Winter in Spring

 

It’s southern England in the middle of March and it’s snowing.  And the wind chill factor is something like minus eight hundred and twelve.*  What’s the opposite of a meltdown?  I’m having one.  I am not willing to PUT UP WITH THIS WEATHER in the south of England in the middle of MARCH.**  My crocuses, daffs, hyacinths and hellebores have SNOW on them.  And the wind?  Not only does it try to push your teeth down your throat should you be so injudicious as to open your mouth—in shock—to breathe, it makes Wolfgang rock on his (elderly) suspension as we speed toward Sorgumlea and Nadia and it lifted one of the Wall Man’s neatly stacked bricks and threw it at my greenhouse—crash!  Bricks are heavy, you know?  And their glide ratio is not good.  But a brick still levitated off the pile, flew up into the air and whanged down on my greenhouse.

The Wall Man hasn’t been here in about four days—it’s been raining till it started snowing.  So not only is our wall not being finished, but the WIND comes through the gap into my garden galloping like a jousting knight—GET OUT OF THE WAAAAAAAY.  Pavlova was nearly tossed over the opposite wall onto Phineas’ lawn.***

Generally speaking however Pav doesn’t care.  The hellhounds care.  Make it stop or we’ll stop eating (again).  I also hate picking up crap in this weather:  you have to take your gloves off.  For most of your average [sic] English winter fingerless gloves, especially the kind with the little fold-over mitten end, are perfectly adequate.  I suppose if the evil aspect of winter is going to hang around more I will be forced to learn to adapt to picking up crap with my gloves on.†  I took Pav with me today—now that the daylight is getting loonger†† in the afternoons again there’s a perfectly good hurtling opportunity post-voice-lesson before we return to familiar territory—and since as we know she only ever craps at home and when ordered to do so by the hellgoddess, the taking off of gloves was not going to be a problem.  But it was so COOOLD that she managed to hucklebutt the end of the lead right out of my numbed fingers—she’s mostly figured out how long her (extending) lead is, just as the hellhounds did at her age, and watching her hucklebutt in a tight zigzag pattern is better entertainment than most West End plays.  But she misjudges occasionally.  Today when she got to the end the handle just rattled straight out of my failing-to-close non-grip.  Oops.  Loose frelling hellterror in the middle of vast edge-of-town park and sports and playground area with lots of lovely people and other dogs to meet.  Hey, Pav, I said casually.  She looked at me.  Pav, come, I said, and knelt, which is one of those cheating-but-whatever-WORKS recall tricks—and she came to me instantly.  Noble Pav.  Fabulous Pav.†††

I finally made it to Colin’s Monday tower practise tonight too—I was thinking that in the last few weeks I’ve had a sick car, a sick husband, a sick dog‡ and a sick me.  It’s not surprising my life is even more ramshackle than usual.  But Nadia had dragged me through the first two pages of Vedrai, carino‡‡ and then offered me my first Schubert.‡‡  ::Beams::  This because I wanted to sing something cheerful, and this is one of those spring-it’s-spring-la-la-la-la songs even if it’s called FRUHLINGSGLAUBE for pity’s sake and is (duh) in German.  So I was feeling all chirpy and upbeat and it isn’t snowing hard, the roads are clear.  Although the South Desuetude tower has to be the coldest place on earth, if I hadn’t gone Niall would have kidnapped me off to Old Eden and those cranky bells in this rotten weather?  Nooooooo.

Maybe if I sing FRUHLINGSGLAUBE with feeling it’ll bring the season on a little—?

* * *

*Fahrenheit, Celsius, Kelvin or Icicledoolally, I don’t care.  Cold.  Very frelling COLD.

** Cue every (old) person who has ever lived in southern England telling me about ice-skating every winter in the 60s.  I don’t care.  It’s not the 60s any more.^

^ For which I am very grateful.  I did not enjoy being a teenager.  At all.  You know that so-called joke about locking kids up when they turn 13 and letting them out again when they turn 20, so that parents, other authority figures and random adults are spared the whole teenage thing?  Sounds good to me.  As the kid.  I’d have been great locked up for six years as long as there were sufficient supplies of books, chocolate, a piano, what in those days would have been a ‘stereo system’, a (large) sketchpad, a dog or dogs at my feet and a (walled) field out back with two or three horses in it (horses are herd animals:  you should have more than one).+  I’m getting all wistful just thinking about it.

+ I didn’t discover gardening till I married Peter and bell ringing requires other people.#

# And maybe someone could have taught me to knit when I was 12.  So books, chocolate, yarn . . .

*** This probably has not improved her attitude toward the whole having-a-crap thing.

† I was younger when I still lived in Maine.

†† YAAAAAAY

††† It’s always something.  With the hellhounds, when they were insane puppies and I wasn’t sure of their recall, when they occasionally got away from me I freaked because they are so fast.  I am not joking that they can have disappeared before I’ve finished shouting their names.  Fortunately they never have,^ but they could.  With Pav, my number-one fear is becoming that she is a dangerous bull terrier with dangerous bull-terrier fighting DNA^^ and people are STUPID.  I realise that the Language of Dog is pretty much as complex as any other language but I feel that anyone who lives in an area that has pet dogs—which would be pretty much everywhere in England—ought to frelling recognise the wagging tail, flat ears and belly-creep of the (over) friendly hellcritter, whatever the shape of its profile.

^ knocking on wood here

^^ In terms of bull-terrier jaw DNA, by the time she’s grown I’m not going to be able to pry her mouth open any more.  Hellhounds I still can—but they aren’t big clampers anyway, aside from not being wired to grab something and not let go.  I am hoping by the time she’s grown I will have less need to pry her mouth open.  Today I saw her go for something, and I could see by the way she was holding her mouth closed there was something in there . . . a broken-off chicken thighbone GEEZUM GEEZUM GEEZUM that could have killed her if she’d chewed it up and swallowed it—oh yes, she chews her trophies.  I’m having to learn that too—hellhounds mostly just carry their treasures around—Pav, with that bull-terrier jaw, will chew up heavy plastic, for example, which SPLINTERS.  Whimper.  I will have to ask Olivia or Southdowner what you do when you have to get something out of your puppy’s mouth after she starts biting steel girders in half.  Small pocket-sized titanium-alloy crowbar?

‡ And then frelling Chaos decided to stop eating too because the fact that Darkness wasn’t eating was making him nervous.

‡‡ Zerlina, in DON GIOVANNI.  Mmmmm Mozart.

‡‡‡ Not quite my first Schubert.  Blondel tried to give me the ratblasted Lotus Flower but I hated the lyrics so much I couldn’t engage, even with the protective colouration of the terrifyingly unpronounceable German.