Robin McKinley's Blog, page 7

Interim Post

 

I very often have a hellbeast at my feet here at my computer.  This sounds like a perfectly normal situation for a person who works from home and has hellbeasts of one sort or another,* but as I have already mentioned a few dozen times in the last fortnight this is not merely a small house it’s a very small crowded kitchen, and my only remotely sensible stretch of counter bears a laptop computer and a very tall, weavy pile of books, magazines, newspapers and print-outs of Story in Progress.  This leaves the sink and its drainboard and the Aga, and the corner between the two which is jammed with decorative tins containing kibble and jugs of chopsticks and various utensils.  Add a hellbeast on this little square-cornered ‘u’ of floor and AAAAAAAUGH.  Tonight it’s been Chaos who takes up an EXTRAORDINARY amount of space, starting with the fact that he drags all the bedding from the corner between my stool and the Aga, where, when a person is lying there, he/she is only blocking the cupboard that contains all the non-refrigerated food items** including the several gallons of organic extra-virgin olive oil which I get through every few weeks and am therefore constantly referring to***, to the CENTRE of the ‘u’ . . . and then stretches his unnecessarily long limbs in all directions.  Since I can’t do the washing up because I can’t get to the sink I might as well write a blog entry.

. . . But, oops.  I was going to write a first ‘ask me a question’ answer round up tonight and seem to have been . . . distracted.  Some things don’t change.  So let me crank up the suspense a little.  Tomorrow . . . or maybe the next day . . . or maybe the day after that . . . I will answer THE FOUR MOST ASKED QUESTIONS.  Don’t tell me you can’t guess what they are.

* * *

* I passed on seeing the Met’s new Cosi fan tutte^ because I hate the blasted opera.  For all of my worship of Mozart’s music, with the exception of Marriage of Figaro I dislike almost all the characters in all the operas^^, and prefer to cherish my ignorance of the language so I can listen to the ravishing music on CD untroubled by knowing what’s going on.^^^  And Cosi is the worst.  It’s disgusting.  And I was saying the men were every bit as bad as the women^^^^ long before it was fashionable to say that.  But I digress.  I listened to it on Radio 3 however, here in my kitchen at my computer with hellbeasts at foot, and was suddenly sorry I hadn’t paid real money to go see it, when I found out it was laid in Coney Island in the ‘60s with all the carny acts live on stage including a BOA CONSTRICTOR.  The snake charmer was interviewed during the interval and said, go on, you can pet her, she’s very friendly.  I would totally pet her, but someone tell me how you know if a boa constrictor is friendly or just still full of rodent/small elephant?  Or in shock from stage lights and loud noise?

^ In the cinema, I hasten to add

^^ I usually loathe the plots as well

^^^ I didn’t like AMADEUS much either because Mozart is such a jerk.+  I had some sympathy for Salieri even if he took it maybe a little too far.  Except, of course, he didn’t, and at least some of his music is rather good.++

+ But, you know, considering the libretti he chose to set . . . maybe I’d better take him off my ‘who I’d invite to dinner’ list.  The problem is that almost everybody who’d be on it I wouldn’t get along with#:  Tolkien, for example.    Hands down my single most important literary influence.  Of course I want to meet him.  Shudder.  Pushy American woman with opinions, including that there aren’t enough women in LOTR?  I don’t think so.  My career is arguably one long effort to rewrite that bit of history.  But as I keep saying I grew up in the frelling Dark Ages.  I’m eternally grateful to Tolkien.  I have to be.

# One or two I’d enjoy the company of.  Peter Dickinson would be on that dinner party list.  Siiiiiiigh. . . .

+ Speaking of taking historical figures in vain to make a more saleable story, is anyone following Olivia de Havilland trying to sue Hollywood for this series about her and her sister’s feud?  She’s lost the first round, according to Google, but can appeal.  I admit I don’t know enough about it but all my instincts are on de Havilland’s side.  I’m not hugely impressed by the industry’s argument that the people need bread, circuses, and Christians being eaten by lions. I don’t even like it when they mess dead people around.

^^^^ The title translates, roughly, as ‘All Women Are Evil Cows’.

** Some bozo on Twitter is starting a series of ‘writer’s refrigerators’.  ::falls down laughing:: You open my refrigerator at your peril:  you will be immediately assaulted by a picked regiment of kohlrabi, supported by bristling broccoli, speared asparagus and fat carrot clubs.  You may also drown in vats of home-made stock.  It’s scary in there.

*** You know the more or less current theory about Good Fats?  I’m not walking proof, but I’m certainly walking evidence, that you can glug down olive oil like you glug down pots of tea^, and yet maintain your broomstick-like figure without a moment’s consternation.^^  All calories are not equal.  Just like those goofball extreme diet people on line keep telling you.

^ Olive oil is also a crucial part of what passes for my cough cough skin beautifying treatment cough cough.  I use coconut oil or shea butter, both of which are solid at room temperature and are in fact like granite in the winter.  But they melt really easily.  I put them on a cake rack over the Aga till they go liquid, stir in a little olive oil, take the resulting so-good-for-you-it-hurts goo off the Aga and let it cool, and hey presto.  Skin cream.  If you want to get carried away you can add a few drops of rose oil, but then I start feeling like one of those And Live Green! goofball extreme-diet people on line, so I don’t.

^^ Although I suppose all that olive oil might be contributing to the mattress-factory-explosion hair.  I don’t care.  I like having hair, which, as I said recently, has been an issue twice in the last decade.  Although the curly thing . . . Merrilee has been trying to explain to me that you don’t brush it madly like normal hair, because that just makes it frizz.  Oh really.  I think maybe I already knew that.  But she uses products, and I’m not going to use products because there’s sure to be something in them I’m allergic to.  And I don’t think applied olive oil is the answer here.  But the other morning, attempting to not-brush brush I discovered a frelling dreadlock starting.  No.  Arrrgh.

Easter Eve

[WARNING AND APOLOGIES:  excessive wordage.  I can’t shut up, and when I’m also quoting other people at any kind of length, um, well]

He is risen, because it’s after sunset Saturday night.  Yaaay.  Also, allelulia.

And I made myself some glorious (if I do say so myself) asparagus and duck stock* soup to come home to.

Next, an aside and, I hope, a clarification.  First:  Blogdad found the WordPress dashboard colours for me.  They were hiding and have I mentioned in the last five minutes how untechie I am?  So I hereby proclaim this to be the new text colour for reader comments.  I know, I know, I should just put quotes around them but . . . they look all funny.  It makes my blog look like not my blog.  Quotes are fine in fiction** and, er, nonfiction . . . but a blog isn’t really either of those things???  It’s something else.  And it’s personal.  And I don’t want quotes in my blog as a regular thing.  So we’re going to have a designated reader-comment colour and I will try to remember, when I start quoting reader comments, to identify the first one in a post, to remind everyone, and clue up any new readers.

So, here begins a reader comment from a few days ago:

Why wouldn’t bad words be allowed? It’s your blog. You set the rules. If you want to swear your head off, that’s up to you. If you don’t want us to swear our heads off, that’s okay, too. It’s your living room. . . .

Oh dear.  I think you’re reacting to (bad words, don’t know if they’re allowed on here) which was a pre-colour reader comment a couple of posts ago.  Evidently insufficiently set off as such.  But I answered:  I’ve decided not to employ random swearing, because there are still a lot of people this distresses, and I don’t want to cause inadvertent/unintended distress.  And so I might as well add here that I would like my commenters to follow this guideline as well—but I reserve all our rights to blow our rude-word tops when circumstances demand.  I don’t have much use for the theory that no decent member of society ever uses bad language.  Maybe ‘decency’ needs redefining.

[The same reader continues:]  Great-Aunt Gladys has been *thinking* those words for decades; she didn’t reach her age without managing her feelings. Precocious ten year olds these days know the words, know the context, and can probably talk intelligently about the etymology. . . .

Knowing the words, thinking the words, using the words and using the words in public are four different things.  Listening/reading someone else using them is a whole further range, from the cranky old lady who lives on that cul de sac with all the potholes*** to the 2017 winner of the Pulitzer Prize.&  And I know some of the precocious ten-year-olds you’re talking about;  they write to me.  Personally I think some of them are finding being that precocious that young a little hard—perhaps most of them do not, but most of them don’t write to me.  And I grew up in the pre-internet age where privacy and boundary-setting were dazzlingly different than they are now—for both good and ill, sometimes very very ill or crusades like #metoo and EverydaySexism and many, many others wouldn’t be necessary now—and I can’t judge.  But I think childhood is hard full stop, and if there’s any kid out there attempting to have a more or less old-fashioned childhood, who reads BEAUTY or SPINDLE’S END or most of the other McKinleys, and wants to know something about the author—and isn’t so old fashioned that they can’t get on line—I don’t want them feeling beat up by this blog.

And on a topic closely connected in my mind, when people ask me, I don’t recommend kids before their midteens reading DEERSKIN or SUNSHINE, especially DEERSKIN. . . . But I wouldn’t forbid it either.  Because I believe they’re both worthwhile books and I can’t know other people’s lives.

Good Friday? Corruption of God’s Friday. Like holy day became holiday.

Well—it depends on whom you read.

http://www.slate.com/blogs/browbeat/2014/04/18/why_is_good_friday_called_good_friday_the_etymology_and_origins_of_the_holiday.html [WARNING:  this article is headed with what I, as a twitchy, depressive Christian, feels is an unnecessary photo of an actor playing Jesus, covered in graphic blood and displaying look-at-me-I’m-ACTING! agony, which may be unfair of me, but I don’t find these re-enactments enhance my Easter experience]

And similar, more briefly, here:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/blogs-magazine-monitor-27067136

I was raised in the ‘Good Friday’ tradition, where it’s ‘good’ because Jesus’ death saved us all from sin.  But the tradition I was raised in also drove me away from Christianity for half a century.  I rather like ‘Sorrowful Friday’.  And the end of the universe monks go for ‘Holy and Great Friday’ so I should probably call it that.  But Black Friday is short and to the point.

(We need an ability to “like”, “ 1”, “applaud”, or whatever on comments. Naturally all of the blog readers are eloquent and full of fascinating witticisms.)

I TOTALLY agree.  I will take it up with Blogdad.&&

WOZZECK?!?!?!?!

Well, I said—I wanted something light and cheerful.  The Mikado.  The Merry Widow.  Wozzeck.  I was perhaps not in the liveliest frame of mind last night. . . . Note for people who are not opera junkies:  Wozzeck is one of the most, and in some people’s minds, the most depressing opera ever written.  It’s not that it’s about murder and death—opera is WEDGED FULL TO BURSTING with stories of murder and death—but that it’s a grind-you-down, ordinary-person-driven-past-bearing-by-pressures-beyond-his-control story of murder and death.  Yes, Wozzeck’s mistress is having it on with the drum-major and he kills her for it, and then drowns sort of accidentally.  But Wozzeck, just a bloke who happens to be a soldier, has already lost agency as a human being by the way the military treats him—set up vividly in the very first scene—plus he is being used as a guinea pig by a psychopathic doctor because he needs the tiny extra bit of cash the doctor gives him—he’s got a kid with the unfaithful mistress to support.  The mistress, just by the way, to crank the general wretchedness a turn or two extra, reads the Bible and feels horribly guilty about the drum-major.  I don’t think we know that much of her back story, but women almost by definition rarely have any real agency in opera (Lucia di Lammermoor, GAAAAAH, or that chump Desdemona, or Violetta in La Trav, another woman driven out of society and then dying as the price for taking the only option available to her, becoming a whore, I mean high-price courtesan), and if I want to think that Berg had that in mind when Marie receives earrings from the drum-major as Wozzeck receives cash from the doctor, that’s my privilege.  There is no glorious catharsis—nor any hummable tunes—in Wozzeck.  Just a series of short, scary scenes with sharp, scary music.  Brrrrrr.  Oh, and just in case you missed the moral, if you want to call the final kick in the ear a moral, the kid left an orphan is officially damned to have a lousy life.

And while I get what you mean about the Exodus reading for Holy Thursday, I do find it so resonant hearing at church the same things that would have been read during the seder that was the Last Supper/the institution of the sacrament of the Eucharist. . .  

(I’m doubtless biased, having grown up in a household with two religious traditions, but I think it’s so much more meaningful when put in context. . .)

To come home today for the first night of Passover and read the same thing over again in the haggadah, to participate in the same ritual… it reinforces (for me) all that is memory and immediacy and connecting past to present action. ..

WELL MAYBE.  Because I am totally obsessed with language the whole TRANSLATION thing is kind of my personal burning pit, and I have about a dozen different Bibles to serve as bellows if I ever burn a little less fiercely for a minute or two.&&&  So just how whichever version we’re reading is like the original seder?  And then there’s the question about whether the Last Supper happened on Passover at all, or some other day entirely.  Or something.

From http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Op-Ed-Contributors/The-last-supper-a-Passover-seder-348420 :

‘The truth may be that though the last supper took place shortly before Passover, it was not a seder at all but a talk-feast, a meeting of the fellowship – the havurah – which Jesus constituted with his disciples.’

And I say . . . whimper.

(I can . . . relate to being the default last-minute lector. . . .on days when I’ve had little/no warning . . . I apparently revert to librarian mode and  . . . slip into Storytime Voice. I didn’t realize . . . until someone made a remark . . . about how wonderfully *dramatic* I’d made the reading. Oops.)

When I read at St Margaret’s I tend to be a little dramatic.  Oops.  But it’s also the space . . . and the fact that that’s where we sing Jesus Is My Boyfriend music.%  Arrrrgh.  I’m not deliberately laying it on, it’s the way it comes.  I got to do one of Jesus’ rants once, and afterward I thought, hmm, I may have gone a little far.  But one of the more dramatic members of the admin came up to me and said, that was a really good reading.  Oh?  Okay.  Oh good.  Thanks.

The brokenness of the world is entirely shitty, and I think if more Christians talked about it like that, we might actually be able to have conversations about religion and whatnot without killing each other. And this might help, or might make it worse, what human actually knows how to talk about grief, but here it is. Taken from the Jesus Storybook Bible, which was indirectly quoting Tolkien, in regards to Easter: “Everything sad is coming untrue.”

Lewis, I think?  Sounds like Narnia to me.  And—I wish.  But yes about the talking thing.  It’s why I get so frustrated when the people around you go all stuffed when you say GAY MARRIAGE!  YES!  WOMEN IN THE MINISTRY!  YES!  WE ALL GET TO HEAVEN, IT JUST TAKES THE AXE MURDERERS LONGER!  YES!  THE REASON SATAN IS SUCH A CRABBY COW IS BECAUSE HE KNOWS HE’S GOING TO BE OUT OF A JOB IN A FEW MILLENNIA!  YES!%% 

. … I wonder if Jesus ever swears. Because what we do to each other would be enough to drive him to it really.  I’m now making myself laugh imagining waking up on Judgement Day and his first words to me being ‘What the….?’ Luckily God has a sense of humour, or I’d be done for. . . .

GOD CERTAINLY HAS A SENSE OF HUMOUR.  HE/SHE/IT/THEY CREATED THE UNIVERSE, DIDN’T HE/SHE/IT/THEY?  INCLUDING US?  Not original, but worth reiterating, perhaps especially on Easter Sunday, which it has become as I write this.

* * *

* Although I frelling spilled a great frothing puddle of the stock on the floor ARRRRRRRGH.^  Fortunately I have a four-legged self-motivating dustbin on the premises who took care of the problem with great skill and thoroughness.

^ I make chicken stock every week.  Why couldn’t I spill that if I’m going to spill stock?  Duck stock is a TREAT.

** And, outing myself here, I loathe novels that don’t use quote marks, and mostly refuse to read them because they make my tiny restless brain work too hard.

*** Which may be CONTRIBUTING to her crankiness.  Just sayin’.

& ‘Nigger’ counts.

&& Who is, I hope, having a nice restful Easter, I hope only once interrupted^ by some IQ-of-meatloaf who had somehow managed to get locked out of her own blog.  Frelling WordPress said TIMED OUT!!!, shut down, and disappeared the bar that has the frelling admin stuff on it, including the log in.  ARRRRRRGH.

^ . . . so far

&&& Or you can just go to biblehub.com but I don’t find rending one’s garments and gnashing one’s teeth in front of a computer screen nearly as satisfying as rending and gnashing surrounded by large open books, with, you know, three-dimensionally flippable pages.

% Some of which I ADMIT is fun to sing.  I ADMIT IT.  But I also admit to rewriting the lyrics when I like the tune, and then it’s hard to remember what I’m supposed to be singing in church, which is more embarrassing when you’re in the band . . .

%% And if Satan has the all-time-is-the-same app that God uses, he^ has a Schrodinger’s cat thing going where he’s already out of a job, and that might make him more crabby.

^ I suppose Satan needs to be he/she/it/they too.  Equal time.  Ugh.  I’m quite happy to leave him male.

Black Friday

So far so good with the (stupid) weather:  I did leave the vigil a little earlier than I would have otherwise, last night, because I was worried about the drive home.  You would think that the end of the universe would not be in Hampshire, but it is.  There are streets and villages all around the abbey called things like Valley Bottom and Misty Bourne* but the abbey, which is at the top of a hill, attracts all the really best worst weather.  Heavy fog?  Valley Bottom is a trifle cloudy, and the pea-souper around the abbey makes you want to get off your horse and walk, except that Wolfgang objects to going .05 mph just because we can’t see the road.  High winds?  You’d think even a hill at the end of the universe would run out of 200-year-old trees that it takes an all-terrain crane to move when they’ve fallen across the road, but it hasn’t run out yet.  Wolfgang has learnt to jump** but you don’t want to do a lot of this when you can’t see the road for the fog.  You’re saying you don’t get high winds and fog at the same time?  You haven’t tried to visit the Abbey at the End of the Universe.***

And we had a borderline frost Wednesday night& so I’m allowed to be apprehensive.  But today’s Easter service was in the middle of the afternoon.  Tomorrow will be the interesting one, with the night Mass when we resurrect him&& starting at nine and . . . going on for a while.  All that ‘hallelujah he is risen’ stuff.  Goes on.  Yesterday’s service—Maundy Thursday—wasn’t too awful&&&, and the sitting in the tiny gatehouse chapel in front of the candle-heavy altar, after Mass in the main chapel, is always very moving.

Today . . . they don’t just read the Passion on Black Friday, they half-dramatise it, with three readers, one the narrator, one Jesus, and one any other solo speaking part:  when the crowd speaks, the three speak together.  It’s pretty harrowing.   Plus we’re in that wasteland of silence and emptiness:  the saints’ statues have all been taken away, and the celebrants walk in silently, without the usual bell having rung you to service and the little bell warning you to stand up for the priest.

I don’t lose it and cry and cry and cry and cry any more . . . much.  I did this afternoon.  It’s what I was saying the other night:  sometimes your losses and the sadness that doesn’t go away—and your sense of unworthiness which of course a lot of Christian ritual hammers you with%—are just Too  Much.  But if you’re going to cry and cry and cry and CRY, till you have to pour yourself out of your seat, splash to your car%%, turn the key in the little hole and tell him to take you home because you can’t see out of your eyes, Black Friday is perhaps the day to do it.  Because, furthermore, Jesus is dead.

Radio Frelling Three is playing the Dream of Gerontius in honour of the day.  Arrrrgh.  I think I’ll turn it off and put something light and cheerful on the CD player.  Gotterdammerung, maybe, or Wozzeck.

Oh, and the temperature is dropping again.  Time to bring a lot of wet, dripping baby plants indoors again.  It’s supposed to rain again tomorrow, but just so long as it stays rain . . .

* * *

* And Wind Tunnel and Storm Haven and . . .

** He tucks his knees very well for a twenty-three-year-old, thank you.

*** The local council doesn’t like the abbey either.  All that supernatural weather makes them nervous.  So they close the road a lot.  I don’t think I’ve ever seen them actually do something while the road is closed^, but when there’s been another sighting of something forty or eighty feet long with red eyes and fangs flying over that hill, they snort ‘oh nonsense’ and then close the road for a few days.^^  My own theory is that all that frelling holiness attracts the Evil Weather Demons.

^ Except moving 200-year-old fallen-down trees

^^ Although road closings due to malign entities may be contagious.  There was a wild spate of road-closures here in New Arcadia a few weeks ago—and we’re not the same local council as the abbey—including one located exactly at the bottom of my little cul de sac.  Closed down one lane, temporary lights, the full irritating show.  When they first set this up, the temporary lights at our end were visible to those of us daring to descend from our eyrie, and then they MOVED THE LIGHTS so you got down to the bottom of our little hill and there were cars on either side of you AND YOU HAD NO IDEA WHICH DIRECTION THE TRAFFIC WAS ABOUT TO GO.

So having got that out of the way, they tore up our road.

And then they went away.

They went away for about ten days, while those of us living on our cul de sac risked sudden death every time we emerged through the gap in the terrace[d houses].  There were all kinds of (possibly dubious) works going on in all the other chasms dug into our roads, but not ours.

After about ten days, they came back.  And filled in the road.  And took the *&^%$£”£”!!!!!!!!!!!! lights away.

This may be my fault.  I may be bringing something tricky home with me from the abbey, on my clothing or Wolfgang’s tyres.  I keep wanting to ask if any of the other hardcore midweek and prayer-service attenders at the abbey have strange weather and even-more-than-usually unpredictable roadworks in any of the villages they live in, but I haven’t quite figured out how to phrase the question yet.

& Another way to say this is that the thermometer in the middle of my garden said that we did, and the thermometer leaning against the house wall said we didn’t.  And it was raining by morning, so there were no (for example) wilted pansies to tell me there had been a touch of frost.  I had brought all my baby plants indoors again . . . including all the extra baby plants that had arrived in the post that day.  At least there won’t be any more frelling live plant deliveries till Tuesday.

&& I’m told anything after sunset on Saturday counts.  WHATEVER.  BRING HIM BACK PLEASE SOONEST.

&&& Except for Alfrick^ appearing at my elbow about thirty seconds before the service started and saying ‘you’re doing a reading.’  I am? I said.  The monks always do a certain amount of bustling before service, especially for a big important service, so having him stalking past me didn’t mean anything till he stopped.

I’ve never done a reading at the abbey.  Let alone been assigned one thirty seconds before the service during Holy Week.  I assume someone had a last-minute case of laryngitis, and Alfrick knows what I do for a living:  reading words off a page to a listening audience is not a problem.^^   Although I hope he didn’t take any stick for his last-minute substitute’s pink All Stars.

^ Alfrick is my monk.  The proper phrase is ‘spiritual director’ but that sounds so idiotically fatuous, the sort of thing that, back in my I-believed-in-something-Out-There-but-it-wasn’t-Christianity days, would stop me at the door.  I ain’t goin’ near any frelling (or frellin’) spiritual director, thank you very much.  Then I converted and the world changed.  Can’t remember how much of this story I told on the old blog.  My then-curate at my ‘proper’ church, St Margaret’s, was very interested in the meditative tradition, and so am I—it was one of the things that translated better than most things, across the divide between there (no Jesus) and here (Jesus).   He said that the monks at the abbey ‘sat’, ie had meditative services.  MONKS?  I said.  ABBEY??  No, no, he said, they’re friendly.  Really.   And he went with me, the first few times I went to the abbey, to prove that they welcomed everybody who wanted to come there.

Well, sort of.  The prior is tall and imposing and is very committed to his church and his God, and he has opinions.  And I heard him having a rant—not that I know anything about rants—about a few things that were not being done well in both the local and the global community of Christians.  He frightened me half to death.  I started calling him Scary Alfrick.  Not to his face, of course.

You see where this is going.

Most of a year later I found myself thinking about this spiritual director thingummy.  The abbey advertises spiritual direction.  I said to my curate, they’re not talking about anybody, are they?  They mean like other religious/professional Christians.  No, said my curate, they mean anyone.  If you’re interested, ask.

So I dithered for a while, and then wrote an email to the abbot.

Nothing happened for several weeks.

Then the frelling prior waylaid me after service one night, apologised for the delay, and said that they were really full up with directees but the abbot would make a decision about me soon.

Okay, I said, nodding rapidly.  Okay, okay, thanks for telling me, okay.  And went home and thought sadly, well, I’ll be put on a waiting list.  Sigh.  Never mind.  I can buy another concordance.

Several more weeks passed.

And then one night after meditative service, there was the prior again, waiting at the top of the little slope up from the chapel door.  It’s not enough he’s seven feet tall, he’s standing at the top of a hill with the light behind him.  I totter up to him and try not to squeak.  He’s going to tell me about the waiting list, and that it’s only twenty years long.

The abbot has assigned you to me, he said.

I think I probably said EEEEP, because he said hastily, if that’s all right with you, of course.

Yes!  I said.  Yes!  Yes!  Thank you!  Yes!

And I went home and thought Scary Alfrick. God definitely has a sense of humour.

That was five years ago.  If anyone ever tried to take me away from Scary Alfrick I would bite them. 

I’m afraid I’m a nasty old cynic, and it makes me laugh that the poor things are Benedictines, which means they’re required to be friendly, treating every stranger as Jesus, etc, it’s in the Benedictine contract.  Every weepy, babbling lunatic off the street# including elderly recent converts with American accents, they have to welcome.  But I didn’t know that then.

# Hmm.  Maybe there’s something about all those road closures.~

~ But it doesn’t actually stop any of us.  We keep coming.  We just complain a lot.

^^ Although it was the blood-on-the-lintels Old Testament God rant in Exodus, speaking of rants, not my favourite part of the Bible.   Especially not declaiming all that striking down of the first-born with the pronoun ‘I’.

% I can, you know, parse the whole ‘The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit; a broken and contrite heart, O God, you will not despise’ thing, but I don’t think this is the way to go about it in the twenty-first century.  Maybe they needed it in the first century, which is a strong argument to me that we have changed a lot in the last two thousand years.^

^ However don’t get me started on translations.

%% Although it was also RAINING

NOOOOOOOOOOO

Nooooooooooooooooo.*  There is a rumour that winter may yet return, here in southern England where one lost, bewildered snowflake makes us all panic.**  That it might come back this weekend.   April Fool!  Arrrrrrrgh!  Let’s hope it’s just an April fool with a very long intro. 

If I miss any of the Easter services at Abbey at the End of the Universe*** I will be a little puddle of unshriven misery.  I’m a late-convert Christian as, again, readers of the old blog know&, and I take my Lent and my Easter very seriously, in fact I find the whole of Easter with all that death and torture and betrayal and unimaginable loneliness and despair frankly terrifying and I don’t want to do it alone, huddled up by the Aga with the hellpair and the snowdrifts banking against the windows.  The monks make it even more terrifying, but it is very cathartic that way, and by the time you’re stumbling back to your car after the night Mass on Saturday&& you’re a new person.  It helps if you’ve done a proper preparatory clear-out for Lent&&& and of course I’m incapable of anything resembling clearing out, but . . .

. . . Chaos and I are recently back from our country walk and it didn’t just rain on us it sleeted and HAILED.  NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO.

* * *

* I’m not doing too well with the calm thing and the less emphasis thing.  Oh well.  There’s always next year.

**  Um, the Pacific Northwest is not just Seattle and Puget Sound. Parts of it get tons of snow (Paradise for instance gets about 50 to 60 feet every year). Some of it is desert.

Oh, Mt Rainier!  Sorry, I knew that.  Where record-breaking snow is standard op.  Also about the deserts.  Seattle is my default because if I had ever been going to leave the east coast I’d’ve moved to Seattle.  I did think about it^.  Also, the uni bookstore ordered in MILLIONS of copies of SUNSHINE for my tour stop there, and not only was it a lovely audience who bought a surprising number of those millions, but the even lovelier man who ran it asked me to sign ALL of the remainder because he was sure he could sell them.  Never has writer’s cramp felt better.  And, furthermore, he did sell them.

^ Before Peter.  And England.  Here I stay.  I hope.

*** AKA Holy Restaurant at the End of the Universe, gluten-free wafers a speciality.  Now, here’s the thing.  I eat no cereal grains any more, not just the gluteny ones.  Slip a few grains of rice in the salad or oatmeal flakes^ in the crunchy seed mix and I am ill.  But I ingest gluten-free wafers of unknown cereal origin every week and there are no repercussions.^^  Maybe the Catholics are right about transubstantiation.

^ All forms of oats are especially bad.  So much for my Scottish heritage.

^^ Or if there are repercussions, they’re lost in the general uproar.  It’s not like any of my body parts and organ systems just function.+

+ Including the BRAAAAAAAIN.  Er, what?

& Frell, frell, frell it frell.  I still haven’t imported any footnote symbols.  There are about a gazillion of them here in Word, I just keep forgetting.  Anyway.  I had a rather spectacular conversion experience 12/9/12, which gave me a year to get used to God, who adapts to what her children need and appears to me as female, and hanging out with Jesus, who I accept as a historical bloke but then the offspring of God was adapting to the time and might be more gender fluid under other circumstances—you may be beginning to understand why I find it difficult to find a congregation I am comfortable in, even if the occasional priest or monk can cope with me—ANYWAY, I had a year to get used to the believer shtick before Peter had his first stroke and it all started to unravel badly here below.  And I want to say that to any nonbeliever I realise it makes no sense because the obvious question is so why doesn’t God fix all the shit?+, and I don’t know why not, but I might not still be here if I hadn’t had God, Jesus and a few saints and angels (and monks) to lean on and turn to and SCREAM AT these last few years.  And while there are moments when your losses and your energy levels gang up on you and say, oh, stick a sock in it, will you?  Just lie down and die and get it over with . . . um, actually, I have stories I still want to write, so I’d like to stay on a while yet please.

+ (bad words, don’t know if they’re allowed on here)

In my real life I use more bad language than there is bad language.  Hey, there are scientific studies# that say that swearing lessens pain!  And some of us find life painful.##  Mostly I rely on the old faithfuls that Shakespeare would probably recognise, but if I can’t find a phrase exquisitely apropos to the current situation I WILL MAKE SOMETHING UP.  AND IT WILL BE RUDE.  But in public, including this blog, eh.  I might feel differently if I didn’t know a lot of Great-Aunt Gladyses### and precocious ten-year-olds read my books, and therefore might have a look at this blog:  I don’t want to ruin anybody’s day accidentally, and that includes the anxious parents of the precocious ten-year-olds.  If I want to knock you down and throw your laptop in the swamp and accuse you of biologically unlikely antecedents, that’s different.  But random swearing still bothers a lot of people, so I try not to swear randomly.  I do, however, reserve the right to say that the last few years have been shitty.  Because they sodding well have been.  Shitty.

# But don’t get me started on ‘scientific studies’, peer reviewed double blind blah blah blah.  I’m a practising lay homeopath, and I’m tired of being bashed by bozos who think that ‘scientific studies’ are the only way you ever learn anything real and true and even more tired of the endless revelations about the bias and screw-ups of the scientific-study industry.

## Especially the way some of us go about it.  If you have a long-legged, long-armed, twitchy, fidgety, clumsy person living in a very small house full of stuff including hellbeasts, THERE IS GOING TO BE PAIN.  Mind you, the long legs are good for stepping over obstacles when you see them in time and the long arms are good for reaching things on the tops of the shelves that run up ALL THE WAY TO THE CEILING . . . which in fact I can’t reach, which is what stools were made for.~ But I bought this cottage partly because the ceilings are higher than normal which is at least one more bookshelf and definitely worth having.

~Including whole new levels of possibilities for pain.

### A Great-Aunt Gladys is someone who finds E Nesbit and Frances Hodgson Burnett  risqué.~  And for any real Great Aunt Gladyses out there who read Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie~~ and Armistead Maupin~~~ and Cixin Liu~~~~ and Alison Bechdel~~~~~~ my apologies.  Great-Aunt Gladys has been a troubling presence in my life since BEAUTY first came out when I was twenty-five, looked sixteen, and was patronised so badly by her in her regiments that I considered changing careers to short-order cook.  Listen, it’s my usual thing of overlooking the good and obsessing about the bad.  MOST of my readers at ALL points of my career~~~~~~ have been fine, and many of them have been delightful and charming and thoughtful and everything a neurotic and over-reactive author could want, if she’d stop looking around for something nasty to happen.

~ And not just racist, sexist, homophobic, etc.  It doesn’t stop me rereading them with love, but I do quite a lot of cringing too.

~~ Yes.  I had to look up the spelling.

~~~ No, I didn’t have to look up the spelling but I did anyway.

~~~~ And since I’m reading THREE BODY PROBLEM I didn’t have to look up the spelling because it’s lying right here.

~~~~~ Yes, okay?  One of the Really Cute Guys in . . . um . . . I think it was ninth grade, was named Bechtel and having painstakingly learned to spell it I can’t stop spelling it that way forty-odd years later. [soon to be new footnote symbol HERE]

[soon to be new footnote symbol HERE] And no, I did not do that cheezy girly thing of writing ‘Mrs Joshua Bechtel’ all over my notebooks, which I thought was unbelievably creepy and anti-feminist even then, and I’m not at all sure I even knew feminism was a thing, but I knew that all the interesting characters in LOTR were blokes.

~~~~~~ Since I decided against short-order cook

&& This is one of the things I love about the Anglicans.  They only keep him dead about twenty-four hours.  Dead on Friday^, alive Saturday night, yaaaay.

^ Although even the monks call it ‘Good’ Friday.  I don’t care that dying was the gateway to eternal life, it wasn’t just dying it was horrible dying, and I say it’s Black Friday.  Add it to the list of my heresies.

&&& And I don’t mean giving up chocolate

Comments

 

There are several things I want to try to do better this time.*  I am going to try again with a Robin’s recommended booklist, for example, because it’s IDIOTIC that I spend so much of my time reading, and rarely mention any of it, even the good stuff, because I suck at writing book reviews.  The further problem however is that I suck at any kind of short form, like, for example, an annotated ‘read this’ book list.**  We can but persevere.***

Something else I want to do is try to make more use of reader comments.  There will be, some day soon I hope barring further technological disasters in other areas, an ‘ask me something’ button which will be specifically for that purpose.  But I don’t want you to feel you have to ask me a question;  I like reading the yattering-on stuff too, about life, the universe, pan-galactic gargleblasters and fish.  And right at the moment I’m feeling a little shell-shocked about running a blog again at all, so a lack of laser-eyed hard-edged questions is comforting.   But I thought I could make a start with the fish and the gargleblasters.&

I’m so glad to read your voice again (if that makes sense).&&

It does on the planet I’m from.  Nanu nanu.&&&

Oh YAY you’re BACK!!!! I’m so excited to catch up with, or go forward with*, you.

*whichever works

Both.  See above.  This is a very flexible planet.  Who wants to be linear?  Booooooring.%

No one does footnotes like you do footnotes!

Oh good.  Also . . . probably just as well.  Not only do I like to be unusual, there’s probably only so much of this kind of thing the population can bear.

You’ve seen those videos where the dog sees his person for the first time after a long absence? It’s like that. Yay.

This totally makes me fall down laughing.  Thank you.

I forgot what fun it was to read cascading levels of footnotes.

Oh good.  There are usually some protests about Extreme Footnote Use and Abuse of Reader Patience.  Hmmph.  I don’t understand this at all myself of course.  Cascading, exactly.  It’s just like rolling down a slightly watery flight of stairs, right?  Bump, bump, bump, BUMP. What problem?

I would love to have access to previous archives, I miss visiting the posts and pictures, but will eagerly take whatever you post.

I’m not at the minute planning to open the entire archive.  I am planning on mining it.  There will be inevitably a certain amount of recycling too.  My life is still my life and I don’t want to worry about which stories I’ve already told you.  And I’ll be re-posting a few highlights, if highlights is what I mean.  Peter’s memorial service, for example.

Hannah may very well be your BFF but we all feel special and part of your life when you post. (Yes, we are creepy book nerdling stalkers… you don’t mind, right?)

Well . . . if I had any idea what true self advertising was I might have a go, but I don’t, and this is Days in the Life.  My life.  Yes.  I’m hanging it out there for people to read.  I don’t really see your liking it making you a creepy book nerdling stalker.%%%  I wouldn’t be writing this if nobody seemed to be reading it.

Then, when you disappeared from online and the blog went dark, I felt so terrible that I had never commented saying THANK YOU for writing your books of course, but also the blog! A huge time commitment, I know. I so appreciate your sharing bit of life, authoring, dogs. Very glad you’re back and I’m sorry it’s taken me a decade to comment

THANK YOU.  The point is you did break silence.  Yaaaay.

Although I kept reading various faves of your bibliography until black mold nearly killed me and all my household goods went into storage

I recommend investing in a dehumidifier.  And for immediate gratification . . . ebooks.  They are not things of beauty but they do have their uses.  1,000,000,000 books in your backpack, for example.

Ugh, I would describe technology as a bear if it wouldn’t be a disservice to bears everywhere.

Yes, I keep almost referring to it as a bear and thinking, NO.  NOT A NICE FURRY BEAR.  Possibly a kind of grizzly-on-rampage/rabid polar bear crossed with a basilisk-alligator.

What timing that I think to look you up while procrastinating at work a bit,

EXCELLENT.  I so like being a bad influence.

You’ve been missed, and I’m another who was worried but tried not to worry because you were probably just out living your life like a normal person.

NORMAL?  NORMAL?  You wound me to the heart.

I offer you what my various internet friends call “creepy internet hugs”

Eh.  See above.  The internet is a huge teeming ratbag full of evil creepazoids%% but there are still quite a few nice people around, and nice people tend to offer hugs upon suitable occasion. %%% Welcome to the long-lost$ is usually a suitable occasion.$$  Grief, sigh, is usually a suitable occasion, although I’ve been known to run away because hugs generally make it harder not to cry.$$$

One of the ongoing problems with the internet is figuring out what the etiquette is.  There are plenty of ideas but frelling little consensus.  Meanwhile we go on copying and pasting bits of our wiggly three-dimensional lives and sticking them on the screen where they don’t look quite right in two pixelated dimensions.  The important thing is to go on having three-dimensional lives.  Yes.  I’m old.  I remember pre-internet.   I find it scary that you walk through neighbourhoods that you know are full of children, and it’s a beautiful weekend day, and there isn’t a single kid outdoors running around and yelling and hitting things with sticks and getting muddy.  They’re not even sitting on their front stoops with their devices because I guess who needs sunlight and fresh air??  Arrrrgh.  Also, the sunlight-usable screen is still mostly a high-end product, I think?  I still go outdoors every day, rain, shine, blizzards or dragons, but my hands are either full of hellbeast leads or trowels and secateurs.   I haven’t a clue if I have any daylight-resistant screens or not.  I DON’T CARE.

I live with ghosts too.

I wonder how many of us don’t.  I’m glad to have ghosts, considering the alternative.

I am so sorry to hear about Darkness. But, like Peter, you do still have him with you.

I know I told you this on the old blog:  I used to try to be discreet about talking to my husband in the churchyard.  I’ve stopped bothering.  I’m the crazy old lady who gives her dead husband a daily update, standing by his grave in the churchyard.  Every town needs a few characters.$$$  Two and something years after he died he still doesn’t have a headstone because it’s too blasted final, but I do keep on keeping a rose in one of those plastic stick-in-the-ground vases.  I’m thinking of adding a second vase with some daffodils tomorrow when I buy a new rose.

And I see Darkness constantly, partly because of his colour.  He’s always in the corner of my eye, or the shadows at the back of one of the dog beds.  And when neither of the two currently responsible for my dog-food bills are in the back of Wolfgang I hear all the others.  Darkness is better than twice the size of Hazel, but being noncorporeal they all fold in together without anyone getting lain on.

It probably took 2-3 years for me to find a new normal after our daughter died. But it came. Finally. I still get grief ambushes, but it’s better.

Peter at least had a good run, including that his children all outlived him.  Losing a child has to be the worst.  It’s not just awful it’s wrong.  And I’m over the two year mark and I haven’t figured out my new life yet.

Jedi hugs, if you’d be willing to accept them from an internet stranger

For those of you who didn’t get this reference either:

https://criminalreviews.wordpress.com/2012/12/19/a-captain-awkward-glossary/#jedihugs

This is TOTALLY an example of why the internet is ALSO a GOOD THING, when you’ve just deleted your 1,000,000th inducement from those beautiful Asian ladies with very small feet, and are wondering if your future is in itinerant knitting or something.  YES.  Because there are MANY times, places and mental lack of balances, when the LAST thing I want is a hug even when I recognise the kind intent.  Human contact also makes you vulnerable, and if you’re feeling pretty vulnerable already . . .  YAAAAAY for Jedi hugs!

THAT’S [MORE THAN] ENOUGH FOR ONE POST.  MORE LATER.

* * *

* ::falls down laughing::  Staggers upright, wipes eyes . . . no, no, can’t do it . . .  ::falls down laughing again::

** Yes, I’ve now failed at this two blogs in a row, the Palaeolithic livejournal one as well.

*** Or move to another planet.  Always a possibility.  It has to be one with fragrant roses and furry hellbeasts however.

& I am not copy and pasting all the ‘welcome backs’ and ‘we missed yous’ because these are too self-referential even for me, and my profound and comprehensive self-absorption is already graphically on display.  But let me say that if there weren’t a fair number of these ‘welcome backs’ and ‘we missed yous’ I would not now be re-adding ‘blog’ to my list of regular activities.  THANK YOU ALL.  This is still supposed to be some kind of advertising platform—I exist!  I write books!  Please pay money to read them or talk me up at your library!—but I wouldn’t have the heart for it if somebody didn’t directly tell me they were enjoying it.  You don’t even have to be whacked out yourself, but it probably helps.

&& I may resign myself to Windows 10 yet.  It has a much better selection of pinks, which I have chosen for elegant setting-off of reader comments.  Previous Windowses didn’t understand pink at all, and only offered a cheesy range of lavender if you wanted to frighten the children with lurid typeface colours.  Or mark out reader comments.^

^ Now watch WordPress go ewwwwwwww and expunge it.

YES THAT’S FRELLING FLAPDOODLINGLY SUPER-ARRGH-MAKING EXACTLY WHAT’S HAPPENED, AND FURTHERMORE, THIS FRELLING DOODAH DASHBOARD DOESN’T OFFER ANY COLOURS, WHICH THE LAST ONE DID.  WHAT DO I DO NOW??? ARRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRGH  ALL RIGHT, COMMENTS ARE IN BOLD.  LIKE THIS FRELLING FRELLING FRELLING SUBFOOTNOTE.

&&& Did Mork ever mention roses and hellbeasts?  I can’t remember.

% Although, boring.  Sigh.  I got to stay home Friday night and I was so excited!  I cooked!  I read!^  I cleaned out the frelling refrigerator.  That wasn’t nearly so exciting, although I guess it’s a consequence of staying home a lot rather than eating in groovy restaurants, but when your vegetable drawer is FLOATING^^ you want to bail it out before you have dirty water all over the floor and (a) panic that one of the hellpair has a urinary infection (b) the hellterror DRINKS it and then . . . develops a urinary infection.

^ I played the jigsaw app on my iPad.  What a mistake that download was.  I now have a puzzle collection getting on to rival my ebook collection.  At least it doesn’t show, like ebooks don’t show, unlike hard copy and . . . yarn.

I’m strangely paranoid about people peering over my shoulder however and when I’m looking for an ebook in company I try to make small unflashy swiping hand gestures.

Also . . . CDs.  I’m not telling you how many albums I bought at those two concerts last week.#

# Yes I know about Spotify and streaming and . . . stuff.  Remember what I said about living on a cul de sac.  I do download knitting patterns~ and sheet music, but it often takes several tries AND some lively email with customer service.

~ COUGH COUGH COUGH COUGH COUGH

^^ Yes I have cleared the teeny-weeny-weeny pinprick drain hole.  Many times.

% Yes I’ve had experience with . . . erm.  But so long as you remain aware that this is an edited version of my life^, and aren’t expecting to replace Hannah, we’re good.

^ I rarely lie by commission, and only for serious cause, like maintaining someone else’s privacy.#  I lie by omission all the time.  Which maintains my privacy.

# If you want to be snarky about it, all the aliases on this blog are a form of lying by commission.

%% See:  Facebook, or the current scandal about it.  There is no way that any of these ginormous galaxy-swallowing mega-corps aren’t evil and corrupt, even if when they were three people in someone’s garage they were all pure and holy and devoted to improving the lot of all life on the planet.  Suspicion is good.  It won’t protect you from trolls, hacking and spam^ but it’ll at least raise your chances of not having your bank balance wiped, your home repossessed and your best beloved running off to Mongolia because that’s where your last text saying HELP HELP appeared to be coming from.

^ AAAAAAAUGH.  Nothing protects you from spam.  It’s like slugs in the garden:  you haven’t a hope of eradicating the squishy little horrors.  You can only hope to bash them down to a just-about-manageable level.

%%% Notice that I do not say normal, although normal is okay in its place.^

^ ::looks around::  ::fails to find a place for normal::

$ Unless, of course, they left to avoid the hug thing.^

^ I may not count as long-lost, but trust me, last year has felt very long.

The last five or so years have felt very long, but we won’t go there tonight.

$$ It’s only fair to warn you however that if you see/meet me at a book signing or similar some day^ and try to hug me, I will probably roar and bite you.  I find public occasions very stressful and not suitable for much of anything except attempting to live long enough to flee.

^ ::deletes another selfie::

::deletes another selfie::~

~ ::deletes another selfie::  So, like possibly not.  Unless I can wear a bag over my head.  As Bette Davis said, old age is not for sissies.  [needs another frelling footnote symbol]

[needs another frelling footnote symbol] Also, I have this hair.  The central thing is that I am VERY GLAD to HAVE hair, since it keeps taking comprehensive stress personally and falling out, and this latest time it’s grown in it . . . it can’t decide if it really wants to be curly or not, so I have both RINGLETS, every time it grows in there are a few more of these, I haven’t had serious ringlets since frelling kindergarden, and just-barely wavy bits, which is what it’s mostly been since kindergarden.  Curly bits, less curly bits and not curly bits do not INTEGRATE WELL. [[needs a SECOND new frelling footnote symbol]]  The result was memorably described by a friend who had to make me immediately recognisable to someone who had never met me as ‘an explosion in a mattress factory.’[[[THIRD new footnote symbol]]]

[[Needs a SECOND new frelling footnote symbol]] I was complaining about this to Merrilee, who has the best curly hair ever, and she said, Welcome to my world.

[[[THIRD new footnote symbol]]] Yes we’re still friends.  He has other virtues.

$$$ I met one of the others yesterday, as I was out with the hellpair at teatime—4 pm or so.^  He said, Good morning.  He added, I know it’s not morning, I’m left-handed.

I like this.  I’m sure he worked it out beforehand, so as to support his position as a town character, but I like it anyway.

^ BRITISH SUMMER TIME ARRRRRRRRRRGH.  CLOCKS GOING FORWARD ARRRRRRRRRRGH.  IT TAKES ME SIX MONTHS TO READJUST AND THEN THEY FRELLING GO BACK AGAIN SO TIME NEVER FEELS SETTLED OR RIGHT OR COMFORTABLE ARRRRRRRRRRRGH.

It occurs to me I’ve been wasting an excuse for my relentlessly haphazard relationship with time.  IT’S BECAUSE I’M VERY SENSITIVE AND HAVING THE CLOCKS JERKING ME AROUND TWICE A YEAR DESTROYS MY DELICATE RADAR.  Hee hee hee hee hee hee.

I HATE TECHNOLOGY, continued

 

This is going to be a long series.

I was already risking a lot of bad language, despite having given myself a Severe Talking To, after the post about SNOW in southern England in March, to the general impact of, I will not crush every blog post with a superabundance of CAPITAL LETTERS, italic and bold, nor will I drown every paragraph with EXCLAMATION MARKS!!!!!!!  I will learn to be calm, calm, calm, CALM!!!!!!!*

So I was risking serious off-the-rails-ness by my choice of next blog topic, which was to be entitled Learning Curve, because I was going to figure out how to post a photo, specifically of the hellpair, gloriously taken on Pooka II.**  But the thing about photos is that they’re worth a thousand words per, right?  Whereupon you don’t have to write them.  And while I have no intention of getting sucked back into a blog post every night, still, and especially while I’m still trying to rouse this new beast into robust*** life&, I don’t want too many days going by between posts.

AS IT HAPPENS this week was always going to be kind of a monster&& because Raphael has been trying to finish this ghastly migration business when he hauls my electronic/on line/digital life/lives from an assortment of FLAMINGLY INCOMPETENT servers and plonks me down into . . . well, I’m sure it’ll turn out to be flamingly incompetent too in its own way and time, but in the first place there is only one of it, which makes a change, and second IT’S ALL RAPHAEL’S PROBLEM.&&&

But that doesn’t mean that the process is going according to plan.%  Plus before the migration thing ever got scheduled I had two, count ’em, two concerts this week, yesterday and today, which was still going to be more or less all right because Raphael was coming on Tuesday . . . and then he had a drop-everything emergency so he came on Wednesday.  Yesterday.  Day of first concert.  And Fiona and I got back later than planned last night because the frelling road home was closed and her satnav had a nervous breakdown.%%  She then made the mistake of coming indoors for a sit-down that wasn’t in a car . . . and was treated to a magnificent, many-splendoured meltdown%%% when I discovered that the migration had migrated away from here and was doubtless sitting on a beach somewhere drinking swirly colourful things out of beautiful frosty glasses with paper parasols ARRRRRRRRRRRGH.$

I spent a lot of time on the phone with Raphael today.

And then there was the second concert tonight$$.  And the frelling road home was CLOSED AGAIN.$$$

But I was GOING TO POST TONIGHT since I didn’t do it last night.  And I have this photo of the hellpair . . . which with vast, agonising effort I managed, first, to send from Pooka to Outlook since I have no idea how to tell Pooka to send to the blog, and then with truly heroic vast, agonising effort I managed to transfer the photo out of my email to a brand-new folder!!!!!!, on the desktop, which I more or less remembered from the old blog I’d be able to access from the ‘new post’ page.

I went there.  I hit ‘add media’.  I hit ‘select files’.  I hit ‘hellpair.’  I hit ‘upload’.

AND IT SAID, THIS TYPE OF FILE IS FORBIDDEN FOR SECURITY REASONS.

* * *

* Heaven knows I’m old^ enough.

^ Stop that.

STOP THAT.#

# Snarlsnarlsnarlsnarlsnarl!!!!!!

** They’re right about selfies, by the way—the hypesters, I mean.  I don’t know when this (r)evolution in applied horror began but I can tell you that the iPhone X takes magnificent selfies.  AAAAAAAAAAAUGH.  I am aware that, along with the list of books by erm erm erm ahem I need to paste memorably and flamboyantly and soon all over the blog’s opening page^ I should also provide a photo of the perpetrator, and it would be easier, simpler and cheaper^^ if I could do this at home.  Well, it still will be easier, simpler and cheaper, but it’s not going to be soon.  My delete-button finger is developing a callus.

^ Read this blog!  I am a PROFESSIONAL WRITER!  Never mind that this blog exposes me as a cranky technophobic halfwit who overuses all available media for EMPHASIS!

^^ Aside from the price of Pooka II herself

*** A word that is rapidly losing its meaning because of the way British politicians throw it around.  You know that when Theresa May says ‘the government will mount a robust response’ that’s not what she means.  The word deserves better.  So does the government, come to that.

& Robust and snarling life.

&& Even aside from the weather.  Most of which has melted, by the way, the snow, I mean, around here.  There are still remains of snowpersons and gleams of snowbanks from dark shadows.  But the March That Was isn’t over yet, as any of you living almost anywhere in the right-hand two-thirds of the USA^ are well aware of.  New York City was closed yesterday, Boston is closed today and the Midwest isn’t happy either.  I had an East-Coast friend due here tomorrow and her flight was cancelled.  I think the airport was cancelled.  They’re going to turn it into a Walmart with an eight-screen cinema and a drive-through McDonald’s.

^ And possibly the Pacific Northwest, where it isn’t supposed to snow any more than it is in southern England.

&&& When Blogmom and Raphael/Blogdad were trying to parcel out the misery between them there was a lot more room for incompetence to build momentum.  IT’S GOING TO BE DIFFERENT NOW.^

^ I hope Blogdad does not develop the habit of reading Days in the Life posts.  I want him to sleep at night.

THEY’RE GETTING A PUPPY.  SOON.   YAAAAAAAAAAY.  Speaking of sleep, though.  HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA.  Well, they’ve survived three human babies.  They’ll cope with a puppy.

% Starting with giving myself tendonitis doing an epic clear-out of email so as to have less to migrate.  Ow.  Furthermore the hellterror goes on the right—my group-delete hand.^  So you’ve got a hand that doesn’t close and an elbow that doesn’t bend and a thirty-pound heat-seeking missile on the end of a long extending lead and . . .

^ Deleting a few selfies is easy.

%% This is not the same satnav that brought us to a sewage treatment plant and said ‘you have arrived at your destination’^ when we were trying to find the cinema.^^  But this new one is obviously a near blood relative.

^ In Billy Connolly’s voice BEFORE SHE TURNED IT OFF.  Satnav-voice jokes are only funny once. 

^^ This was several years ago, and old-blog readers have already seen this story.

%%% I was already not in a good mood when Pooka, applied to at the concert venue for driving distances to another concert, declared that she couldn’t tell me anything because she wasn’t connected to the internet.  My provider said ‘log in’ and then wouldn’t let me.  And then it told me my account was off line anyway and to try again later.  ARRRRRRRRRRRRGH.^

^ Fiona promised, when she finally left last night, that she hadn’t heard any language she hadn’t heard before.

$ I HOPE IT SNOWS

$$ You know you book these things months in advance when the tour dates come out, because you’re only going to get the one shot at anything remotely in your area^ and if two bands you happen to want to hear are on consecutive nights at opposite ends of your bailiwick,^^ well, that’s just the way it is.

^ This doesn’t stop Fiona, who is happy to drive to Aberdeen for a concert she fancies.  She doesn’t have hellcritters.

Also, she is mad.#

# Hey, she’s the one taught me to knit.  ’Nuff said.

^^ Fortunately I have more than one friend who is willing to do the driving.

I’m actually thinking of getting a satnav.#  But we won’t go there tonight.##

# I’m looking for one that specifies ‘no sewage treatment plants’.

## We won’t go there!  Hahahahahahahahaha!

$$$ And remember what I said about ‘opposite ends of your bailiwick’?  Yeah.

It’s snowing

 

It’s the frelling middle of frelling March in the SOUTH OF FRELLING ENGLAND and it’s SNOOOOOOOOOOOWING.  Furthermore, it’s snowing again.   Again as in yesterday, and again as in the day before yesterday.  And it had done this about a fortnight ago already and we were all outraged.  We’re now bored with outrage!  We want to move on!  We had nearly four inches of the blasted stuff last time—other bits of the south of England had it much worse—and a mere two or thereabouts this time BUT THAT’S NOT GOOD ENOUGH.  What does this weather think it’s doing?  Where does it think it is?  Skarsvag??

I’ve been forcing Chaos into his coat which outrages him.  He rather likes snow, but then he has four feet to keep himself upright on, and a much better centre of gravity arrangement.  My little cul de sac is also the tallest hill in town, and while we’re talking low kindly Hampshire hills, still, when there’s trodden-down snow-ice between me and the main road, I start feeling a trifle aged and vulnerable, and wish that I enforced the whole YOU MAY NOT HIT THE END OF YOUR LEAD WITH CRUDE BODILY FORCE thing during the rest of the year with more vigour.  The hellhounds and I had some Interesting Times when they were young* but they’ve been pretty polite for years.**  The hellterror, not so much.  ‘Polite’ is not really a concept that fits into that little badger head.  I can see her hesitate when I shout ‘CAREFUL!’ but it takes a while for the unwilling neurons to agree to send messages to all four legs and even the long extending leads aren’t that long.***  A fortnight ago we also had an Ice Cliff at the bottom of the cul de sac, because of the way the wind had been blowing%, and because natives of southern England either have instant nervous breakdowns when the white stuff starts drifting down from the sky or can’t take it seriously, and if you drive your big stupid car over a snowdrift a few times you end up with an Ice Cliff arrrrrrrrrgh. 

It’s cold out there, with the snow and all%%.  Pav never seems to feel it%%%, but while she’s short-haired it’s amazingly dense and plushy and this is still southern England.  If I had her in Maine she’d probably have a coat.  Chaos, however, is thin-skinned and silky-furred and while off lead at 90 mph he can keep himself warm, for dull middle-aged strolls around town$ he is wearing his coat.  I do put it on him carefully, the way you put a blanket on a horse, high up on the neck, so you can pull it down and smooth the hair in the right direction.  This is actually harder to do on a small lightweight animal and a small lightweight coat, especially when you have to argue with the too small for purpose hole for the harness catch to fit through.$$  And then he trots down the street ahead of me, tail lashing like a horse whose rider is banging on its kidneys, and, also in horse parlance, inside out, which means trying to touch his ears to his withers, so his top line is concave and his throat line is convex.  Which is opposite to what you want, and a sign of discomfort.  Whippet spines are amazingly flexible however and a hellhound can usually manage to be humpy-backed too.  They may be part boa constrictor.  This would also explain the sensitivity to cold.

At this rate I’m going to have to buy a real snow shovel, like I had in Maine, instead of this silly plastic thing where the handle unscrews so you can keep it under your chest of drawers. IT WAS SUPPOSED TO WARM UP AND MELT TODAY.  IT DID NOT DO SO.  WE WANT PALM TREES AND SARONGS.  WE WANT THEM  NOW. 

AND AS I POST THIS, VERY LATE MONDAY NIGHT, IT’S TUESDAY MORNING AND THE FIRST FRELLING DAY OF FRELLING SPRING.$$$

* * *

* The three of us once rolled down most of the hill below the cricket ground [sic] together, although I’m the only one who did any shouting.  Fortunately we did not roll over any deposits left to trouble the unlucky by EVIL STINKING RATBAG SLIME MOULDS who do not pick up after their dogs. 

** Let them off lead, however, and stand well back.

*** This is one of the problems with having whippets.  They can hit exit velocity in two leaps, and a long extending lead is about three leaps long.  They are the fastest dog on earth, pound for pound, and as sprinters they’re completely in a class of their own.

% [NEXT BLOG TASK is to import some of my proper footnote symbols again.  It seems to me ABSURD that you don’t even get the dagger on a standard keyboard] And blowing and blowing.  I’m used to the wind that soars over the eight-foot^ garden wall and then eels its way through/around the dubiously-fitting frame of the kitchen/garden door, wailing like a bonkers banshee as it does so.  The hellterror may open one eye if she’s not busy trying to take down the mailperson or other dangerous invader, and then again she may not.  Any hellhound on the premises however will go flatten himself into the most uncomfortable corner in this kitchen—and I’ve already told you it’s nearly all dog bedding—for the single, diamond-bright reason that it’s the farthest corner from the malignly enchanted kitchen door.^^  The wind that’s come with our two blizzards however is the ripping-the-roof-off kind, and my bedroom is on the first floor.^^^  I, however, have no inclination to leave my well-duveted, extra-blankets-for-security bed to crush myself into a corner of the cold, hard bathtub, which would be approximately the farthest point from the bedroom window making that noise.

^ Sic.  Maybe seven.  But tall enough to pass the home check when you’re trying to adopt a dog.  More on this later.  At the moment there is no happy ending in prospect.

^^ Darkness used to be the more bothered.  I regret to relate that in his absence Chaos has decided to take up this mantle alone.

^^^ Second floor, if you’re an American.

%%  And the day before we turned honorary Norwegian I was in the greenhouse frantically potting up all the blasted little plug plants that had arrived in the post that day because it is, after all March, and this is southern England.  The indoor jungle gets a little extreme every winter because I’m stuffing all my geraniums in an insufficiency of windowsills, but I’ve been trying to get away from pot plants all over the tables as well, especially now that most of my office is in the kitchen, and the slow cooker is making stock or soup more days than it isn’t, it throws out almost as much heat as a mini Aga, and roast geranium isn’t on the menu.

And just to add insult to injury, the dahlia tubers in the attic are sprouting.

%%% I tend to go by the Ear Test.  If the ears are warm, the critter is warm.  If the ears are a bit chilly but the critter is obviously having a fabulous time, it’s probably fine.  If the ears are cold, the critter wears a coat, whether it wants to or not.^

^ Although I feel sorry for the West Highland Whites and Scotties and Cairns and so on wrapped up in thick padded jackets the minute the temperature falls below balmy.  Do your homework!  These dogs were bred for Scottish weather!

$ And I am not DRIVING anywhere in this stuff!!!!  Yes, I am from Maine, but they generally speaking have enough snow ploughs to keep the roads in order, which is not the case here, AND the locals generally know HOW to drive in this stuff which is not the case here, AND Ferdinand, my Subaru of radiant memory, had four wheel drive for comfort and reassurance.  And occasional use.

$$  Ooooh.  That was the sound of a lot of snow coming off a steeply-pitched roof and crashing into the garden.  On top of a lot of plants that are already in a bad mood.^  Unless it’s some really astonishingly inept burglars, in which case Chaos can go pee on them.  Chaos, being a middle-aged gentleman, pees a lot.

^ I am so not looking forward to finding out how many things have died, especially having been lulled into a state of gentle temperate anticipation after a lovely mild winter, and were busy putting out tender new shoots and buds and things.  I’ve got hyacinths flowering in the snow, although the bulbs will live to flower another year.

$$$ In southern England.  Have I mentioned IT’S SOUTHERN ENGLAND?

I have three dogs

 

Again, thanks for all the fish . . . I mean, thanks for all the ‘welcome back’s and ‘we’ve missed you!s’ and the ‘we’re so glad you’re all right’s.*  But the last one I’m afraid I need to take some issue with.  Define ‘all right’.

2017 was another shitty year.  I said shitty.

Peter died the end of 2015.

I spent most of 2016 falling apart.  That’s the bottom line about why the blog dwindled away as much as it did.  It was just too sodding difficult to keep the blog voice going, and there’s a limit to the amount of crying and throwing up in public that I’m willing to do.**

2017 had some other sucky issues*** and current ongoing dramas include that Peter’s will has still not yet proved/cleared/exploded in the faces of all the idiot bureaucrats who are endlessly holding up the show. 

But . . .

Let’s get this over with.

I have three dogs:  two hellhounds and a hellterror.  The hellhounds are litter brothers, Darkness and Chaos, seven-eighths whippet and one-eighth deerhound.  They look like slightly bigger, slightly sturdier whippets—they’re also entire—unneutered—which also contributes to their being a little bigger and heavier.  Darkness is steel grey, not quite black;  Chaos is fawn.  Pavlova, known as Pav, is a mini bull terrier.  She looks just like a bull terrier, which is not surprising because that’s what she is, but she’s a tri-colour and little, and so nobody recognises her.  Except as a force to be reckoned with.

I have three dogs.  One of them is a ghost.

Darkness died the end of last September.

And no, I’m not all right.  The hellhounds to a great extent got me through Peter’s last horrible months in the care home after the second stroke.  I took them with me any day that I wasn’t taking Peter out somewhere, and they developed quite a following among both staff and residents.%  And . . . five years ago we were a family of five.  Now we’re a family of three:  or three and two ghosts.  I was so not ready to lose anybody else so soon.

Darkness had cancer, but that’s not what killed him.  That’s part of what made it quite so awful.  He was diagnosed last winter:  an ‘ulcerating mast cell tumour’ which the vet said doesn’t usually metastasize, so what you see is probably what there is.  So after the vet more or less wrote him off I pulled all my homeopathic and alt-health books off the shelves and bolted together a Heath-Robinson contraption of a protocol. . . .

The thing is, the tumour shrank.  Darkness was still an old dog with cancer, but he was getting some of his strength and interest in life back.  Some of his twinkle.  Some of his sense of humour.  He had never lost his pleasure in lying in a many-legged heap on the sofa, so we did a lot of that.  We went for a country walk every day, not just boring town pavement, even if it was only fifteen minutes at an amble.  Just before the end he was up to half an hour, occasionally forty minutes, at an amble-plus.  A brisk amble.  And then, suddenly, he hit the wall and was dead in two days.  Renal failure.%%

Shock.  Shock.  Shock.  Grief.

I’ve been afraid Chaos would pine and follow him—they were inseparable for a little over eleven years, and Darkness was boss dog, although he wore it lightly.  But the vet says that usually only happens when the grieving dog doesn’t have a strong connection to the owner . . . which is not the case here.  I’m not sure who is attached to whose hip.  But I think Chaos is okay.  As okay as either of us is in the circumstances.  Of course every time he sighs or moves from one bed to another%%% I catch my breath.  Whereupon Pav rolls out and does cartwheels.

And yes, I still have friends and stuff to do with my life—including getting the blog shtick going again.$  I still have two hellbeasts to hurtle.  But I miss my Darkness.  And my Peter.

* * *

* I can seriously do without the on line pharmacies—there’s one that’s posting me about 1,000,000 times a day and doesn’t take being binned or spammed as a valid request to GO AWAY.  And I’m absolutely not interested in the beautiful Asian ladies with small feet [sic] or the double-penetration sex toys^.  ARRRRRRRGH.  Something else for poor Blogdad to sort out next week.

^ I’m not interested in single penetration sex toys either, just to be clear about this.

** For which you are grateful, whether you know it or not.

*** Including technological ones which is why I now have a Blogdad instead of a Blogmom.  Blogmom had been pointing out for some time in her best patient voice, a necessary attribute when dealing with me unfortunately, that the current state and structure of the blog was increasingly unsafe and unwieldy, and Changes Needed to Be Made which meant that I had to, ugh, make decisions, ugh, and eventually it became clear that it would be easier if the whole screaming enterprise was tied up in bedsheets and stabilised with heavy gardening twine and a few padlocks and hauled over here.  So much for the global neighbourhood internet thing.^  Migrating me across the Atlantic became a plan especially when it turned out that Raphael, our Computer Angel for twenty years^^, is DANGEROUSLY INSANE, I mean, was willing to take over my on line life.^^^

^ Which is so bogus.  In the first place . . . BLAH.  I have just deleted my rant on economic equality, ie the—global—lack of it , and how internet providers only provide in areas where people are going to pay them for it.  So let’s just say that even in crassly well-off areas like here if someone lives on a tiny cul de sac with only four houses on it—plus the two corners, but they face the main road—BT can’t be frelling bothered updating the wiring, and while this town has SUPERFAST BROADBAND!!!!!!, we’re that tiny black hole in the map of the area.

Aggravated by reading TALKING TO MY DAUGHTER ABOUT THE ECONOMY, even if I have the chutzpah to doubt some of his premises LIKE I KNOW ANYTHING ABOUT THE ECONOMY.  Well, but . . .

I am proud to lower the level.  But I spend all the money my neighbours spend on Louis XIII de Remy Martin Black Pearl Grand Champagne Cognac and new cars on organic food, so it’s not like I don’t know I’m one of the lucky ones.#

# At least if I finally get a book done before my money runs out.  I try not to think about this.

And yes, it has occurred to me that I need to get some information up on the opening screen of the New Blog about the fact that I write books, for any passing stranger who stumbles onto it and thinks, Robin McKinley’s Blog?  And I should care why?  Yes, it should have occurred to me BEFORE.  Well, it didn’t.  I’m like this.

^^ Nearly.  His first job out of school was with the firm that was catering to Peter’s and my first essays into computer ownership.#  And when the firm split up, Peter and I may have been/may be clueless about computers but we weren’t/aren’t## stupid, and we went with Raphael.  The rest is history.

# AAAAAAAAAAAAAUGH.  I know, you could see that coming.

## You will have to get used to the idea that Peter is still a live presence in my life, even if his mortal remains are buried in the churchyard around the corner.  I’m not going to go on with the weren’t/aren’t.

^^^ There’s no accounting.  I assume—have been assuming for twenty years—that he thinks I’m fun to watch.  Shtick I can do.#  It’s technology that defeats me.

# ::waves::

% I was always going to take Pav in one day, and never quite did.^  I was a mess, and she was too volatile—not her fault—indeed as I’ve come to recognise, and knew even then, the whole manic bullie thing is laid on partly to cheer the locals up.  Chaos and I have cause to be grateful lately, although she also feels we need protecting in our weakened state, which means offering to ingest any and all other dogs that dare to cross our path.  Except other sighthounds, of course, who are invited home for tea and biscuits.

^ Peter left so soon.

%% Which if I’d been a vet I might have seen coming . . . ?  I knew about the muscle wastage, and how hard it was to keep any weight on him, but I thought that was old dog with cancer.  Hindsight is always 20/20.

%%% The kitchen floor of this tiny cottage is basically all dog bedding.  But this is where we spend all our time, at least in the winter, because that’s where the lovely warm Aga is.

$ I hope. And yes, I know, many many people have it much worse than I do.  And if any of them are reading this blog post . . . I am very very sorry, and I hope you climb out of it, and back into the sunlight again.

Oh. Um. Hi.

 

I wasn’t actually expecting anyone to notice right away that I was semi-back on line.  So to begin with, thank you all you (real) people* who posted in response to last night’s brief appearance.  It’s been a long time coming, the new blog, and then it happened and I didn’t realise it had happened, but I got an email come-on from WordPress saying, hey!  Why don’t you log in!, and I thought, ha ha ha, since my tech karma has been even worse than usual . . . most of the last year.**  Or possibly century.  My sense of time is not good.  A long time.

Of course I had an interesting time, logging in, and after I had given up and was going to talk to Blogdad*** in the morning, I had this new email**** offering me a WordPress password reset link.  In a fit of painful hilarity I clicked on it . . . and it let me do it.  So, lightheaded with a previously unknown rapture, I thought I’d try posting a few words because that certainly wouldn’t work.

. . . Some things don’t change.  I’m now up to and over my old-standard post length having told you a very long story in the footnotes.

Thanks for reading.

* * *

* And all you bots, go away.  Presumably there is a blocking add-on on the to-do list^ somewhere.  Meanwhile, if I inadvertently delete anyone real—and two comments have come in twice, and I’ve deleted one of each of these, but if this bounces back to the sender as refused and rejected I’m very sorry but I haven’t deleted you, I’ve only exorcised your doppelganger.

^ Not my to-do list!  Blogdad’s [sic]!

It’s a long story.  I’m coming to it.

** For example.  The faithful Pooka, who is a 4s, and therefore something like six years old, which is beyond Methuselah in iPhone terms, has been failing.  She has totally earned her retirement, and I wish all my tech were this reliable.^  I waffled exceedingly about how to replace her, assuming it would be a 7 or an 8 and did I want the same little-pocket size or go up to the large-palm size, and of course I was going to stay with the little one because the whole bigger-harder-faster-more thing is bogus and a pain in the rear.  And then Hannah^^ said that she wished she’d got the bigger size and I thought, oh.  Crap.  It was at about this interesting point of nonprogress that I started reading reviews of the X.  I never meant even to read reviews of the X, but as soon as you start googling iPhones, the X appears and sits on your chest like an incubus.  And maybe all the reviewers have the same contact lens prescription or maybe Apple slipped them all the same eyeball enhancer in their beer at the launch event, but there is a curious unanimity that the screen on the X is a Significant Leap Forward, in fact the First Significant Leap Forward in screen fabulousness since the iPhone was first unveiled to a breathless world.  And I want Pooka Mach 2 to last as long as the original did.^^^  And I don’t want Hannah, the next time she’s here, to say, oh, you should have got the X!  The screen is amazing! 

So I bought the X.  It only took a third mortgage and half of a fourth.^^^^

Raphael, Computer Angel,% set her up for me, making soothing noises%% as he did so, and slipping so softly out the front door afterward that the Pooka 2 didn’t immediately notice that she was alone with me.  AND IT WAS A FRIDAY AFTERNOON.  All went . . . um . . . reasonably well . . . um.  At first.  And then I tried to buy something.  Maybe Apple was satiated with the price of the X herself and thought having fun was worth a few pence of app sales.

The App Store wouldn’t let me buy anything.

I found myself in an endless loop of putting in my password and being sent to my Verification Page, which is the same frelling verification page I’ve had for six years, and when I ‘confirmed’ it . . . I was back at the putting-in-my-password screen.  And I put in my password, and then . . .

This went on for MOST OF THE WEEKEND.  There were occasional excursions into supporting documentation like the pop up that said, We won’t charge you till you buy something!  I’m only frelling here because I’m trying to buy something. 

Finally, staring at the (*&^%$£”!!!!!!!!!!! verifrellingcation page for the 1,000,000,000,000th time with hot eyes and smoke coming out of my ears . . . I stripped everything out of the thrice-blasted form and put it all back in again EXACTLY THE SAME WAY IT HAD BEEN BEFORE.

And I went and tried to download my rhyming dictionary.  Which actually tried to download . . . briefly . . . I GOT ALL EXCITED . . . and then it stopped.

And there was the verification page again.  AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAUGH.

So staring with even hotter eyes, and the dense red-streaked black smoke boiling out of my ears was definitely contributing to the national air pollution level, I noticed that the frellingfrellingfrellingFRELLING page had REMOVED the three back-of-card confirmation numbers.  Which I had just put in, with everything else, about thirty seconds ago.

So I put them back in.

AND IT WORKED.  I COULD BUY STUFF.  TELL ME WHY IT WORKED.

No, better not.  I probably couldn’t take the strain.

^ Not that she hasn’t had her little ways.  But you only say nice things at retirement parties.

It was however difficult to find a gold watch small enough.  And we had to put her on a stepladder to be visible over the podium.

^^ My BFF.   I haven’t figured out about the seamless segue from the old blog, which is to say there isn’t going to be a seamless segue from the old blog.  So one of the prominent seams with raggedy stitches is that I’ll probably remind everyone of regular recurring blog characters.  Hannah is a good place to start.

For getting on forty years.  EEEEEEEP.

^^^ Never make plans concerning technology!  Never.  Make.  PLANS!

^^^^ The price is obscene.  But the way they have you by the throat is just the way it doodahdoodahBADLANGUAGEdoodahdoodah is.  WHICH? magazine reviewed the X and said it was pretty well as wonderful as its reputation, except for the price, but not to worry because some of its rivals are less expensive and nearly as good.  No they freaking aren’t.  In the first place you have to go Android, and I’ve already made that choice once and I have a very small brain and I am NOT going to learn a whole flapdoodling new flapdoodling system, thank you very much . . . and in the second place the equivalent Androids aren’t that much cheaper.

And then the so-called choices Apple does give you:  storage size, for example.  You can have something the size of a plastic bucket a kiddie takes down to the seaside to pile sand in . . . or you can have something the size of a planet.  Jupiter, say.  Or Kepler-1647.  Nothing in between.   So how many people are going to spend what amounts to the GNP of Brazil on a piece of tech and only be able to keep a few handfuls of sand in it?  Even for a savings of seven pounds sixty-three?  NOT VERY MANY.

% Speaking of important recurring blog characters.  RAPHAEL.  COMPUTER ANGEL.  MAKE A NOTE.

%% Although I’m not sure if these were for me or the iPhone.  The spells tech wizards and Computer Angels perform to get their rabble to behave are beyond mere human comprehension.

** Most of my email isn’t working.  For example.  Did I say anything about worse-than-usual tech karma?  Yes.

*** Hee hee hee hee

**** Sometimes it works.

???

Oh wow whee.  I’m almost live.  Oh to have a blog again, now that April’s (almost) here.