Robin McKinley's Blog, page 96

New Thing, 6

SIX 

I did make it to New Iceland in three days—at twilight and completely shattered.  The streetlights were winking on (at least New Iceland had streetlights—it might be almost like home except for the total lack of buildings more than two stories tall) as I drove down Sir Alexander Dane Avenue, looking for the Friendly Campfire Motel which should be up here on my right somewhere . . . ah.  There it is.

            I was already almost driving back out of town again.  It was only about five blocks long.  And this was town that people who lived in Cold Valley came to for . . . everything except aspirin, newspapers and milk.  Courage, ma brave.  I turned into the Friendly Campfire’s parking lot.  Reception was a quaint wood-effect cabin on the main road, and the rooms were a series of quaint wood-effect cabins in a kind of semi-circle around the edge of the parking lot.  There were trees.  I liked trees, in their place, about twenty stories down.  These looked like the kind that would probably rustle indiscriminately, and might contain stertorously-breathing crickets that tested the window latches at night.  I sighed.  I parked. 

            There was an interesting campfire-effect light in the window of reception.  It had a knobby, rectangular, glowing brown lump at the bottom, and a kind of fan of orange-red bars above.  They flickered.  I stared at them.  It had been a long day.  I could feel myself becoming hypnotised.  I shook my head and pushed through the door.  A bell jingled.  A perfectly normal-looking human being came through a door behind the counter and smiled at me.  “Do you have a reservation?”

            “Yes,” I managed.  “MacFarquhar.”

            The perfectly normal human being looked briefly nonplussed, and opened a giant ledger book.   She stared at what she found there.  I didn’t ask her how the man who’d answered the phone had spelled my name.  I was too tired to cope with such stimulation.  “I hope you had a good journey?” she said politely.

            “Long,” I said.  I looked at my hands.  Neither they nor my butt were likely ever to be the same again.  Self-drive vans available at the last minute that are big enough to hold a sofa and twenty-five (or thirty) cartons of the miscellaneous rubbish of an ex-life are not necessarily comfortable transport.  I thought the springs on this one had probably been old and tired before the fifteen (or so) cartons of books and a rose-bush in a pottery pot had compressed them further.  “I’m not used to a lot of driving.”

            “You came up from the city?” said the normal person.

            “Yes,” I said, not sure ‘the city’ would mean the same thing to her that it did to me.  From New Iceland, everything would be the city.  Except Cold Valley, of course.

            “Do you know how long you will be staying?” said the normal person.

            Depends on your crickets, I thought.  “A night or two.  I guess.”

            She nodded.  “You can change your mind,” she said.  “We aren’t busy this time of year.”  She turned the ledger around and offered me a pen.  She went kerchung! with my credit card while I scrawled ‘K MacFarquhar’.  My handwriting wouldn’t help anyone’s spelling.

            “Cabin seven,” she said.  She handed me a key.  The key chain had a plastic campfire hanging from it.  At least it didn’t glow.  “Do you need somewhere to have dinner?”

            Dinner.  There was an idea.  “Oh.  Yes please.”

            “The Eatsmobile is only two blocks away.”  She smiled sympathetically.  “You wouldn’t have to drive.  Everything else is out at the mall.  Eats is open for breakfast too.”

            “Thanks.”  I had an appointment with Hayley at ten o’clock.  “Can you tell me where the Homeric Homes office is?”

            She looked at me with new interest.  I had suddenly become a potential neighbor.  I smiled sheepishly.  I wasn’t going to tell her I stuck a pin in a map.  Or that her front window lighting gave me the whimwhams.

            “Yes, of course.  Eats is straight down Bradbury Street, at the end of the second block.  If you take your first left, onto Schmitz Street, Homeric Homes is almost on the corner.”  She hesitated.  She was longing to ask more questions.  I was too tired to help or hinder her.  I stood there like a clueless damsel waiting for a magician to cast a spell on her, unless Flowerhair and Doomblade or the Silent Wonder Dog got there in time.  “If you need anything else, please ask,” she said at last.

            “Thanks,” I said, and went back outdoors to look for cabin seven.  It was easy to spot.  It was the one with the campfire flickering in the window.

 

YESSSSSSSSSSS.

 

I have brought Hannah over to the DARK SIDE.  She is going to LEARN TO KNIT.  —Well, relearn.  She, like so many of you—my family of origin seems to have been a knitting-free zone—was originally taught by her grandmother.  But when she and I were festive, swinging, cutting-edge young things, knitting was antiquated, déclassé, extinct.  Your grandmother still did it, but nobody else did.*  And then other things like career, family, and the need for at least three and a half hours of sleep per night, get in the way of rediscovering your handcrafty roots:  How to knit, how to sew a fine seam, how to make nightgaunts out of pipe cleaners.  And then one day you look up from your desk and think, I can make publishing CEOs on the other side of the city/planet** tremble but I’ve never (re)learnt to knit.***

            Or possibly you’ve been moaning on the phone to your best friend about how you spend too much time on airplanes.†  And how when things go well you can read or watch a film†† or even get some work done, but things so often don’t go well, and you’re sitting in the gate area and the PA system is telling you every five minutes that you will be loading momentarily, and then when you finally do get on the frelling plane you have a really annoying seatmate who is afraid of flying, freaked out by whatever was holding up loading, and needs to chat.  And the requisite screaming baby is in the seat behind you.†††  And then, because the plane loaded late, you’ve lost your place in the take-off queue, and you’re going to be frelling around here on the ground for quite some time and I hope there isn’t a connecting flight at the other end and . . .

            At which point your friend may say smugly, You should learn to knit.

            Which is what I said to Hannah tonight.  And there was a long pause on the other end of the phone, and then she said, You’re right.  That’s exactly what I should do. . . .  So then we both spent some time looking up knitting shops in New York City‡ and she’s totally going to do this thing.

            YESSSSSSSSSSSSS.

            I am glad today has had a chance to go out on a high.‡‡  High moments in the last fourteen hours have been somewhat thin on the ground.  To begin with it’s been a gorgeous day . . . the first non-dire day we’ve had in about a fortnight.  I COULD GET SOME GARDENING DONE.  I COULD POT UP THE MILLION LITTLE GREEN THINGS WAITING TO BE POTTED UP.

            Except I can’t.  Mondays are voice lesson and ringing at Colin’s.  I haven’t got time for more extracurriculars.  Tomorrow it’s going to rain again.  Indeed it’s warming up to raining again tomorrow right now.‡‡‡  I did slam in a few sweet peas this afternoon in the little gap of time between getting hellhounds back to the cottage for the dog minder to sweep them away and when I need to leave for my singing lesson, but ‘slam’ is the operating word here and remember I said they needed to be potted on?  Yes.  They’ve got a good quarter-inch of white root showing around the bottom of the porous plant-in-situ pots I put them in weeks and weeks ago.

            And . . . I think I told you that I had gone to Oisin’s on Friday positively charged with tragedy, and was going to amaze him with my profound aural empathy with Orfeo mourning his lost Eurydice.  Ha.  Frelling ha ha ha.  About 95% of all that rich, blossoming cornballery went away the moment Oisin raised his hands over his keyboard.§  GODS FRELL IT.  I knew some of it would go away as soon as there was Someone Else Listening but I was pretty depressed that nearly all of it did.  This demoralised me sufficiently that I never really got it back over the weekend, and the Che Faro I took to Nadia today was a poor thin shadow of its last-week self. 

            It was not all bad.  In the first place, Nadia knows.  She’s a singer, and when she says ‘you’re your own worst enemy, Robin,’ she says it sympathetically.  In the second place she’s a girl.  (This was pretty funny.  She was saying ‘I’m a girl’ simultaneously as I was saying ‘he’s a bloke’.)  In the third place . . . she was serious about letting me work on it with her.§§  And in the fourth place . . . I went in saying, you know, even at my cornball best last week when I really was ( . . . I think . . . ) producing some vague, uncertain drama about the whole thing, that top F is an utter ratbag . . . and F isn’t high enough to inspire this amount of angst and perturbation.  And she said immediately, it’s on ‘ben’, isn’t it?  (Yes.)  That’s a really bad vowel sound for singing.  —So at least I wasn’t just being hopeless.  And she gave me some stuff to do.  And I love my voice lessons, even when they’re on THE ONLY GOOD DAY WE’RE GOING TO HAVE ALL MONTH, and when I’m singing like a slightly defective robot.

            And then tonight’s ‘tower’ ring was in Colin’s garage, with his inverted flower-pots.  I am so useless with those ridiculous bells.§§§  But tonight uselessness was general.  We all went home healthier than we came because laughter as we all know is the best medicine.  But in terms of ringing. . . .

            OH GODS IT’S SHEETING OUT THERE.

            But at least Hannah is learning to knit. 

* * *

* And the things your grandmother knitted for you—I had friends with knitting machines for grandmothers—made you cringe in fashion horror, as you drew up your leopardskin spandex with the roses and skulls,^ and snicked on your stud bracelets.^^   A lot of white rats and guinea pigs belonging to dashing, contemporary young things with knitting machines for grandmothers slept extremely well in those days.  

^ I had a pair of jeans-equivalent in this fabric until fairly recently.  

^^ I still have most of these.  I amuse easily.  

** http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Steinberg_New_Yorker_Cover.png

. . . Whew.  Read the caveats at the bottom of the page.  Art is harder.  You can’t excerpt 200 words from art.  If you just drew a square with ‘Kansas City’ written in it it wouldn’t have the same effect. 

*** Or how to make nightgaunts out of pipe cleaners.  Your grandmother probably didn’t teach you that one. 

† Uh-huh.  There was that convention in Hawaii you went to several times.  There was that other convention in San Francisco that gave you enough free time to go on a wine-tasting tour of the Napa Valley.  I’m pretty sure that last trip to Paris—when you came home with the fabulous dress—was work-related.  My heart frelling bleeds.

 †† On your iPad.  In hindsight I realise that I should have known that when both Hannah and Merrilee not only bought iPads but adored them, that I might as well embrace my doom.  I don’t think either of them plays computer games though.  And I’m afraid to ask.  I think they might yell at me. 

††† Or the requisite screaming baby is being held in a parental lap behind your really annoying seatmate so that the requisite marked-for-death toddler with legs just long enough to kick the back of the chair ahead of it every time its parents are looking the other way can be behind you. 

‡ Oh gods look at that gorgeous yarn.  Thank the gods it’s three thousand miles away.^ 

^ No!  I don’t want to know if they ship overseas!  Nor do I want to know the brand so I can see if anyone over here sells it!  NO! 

‡‡ I say nothing about the night.  Which is young and full of dreadful promise. 

‡‡‡ All right, all right, it’s after midnight, it is tomorrow.  The frelling rain doesn’t have to be so sharp off the flapdoodling blocks. 

§ Or keyboards, in this case:  he suggested he try the organ.  The accompaniment sounded really nice on the organ.  What we’re doing here is giving a miss to the main event, which would be me. 

§§ YAAAAAAAAAY.  Sorry.  But . . . YAAAAAAAAAAAAY. 

§§§  From the sublime to the ridiculous or what.  Colin’s entire garage would fit inside the mouth of the abbey’s biggest bell.

Chirpity chirpity chirp chirp chirp

 

I rang my first ordinary Sunday service at the abbey this afternoon.  Chirpity chirpity, etc.  And I did not humiliate myself.*  Quadruple chirpity.  Sextuple chirpity.  Icosahedronic chirpity.

            I didn’t tell you this last night because there’s a limit to how much gruesome suspense I’m willing to share.  Gemma has kept on telling me that the abbey is always short at Sunday afternoon service, and that last week, for example, they almost didn’t ring at all because only four ringers turned up—apparently they have a status to maintain, and with eighty-seven bells refuse to countenance minimus**—and then Wild Robert, who I believe shows at the abbey most Sunday afternoons except when he’s in London practising for the national twenty-six-bell demolition derby, arrived in the nick of time***.  Indeed Wild Robert told me a similar story about Sunday afternoon at the abbey a fortnight ago.  And then after the reification of the overgoddess last week I was thinking, okay, McKinley, they didn’t need you but they let you ring, when are you going to start paying your way† by showing up for ordinary service ringing?

            Dither dither dither dither dither.  The other side of service ringing is that you don’t get to do it till you’re ready.  Till you can, you know, ring.  Which I’m not showing really rampant signs of being able to do at the abbey (yet).  I’m clearly improving, if raggedly, but . . . but if they’re that short-handed we could ring frelling call changes.††  Dither.  Dither.

            So last night, Saturday night, at the last possible minute for Sunday, I wrote—emailed—Ulrich, saying that I felt I should wait till I was asked but Gemma keeps telling me the abbey needs ringers for Sunday afternoons and while I’m finding ringing at the abbey a steep learning curve if/when they think I might be more of an asset than a liability . . . I could maybe come along. 

            Then I spent the rest of the evening twitching wildly every time my email pinged.†††  But by the time I went to bed last night at seriously mmph o’clock‡ Ulrich had not answered.  He could have clutched his forehead and reeled away from his email with a cry of dismay . . . or he could have a life and been out doing pleasant things on Saturday night.  But apparently my Sunday afternoon was to be free to keep on with SHADOWS.‡‡

            I was staggering around, perhaps rather late, this morning, grappling with difficult issues like tea and underwear, and I had Astarte on the kitchen counter.  And she pinged.  I stared at her with a wild surmise.  That email ping could have been any number of people.  It could have been my homeopathic mailing list.  It could have been someone wondering where I was and why I hadn’t answered their last (a lot of choice here).  It could have been first contact with a sentient alien species.

            It wasn’t.  It was Ulrich.  Please do come along, he said.

            So I did.‡‡‡

            And I wasn’t brilliant.§  But I was okay.§§ 

* * *

* This is me, right?  I don’t say ‘I did well’ or even ‘I did pretty well’ or even ‘I didn’t do too badly’.  I say ‘I did not humiliate myself.’  Siiiiigh.  I wonder if I could ask for a positive attitude for my sixtieth birthday?^ 

^ I could ask.  

** Four bells.  Remember that method ringing is about jumbling up the order, but that a bell can only move one place each row.  There’s not a lot you can do with only four bells.  People have been known to ring full peals on four bells . . . but they’re madder even than the usual run of method ringers.   At New Arcadia, however, if there are four ringers for Sunday service, they ring minimus. 

*** Which is not to say that he hadn’t been to London.  He had.  In several locations.  Wild Robert spends all day on a train on Sundays, punctuated by bursts of ringing.  By the time he gets to the afternoon ring at the abbey the edge, I believe, is wearing off, and he’s almost ready for the new week, which contains things other than ringing. 

† I’ve said all this before but I’ll say it again because it’s important.  Bell ringing lives and dies on a huge amount of volunteer effort.  A huge amount of volunteer effort.  Being a paid-up member costs you about £7.50 a year and if you are a cheap s.o.b. your church will pay your sub for you.  The rest is the hours that you and the other ringers put into it.  All those millions of hours ringing teachers put into teaching people to ring—most of whom will drop out again before they become useful ringers—are all gratis.  All those hours the bands around those learners put into ringing for the learners to bounce off of are all gratis. 

            But we need bells to ring.  Bells are housed in churches^ and maintained by church admin.^^  And we pay for the enormous privilege of having bells to ring . . . by ringing services.  Ordinary Sunday services, and anything else the priest or semi-sacred minion or congregation member asks for—reification of goddesses, weddings, funerals, births of grandchildren, first official contact with sentient alien species^^^, whatever.  It’s what we’re for.  And yes, there are lots of ringers who don’t honour this unwritten contract, but they are all slime moulds. 

            And personally, as someone who needs endless practise grinding to frelling LEARN anything, I get anxious about payback pretty quickly. 

^ There are, I believe, a few Catholic churches with method bells, but the overwhelming majority of method ringing goes on in Anglican church towers.  I think this is true world-wide as well as the UK, but then method ringing as it is done in the UK is a British invention and British art form, and it tends to show up only in (chiefly) English-speaking ex-colonies:  USA, Australia, South Africa.  The UK and particularly England however is the only place there are lots of bell ringing towers.  

^^ With occasional help from ringer-driven Bell Funds, especially when major work needs to be done.  Churches haven’t been wealthy since Henry VIII.  Ha ha.

^^^ I’m looking forward to this one.  Perhaps they’ll compose a new method, like they have for the Olympics+.  Spock Royal.  Aeryn Sun Surprise.  Vorlon Vector Double Spliced.   

+But don’t get me started.  

†† I’m not looking forward to call changes at the abbey.  The ringing chamber, as I keep moaning, is gigantic, and the sound-carrying is dire.  As it is I’m just about guessing when there’s a sharp barking noise during a touch that it’s the conductor shouting ‘bob’ or ‘single’.  Now all I have to do is figure out which.  Call changes are dependent on the conductor calling EACH change.  Which means you have to be able to hear them.  But call changes mean that people who haven’t learnt any methods^ can still ring. 

^ Or are too panic-stricken or intimidated to remember them 

††† It does this kind of a lot.  I belong to a distressingly lively homeopathic list. 

‡ I have many wicked friends who want the worst for me, and introduce me to evil computer games.  I’m also rereading CHARMED LIFE for the umpty-mumbleth time, but I’m trying to read it as slowly as possible, which leaves me easy prey to evil computer games.  Aaaaaugh. 

‡‡ Speaking of aaaaaaugh.  AAAAAAAAAAUGH.  

‡‡‡ Note that I wasn’t sacrificing a good gardening afternoon or anything.  The gale didn’t merely knock all my rosebushes over, it drove water both under my front door and through the stable-door crack in the middle.  I hope the baby robins are hugging the ground.  The hellhounds and I, attempting to hurtle, remained earthbound chiefly because they hated the whole situation so much that they became little anvils at the ends of their leads.

§ Brilliance, with me and bells, is not an option. 

§§ I was half grateful and half amused, watching Og figuring out how best to handle me.  He called an easy touch of bob minor while I was ringing inside.  I rang the tenor-behind for Stedman doubles—at a tower that isn’t the abbey I can ring Stedman.  And we finished with rounds on the back six, which was kind of a hoot.  The last four bells at the abbey are all seriously, INCREASINGLY huge.  I’ve told you about ringing rounds on forty-six, where you pull off and then have to wait till it’s your turn again, because there are so many bells that have to go first.  In a way the effect of waiting is more pronounced when you’re ringing only the back six because it is only six, but the pauses between the big bells are so marked.  I was, of course, on the treble.  Dong . . . dong . . . . . .  . dong . . . . . . . . . DONG . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . DONG . . . . . . . .  . . . . . . . . . . . . . DONG . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . DOOOOOOOOONG.

            But it was also useful, this afternoon’s ring.  I’m finding my feet at the abbey.  I hope.

Tea and No Sympathy

 

IT’S RAINING.  Of course it’s raining.  It has always rained.  It will always rain.*  Tomorrow we’re supposed to have gales.  I’m so happy.  Meanwhile the robins have dispersed.  Silly little beggars.  They should stay in the greenhouse where there’s a roof.  I’ve thought of this a lot in the last ten days or so—at least the baby robins in the greenhouse aren’t melting.  There is a good EIGHT INCHES of rain in my buckets.  I’ve emptied my two-inch-measure rain gauge several times.  Robins were still in the nest yesterday but gone without a trace today.  Usually the little-things-in-the-shrubbery start making themselves known immediately—and there’s no way in or out of the cottage garden except by flying** unless I open the greenhouse door, which I haven’t in over a week.***  They’re probably in shock:  they hop out of the nest, stumble along the shelf, nose-dive to the ground, yell, YAAY!  FREEDOM!, and are instantly smacked to the floor by a large handful of rain.    

            The double daily serving of mealworms disappeared as normal today however, so something is eating them.  The mealworm saucer—also inside the greenhouse, where dinner won’t drown—is on the flight path to the nest and I haven’t seen anything else hanging around, so I prefer to think it’s dad robin.  I’ve seen him a few times, looking harassed.  If perhaps there’s a break in the gales tomorrow I would quite like to get outdoors and pot up a few little green things (this will involve moving the dish of mealworms, which is on my potting table) and will try to catch dad poking mealworms into little things in the shrubbery.

            I rang for a wedding today, in South Desuetude, poor things.  I hope the bride’s gown had mud flaps.†  But Colin is bonkers.††  We rang some rather good call changes, nice and brisk and crisp.  I’ve said this before, that you’re usually so fixated on trying to learn methods that you forget that (mostly) well-struck call changes are pretty cool.  Then Colin cast his eye over his band and declared that we would ring bob triples.  For pity’s sake.  Four of us out of eight knew what we were doing—I can’t remember the last time I was offered the opportunity to have a go at a practise course of bob triples.  And we’re ringing it for a wedding??†††  Two of us clueless ones were on the treble and the tenor—but I was ringing inside as was Cora, who promptly went wrong on her first dodge.  Colin dragged us jovially out of the resulting morass and we continued . . . and then Boadicea went wrong.  No fair.  You’re one of the ones who knows what she’s doing.  I never did figure out who I was making long sevenths over.  I know the line on the page, as opposed to in the hurly-burly of ringing, so I just kept counting my line—and Colin kept yanking us on.  We came round.  I have no idea how.  It cleared the churchyard however. . . .

            And I went home for a bracing cup of tea. 

libby.gorman

I do not know about this “warming the cup” part of making tea. Doesn’t the hot water make the cup warm? 

b_twin_1

Depends how long you want the cup of tea to stay hot. If you want the tea to cool quickly so you can gulp it down before you dash out the door then a cold cup will assist. If you want a leisurely cuppa then warming the cup is “proper”. 

::Clutches forehead::  Where were you people RAISED?  Is NOTHING SACRED?  Have the younger generations been DENIED THE WISDOM OF THE AGES?  You warm your vessel for brewing tea—cup or pot—so the tea steeps correctly. ‡  And then there’s the whole commotion about whether you add the milk first or second:  but since I don’t use milk I am allowed to give a miss to this embattled controversy.‡‡

            Now I am going to SING.  Oisin gave me a, you should forgive the term, new thing yesterday, which casts an interesting light on his view of my singing, but I’ll tell you all about it if I manage to learn it.  Mwa ha ha ha ha. 

* * *

* Except when there’s a drought, of course.  

** All right.  I admit it.  Phineas’ previous cat once made it over his garden-room roof into my garden.  I was not amused.  He^ received a bucket of water for his pains and I didn’t see him again.  Grrrrrr.^^  

^ The cat, that is.  Not Phineas.  

^^Q&A page today: http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2012/apr/27/joss-whedon-screenwriter-director 

Cat or dog?

Cat! Dog: need need, poop, chew, need, lick, need. Cat: whatev. Meow, yo. Here’s a mouse. 

Feh. 

Cat: misses litterbox, plays head games, leaves dismembered corpses on your pillow.  Dog:  craps outdoors, doesn’t mind admitting is glad to see you, finds sleeping in heaps with chosen goddess sufficient glory and does not keep presenting asshole for admiration when you’re trying to watch a film. 

. . . AT WHICH POINT The Cat Anti-Defamation League, or possibly the Joss Whedon for Galactic Supremo Party, nailed me and WORD CRASHED . . . taking, among other things, New Thing with it.  Granted I have New Thing backed up liberally but I hadn’t copied today’s ep yet.  GAAAAAAAH.  Microsoft Recovery seems, in fact, to have recovered . . . this post, anyway, but I’m thinking maybe I’ll start a new file with today’s ep of New Thing, just in case of retrospective accidents.  And the four hundred and six empty documents also recovered are making me nervous.  What I had been trying to do was copy and paste one other quote from this article which maybe I’ll just type in . . .

How do you relax?

I do not understand your earthworld questionings. 

Maybe Whedon should take up bell ringing.  

*** I have MILLIONS of little green (mostly) mail-order things waiting to be potted on and/or planted out.  MILLIONS.  I swear every day Cathy was here there was another frelling delivery of little green things wanting to be potted on.  I’M SURE I DIDN’T ORDER ALL OF THIS STUFF.  And the day of our expedition, the one that was foiled, we stopped at a garden centre on the way home^ so that I could assuage my lacerated feelings and . . . MILLIONS.  I’M TELLING YOU.  MILLIONS.  

^ I was driving.  Cathy couldn’t stop me.  She tried.  

† Although my sympathy dwindled to negligible when she was half an hour late.  I am near as near to finishing my second leg-warmer however.  I wonder what horrors I will produce/reveal when I try to seam the frellers up.  

†† We knew this, of course.  Meanwhile Niall is disloyally going back to Curlyewe on Monday—which is their tower practise night, so it’s easier to organise them to come along early for a slug of handbells first.  He promises this will not become a regular event.  I’ve never rung at Curlyewe (tower) so I’m jealous . . . and then it turns out Colin’s tower practise this Monday is on his grisly little garage ring—with the flowerpots in the ceiling, and the tenor, the biggest bell, weighs eleven frelling pounds.  It’s like trying to cook with a doll’s tea set.  ARRRRRGH. 

††† Maybe if she hadn’t been half an hour late. . . . 

‡ You need half-decent tea for the effect to be noticeable however.  Do not speak to me of tea BAGS if you wish to live.  And the latest fashion nonsense about triangular-solid-shaped bags that bloom in hot water, frelling spare me.  As if anyone who drinks PG Tips cares.  Mind you, if all you want/need is a slug of caffeine as rapidly as possible, it’s all good.  But a really excellent cup of tea worth lingering over requires finesse.  Which includes superior-quality LOOSE tea . . . and warming whatever you’re making it in first. 

‡‡ When I did use milk, I added it second.  But this was not because of philosophical deliberations or considerations of the physics of creaminess.  It was because I wanted to be sure the sixty-four spoons of sugar I put in first dissolved properly.

 

New Thing, 5

 

FIVE  

Gelasio was allergic to dogs, so we’d never had one.    

We’d had little hairy yappy things when I was a kid, because my mother bred them:  Gormenghastly terriers.  If you have a Ghastly terrier, my mother probably had a hand in it somewhere.  The family joke was my parents had had only one kid because they needed the bigger of the other two bedrooms for breeding stock.  This was on the Very Upper West Side before it got gentrified;  by the time we were surrounded by CEOs and kitchen designers my mother’s Ghastlies had been declared to be in the national interest and no one could touch her unorthodox kennel arrangements.  Also, after my father moved out, she started sleeping with the building manager, who was god, and all the other tenants knew it.  

She still had Ghastlies, but I hadn’t seen her or them in a while, since she was inclined to take Gelasio’s going off with the girlfriend as a personal failure.  Which is to say that my father had lived in Boston since I was a teenager, and my mother seemed to think I should have learned how not to have this happen to me by her experience.  Since learning by her experience (according to her) would have involved having several children, this was a non-starter, but I didn’t even have dogs as an excuse. 

Making a cup of tea took twelve minutes, between how long it took for the water to boil, and then boil again after you’ve warmed the cup, and then waiting till the tea had steeped the precise length of time for optimum excellence—I was perhaps a trifle fussy about my tea—so I had time to invent my perfect dog.  If you put four or five (or six) of my mother’s Ghastlies together you would just about have one dog-sized dog, only I wanted one less hairy and yappy.  It would be tall and noble and graceful and have a far-off look in its eye.  It would also be short-haired and would never bark.  When the wizard from Flowerhair Four tried to break in and steal the medallion of chura kampo, which was lined up to be the quest thing in Flowerhair Five, my tall noble dog wouldn’t bark before it foiled his fiendish plan.  I had to admit that the slightly sinister three-bedroom house was much more appropriate for this scenario than the little normal two-bedroom one I’d already put in for. . . . Wait a minute.  Was I maybe having a little trouble with the standard boundaries of reality here?  Maybe eighteen cups of tea was too many for one day.  And after my tall noble barkless dog did its foiling, then what?  I call the cops?  Pardon me, I have caught this wizard housebreaking.   How do I know he’s a wizard?  Well, because he wanted the medallion of chura kampo— The medallion of what? the police receptionist would say.  Chura kampo, I would repeat, patiently, and who else but a magician . . .   

My email pinged.

Two months’ security deposit is standard, wrote Hayley primly.  But you should inspect the property in person before you make your decision.  When will you be in this area?  I would welcome the opportunity to show it to you.  The house is unfurnished, but there is a plumbed-in connection for your washing machine in the kitchen.  The one restriction is that there is a no-pet rule.

No pets?  You are living in Cold Valley and you can’t even have a dog?   Almost without thinking, because my mind was full of the Silent Wonder Dog, I typed back, I am sorry about the no-pet rule.  I was looking forward to getting a dog, living in the country.  For the first time in my life.  I had been steadfastly not thinking about this ever since I saw my pin vibrating in the name Cold Valley.  I liked my holidays in the Adirondacks fine.  But I liked coming home even better.  I was with Marlon Brando on this one:  I don’t like the country, the crickets make me nervous.  Especially the really big ones that breathe under your windows all night and occasionally test the window latches. 

Hayley wrote back so quickly I had visions of her dancing around the office in New Iceland, crowing to her colleagues, I have someone who wants to move to Cold Valley!, and being determined not to let me get away.  The other property permits pets, she wrote, and it has a washing machine, and some basic furnishings.

And Yog-Sothoth in the cellar, I thought.  I was going to have to inspect it in person.  With a lance, or at least a sturdy umbrella, to test the cellar walls for hollowness.   And why shouldn’t I inspect in person?  I looked around the huge empty room that had once been my office.  I’ll be there in three days, I typed.  Can you recommend a hotel? 

 

Meteorological Mayhem

 

Hellhounds and I put Cathy on the train in Mauncester this morning.*  Hellhounds and I then headed farther out, to Warm Upford, to check on the bluebell situation.  And the heavens opened.  Sweet bleeding demiurges, I thought it had been raining before.  This was the solid wall of water variety, coming down so hard you not only can’t see out of your windscreen, but you wonder uneasily if it’s going to dent your roof and rip your windscreen wipers off.  You’re going at 20 mph because you can’t see . . . and then you fall into the Mississippi River, SPLASH, and here you thought you were in southern England and what the frell happened to the frelling levees?**  Fortunately Wolfgang is equipped with an amphibian button from his secret life as a stunt car for James Bond, and so we swam to shore and continued on our way, which had become brown and given to whirlpools.  We were the second car behind a monster lorry, and when it hit a road-flood I swear the bow-wave was taller than Wolfgang.  This kind of downpour doesn’t last, I told myself, clinging valiantly to the steering wheel, and indeed it didn’t, it slacked off to mere sheeting between onslaughts of cannonball rain.  We got out to Warm Upford and turned around despondently to come back by another route and . . . there was suddenly and unexpectedly this astonishing manifestation called ‘blue sky’.***  I pulled Wolfgang over at the first opportunity and hellhounds and I got out for a sprint. A wet sprint.  A very wet sprint.  A very, very wet sprint.  A very, very, very wet sprint.  A . . . .†

            I had a concert to go to tonight.  In Frellingham.  Arrrgh.  Frellingham is about forty-five minutes from here.  Nina lives there now, and she emailed me a while ago about the schedule at the little concert venue a few blocks from her and her bloke’s new house.  We had agreed that tonight’s visitation looked amusing:  a ragtag collection of old folk-hippie musicians who have (apparently) banded together against the encroachment of electro-techno alternative art prog dance-punk-metal experimental grungehorror cyberthrash, and gone on tour.   Nina had bought tickets.  Hellhounds and I got back from our wet sprint, and having used up sixteen towels getting half dry, I emailed poor Nina in a bit of a panic saying I’m not driving to Frellingham in this. 

            It cleared off.  Sort of.  Comparatively.†††  Hellhounds and I only got semi-wet on the afternoon hurtle, and the wind wasn’t blowing more than 80 mph except for the occasional gust, so I slid a few extra lead weights into the special James Bond slots under Wolfgang’s chassis†† and we went.

            The concert was . . . amusing.‡  Sometimes it is a good thing to be reminded that your youth is something you get to grow out of.  And I only got slightly lost on my way to Nina and Ignatius’ new house—I’ve only been there once before and which way you go on the unmarked roundabout(s) may take a little while to lodge in the memory.

            Tomorrow . . . reality bites.  And SHADOWS reign.‡‡ 

* * *

* Waaaaaah.  But . . . pretty much everything about the timing of this visit sucked dead (you should forgive the term) bears.  She was supposed to be coming after I had finished and handed in SHADOWS.^  She was supposed to be coming after I was caught up to Hamaker New Thing Monkeywrench #s 1 and 2.^^  She was also supposed to be coming here to have long walks through the countryside and, it being bluebell season, she would not only see bluebells, but we might possibly get a hellgoddess and hellhounds surrounded by bluebells photo.^^^

            No.  None of the above.  But she did see baby robins.  And we lay on the folded-out sofa at the cottage with a plethora of hellhounds# and watched WONDERFALLS## on the Shiny Two-Ton No Longer New Entirely Rebuilt Ex-Lemon### Laptop, thus proving it can do something right.~  Also, that bartender is hot.~~  And the rain drummed on.        

^ And was far enough along on the doodle backlog that you could actually get into my office again.  Not, I suppose, that she needed to get into my office, but it’s easier to browse my F&SF shelves, which are what live (mostly+) in my office, from within arm’s length than . . . not within arm’s length. 

+ There’s a wall of homeopathy too.  Which is why SF&F spills into the bedroom. 

^^ When in fact I’m writing ep 12 and it’ll be another one or two before we get to HNTM one.  We started #3 while she was here anyway. 

^^^ Instead she drank a lot of tea out of my bluebell mug+, since that was as close as she was going to get.  Well, there are a few bluebells in my garden, but given the, ahem, lushness of the planting out there, you’d get just as soaked going to look at them as if you went and found some wild ones. 

+ http://www.emmabridgewater.co.uk/flowers/bluebell-12-pint-mug/invt/ngbb002/

Hmph.  It’s got more expensive since I bought mine.

 # They expand to fill available space.  I’ve noticed this before. 

## http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wonderfalls 

### She says with dramatic emphasis. 

~Including, evidently, playing a region 1 DVD.  I am so clueless about all of this. 

~~ So is Beth. 

** Ask George W. Bush. 

*** It was still raining, of course.  This is southern England^.  It rains out of blue sky all the time.  But it doesn’t usually rain the pummelling you all over your body kind of rain out of blue sky.  Usually. 

^ Unless it’s the Mississippi delta. 

†  And I’m afraid the rumours that it’s a bad year for bluebells appear to be true.  There aren’t as many flower stalks at all, it seems to me, and the ones there are have four or six little bells per, and usually you get twelve or fifteen.  Aside from the tricky questions about taking photos in the rain, if I can’t find a better forest floor of them, there won’t be bluebell photos this year.  I have a couple more places to try, but I’m not too hopeful.   That was my best bluebell sea today.

†† Very bad for mileage, but they do keep you on the road. 

††† I’ve just had a frelling email from frelling Cathy saying it was beautiful and clear all day where she was on the south coast.  WELL ISN’T THAT SPECIAL. 

‡ There wasn’t a single person there under forty.  There was also way too much khaki hemp^ and Birkenstocks, but I lowered the level as much as I could in a salmon-coloured turtleneck and All Stars and a watermelon-coloured pullover.   My frameless glasses are against me though.

^ No, no, not that kind of hemp.  

‡‡ And New Thing gets a nice padded footstool.

Wet wet wet

 

It’s okay.  I can write a blog tonight.  Darkness ate dinner.  *&^%$£@#~} !!!!!!!!!!!  Cathy, on the other side of the table, is breathing a deep sigh of relief.  She’d made the perilous, not to say fatal, offer to write another guest blog if I found myself incapable on account of the extreme reprehensibleness of hellhounds and the resultant need to wail and rail incessantly all evening.*  Which is to say, Darkness stopped eating.  Yesterday. 

            I know, I know (and you regular readers know, you know).  Normal dogs—well, normal sighthounds—miss meals occasionally.  It’s not a big deal.  It’s a big deal with these guys because of their history.  And it’s a big deal to me because I’m the human supposedly in charge of managing they survive their history.  And they are a lot better, about food, about eating food, and about stopping eating (food) and about looking like they’re at death’s door after about twenty-four hours of not eating.  And I may have an ever so slight tendency to hit red alert before it’s absolutely necessary.  But. . . .

             If you graphed hellhound appetites and the amount of food I actually manage to get in them, the lines would swing up and down wildly anyway, like the surface of Lake Superior just before the Edmund Fitzgerald went down.  I’m used to this.  I don’t frelling like it, but I’m used to it.  Occasionally, however, one or both hellhounds ship a really big wave and head for the bottom.  If I hadn’t been distracted by having fun with Cathy—because I am an irresponsible dog owner and a horrible selfish thoughtless human being—I might have noticed that the current oh-well-maybe-I-will-and-maybe-I-won’t food mood was hardening into something more drastic.  It had crossed my mind that the current lack of enthusiasm phase was going on a little long.

               AND THEN . . .

               It has not been a good day.  Today was our last chance to get out into the country and look at bluebells.  And it rained.  Again.  It’s been raining all week.  It was raining when I picked Cathy up at the train station.**  It was raining as we both arrived at and left the abbey.***  It was raining most of Sunday in both Hampshire and Bristol, although Cathy managed to find a little sunlight and follow it around for a few hours.  It rained on my voice lesson.†  It rained on our going to Glaciation to ring with Colin.  It rained on our trip to Mauncester yesterday.††  IT’S BEEN RAINING FOREVER.  IT IS GOING TO RAIN FOREVER.†††  It is just about hip deep around town and squelching out over the countryside when Cathy only has two pairs of shoes with her is not really a credible option.

                AND THEN DARKNESS STOPPED EATING.  AAAAAAAAAAAAAAUGH.

                It has not been a good day.

                 But Darkness ate dinner.  Enthusiastically.  So I can revert to being all wet and soppy and droopy and soggy, not about the rain, but about the fact that Cathy is leaving tomorrow. . . . 

* * *

* The deep sigh of relief may have been as much to do with the lack of incessant wailing and railing as the fearful prospect of coming up with another 1000 words that could pass for a coherent synthesis of some damn thing or other only two days after the previous guest blog.  

** It had only just started raining (again), fortunately, since I was late.  Of course I was late.  I’m always late.  And then we had to hare off at extreme speed for the Reification of the Overgoddess at Forza.  I have rung my first service at Forza del Destino.^  Eeep.  This blood-freezing adventure began last Wednesday, when Ulrich said at practise that it was an all-hands-to-the-pumps situation Saturday afternoon for the reification.  I looked away and shuffled my feet because I am not, after all, an abbey ringer, but Gemma said, oh, go on, I’m going to.  So I checked with Cathy about train times and then, in fear and grovelling, although it’s difficult to get grovelling across in an email, I wrote to Ulrich, asking if they still needed extra hands for the reification, and he wrote back pretty much by return electron saying they’d be happy to see me.  Oops.  Now I’m for it. 

            In fact they didn’t need all of us shmo-level ringers, but they were nice enough to pile us all on for rounds on forty-eight.  And Og came by with his clipboard and said to me, smiling in what I’m sure he was under the impression was a friendly manner, You are now on my LIST.

            I may have a bell tower again.  That is, I admit, may.  I’m still expecting them to pull themselves together and bounce schmos like me.   And I wish it weren’t a gigantic, ancient, tourist-magnet, one hundred and twelve bell frelling ABBEY.  However, I’ll take what I can get.  And they’re still, with an irony so shiny and sharp it needs a scabbard , my best practical choice for a new tower.  Hahahahahahahaha.  Ouch, that hurts. 

^ I’m feeling just a trifle creeped out by my having long ago carelessly blognamed it The Force of Destiny.  

I invent a verb.  I feel it could have wider application however. 

It could be a lot worse.  I could have named it La Traviata or Aida. 

Or I could revert to not being able to ring anything.  Anything.  But we are not considering this possibility.  We reject it.  

And its name may be Doomblade. 

*** With a spectacular escort of guards.  Yeep.  We never had guards at New Arcadia, but then we didn’t rededicate goddesses either.  But Cathy and I crossed three different cordons, getting in—I’m a bell ringer! I kept squeaking, feeling a complete fraud—and two getting back out again.  Our favourite was the nice German lady (in the scary guard uniform) who wanted to know about bell ringing.  

† Yes.  I took Cathy to my voice lesson.  And if she tries to write a guest blog about that I will destroy her.^ 

            It was pretty interesting though.  I hadn’t thought about this when I asked Nadia if I could bring a friend that Monday, but it was the day after Diana’s memorial and I was going to be another jigsaw for Nadia to put back together, as well as in (fractured) avert mode because There Was Someone Else Listening.  It was not my most brilliant lesson—but it was not, in fact, my most embarrassing either.  Nadia says sometimes your worst practises and your worst lessons are the most educational—and this one taught me some stuff.  Nadia spent some time talking about channelling emotion into your singing.  The impulse—my impulse anyway—is to stomp all that slithery, squishy stuff down, and the stomping process is a lot of what breaks you up into jigsaw pieces.  Feh.  I’ve told you about the frelling chasm between what I can do at home when no one is listening, but where I don’t have all of Nadia’s tricks for getting a better quality of sound out of me, and what I can do for Nadia, whom I want to please and therefore am afraid to get stuff wrong for—I mentioned that I’d torn the heart out of Che Faro over the washing-up and Nadia said briskly, I look forward to hearing it next week.  EEEEEEP.  This is pretty much the same kind of exciting and same kind of terrifying as the prospect of maybe having a bell tower again.  I would LOVE to work on Che Faro with Nadia, but I’ve assumed that was seriously down the line from where I am now.  And it probably is, you know?  I’ll take it in to her and . . . 

^ No, wait, I can’t destroy her, she’s helping me with New Thing.  

And in answer to some forum question or other, yes, it will get a title, at least of sorts, as soon as you learn the protagonist’s name, which is in ep nine or so. 

†† More *&^%$£” =}]~#@!!!!!!  Our trip was supposed to produce a certain outcome which was going to produce a particular blog post.  And we were FOILED by . . . well, never mind what we were foiled by.  I’ll get there in the end.  And then I’ll write a blog post about it.  Grrrrrrrrrr.  

††† I tell myself, rain is good.  We’re in a drought.  We need this rain.  I AM SURE I AM GROWING MOULD ALL OVER MY BODY.

 

New Thing, 4

FOUR

 

My heart was beating a little fast.  I opened the attachment.  And blinked.  You couldn’t rent a broom cupboard in Manhattan for what Hayley was offering me a two- or three-bedroom house for.  The three-bedroom house was enormous.  It had a long porch around two sides, a dining room, double front parlours, an attic and a cellar, and a huge garden.  A huge garden.  There was a photo of it, with Yggdrasil in one corner.  I was sure the listed rental was too cheap even for Cold Valley.  It must have rats, or damp, or Shub-Niggurath, Yog-Sothoth and Nyarlathotep playing poker in the cellar.  I shook my head.  Just looking at it on line was giving me agoraphobia.  It was even bigger than Gelasio’s penthouse.  Ha ha.

            The other one was possible.  It was just an ordinary house.  It had a garage for the car I was going to have to buy, and a clothes line in the back yard, so I didn’t have to pay to run the dryer.  Oh, gods, I thought.  Please tell me it has a washing machine.  I am much too old to drive twenty or thirty miles to a Laundromat every week.  This was aside from the fact that I’d been behind the wheel of a car slightly less often than once a year for the past twenty years—which had been fine with me.  Driving to buy food was going to be an interesting experience.  So was learning to live with gas prices. Maybe Cold Valley had a farmers’ market.  Maybe I could eat a lot of frozen peas and canned tuna.  And scrub my clothes on a washboard in the lake. 

            Driving to Cold Valley in the first place, with all my worldly goods (such as they were) in the back of a hired van, was going to be an interesting experience.

            Was I really going to do this?  I looked up.  I had forgotten how big my office was till almost everything had been taken out of it.  I felt marooned in here now;  it took an effort of will to walk three steps to the door, six steps down the hall, and two across the kitchen to the granite-topped island which used to have the electric kettle on it.  Gelasio would have let me keep more of the furniture, but I had suddenly taken against all the stuff he, or anyway his money, had bought, and after that there wasn’t much left.  In here with me now was the sofa I’d bought at a junk store in the East Village and was the biggest thing I’d brought with me when I married Gelasio (although it was now a rather handsome dark green fake-brocade print instead of blotchy khaki with the horsehair sticking out in clumps), a dozen (okay, maybe fifteen) cartons of books ( . . . okay, maybe twenty), and about three of clothing.  I had kept the jeans-and-All-Stars end of my wardrobe;  nearly everything else had gone.  I’d got a little money for it, but I hadn’t tried to do any better.  It was like when young Mr Wolverine, my lawyer, had wanted to go after Gelasio for a bigger settlement—Gelasio didn’t owe me anything.  I’d been a (relatively) happy freeloader for the last almost-twenty years.  I had enough money to buy a car and to pay the rent on a two-bedroom house in Cold Valley.  Yes, I was going to do this.  What better ideas did I have?

            I wrote back to Hayley saying that I was interested in the two-bedroom house, and could she tell me please if it had a washing machine?  And was it (aside from laundry appliances) furnished?   Should I forward her a month’s rent so she would hold it for me?

            I hit ‘send’ and went back to the kitchen to make another cup of tea.  This was probably the eighteenth today.  One for every year of my marriage.  Oh, stop it.  The sooner I was out of here the better.  There’d be a hotel in New Iceland;  I should just go.  I’d phone around about self-drive vans tomorrow.

            You forget how long it takes to boil water if you’ve got used to an electric kettle.  While I was waiting for my hot water and trying to come up with non-controversial topics of reflection (how far would a tea mug thrown with violence through an open penthouse window fly before gravity forced it to yield to reality?) I suddenly thought, I could get a dog. 

 

The GameMaster (guest post by Black Bear)

 

I didn’t start playing role playing games until I was in college. Note I said “playing,” because I owned a copy of Basic Dungeons and Dragons from age 12 or so. Read it til the pages fell out. Rolled the cheap dice–the color of blue chalk–over and over, and drew up elaborate maps of the dungeons I’d explore if I had friends who wanted to play. But that key element was missing–and in hindsight, it’s a little surprising my middle school friends and I didn’t play. We were the right sorts of nerds; we all played computer games, we watched Star Trek (original series) obsessively each day after school… Yet somehow, D&D never got on the radar properly, and I didn’t have my first taste of real gaming until I began working at a local store called The Game Preserve.

The GP, as it’s still affectionately known, opened my eyes to the wide world not only of games (board games, puzzle games, wargames, role playing games) but to the wide world of gamers. We run the gamut; even back then it wasn’t just the guys in black t-shirts who William Shatner famously railed at on SNL: “Move out of your parents’ basements! Have any of you EVER kissed a girl?!” There were and are plenty of folks like that in this hobby–but there are also lots of folks who come to it from different angles. People who like stories, and fantasy, and improv acting, and solving puzzles, and working as a team with a bunch of other like-minded friends. That was a huge part of the draw for me; when I got to college and fell in with a real regular gaming group, it was a rich part of my social life every week, to get together and tell a fabulous story each Saturday from 2 until 10 (pizza break at 6. Occasionally take-out Chinese, if we were feeling flush with cash.) We all turned out all right, too–a doctor, two lawyers, a writer, a poet, an archaeologist, an alt-medicine practitioner, a computer jockey…and me, a so-called museum professional.

So, gaming is a large part of my life–enhanced by the fact that when I graduated from college with no obvious job prospects (thank you, medieval studies degree) I went right back to work at the Game Preserve for a number of years. I continued playing my games of choice–RuneQuest, and Call of Cthulhu–in the ensuing years, and in the process discovered that if I was going to play the sorts of games I want to play, I was probably going to have to be the gamemaster. That is to say, I had to be the one in charge. In college, I was always just a player, acting out my character’s part in our increasingly complex adventures; but after college, I began to mastermind these things myself. This isn’t as complicated as you might imagine; while I come up with the basic thin lines of a plot myself, my players are the ones that flesh it out, making it into a real Story, so to speak. As an example, one year for Halloween I literally had nothing but the following jotted down on a bit of notepaper for our H.P. Lovecraft mythos-based horror game:

TRAPPED ON A TRAIN

ELECTRICAL MONSTER HIDING IN BAGGAGE CAR

SLOWLY WORKS WAY UP TRAIN ZAPPING PEOPLE

HIJINKS ENSUE

My players made those four sentences into an evening of fun for all concerned. For those who’ve never played these sorts of games before, essentially the gamemaster is the one who says things like “The train is 8 cars long, including an engine and caboose. You’re sitting in the dining car, eating dinner, when the porter says, ‘There’s a mysterious crackling sound coming from the baggage car.’ So what are you doing?” And the players are the ones who say, “I’m grabbing a fire extinguisher! I’m running toward the baggage car!” (Or, perversely, “I’m stealing all the silverware while the porter is distracted.” Part of being a gamemaster is being prepared to roll with it when your players do things which are, from a story standpoint, utterly stupid.) This is where the fun comes in–it’s up to me what the crackling sound is, and what happens when the players come running back with the fire extinguisher. But it’s up to them what they do when they see a horrible ball of blue hissing flame busily charring its way through their steamer trunks. Spray the extinguisher? Throw a mail bag at it? Run like hell? I won’t know until they do it, and this is what makes the hobby so much fun for me–the constant back and forth of storytelling, balancing the predictable against the unpredictable.

Thus it happened that Robin and I came around to New Thing. As she said in her blog a few nights ago, I’ve been regaling her with stories of my players’ foibles for years now. It makes for great re-telling afterwards; Greg Stafford’s RuneQuest, which is the world I chiefly game in these days, is a lush and varied mixture of high fantasy, low fantasy, and Joseph-Campbell-esque mythology, making a fabulous backdrop for the ridiculous situations my players get themselves into and out of on a regular basis. As she also said, we’ve talked many times about ways to make a McKinley-based RPG happen on the website–but thus far, most of the ways to do it up right would involve a LOT more work on her part than the blog does now, not to mention skirting the edges of copyright disaster. But then she came up with the brilliant thought of approaching it from a different angle–we’d play our way through a story of Robin’s own devising, with me contributing unexpected situations and characters for her protagonist to encounter. But it’s all very fluid–each of Robin’s episodes influences what I may or may not toss into the mix for the next go-round. It’s less a game (no dice rolling, and as she says, the protagonist is NOT allowed to die) and more a cooperative storytelling experience in which Robin writes something amazing, and I keep monkeywrenching the works at key points in the plot. So we’ll see how it goes. I’m delighted to know that people are enjoying it–it’s fun to do! I love serials myself; Plot Without End is an appealing format for me (obviously) and so I’m excited to see where New Thing goes. Hope you are, too!

* * *

Note (pant, pant) that we haven’t got to Cathy’s first monkeywrench yet.  I’m SLOW.  –ed.

Diana

 

John Burrow—Diana Wynne Jones’ lovely husband—rang me up about two months ago and said they were doing a memorial service for her, and would I speak at it?  Only five minutes, he said, there would be several speakers.  My first impulse was to say no—of course I wanted to come, but I wasn’t sure I could speak.  I asked if I could think it over.  And then rang him back and said yes.

            It was today.  It has been looming rather awfully in my mind this past week—especially after I found out it was going to take six earth spirits and a papal intervention to make the journey happen:  British Rail shuts down on weekends.  They put up a lot of ‘works’ signs and claim to be laying on buses to cover the suspended routes . . . but in fact they all go to Blackpool and eat ice-creams (in the summer) and play poker (in the winter) and standard rail disservice begins again Monday morning.  The line I used to take when I was visiting Diana that last year wasn’t running at all and everything else seemed to be bristling with warnings and delays and dubious ‘status’. 

            But we got there.  Cathy came along but spent the day being a tourist.  (She had such a good time we may have to do it together on her next visit.)  I spent about three hours listening to some of the people who loved Diana talk about her, and watching the slide show of her life that her family had put together for background.  During the tea break when you went downstairs there was a gigantic circular tower made of copies of her books, and Photostats of handwritten manuscript pages, and the sight of her handwriting made my heart turn over.

            It was very simple.  There were about twenty of us who spoke, and in a group that large, you’re going to have one or two duds.  We didn’t have any duds*.  That in itself seems to me to say something pretty remarkable about the people Diana attracted.  There were clips from the film of HOWL’S MOVING CASTLE** and from interviews with Diana.  The composer of a ballet based on BLACK MARIA (AUNT MARIA in the States) played an excerpt.  All three of her sons spoke.

            I had to hare out of there and back to the train station almost as soon as it was over, because I wanted to make the long drive home in daylight.  And I’m so shattered I may not get out of bed at all tomorrow.***

            But I’m glad I went.  And this is what I said: 

* * *

Diana was my first real writer friend—or perhaps I remember her as first because she is such a blazing star in my memory.  I shifted publishers between my first book and my second, and my new editor, Susan Hirschman at Greenwillow Books, asked me if I knew Diana Wynne Jones’ work.  This was in the early ‘80s, and Diana wasn’t yet well known in America.  Susan had brought out CHARMED LIFE a year or two before.  She thrust a copy in my hands.  ‘You will like this,’ she said.

            That was an understatement.  I was in the book’s thrall by the end of the first paragraph—and in Diana’s for life.  I moved to New York City shortly after the mind-altering experience of my first Diana Wynne Jones book and Susan, bless her, invited me to meet Diana the next time she was in town.  Diana wouldn’t have had to be half the charming and fascinating human being she was to knock me over.  But she was that charming and fascinating—even goofy with jet lag and culture shock.  She was manifestly a wizard of enormous powers.

            I remember the first time toiling up the vertical slope to the house she, her husband and three sons lived in, here in Bristol, and thinking—dimly, through the roar of the blood in my ears—that it was of course suitable that a wizard of enormous powers lived on a mountain.  (I also remember them taking me downhill to their local, and falling off my bar stool.  Even the beer was stronger when Diana sat on the next stool.)

            There were long hiatuses in our relationship because I was a better worshipper than I was a friend.   But she was always there, wise and funny, intimidatingly well-read and terrifyingly intelligent—and there were the books, the wonderful, wonderful, wonderful books.  I have a game I play with my favourite authors—I don’t read their newest book till the next one comes out.  I won’t be able to play that game with Diana any more.

            I live only about two hours away by train (except on Sundays, when it becomes three or four).  I came here several times, the last year of Diana’s life, and she fed me lunch.  I’m as tricky to feed as she was, and she catered to my oddities with kindness and aplomb.  One of my favourite memories of those visits was the lemon meringue unpie:  she found out I loved lemon meringue pie, but could no longer eat flour.  And so the unpie was born:  a glorious great tureen of lemon meringue, tactfully missing out the crust. 

            I think we may all be little children about the people we love.  It is easy to say ‘I can’t believe she’s gone’, and the phrase is a cliché because it has been true so often, of so many much-loved people.  I find myself thinking that if maybe I don’t read that last book, the one I can’t read till the next one comes out, maybe, somehow, she won’t be gone, because she’ll have to write that next book for me, for all of us. 

* * *

One of Diana’s sisters read the first chapter of the book Diana left unfinished when she died.  It’s amazing.  It’s—it’s one of Diana’s opening chapters, that grab you and make the world go away because you’re wholly caught by the world on the page.  We can’t not know what happens. . . .

* * * 

 

It began with the necklace. (And yes, I’m wearing a green rose in my hair.)

 

 

It began with the necklace, because Diana gave it to me.

* Okay, spare my blushes and all, but I can give a speech with embarrassing anyone.  Probably. 

** Which I still haven’t seen because it’s not the book. 

*** I have to hurtle hounds, sing, and ring bells.  Feh.  Cathy has offered to wake me up by singing ‘Oh what a beautiful morning’ and I suggested that if she wants to live. . . .