Singing, hurtling and eating. Or not.

 

 

The good news:  hellhounds ate lunch.  The bad news:  Eventually.  This is the first really long grim eating-resistant patch they’ve had since Pav came home and in the first place I’m out of practise being made this crazy and in the second place I. DO. NOT. HAVE. TIME. FOR. THIS. NONSENSE.  Night before last Chaos didn’t eat more than two mouthfuls of supper—Darkness scarfed his and looked like he’d eat more.  Last night I gave Chaos less . . . and Chaos scarfed his, looked like he’d’ve eaten more, and Darkness didn’t eat more than two mouthfuls.  AAAAAAAAAUGH.  And . . . which is why I feel obliged to be made crazy TRYING TO MAKE THEM FRELLING EAT . . . you can pretty much tell who didn’t eat much last meal:  he’s the one who tries harder not to eat anything NEXT meal.

Sigh.

Hellterrors are clearly my future.*  But I sometimes think Pav carries it to extremes.  I’d heard rumours of dogs that will lick up a homeopathic pill if you offer it to them—the pills are sweet, after all.  Pav does.  No problem.  Hellhounds do not,  of course, hellhounds who closely inspect even bits of chicken before they accept them (when they accept them), although fortunately they are only weary rather than hostile to my periodic prying open of their mouths to dose them with one thing or another.  I wouldn’t DREAM of trying to give them actual medicine any way but stuffing it down their throats by hand, or rather by poking finger.  Pav’s first pill a couple of days ago I went through the business of opening her mouth to put the pill at the back of her throat, and she was so HEY, DO I GET TO SWALLOW SOMETHING?  THAT’S GREAT, I LOVE SWALLOWING THINGS that because I am a silly person I offered her her next pill on the flat of my hand, like offering a horse a carrot.  She ate it.  She picked it up and ate it.  I waited a minute—probably with my jaw hanging open—to make sure it didn’t re-emerge.  Nope.  The next one I gave her the same way and I heard her chewing it up.  Crunch crunch crunch (they’re kind of big pills for a relatively little hellterror).

. . . It’s been another frantic day.  Fridays usually are.**  And in a few minutes I have to face hellcritter supper, two-thirds of which is likely to be fraught.

* * *

* I’ve told you I had my hand pretty much poised over the phone to make the appointment to visit the local greyhound rescue when I saw the ad for whippet-cross puppies—and that I came out of hellhound puppyhood gasping that I was getting too old for this and they were probably my last puppies.  Ahem.  Pav, however, as puppies go, is so frelling easy that I can imagine doing this again^, but I was thinking, if I ever get to the greyhound-rescue point again, a good rescue shelter knows its dogs, and I CAN ASK FOR ONE THAT EATS.

^ And if I breed the little hussy+ I almost certainly will

+ Southdowner asked me if I had a plan in place for when she comes on heat the first time.  I said that I was going to continue to crate them, and crate them separately, and the hellhounds thus far had never shown any great interest in bitches on the make. . . .  So you’re hoping to get away with it, said Southdowner, only a little sardonically.  It’s not impossible, she went on, but bullies tend to be sexy little things.  I was afraid you were going to say that, I replied sadly.

** Try warming up your singing voice while your hellhounds are refusing to eat their lunch.  Between the sheer ARRRRRRGH factor and the absolute necessity not to say ARRRRRRRRRRRGH to them, your voice snaps shut like a switchblade.  I sang anyway.  I am DETERMINED this time to start singing for Oisin regularly.  I am NEVER going to get used to singing with someone else doing something else/an accompanist/a partner if I DON’T DO IT.  Meanwhile I’d had this possibly sensible^ idea that I might have a better run at figuring out the system for singing-with if I started with songs that I know really, really, REALLY well—like the songs I sing when I’m out hurtling^^.  So I fished a few of these out of the rather terrifying stack(s) of music standing beside and around the piano^^^ and discovered . . . that in the weeks, months or years of singing them away from the piano I have, in a few cases . . . as one might say developed my own version.

I sang ’em anyway.  I tried to sing them the way Oisin was playing them. . . . #

^ Sensible?  Sensible?  Who do I think I am?

^^ I’ve been thinking about this.  When I was a kid you heard people singing—out walking the dog, or the guy at the garage pumping your gas, or your friend’s mom when you went home with someone after school (because in the ’50s in America your friend’s mom would be home).  I’m not so old I remember a time before radio but I certainly remember a time before transistor radios had completely taken over—when people still sang because there wasn’t a professional doing it better out of some small shiny electronic box near at hand.  Even then though you still heard ordinary people singing sometimes . . . you even heard them singing occasionally through the early eras of portable playback gadgets.  And then the Sony Walkman happened.  Wiki says it launched in 1979:  I remember it (and increasing numbers of rivals), in its turn, completely taking over in the ’80s.  And I can’t remember the last time I heard anyone over the age of about six singing for no particular reason in public.  I remember being a little uneasy back then about the turn on, tune in and drop out aspect of everyone’s favourite new toy—I was a teenager in the ’60s after all—although I succumbed pretty soon.  I’m maybe more conscious of the dangerous attractions of voluntary isolation than someone who works in an office and quite reasonably can’t wait to plug in away from his/her annoying colleagues.  The professionally creative always has the excuse of needing to earn a living for locking herself away from the rest of the world and music can be a very good way to engage with that ratbagging story that won’t tell her what it wants.  I’ve already answered my own question about why a nearly talent-free amateur dweeb should bother studying music—because any experience of performance spectacularly opens out your relationship with all music—but I’m still not going to try to strongarm anyone into coming to the Muddles’ next concert.  But . . . I think we’ve lost something, if people really don’t sing while walking the dog(s) any more, or hum off-handedly, and possibly off-pitch, while standing in a queue at the chemist, rather than automatically getting their iPod out and closing themselves off with earphones.

^^^ Very similar to the TBR pile(s) around the bed at the cottage.  And let’s not talk about the yarn.  In the cupboard, under the bed, and in the too-short-for-another-shelf-of-books-because-my-moron-of-a-carpenter-didn’t-do-what-I-said space+ above the upstairs bookshelves.

+Maybe he had a vision that I was going to need stash space in a few years.

# Which in the case of, say, Benjamin Britten taking the mickey out of Peter Pears, trying to follow what your pianist is doing is not helpful.