Sometimes your day
. . . just does not organise itself into a blog shape.* Today has been one of those days.
The phone went at a few minutes before eight this morning. I was of course asleep. However I was out of bed and most of the way across my office before consciousness attempted to kick in and tell me that the reason why I was sprinting, naked and asleep, through a dangerous jungle of furniture and topply piles of books and papers, was because the phone was ringing. Okay: the source of the racket is obviously this curiously shaped and wired object, what did you say it was and what is it I do with it again? The caller was the Tree Man, who agreed to go round and look at my leylandii. So I was up. Weaving slightly, but up. Clothing. Weather? Different clothing. Bundle hellhounds in car. Now where are we going?
Ah. We are presently in the annual four-month gap where a big local wood, theoretically open on the CROW act, which says something about public pedestrian access to wild land, actually is open or at least is less aggressively closed than during the other eight months. The law seems to say that landowners can deny access up to 28 days a year, but these bozos have WOODLAND CLOSED signs up from the beginning of August to the end of March. I am mostly pretty law abiding-I don’t like the stress level of being illegal: I can find much easier, simpler ways to stress myself silly-and this includes obeying b******* rules because I don’t like confrontation either, unless I’m really invested in the outcome. In this case since I know they raise game birds, I don’t want to get shot in the process of insisting on my rights. But I do feel a little testy about the eight months and one of these years I’m going to find some official footpath/access person with an ear to bend and discuss this among a few other local manifestations of what I read as ‘I have lots of money and whatever I own is mine and therefore I don’t have to do what the law says, and besides you’re ugly and your mother dresses you funny.’ This particular wood, even during the four months it’s not actively closed, is not exactly welcoming. All that changes is they take the CLOSED signs down. The gates are still all padlocked shut. You want to walk there? Fine, you climb over. Carrying hellhounds.**
It is always useful to get off to something slightly more resembling an early start on Fridays because I have my piano lesson Friday afternoon and then sacred home tower bell practise in the evening, so ‘catching up later’ is not a good option (especially these days, when a fair amount of ‘later’ tends to be taken up by the blog). We got down to the mews early enough for me to spend most of an hour trying to convince myself that I did know how to play the piano and also that all those hen scratches on several pages of manuscript paper were actually a Song and a Sonatina-ette (unfinished)***. And the seven hundred and fifty-seventh run through in a row of the Song when I was still needing vast pauses to remember what comes next† I was thinking in despair that I really was getting senile, and, just by the way, I object to this, when it occurred to me that I’m trying to memorise something while the ME is active. Not very active, granted, or I’d be sparing poor Oisin the trial of having me underfoot for an hour††, but active enough that carrying water in a sieve would be more productive. I had in fact memorised my Song just before I was felled but ‘memorise’ is a complex and many-layered process in my case . . . each complex more neurotic and each layer more resistant to jackhammering than the last. Something has to stay memorised for a while before it wears a groove it can lie down in comfortably rather than sliding faster and faster down the glass-like slope of my acuity before it hits the rim and sails off into Outer Darkness. The Song and I are still in the early scrabbling stage.
I did get through it-more or less-for Oisin, who, one assumes, can silently improvise plausible bridging bits for the gaps. And I made him play the Sonatina-ette. He said, you might think about longer phrases . . . and went noodling off into variations with one of my short ones, and I was delighted because this is very similar to what I was thinking anyway, which is that while I want to finish it as it stands, as my next project I’d quite like to take it apart and make room for some of the stuff I can hear standing around just off stage humming to itself.
. . . And then we were just settling in to a nice conversation about creativity-begun by my saying that my one great advantage, as I set out with my compass, walking stick and a knapsack full of chocolate on the strange and exotic landscape of composing, is that I’m used to making stuff up. Not this stuff, but stuff. The sheer fact of Making Stuff Up holds no terrors for me, including that I’m used to the sweat and blood aspect. And by golly aren’t I just reinventing the wheel-but I’ve been the traditional music education route, where you know what you’re doing before you do it, and that was when I almost flunked out of harmony class in college. I like this system much better, where I haven’t the faintest what I’m doing but I can do it anyway, and backwards, upside down, and with none of the correct labelling, doesn’t matter. Even if it does sometimes feel like calling out the fire brigade to thread your needle for you, at least the needle gets thread poked through it.
Anyway, I looked at the clock mid sentence and snatched up my music to flee out the door to my appointment with another builder at Third House about an estimate for the attic floor with a whole masterful upscale Loft Conversion to come after.††† And the builder . . . was half an hour late. I was leaving when he pulled in.‡ And the main thing he did is raise a lot of new issues . . . I am so out of my depth here. I just wanted somewhere to store books.
And then I pelted back to the cottage, discovered a message from the Tree Man saying that he was sorry to report that the tree is perfectly healthy‡‡, took hellhounds out for their afternoon scamper, fed them supper‡‡‡, and jogged off to tower practise, holding my head on with one hand. It was a funny practise: we went wrong on really dumb stuff, a plain course of Grandsire triples for heaven’s sake . . . and then out of nowhere the good ringers pulled a plain course of Cambridge Minor out of their hats which was striking-competition-worthy and was also the sort of thing that makes us stumbling, ME-brained post-beginners heave a deep sigh and say, That’s why we’re in this game. That’s what we’re aiming for.§
And since Peter is playing bridge, I went to the pub. Where Niall and Penelope are standing the rest of us for weeks after that little slip about last Sunday service when the clocks went forward Saturday night.§§ And now I’m back at the cottage and Beethoven’s Fifth is over with and I think I feel like some Purcell.
*Although at this moment I am listening to Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. Most of Beethoven’s symphonies have this effect on me: that I can rush out, right now, and conquer anything. Even a blog entry.
** I don’t jump my hellhounds over anything involving wire, barbed or not. Even the unbarbed kind they could put a foot through way too easily, because of the way dogs jump, which is more of a hustle, with a lot of rear end action.
*** The Sonatina-ette is officially unfinished. The Song merely keeps trying to morph in a subtle way. This does not make learning to play it any easier. I keep thinking, hmm, that’s interesting, I wonder if . . .
† Playing from memory makes the morphing process all the more irresistible, because you are perforce thinking about the music.
†† No, I lie. When the ME is persecuting me, I’m far more likely to ring him up and say, I feel like death on toast, but if you don’t have anything better to do, can I come along anyway?
††† Eventually. After CHALICE is a best seller.
‡ In his defense, he’d left me a phone message . . . at the cottage. Which of course I hadn’t had.
‡‡ Which, furthermore, they ate. I’m in shock.
‡‡‡ Oh, blithering hells! I also have a strong sense of, if that’s what it’s supposed to look like, why does anyone plant them?
§ Niall says it was worth it. Lying in on a Sunday morning (even if inadvertently). What a concept!
§§ A reminder I needed since there were enough good ringers to give me a go at Stedman Triples. Ow. Ow. Ow.