Unprecedented

I have a new, unique, never-to-be-repeated* excuse for not having written my next blog post in a timely** fashion.  I have had conversations with more than one live human being*** per day for the last fortnight-plus.  This does not happen.  After the first few days my tongue gets chapped.  My brain wrings its hands.  My Converse High Tops start tap-tap-tapping in another direction—any other direction—away†—& then somehow or other because the stars have aligned funny, this people thing goes & happens again.†† What am I, a mingly sort of person or something??  NO.  What hideous lying rumours are going round about me as the life & soul of some party I’ve never been to & wouldn’t attend if I were invited which I wasn’t?  WHAT?

But I want to say that what I am not doing is getting ready to slide out of writing this blog again, the way I did last year.  NOT.  It’s just that–after the first few days of relentless humanity–I’ve had to spend increasing amounts of time curled up with Genghis, reading murder mysteries†††, to recover from all this freaky civic interaction. 

* * *

* Yes, I know, if it’s unique there’s only one of it.^  I am employing literary emphasis.  The advertising—and careless journalistic—habit of using unique every time they want to say Buy me & you’ll be positively ahead of the Joneses for at least a day & a half!!^^, is one of the MANY MANY MANY things that make me cranky.

^ I would be willing to listen to an argument that if a unique thing becomes a series, it merely stops being unique, & you don’t lose all credibility for having called it unique when it still was.  

But not if you’re advertising something for sale, because you know perfectly well it isn’t unique, or if it is, it’s only because the sales ploy failed.#

# I can hear the surly conversation around the computer-era-water-cooler-equivalent= now.  So, guys, what’s the new UNIQUE?  We’re gonna lose money on the Self Rotating Giant Whirling Paw add-on for our new AI canine companion bionic operating system if we don’t get glitzy fast. 

=  Um.  The laptop screen with 67 tiny unidentifiable zoom windows open?  No, no, zoom is so last decade.  Team Integrated Circuit Brain or whatever it is now.

^^ Although of course we are sending the Joneses exactly this same come on, so, you know, you’d better move fast.  You could still maybe get six hours on them, pesky people that they are.

** TIME AAAAAAUGH TIME

*** Ie shouting at idiots^ on my laptop screen does not count^^

^ including, but not exclusively, those misusing unique

^^ Hmm.  There is, however, an important question about whether random conversations with people I don’t know the names of count.

Oh now let’s not get carried away.  All those conversations with people on the street whose names I don’t know# but, in most cases, whose dogs I recognise, they count.  Or sometimes vice versa, the vice and the versa in this case referring to people recognising my dog.  Scary numbers of people know my dog.  & I think I’ve told you about the distressing number of little old people who totter up to say hello to Genghis because they miss having their own dog but they think they’re too OLD??  I will probably tell you again too because it preys on me, with fangs, & these conversations keep happening.  I’m planning on dying quietly## in my sleep in extreme old age with my Yorkie on my lap###.  My only official anxiety is how long I can put off the Yorkie phase.  My grasp of practical physics is limited, but I imagine merely wearing weighted shoes#### isn’t really going to be of much use for prevention of being pulled over by one’s dog, if I decided that Genghis hasn’t been challenging enough & I opt for a Rottweiler next time?#####

# this does not include the people whose names I should know

## Yes!  QUIETLY!  I’m going to have figured out how to go all mellow between now & then!=

= ::falls down laughing hysterically::  If you ever meet anyone who claims that her name is Robin McKinley & she writes books, & she’s mellow, she’s someone else, you must have misheard her.

### which is exactly what happened to one of my neighbours.  The people who subsequently bought her house are very nice, but I still miss her.=

= I even miss the weeny fluffball doggish being.  The new people have a cat.   

#### CLOMP CLOMP CLOMP CLOMP.  People will run away and hide when they hear me coming.  Which will at least solve the superfluous conversation problem.  

##### Large male Rottweiler:  135 pounds=.  Large male Yorkshire terrier:  the freaking breed standard says ‘not to exceed 7 pounds.’== 

= THEY NEED A LOT LESS WALKING THAN A GERMAN WIRE HAIRED POINTER HOWEVER, WHO IS HALF THE WEIGHT.  Or less.  Genghis is about a third of 135 pounds.@  But from what I know of Rottweilers, they’re merely, you know, gruesomely powerful.  They don’t have the true rocket-launcher feature.

@ I did it on my calculator, okay?  We have already discussed long division.

== You’d think something that small would die young of ruptured everything, that there isn’t room in a seven-pound body for the usual canid assortment of heart, lungs, stomach, intestines, liver, bladder, special domestic-canine sub-genomic musculoskeletal-tail-wagging evolutionary adaptation, etc, & the bits would all rub up against each other till friction made them explode in year three or so.  But apparently Yorkies are quite long-lived.  Hmmmmm.  Maybe I could get used to tiny.@

@ Although I am reminded of Dorothea near the beginning of MIDDLEMARCH rejecting a puppy$ her unwelcome suitor has brought her, saying that her sister had had a thimble sized critter with legs, & ‘I am short-sighted, I was afraid I might tread on it.’ $$

$ Maltese.  Another of these palm-sized things that is mostly hair.

$$ I’d’ve taken the puppy.  PUPPY. AWWWWWW.%  I don’t think a puppy counts as a betrothal, even to the Victorians, who were testy about these things.  And it could have learnt to stay out from under my large clomping feet.%%

% Although a Maltese or Yorkie puppy you probably need a magnifying glass to confirm cuteness. 

%% &, you know, WHAT HAPPENS TO THE POOR REJECTED PUPPY?? Maybe it goes to the sister he marries after Dorothea won’t have him? Who already has a penchant for thimble sized critters?

† Which is awkward, if you’re sitting around your own table in your own kitchen.  I’m barefoot indoors anyway.  My 3-dimensional regular visitors are used to me, but when I opened the door last week to someone I haven’t seen since I moved up here, he said, you’re barefoot in late October in northeast Scotland??  Um.  Well, I have a large warm dog & an Aga.  & a woodstove.  It’s almost worth the chilblains to stay barefoot even once woodstove weather has begun^ because of the wild exciting climate wars happening at ankle level.  The assaults!  The rebuffs!  The attacks!  The retreats!  The sly ambushes from behind furniture legs!  The blitzes from above!  All of human history played out on your very own floor between the opposing airy blasts of invading woodstove swelter & resident icy guerrilla draughts.^^

^ So far this non-autumn it has mostly been insanely warm.  We all settled in for real autumn to start happening, dunno, beginning of October?  Bright crisp air, dropping temperatures.  & then Florida arrived.   I keep waking up because I’m frying—I LIKE blankets, okay?—& throw everything off, & then I can’t get back to sleep because there’s nothing weighing me down.

without the alligators. 

We’ve addressed my strange sleep habits previously.  So let’s say, about three hours after I went to bed.

Yet another reason I’m not a big fan of summer, although wearing all my Steeleye Span t shirts during the days is a plus.  & no, in my hierarchy, there is absolutely no point to wearing amusing t shirts under your woollies.

^^ There’s probably a story in there somewhere. 

†† When there were 2 pews of people at compline, I almost turned & ran.  Only I couldn’t, because Genghis had already seen them & he likes people, so he was barging forward in his Genghisian way while I was stumbling along behind him, aghast.  It took me about halfway down the (long) aisle to remember that the people who were Genghis’ friends were Genghis’ friends because they are my friends, & one of the illicit, not-holy reasons for going to flipping doodah compline is in the hope of seeing them.^

^ Yes, I am often my own worst enemy.  Yes, my panic button works a lot faster than my thought processes.  Yes, this is a problem.  Any more questions?

††† One of the conversations I had with one of ALL THESE PEOPLE the last few weeks was with someone who also reads murder mysteries.  Oh, she said, what kinds do you like?  Well, I said, I don’t read serial murderers, & I don’t read anything where the first chapter is the last day or hour of the poor sod who’s about to get offed—the corpse is a plot device, not a human being;  I will just about put up with it that they were a nice person & we have to hear about this while their murderer is being found out;  note singular of the word corpse;  & I really won’t read it when, having accidentaled my way through the Last Day by not realising that was what it was, I the reader is expected to read extensively about the murder from the soon-to-be-corpse’s point of view, & how they struggled, & how desperate they are, & how all the things they’ll now never do flash pitiably before their hopeless eyes—& I don’t read anything where women or children are tortured or imprisoned for long horrible intervals, & I don’t like detectives, police or private or inadvertently involved bystanders, with Burdensome Traumatic Pasts that keep interfering with the detecting so they can make stupid decisions to make the story more interesting which it doesn’t, & . . . & at about this point my interlocutor started to laugh, & said, there isn’t anything left!  & I regretfully acknowledged this is almost true.  Oh, I don’t like cozies either.  Somehow or other I still have several hundred [sic] mysteries sitting unread on my Kindle.  If I read one I like, I buy the hard copy.^  I do this often enough that—with all the hard copies I’d bought before Kindle became a thing—that, yes, my murder-mystery shelves are overflowing like every other literary genre section in this house.

^ I know.  But I like hard copy.  I will continue to like hard copy as this house slowly sinks into the earth from the weight of 1,000,000,000 hard copies.  &, look!  There’s another box arriving right now from Blackwell’s/GUARDIAN bookshop/Topping & Company/Postscript/Bibliophile/Abebooks, BOOK DEPOSITORY CLOSED, SOB, &, yes, I’m afraid, Amazon, my bad, or possibly one box from each.  I’m an equal opportunity it-isn’t-hoarding-if-it’s-books purchaser. 

I’m actually wearing that hoodie today.#

# As I finally FINISH this blog I’ve been making little runs at for several days.  It was still only a fortnight in the first paragraph when I began.