Snow and singing

 

I got up this morning [sic] and . . . it was white outdoors.  NOOOOOOO.  NOOOOOOOO.  Meanwhile all the local weather forecasts were saying ‘dry in the south, snow falling north of London’.  This included the Met office and the BBC, where you type in the name of your town and your post code and click, and your very own personalised weather report appears on your screen with beautiful, detailed maps and arrows of progress, and cloud and sun and precipitation symbols headily mixed in with a selection of totally puzzling indecipherable icons.  The entirety of which may or may not have any relevance to reality.  It’s one thing however to be a big fancy meteorologist in a tall windowless skyscraper in Leeds or Oslo or Bucharest, feeding multi-computer-derived statistics into the master computer for people all over Europe to read from their high-tech devices of choice.  I wonder if the fellow at our local nine-volt radio station feels at all silly after he brushes the snow off his coat and out of his shoes being handed today’s forecast to read over the air to his neighbours saying ‘dry in the south, snow falling north of London’.

MY VOICE LESSON IS ON MONDAY AFTERNOON.  Although after the week I’ve just had, including the aftermath of not-quite-flu, it might be kinder both to my self-esteem and to my singing teacher if I had a bombproof excuse to miss.

DON’T WANT TO MISS.

The snow was teeming down.  It was teeming down so extravagantly that the two big fat robins that hang out in my garden, and generally only pick up the seed that has fallen out of the feeder were taking turns at the feeder.*

Teem teem teem.

Meanwhile, partly because I am too distracted by the blasted weather to concentrate on SHADOWS, I am making various overdue coping-with-the-real-world phone calls.  Arrrgh.  On the phone list are two more Potential Wall Rebuilders.  One of them never answers their phone** and the second one . . . ANSWERS THEIR [mobile] PHONE FIRST TRY***.

An estimate on a brick and flint wall? they say.  Sure.  Where are you?  I tell them.  Oh, we’re looking at a job in Gallowglass.  We’ll be with you in twenty minutes.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

They’re going to have a bid for me tomorrow.  They are GOLDEN.

While we were standing around looking at the hole it STOPPED SNOWING.

I had a WAY better voice lesson than I had any business having.  As I said to Nadia—being very underpractised this week due to circumstances mostly beyond my control—it’s worth coming almost no matter what because of the way she resets or retunes my voice . . . which I then lose slowly and inevitably over the week, till I come in again next Monday and she does it again.  But there are still things that happen at home that don’t happen for Nadia because I’m worrying too much about doing it right for her.

Today I sang my first Bb at a lesson.†  I’m going to get high C back.  I am.  Before I die of old age.  Really.

* * *

* British robins are ground feeders, but as I know from experience they will hang upside down from the chandelier for live mealworms, or perform any other acrobatic necessary, so they don’t insist on eating at floor level.  I’m a squirrel phobic, so I’m using squirrel-proof feeders not because they are squirrel proof but because they may discourage the blighters into stripping some other, less defended bird feeder to the paint six times a day, or as often as the idiot local human can be stimulated to refill it, and I am not going to lay an expensive vermin smorgasbord on the frelling ground.  Robins can learn to use a feeder like lab rats can learn to press a lever and get a peanut.  These robins are clearly mutant anyway—they are GIGANTIC, and there’s two of them.  You only get one robin per territory.  This is surely too early for them to be pairing up for nest-building?^  Last year mum robin was pretty huge, but dad was normal robin sized.  The Mutants Are Taking Over.  So long as they don’t start threatening Pav when she’s having her morning frolic^^ I assume we can cohabitate.

^ I hesitate to mention this under the circumstances but the long-range forecast is for a month of winter.  IT’S THE MIDDLE OF FEBRUARY IN SOUTHERN ENGLAND.  THE SNOWDROPS ARE ALREADY OUT.  THE CROCUSES AND THE FIRST DAFFS ARE SHOWING COLOUR.  IT’S SPRING, OKAY?  GET WITH THE PROGRAMME.  IT’S FRELLING DRATBLASTED SPRING.  IT MUST BE SPRING, THERE ARE TWO ROBINS IN MY GARDEN.

^^ A crap avoidance technique.  Fortunately she continues to be so food obsessed that she will eventually crap, probably before I freeze to death, standing outdoors in my dressing gown keeping an eye on her,+ because breakfast follows closely.

+ I’ve told you she eats rose bushes?  It’s a good thing she’s cute.  There’s also the unwelcome fact that there’s presently a GIGANTIC hole in the wall immediately to the right of the kitchen door, and while there’s a tiny little semi-decorative picket fence in the way, this would not much hinder a hellterror on a mission.

A gigantic hole draped in a fig leaf of barbed wire.  Last night hellhounds and I—hellterrorless, I was tired—were out for our last little quarter-hurtle and . . . there was a frelling street brawl.  We slipped away into the shadows and slunk back to the cottage, but I could still hear it, and I could hear it more clearly than I wanted to through the hole in the wall.  I WANT MY WALL BACK.#

# One of the several unwritten Third Damar Novels concerns a woman living in a walled garden.  Notes about her went into the story file long before I moved over here, let alone moved into town from a large semi-walled country garden to a tiny completely walled town garden.  I feel that—supposing I get around to her—my writing about her experience will take on a vibrancy it might not have had thirty years ago.

** One of the causes of my failure to engage with the real world is that I prefer the sole-trader type, being sort of one myself, and they are the least likely to have things like receptionists, or to answer their frelling phones themselves.  This basic situation has improved with the ubiquity of mobile phones, but people don’t necessarily answer their mobiles either.  Ask me how I know this.  Ask me about punctiliously turning Pooka off before entering the monks’ chapel and then forgetting, sometimes for days, to turn her back on again.  You’d be surprised how easy it is to skip over the opening screen with all the missed messages on it when you’re on your way to your current Audible read-aloud, or the converter thingy that will tell you what Centigrade or metres are in real numbers.

*** They were however impossible to locate in the first place, which is kind of the same thing, about sole-trader types.  They’d done a gorgeous wall in Ditherington several years ago which I’d had my eye on for if I ever got enough ahead in funds to have a short stretch of brick-and-flint wall put up at Third House . . . but they don’t have a web site and they have a funny name.  BUT I TRACKED THEM DOWN.

† Not that I knew it, of course, because that’s the way it goes.  You do your exercises—or your teacher leads you through them—and at the end you check and see where you got to.  I couldn’t sing high Bb in a piece to save my life.