A Keeping My Head Down Day

 

Today has been mostly head down over the writing desk (or the writing kitchen table, as it may be), looking up occasionally long enough to regret a good gardening afternoon . . . the things I do to get paid.*    

              Atlas has been hacking back Mme Alfred Carriere who was showing signs of pulling down my semi-detached neighbour's house wall, and while Phineas is an exceptionally easy-going fellow, I think even he might protest being involuntarily catapulted into my back garden.  I wouldn't like it either:  the garden's small enough already, I don't want the contents of two bedrooms, a study, a kitchen and a bathroom scattered around** although loose bricks are popular as plant-pot stands.  Since I don't do heights, Atlas is the one who's been out there with the ladder and the loppers.  It's astonishing how much more light there suddenly is:  Mme Alfred is kind of a monster.  But the best kind of monster:  the kind that produces lots of big fat roses.  She needs her autumn feed, as does everything else in this garden and Third House's.  Meanwhile I've got the autumn bulb orders arriving any day now—yeep.   With less of Mme Alfred shadowing that side I can get more tulips in.

             Autumn has kind of snuck up on me*** partly due to the coldest August in seventeen years†† . . . I am not ready for it to be autumn.†   I used to like autumn better than I do now;   that first crackle of cold meant adventure;  it used to feel like the time of year I woke up after the sultry hedonism of summer.  But I'm not very interested in adventures any more—or rather the adventures I am interested in are things like learning to ring Cambridge minor or having a high A available during choir practise, and not only erratically after midnight and a glass of champagne on a good day.   Back in the days when autumn meant adventure I didn't have increasing numbers of tender begonias, geraniums, dahlias, cosmos, fuchsias, blah, blerg, blug to try and frelling overwinter.  Have I told you I keep thinking about buying a second, extra-small grow-lamp and hanging it over the Winter Table that goes over the hellhound crate at the cottage—?  The summer/greenhouse at Third House is starting to get kind of crowded. 

* * *

* Yes, in many ways very like what most people do to get paid.  I keep telling you writing is not glamorous.  It has its brilliant moments, but glamorous?^  No.  And I splattered salad dressing on my white shirt today (again).^^  Frelling springy frelling lettuce frelling leaves. 

^ A friend was telling me about the book convention she's just back from and I was thinking yes, I remember why, when I moved over here, I wasn't particularly sorry to be too expensive to import to most American book cons any more.  It's the same thing in a different medium as book mail:  most of the people who want to talk to you about your books are really nice, or at least complimentary, even if both of you are so desperately embarrassed and uncomfortable by the encounter you each run away afterward to hide under the bed.  But it's the skirmishes and confrontations—including the occasional downright scary one—I remember.+ 

            The main drawback, for someone like me, lacking in most public social skills++, is that I have totally lost what habituation I once had+++, and when my poor publisher starts talking about promotion and that of course they'll pay my travel expenses I'm like, What?  Are you kidding?  I only so much as cross the Hampshire border with a written permission from Queen Mab.  She's not noted for her good temper either, and I don't want to press her too far.  An extra thimble of Laphroiag is acceptable as a thank-you for allowing me to go to London for the day:  I don't want to imagine what she'd demand for a trip to New York. 

+ And the frelling patronising ones.  The whole 'oh, when are you going to write a real book?' brigade, and its outliers, like the hug from the perfect stranger who says, BEAUTY was such a sweet little story.  I want to believe there's a lot less of that around these days when YA is hot, but thirty years ago . . . especially with this face which thirty years ago looked about sixteen.  I looked like someone who might have written a sweet little story.  This involuntary circumstance was not good for the development of my attitude toward my public.  I've told you all this before, haven't I?  Sorry.  The unexpected shaping experiences of one's life are, I find, harder to integrate and forget.  —Grrrr.  There's one stranger-hugging woman I could probably still pick out of a police line up . . . but that scrimmage was also when I was still in the early, first-book, I'm a Published Author! phase, and hadn't started biting people yet~.  She probably went away thinking she'd brightened my sweet little life. 

~ Yes, Jodi, I'm looking at you.  But I don't think you're the natural viper that I am.

++ And for anyone who has met me at a con and thought I came off fairly human:   thank you.  Clearly you made it easy for me. 

+++ And gained a sweet little case of ME . . . and more lately, a sweet little couple of majorly flaky hellhounds. 

^^ Yes, I should wear a bib or an overall or something.  Except that I hate it.  It makes me feel like a drooling idiot.+  Of course I'm not thrilled with using spot remover several times a week either.  These critical dilemmas of life. 

+ If the shoe/bib fits . . . 

** Not to mention the potential for highly distressing contact between the ex-hellkitten and the hellhounds.

            I think I tweeted about the hellhounds attempting to chase the statue of a cat.  I entirely agree it's a very lifelike statue of a cat but I thought dogs had a highly developed sense of smell??  And yes, I know, sighthounds, but they pick up scent-trails like foxhounds and cruise along with their sterns in the air and their noses to the ground.  Maybe there's a switch buried deep in their medulla oblongatas^ that auto-sets for whichever stimulus comes in first, eyes or nose, and then turns the other one off.   But hellhounds have taken this daunting rebuff to the way things are supposed to be—cats are cats, and they run away—very much to heart.  Chaos checks that statue now every time we hurtle by—he has grasped that there is something wrong with this cat:  it doesn't run away and, upon closer investigation, it smells funny—but he's still sure he's missing something.  Darkness keeps an eye on Chaos keeping an eye on the non-cat. 

            Today we met a cat—a live, breathing, tail-twitching cat—of very much the same colouring and demeanour as the non-cat . . . and the hellhounds didn't know what to do.  Ears and tails went up, and butts sank halfway to the ground in that ready-for-anything posture and . . . nothing happened.  I'd already put the brakes on the leads in case anything did happen.  But the cat just went on lying there, curling the end of its tail up and down, and the hellhounds went on looking at it, waiting for it to prove that it was not a non-cat . . . and eventually we pottered on, befuddled hellhounds following on a loose lead. 

^ Or equivalent.  My knowledge of the architecture of the canine brain is nil. +

+ Yes I know I could google it.  Tomorrow.  If I remember. 

*** Not that everything to do with the passage of time isn't, in my experience, essentially sneaky. 

† Ho hum.  Like I don't say this about every season, month, year, week, hour, blog post, bolting hellhound. . . . 

†† Which is fine with me.  And reminds me that when I first moved over here we used to have English weather, which is to say cold and wet, including in August.  Ah, nostalgia.