Signing. Survived.

 

I AM SPECTACULARLY OFF LINE.  SPECTACULARLY.  I CRASHED AND BURNED WITH DAZZLING, NAY, EPIC GRANDEUR LAST NIGHT, AT BOTH THE MEWS AND THE COTTAGE, WHEN I TRIED TO POST WHAT FOLLOWS HERE NOW, AND I CAN'T GET BACK ON.  THIS COMES TO YOU BY WAY OF A FRIEND'S MOBILE TOGGLE, AND WHEN I'VE POSTED THIS I WILL DISAPPEAR FOREV . . . I MEAN, UNTIL COMPUTER MEN CAN COME AND SORT ME OUT WHICH, SINCE THIS IS A FRIDAY, BECAUSE ALL DISASTERS HAPPEN ON FRIDAYS, MAY NOT BE TILL NEXT WEEK.~  HAVE A NICE SOMETHING OR OTHER.  GAAAAAAH.

OH FRELL'S BELLS.  You're going to have to wait at least till tomorrow for some photos, I'm afraid.  Cathy R took lots, as per my request, and she's even loaned me her camera's memory card and . . . it won't fit in my computer.  I thought I had an extra super-sized slot*, but . . . no.  And Mrs Redboots, while eight of us were sitting around at the café afterward waiting for our food,** emailed me the ones she took, but Outlook has managed to lose them.***

So.  There was a signing.  I think it went pretty well.  The nice man at the shop was smiling when we left, but that could of course be because we were leaving.

There were no bats last night either, and I'm pretty sure there really weren't, because I was sleeping badly enough that I'd've noticed if there were.†  Got out of bed finally in a weary, resigned sort of way and stared owlishly at the heap of pink leotard, lacy blouse, black leather mini, sparkly silver tights and sequinned leopard print All Stars.

It was sheeting rain.  Okay, that's fine, it means I don't have to worry about watering my pots, and it may mean I get to sleep tonight due to the signing being over plus a continued absence of bats.††

Hurtled hellhounds.

Put on the pink leotard, lacy blouse, black leather mini, sparkly silver tights††† and sequinned leopard print All Stars.

It stopped raining.  Perhaps this was a good omen.

I went to train station.

Got on train.‡

Knitted, somewhat frantically, all the way to Waterloo.  Golly, the blood-pressure headaches and tension stomachaches I might have avoided, all those early years when I did do a certain amount of business travelling, if I had discovered knitting.  It's not like it makes all the anxiety go away, but it is like managing to run just fast enough to stay ahead of the ravening monster chasing you.  Or like sometimes, when you've taken a painkiller, and it's worked, but you can still feel the thing with teeth trying to get in and bite you:  the drugs can hold it off but can't make it go away.   Knitting on the way to a public author thing is a bit like that.‡‡  And in this case frelling PEG II has been messing with my head again, and so I was thinking irritably about the amount of ratbaggery I'm putting up with over this thing-I-said-I'd-never-do, a more-than-one-book story, as I was on my way to sign copies of its elder sibling. . . .

* * *

There are dramas unfolding even now, after I'm home again.  First I found out I wasn't going to be able to get at Cathy R's photos, and then I discovered that Mrs Redboots' took a left turn when they should have taken a right and are now in Heilongjiang Province.  I emailed Vikki K, who has a slight parallel tendency not to go to bed early, and she promised to email her photos.  This was going swimmingly . . . always a bad sign . . . when the last few photos refused to open.  Oh, frell, I said, and was about to email Vikki again and ask if she could resend, when I had a sudden attack of paranoia . . . at which point I discovered that the earlier ones, which had been opening, weren't opening any more.

None of the photos that Vikki had just saved my day/night/blog post/credibility with by sending tonight was now available.

And then I crashed off line.

And I have spent the last hour trying to get back on line again, and screaming.‡‡‡   My computer is performing acts of aggravated iniquity I have never seen before.

And I'm now writing this wondering if I'm going to manage to post anything tonight.  There will be a nice irony in the night of my signing being the one I bomb off the air, right?  You'll all think we all went out and got spectacularly drunk and danced on tables and were chased through the streets by the Met's finest and then reeled home so late I barely made it to my piano lesson.§  Unfortunately . . .

So I'm now going back to the cottage, and I'm going to try to sign on there, and . . . And then I'm going to bed.  Some day I will finish telling you about the signing.  Some day there will even be photos. . . .

* * *

~ It might amuse you to know that my first thought, as I reeled from the overwhelming implications of being off line, was, well, I have lots to read.  Oh, and knit.

* In fact I remember it.  It's directly under the smaller one.  Clearly on some other computer.  Possibly in some other life.

** And waiting . . . and waiting . . . and

*** I can hear that crackling static that passes for its laughter.^

^ And that was before everything else went wrong.  Predictive crackly laughter.  Arrrgh.

† I dreamt, among other things, about the Muddlehamptons' concert^.  I dreamed that they were actually putting on CARMEN, and that I was singing Carmen. I have a really mean subconscious.  Really mean.

^ Which, it now being after midnight, is TOMORROW.

†† Tomorrow night, of course, I'll be awake from worrying about the frelling concert.  If I wake up Saturday morning humming the Habanera I may run away.

††† I had forgotten how ITCHY the flaming things are.  It is one of the great failures of modern science, that they appear not to have yet developed a non-itchy sparkly fibre.

‡ With ticket helpful Penguin minder had preordered and sent to me.  How's that for efficient minding.  And the train was on time.  Penguin apparently also has pull with the travel gods.

‡‡ One thing that can be said in favour of doing public things a little oftener than I do is that then they're less eeep-making.  A bit like ringing quarter peals.  A quarter peal feels like a harrowing major event.  Then if you do a few in a row it's like, oh, a quarter peal.  I can do that.

‡‡‡ What a good thing I'm not singing Carmen tomorrow.

§ At 3 pm.