Some of me is better
My stomach is better. The rest of me . . . isn’t. Sigh. One of the splendidest pleasures of ME is the way the symptoms change. It’s like, jeez, what’s the matter with me? -Oh, right, ME. In this case, this is a particularly achy manifestation. This is what I’d be like if I ate lots of tomatoes all the time, I suppose, plus the sciatica which is among the sequelae of riding a lot of unsuitable horses when I was still young and stubborn and believed that what bodies do is grow back together again the way they were before you broke them.
So despite the fact that it’s not sheeting for the second day in a row* I didn’t get out into the garden. There’s a whole chorus of plaintive little plant voices I can hear as I sit at my kitchen table at the cottage**, eating supper late***, remarking on their continued condition of Small Plastic Container Trapped. We want to get our roots down into the lovely claggy cloggy builders-rubbly earth! Waaaah! And as to the condition of the soil, you can always go buy more environmentally correct Soil Improver at the dump! But after lunch and a few pages of PEGASUS, when I should have been tearing back up to this end of town to get out in some garden or other†, I was having trouble standing up.
So I reorganised my piano music instead. I haven’t told you that there’s been a revolutionary change in my life. Peter, The Man and I designed, and The Man built, a music rack. British uprights of a certain vintage-or anyway I hope no one is still building the wretched things-have this foldaway rack thing that is flimsy, stupid, and doesn’t work very well, and how it caught on in the first place is entirely beyond me. It folds up and tucks down under the lid-not the keyboard cover, the proper lid, under which all the wires and hammers and things lurk-and mine just stays there because I don’t use it. For the last two years when I need to prop music up I drape a small piece of carpet over the folded-back keyboard cover, and stand it delicately on that. As long as it’s not the complete sonatas of Mozart it stays there pretty well, although if it’s too short to tuck under the rim of the piano lid at the top I need paper clamps to keep it open. This makes turning pages challenging.†† I have yearned for a music rack. I’ve whimpered to both Peter and The Man about this, they being the three-dimensionally-eyed-and-handed blokes around here-I not only throw like a girl, I have a girl’s sense of spatial relationships, which is to say not very much-and haven’t got too far. But the last time my piano tuner came and I was talking wistfully about how much sheer volume you can get out of Oisin’s baby grand (whom my tuner also tunes), he said, well, you know you can perfectly well prop open the lid of an upright, and you’ll get a lot more volume out of it too. And of course he’s right. Duh. But the immediate point is that having the lid open gives somewhere to hang a detachable music rack. . . . It also means that, with the lid open, I can’t pile piano music all over the top of the piano any more, and therefore all my sheet music††† has been all over the lowboy and the floor the last three weeks or so instead, which is not ideal.
I should maybe dedicate my Song and/or my Sonatina-ette to the music rack, or possibly to The Man (who would be disbelieving and embarrassed in equal parts, I think. Mostly he finds me . . . amusing. This might be over the line). I don’t want to imagine my new composing fervour trying to exist balanced on a bit of carpet: I can write on the music rack. It has elegant little legs (padded with precisely glued-on bits of one of Peter’s old shirts) that hold it at just the right angle-and it too folds up when not in use, but that is its only resemblance to the matchstick-and-bent-wire contraption hanging under the piano lid like a kind of malign mechanical bat.
Yaay revolution.
* It rained a little while hellhounds and I were louping^ over the countryside, so honour was satisfied.
^ I’m not sure you can truly loup anywhere but Scotland, but we try.
** With two pairs of bright shiny hellhound eyes willing me to go upstairs to my office, so they can go with me, and to their favourite bed. Aren’t carnivores supposed to spend most of their life asleep? We’d be happy to sleep upstairs, they say. When I’m uncooperatively eating in the kitchen, I mean, what were desks wider than a keyboard and a pile of paper, and plug in thingummy for your palmtop, oh yes and a tiny round electric coaster to keep your teamug hot, invented for?, I have to be very careful not to touch my knapsack, because picking up my knapsack is the SIGNAL that we now ARE GOING UPSTAIRS. This is awkward when I forget, as sometimes happens, to get my memory stick out the minute I come through the front door from wherever, if I’m planning to plug in down here. -There follows a rush of hellhounds from the crate followed by flinty-eyed indignation when the going upstairs part of the process does not occur in a timely manner. You’re messing with your knapsack! they say. But I am not picking it up! I reply. Cheater! they say. Bully! I say.
*** Hey, it’s Wednesday, I went bell ringing.^ If I can walk, Wednesdays and Fridays, I go bell ringing. I made a mess of Grandsire, sigh, but held together better elsewhere. It’s really quite inspiriting, holding your own line on a method you don’t know very well, when all around you people who should know better are losing theirs. It’s true I was told to go study it because I was about to have to ring it, but it still counts. The ME clearly is not bad or I wouldn’t be holding any lines at all. I still have vivid flashbacks to my first try at learning to ring, when I crashed out because the ME ate my brain: that was when I first went down with it, and spent eighteen months on the sofa. But I also wasn’t far enough along ringing yet-crucially I hadn’t crossed the ringing-inside barrier-to have developed enough of an automatic pilot to help me keep going, or at least paddle in place. This time around my automatic pilot is made up of bits of string and old rubber bands where the rubber is almost perished, but it exists. It’s hard to explain the sensation of performing an activity that requires split-second concentration when your ME is giving you gyp: your brain keeps dropping out like a bad radio signal, and your eyes, hands, and habit-pattern-let’s not call it memory-have to fill in till it bleeps back on line again. Briefly. Before it goes zot again, or probably something more like Zaphod Beeblebrox, which would be enough to make most people forget what they’re doing.
^ Anyone who may have heard Radio 3’s essay tonight, about maths and music, including about 45 seconds about bell ringing, please discard anything you think you learnt. I hope he’s a trifle more accurate on all the other stuff than he is on bells. I was really rather impressed that he could get so much wrong in so few sentences.
† There’s a new epic beginning at Third House: the Saga of the Large Ugly Tree. I think it’s a leylandii-it’s that kind of thing anyway-and it’s way too big for its location as well looking like it’s not thriving.^ And it turns out it gives its nearest neighbours the jumps every time there’s a high wind, as there has been recently. I want to get rid of it anyway (and replace it with a small, small-garden-suitable tree, preferably one that does things like flower and/or fruit and/or turn interesting autumn colours) and my neighbours have agreed to pay half to get this project moved to the top of my To Do list. (Poor things. They have no idea.) The immediate obstacle is that this whole end of town is a Conservation Area which means you almost need a license to cut your grass, let alone remove a tree. So I’ve just downloaded the 1,000,000 page form that is required to obtain city council permission for arboreal destruction, and am playing phone tag with a tree surgeon whom I hope will agree with me that the tree’s not healthy and should come down.
^See: can’t bin a thriving plant, however undesirable
†† Although it has provided an unanswerable excuse whenever Oisin suggests that I really do need to learn to turn pages while playing.
††† Not all, actually. There’s still quite a bit hiding at the cottage, its hands in its pockets, whistling, pretending not to be more sheet music.