The beginning of 16 November a day late

 

I barely got out of bed this morning.  I had foresightfully set the alarm/kitchen timer and when it went off I opened one eye in a disbelieving manner.  You.  Must.  Be.  Joking.  I spent the morning (okay, what remained of the morning) thinking I should email Niall that I'll never make it to handbells tonight—no, Wednesday is not handbell evening, but it is for Niall*.  And he'd handed me some clunker on a plate about his Wednesday evening ringers being absent . . . all but one poor sad lonely fellow in Aberystwyth or the Isle of Wolverines or something and how I could make the lives of two despondent handbell junkies full of joy and light if I would sacrifice just one Wednesday evening . . . all right, I said, just stop going on about it.**  The point here is that if I cancelled, he and Theophrastus would revert to wretchedness and withdrawal symptoms.  Gah.

            So to give myself a sort of run at mental function and so forth I decided to get on with ordering the rest of my Met Live HD tickets.***  And discovered that you can't just click on the Met Live link, tick off your operas, choose your seats and go . . . you have to go through the entire dranglefabbing ordering process for each individual opera.†   I was so outraged I even rang the theatre and said, I'm missing something, right?  This can't be how you're expecting people to do it.  Yes, said the young man blandly, you have to order each one separately.  Pass it on up the line to your manager that this system is stupid and nuts, will you please? I said.  Will do, said the young man, still bland.

            So I went through the whole idiot show seven times.††  Plus the times you have to go back and do it again because you left something out.  ARRRRRGH.  Adrenaline was flowing nicely by the end of this performance, the presence of which will substitute for the higher cortical operations on the days after birthday parties and other such situations, so I did move on to get some work done.

            Got back to the cottage with hellhounds with a few minutes to spare before Niall would pick me up and decided to check what was on my phone machine.†††  Message from my credit card company:  Please get in touch immediately.  Second adrenaline spike of the day.  Not good.  So I rang up and promptly was embroiled in the whole prove-you're-who-you-say-you-are rigmarole, oh, gods, I wonder what memorable date I gave them?  Clearly not memorable enough.  She finally asked me a sekrit question I could answer, and then revealed that their fraud division had been disturbed by the seven rapid-fire transactions to the Mauncester cinema this morning.  ARRRRRRRRRRGH.

            Niall was parked in the street reading a book‡ by the time I ran down my little hill and hurled myself into his passenger seat.  And we shot off into the night to rescue a miserable jonesing handbeller from himself.  I had been allowed to form the impression—Niall is a master of misdirection‡‡—that Theophrastus used to ring a little many years ago but is really getting into this time and needs encouragement.  We got there and turns out that Theophrastus has been ringing handbells every day with a Saturday matinee since about 1840‡‡‡ and he and Niall seized their bells like Mario Andretti grasping a steering wheel and GEEZUM CRACKERJACKS, GUYS, I CAN'T RING THIS FAST.  I'm the bicycle, okay?  I ain't no frelling Formula One.

            So.  We're going to have a birthday series.  Item one:  the sofa. §           

* * *

* All evenings are handbell evenings to Niall.  He's just sometimes prevented from fulfilling his destiny. 

** Meanwhile thank the gods—okay, the bell gods don't hate me as much as I thought—that I had innocently booked Peter and me tickets to an opera in Whortleberry next Wednesday.  There's a quarter peal to celebrate the five hundredth anniversary of the siege of Bindlefugg^ and six bishops and a cassowary are coming to the service next Wednesday and Vicky's been told off to find a band.  Midweek rings are hard:  not all ringers are past retirement age.^^  She's so desperate she's asked me. 

^ You know this story.  It was raised at last by a ten-year-old girl who was the only person thin, brave and silly enough to squeeze through an arrow slit and then slither on her belly and elbows through the enemy line and bolt for it.  There's still a statue to her on the green. 

^^ Some of us are free lance. 

*** I have in fact been trying to do this since Saturday night and the sodding ratbag theatre has been renovating its frelling web site.   All flaming week.   

† And this is after they renovated their web site, you know?  

†† If anyone is counting, I'm not going to Nixon in China.  I've seen it once.  Honour is satisfied. 

††† I was hoping to hear back from my dog minder.  Siiiiiiiiigh. 

‡ Paper.  Pages that rustle when you turn them. 

‡‡ He was born in the Year of the Snake.  I rest my case. 

‡‡‡ He's extremely well preserved for his age. 

§ Oooh, I said (yesterday).  Peter said, you know about four of them and the fifth one is a mistake.^ 

^ Wrong.  About the mistake.