Robin McKinley's Blog, page 95

New Thing, 9

 

The Story So Far… 

NINE   

At home—I mean, back in the city—I’m one of these people who comes up from the subway and invariably turns in the wrong direction, even if I’d done the exact same thing last week and the week before.  And the year before.  What I learn from my mistakes is that I keep making the same ones.  It’s six blocks from the subway stop to my editor’s office at Dirigible Books.  I usually made it in twelve.  On a good day, ten.

            I took a deep breath as I paused on the sidewalk at the edge of the Friendly Campfire parking lot.  The Eatsmobile was straight down this street.  I didn’t have to turn or anything.  How hard can it be?  I’d got this far, hadn’t I?  Yes, but that was in daylight with the GPS murmuring reassuringly.  And my lucky rose-bush in the back of the van.  Gods, I was tired.  Maybe I should just eat the van’s troubleshooting manual and go to bed. 

            As I was dithering—I was less concerned about the nutritional quality of the manual than I was about the rusty tea bags in the Friendly Campfire’s welcome basket.  Could I possibly find my tea in the back of the van?—I heard a sound behind me and turned around.  The perfectly normal person was just letting herself out of the office cabin.  The friendly campfire was still burning in the window, a little beacon in the darkness, guiding tired wanderers to their neon haven.

            To my surprise, she waved.  I didn’t mind waiting another minute.  I was sure the snakepits between me and the Eatsmobile weren’t going anywhere.  She heaved a seriously large, and apparently seriously heavy, knapsack over one shoulder.  Woman after my own heart.  “I hope you’re comfortable in your cabin?” she greeted me.

            “Yes, thanks,” I said, and added experimentally, “after I turned the friendly campfire off.”

            She laughed.  “Yes, they’re gruesome, aren’t they?  Jan’s a decent boss though so I don’t tell him what I think of his logo.”

            “Are you from around here?” I said.  She somehow didn’t sound like someone from New Iceland ought to sound.

            “No. Boston.  But it’s cheaper here.”

            Yes.  I might even be able to live on Flowerhair and Aldetruda.  “I was pretty startled by the house rental prices.”

            She looked at me again.  “Then you are going to be here a while.”

            “A while,” I agreed noncommittally.  She was obviously curious, but she was equally obviously hitching up her knapsack straps and rolling forward onto the balls of her feet in preparation for staggering off somewhere (habitual overloading of a large knapsack produces a characteristic posture).  Home, probably.  Without much hope I said, “You in a hurry?  Can I buy you a coffee—or a beer—and cross-examine you about local mores?”

            She hesitated, looking at her watch.  “Sure.  I can text the offspring that I’m going to be late.  You going to the Eatsmobile?”

            “Well, it was recommended by a local,” I said, smiling. 

            She laughed again.  “I’ve only been here ten years.  I’m still the single mom who moved into old Mrs Jennings’ house, who is probably rolling in her grave, poor old thing, she never held with those newfangled inventions like divorce.”

            “So what’s so great about old Mrs Jennings’ house that you’ll stay despite the disapproving moans from the cupboard under the stairs?”

            “The way the light comes in the big windows in her living room,” she said promptly.  “Fortunately she’s not a big moaner.  And the cold patch in the front hall is really nice in August.”

            We had crossed the street and were moving purposefully in what I was willing to believe was the direction of the Eatsmobile.  No visible snakepits.

            “I like to imagine I’m an artist,” she went on ruefully.  “But the offspring and I have to eat, so I moonlight as a receptionist and bookkeeper at the local motel.”

            The Eatsmobile was a big shiny diner:  the front of it had been done up to look like the biggest Airstream that ever lived.  I loved it on sight.  My heart lifted for maybe the first time since Gelasio had interrupted Flowerhair’s adventure with the attack mushrooms, as we walked up the little stair and opened the door.  I took a deep, appreciative breath of strong fresh coffee and deep fat frying as we crossed the diner’s threshold.  “I can recommend the meatloaf,” said my new acquaintance the bookkeeper-artist-ghostbuster.  “If you’re into meatloaf.”

            We slid into a booth.  “I think I’m probably into anything this place serves,” I said.

            “Good answer,” she replied.  She added, “Hey, Billie,” when one of the waitresses waved.  “I’m Serena,” she said to me.  “One of the great misnamings of the modern era.  My mother had four kids and fostered two more, and I was more trouble than the other five combined.  So she often told me.  What does the ‘K’ stand for?”

            I hesitated.

 

More about ME . . .

 

 . . . Most of which regular blog readers will have seen before. 

Mrs Redboots posted a link in the forum last night, to a blog post by a friend of hers who also has ME: 

http://dawnknits.livejournal.com/13423.html?view=40559#t40559

Much worse than mine.  As I keep saying, mine is a mild case.  I know what she’s talking about though—I had eighteen months on the sofa when I first went down with acute ME after two years of regularly recurring glandular fever, which is a very common lead-in.  But then I started finding things that worked for me, and I started being able to get up off the sofa occasionally.*  And oh, glory, how I know about things like avoiding your kind supportive neighbours because you haven’t got the energy to chat.  You get horribly selfish with a disease like ME—or you may do—because suddenly you have so much less livable life at all, and you can’t bear to waste what little is left to you.  I’m a cranky introvert anyway—even in my pre-ME days social stuff was tiring, even when I enjoyed it.  Now?  . . . Don’t even ask.  It’s hard to be a nice person when you have a chronic freller. 

            I want to put in a word on the well-meaning but clueless world’s behalf however.  Dawn mentions acquaintances saying jovially that they’d like a ride in her stair lift, that it looks like fun.  Well, I’d snarl too, because I’m not good at being patronised, and of course you wouldn’t be using a stair lift if you didn’t frelling have to.  But . . . there’s another thing that happens, and sometimes I recognise it when it does:  the person who puts their foot in it may be trying to include, or re-include, you into the human race.  Oh, a stair lift, oh, okay, no big deal, it looks like fun.  From your angle it is a big deal.  From their angle, they may be trying to say that it isn’t—in the way that counts.  They’re trying, clumsily, to close the gap between you:  to say that the important thing is that you’re both human beings. 

            I get something like this kind of a lot when I am so unfortunate as to have to try to share a meal with someone.  Uggh.  I’m dairy intolerant, chemical sensitive, and on the rheumatism diet,** and when my digestion is in a bad mood (and it is more than it isn’t) I avoid gluten too.  You’ll have to take my word for it that at home, with my organic grocery boxes coming twice a week, it’s not that big a deal.***   Out in the real world . . . I am hell to feed, and I rarely enjoy the attempt.  Which leaves me, sometimes, reluctantly having conversations with people who stare at me, trying not to let their mouths drop open at the idea of not being able to eat pizza or brownies or milk in their coffee† and after a dumbstruck silence they’ll say something like, Oh.  Yeah.  Um.  My sister-in-law is allergic to spinach.  So we can’t have spinach quiche when she comes to dinner.  At which point you have a choice:  you can kill them.  Or you can recognise they’re trying.  They’re trying to close the gap between you.

            Uggh.  Of course, you’d rather there wasn’t the gap. ††

            Slightly similar, in that it’s a perspective thing, is something from the article I posted the link to last night, that I was going to mention and then, because I had so many other things to moan about, I didn’t get around to.   Someone told the journalist anonymously that a GP at her clinic had suggested that she take up meditation as therapy.  I may be reading this wrong, but my impression is that she—and the journalist—felt that the GP was telling her it was all in her mind.  But . . . it sounds like a good idea to me.  It’s well known (isn’t it?) that a regular discipline of meditation has enormous physical benefits—as well as calming and centring your butterfly mind.  ME is a real disease—we’re not whiny self-absorbed victims who only need to get a grip—but mind and body are one critter.  Any disease is a disease of the body and the mind.  Let’s not forget that, in our necessary attempts to get the respect—and the research—that we need.††† 

* * *

* In my case chiefly vitamins, homeopathy and Bowen massage.  I had a friend with fibromyalgia^ who sent me to her doctor.  For which I am still, twelve years later, grateful, since he took me seriously—and started me on vitamins.   The very first thing that made a difference to my pain and energy levels was magnesium supplements.  This won’t be part of everyone’s answer but it was the first thing that gave me some hope that there was something that I could do—that there was a way to alleviate some of the worst symptoms.  And I remember the terrifying shock of that first small improvement—the shock of hope.  This was also years before the NHS had been dragged, kicking and screaming, into recognising ME as a real disease.  My friend’s nice doctor was private, and I couldn’t afford him after the first few visits—and my NHS doctor ‘didn’t believe in ME’. 

^ Speaking of neuro-immuno-whatsits as syndromes:  fibro is another one.  I read up on fibro too because the overlap with ME is considerable, and the boundaries of both are fuzzy.  

** No tomatoes, potatoes, eggplant, peppers, or (weirdly) mushrooms, except Shiitake.  They’re all nightshades, except the mushrooms, but mushrooms are still on the list.  Dairy is on the list for some people—turns out it is for me too, but I was already off it for other reasons.  But I gave up my once/twice a year ice cream blow outs when they started giving me severe joint pain.  Feh. 

*** Peter is mostly pretty tactful about eating the stuff I really miss, like toast, or ice cream, when I’m not around.  This is not a household rule, however, nor is the ice cream hidden at the back of the freezer or the bread in a cupboard I never look in.  I don’t want any more walls around me than I absolutely have to have, even when they’re for my benefit. 

† I’m violently allergic to coffee.  Just by the way. 

†† Personally I do have a lot of trouble with the ‘you don’t look sick!’ thing—which I also get kind of a lot, because I don’t (usually).  This presses my buttons so hard that I can’t tell if this is another clumsy effort to close the gap between me and the healthy moron who just uttered those words, or whether they are telling me I’m malingering.  And I guess that as I’m at the high-functioning end people have trouble with my issue about driving:  driving is exhausting because of that constant, split-second awareness you must maintain behind the wheel, and that healthy people don’t even notice they’re squandering.  I have to kind of crank myself up for it—and I can do it, but it costs.  So I do it as little as possible.

            I suspect that my fury about the enforced-exercise so-called ‘treatment’ is partly fuelled by the fact that morons who know or recognise me as someone who is ‘naturally’ physically active seem to think that it would suit me—that I just need a little prod toward pulling myself together again.  This is not an attempt to close the gap.  This is being a flaming asshole.  The irony is that—see:  Lack of Slack Syndrome—that you do need to keep as physically fit as your illness allows because it makes good days as good as you’re capable of and it’s a fragile but crucial buffer on bad days.  Normal healthy people can do their twenty minutes’ exercise three times a week and then go for a fifteen-mile hike on the weekends.  I can’t.  I do a couple of hours a day, every bloody day, with attendant hellhounds—and some days we cover seven or eight miles.  Sometimes we cover one.  Sometimes we keep going a clip (rather to hellhounds’ annoyance.  They like mooching).  Sometimes we sit down a lot—or, lately, with the drought rivering past our knees, lean.  I try not to force myself a micro-millimetre past what my body is willing to do that day—but I try not to do much less than a micro-millimetre of what it’ll bear either. 

††† And one of these days I will take a deeeeep breath and write about depression.  Do I know about depression?  I sure do.  Speaking of uggh.  Very, very big uggh.

ME Awareness Week. And some bad bells.

 

Hey.  People.  I read the forum.  But you don’t seriously believe I’m going to post the second part of Corellia’s saga right away, do you?  Blow off two guest posts in a ROW?  If I had two nights in a row off I’d have established a habit of lying on the sofa covered with hellhounds during blog-writing time, eating bonbons and reading trashy novels.  Marabou-trimmed satin lingerie optional.  No, no, no.  Besides, torturing blog readers is one of my few pleasures.

            . . . ‘Pleasures’ certainly not including bell ringing.  Oh gods.  Practise tonight at the abbey was unbelievably awful.  Awful.  As I said to Albert as I raced out the door* to escape as soon as possible, this habit of taking one step forward and two steps back is getting discouraging.**  Profound and utter humiliation is disagreeable at best but in this case I don’t know what to do about it.  I’ve only ever learnt . . . well, pretty much anything, but particularly bell ringing . . . by grind.  Relentless grind.  You don’t get to grind at the abbey—there are too many ringers at too many different levels (especially upper) to have time for grinding any of them.***   I’d been hoping that I was far enough down the ringing road generally that I wouldn’t need to grind the way I used to . . . wrong.  But the big spiky unmediatable situation here is that it’s specifically the abbey that’s the problem:  those bells, that frelling ringing chamber, the fact that it’s the abbey.  I can ring Grandsire Frelling Triples at other towers—not gloriously well, but I can ring it.  Or I could.  I think I’m forgetting, because what I’m chiefly doing lately is failing to ring it at the abbey.  I cannot begin to tell you how WILDLY FRUSTRATING it is to listen, or to stand behind and watch someone else ringing, something that in any other tower I’d give my eyeteeth† to have a go at—I should be consolidating my Grandsire Triples and practising bob triples and major, Stedman triples, Cambridge minor, treble bobbing to surprise major.  But I can’t ring at the abbey. 

            I wasn’t even expecting the worst tonight.  Usually I’m horribly good at expecting the worst.  Tonight when I pulled off the bell felt familiar—it is not, in fact, the bells, it’s the ballroom-sized ringing chamber and the abbeyness of it.  And I thought, pulling on this familiar bell, oh good.  I’m getting there.  I’m making progress.  This is, or at any rate is going to be, my new home tower.

            Does anyone have a bridge handy that I could throw myself off? 

* * *

Meanwhile . . . @cambridgeminor/CathyR tweeted me this today: 

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-2141230/All-mind-Why-critics-wrong-deny-existence-chronic-fatigue.html 

I know there have been ME awareness weeks—possibly every year at this time, one of the symptoms is really bad memory—but I’d missed we were having one now.   And ME, like way too many other badly understood and/or scary don’t-want-to-think-about-it-because-it-might-happen-to-me afflictions and ailments, can use all the good press it can get.  Yes, it’s a real disease.††  No, we’re not all malingerers.†††  Hurrah for journalists who write articles‡ saying that ME is a nasty kick in the head from fate and to take it seriously.  And I’m very glad to see someone making a noise about the appalling so-called ‘treatment’ of enforced exercise, which I’ve railed about here before.  If you have ME the last thing you should do is force yourself to do stuff.  That only makes it worse.  As I’ve also said—but to me, being someone with ME, this is all worth saying again—there may be a few ME-diagnosed people out there for whom enforced exercise worked . . . but I’d personally doubt that in that case what they did have is ME.  It’s a fairly slippery disease/syndrome and there’s a lot of overlap with other fateful kicks in the head. 

            But I want to add (again) that my experience of it is also that what energy, physical and mental, you do have you MUST USE, because if you don’t it will not only go away again—but you’ll feel worse, just like if you forced yourself to do too much.  The Lack of Slack Syndrome.  One of the things this article also mentions, and good for her, although I’d put quite a few underlines around it too, is the good days and bad days thing—you may also have good half days and bad half days, good hours and bad hours . . . good minutes and bad minutes.  She mentions people who have to put their lives on hold because they can’t do anything consistently.  Yes.  This is one of the big ratbags about managing it—and leads to why I seem to get away with so much.  I’ve told you (often) before there are a lot of smoke and mirrors on the blog—well, if I have to lie down for an hour or a day, I just do it.  I don’t have to tell you or my boss about it—and the hellhounds adore it, of course.  But one of my bottom lines is that I have no stamina, despite all that hurtling.  I gave up horses (several times) because I can’t ride regularly enough.  I don’t ring quarter peals because I never know when I’m going to have a bad day or a bad hour, and you’re letting down five or seven other people if you fold up unexpectedly.  I don’t travel for a variety of reasons, but head of the list is the ME.  Managing it on the road is . . . well.  I’d rather have bell practise nights like tonight, when throwing myself off bridges seems like a rational reaction, than cope with a bad ME day away from home.

            This is one of the things I’d like to see more recognition of—that most people with ME are still capable of doing something—and most of us want to:  who wants to be helpless, hopeless, dependent and bored?—but we need SLACK from the healthy, functioning world.  We need FLEXIBILITY.  The business/working/income-oriented world is still lousy about people who don’t fit their pattern.  It’s like the colossal waste of energy and talent of parents who want to, you know, raise their kids themselves.  The corporate world still seems to think that kids are something you do in your spare time, and that making widgets and earning money is the real centre of the universe.  What is wrong with this picture.

            Everybody would be happier if they could work and live to a model that suited them better, you know?  You don’t have to have ME or little kids.  Elasti-world!  Now all we need is a logo and catchy tag line. 

* * *

* Not a good idea from this tower.  GERONIMOOOOOOOOOO! 

** I’ve also started wondering again how long before they tell me not to come back.  

*** Except in terms of ‘into little pieces’.  I came home in a basket.  

† As if anyone would want these eyeteeth.  I did, however, get my crown glued back in today. 

            Dentist from R’lyeh was on holiday, so I saw An Extremely Chirpy female dentist.  Extremely Chirpy.  Except that I guess you aren’t allowed to make jokes about doctors on drugs I’d say she’s on drugs.  Nobody is that chirpy without chemical assistance.  I commented, as I produced the small offending object, that it was remarkably clean, as was the post-stub it used to be stuck to.   This is, in fact, a crown put in by Dentist from R’lyeh himself, so they could look it up in their records and the chirpy dentist went off into peals of tinkling laughter when the assistant declared that he’d glued it in originally with Glurpbggg™ ^ which is a temporary cement.  Oh, that’s why the crown was so clean! sang Ms Nitrous Oxide.  Temporary cement always dissolves over time!

            Erm, I said, spitting out the crown, which she had spronged back in place to check rapport and congruity with the surrounding teeth, and then couldn’t dislodge again, why?

            Oh, because it’s such a good fit! she trilled.

            Um.  From where I’m sitting . . . the temporary cement was always going to dissolve?  Therefore I was always due to be back here in this chair having spent x number of days chewing on one side of my mouth and worrying there was something actually wrong, and then spending an afternoon I might have spent getting on with novel-in-progress schlepping into Mauncester to have it put back in?

            Um.  Why?

^ I can hardly wait to see what WordPress does to the TM symbol.  I wonder if I need popcorn. 

†† Although I personally think it’s a syndrome.  As I keep saying.  If I were going to guess more, I’d guess that it’s caused by a variety of sensitivities to the extremely not-what-we-evolved-for life we lead now.  A kind of uber-allergy.   

††† Note that of course there are malingerers among us.  It’s like some accountants embezzle.  That doesn’t mean the definition of an accountant includes ‘embezzler’.  

‡ Although please the frelling gods couldn’t they have hired a PROOFREADER?  Text as bad as this undermines both the message and the professionalism of the journalist or the paper or both . . . or maybe that’s just that I’m a professional writer with ME.

The Odyssey, part one — guest post by Corellia

 

I am not a dog person. I love all animals (except snakes), but the only animals I worship and adore are cats. I also hate travelling. Which makes it even harder to understand why I would spend the last part of my Easter holiday travelling across half of Norway to get myself a new dog.

Read more (PDF): The Odyssey, Part One.

 

 

New Thing, 8

http://robinmckinleysblog.com/the-story-so-far/

EIGHT   

I’d managed to remember to put my toothbrush and hairbrush in my knapsack (with my laptop and iPad) but . . . I wondered, staring into the depths of the very full van, that’s very full, that’s, maybe, very very very full, if I had any chance of finding a plastic bag that had underwear and a t shirt in it.  Of course I should have thought of this before.  I should have thought of a lot of things.  I should have hired a larger van.

            Meanwhile, I could put the rose-bush on the porch (in the absence of ponies.  In my horse-mad, living-from-one-summer-horse-camp-to-the-next youth, I had learned that ponies will eat most things, including hamburgers.  I was sure a broad-minded pony could eat a rose-bush).  It could catch some rays tomorrow morning.    

            It was odd about the rose-bush . . .   

            I’d had no intention of bringing live plants to Cold Valley.  In the first place, the roof garden had been one of the features in the sale brochure, and was part of the deal with the new owner.  (Yes, there was a sales brochure.  Gelasio isn’t on the Forbes 400 list, but give him another decade.)   Some minion of the new owner’s lawyer had already been through with a (digital) clipboard and a magnifying glass, noting the damage done by the movers (‘one black smudge mark easily the size of a bisected flea, one chip of paint visible only through a 3x lens’) and I was sure he’d not merely checked the plants against a master list, but counted every leaf, bud, twig and the depth of the dirt in the various pots and timber-walled beds. 

            But the evening of the day I’d opened my atlas and stuck a pin in a place called Cold Valley I’d bought myself a half-bottle of prosecco and put it and a water glass, being fresh out of champagne flutes for some reason, in the freezer.  When they were so cold they hurt I took a glass of fizz out onto the roof.  It was too early in the season to hang around outdoors and the air was bitter.  Everything about me was icy:  my hands,  my body, my heart, my future.  But it wasn’t like I was going to see another summer here.  Now or never. 

            The problem with the Upper West Side is that you don’t get to see the sunset over Central Park.  And I wasn’t much of a dawn person.  Well, occasionally from the wrong end.  Usually when there was a deadline looming, under which circumstances I wasn’t much in the mood for natural beauty.

            Except for the bougainvillea the garden was pretty art house.  Our gardener had ambitions.  He’d even made the bougainvillea look sort of tortured and eloquent.  When Gelasio had hired him, however, he wanted the work and was more tractable than he became.  Which is why Gelasio got his bougainvillea.  And I got my roses.

            I know nothing about growing roses.  I just like the way they smell.  So when Ford asked me about my ‘vision’ of the garden, I said, “I don’t know.  But I would like roses, please.”

            He wrote down ‘roses’, probably grinding his teeth.  Another damned soggy female with a rose fetish appeared in a thought bubble over his head, although only I saw it.  Gelasio and I had only been together about a year at that point.  Gelasio grabbed  my hand and squeezed it.  His thought bubble said:  Roses.  How romantic. 

            Ford was a mean man with a pair of secateurs.  This time of year the roses were still tiny stubs, although the first leaves had cautiously unrolled and were testing the air.  I sipped my fizz and shivered.  And had another stupid idea.  “You know,” I said to the rose-bush standing next to me, “Maybe I could take one of you with me.   Mr Diamond-Studded Shoelaces won’t miss one of you.”

            The night was absolutely clear and absolutely calm.  There was therefore no reason why there was a sudden wild shudder of air—which, furthermore, seemed only to affect the rose-bushes—and a murmur as if a lot of people in the next room had said meeeee.  I looked at my glass.  No, this was my first one, and it was only about half empty. 

            I looked up again.  “Sorry, guys,” I said.  “But Mr Diamond-Studded Shoelaces’ gardener will take good care of you.  You get to see sunrise over Central Park every day and your barnyard fertilizer will only be from pedigree chickens.  The gallant heroine who comes with me will probably die in the first raid.  And I’ll have this one,” I said, turning back to the rose-bush standing next to me in her pot, “because she’s the smallest.”  Nothing like small enough when I was wrestling her into and out of the freight elevator, and hoisting her into the back of the van. 

            Nonetheless.  Here she was.  I bent to embrace her, staggered to the porch and set her down.  This was obviously a lucky thing to have done, because when I went back to the van a plastic bag had fallen out of its cranny onto the spot where the rose had been sitting, and the bag contained two t shirts, three pairs of underwear and four pairs of socks.

Sunday night after Sunday afternoon

 

I’m bored with only chewing on one side of my mouth.*   And Gemma was not at the abbey this afternoon which made me feel more put-upon.  We had eight, however, which meant we could ring triples.  Watch me frelling dive for the treble. . . . At least it wasn’t seven Brilliant Ringers and me:   our eight included two of the middling band members—they’re better than I am, but that still doesn’t take much**—so at least I didn’t have to humiliate myself further by saying ‘no’ when they asked me if I could treble bob to major.***  It wasn’t even seven blokes and me†; Leandra and Moira were both there.  Moira is consolingly middling level;  Leandra is a major frelling hot shot, but has the gift for treating morons and gibbering twits like human beings.  I aspire to being worth her time.††

            Other than that, it’s been SHADOWS.  And maybe a little New Thing. 

KatydidNL

Am I the only one who really wishes she had a copy of these Flowerhair books? 

Snork.  Because I am a depraved human being I’ve been thinking about inserting the occasional excerpt.  I’m just not sure how far this parody thing will stretch. Carooooooooooooom WHACK.           

. . . And it’s not going to freeze tonight.  I don’t think.  I hope.  I planted a lot more tender little green things today.†††  I may just bring the potted-up dahlia cuttings in.  Just because I can. 

* * *

* Because I am a hysterical twit one of my first thoughts after the bloody crown^ chunked out last night, after the screams of horror etc, was, ohmigods can I SING?  I have a voice lesson on Bank Holiday Monday!  —Yes I can sing.  Good grief.  Chewing is, however, problematic.

^ An interesting image.  Sort of Charles I.  

** I’m getting better.  I am.  My mind still goes blank.  But sometimes it comes back.  Sometimes it even comes back bringing the blue line of the method we are (theoretically) ringing with it.

              But just walking over from the car park the middle of a Sunday afternoon . . . the world is full of frelling tourists, and one of the things they’re gaping at is the abbey, which is gigantic and impressive and all that.  And beautiful.  I’ve loved it for years, and when I didn’t seem to be DOING quite so much, including before I started bell ringing, I used to creep in for evensong sometimes, to listen to the voices and the organ in that extraordinary space.  I look at it and I think and I frelling RING there?   You’re kidding, right?^  It takes you a couple of minutes’ hard walking to get round this vast building to the door to the tower, and by the time I climb the ninety thousand stairs, including the rope ladder over the oubliette at the end, I’m in no fit state to do anything but sit in a corner and gibber.^^  So when Og or Albert calls out the name of a method and expects people to step forward and grab ropes, I’m like, Nooooooo!  I’m knitting!  I climbed ninety million stairs (including the rope ladder over the oubliette) to sit in a corner and knit!

            I really want to get over this stage.  Really.  Want.  It’s boring.  Speaking of boring. 

^ I seem to be uttering this phrase kind of a lot lately.  It turned up in New Thing recently which was probably a mistake because we all know life follows art.+  I ordered a bunch of stuff from one of these on line organic save-the-planet sites including six tins of Spicy Lentil Soup which I’m fond of and it’s faster than making it when you’re ringing that night and besides you’re only allowed nine calories a day which means cooking is mostly kind of demoralising.  Five tins were in the box they sent me.  So I emailed them saying, just reassure me you didn’t charge me for the sixth, okay?  And they wrote back saying, we need more information about your order, and then we can respond to your concerns.  One of their list of questions was What colour was the TAPE used on the packaging?  What?  Clearly an occasion when the only possible response is, You’re kidding, right? 

+ Yes, I’d be worrying about those attack mushrooms if I were you. 

^^ . . . And get out my knitting.+  Knitting is very good for the blood pressure++ as I have just been telling Hannah. 

+ Can anyone out there recommend or point me at a pattern for a mug cosy—and before you send me six hundred and forty-nine links to patterns for those wrap-around mug cosies which seem to be a major fashion accessory these days (including some very cute ones on Ravelry), what I want is a mug cosy that looks like a tea cosy only smaller.  This is one of those things that supposing I live long enough to get casual with knitting the way I’m casual with baking (‘okay, fine, that looks about right’) I assume I’ll be able to invent, or devent, from a tea cosy pattern, or a circular hat pattern, or something.  Right at the moment I need to be told what to do, in words of one syllable, and not very many of them either.  

++ Which, after ninety thousand stairs, is banging in your ears anyway.  I only have breath to gibber with because of all that hellhound hurtling.  

*** Major is eight bells.  And the fancy upper level methods have a frelling fancy upper level line even for the lowly treble.  I can treble bob to minor—six bells—at some tower that isn’t the abbey.  Eight . . . well.  I’d like to have a try, some practise night, after I’ve stopped freaking out.  

† This should not matter.  A ringer is a ringer is a ringer and there have been women ringers for the last hundred years or so (although I’m very glad I didn’t have to be one of the first).   But I start feeling all patriarchally oppressed when I’m surrounded by blokes who are all better at something than I am.  This is my problem, not the blokes’.  

†† Along with being a sweetheart to the dim and wussified, Leandra is tiny and fierce.  She’s Albert’s wife and, like him, a major feature in the local guild.  She’s also one of the comparatively few top-flight women ringers:  there are plenty of girls down at my level, but it’s usually only the boys who are obsessive enough to go on to great things.^  There are still a few lingering sexist assumptions in bell ringing, among them that women don’t ring at the back on the big bells.  Colin likes to joke about this, after he’s handed me the rope for the tenor.^^  The back bells at the abbey are seriously large.  Entire fleets of aircraft carriers weigh less than the tenor.  When we’re ringing on eighty-four, look around:  Leandra will be at the back somewhere.  She’s so little that if you’re on a bell on the opposite side of the aircraft-hangar ringing chamber you can barely frelling see her.  The abbey band wouldn’t dream of messing with her, but I’m rather hoping to see her tangle some day with an old-fashioned visitor who doesn’t think women ring big bells.^^^ 

^ I’m obsessive enough.  I’m just not good enough. 

^^ The tenor at Glaciation is not particularly large but it is very deep set which means you need six friends to help you drag it off its perch.  Thus a little innocent merriment may be had on a dull ringing evening.  

^^^ Although watching Wild Robert casually handle a monster bell is as good as a play.  He’s half a head taller than I am but probably weighs less.  

††† While dad robin dealt with an extra serving of mealworms.  I’m going to run out.  I’m going to have to buy maggots till the next delivery.

Happy happy happy. Happy. Happy. Grrrrrr.

 

IT’S THE FIRST DAY OF A THREE-DAY BANK HOLIDAY WEEKEND.  AND THE CROWN ON ONE OF MY HORRIBLE STUPID TEETH HAS JUST FALLEN OUT.  I’m so happy.  Happy, happy, happy, happy. 

            It has not been a brilliant day and furthermore Peter is in Cardamomlinghamshire visiting relatives so I don’t even have him around to blame.* 

            Gemma told me last night, cheerfully, on her way out the door after handbells** that she probably won’t be there for afternoon ringing at the abbey on Sunday.  She saw the stark panic flood my face and said hastily, you’ll be fine.  You’ll be fine.  I’ll be fine, eggs grow on trees, teabags make the best tea, and Charlemagne was a girl.  AAAAAAUGH.  Last Sunday it was five fabulous male ringers . . . and Gemma and me.  AAAAAAAAUGH.

            I’ll be fine.  Yes.  I’ll be fine.  I’ll take my knitting. . . .

            AND WE’RE GOING TO HAVE A FROST TOMORROW NIGHT.  A FROST!  A FRELLING, FRELLING, FRELLING, FRELLING FROST!  IT’S MAY!  IT’S MAY IN SOUTHERN ENGLAND!  WE’RE ALLOWED TO PLANT LITTLE TENDER GREEN THINGS OUTDOORS IN THE GROUND IN MAY IN SOUTHERN ENGLAND!***

            Usually.

            I had quite a nice time in the garden a couple of days ago—when it finally stopped raining long enough to make this practical—playing eenie meanie with all the racks and rows of little green mail-order things that arrived during the floods and are still waiting to be put somewhere they can settle down and grow.†  I planted the sweet peas, finally, some begonias, some (tender) fuchsias, most of the rest of the glads, some petunias.  Today . . . today I (furiously) planted the dahlia cuttings in pots two or three sizes smaller than I meant to—I don’t have TIME for endless potting-on:  stuff goes in an intermediate pot and then it goes into the ground or into its big permanent pot—so they’d all fit on a tray in case I’m bringing them indoors tomorrow night.  The stuff that is already in the ground is going to have to take its chances†† . . . but the sitting-room is going to be frelling impassable if I have to bring in all the unfrost-proof things in trays and pots or still in their mail-order plastic cells. . . .   

* * *

* You made my crown fall out!  You did!  You know you did! 

** Have I told you we seem to have morphed into Thursday and Friday handbells??  Wait, wait, I have a novel to finish and I do need to reserve some brain.  I think I’ve told you Gemma is a doctor, and she’s just changed clinics/surgeries which means her schedule has changed, and Thursday afternoon handbells are no longer possible.  So we had, I thought, moved handbells to Fridays right before New Arcadia bell practise^ . . . except that it turns out Colin can’t do Fridays but was too polite to say so.^^  I have this habit of not really paying attention to details and therefore found myself saying to Niall and Colin, well, okay, we’ll just have to keep on with Thursdays, and Niall and I can ring with Gemma on Fridays . . . WHAT AM I SAYING.  This week was the first of the new schedule and . . . two days in a row of handbells is . . . intense.  

^ Which means I will now stuff hellhounds into their harnesses and pelt out the door so as to be out of earshot by the time they start ringing up.  I’m getting better at sleeping through Sunday mornings though. 

^ The British.  ARRRRRRRGH. 

*** I’m having another of those ‘why do I DO this to myself??’ moments.  I moaned this to Peter tonight over the phone and he said, because you’d think less well of yourself if you didn’t^, which is true as far as it goes, but it still begs the question why do I have to choose activities where terror will be my natural environment?  Why couldn’t I collect stamps or go to more films?^^ 

^ And given my standard level of self-appreciation this could get dangerous.  

^^ No horror, of course.+ 

+ Avengers Assemble is playing semi-around here this weekend and I am half-tempted to go except for two things:  (a) it’s in frelling 3D, and my loathing for (frelling) 3D was renewed and reinforced by (multi-frelling) THOR and (b) I haven’t got time.  If I’m going to ring bells and sing and rescue all the little green things drowning in my garden(s) and finish a novel before the hellhounds and I have to stop eating, although the hellhounds wouldn’t mind, I haven’t got time.#  And, just by the way, Sunday morning ringing at New Arcadia is forty minutes plus a one-minute bolt from the cottage to the tower and a more leisurely several-minute stroll back.  Sunday afternoon ringing at the abbey is an hour, plus a half hour commute.  Also, terror is tiring.  

# And the blog is a not insignificant eater of time.~ 

~ And there are a lot of doodles waiting to be doodled.  Siiiigh.  I should draw you a Venn diagram of Available Energy Usage by Robin McKinley some time.  I don’t know if this is the frelling ME, or advancing age, or just that I’ve always been peculiar, but what I can and can’t do isn’t just about whether I feel (relatively) alert and intelligent or as if I have ham salad for brains and limbs made of half deflated inner tubes.  It’s more of a Chinese-menu situation where you want stuff from as many columns as possible.  And your fortune cookie is still going to tell you you’re frelled. 

*** Meanwhile friends in the Midwestern prairie are having temperatures pushing ninety (°F).  

† I’m still seeing disturbingly few little feathered things in the shrubbery.^  I wouldn’t have thought literal drowning was all that likely in my garden-on-a-hill, and there’s still the greenhouse to take shelter in.  Nor would I have thought I have many predators out there, although what is that unpleasing line about there always being a rat within five feet of you?  I’m sure my local rats would be more than happy to tuck into adolescent robin.  But dad robin is still hanging around for mealworms.  Robins are such fearless little critters^^ that you get a prime view of what’s going on with them.  There were still two adults^^^ when I started putting mealworms out but they were very chary of me—which served to reinforce my guilt about how little gardening I’ve been doing recently and it’s not all down to the weather—but robins don’t really do chary and dad, at this point, pretty well gets in my face and says, Mealworms?  Where are the mealworms?, if he’s dispatched the previous serving.  I put them out twice a day, and he must be feeding them to someone because if he ate all of them himself he’d explode.  The mealworm saucer normally lives on my potting table in the greenhouse but I put it out in the courtyard by the kitchen door when I want to use my table, on top of a tall pot that will have a dahlia in it eventually.  He knows this.  So first he sits in the apple tree next to the greenhouse and stares at me, and then he perches on that pot and looks at me meaningfully.  I may have to start buying more mealworms. 

^ I did get a couple of photos of the babies, but they’re not very good.  The nest is tucked back behind various jars and plastic boxes of plant food and it’s dark.  I didn’t want to blow a flash in their tiny fluffy faces and I haven’t been very lucky with the right angles of sunlight . . . or any angles of sunlight, lately.  They’re only in the nest about ten days, I think—maybe two weeks.  Not long at all.  And I didn’t notice they’d hatched immediately—they were already beginning to grow feathers by the time I saw them—since I’d been trying to leave mum alone so she’d go on sitting.  But I’m reasonably sure there were five of them to begin with.  Five’s a lot.  

^^ Unlike their human namesake  

^^^ If there’s only one parent left, it’s probably dad, because mum has sashayed off to start a new nest somewhere else. 

†† I may raise the odds a bit by throwing a bit of bubble wrap around.  After potting up the frelling sweet peas—usually I just slap them in the ground to begin with—and bringing them in and out for about a fortnight I am VERY RELUCTANT TO LOSE THEM NOW.

New Thing, 7

 

SEVEN

The first thing I did was stomp across the parking lot, go into cabin seven and unplug the campfire.  Then I went back to reception and moved the van.  I opened the van door and then just sat there in the driver’s seat with my legs dangling, too tired (or sore) to climb down from that perch one more time today. 

            There were tiny porches in front of all the cabins, with railings, where you could tie your horse.  That would be one approach to the gas prices problem.  I was sure the garden at Lovecraft’s Lair was big enough for a horse.  And you could put a cart in the garage as easily as a car.  But we’d have to stay overnight when we came to town.  That would cut into the money I was saving on gas.  I’d have to ask Friendly Campfire if they could consider installing a hayrack.  Hmm.  I didn’t think Flowerhair or the Silent Wonder Dog could help me with this one.  I sighed.  I climbed down, slowly, hanging on to things.  The stomping part of unplugging the campfire had been a little unwise.  The back doors on the van creaked when I pulled them open.  “I agree,” I said.

            I hadn’t been entirely intelligent about packing.  Actually ‘stupid’ covers it pretty well.  After ten days in a gigantic, almost empty apartment, I’d sunk into the mindset that my mingy few boxes and odds and ends like the kitchen stool and my anglepoise desk lamp would probably all fit on the passenger seat of a smartcar and I could maybe tie the sofa to the roof.  So the morning after I’d told Hayley I’d be there in three days I asked Joe the Doorman if he could recommend a van-rental place that would let me leave the thing for someone else to deal with in a small town in the outer reaches of the galaxy that no one running a van-rental in New York City had ever heard of, and, furthermore, rent it to me now, none of this wussy making an advance reservation nonsense.   

            Joe the Doorman can always recommend someone.  He didn’t even have to say ‘Tell him I sent you—he owes me a favor’—this is a given for those lucky enough to live under Joe the Doorman’s aegis and luxuriate in his recommendations.  Which I was about not to any more, but I could at least go out in a van that wouldn’t die on me in the going.

            And it didn’t.  It was a pretty good van, aside from the somewhat debilitated shock absorbers, and the fact that it got about .02 miles to the gallon.  (Hey.  It was carrying barely 1000 books.  Okay, and the rose-bush.  Which I knew from heaving it to the freight elevator weighed forty tons.)  And, because I was sent by Joe the Doorman, they let me rent an elderly but regularly updated GPS thingy, without which I knew I would end up running away from alligators in the Everglades.  I felt that the Screaming Skull logo was a little disadvantageous—eye-catching, perhaps, in a city with a lot of van-rental options—but disadvantageous.  Increasingly so once you’d crossed the Triboro Bridge and had to, for example, stop for gas occasionally.  But some other lucky person was going to be driving it home.  If it was one of the enormous, shambling young men at the Screaming Skull garage, there would probably be fewer gas station attendants who killed themselves laughing on the return journey.  (Joe the Doorman’s recommendations were always reliable and sometimes interesting.)  Which meant I needed a car (or a pony) by the day after tomorrow.  As well as a place to unload 1000 books and a rose-bush.

            The main drawback to this van was that it was too small.  My three-dimensional spacial-awareness faculty had been put drastically to the test—and had pretty much burnt out at about 1:00 a.m. a day and a half ago, when I’d started taking my clothes out of the cardboard boxes, putting them in a series of plastic bags (the seething mass of used plastic bags under the kitchen sink had been, fortunately for me, still there, after the house-contents razers had eliminated all signs of Gelasio’s occupancy) and stuffing them in anything that even looked like a gap.  At one o’clock in the morning, when you’ve been putting not-everything in your too-small van and then taking it all out again since six pm, almost anything looks like a gap.  Especially after seven hours of underground-parking-garage lighting.  Joe the Doorman sent sandwiches down with a minion a couple of times or the valet, coming in at 7 a.m. to loosen the chains on Mr Testosterone’s four-wheeled cruise missile, might have found my wasted body lying motionless next to a small white(ish) van emblazoned with a wild-eyed skull vomiting flames through a dislocated jaw.  When Mr Screaming Skull had asked me what size van I’d carelessly said, oh, the smallest one.  I’ve only got a two-seater sofa and a few boxes of books.

            Unh.

Yarny

 

Someone on the forum asked for recommendations for New York City yarn shops.  We are so all over this. 

Hannah had her first lesson in knitting and purling today.  She sent me some photos, and I’d post one if I could figure out how.  She’s making a scarf* out of this gorgeous amber-butterscotch yarn that I would kill for.  And I tried once, as southdowner and b_twin_1 can attest.**  I dunno . . . no, no, I’m still better off practising on CHEAP yarn and leg warmers and hellhound blankets for a while longer.  Better.  Off.  BETTER.***

Hannah’s new mentor, who is a mega-demon knitter with faultless qualifications, upon inquiry, suggests the following Manhattan yarneries.  Annotations are your editor’s own: 

http://www.schoolproductsyarns.com/

The Oldest Yarn Store in Manhattan, and there’s a BLOKE on the opening page. 

. . . which is also owned by the woman responsible for:

http://www.karabellayarns.com/default.aspx

Dyed and gone to heaven yarn

http://www.karabellayarns.com/yarndetail.aspx?yarnID=79

Kill meeeeeeeee.  I adore merino.  And look at all those COLOURS.

 http://www.theyarnco.com/

Broadway in the low 80s, upstairs:  ‘you don’t see the store from the street but I think it’s right next door to that Laytner’s’

http://www.theyarnco.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=200&Itemid=15#ecwid:category=2196588&mode=product&product=9581677

Sigh.  Well, I’m not hurrying.  I couldn’t knit the freller anyway. 

http://www.purlsoho.com/purl . . .

http://www.purlsoho.com/purl/products/item/7962-Susan-Bates-Crystallite-Knitting-Needles-US-8-to-105

Oh whimper.  WANT. 

http://www.stringyarns.com/

I’m not asking if any of these people ship overseas.  Am.  Not. 

. . . But what do you suppose this is like to knit?  . . . Arrgh.  Wait a minute.  It doesn’t have its own page.  Click on ‘yarns’, and then on ‘artyarns’, and then on ‘artyarns pearled and beaded’.  Want.  But how does it knit? 

http://www.thewoolgathering.com/

Okay, finally, a web site that you can’t browse and make yourself miserable.  Yaaay.  Sniff.  

Hannah also her own self went to: 

http://www.knittycity.com/blog/home

. . . http://www.knittycity.com/store/index.php?route=product/product&product_id=388  More artyarn.  This one glitters.  Okay, I wonder if artyarns has a UK outlet . . . back, back, thou tempter!  Back, I say!

http://www.knittycity.com/store/index.php?route=product/product&product_id=361  The individual colours don’t seem to have their own pages, but it doesn’t matter.  I want all of them.

http://www.tangled-yarn.co.uk/brand/malabrigo/arroyo/malabrigo-arroyo-850-archangel/prod_921.html  . . . damn.

Apparently I have to go to France for artyarn.  And not the near end of France either.  Oh, wait . . .

http://www.yarnbox.co.uk/cgi-bin/trolleyed_public.cgi?action=showprod_BMSH1S  Rats.  Well, I’m broke.  What a very good thing I’m broke.  

ANYWAY.  Hannah says Knitty City were very nice to her and even though the shop was full—including a men’s class—someone took time to help her pick out her (unnecessarily beautiful) yarn. 

. . . OH GODS I’M SO HOMESICK I COULD DIE.  No, no, I can get into plenty of woolly trouble in the UK.  And have.  And will continue to do so.  But I love New York—you will have observed that I plonked New Thing’s heroine there, and even if I did instantly snatch her out again, still, she’s a native New Yorker and that won’t go away. †

            It’s not touring SHADOWS or PEG II (or III) that’s going to get me back on an airplane, it’s the prospect of cruising Manhattan yarn shops with Hannah.  Now all I need is an Extreme Dog Minder.  Meanwhile . . .

LEG WARMERS

Only a few rows to go.  And fewer than that too, because I’ve knitted about four more waiting for stuff to load tonight.  The old mews laptop has been in a bad mood ever since Word took it down with violence the other night.  One of the best things about knitting is the low technology requirement.

* * *

*Please tell me someone else out there started with something that wasn’t a scarf.   Clearly I don’t get it about scarves. 

** Southdowner had just better not wear that jumper anywhere in my vicinity. 

*** Just until I don’t have to make my leg warmers double-length any more.  Because I need them to squunch down excessively around my ankles to hide all the errors.

†  And if anyone is wondering if I’m forgetting my roots, I don’t really have roots:  the curse of the military brat.  I call myself from Maine because I spent more years there than anywhere else^.  But my best friend lives in New York.  As well as my publisher.  And my agent.  And the Nur ad Din room at the Metropolitan Museum.  And the Metropolitan Opera. 

^ Although Hampshire, England has now surpassed this record.  I realise this with a shock.

More tea. More lack of sympathy. More frelling bells.

 

Arrrrrrgh.  Ringing at the abbey.  Arrrrrrgh.  My first go of Grandsire Triples tonight was a complete retro meltdown.  METHOD BELL RINGING IS A STUPID OBSESSION.  I AM GOING TO TAKE UP SOMETHING SENSIBLE LIKE CUTTING USED PLASTIC BAGS IN STRIPS, PLAITING THEM TOGETHER, AND MAKING RUGS OUT OF THEM.  And then, as if this was not humiliation enough . . . Peter and I went to Tabitha, the Bowen-massage lady, this afternoon, and she has this frelling fixation on drinking water.*  She gives you this frelling ewer of water to drink at the end of your session ‘to help flush the toxins out quickly.’  Uh huh.  By the time we got home again I had barely an hour before bell ringing . . . and of course I had to have a cup of tea.  Face Grandsire Triples with a bell-rope in my hands without a recent injection of caffeine to stiffen my resolve?  No chance.  And the result was. . . .

      I had thought there was a loo at the abbey.  Well, there is, but the public one closes at the end of abbey-as-museum visiting hours.**  And the staff one is available only by Delphic utterance, and while Og gave me the correct orison, no one had a spare golden apple with which to placate the guardian dragon.  So . . . I climbed down through the centuries again to ground level . . . and staggered dizzily out into a good-sized town with dozens of public loos—the fabulous public loo system is high on my list of good reasons to live in this frelling country—all of which were closed.  Nobody needs to pee after 6 pm.  It’s probably in the fine print of my visa.  Eventually I gatecrashed a hotel.  I might as well have been in New York City.  Arrrrrgh.*** 

      And, not that these two events had anything to do with each other . . . but my second trial of Grandsire Triples . . . was not too bad.  Therefore I am writing this blog rather than getting my sword off the wall to make it easier to fall on. 

I did realise I was speaking rather provocatively the other night about tea and critters. . . . 

Mirkat

Have I shared this before? http://www.adagio.com/teaware/ingenuiTEA_teapot.html 

Hmm.  Do you use this?  Do you like it?  I’m having a little plaintive ‘why?’ moment.  I like my teapot.  And it works just fine.  But if this one makes you happy then that’s good.  

Or do you have a favorite tea infuser? 

About fifteen years ago some bright spark finally invented—or anyway marketed—or anyway marketed in the UK—a proper frelling tea sieve.  It’s the shape of a tea mug, and just enough smaller to fit inside the mug, and with a lip around the top so it hangs on the rim and you don’t have to fish for it.  Peter and I have several, partly in case of accidents or visitors, and partly because since I tend to like my tea STRONG any infuser I employ regularly tends to pick up flavours, so I want different infusers for different teas. And that’s what I use.  I also have two teapots with very large lids, which means very large holes where the lids fit, which will take one of these infusers—or an even bigger one, suitable for teapots belonging to people who like their tea STRONG.  Whittards was the first I know of to introduce these purpose-built mesh infusers, but most tea shops that sell loose tea have them now.  

EMoon

I think being in central Texas defeats the whole notion of tea. 

Phooey.  Don’t any of you forum people watch THE AFRICAN QUEEN at regular intervals?  In which Katharine Hepburn drinks lots of hot tea in the tropics? 

When visiting in England, I loved tea. . . . But here I have a) sulphury, hard, heavily treated water, b) water that is, for much of the year, emerging from the faucet warm to hot, and c) no real desire for anything hot to drink because it’s so hot. 

Have you ever tried a cup of good tea in hot weather?  I drink it year round and while English summers are nothing on Texas summers, in a bad year we’ll get weather quite hot enough to lay me out and make me miserable.  Hot drinks may have the curious effect of cooling you off.  

And no desire to waste the water that filling a pot with hot water, tossing that water, and then filling it again means, because we’re still in drought. (Or for that matter having the stove on long enough to boil that much water.) 

Good lord, who said anything about tossing it?  You put it back in the kettle.  It’s still half-warm too, so the kettle will re-boil that much quicker.  AND YOU NEED AN ELECTRIC KETTLE.  You can now get them in America although I’m not sure how common they are.  But they are THE BEST. 

In our rare cold spells, I wish very hard for good hot tea. But make it? In these conditions? Probably never. 

Different water filters will deal with different things;  presumably your local Water Filter Experts have not endeared themselves to you.  I doubt I’d drink the stuff you’re describing either in tea or at all.  But there is always bottled water.  Bottled water varies too—there’s a lot of fancy expensive mineral water out there I actively dislike the taste of—but if you used bottled water just for tea you wouldn’t get through it fast enough to put the mortgage at risk. 

nickithomas

I use loose tea in the cup . . . Put milk in cup first ( . . . I am one of those unreasonably fanatical milk-firsters), a generous spoon of tea in a strainer, shake strainer over bin (to get rid of the dusty bits that will end up floating on your tea otherwise) before putting on cup then pour boiling water in SLOWLY and moving around to cover all the tea. When full, leave a minute or 2 before removing strainer and stirring. 

SHUDDER.  Well, as above, to each her own.  If this works for you then that’s fine.  But your tea can’t infuse properly if you treat it like this.  Milk first isn’t a problem—you just brew your tea in a one-mug-sized pot, and pour it into your mug with the milk in it.  PS:  Good tea does not have dusty bits.

Have to admit that this does not work well with the really good expensive tea that tends be much bigger leaves and requires more steeping – but I can’t afford that very often anyway. 

It’s not just more steeping—you need hot water.  There’s a whole fal-lal about water temperature, and how different teas do better at different temperatures.  Generally speaking you don’t want furiously-boiling water, which may burn or anyway damage good tea.  You want it some kind of just-barely-off the boil.  Which if you’ve already put your milk in, isn’t going to happen. 

glanalaw

I drink PG Tips, but only because it’s the only halfway decent loose tea to be had in this part of the country. 

I’ve heard rumours that PG Tips does a not-bad loose tea.  As someone who remembers PG Tips in their heyday of powdered charcoal briquettes and black widow spider legs, I am dubious, but I will take your word for it.  Since I plunged into the Fussy Snob Tea world a long time ago I’m not likely to try it myself. 

Short of mail-ordering from England, which isn’t an option on the poor-starving-college-student budget. 

Oh, now wait a golly gosh darn minute.  I don’t for a minute believe there aren’t a million posh tea web sites in America.  The British tea fetish is pretty much a myth—the overwhelming majority of cuppas are made of (bleaugh) cheap tea bags, and overall, the British drink more coffee than they do tea.  Sacrilege.  But cult tea is alive and thriving—it’s come on pretty much parallel to the availability of proper strainers, I think.  In the dark ages your only option for loose tea was those damned little tea balls on chains that you hooked round the handle of your tea pot.  Except that they were TOO SMALL so you might as well use bags after all, the tea still had no room to expand.  Mostly I just dumped the tea in the bottom of the pot (or the mug) and let it swirl.  Since I like loooooong steeping, by the time I was ready to drink it the tea leaves had all settled tactfully to the bottom anyway.  If I was using a pot, I poured through a sieve.  This did mean that by the time you drank your last cup it was getting kind of . . . violent.  But one of the laws of the universe is that good tea does not stew.  It may get a little exciting, but it never goes bitter.

If I was making tea that someone else was going to drink with me I would sometimes use a festoon of those wretched little tea balls, so I could pull them out.  I had about six.

Regarding cats vs. dogs: I’ve always preferred cats (and at my present stage of life, a dog would be impossible because I’m not home often enough). 

Buy two dogs.  Then they keep each other company.  People roll their eyes when I say this, but it’s perfectly practical.  It’s the first dog that’s the huge leap of responsibility.  Dog or no dog is the big one.  One dog or two dogs is details—including important details such as getting two dogs that like each other—and a little extra dog food. 

But then most of the cats I’ve know, definitely including the current one, seem to think they are dogs actually, at least in terms of the being-glad-to-see-you and the cuddling. 

It’s individuals really, on both sides, the humans and the critters.  If I have to come down on a side, then I’m a dog person.  Clearly.  But there are plenty of dogs out there I wouldn’t have even if they came with a guaranteed charm for ringing Grandsire Triples (just add boiling water).  And even within categories of dogs I don’t like—little frelling terriers, say—there are individuals I’m all over.  I met up with Titus’ little frelling terrier puppy again about a fortnight ago and he’s still adorable.  And I was taking care of the hellcat again while Cathy was here, while Phineas was golfing in Scotland [sic].  I’m actually pretty pathetic:  if it’s furry and it acts like it likes me, then it’s my friend.

I hope your baby robins don’t wash away! 

Me too.  I’m worried I’m not seeing more little rustling things in the shrubbery.  I did see dad robin stuffing mealworms into something yesterday, so I think there’s at least one of them still undrowned.

Blogmom

Cats rule! Dogs drool.  

Flapdoodle.  In the first place, you have a dog, and I bet he does not drool, any more than the hellhounds do, who are an entirely drool-free zone.  In the second place, worst droolers I’ve ever met have been cats.  I’m told it’s something to do with having been weaned too young.  But they knead your lap or your chest and DROOL.  Ewwwww.  Give me an honest Great Dane any day. 

Kathy S

Dogs set booby traps. Cats courteously bury it. 

Again, flapdoodle.  I have cat crap all over my garden at Third House and I don’t feel the least kindly and tolerant about it.  One of my absolute pet peeves is the fact that cats are allowed utter freedom to trash other people’s property, shred, roll in or dig up their plants, crap all over their driveways, claw their doorframes, eat their endangered songbirds and have yowling cat fights under their windows and that’s just the way cats are.  I completely agree that dog owners should pick up after and generally control their dogs . . . but it bites me big time that there is no regulation of cats.  Including that they get to make your dogs’ lives hell because it amuses them to act like jerks. 

b_twin_1

I will acknowledge that dogs are inclined to leave landmines. BUT…. Cats also leave them. In your garden beds. Where you can find them whilst you are on your hands and knees weeding…. 

Yes.

I think that we’re frelled no matter which side we take… 

Yes.  That’s about it. 

Diane in MN

I like cats–at least, I like doggish cats–but I seriously do not like litterboxes, or the little kitty feet on the countertops after they’ve been in the litterbox. I admit that my dogs can slime the countertops, but there is a difference, however slight. 

This is pretty much the deal breaker with me.   The little kitty feet on my counters.  I’ve lived with cats.  And I’ve liked the cats I’ve lived with, and I find purring very soothing to go to sleep to.  But cats leap.  That’s the way they are. 

shalea

I love both dogs and cats, but I have an absolute No Feet or Butts on Food Preparation Surfaces rule for everyone — cats, dogs, small children (who might sit on countertops). 

And how do you ENFORCE this?  Dogs and children are (relatively) straightforward to train.  Cats, not so much.  I know they can be trained, and that what I react to as head games is the cat idea of social interaction, but how do you keep them off your countertops?  Barring poisoned spikes, that is, which would be kind of in the way at suppertime. 

AbigailW

So what kind of tea do you drink? I like a good cup of black tea and I know that bags are cheating, but what do real Brits drink? I suspect it’s not Twinings. 

CathyR

Well, this Brit drinks Twinings. Teabags. English Breakfast. Weak, no milk, 1/2 a sugar. A brew less like Robin’s it would be hard to imagine! 

Which is to say everything is about individuals. 

* * *

* Speaking of obsessions.  I wonder if she’d like to go halves on developing the plastic rag rug market. 

** I think the loos stay open later if there’s a late service or a concert.  —The admin, and the proliferating admin decisions, about trying to run a major national centre of practising Christianity and an internationally famous tourist attraction must be mind-blowing, and not in a good way.  Any big corporation is a complex mess to run but when the widget your factory produces is spiritual enlightenment, wowzah, oil and water are soulmates in comparison.  I know people who know people, and the abbey is a complex mess.  And I’m told our tower captain watches the abbey diary like Jeremy Lin watching the ball,^ and not infrequently phones up this or that person and says, pardon me, but shouldn’t the bell ringers know about this?  Oh—er—yes, says this or that person.  Sorry. 

^ Good gods, I just made a sports reference+.  Sorry.  But I like stereotype breakers, and he is one. 

+ That isn’t about horses.  Hey, did you know that Great Britain has a very strong dressage team for the Olympics this summer?  First flicker of interest I’ve felt in the Olympics, which I would much rather were being held somewhere else. Katmandu. Neuquen City.  

*** Gemma had given me the keys to her house.  This would have involved driving, for pity’s sake.  For a LOO?  I thought she was joking.  She wasn’t.  I was jingling her keys in my pocket and wondering what the chances were that Wolfgang would start not once but twice only about twenty minutes after I’d turned him off^ when I took a sharp right and shot through the doors of the Hotel Forza Verduta.  Fortunately the only receptionist was on the phone.  I heard her say ‘There is a train from London . . .’ 

^ No, I still haven’t booked him in to get his starter motor replaced.  I know, I know.  And I don’t like living dangerously.  I’m just disorganised.