude has more than once got me into trouble.  Do I learn anything?  No, of course not.

††† I don’t have memory space for anything.  I do not have memory.  What did you say?  Who are you?

‡ I was perhaps extra thrilled at the possibility of not freezing to death because the temperature has rocketed up by fifteen or twenty degrees—from longjohns and woolly scarf weather to light cardi and only one pair of socks weather.^  Hellhounds, who rather like having to hurtle to stay warm, are all, Wha’?  Eh?  While I haul on the leads and shout COME ON YOU MISERABLE SLUGS.  IT’S SPRING.  SPRING IS GOOD.  I hope this is spring. . . .

^ But it’s supposed to RAIN.  NO.  NO RAIN.  NOT TILL THE WALL IS FINISHED.

‡‡ Although Chaos clearly felt he was being BETRAYED when the moment after I’d picked their bowls up I started putting my shoes back on to go AWAY again, leaving hellhounds BEHIND.

‡‡‡ Hi-oh Silver and awaaaaaaaaaay.

§ I said that I found usually that the first ten or fifteen minutes [of the standard twenty-five minute sit] my brain is tearing all over the landscape in all directions simultaneously . . . and then as it begins to SETTLE THE FRELL DOWN the last ten or fifteen minutes go really fast, but I assumed that was because it was still a new discipline for me, that it was just lack of practise.^  Aloysius looked a little ironical and replied, not necessarily.

^ On the vanishingly rare occasions when I do a second twenty-five-minute sit immediately—as for example last Saturday morning—the beginning settling-down process happens encouragingly quickly.  Instead however toward the end of the second sit the brain wakes up again and starts saying, No, no!  This is sheer self-indulgence!  We don’t have time for a whole second twenty-five minutes!  Stop it at once and go do something useful!

§§ Who whinnied.

 

The fabulous loyalty of dogs

 

 

So Darkness is scarfing down his food and positively begging for more . . . you could almost mistake him for a normal, food-obsessed dog . . . and what’s coming out the other end is, you know, um, appropriate.  YAAAAAAAY.  Peter is better.  My front door lock loves me again (at least today).  It was a BEAUTIFUL day today—you know, like spring.  Jolly jolly jolly.  And I’m so tired after all the drama I want to sleep for a week.*

Now as a housekeeper I am a very good writer of fantasy novels, but I do have a few limits, usually to do with germs.  I don’t leave washing up in the sink overnight.  I did last night.  There was washing up because I finally folded and started giving hellhounds a proper cooked supper, with, you know, chicken and chicken stock.**  The purpose of that final before-bed snack was supposed to be to top the frellers up or to give me another chance to get food into them at all when they’re in one of their moods.***  This is also the one meal I feed them the gold-standard kibble that makes me weep over my credit card every time I have to order more.  It shouldn’t need chicken too.  But even the gold standard isn’t doing much good if they aren’t eating it.  So . . . dispersal of more chicken.  At the moment and I am making no predictions, but that third meal, did I say AT THE MOMENT?, AT THE MOMENT is their favourite.  They’re all over me as soon as we get through the cottage door at night† and afterward there’s all this frelling washing up . . . which was what I was trying to AVOID by investing in gold-standard kibble.  It’s okay, I’m fine with smug hellhounds as long as they frelling EAT.

You know there’s this whole romantic fudge about the loyal dog—which you naively hope is the end result of putting your time in after signing on to the ‘a dog is the only love money can buy’ flapdoodle.††  I would agree that usually a well-treated dog behaves at least some of the time in the way 40,000 years of domestication by a master species that gets off on adulation would want.  They’re still live critters with crazy little ideas of their own.  Both Darkness and Chaos believe me to be the hellgoddess, dispenser of all goodness†††, mostly benevolent tyrant of all their days.  But Chaos in particular is UTTERLY MY DOG.  Although their favourite bed is in my office if I’m downstairs he won’t go upstairs.  Off lead he checks back with me three or four times to Darkness’ once.‡  He’ll do aaaaaaaaaanything for me . . . except eat reliably.  He’s a worse eater than Darkness.  What is the one thing that would most improve my life with hellhounds?  That they ate reliably. ‡‡

We would appear to be moving toward another of these poignant confluences of life as a dog owner.  What single thing would most improve my life as a hellterror owner?  That she crapped reliably.  I’m already grimly aware that she has Her Places and if she’s not near one, well, too bad, she’ll just wait till she is.  We’re going to Cornwall for the weekend?‡‡‡ Whatever.  Imagine a hellterror insouciantly whistling a little tune.

It gets worse.  The evidence is accruing that she’ll only crap for me.

This is not the kind of loyalty I had in mind.

* * *

* Tonight was the abbey tower AGM^.  I went^^—it’s my first year as a member, it would be Beyond Tacky not to go unless I was saving the universe from another part of the galaxy.  I took my KNITTING.  Another slightly^^^ erratic pullover back is about to join its friends.  This AGM was a much more dignified affair than the ones at New Arcadia, where we tended to sit around in the tower—possibly on the floor—with a plastic bin of biscuits or similar.  The abbey AGM was held in some random cleric’s drawing room, complete with decanters and oil portraits of high-coloured nineteenth-century ladies wearing forbidding expressions and lots of lace.  I nailed the rocking chair.  I was ready to enjoy anything, sitting in a rocking chair and knitting, even being referred to as Mme Guillotine.  Hey, I don’t speak a word of French and I doubt Mme Defarge was really into pink.

It was actually pretty interesting.  Everything at the abbey is complicated, and prone to five-hundred-year-old traditions that would cause the Anglican Church to rock in its moorings if they were changed.  And given the outcome of the recent vote on women bishops, the C of E can’t afford any rocking just now.

^ Annual General Meeting, which doesn’t seem to be an American usage.

^^ Which means I missed ANOTHER of the every-other-week extra learners’ practise at Fustian.  ARRRRGH.

^^^ Well I hope slightly

** The hellterror gets kibble and cheese.

*** The hellterror has only one mood about food.  I’M STAAAAAAARVING.

† Hellterror, who is given her two main meals after the hellhounds as befits not only her lowly station but the fact that she gets breakfast as well as a puppy kibble handful here and there throughout the day, receives her final snack first to shut her up.  She is nonetheless moaning in her crate, Me!  Me!  You forgot about me!  That wasn’t a snack, that was a crumb, a particle, a scintilla, a SPECK!

†† Somewhere a phantom Rowan is laughing.  And a lot of other paid-for critters are doing species-appropriate indignation.

††† And a fair amount of not so goodness.  YES.  IT’S BEEN OVER FOUR MONTHS.  SHE’S STAYING. SHUT UP AND GET USED TO IT.

‡ Since Chaos is by far the more lunatic, this is quite useful.

‡‡ This includes that reliable digestion follows.

‡‡‡  I wish.

Weekend

 

It was a fair old flaming rubbish tip of a weekend.  And it started off so well.  I made it to Aloysius’ early Saturday morning silent prayer meeting.  Did I tell you* that in response to my nagging about a silent prayer service at a more civilised hour than eight frelling a.m. on a Saturday** he’s begun, just for the duration of Lent, a Wednesday afternoon silent service before the daily Lenten (ordinary) prayer service  . . . which I think chiefly gets me off his back for three (?) more weeks but hey, whatever works.  I had told him about taking a blanket to sit in the monks’ chapel and he looked thoughtful and said that I’d probably want a blanket for St Margaret’s lady chapel.  So I went along this Wednesday with my becoming-well-travelled blanket and YAAAAAAARG &^%$£”#@???**{~] COLD!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!  St Margaret’s*** chapel makes the monks’ look tropical.†  St Margaret’s is relatively new build, but the electric fire on the wall in the chapel I swear is older than I am.  And I was sitting RIGHT NEXT TO IT on Wednesday afternoon and all that happened was that the right side of my face got rather warm.  Saturday morning at 8:30—and who is at their best at 8:30 on a Saturday morning—I had to sit against the wall so as not to block ingress (and heat) to other worshippers—all of whom, bar Aloysius and me, got to sit in CHAIRS††.  As it happens we were—ahem—thin on the ground on Saturday††† so during the five-minute break to thump some life back into frozen extremities I also shifted over to sit next to the heater again.  This meant that for the second twenty-five minutes of life-sapping cold I had a little hot space between my shoulder blades. . . .

But the rest of the weekend was a trifle dire.  Darkness started his double-ended geysering trick again on Friday . . . which I initially thought was a one-off but was nothing of the kind, and indeed has been much more severe than his having-bolted-a-sandwich-end-found-in-a-hedgerow-when-the-hellgoddess-wasn’t-looking usual and . . . I’m kind of worried.  This is not only hard on my nerves (and my washing machine) but on Darkness, whose gut is already not of the strongest and most resilient.  I will probably take him in for a chat with the vet, but I don’t want to put him on ConMed drugs unless I absolutely, absolutely see no alternative.  His ‘picture’ has changed and I’ve changed his homeopathic remedy accordingly, so it’s possible that next time we’ll be back to getting through it faster.  But . . . I’m worried.  He’s six and a half years old, which means he’s in his mid-forties in people time, and wear and tear starts catching up with you. . . .

I missed my Saturday evening service—my favourite church service of the week—with the monks, because I didn’t want to leave Darkness that long, and my concentration wouldn’t have been up to much anyway.

And then Peter went down with one of his streeeeeeeeeeeeaming colds, I will leave it to your vivid imaginations, but he does stream like no one else and his colds tend to roar up on him like a charging lion.‡  And while it does seem only to be a head cold, still, when you’re eighty-five, it’s all a little precarious.

Oh yes and then my front door lock at the cottage jammed and WOULDN’T LET ME IN AND MY HELLCRITTERS, one of them in a somewhat parlous state, WERE ALL CLAMOURING ON THE OTHER SIDE OF THE DOOR AND WONDERING WHY I WASN’T COMING IN TO TELL THEM HOW WONDERFUL THEY ARE.‡‡

I had very little sleep Saturday night between worrying and lurching awake every time I thought I heard a hellhound change position downstairs, and very nearly bottled out of ringing on Sunday.  I only dragged myself to New Arcadia because I knew Niall and Penelope were away and so they were very likely to be short-handed—and I was out of bed and dressed and everything, I was just brainless.  There were exactly six of us, and I was the weak link—and I tend to get buoyed up a level if the rest of the band is good.  So not only did we sound not bad but it was fun.  I’m really not used to Sunday mornings at New Arcadia being fun.

Darkness seemed to be stable enough that I went off, with only a few languishing backward looks, to the abbey for the afternoon service ring . . . and that was not bad either despite quite a plethora of rogues.  I appreciate that they want to shovel as many unsteady learners as possible into a touch to give as many (unsteady) learners as possible time on a rope but having the gorblimey treble going walkabout when I’m ringing inside on bob major, which I haven’t rung nearly enough to have any automatic pilot for and am still very dependent on the treble being in the RIGHT PLACE, was not friendly.  And there were three of us with erratic wanderlust in the Grandsire triples plus a rogue conductor and . . . nobody died.  I wasn’t brilliant, but I kept my line, even when some of our other variables were not keeping theirs.

It was a beautiful, very nearly spring day today . . . and Darkness has eaten both lunch and dinner with evidence of pleasure . . . and no unseemly results (I think).  Maybe the week is going to improve. . . .

* * *

* I looked back in the blog and I don’t think I did

** Not that a freelancer cares that it’s a Saturday.  But it’s the principle of the thing.  Also, eight o’clock . . . no way.  It’s almost cruel that they decided to move it to 8:30.  Because then I did have a chance.  Rats.

*** I seem to have named St Margaret’s of Scotland a little too well.

†Of course I’m not sitting on the frelling floor at the monks’, where there are definitely polar winds.  Yet.  I haven’t yet clawed my courage together to ask a monk if it would be acceptable for me to sit zazen—cross-legged on a cushion on the floor—so long as I pulled myself together and behaved once the service starts.  They know Aloysius—and I’d be very surprised if they didn’t know something of the Zen Christian subset in the Christian contemplative tradition—so this won’t be entirely bonkers-sounding.  I hope.  Except for the polar winds of course.  Maybe I’ll just not get around to asking till later in the season.  Although I kind of suspect that while St Margaret’s chapel may warm up by June, the monks’ old stone sanctuary with the vaulted roof is going to stay brumal.

†† I know.  I’ve just been saying I’m going to ask the monks if I can sit on their floor.  I’ve never been sane, rational or consistent, why should turning Christian make me morph into someone else entirely?  I will merely become a sort of heightened insane, irrational and inconsistent.  Or maybe God will improve my circulation.  He’s known to move in mysterious ways.

††† There’s a lot of flu going around.  That’s a lot.  What is it about March?  Doesn’t this happen every year?  It’s like all the bad evil germs and dormant viruses that have been lying around going la la la la all winter suddenly wake up and think, Hey!  Spring!  I was going to cause way more mayhem before spring!  —And explode into unseemly activity.

‡ I guessed wrong about the homeopathic remedy for him too.  The problem with Peter’s head colds is that they come on so fast you don’t have time to change your mind if the first thing didn’t work.  It’s not this simple, of course, but it is this frustrating.

‡‡ I got in eventually.  Atlas took the freller apart today and OILED THE CRAP OUT OF IT and at the moment it is working beautifully.

‡‡‡ Even if I did have to go to my voice lesson today without having practised properly first because Peter had A Guest and the cottage was full of Atlas.

KES, 68

SIXTY EIGHT

 

I sat there for a minute.  I didn’t have a minute.  Six o’clock was coming, and so was Jojo.  I looked out the window toward my neighbor who was never there.  Someone was keeping the grass cut.  I wondered if it was Gus.  I sighed.  I began the laborious process of unclenching my hands from the steering wheel.  I could almost hear the suction pop as each finger came loose. Then I flexed my hands, checking that all the fingers were still present, functioning and in their usual places.  Yup.  Seemed to be.  Although there were red marks where I’d been gripping the wheel.  I opened the van door and stepped down.

And fell into a deep narrow hole, wrenching my ankle, since I’d managed to park next to a rut.  At least my hand on the doorhandle had reverted to clenching, so I had a sore shoulder instead of a broken ankle.  My respect for Hayley’s ability to negotiate local geography in four-inch heels soared, at the same time feeling that such a keen grasp of spatial/objective relationships could be put to better use.  Inventing a toothpaste tube you could counter-squeeze superfluous toothpaste back into, perhaps.  I wondered if Mr Demerara’s contractual upkeep as landlord might stretch to filling in the ruts in the driveway.  Slowly I picked my way to and then up the path toward the front door.  I turned around, not monarch of all I surveyed.  There was a hedge in the way between the houses, but the far end of my never-there neighbor’s driveway was faultlessly smooth.  I climbed the stairs to the porch, limping slightly and rubbing my shoulder, listening for rustling noises from deinonychus.  I wondered if I could learn to differentiate between sleepy, satiated rustling noises and hungry, predatory rustling noises.

There was a new hole in the pocket-lining of my old leather jacket and underneath it, burrowing into the seam like a drill bit seeking a stud, was the ring of three enormous keys and a little one.  I pulled them out, listening to the sound of elderly satin tearing.  Front door, back door . . . I had no idea what the third big one or the little one was for.  I didn’t remember there was a little one, when Hayley had handed me the keys . . . steady, MacFarquhar.  Of course the key had been there.  It was not a Melmoth plant and it would not suck my blood while I slept.  And the deinonychus under the porch probably looked a lot like raccoons.  I knew about raccoons:  they used to play softball in the attic of my friend’s Adirondack cabin.  I hadn’t noticed the little key, or paid attention to what the third big one was for because I’m a space case.  Especially the last few months.  (What did Mr Wolverine want now?  I was supposed to be done with Mr Wolverine.  I wanted to be done with Mr Wolverine.  Like I was done with Gelasio.)  This morning there’d been a lot going on to distract me.  Dogs.  Muffins.  Hallucinations of guys in black.

I remembered that the biggest key was for the front door.  I separated it from its fellows and stared at it for a moment.  Even if I took it off the ring it wouldn’t fit in any mere jeans pocket.  If I put it on a chain and hung it around my neck I’d get friction burns.  How did one manage having a life with a house key one needed a pack animal to schlep around?  Maybe you weren’t supposed to have a life if you lived this far out in the sticks.  Maybe you were supposed to do that country thing I’d heard rumors about, and not lock your door.  I shuddered.  No.  Way too rural for me.  Where I came from locking your door came directly after breathing on the life-maintenance list, and well before brushing your teeth or remembering your mother’s birthday.

So.  Back to the key problem.  I looked at it, lying across my palm (and sticking out at either end.  I had to hold on to the rest of the ring with my other hand).  I didn’t really see teaching Sid to wear panniers.  I’d have to put the complete works of Anthony Trollope in the other basket to balance the load and then she’d get friction burns.  The key’s teeth were as long as a Ghastly’s and I didn’t know if it had had good bite-inhibition training when it was young.  Not that bite-inhibition training had had any discernible effect on Chan Two.

I’d worry about basic key transport later.  I’d worry about all of it later.  I could almost hear Jojo’s iPod blasting out classic AC/DC from here.  On headphones.  I hoped the bus was empty enough that no one had to sit next to him.  I put my huge old-fashioned key in the huge old-fashioned lock.  Thunk.  I turned it.  CLUNK.  I paused again.  I reminded myself about six o’clock.  I opened the door.

Darkness.

Peter

 

Since Peter never writes me GUEST POSTS any more I decided to steal a link to some of the new things happening over on his shiny new website.

http://peterdickinson.com/old-stuff-revisted/

” . . . I opened a file titled “Preface” and found something I’d written when it was decided that some edition of the first volume of our Elemental Spirits series, Water, ought to have a preface. I don’t remember the ins and outs of it, nor why it isn’t in the edition on my bookshelf,* but we seem to have cannibalised our efforts and come up with a composite. You will find the remains of mine,  In the Mermaid Tavern: The Sea Witch, in the Short Stories section. . .”

There now.  More free fiction.  And KES tomorrow night.

* * *

* Because it took 1,000,000 years for your wife to write two short stories for FIRE and Putnams decided to reissue WATER in a matching edition^ and to make it a little more interesting they asked us to write a little ‘new material’.  They didn’t want a whole new story or stories–which, with my track record, is just as well^^–just a sort of teasery type of thing.  Like a preface.  Well, we couldn’t write a preface–the nearest we’ve ever been able to come to collaborating is this alternating short stories business^^^–so we did a very condensed sort of alternating-stories thing.  I don’t remember any more and I can’t find our copies of the second edition of WATER which are SOMEWHERE in Third House’s attic, but presumably THE SEA WITCH didn’t make the final cut, probably because I was having trouble not writing more novels and Peter had written about twelve short stories in frustration.  Maybe he’ll find a few more in some other file.

^ The original hardback illustration had been done by Trina Schart Hyman.  Siiiiiigh.  She’d really liked the idea of the ELEMENTALS series, and had done roughs for all four.  But the other three were too rough to use and she isn’t around any more to finish them.  Sometimes my being hopeless hurts more than other times.

^^ With SUNSHINE, DRAGONHAVEN, CHALICE and THE FRELLING PEGASUS TRILOGY, all of which began life as ELEMENTALS short stories, we could have had FLOWERHAIR AND THE WATER GOBLIN+ and HETTHAR, GELJDRETH AND THE EYE OF NEWT and . . . no, no, no, let’s not go there.

+ May I just say that neither Kes nor I would put up with Dvorak’s version of the story

^^^ And an unfinished novel written in emails between an English boy and an American girl.  Guess who let the side down there too.  SIIIIIIIGH.

Wall. Week one.

 

It lives.  I hope.

It begins.

The low curved brick wall you can see isn’t the new wall, it’s the remains of the flowerbed Theodora had against the back wall of her garden.  The beginning of The Wall is the lower brick work this side of it.

Progress. Amazing.

.

Early signs that my greenhouse will have a back wall again.  Soon.

USUALLY there’s about a foot and a half of sand in the gap between the little low front wall and the back wall of the greenhouse.  This is the second time poor Atlas has had to dig it all out.  My predecessor put in the greenhouse, and this was a plunge bed–where you put plants in pots up to their brims (hence plunge) to give them more insulation than just their pots provide.  But she didn’t line it, and the part of the wall that is the back wall of Theodora’s summerhouse started coming through black mould on her side from damp sand on my side.  Charming.  So Atlas dug it all out, lined the trench, and put it all back again.  And the lining did stop the plunge-bed sand from being part of the merry frolic in poor Theodora’s garden when the wall exploded.

Ooh. I don’t know how well this comes through in photos but watching the building process is very cool. Aside from the extreme thrill of the prospect of having a WALL again.

 

 

A thriving young wall.

 

 

Sand. Wow. Sand. I didn’t know cement took so much SAND. (That red and white thing through the shrubbery is his cement mixer.)

The tiny sliver of salmon pink in the upper left hand corner peering over Theodora’s summerhouse is my cottage.  I BOUGHT IT THAT COLOUR.  I HAVE NOTHING TO DO WITH IT BEING PINK.*

Another close up of the action. I love the in medias res tools.

 

I think I’ll pass on any pancakes made out of this batter.

 

Greenhouse wall! Yaaaaay!

 

It’s growing! It’s GROWING!

And just out of the frame in the lower left-hand corner I have double hellebores and snowdrops flowering like mad.  I’ll try and get some photos of them too.

And now, if you’ll excuse me, I am going to bed early.  In theory I’m getting up at unearthly o’clock tomorrow morning to make another run at Aloysius’ once a month EARLY silent prayer service.  Aren’t there any Cults of Night I could join?

* * *

* Of course I didn’t immediately have it repainted either.  Eight years later however it needs repainting.  Somehow I think it’ll probably stay pink, although I might make the depth of colour a little more intense. . . . ^

^ Also:  token footnote.  So no one complains about the lack of footnotes.

 

Chilly Singing

 

I am so cold.  I am SO TIRED of being so cold.  I’m at the mews, positively bent over an electric fire—which I have propped up on a stack of knitting books to get the heat source nearer—and I have been for the last hour . . . and I’m still cold.  I’m still bringing my geraniums indoors every night, so it’s cold anyway, but Muddles practise for the next concert started tonight* and . . . what is it about little old country churches?  And are little old country churches as gelid on the continent as they are here?  Or in the Yukon?  Or Siberia?  Some of us were huddling around one of the so-called radiators during the break, nursing our cups of hot tea and pretending the radiator was actually radiating anything, like heat, and musing about our options.  How much higher a subscription rate would our members bear for the sake of better practise space?**  We could barely get the words through our chattering teeth.  One woman suggested we look forward to summer.  Then it turns clammy, I said.  Walk into St Frideswide on a hot summer day and it’s like being slapped in the face with a wet fish.***  The woman I walked out with later said that her throat is usually sore by the end of practise, and that she needed to sing at home more.  That’s not practise, I said, that’s the cold.  I was feeling bitter and freaked out however after Galen, as he declared practise over for the evening, said that he felt that the Gloria was too easy and we needed an extra challenge between now and the end of May.  WHAT?  I went up to him on the way out and said that this might come as a shock to him but not all of us had ever sung Vivaldi’s famous Gloria before, and he looked at me as if I’d just offered him a tuba when he’d asked for a soprano, pulled himself together with an obvious effort and said airily, oh yes, I know.

On the other hand the Wall Man† has showed up several days in a row.  He even seems to be building a wall.  But I was out with Pav while he was wielding his trowel—he spends as much time hauling bags of sand and making his cement-mixer go ta-pocketa-pocketa as he does slapping bricks together—and we bonded over being dog owners and how the rest of the non-crittered world thinks we’re barmy.  So I’ve decided he was clearly the right choice.  So long as the wall doesn’t fall down.  Again.

* * *

* We are singing the Vivaldi Gloria, which is, of course, a transcendently gorgeous—one might almost say glorious—piece of music, I love it to pieces, and I’m thrilled to have the excuse to be learning it.  But . . . another local choir, with far greater pretensions to fabulousness than we have, as well as a lot more local profile, are also doing it this spring.  I even pointed this out and the response was a casual, yeah, rotten luck, isn’t it?  —Um.  Do we have a death wish or something?  The main comment about the latest concert I wasn’t in^ was that it was poorly attended.  Given our expectations about audience numbers this is pretty dire.  Were there more choir members than audience?  Did the audience consist of the caretaker and the caretaker’s dog?  And now we’re going to put on something that a better local choir did only a few weeks before us, and will have done so so inspirationally rivetingly that everyone in the audience went home and pulled out their Vivaldi Gloria CD and has been playing it nonstop ever since, and will have no desire to hear a less good small local extremely amateur choir butch—I mean, perform it somewhat inadequately, especially in comparison to recent relistening of John Eliot Gardiner and Neville Marriner and Riccardo Muti and their choirs—?  Reality check.

I think we need a new approach to marketing and public relations.  I wonder if we’ve tried kidnapping?  Or a programme of Marty Robbins’ Greatest Hits?

^  I didn’t go to the opera either.  I was at home with frelling SHADOWS.  How many ways can you lose?

Jmeadows

Proofreading and errors –

Yes. *weeps* Yes.

I have a feeling [publisher] is trying to get everyone there moved over to electronic copyedits. Before, I’d been doing what you’ve been forced to move to — copyedits done in track changes, then printed out, which meant some of the changes were super confusing and hard to see. I mean, I think I’d still go over the [copyedited manuscript] three or four times, because I’m like that, but the invisible changes made it really important. And now I’ve been hearing others have been getting their copyedits through the emails. . . . Do not want. I will make sadfaces to get my paper with their invisible marks, if I must.

You comfort me.  I was expecting your generation of writers—do you compose straight onto a computer?  Do you ever, or have you ever, started with, you know, a piece of paper and a pen or pencil?—to have the electronic/virtual/no-hard-copy editing options totally sussed, and to look at people like me+ pityingly and a little impatiently.  I don’t even understand what track changes are.  Except that they are a ratbag.  And if it’s general that they’re confusing and hard to see, if it’s not just me and some random gremlin in my editor’s assistant’s printer, why don’t we go back to yellow stickies and red pencils and automatic hard copy?++

+ Who still have my beloved IBM Selectric I typewriter in the attic, even though I haven’t been able to get parts for her in about eighteen years.

++ You know it’s almost impossible to get red pencils any more?  You have to find an art department that sells coloured pencils individually, and raid the red.

** One of them suggested we do it by voluntary donation.  Um.  I’m not willing to pay more while some other joker who doesn’t mind the chilblains chooses not to . . . and still gets the better space on my money.  Let’s hope this isn’t the draft legislation that is put to the vote.

*** I used to ring their bells.  You could get heatstroke in the bell chamber, no problem.  Of course this does require a summer that includes sunlight and warmth, neither of which were in evidence last year.

† Who is clearly made of strong, cold-resistant stuff

Book rec: TANGLEWRECK by Jeanette Winterson

I had no intention of reading this book because it was going to be pretentious, patronising drivel by someone much admired in the field of lit’rature, who would make it clear in every paragraph that she was slumming by writing a kids’ fantasy.

I loved it.

I had been, with most of the rest of the reading world, gobsmacked by Winterson’s first novel, ORANGES ARE NOT THE ONLY FRUIT.  You’ve read it, right?  It was also made into a very effective (and affecting) TV miniseries*.  And while it is about an adopted girl who may be rather like Winterson herself growing up gay in an English Bible belt town with a ferocious mother, I entirely agree with Winterson’s comment about this, ‘I’ve never understood why straight fiction is supposed to be for everyone, but anything with a gay character or that includes gay experience is only for queers.’**  ORANGES is just a fabulous novel about growing up not belonging to your family or your society or your world.

I’ve read some of Winterson’s other books but I’m about a hundred years out of date in my liking for literature.  As a modern reader I tend toward the genre end.  But Winterson is a witty and powerful writer so I’ve kind of kept an eye on her.  There was a fairly substantial hoohah when TANGLEWRECK came out, and I thought, nah, it’ll just make me crazy.  But I kept frelling tripping over references to it.  Too many of the writers and critics I like liked it—in the edition I ended up with there’s a quote on the front from Jacqueline Wilson***—and I could feel myself becoming ensnared, rather like the heroine and her friend Gabriel in the evil machinations of Abel Darkwater and Regalia Mason.

And then on one of Fiona’s and my yarn expeditions we spent some time at an old-books store.  I’m sure I mentioned it at the time.  Well, one of the books I bought was . . . TANGLEWRECK.  I didn’t mean to!  But it was sitting face out on its shelf, all shiny and new, and obviously having belonged (briefly) to someone who didn’t appreciate it!  It was waiting for me! †

Here.  Read Chapter One, The Time Tornado, and see if you don’t immediately want to read the rest of it:††  http://www.amazon.co.uk/Tanglewreck-Jeanette-Winterson/dp/0747580758/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1362011579&sr=1-1#_

And there’s a scene near the end that I wish I had written.  This happens a lot less often than you might think.  There are lots of Great Books I wish in a sort of admiring, mostly intellectual way, that I’d written.  There are not that many books that get me close in, through the secret back entrance, grab me by the heart and squeeze.  This scene is one of those.  But Winterson thought of it first.  Ah well.

* * *

* Wiki says Winterson herself did the adaptation.  It was also extremely well cast.

** I am so grateful Wiki happens to cite that quote.  I was wondering how the doolally I was going to persuade Google to find it for me.

*** ‘A fantastic book, a big wonderful story.  It’s got everything’

† It was also rather less than half price.  Never underestimate the draw of a bargain.

†† Here also is a very good review, I mean not merely positive but persuasive, although in case anyone else has the same reaction I will add for your reassurance that I thought the rabbit named Bigamy was a sure sign of the tweeness I feared http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2006/jul/02/booksforchildrenandteenagers.jeanettewinterson

Here also is a review of the more-or-less sequel which I clearly have to read.  I haven’t done so yet because the Creature Sawn in Two will give me nightmares.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/jan/09/jeanette-winterson-childrens-book-review

 

I lead such an exciting life

 

I’m sitting here in a skirt.*  Yes!  A skirt!  A real live skirt!  And it’s not my birthday or Peter’s birthday or even a hellcritter’s birthday!  We just randomly went out to dinner tonight!!!!  It’s so exciting! **

Well, not quite randomly.  It’s a 26th.  I’ve told you that if we feel the need of a celebration creeping over us we’ll try to fend it off till the next 26th or 3rd, those being our two official monthly opportunities for festivities.***

So we were feeling festive.  So we went to The Bard and Orpharion and ate duck leg confit and drank champagne (me) and Chilean merlot (Peter).   And we took a pack of cards with us and dealt bridge hands and then Peter got all interested about how we would play them.  Eeep.  Did I tell you I did, in fact, survive my second bridge lesson last weekend?  I mean with two other people so we were, like, pretending that I could play bridge?  And I keep saying that I have the wrong shape of brain for bell ringing.  Well, I do.  But at least bell ringing doesn’t make you guess what the other ringers are going to do next and the winning and losing aspect is a little more tactfully obscured.  Arrrgh.

* * *

* Furthermore I’m sitting here writing an evening blog post at the cottage.  With my feet propped up on the front of the Aga and an acute and sublime awareness that I’ve already done the coming-home thing with three hellcritters and a ridiculous amount of kit^ and don’t have to do it again tonight.

^ A gigantic knapsack plus a bulgy canvas carryall briefcase thing.

** You mean . . . some people just go out to dinner?  I’ve been living in a small town in Hampshire with too many hellcritters for too long and I’m losing track of modern cultural mores.^

^ And we won’t even discuss modern technological mores.  My editor’s poor assistant wasted kind of a lot of perfectly good time and air space explaining some of SHADOWS’ copyeditor’s more arcane (and sometimes invisible) marks to me.  Like the one that made it look like she’d spelled Haydée Haydé.  (Maggie has read THE COUNT OF MONTE CRISTO.)  ARRRRRRRRGH.  Worrying about this sort of thing keeps authors awake at night.  It’s your name on the book jacket.  To publishing hopefuls still working toward their first sale of course this sounds like the MOST THRILLING THING EVER.+  To those of us it has happened to, while it’s still totally worthwhile and I don’t want any other job++, there is indubitably a mixed-blessing aspect.  Like when people get really angry with you because pages 35-60 in their copy are repeated and 61-86 are missing and when you tell them that you’re sorry but it’s nothing to do with you, to take it up with your publisher, they think you’re blowing them off and become abusive.  Or they want to know why you haven’t made movies of your books, don’t you know that’s where the money is?  Um.  Well, that’s where the money is for the few, not for the many, and very, very, very, very, VERY rarely for any writer involved . . . not to mention that this isn’t up to me either.  But the proofreading mistakes?  Totally yours.  The thing is, they’re at least half right about that.  Your publisher hires eagle-eyed professional proofreaders, but you see the final pages too.  Occasionally some hideously embarrassing botch creeps through the gauntlet of all those searchlight eyes and appears in all its malign glory in the finished book+++.  But usually it’s something that’s gone wrong in the process somewhere, like a full stop dropping out or quotation marks curling in the wrong direction or a half sentence disappearing at the bottom of a page.  Even the missing full stop will haunt your dreams, once you’ve noticed it, or had it pointed out to you, AND YOU SHOULD HAVE CAUGHT IT IN PROOFREADING.  BUT YOU DIDN’T BECAUSE YOU ARE A MORON.#  AND IT IS ALL YOUR FAULT.  It would have been a really good book if it weren’t for that missing full stop.  As some reader, somewhere, will tell you.

I am not looking forward to proofreading SHADOWS.  I will miss the quotation marks curling in the wrong direction and the use of ‘their’ when it should have been ‘there’.  Which will be lacerating enough.  But what will be worse is discovering THAT ENORMOUS FRELLING PLOT HOLE that it’s now way way way too late to do anything about.##

+ Even more thrilling than randomly going out to dinner.

++ Not least because I’m pretty sure I’m unemployable by any normal standard

+++ Regular readers of author blogs will know that there is a LAW OF THE UNVERSE that says that any author opening any first copy of any new book—I mean that author’s new book—must open it on a page with a proofreading error on it.  I get around this by not reading my stuff once it’s published.  I can’t read it anyway.  It’s a sort of combination effect, like psychic eczema, migraine, and being trapped in a stuck lift/elevator with a bore.  A pedantic bore.  A smelly pedantic bore.  And the smelly pedantic bore has a large smelly dog who doesn’t like me.

# You are a moron who, furthermore, has looked at these insanely annoying words in this beyond-insanely annoying order WAY too many times AND CAN’T LOOK AT THEM ANY MORE.

##  You can make limited editorial changes at the proofreading stage, with an emphasis on the limited.  If you go over a certain short sharp maximum your publisher will charge you for it.  If you want to make real structural changes . . . I think they gag you and lock you in a closet till the book is safely out.  I don’t know.  I don’t want to know.

*** For new readers or old readers who have better things to remember:  The Beginning was when I met this fellow Peter Dickinson, whom I knew slightly from book conventions and things, at the Bangor, Maine airport, to bring him back to Blue Hill for a weekend’s exposure to life in a small New England town.  This was on 26 July, twenty-one and a half years ago.  We got married the following 3rd of January.  I’m not young and Peter is old, and when we decided to do this thing, Peter said that there weren’t enough years left for a sufficiency of anniversaries so we needed to celebrate some monthlies as well.  So we do.

Of Daydreams and Harps, part 3: Guest post by Bratsche

 

I had one early adventure with my harp. A week after we got it, I was working outside when my husband came out to tell me that my harp sounds very resonant when a string breaks. Bother! I called Dusty Strings and they promptly popped a new string in the mail. When I bought the harp, they provided care and maintenance instructions, which included detailed directions on how to change strings. I have changed lots of strings on violas and violins over the years, so I knew I could change a harp string; but there was still an element of “let’s be very careful so I don’t mess anything up” about changing my first harp string. It all went well, and nothing else has broken since then.

I am finding it grand fun to have a harp in the house. It has been amusing to look over my own shoulder (so to speak) as I am learning to play the harp. I have been a teacher for long enough that I can see my progress happening even while I am in the middle of it. Things go even better when I remember to follow my own advice (go slowly, count out loud, practice the two hands separately, etc). The first December I had my harp, I discovered that if I concentrated REALLY hard I could actually play the melody of a Christmas carol I know well while singing a harmony part.* I wouldn’t do it in public any time soon, but it is a lot of fun to be able to play a duet with myself!

One of the things I wondered about when I was in the process of getting a harp was what it would be like to have two instruments I really like in the house. Frankly, I wondered if I would slight my viola in favor of my harp. It turns out that I enjoy my viola even more now than I did before. After playing my harp, I enjoy the ease with which I can play my viola. I like the pieces I’m playing on my harp, but being able to tackle “meatier” pieces on my viola is good too. On the other hand, my harp allows me to noodle around with different chords or large intervals that are harder to do on viola. I’ve written a few twiddles** on my viola over the years, and it’s fun to have another instrument with which to make up music.

There have also been a few unexpected pleasures about having a harp in the house. Its attractive shape adds grace to any room. In addition, my daughters enjoy playing on it from time to time. Most of the time, I enjoy hearing them and knowing they’re getting the fun of “fiddling” around on the harp. Every once in a while though, I’m not aware they’re going to play, and I get the added pleasure of hearing lovely harp sound*** in the house and then realizing “Hey, that is my harp, not a recording!” The final unexpected pleasure has been when I’m playing viola in orchestra (for work) and hear a harp behind me. The first time that happened, I was surprised by how strong my “I have a harp too!” reaction was; and that extra little glow of satisfaction still happens now, even after a couple of years.

My lovely harp

If anyone is ever considering getting a harp, I would highly recommend Dusty Strings.^ Everyone there with whom I dealt throughout this process was very friendly, helpful, and enthusiastic. If you’re in the Seattle area and want to plink on a harp, hammered dulcimer, banjo, ukulele or any of their other instruments, stop by. You will be welcomed!

A final thank you is due to Robin and many people on her forums. Your enthusiasms for various hobbies were an additional encouragement when I was starting to try my daydream on for size.^^

- – - – - – - – - – -

* I’m an alto but have never worked hard enough at harmonizing by ear to be comfortable doing so; so it’s nice to practice singing the alto part (from the music) while playing the melody on the harp, even though it takes a lot more concentration than when I sing the melody and play the harmony.

** I hesitate to call them pieces, since they’re short (2 or 3 lines of music); but I bet that if they were someone else’s creations I would “of course” consider them “real” music.

*** A harp sounds lovely no matter what is being played, so it sounds good even if they’re just plucking random notes.

^ I would also highly recommend two of their harp accessories. The first is the custom tuning wrench. Having now used both the “regular” t-wrench and the custom one, I definitely like how the custom one feels in my hand and its ease of use. The second is their harp stool. I was already going to be spending so much money to get my harp that I was hesitant to add to the total by getting the stool. However, the people I talked to at the shop swore by it, and I decided to go for it. I have loved it ever since! It gets taken from room to room in my house on a daily basis and is my harp stool, sewing stool, computer chair, kitchen table chair, etc.

^^ Although I still have NO intention of ever re-learning to knit. ::ducking the ravening knitting hordes::