Spring Sunday with a friend

 

I've been singing.  I've been singing with Hannah and Peter in the same room.  It does happen occasionally that I sing when Peter's around—especially on Mondays when I have to warm up before I go to my lesson, and can't afford to get too precious about circumstances—but I do not sing for other people.*  I'm not sure if I should be embarrassed or not that it was kind of fun—especially the part with them shouting out suggestions.**  I want to say something rude here about neither of them being musical*** but Hannah . . . for pity's sake, Hannah goes to Broadway musicals.  It's not like she doesn't know what proper singing voices sound like.†  Hannah is a very good friend.

            And, more to the point . . . she's here.  I left you last night in a Perils of Pauline situation, with our heroine(s) suspended on the brink of being Lost Forever in Darkest Hampshire.  Or possibly not even Hampshire.  Outer Mongolia.  Aberdeen.  Saturn.††   I was just driving back to the cottage in despair††† yesterday when Pooka started barking at me again.  I managed not to run off the road—or more to the point did not run into either of the brick-and-flint walls that claustrophobically enclose the single lane of my steep little cul de sac—and further contrived to press 'answer' before the call was swallowed up by the entropic maw of the voice-mail system from which none escape unscathed, and . . . it was Hannah.  The driver has decided maybe it isn't the Egg and Custard, she said in Old High Manhattan Laconic, maybe it's the Toast and Marmite.  Or the Daffodil and Schnapps.  Or the Militant Stepdaughter . . .  More emphatic male quacking in the background.  Here, you talk to him, she said.

            But where is it, I said.  Whatever its name is.  There is no Caerphilly Road in Mauncester.

            Yes there is, he said promptly.  It runs north-south through the Doggleburies.

            What? I said.  The only road that runs north-south is the Hindu Kush Turnpike.

            After a good deal of witty repartee on the order of "You mean Banded Dogglebury or Sod-all Dogglebury?" and "The giant chalk boulder that looks like the anti-matter Darth Vader is in Gerrymandering, it's not in the Doggleburies at all," the driver, who by this time I had decided had no business behind the wheel of a car that contained my best friend, capitulated and said, "I'll meet you at the Ultimate Fishmonger."  "Great," I said.  "I can find the Ultimate Fishmonger, because it exists in this universe."  In fact he didn't meet me—he dropped Hannah and ran, possibly in some fear of heavy reprisals from a local who knows all the pubs in Mauncester‡  But at least Hannah was there.

            . . . And it's been another beautiful day today and Hannah and I went to a National Gardens Scheme‡‡ garden as the sort of thing one does on a beautiful Sunday afternoon in spring in England, and were swarmed by daffodils and crown imperial fritilleries and alpaca, and suppressed our giggles at the extreme High Tory-ness of the owners‡‡‡ and I bought a plant.§

            We also had two gorgeous hurtles with hellhounds over hill and dale and blowing white blossom in the hedgerows and blue, blue sky and general gloriousness and joy and the sap rising in the trees and the human morale . . . and bloody Chaos is celebrating the change of season by not eating. 

* * *

* Although I have made a rod for my own back, in that April's Visitor^ is here over a Monday and I'm taking her with me to my voice lesson.^^ 

^ I can't remember what her blog name is, and since my dramatis personae file isn't in any kind of alphabetical order and it's gotten rather long over the years I can't find it.  I could always name her again. . . . 

^^ She's the kind of friend who makes it sound like she means it when she says, Yes!  I'd love to!  But then I specialise in insane friends.  Regular readers of this blog may have some idea why. 

** Stop laughing.  Folk songs.  I sing a lot of traditional folk songs.  I can do a handful of the obvious ones on request.  Supposing I'm singing with you in the room, which is not likely. 

*** I can say something rude here about Peter not being musical.  Peter is aggressively non-musical, although not, in fact as aggressively non-musical as he likes to pretend.  Still.  If you are going to take singing lessons and are pathological about singing in front of another human being because you genuinely don't have much voice but (chiefly) because you are intensely neurotic, Peter is a very good person to be married to.  Sometimes fate is kind.  It was not on my list of husband requirements twenty years ago that he had to be able to put up with my singing. 

† . . . At this point I might, as an opera snob, say something about Broadway musical voices . . . but I'm not going to. 

†† Are there pubs on Saturn?  Discuss. 

††† And wondering how long it would take Wolfgang to start again once I'd turned him off.  Since our little erratic fault thingy is continuing.  Yes, I should be ringing up the mechanic and having a little discussion about the connection between the starter motor and the thing it starts, but I've fallen into the abyssal pit of 'I'll do it as soon as I get SHADOWS turned in'.  The post-SHADOWS agenda is getting a trifle long.  Headed, as it is, by doodles.  

‡ By name!  Only by name! 

‡‡  http://www.ngs.org.uk/ 

‡‡‡ Hannah got nailed as an American, but I escaped by mumbling.  An immigrant with no gift for accents quickly develops an instinct for when mumbling is appropriate. 

§ Surprise.  You're surprised, right?^ 

^ I'm waiting impatiently for my new roses.  . . . You know, seven years ago when I moved in to the cottage, I've told you this, right?, the previous tenant was a terribly proper gardener and the garden was full of terribly proper and high-brow plants.  And everyone said, oh, you're going to rip everything out and plant roses, aren't you?  And I got very huffy and said certainly not, I am only going to pull out the boring things, I like lots of plants that aren't roses . . . But seven years later I'm aware that pretty much every time anything dies I replace it with roses. . . .+

+ No, it was not a rose I bought today, it was a lychnis.  It's pink though.