Robin McKinley's Blog, page 92
June 9, 2012
KES, 17
SEVENTEEN
I backed up a semi-paralytic step or two so the door wouldn’t bang into me as Cthulhu squelched out.
The door opened.
. . . About an inch, squealed like a trophy wife at the sight of a diamond bigger than her head, and stuck. Cthulhu, still invisible behind it, gave it another shove and it opened another inch. Maybe an inch and a half.
The suspense was going to kill me before Cthulhu had the chance.
A third wallop from the far side that made it shudder—hey, that’s my floor you’re destroying, even if you are a dark noisome thing from the immemorial depths—and the corner of the door clawed a fresh mark in the floor and flew open. . . .
Not Cthulhu. A monstrous metal robot thing with . . .
No. Wait.
It was a dwarf, carrying a metal stepladder. He was wearing jeans and a workbelt and his hands and face were smeared with dusty grime from the cellar. He was about four and a half feet tall with dark curly hair and he was as startled to see me as I was to see him. Possibly he wasn’t expecting an elder thing from beyond the stars however, and was therefore less profoundly relieved than I was, but he was still clearly startled. He stopped where he caught sight of me, at the top of the stairs.
The dwarf regained his composure first. He said, “Sorry—are you looking for something?”
“Er,” I answered, and was horribly embarrassed to discover that my voice was wobbly. I cleared my throat and tried again. “Er. I’m—er—waiting for Hayley. The realtor who’s showing me this house. She’s out in front on her phone. She told me”—I was embarrassed all over again at the way I sounded, like a little kid insisting she has permission to rollerskate in the living room—“it was okay if I went in and looked around.”
“Oh!” The light went on. “Oh, I’m sorry—you’re the new renter, are you?”
Blast and hurricanes. Gossip doesn’t half travel fast, does it? I haven’t said I’m renting it yet. Not out loud, anyway. “Er,” I said again. Since I was clearly on a roll doing the intelligent response thing I went on: “Well, that’s the plan. Sort of. I guess.” I hesitated. He might be a little vertically challenged but there was nothing meek or self-effacing about the look in his black eyes. I noticed he had long thick curly eyelashes. Gelasio had long thick curly eyelashes. Stop that. I plunged on: “I’m from the city, and I—er—decided I wanted to live in Cold Valley, but I’m not sure what I’m looking for.” I looked around. Table. Window. Sunlight. A frond of something tapped against the glass. Triffids. “This house is bigger than I had in mind, but I want to get a dog, and the other house Hayley offered doesn’t allow pets.” We would pass over in silence the mauve siding, the yard-free house, and the one with the whooshing pine trees. I had my mouth open to say the next stupid thing and thought, you’re babbling. Shut up.
The dwarf had narrowed his large black curly-lashed eyes thoughtfully while I was talking and seemed to be giving me some kind of careful once-over. This did not add to my sense of security and having-a-clue-ness. “Well, you’ll do, I expect,” he said, and while I was thinking what the hell?, he stepped out into the hallway and set down the ladder and a toolbox I hadn’t noticed he was carrying. “Yep—it’s big enough, true that. Plenty of room for dogs. You say you’re from the city—you sure you’ll like living up here? Gets mighty quiet, this place.” He moved toward me and I cringed out of the way as if he were waving a bad-tempered enchanted sword. (Flowerhair had got in trouble more than once when Doomblade recognised an old enemy from one of its previous, more heroic, bearers.) But he was only heading for the kitchen sink. He hooked a stepstool I also hadn’t noticed (I know authors are supposed to be observant. It had been a hard few weeks) out from under the table with one foot, climbed up on it, and began to wash his hands. There was soap in the soap dish and a dingy-looking towel hanging on a hook. More basic furnishings. There would be a quarter of a roll of toilet paper in the bathroom and a disintegrating can of Comet under the sink.
Yeah, I thought. Mighty quiet. And there are all those crickets. And things. Yeep. Okay, this is why I’m getting a dog. If there are funny noises it’s the dog. Out loud I said: “Yeah. I know. Theoretically. I’ve never lived in the country. But it’s why I want a dog.” I suddenly got unparalytic enough to think: Wait a minute. Who is this guy? What is he doing in my cellar? (Oops—there’s that ‘my’ word again.) And washing his hands in my sink? And keeping his stepstool under my table? Well, the landlord’s table. Where was Hayley? Maybe Yog-Sothoth and Cthulhu had got her. With the dwarf at the sink I had a clear run for the front door, at least if I didn’t mind vaulting over a toolbox. . . .
June 8, 2012
Stuff happening
I am way too tired. Arrrgh. And there are, by this evening, clearly germs or other malign entities involved. Yesterday I was just thinking YOU’RE DOING TOO MUCH AGAIN YOU STUPID WOMAN WILL YOU PLEASE CONSIDER YOUR BANK BALANCE* AND CONCENTRATE ON SHADOWS? Niall had a call-out while we were ringing handbells last night so I even had the opportunity to pack it in earlier than usual and GO TO BED, but did I? Don’t be silly. Of course not.** Unnnh. And I have that wedding to ring tomorrow, in East Timor, supposing I can find it.***
Supposing Wolfgang is running. Hey, guess what. Two hours after I paid the bill . . .
My voice lesson was on Wednesday this week because of the Jubilee. And it was at Nadia’s home in Rumbelow instead of Sorghumlea as usual. Rumbelow is farther. I was allowing lots of time for post-Jubilee, having-taken-one-more-day-tottering-home traffic. I had, however, been blithely driving Wolfgang all over the landscape and he had been starting INSTANTLY every time. You see where this is going. I threw my music on the front seat and climbed behind the wheel. And Wolfgang didn’t start. AAAAAAAAUGH.
Usually he changes his mind/cogs/pistons/ points/little twirly thing that engages with the engine/whatever fairly soon. So I sprang out again, opened the bonnet, and started fanning wildly, since it’s usually to do with the engine being warm.
Ten minutes later he started. I slammed the bonnet shut, leaped back behind the wheel, floored the freller, and soared off, like something out of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang or possibly one of Orville and Wilbur’s less successful early attempts. The funny thing was, after this lead-in, I should have had no voice at all for Nadia, especially in her tiny home studio which is almost entirely lined with resonance-sucking books and sheet music, and a resonance-caroming metal filing cabinet for variety. But there’s a kind of freedom in knowing that you can’t sound your less-than-brilliant best and there’s also considerable freedom in having very little to lose. I’m officially learning When Daisies Pied † but I’m also pursuing my own line through the trad folk backlist and I started singing Blow the Wind Southerly as soon as I got my F back, because it’s been a favourite all my life. Since before I heard the Kathleen Ferrier recording, indeed, which is pretty much the world’s earworm for that song, which is a pity really because while it’s a gorgeous version it shouldn’t be so famous or so authoritative that it stops the rest of us in our tracks. Folk songs are for us folk, you know? So I took it in with me this week, hoping that Nadia might be wheedled into listening to it and she said immediately, let’s hear it. And then she said it was a good choice for my voice†† and started making me pay attention. Feh. Okay, this is what I go to her for. But she managed to harry and chivvy me into making some kind of real connection with the song and for about half a dozen bars I sounded like someone else. In a good way. Someone I wish I sang more like more often. I also sounded almost something like a proper mezzo: you know how you can tell, listening to two voices singing exactly the same line, which one is the high soprano and which is the mezzo—it’s weight and resonance and stuff. I’m not a proper anything, but I’m probably a mezzo if I am anything. And for half a dozen bars I had a little of the right reverb.
It went away again as soon as I got home, of course. I’m also working on a song Oisin suggested which is so far beyond me it’s not funny††† but I love it and it’s a huge, if somewhat complicated, hoot and dripping with irresistible possibilities for characterisation, but to hook into any of that you have to engage. And to engage you have to be able to hold the frelling tune as well as losing your sixty years’ relentless self-consciousness—I keep thinking that the difficulty of carrying the tune should ease the self-consciousness because you’re having to concentrate so hard, but all that really happens is that for every fragment of musical success the self-consciousness rushes in and plugs the hole. Self-consciousness hates a vacuum. Anyway. I came home from Nadia‡, raced to the piano and pulled out the other song and . . . yessssss . . . for another half-dozen bars I could hear what I would be trying to do with it if I could. This did, of course, entirely go away today with Oisin siiiiiiiiiigh, but I was even kind of expecting that and had decided that I wanted to get the Horrible First Go with Accompanist over with so I could try to, you know, focus. I’ll do it better next week. The question is how much better I ever will get.‡‡
And further on the subject of how much better I ever will get: Wednesday night at the abbey. I rang Grandsire Triples—not too badly. I am genuinely beginning to get my eye in for that frelling appalling ringing chamber. There is something very weird about the rhythm as well as the non-circular circle‡‡‡. But I am beginning to get it. Which is not the same thing as saying that I won’t ever have another disastrous evening when I can’t ring ANYTHING. I will. But . . . I’m in a twelve and a half steps forward for twelve and a quarter steps back situation, and this is good. But the best was when Scary Man called out: Plain Bob Triples for Robin. This is another of those line-crossing things—I hope. When you’re a visitor, you’re asked what you want to ring, and the abbey is going to be used (wearily) to people wanting to practise the dumb end of upper-level stuff—stuff on eight bells, for example, like Grandsire or Plain Bob Triples, which is barely ringing at all to a hot ringer, but it’s a big deal for us hoi polloi, and hard to get elsewhere very easily. So I came asking to ring Grandsire Triples. I’ve filled in a few times for simple-minded stuff on six bells, but I’m still visitor status. But I’ve been showing up for those Sunday afternoon rings, when they do tend to be short-handed, and generally trying to be a good useful willing little nebbish, you know? And Scary Man calling me to practise something I haven’t asked for is—maybe—a kind of taking me on . . .
I hope.
* * *
* Although, being menopausal, I don’t have to eat^, and hellhounds would probably be grateful to be let off the nuisance of food, I still have to buy books and yarn. And tickets to next year’s Met Live. And mealworms.
^ Peter gets anxious when I say things like this. Husbands. Feh.
** Although I had help in the not going to bed. Chaos didn’t want his final theoretically low-key tuck-you-in-with-a-nice-snack meal so (a) I stayed up later performing all the known Food Rituals in a (fruitless^) attempt to change his mind and then (b) when I finally couldn’t stay upright any longer went to bed brooding about today’s prospective canine mayhem . . . which was duly accomplished. Dogs. Whose idea was dogs. Mayhem seems to have been of shorter duration than sometimes, however, so I’m going to pretend (a) that it is over and (b) that it’s a good omen for whatever is wrong with me.
^ Although dogs don’t generally eat fruit, I’ve known quite a few who do
*** There’s been a conversation on the forum about Google maps. I wouldn’t trust a Google map to tell me how to find my butt with both hands. I have to assume that this area^ is unusually bad or ‘Google maps’ would have the same connotations as ‘South Sea bubble’ and ‘Bernie Madoff is good with money’. Reporting errors, as has been suggested, seemed like a good, sensible, community-minded idea the first time I heard it, but I feel that there is a base line responsibility that has not been met. It’s like you’ve agreed to sew on a button and someone hands you a sheep.
^ Hampshire, I mean, not my rear end
† Thomas Arne http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sMrk633pI8c
†† ::Beams:: I’m clueless, you know. I just sing stuff that I like. And I love a lot of the standard folk rep.
††† And I haven’t told Nadia because I’m afraid she’d have kittens. I’ll wait till after she’s had the baby.
‡ Wolfgang having started again
‡‡ Siiiiiiiiigh . . .
‡‡‡ We rang a touch of little old plain bob doubles for Aglovale to practise calling, on the front six with me on the three. And the six front bells are literally a queue: straight as a dressage whip, with just that bit of curl at the tip. Good grief. You have to ring by memory, by ear, and by developing monocular vision, like a robin or a horse. I’m not good at any of these things. And the eye-walling is complicated by the fact that in glasses your peripheral vision isn’t very good to begin with.
June 7, 2012
Mostly KES, all forum
jjmcgaffey
I know I keep moaning about being an introvert with a privacy fetish . . . nearly every night, and usually for over 1000 words. Cognitive dissonance alert.
This was a true LOL for me… the reason it’s a LOL is that I can do the same thing, though I don’t blog (yet).
You’re leaving out the huge, central, critical fact about this blog: it wasn’t my idea. There is no way in any of the six hundred and thirty-seven dimensions presently known to science that I would have started a blog voluntarily. I started a blog because my agent told me I had to, and my publisher was back there saying, if you want us to go on paying attention to you, a blog would be a very good thing.** I then had to find a way to do it that I would do it. And 1000-plus words on Days in the Life* every oven-frelling-roasted with a side of snarling night, is the way I can do it, and keep doing it. For better and worse. With occasional breaks for roses and baby robins. And guest posts. And now KES.
NO FAIR. I’m having to remind myself to breathe – I was literally holding my breath from the second “there was a funny noise”, and now it’s going to be days before I find out what it is!
Cliffhangers. Mutter, mutter…
Mwa hahahahaha. I have to get some fun out of this, you know. All work and no play makes Jill . . . cranky.
mockorange
I’ve just re-read the whole story so far in one fell swoop and am happy to report that it reads just as well, if not even better, at the second time of asking. Always an acid test for me with fiction.
Oh dear. Well, I’m (very) glad and all, of course, but . . . remember this isn’t quite Fiction As We Know It, Jim. There’s no planned story arc, no development, no climax, no denouement. It’s One Thing After Another And We’ll Find Out Where We’re Going By Going There.*** I have some ideas. Cathy also has some ideas, if I could get my act together a little faster. Siiiiiiigh. Peter and I were going to write four books of short stories about water, fire, earth and air elemental spirits, right?† And I wrote SUNSHINE, DRAGONHAVEN, CHALICE and PEGASUS instead. The frelling PEGASUS TRILOGY started as a short story for AIR. ::extensive whimpering::
I’d better not let Peter and Cathy get together.
But anyway. Over the long haul, KES will be more of a meander than, um . . . fiction. And I’m not sure that reading 5,692,412 eps in a row will be a good idea.
PamAdams
Look out, Kes, it’s the house from Sunshine!
This is one of the problems with having been writing stories for a while—you run out of first uses of what you might call The Big Simple Stuff. I like lakes. I like houses. I like big old ex-grand ramshackle houses near large bodies of water. And aside from other crucial differences, Kes’ house is a lot smaller, less grand, and farther away from its lake.
Serenityruler
. . . did I pick up on a reference to the Yellow Wallpaper?
No. JANE EYRE. However, this is a good opportunity to remind you that the author isn’t always right. She can be pulling/using/responding to stuff she’s not consciously aware of pulling/using/responding to. The whole process of turning the live, out-there story into something on paper/screen is very mysterious, often most of all to the person who’s doing it. And as I’ve also said before, the reason the Story Council tries to match up its stories with its authors is because the story can only use what its chosen author can give it. I am driven mad by stories with critters in which the critters behave nothing like the way critters behave, because the author doesn’t know his/her critters. If you can’t get it right, don’t tell the story. Everybody makes mistakes and everybody bites off more than they can chew—and this is a good thing, it makes you try harder—but if you really don’t know a cat from a kangaroo, stick to something you do know, or get some coaching from a cat-owning friend.††
Another way of saying this is that a carnivorous story is going to dwindle away into a poor sad flimsy thing if it’s given to a vegetarian author.
Anyway. I loved The Yellow Wallpaper, which is totally and utterly a classic, but that’s not what I was consciously thinking of here. But you could be right, because I’ve certainly read it—and been rattled by it. But she doesn’t eat the wallpaper, does she? Or does she?
mockorange
^ She finds herself wondering what Kes and Maggie would think of each other.+
+ Or the Silent Wonder Dog and Mongo. Snork.
I am now overcome with a desperate yearning for fiction in which SWD and Mongo team up to save the world. Or, you know, team up to save Kes from scary crickets, rustling trees, and whatever may be in the basement. No doubt it would be unrealistic to hope for a guest appearance from Mongo in Kes aka New Thing, what with Mongo being the co-star of upcoming published fiction, but in my head ….
Well. Anything is possible. Jasper Fforde has proved this conclusively.††† And to the extent that I’m planning anything, I’m planning to do some boundary-crossing, preferably scandalous. I’m ten eps ahead in the writing and can’t remember which bits show up where, but I’ve told you already you’re at least going to get the first chapter of the first Flowerhair book, haven’t I? And I’m pretty sure Kes (who is about to turn forty as I’m about to turn sixty) read Robin McKinley when she was an odd bookish kid.
Aaron
GENERAL JAMES B. CABELL HIGH SCHOOL
General? Now that’s an alternate universe.
FINALLY. I THOUGHT NO ONE WAS GOING TO PICK UP ON ANYTHING. Now I am myself hopeless at picking up references, but I am a little startled that no one has noticed . . . [mrrrrmgglmph].
KatydidNl
“…A member of that family owns y—I mean, the one you are looking at, but he lives in Europe,” (she said disdainfully) “and I have never met him.”
Heh heh heh. Anybody else want to take a bet that Kes — and therefore by proxy, also WE — will be getting to meet him, sooner or later?
::Whistles::
C’mon, Kes. This is definitely the house for you.
Kes, while a kind of alternate me, is not a perfect projection. She grew up in New York City, and I grew up a Navy brat. And I like whooshing pine trees. But this is the house for Kes. In spite of the Thing in the Cellar. Hee hee hee hee hee hee hee.
Mick
Can I exclaim from the rooftops how excited I am that she stole my daughter’s name as her main character?
Oh good. I’ve been slightly braced for someone to want to punch me out. I like Kes and Kestrel, as I’ve said before. I think I’ve also said before that various well-meaning friends tried to persuade me that there were other suitable birds and bird-names and I kept saying NO. SHE’S A RAPTOR. Also, kestrels are fabulous. Just . . . fabulous.
(speaks the proud mother of Kestrel Marie…whose last name is much more pronounceable than this character
MacFarquhar isn’t actually hard to say. It’s hard to spell.
…and whose name is shortened kindly to “Kes” as well).
It’s a good name. I think. Even if it wasn’t short for Kestrel. Kes. Whoever she is, I like her.
So, naturally, I love the story
Oh good. ::Beams::
Katsheare
. . . And reading Hayley, I now realize that, for me at least, I no longer envy or hate her, but pity is there. What does one sacrifice to be that put together?
About Hayley: MWA HA HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA. Heh heh heh heh heh heh. Heh heh. Heh. —And I agree, by the way. About the Business Superwoman look.
So. Seriously. LOVING. New Thing.
Oh good. ::Beams more::
Mirkat
I was so excited when she described the downstairs because it is EXACTLY how the house I grew up in is (room to the right, stairs/hallway in the middle, house-long living space to the left). But then I realized that probably LOTS of house from the turn of the (last) century are built like that. And mine didn’t have a tower, of course, nor a massive porch. But at least I feel really connected to the story now.
I wasted a stupid amount of time looking for the right kind of shabby old-fashioned grandeur on line, and failed. But
http://oldhousedreams.com/2012/05/15/1891-queen-anne-merced-california/
http://travel.webshots.com/photo/2793423180039037642IjszPo
. . . if you jumbled these together, made them a lot smaller, and let them go, moderately gently, to wrack and ruin, Kes’ house is something like that.
* * *
* with footnotes
** The thing that makes me curl my lip slightly in hindsight is that five (?) years ago when I started the thing, not every author on the planet was blogging, contrary to rumour and the chivvying of agents and publishers. They are now. Or at least the ones that aren’t it’s like, you’re not? Really? What do you do with your time? —this last perhaps uttered with a certain violence.
Ray Bradbury didn’t blog.
*** Theodore Roethke said it better: I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow. I learn by going where I have to go.
† And we were hoping to do a fifth volume on time elementals. HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA.
†† Or a kangaroo-owning friend.
††† http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jasper_Fforde
June 6, 2012
KES, 16
SIXTEEN
I walked slowly down the long parlour toward the windows. The floor was gritty and unswept underfoot. Housecleaning. My favorite. Not. I hadn’t had to think about it for nearly twenty years, but I still had a vivid memory of mouse turds, cobwebs, cockroaches, and unidentified icky crap in my old East Village apartment. They didn’t have cockroaches in the country, did they? That’s one out of four. I didn’t think it was going to make up for a lack of 24-hour pizza delivery. Joe the Doorman’s food recommendations were superb. Joe the Doorman felt very, very far away. That was another world and another life. Where there had been a housekeeper and a gardener.
This garden was pretty much a jungle. My heart started to sink, changed its mind, and started to lift instead. This was going to be my garden. I’d have to learn what the hell I was doing, but I could do that. Probably. The penthouse garden had belonged to the gardener. We—which was to say Gelasio—were borne with slightly impatient tolerance because we (which was to say Gelasio) paid his salary. We were expected to sit out there on nice evenings with our glasses of champagne (Gelasio occasionally rebelled, and then we drank red wine) and admire his work, but if (as occasionally happened) I saw a blade of grass growing in one of the beds and pulled it out I felt guilty for interfering. (Enterprising stuff, grass. How it got to the penthouse garden of a building tall enough that the unaccustomed were prone to nosebleeds on the elevators I have no idea. But Central Park is full of mysteries, and perhaps these include tiny invisible rocket launchers for grass seed.)
I didn’t recognise much of what was back there in this Cold Valley garden. Probably triffids. And Yggdrasil. The garden had looked a lot tidier in the real estate flyer. Wonderful thing, Photoshop. But I was pretty sure there was plenty of lawn for Gus to mow.
I should look at the house. I’d already noticed that the parlour floor was old, wooden, uneven and needed sweeping. There was wainscoting around the walls and faded wallpaper above it. There were three wooden chairs sitting stiffly in front of the porch window around a medallion of rag rug. There was a fireplace. There was a rectangle of less-faded wallpaper above the fireplace where something had used to hang. I wondered if the less-faded wallpaper counted as part of the basic furnishing. I guess I wasn’t going to have any trouble finding space for my sofa.
The kitchen also faced the garden. I crossed the little corridor that ran from the front door and looked around the kitchen. There was a table. A good, big, solid, real kitchen table. The working surface was nearly two inches thick and the four legs were big round lathed things, like fat spindle banisters. You could do almost anything on that table. Dance the fandango. Groom your elephant. I’d got tired typing on the floor of Gelasio’s apartment, the last few days of my old life. My laptop would sit very well on this table, and I’d bring those stark wooden chairs in from the parlour, where they might look more comfortable around it. Especially after I bought cushions for the extremely forbidding seats. I’d ask Hayley for directions to the mall. I’d also need, in the absence of 24-hour pizza delivery, food.
And a rental car. The van was due to go home tomorrow. I’d have to face turning on my phone and my laptop tonight, and check for messages, like from whichever large shambling young man I’d be handing the van keys over to, and what time.
The kitchen was huge—not as huge as the main parlour, but still huge enough to hold everything I owned. Maybe I could just kind of camp in here. I’d have to find the bathroom at some point. When had I decided I was taking this mansion? Even the little two-bedroom house was bigger than I needed. Maybe I should rethink the cabin. It had only one bedroom. And it didn’t say anything about no pets. No. There were whooshing pine trees around the cabin. I didn’t like whooshing pine trees.
. . . There was a funny noise.
Stop it, MacFarquhar. There is enough weirdness going on in your life, you do not need to be making up funny noises. . . .
. . . There was a funny noise.
Shuffle. Scuttle. SNAP.
Oh, blood and heresy, there really is a funny noise.
Scraaaaape.
I turned around slowly. The adrenaline had blasted through my body so fast that, on top of the woozy moment when I stepped over the front threshold, I was feeling slightly ill. I was facing a (closed) door at the kitchen end of the corridor which, I guessed, led to the cellar. Behind the door was where the funny noise was coming from.
Clink. Shuffle. Scrape.
Probably not attack mushrooms. They didn’t clink much. Where was Hayley? Wasn’t that an awfully long phone call she was having? She was in the pay of Yog-Sothoth and had set me up as a sacrifice. . . .
SNAP.
I jumped. I jumped away from the cellar door. The cellar door was between me and the front door, beyond which was Hayley, unless she had driven away hastily after leaving me for Yog-Sothoth. The noise was now coming up the steps. This time I jumped toward the cellar door—I don’t suppose there was a bolt on this side?
No, of course there wasn’t a bolt on this side.
Scraaaaaaaape. Thud. Whatever it was, it was now at the top of the stairs.
Fascinated, I watched the doorknob turning. . . .
June 5, 2012
The Jubilee ends in more rain
It’s sheeting. I’m not complaining. I MUCH prefer deluges to hot—and the worst of hot and dry is the fact that you’re out there watering your garden constantly. Constantly. Especially if you have a little potted-plant problem. Especially if you have a little potted-plant problem and you’re a snob and prefer terracotta pots to plastic. Although I’m getting over this one by sheer force of . . . wanting to be able to do something besides water the garden in hot weather.
But today it meant we didn’t go to Wisley. Sigh. Wisley is the big flagship R[oyal] H[oticultural] S[ociety] garden in Surrey*, and not impossibly far from here, but far enough that I keep chickening out in case we get there and I realise I can’t drive home. Especially because you have to drive on the motorway**. There has been a rumour about a back way for years but no one has ever found it. And the rescue team sent out after the last expedition also disappeared. Wisley exists in a super-dimensional bubble surrounded by foaming toxic desert. Invisible foaming toxic desert. When we were still a two-driver family and still going up to London fairly often we used to make a loop for Wisley pretty regularly.*** That was a while ago. And now. Unh. But I have been having quite a good patch for driving and their roses will be coming out† so we had made plans to meet friends there today.††
Then the weather, which has not been kind to the four days of the Diamond Jubilee, decided it was going to rain some more today. That’s RAIN. None of the peekaboo doodah we’ve been having here lately††† but serious, sky-opening ‡ RAIN. I might have gone anyway because I was all primed for it, but Peter pointed out there were going to be a lot of people on the fourth day of their four-day holiday saying exactly the same thing, and the tea room, the glasshouse and the plant sales were going to be jammed with these determined-to-have-their-outing-so-we’ll-bring-our-life-preservers-what’s-the-problem? folk. Sigh. So we cancelled.
I was in the throes of a serious sulk‡‡ when Penelope rang and said that if we had cancelled Wisley due to meteorological inclemency she had a small alternative to offer. Very small: about three months old. Their youngest daughter lives in Mauncester and has lately produced her first baby. Possibly due to never having been in a position when I couldn’t give it back, I have retained my fondness for babies, and have expressed an interest in meeting Brunnhilde if the opportunity ever presented itself. Brunnhilde was on her first excursion to New Arcadia this afternoon.
So we went round to inspect. I can report her a very satisfactory baby, which is to say that I held her for quite a while and she (a) smiled and (b) didn’t throw up. ‡‡‡
Meanwhile . . . I’d booked my dogminder for this afternoon and I don’t like messing her around—especially since I seem to end up messing her around anyway—so she was still taking hellhounds out for a (wet) hurtle this afternoon. I got back to the cottage about the time I was expecting her to be returning. I am neurotic and I hate being at any of my/our three houses without my hellhounds.§ Well, Mavis hadn’t come back yet. Whimper. So I washed the dishes and put out some more mealworms for the robins and watered all my indoor plants and folded the laundry and listened to the silence§§ and . . . Mavis still wasn’t back with hellhounds. I started to feel Rather Anxious.
Forty minutes after I’d got back to the cottage I phoned her mobile. We’re on our way home now, she said. I’m only just back in signal range. We’ve been out in the wood beyond the Warm Upford common and I got lost. —This is wholly plausible, by the way. The common wood is mostly plantation, and the tree-harvesters are always rearranging the footpaths and you can find yourself . . . on the mythological back route to Wisley, trying to demaze back out of the wood again.§§§ Furthermore in these days of mobile phones, Warm Upford is a dead zone. It’s pretty interesting how quickly you assume you can rely on can useful technology: Mavis was quite freaked out by the fact that she hadn’t been able to phone for help.
But I have my hellhounds back. Whew.
And Niall and Gemma and I ran late, ringing handbells this evening, because our final touch, which we already didn’t have time for but it would break down in a minute or two anyway, ran twenty minutes and came out to rounds at the end. Yaay.#
* * *
* http://www.rhs.org.uk/gardens/wisley
** Any British person who wants to tell me the A3 is not a motorway can stick it in their ear. The A3 is a great big fast ugly scary road and as far as I care it is a motorway.
*** We had stopped for lunch and a stroll at Wisley the day we came home and discovered the World Trade Center going down in flames. Just by the way.
† You know the real reason it’s raining just now. My Souvenir de la Malmaison is trying to bloom. She’s in the cottage garden now cackling maniacally and turning into wet grey-brown wodges of mouldy, matted tissue paper. Sigh.
†† So Peter will have someone to talk to while I take notes on the roses.^
^ No, of course I’m not finished yet. Can’t you go have a cup of tea or something? What? Well, go have another cup of tea then.
††† If they’d had the Jubilee flotilla on our river they wouldn’t have got nearly so wet. Although it would have pissed the swans off. But almost everything pisses the New Arcadia swans off.
‡ rose-destroying
‡‡ Although it was not at all a bad thing that I was not doing extreme driving today. Siiiiiiigh. I’ve been pushing it the last couple of days and the quality of last night’s shatteredness was ominous, as was the getting out of bed this morning. Getting . . . what? Out . . . what? Unnnnnh.
‡‡‡ I don’t mind screaming tinies so much. The whole birth thing is a ratbag, I understand it takes a long time to become accustomed to the new system. It’s when they get old enough to look at you, and their faces break into an expression of disbelief and outrage before they start screaming, then I start feeling that boarding school till they’re about twenty-five is an optimal plan.
§ The positive way of looking at this is, you have your domestic fauna for company, right? So why shouldn’t you want them around? It’s what they’re for.
§§ Relative silence. There’s an awful lot of chirping going on in the garden. Mealworms! More mealworms! We want mealworms!
§§§ In one of my prior lives as a horse rider I used to get lost in these woods on horseback too.
# We wasted some time over tea and biscuits discussing how we’re supposed to pick up more tower recruits. The arcane-secrets-and-you-have-to-be-crazy aspect of bell ringing is amusing, but in the present day when we need more ringers I think it does us more disservice than service. But we’re at least one up in the recruit department. Katsheare from our very own forum has finally succumbed . . . to being belted about the head and ears with this very blog going on and on and on about bell ringing and is going to give it a yank herself. Yaaaaaaaay. And here is a really good debunking page that she posted the link to: http://allsaintswokinghambells.org.uk/AbRinging/Myths/Myths.html ^
^ Although I like the British understatement of ‘. . . even become quite addictive’. Snork. Also note: ‘The modern Church supports many activities that involve the community outside its own members.’ Yes. There are churches, and probably some of them have bell towers, which are only concerned with their own tithe-paying members, and there may even be some towers that only allow, which is also to say can afford only to allow, church members to ring the bells. Generally speaking it’s a much wider remit. I’m not a Christian, but I do believe in community.
I wouldn’t say that having a stay break, the bell topple over the wrong way and the ringer hanging on to the other end of the rope carried briskly toward the ceiling is vanishingly rare. It happened to me. (Urgent cries of: Let go! Let go!) I’d say that the important point is that while bells are big heavy objects and must be treated with complete and unvarying respect, accidents where anyone gets hurt really are vanishingly rare. (I was not hurt. A little startled, but not hurt. And someone else had broken the stay. But I was enough of a beginner still to need a stay—and the bell fell over backward through the cracked stay.)
And if you’re ringing down slightly faster than you can, it’s quite useful to allow yourself to be lifted tactfully off the floor by the weight of the swinging-down bell . . .
June 4, 2012
(B)ring the Jubilee*, continued
I rang three times in three different towers yesterday. I rang three times in three more (different) towers today. I am shattered. And I have handbells tomorrow evening and the abbey practise Wednesday. And handbells again Thursday. Also I have a novel to finish. I won’t be doing much gardening this week.**
I was halfway through tonight’s final ring when it occurred to me I was about to disassemble into my component atoms. It was our normal Monday night practise, except it was at the wrong tower, because the village had asked if we’d finish with a ring for their beacon-lighting***. I made it. Just. But today’s first tower was entirely my own fault. Yesterday after the quarter† Mandy was hustling for ringers for Pinnacle’s Jubilee fete this afternoon. Pinnacle doesn’t have its own band, so like New Arcadia covering when Old Eden wants its bells rung, Mandy, tower captain at neighbouring Trollhill, has to scrape round when Pinnacle wants some ringing. Trollhill doesn’t have many ringers itself, so Mandy usually has to scrape further afield. She looked at me and said possibly regretfully, it’s a long way to come from New Arcadia.
But I have history with Pinnacle. I rang my first quarter there, on the treble to bob doubles, with Rupert and his band prodding me through in the relentless way a master band can shove a beginner through whether she has a clue or not. I also rang in the Millennium there. It’s also a very beautiful, very Victorian—which is to say if high Victorian architecture brings you out in a rash you won’t like it—church, on the top of a hill, and with an unusually tall pointy spire that you can see from Canterbury††. Various Apollo astronauts noted the presence of a very tall spire-like structure emerging above a green hill in central southern England, although this didn’t get much press coverage, which is a pity, it might have got Pinnacle a few ringing recruits.††† And yesterday after the quarter I was on a serious high‡ so I said that I had a sentimental attachment to Pinnacle and if she was still short, I could come.
The nice thing about Pinnacle is how easy it is to find. You just set out in the right general direction and start scanning the skyline for spires. It’s also a lot closer than I was expecting—I don’t think I’ve rung there since I started ringing again six or seven years ago—so I had a nice comfy knit and admired the view while I was waiting for everybody else to show up.‡‡
Then I had to go home and try to squeeze some work in before rushing off to my next critical Jubilee ring. I’m sure it’s the work that’s making me so tired—not the ringing. One of the things I said to Niall on the way back from the final tower of the evening is that even after seven years I’m still so negligible a ringer that every different tower and every different bell in every tower takes me an effort of brain, will and muscle to adapt to—the clever ringers do it without even noticing they’re doing it. Sigh. But it’s been fun, the last two days. And I never did get those blisters.
* * *
* Are people still reading BRING THE JUBILEE? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bring_the_Jubilee It was an important book when I was a teenager discovering SF for the first time. I read it absorbedly—it was one of the first alternate-histories I’d read and I was all woooooooow—but I had mixed feelings about it and it didn’t survive one of my comparatively early culls, although I’m pretty sure it drifted back into ownership via garage sale at least once. It did leave a mark on my story-teller’s mind.
** But the baby robins hatched yesterday. Jubilee robins. They will grow up with a curious blue and white border to their red breasts and their songs will sound astonishingly like God Save the Queen. I’m putting out mealworms anyway.
*** This was supposed to happen across the country all at the same time like ringing all the bells all over the country was supposed to happen at the same time yesterday. It hasn’t quite worked out like that.
† !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
†† You may need binoculars.
††† Rant rant rant rant rant. Now it’s perfectly true that we need ordinary people to want bells rung but it makes me NUTS that there are so dispiritingly few of those ordinary people willing to put in the time to learn to ring themselves so that, for example, when their Jubilee fete wants some bell ringing it’s not an issue. I admit that serious method ringing is possibly the joy and sanctum of the dangerously cranky, but any fool can learn to handle a rope and ring call changes. And it’s such a nice noise.
‡ And I hadn’t even rung Grandsire Triples inside at the abbey yet. ::still beaming:: . . . Although I haven’t told you how I made a complete hash of ringing the treble to Grandsire Triples a little later. Poor Scary Man must have wanted to kill me. But I can tell you what went wrong: it was just one frelling thing too frelling many in a long adrenaline-heavy day. New Arcadia is a Grandsire Triples band: any time they’ve got enough people to ring it, they do. Grandsire is the only triples I’m at all accustomed to ringing the treble to. And I had just spent forty-five minutes less than two hours before this concentrating like mad to ring treble to plain bob triples. I’d then spent what remaining brain I had available ringing Grandsire Triples inside and shifting back to the treble was One Frelling Thing Too Frelling Many. It was still pretty embarrassing. Scary Man, by the way, is one of these absurd good ringers who shout, Listen!, when things are going less than well. As if this was ever useful to anyone but (possibly) another absurd(ly) good ringer. Yes! I can hear that it doesn’t sound right! And your sodblasted point would be! —Yarrrggh. If I knew what to do to fix it, trust me, I would.
Scary Man also came and stood at my elbow while I was ringing bob minor (inside, but I can more or less almost ring inside, even at the abbey, on only five or six bells) and tried to improve my striking by whispering sweet nothings about which bells at which point in which row I should strike a little sooner/later over. I wanted to laugh, except I was so busy trying not to go horribly wrong. This is like trying to teach brain surgery to someone who finds getting a plaster/Band Aid out of its little paper packet challenging, and has never yet got it on the wounded member straight.
Mind you, I like Scary Man. I like his slightly twisted sense of humour—and his dedication to ringing. And I’m very grateful for at least one manifestation of his extreme ringing skills: he knows that it’s my ropesight that is doing me over—that I do know the method line. Everyone has bad nights/months/seasons/eras but someone who comes to practise week after week after frelling week to learn a method and hasn’t done her homework and learnt the line, is a toad or a worm or pond scum or all three. If it’s just she can’t get used to a ringing chamber the size of Westminster Abbey she may be pathetic, but she’s trying. I have no idea how Scary Man can see this, but I’m still relieved. I’d much rather be pathetic than pond scum.
‡‡ I then made the mistake of telling Mandy that it was closer than I realised, and she said, Great, how would you like to ring a wedding at Trollhill next Saturday? Oh—eep. Okay. Except that I’ve now looked it up on the map and can’t frelling find it. There’s a Trollhill in, like, Norfolk, which is not terribly helpful, and around here there’s Troll Dike, Troll Snack, and Trollhillingtonworthy. Arrrgh. I know it exists—I even thought I knew it exists as Trollhill—because I rang there in my previous life, when Rupert was my ringing master at East Persnickety. Next Saturday may be interesting.
June 3, 2012
(B)ring the Jubilee
I rang Grandsire Triples inside for service at the abbey this afternoon.
It doesn’t get better.
But that’s not the whole story.
The funny thing is that this time last week I didn’t think I was going to be doing any Jubilee ringing. I have zero interest in or support for* the Queen’s Jubilee, Diamond, papier-mache or leopardskin chenille, but I’m a strong believer in bells being part of community events, and this is certainly an event. But I’m also nowhere in particular’s ringer at present, nor am I a good enough ringer that I’m going to be top on anyone’s list of alternates. But, as I’ve said often enough in this blog, this area is short of ringers, so you probably won’t fall entirely through the cracks unless you want to.**
. . . I think I forget where the beginning is. What I haven’t been telling you because I haven’t decided where I’m going with it is that a certain limited repatriation is going on at New Arcadia. I rang a wedding for which Niall organised the ringing, and I knew about a second funeral there was going to be ringing for but didn’t know if I’d be asked. *** Then I got a very polite note through my door from the admin asking if I’d be interested in ringing the funeral, the Jubilee afternoon, or the Olympic thingummy Monday night at Old Eden. I’d again already said yes to Niall for the Olympic thingummy, and—again—I positively wanted to ring for the funeral, and at that point I thought the abbey was going to be ringing a forty-eight bell triple peal of Evil Buckingham Corgi and that there was nothing there for me, so I said what the hell. Then I found out that there was the usual Sunday afternoon open ringing at the abbey and I howled, because I’d much rather ring at the abbey for all sorts of reasons, but having said yes to New Arcadia I wasn’t going to say no. I did check when I was ringing the funeral and was told that they were having trouble making the numbers—I’d genuinely thought there might be semi-ex-ringers coming out of the woodwork to ring for the Jubilee—and that I was absolutely needed. So no help there.
And then I got another note through the door saying that because of predicted downpours various services were being rearranged to be inside rather than outside, and that one of the knock-on effects was that our Jubilee ringing was now at ten a.m. YAAAAAAAAY. Sometimes the (ringing) gods are kind.
So all was well. And then I got back to the cottage, extremely late Friday night, and a trifle stressed after the day I’d just had, to a phone message from Colin saying, we’re ringing a quarter peal late Sunday morning and I’m short a ringer. How would you like to ring treble to triples?
Eeeeeep. I don’t ring quarters (except occasionally accidentally on handbells). It’s only the treble! I thought. I can ring the treble (probably)! So I thought about it, but I also knew this was Colin trying to hustle me into a slightly more emphatic engagement with the whole ringing thing—he knows that I don’t like not belonging to a tower and am wistful about not ringing quarters. He could find another treble. But he was asking me. So I tested my energy levels as you might test a dubious-looking rope bridge over a ravine, phoned him back at a (decent) hour and said yes.
At which point it belatedly occurred to me that if I was ringing service for an hour at ten o’clock and a quarter peal at a tower half an hour away at 11:30 . . . I had a hellhound problem. I was going to have to walk them before the 10 a.m. service ring. And I was still planning on ringing at the abbey in the afternoon.
I got up early. I hurtled hounds who, while always happy to be hurtled, were deeply suspicious of the change of schedule and were all over me as I slunk out the door at 9:57. We rang nonstop for the hour because you only get diamond or leopardskin chenille jubilees occasionally but also because the tower admin was worried that the schedule had been changed so late the village wouldn’t know what was going on, so our bells were shouting HERE! HERE! HERE! Meanwhile, the weather has cooled off somewhat, thank the (various, including ringing) gods, but it’s been raining in a sort of random and uncommitted manner, which means that it’s gruesomely muggy, and not only ringing chamber but ropes and sallies are damp and sticky. By the end of the hour I had a pretty good range of incipient blisters and I was looking at them—and remembering what Colin’s ropes are like, which is to say, uggh—and thinking, I’m going to be bleeding by the end of the quarter, which will make the rope very slippery. . . . And I am still going to the abbey, even if I have to wrap my hands up like Boris Karloff in The Mummy.†
We got the quarter. ::Beams::
Not, I admit, without the odd stumble from yours truly (sigh). We were ringing bob triples which is a very straightforward method and on the treble all you have to do is count up to seven and back down again for pity’s sake but . . . I’m not used to bob triples, let alone not being used to ringing quarters. BUT WE GOT IT. I wasn’t even bleeding. Although the phrase ‘steam bath’ comes to mind.
So I bounced home†† CHIRP CHIRP CHIRP CHIRP CHIRP and was promptly mobbed by hellhounds again. Guys. You had a perfectly good hurtle earlier. But no. Extreme baying from the kitchen when I went upstairs to fetch my Insanely Heavy Knapsack™, so I took them for another brief hurtle to convince them that they were still my first priority.†††
With the result that I had time for about one eighth of my lunch‡ before I had to give Wolfgang another opportunity to behave as a paradigm of cars that start and sprint for the abbey. Again I thought we might be overwhelmed by ex- and/or semi-ringers who wanted to pull a rope for the Jubilee‡‡—but there were only eight of us. I looked around and thought, oh good, brownie points—I want brownie points. And then Og, the Scary Man, who was in charge, said, Grandsire Triples, Gemma, you ring the treble. —???? I thought. He’s going to put me on the tenor? I can ring tenor-behind, although I haven’t done it to triples much. For people with a sense of rhythm it’s dead easy—you just stay last. For those of us who do not have a (usable) sense of rhythm and therefore have to pull every frelling blow consciously, ringing the tenor can be a bit challenging. And we were ringing one of the middle eights, so the tenor was a not-insubstantial bell, which is to say heavy.
Then he looked at me and said, come ring inside.
And I did it. It was (again) not without the odd stumble (also repeat the sigh). But I DID IT.
CHIRP CHIRP CHIRP CHIRP CHIRP CHIRP.
* * *
* No, that’s inaccurate. I have a strong anti-interest. Except for the method-bell-ringing barge which I think is fabulously cool. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/the_queens_diamond_jubilee/9293191/Queens-Diamond-Jubilee-bell-ringers-rehearse-on-Thames-barge.html
I’m sure there’s more recent coverage—like, today—but this is what Google is offering me at the moment. And no, I don’t long to have been one of the ringers. I am so ratty a handler that the idea of trying to ring on a rocking boat with the wind going whizz whizz whizz doesn’t even work as a fantasy. Also, it would mean hanging out with a lot of people who think the Jubilee is hot.
** Wolfgang is behaving in an exemplary manner, beginning with the wedding yesterday. No one had answered my frantic email but the organiser, who hadn’t been planning to ring herself, being fully occupied with laying on the village Jubilee party^, turned up in case of shortages, and while we were waiting for the very, very, very late wedding to be over with so we could ring and go home,^^ we were talking about the local situation. Sox Episcopi is so short of ringers—and to keep going at all they’ve combined with two other towers—that they’re in breathing-them-in-the-face threat of having to stop ringing their bells entirely. This is so sad.
^ I like her anyway. I was knitting, of course, to some interest/amusement from the rest of the band, and Melody said that her grandmother had taught her to knit and that she’d knitted like mad when her kids were little but had fallen out of the habit and should probably take it up again.+ Her grandmother, she said, was amazing, and could knit a sweater in a weekend. I am very slow, I said apologetically, suiting the action to the words. And she said instantly, But it’s not about speed, is it? —Thus earning my undying friendship and eternal loyalty. Well, no, it isn’t about speed. But I’m much more accustomed to people telling me not to worry, I’ll get faster, or trying to show/tell me how to get faster, which I think is (mostly) well meaning but a bit of a bummer. Yes, of course I’d like to be faster, but I like knitting and I’m not sure but what if I learnt to be really fast it would just turn into another thing that I’m frelling manic about. One of the things I like best about knitting is the soothing quality. Like when you’re waiting for the effing bride to effing show up.
+ Yes! Yes!
^^ supposing our cars started
*** Means by which you do not want to be repatriated
† Which wouldn’t have worked, of course. Bellropes are notorious for ripping off bandages.
†† Wolfgang continuing to start instantly
††† After SHADOWS.
‡ At least the frelling hellhounds ate their lunch
‡‡ The country, or this end of it anyway, is covered in posters and bunting. I have cause for assuming that everybody but Niall, Penelope, Peter and I are totally into it.
June 2, 2012
KES, 15
FIFTEEN
We clattered over an old, overgrown railroad track, and then there was a sign: welcome to Cold Valley. Population . . . but my gaze wobbled, and then we were past the sign, and turning down a little street with big old trees heaving up the road surface. The houses were all big, and set back from the road . . . all, um, two of them. It was a short street. There were no cars in the driveways, but there was a old, beat-up-looking pick-up truck parked on the street. Hayley pulled in to the third driveway.
I got out of the car and stood staring up. I was sure the house was staring down. There was most of a flight of stairs up to the porch and the front door: oh good, lots of room for large things with teeth to marry and raise their families in the space under the porch. And drag their kills and play backgammon with the bones. You couldn’t see the tower from the front. I didn’t see anyone, potentially mad or debatably sane, watching from the windows.
The house looked empty. And cold.
Hayley bustled past me and up the steps. How do women wear four-inch heels all day, even sitting at a desk, let alone real estate agents who have to walk on tree-root-heaved pavement and up and down stairs? Hers were navy and cream. Cream. Cream-colored shoes. Okay, I had cream-colored All Stars (among many others), but in the first place you don’t want them too clean and in the second place they go in the washing machine. Hayley spent her evenings rubbing out scuff marks and reapplying shoe polish. And doing calf-stretching and pelvis-straightening exercises.
She reached the top of the steps and paused, groping in her handbag (red, to match her briefcase. Primary colors were evidently big in the New Iceland realty crowd). She pulled out the biggest damn key I’d ever seen in my life: it was nearly as long as my forearm. And the teeth at the business end of it looked like they belonged to one of the things that lived under the porch. I had come slowly up the steps behind her and was standing at what was perhaps a wary distance. She thrust this weapon of mass destruction in a keyhole the size of my hand, and turned it. KA-DINGBLASTED-CHUNK. The door shuddered in its frame. Hayley turned the handle and pushed it open. It was dark in there. I waited for her to go first. I’m so polite. And she had presumably been inside before, and knew where the black voids opened under your feet. MacFarquhar, get a grip. You’re expecting to be living here, remember?
Hayley had one (high-heeled) foot across the threshold when her phone rang. She could have answered it in the house, couldn’t she? But she didn’t. She went and stood at the edge of the porch, pulled her phone out, stared at it and frowned. She glanced up at me and away again in this funny sort of sidelong thing she’d done a couple of times before. Maybe middle-aged women in All Stars made her twitchy. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I had better take this. But you go ahead and look around. The house is empty—please poke in all the corners.” She gave me a smile that made her look like a real human being—except she turned it off too soon and her eyes slid away from mine again. “I’ll be back in five,” she said, and tittupped back down the steps to her car. Leaving me all alone with the house.
It was going to be hard to live somewhere you are afraid to go inside. Especially in the winter. There would be snow here. Maybe I could learn to build an igloo. (How badly did I want that dog? And a washing machine? At what point had I decided that sticking a pin in a map was a binding contract? Where was Flowerhair or Aldetruda when I needed her?) I stepped over the threshold.
I really did have a woozy moment. There’s nothing like fear of the unknown to make your blood pressure misbehave—and I’m really good at fear, and I’m good at unknowns too, mostly unfriendly ones, because they make a better story. For the second it took me to get both feet across the threshold and put my hand on the door frame I was somewhere else. I wasn’t in Cold Valley, or New Iceland—or Central Park in Manhattan. But there were trees, and I could see a meadow, and a glint of water beyond it. I barely had time to think what the—? when I was standing in the front hall of a big, old, empty house, with my hand on the door frame, feeling a little shaky and strange. There was a medium-sized room on my right, a hallway running straight away in front of me, and a gigantic full-length-of-the-house parlour on my left. Sunlight was pouring in from the garden through the windows at the far end and making the worn wooden floor shining gold.
“Oh,” I said.
June 1, 2012
A Day in the Life
There’s a footnote, on Wednesday night’s blog, that the someone who had come to the door of the cottage while I was in the greenhouse locked in inadvertent mortal combat with a robin* was Penelope. A large lorry had crunched up her car (fortunately she was not in it at the time), she was on foot, and wanted to know if she could leave some of her kit with me—she was on her way to a home visit and didn’t need the full panoply,** and it was a long walk back to her own home. Of course, I said, and inquired after the details, which included that the lorry driver and the insurance company might not see eye to eye right away and she had a nursing-home gig on Friday that she had to get to if she had to hire Santa Claus’ sleigh—and it might come to that, since the four-day Jubilee weekend is upon us and the likelihood is that every functional vehicle*** is already booked. I said she could borrow Wolfgang if she couldn’t do any better. That Wolfgang had an erratic fault but that as long as you didn’t try to start him when he was warm there wasn’t a problem—and that he hadn’t misbehaved in months.
You see where this is going.
Thursday morning I was, as so often, late, so hellhounds and I had a as-far-as-we-can-get-out-of-town-from-the-cottage-front-door hurtle. Upon our return I bundled hellhounds into Wolfgang and fetched my insanely large and hulking knapsack and moderately bulging briefcase from the cottage for our standard schlep down to the mews.
Wolfgang didn’t start. It doesn’t happen like this. It doesn’t happen when he’s been sitting quietly overnight under his tree† at the cottage.
Aaaaaaand he didn’t start after five minutes.
I got out my knitting.
Half an hour.
I rearranged my Critical Daily Mass and took the briefcase back to the cottage.†† I shouldered my ludicrously heavy knapsack and we walked down to the mews. We did not hurtle. We walked.
It was at about this point that the downstairs toilet at the mews stopped working.
This may have distracted me from the main issue slightly.
Hellhounds and I semi-hurtled back to the cottage later in the afternoon. Wolfgang was still not in a starting mood. I stuffed Penelope’s rather large bag into another knapsack, and we set out across town to take it to her creaking with the irony of it.
Peter, who gets up earlier and has a better phone manner than I do†††, set to work this morning. Our usual garage out at Warm Upford is so booked they can’t promise to get us in next week either. And—just as I had been discussing with Penelope Wednesday evening—every car hire in the country has all its stock out on the roads already, including the golf carts, the forklifts, and the retired hearses. Peter found somewhere in Arizona that could let us have a lunar roving vehicle but I had a paddy about the difficulties of fetching it.
The RAC man arrived, bless his gigantic orange van.‡
And of course Wolfgang started immediately.
I leaped out of the driver’s seat, rushed across the top of the cul de sac and started trying to climb Phineas’ three-storey house so I could throw myself off the roof.
Turn it off and turn it on again, said the nice calm RAC man.
This time Wolfgang did not start. Modified rapture, if you follow me.
The only good thing about any of this—and have I mentioned that I have a wedding to ring tomorrow afternoon in Sox Episcopi which is about half an hour from here?—is that the RAC man said, no, no, that’s not the starter motor—so at least I didn’t spend way too much money getting it replaced, the thought of which (money) is why I haven’t done it yet. It’s not that I thought the Erratic Fault is going to go away, just that while it’s erratic I can’t demonstrate it to a mechanic‡‡—and if I can put something off, I will.
Peter found another car hire place several thousand miles closer that will let me have the front half of a 1945 Jeep. Fine. I’ll take it.
The RAC man says it’s electrical, that it should be a straightforward pull out bad thingy and plug in good thingy, that there’s a garage that does emergency repairs half a mile away and he’ll give me a lift back—he’s got Wolfgang running, but he says all bets are off about whether he’ll start again.‡‡‡
We convoyed down to the repair shop, and the RAC man and a random mechanic had one of those conversations in another language: I’m pretty sure it’s the gusslebladder findlewhopping the zork, etc. Apparently there is a Volkswagen specialist warehouse/whatever in Lesser Disconcerting and if they have The Part they can messenger it over this afternoon and if they don’t I’m frelled. No, I’m catching a bus to Mauncester to pick up the front half of a sixty-seven-year-old Jeep. The garage will ring me as soon as they know if they can get The Part or not. I need to know by x because I need to be in Mauncester by y because the car-hire place closes at z. . . .
I’d been keeping a running email conversation with Oisin about whether or not I was going to look in on my way to the bus stop, and I was trying to cancel handbells only Niall was en route somewhere on his way back from Wales§. At the point that the garage was clearly not ringing me, I told Oisin I’d see him next week, harnessed the hellhounds and set off for the garage, assuming that a hysterical woman on the ground would be harder to ignore than a hysterical woman over the phone.§§
None of the people who had been there that morning were there now. This didn’t seem to me to be a good sign. Someone said he’d be with me right away, and wasn’t. I kept reminding myself these people were doing me an enormous favour by looking at Wolfgang at all the day before a four-day holiday. . . . And when the man who wasn’t with me right away finally ambled in he said, your car’s ready.
What?
It wouldn’t start for us either, he said. The mechanic found a fault, and fixed it, and now it starts. Of course we don’t know if that’s all the problem. . . .
The Part does not seem to figure in the story at all. And I have no idea what this sterling piece of Good Samaritanism is going to cost me. They’ll put the invoice in the post, airily said the man.
I then had to wait another ten minutes while the car parked in front of Wolfgang was washed. Why they didn’t move it and let me out first, I have no idea. At that point I didn’t care. I had a car. I had Wolfgang. I did not have the front half of a Jeep even older than Wolfgang. Even older than me (although not by very much). I put the hellhounds in their bed in the back seat. I got out my knitting.
Peter did not find a plumber for the downstairs toilet.
The dustbin men failed to pick up my garbage.
And the crown on the tooth immediately behind the crown on the tooth that fell out a fortnight ago . . . JUST FELL OUT.
And have I mentioned recently that this is the beginning of the frelling Jubilee frelling four day frelling weekend?
* * *
* I’ve been creeping out and humbly putting prehensile mealworms in the planter for her, or for the bloke who got her into this mess to bring to her. What is the weird mechanism whereby she sinks lower over the course of the fortnight or so that’s she’s sitting on a given nest? You can see all of her clearly to begin with. By the time the nest is full of little fluffy things that you can’t see over the brim, you had barely been able to see her over the brim for the final few days. It can’t just be her ridiculous pretence of weight. This clutch must be close to hatching because I can only just see her—in fact I thought she was gone today and was pretzeling myself into hopeless contortions to try and get a better look for little fluffy things or (horrors) if after my inappropriate, imprudent and stupid interference the other day she’d deserted after all (in spite of the mealworms). But she’s still there.
** I long to make her a shaman and launch into a vivid description of the rattles, fetishes, capes, stones, wands, chalices and other fascinating impedimenta . . . but I’d probably better not. The so-called anonymity of this blog is rather less use than Venus’ hair in Botticelli’s painting, and I know Niall and Colin have occasionally read these virtual pages. Penelope is one of the range of health visitors this island nation rejoices in—the impedimenta part is true, as is the purpose and the training for healing. And if you think I might be dissing shamanism, quite the contrary. I studied experiential shamanism—the, er, doctrine more or less re-begun by Michael Harner^—for some time, and still use what it taught me.
^ Whose famous book THE WAY OF THE SHAMAN I do not endorse, just by the way.
*** Including the little red wagon Kes’ mum taught a gang of Ghastlies to pull.
† Being extensively crapped on by pigeons. Why don’t all the frelling neighbourhood cats catch some pigeons?
†† As I was locking the cottage door again, a dazzlingly shiny and pristine cherry-red convertible Jaguar with equally shiny and pristine white leather interior turned up the cul de sac. I looked at it, and its dazzling and shiny occupants, with disfavour. It was stopped, thwarted, at the top of the hill—which put it immediately behind Wolfgang—when I caught up with it: immediately behind beat up dented seventeen year old probably-cost-as-much-as-the-Jag’s-wing-mirrors-when-he-was-new Wolfgang. The woman in the passenger seat got out to talk to me. They were looking for an address that was clearly not up here. I assume they thought I was the cleaning lady.
††† Not to mention being British and a bloke
‡‡ I’d had a couple of people who claimed to know something about cars who had heard Wolfgang not starting months ago say they thought it was the starter motor, so I wasn’t just plucking a plausible-sounding phrase out of the aether.
‡‡‡ I was very amused to discover—he having sent me off to have a nice cup of tea while he worked—when he knocked on the cottage door again that he’d made a mess of getting Wolfgang out of what is admittedly the diabolical jigsaw of his parking space (it actually is worse than it looks) and had simply left him at a funny angle in the middle of the way. The RAC man climbed straight-faced into his orange van and left me to cope.
§ No, really. It was a ringing outing. But it was only towers. He didn’t want to miss handbells.
§§ There was also a tiny issue about not knowing its name and not being able to find it in the phone book.
May 31, 2012
KES related
equus peduus wrote:
If this was built as a summer house… does that mean she’s going to freeze come November, or was it built so that servants could live there year-round or something?
Ahem. It was not built as a summer house.
“. . . Most of them were summer cottages, and there are only a few of them left. There weren’t too many year-round houses to begin with. Yours—I mean,” she said, blushing through her face powder, “I mean the one you are going to look at, is one of only two that are still lived in. . . .”
It’s going to be a total ratbag to heat as all big old houses are. But it’s a year-round house.
KatydidNL
I find myself wondering how writing this compares, stress-level and/or fun-wise, to your “regular” output?
Good question. I’ve been thinking about this too, especially as the first thrill-blast of new wears off* and KES settles down to become just** another piece of writing, like the blog, or the rather too-long emails I tend to write if I write any at all (which is why most of my correspondence has gaps of months or years: this is a leap from the old hard-copy street-mail world to the new virtual one which I made with, sadly, no trouble whatsoever***) . . . or SHADOWS. Or PEGASUS XVIII. The short answer is that it’s different. And a change is as good as a rest, you know? And it does give me a chance to have some fun that I wouldn’t ordinarily have—Flowerhair, for example, or Aldetruda, who at the moment I am neglecting, but she’ll have her time. I’m pretty sure Kes has at least one other series, and I’m surer that she’s written a few one-offs. Mostly she’s a parody of me, but occasionally she’s a wish-fulfillment: she writes her stories a lot faster than I do.
Siiiiiiiiiigh.
But KES has three clear advantages as a blog serial. One: an 800-word KES episode takes, on average, slightly less time to write than a 1500-word Days in the Life entry—and the writing muscles it puts the strain on are neither quite the Days in the Life ones or the story-in-progress ones. Sharing the load is always good. Two: I can write KES eps any time, at any length and any speed—I can write three in a row one afternoon and then not look at it for a week; I can write half of one this morning and the other half tomorrow night; I can write two lines in two hours because I’m knitting, and because I want an hour or two to think about the new character/situation I wasn’t expecting before I start feeling my way forward again. Which leads to Three: It’s not dependent on what the hell is going on in my life. I know I keep moaning about being an introvert with a privacy fetish . . . nearly every night, and usually for over 1000 words. Cognitive dissonance alert. Well, yes, and for me too. I’m a professional writer—oh, you’ve noticed?—which means that I can (probably) make something out of nothing if I get to use words, and that’s what I do. Every night. But I can still only do it the way I can do it, and I seem only to be able to do it at over 1000 words a pop. Unfortunately. But the Days in the Life are beads on a string; each bead is pretty much its own small hard shiny separate entity, and I don’t get tomorrow’s till tomorrow. KES is more like a plaited rope—it’s all one thing. And the surprises (I had no idea about the Friendly Campfire till she turned into the parking lot, for example. Or that she was going to bring a rose-bush with her) are still all about forward momentum and that live feel of any story—and nothing about frelling clock time. I frelling hate frelling clock time.
Am hoping this will be a LOOOOOOOOOOOONG serialization.
Well, that’s still the plan. Hold that enthusiasm . . . please . . .
Aaron
I have been pondering a similar, or perhaps inverted, issue. If the blog is intended as an adjunct to the career as a writer one would hope that it is less work than the, to be published commercially, fiction. We don’t know how the effort of writing enough Days in the Life material compares to the effort of writing enough of Shadows since the excerpts that have been posted are presumably “free” in the sense that they had to be written anyway. In contrast, unless the point to the exercise is just the variety, the presumption is that enough Kes is less effort than enough Days in the Life*. For those of us who only do expository writing (and most of that for compilers rather than people) the idea that creative work of the sort represented by Kes might be regarded as “less effort” comes as something of shock.
It’s ultimately less, because it doesn’t get rewritten repeatedly and obsessively. It’s not going to be nailed down in hard copy where I can’t sneak back later and change something if I need to. (Note that I haven’t done this yet, but it’s early days. And I’ve never been good at seeing through the fog ahead: my gift is about feeling that the story is there, and then trying to write down the bit that is immediately under my nose, and hoping for the best about the future.) I’m not saying writing KES is easy or cheap or that I throw it off in the odd fifteen minutes between winning a marathon and ringing a peal of Laudanum Dreamscape Whazzat Royal, because I don’t. It’s work. It’s even hard work, like any writing that you’re trying to make—that you’re hoping to make—any good is. At the same time . . . writing is what I do, in a rather more absolute sense than store-restockers put fresh bales of Pringles on the shelves. Mechanics spend their weekends taking the family to motocross events and keeping the kids’ bikes running. Accountants read PROFESSOR STEWART’S HOARD OF MATHEMATICAL TREASURES in the bath. Countertenors and coloratura sopranos go to Bayreuth for their holidays. Writers write. And given that my chosen off-duty obsessions tend to be things I’m not very good at—bell ringing, singing—it’s perhaps not surprising that writing about it is . . . comforting. (Also, being bad at stuff is better material: like writing a savage review of something is so much easier than writing a good one.)
Some other evening I may rant a bit about the Writing for Free thing. There was a very good article that was making the rounds on Twitter, and I tweeted it on too—but while I’m grateful for someone supporting the idea that us writers have to earn a living by selling what we write, only to say that we shouldn’t write, or have to write, for free isn’t the whole story either.
*I originally typoed Days in the Lift which sounds a little more angst ridden.
I prefer it to Days in the Plunge.
librarykat
Being the mother of a teen boy, I appreciated Serena’s end of the phone conversation, too.
Oh good. (Also I suppose because I’ve always had to watch my weight and post-menopausally I have to live on lettuce and sprouted seeds so I have calories left over for chocolate and champagne, that plague-of-locusts thing teenage boys do fascinates me.)
libby.gorman
Readers who “forget about” their favorite authors must not have really engaged the books to begin with.
Well . . . as someone with a memory like . . . uh . . . what was I just saying?, and also as a writer who at least once a week receives another letter/email from someone saying some variation on a theme of I’VE JUST FOUND OUT WHO YOU ARE. BEAUTY/SWORD/HERO/OUTLAWS/DEERSKIN/ROSE/SPINDLE WAS MY FAVOURITE BOOK and then I left it on the bus/my best friend made me give it back/it was eaten by alligators, and then my parents got divorced/my dog ran away/my boyfriend left me for a job doing ice sculpture on the QEII for Cunard and I couldn’t remember anything for a long time. But my new best friend/boyfriend/dog just put a copy of SUNSHINE/DRAGONHAVEN/CHALICE/PEGASUS in my hands and I SUDDENLY REMEMBERED. . . .
But the idea that readers forget supposedly favourite writers merely because said favourite writers don’t get a book out every year (which I think was the context of this comment?) and a book, preferably, the next in a favourite series . . . that’s depressing. That’s extremely depressing, especially for a slow writer who doesn’t write series.
zerlina
Too sick to read blogs today, but I HAD to read this one.
And I hope it was curative.
* * *
* I wrote ep twenty-six today
** Although there is no ‘just’ about writing to a writer.
*** I have told you, haven’t I, that years ago, and for years, Merrilee had a regular refrain that went ‘we must find a way to harness the writing energy you spend on letters/email’? Hee.
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