IT’S HALF PAST MIDNIGHT, I’M FINALLY EATING DINNER* AND I STILL HAVE TO WRITE THE BOONDOGGLING BLOG.**

            Fiona had booked tickets for the Gigspanner*** concert months and months ago.  And months.  I think she booked them slightly before the tour had been confirmed or the dates settled on.†  This is also before the doodle situation broke down under the strain of trying to write a novel in five months††.  Our previous set up has been when there’s a concert in view she takes the day off her real job††† and comes down for a few hours during the day and terrifies some corner of my office/files/desk/attic into behaving itself, and then we frolic in the evening.  But while I still have many, not to say numberless other corners of my life that could use Fiona’s services, with 1,000,000,000 doodles‡ hanging over my head like 1,000,000,000 Damoclesian swords I can’t frelling face my office, let alone sort out something for Fiona to do in/with it.‡‡

            But it’s a long frelling way for Fiona to come for a concert—even longer when it involves better than an hour of surplus driving to come and fetch me.‡‡‡  And then another one to take me home.  So I was casting about for something to make the day more value-added . . . and devised the cunning plan that we could go see AVENGERS ASSEMBLE in twoD at a theatre that involves the Greater Footling Triangle, a lesser known but statistically more savage area of geophysical mayhem than the better known Bermuda.  The attraction of this theatre (aside from the straightforward appeal of 2D) is that, if it weren’t for the geophysical mayhem part, where you turn right and find yourself on Mars, it would be my best option for some of the other live-streaming opera broadcasts that are becoming increasingly popular. 

            Fiona, who is agreeably broad-minded, agreed to this plan.  And then the frelling theatre changed the times on us.  And we were no longer going to have time to scamper from the cinema to the concert several towns over before Roger started beating up Peter’s fiddle.§  A mad flurry of emails ensued.           

            We compromised.  We decided to go to a new yarn store. 

            But the yarn store happens to be in pretty much the same area as the cinema, so Fiona offered to take us past the cinema first, so we could find it—who knows, we might even go to a film there some day—before we went on to the yarn store.§§  So she fired up her satnav and . . .

            I think possibly I have been rude about her satnav before?  Shut up, Billy.  Shut up, Billy.  You get various choices for your voice.  Fiona has Billy Connolly.  The Scottish accent, when he’s saying sensible things, is pleasing.  He rather too frequently deviates from the path of virtue however.  Clearly satnav tech is not proof against the Greater Footling Triangle.   Or the Greater Footling Multidimensional Roundabout, where, whichever exit you take, it’s the wrong one, and Billy will be telling you to turn around in a minute.

            HE EVENTUALLY TOOK US TO A SEWAGE STATION AND THEN CLAIMED WE’D ARRIVED AT OUR DESTINATION.  I know most modern films are rubbish but . . . §§§

            We finally saw the theatre—on the wrong side of the dual carriageway [four lane highway] of course—on our way back, retracing our steps to find the yarn store. 

            The yarn store was extremely satisfactory.  Extremely.#  Oh dear.  And as soon as I get this posted I am going to race upstairs and discover that . . . I haven’t got enough of the yarn I want to use for the new pattern I just bought## with the idea of it being my first cardigan.###

            And the concert was fabulous.~  It was also long, which is why it was half past midnight before I even looked at my computer, but it was the kind of long that when you finally look at a clock you think, it can’t be that late.  That second set was short, I know it was.  Live music is just . . . necessary.  Technology these days is so amazing (sometimes even for good) that it’s easy to sit at home with your 1,000,000 favourite CDs and think that’s all you need.  It isn’t.  You need it live sometimes too:  you need to see the musicians doing it and hear it as they do it.  You need to pick up the electricity of what they do together—which is not recordable.  Oh, yes, certainly, some performers can put over that fresh vibe to be caught for the ages by the latest equipment. ~~  But it’s not the same.  And these guys really connect, with each other, with you the audience.  Love love love.  Why aren’t they famous? 

* * *

* Well, we had a dinner-like meal at about 6.  But I don’t eat dinner at 6. 

** Yes, I did think of holding New Thing 10 one more day because I knew I’d be back late tonight.  But I didn’t think I’d be this late . . . and I also knew it would be a day rife with blog material.  I possibly didn’t know how rife. . . . 

*** http://www.gigspanner.com/ 

† What?  She hired a good prognosticator.  How do you think? 

†† Which I also have signally failed to do.  Siiiiiiiigh.  It has not been one of my great years. 

††† What?  Oh, she makes jgrrmgles.  To order.  There’s a long waiting list.  She’s the best jgrrmgle maker in Britain, and possibly the world.  

‡ And a few other random items 

‡‡ Hellhounds and I occupy a narrow strip near the door.  The rest is . . . AAAAAAAUGH. 

‡‡‡ See:  I don’t drive much.  Especially to anywhere I don’t already know.  Yes, this means that anywhere I hadn’t already learnt the route to by the winter of 2000, when I went down with acute ME, I probably won’t drive to now.  And don’t I hate it when they change the road layout. 

§ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c2Rx2KSW3-c&feature=youtube_gdata

Blondviolinist, avert your eyes. 

§§ Film and yarn possible in the same expedition.  Hmmmmm. 

§§§ Which was being renovated or expanded or something.  We sat there while the giant thing with caterpillar tread trundled around moving heaps of rock in an aimless manner and Fiona fired up her iPhone—Pooka, I might add, was refusing to connect:  the signal was fine but she was sitting there going Can’t! Won’t! And you can’t make me!—and ascertained that the post code on the cinema web site was wrong.  Oh.  That’s helpful. 

# Ask Fiona. 

## Yes, I know you don’t knit from stash.  Stash is stash.  If you want to knit something you have to go out and buy yarn.  But I find that—um—sometimes you do want to knit up some of your yarn.  That sometimes you bought yarn not merely because it was gorgeous and was clinging round your leg and refusing to get back on its shelf and what can you do when it knows your name?, but because you want to wear it or throw it over the back of your sofa or something.  That you bought it sure that the pattern it yearns to become is out there somewhere, just possibly not in this shop and besides you’ve already been here six hours fondling yarn and your hellhounds need walking and your husband wants to know where you are and if you’re ever coming home^.  But you want to, you know, knit this yarn up, even if maybe it will have a sort of interregnum period of looking like stash.  Um—does this mean I’m not a real knitter? 

^ And when, bringing your purchases into the house, if you will fit through the door.  

## Hint:  open front.  No buttons.  No buttonholes.  And with only a few changes.  Like about six inches shorter^ and the sleeves will be STRAIGHT not belled.  Ugh^^.  The sleeves will probably also be longer to accommodate my gorilla-length arms.  Sigh.  I am looking FORWARD to sleeves that are LONG ENOUGH.^^^ 

^ Maybe I’ll have enough yarn after all. 

^^ Maybe it makes a pretty line.  All I can see is ‘gets into your tea, your soup, the mouth of the dog you’re petting’ etc.   It’s like Fiona was wearing lady shoes today and then complaining about the stairs.  You’re wearing lady shoes.  

^^^ And for anyone with a memory so good you ought to be ashamed of yourself, yes, I have at least one other First Cardigan, and I even bought the yarn for that one at the same time I bought the pattern.  The problem with it is that it pretty much trumpets EASY KNIT FIRST CARDIGAN, which kind of puts me off because I’m like that.  I still like it and still plan to make it (!!!) but . . . I think I’d like to make something that isn’t quite so obviously holding my hand and saying ‘there, there’ first.+ 

+ Says the woman who is about a third of the way through her third leg warmer having still not sewn up the first two.  But I started sewing up last night and . . . it’s working.  Sewing up was my downfall last time—my squares looked reasonably okay individually, but as soon as I started sticking them together their jolly little eccentricities became serious vice and corruption.  Sigh.  Some day I will have the world’s largest knitted hellhound blanket.   Also the most irregular knitted hellhound blanket of any size. 

~ And I have a crush on the drummer.  Just by the way.  And none of the youtube clips do him justice, so don’t give me that ‘ewwww’.  

~~ Gigspanner has two excellent albums out themselves^ . . . but it’s still not the same. 

^ Although they’d better record their Tom o’ Bedlam soon or I shall grow rude and violent

TEN 

Very briefly I considered saying Katie or Katherine or Klytemnestra.  No.  I was getting enough of a new life as it was, without adding a drastic name change.  Besides, my name was on my books, although I could probably claim it was an alias.  “Kes,” I said, and hesitated again.  “Short for Kestrel.  My mother breeds dogs and she was in her birds of prey phase when I was born.” 

             Billie laid two menus down on the table between us and said, “Specials on the chalkboard.  The pork chops are really good.  Ryuu made the applesauce today.”

            “Go on,” said Serena to me.

            I picked up the menu.  “It could have been a lot worse.  I could have been White-Rumped Vulture or Crested Serpent-Eagle.  Or Dark Chanting-goshawk.  Or Pale Chanting-goshawk.  D’you suppose they’d let me have the meatloaf with the applesauce?”

            “Yes,” said Serena.  “I like Chanting-goshawk.”

            “Yeah,” I said.  “So did Mom.  One of her foundation bitches was Chanting-goshawk.  Chan Five is winning stuff now.  And there was a time when my nickname was Bat-hawk.  Don’t ask.”

            “Why do I have the feeling your mom and my mom would get along?”

            I grinned.  “Well, they stopped with me,” I said.  “You’re the youngest, right?”

            Serena laughed again.  Between the prospect of real food and the sound of real human laughter I was beginning to feel almost good.  “Next youngest.”

            Serena had the pork chops and I had the meatloaf.  Billie put a tureen of applesauce on the table between us, and another tureen of cole slaw.  Serena was deep in conversation with the offspring when the food came.  “No you may not have microwave popcorn for supper.  More microwave popcorn.  This isn’t getting you the sympathy vote from me, you know.  So climb on your bike and come here.  If you order and eat some green vegetable I’ll treat you to Ryuu’s cherry pie.  I saw it in the window as we came in.”

            Urgent noises on the other end of Serena’s cell phone.  If I was going to guess, I’d’ve said teenage boy.

            “And why haven’t you replaced your bike light?” said Serena.  “I gave you the money last week.”

            More urgent noises.  Serena closed her eyes.  “Okay.  Whatever.  I’ll be home soon.  I’ll bring you something.”

            Quack quack quack went the phone.  “You will not starve to death.  Her name’s Kes.  I’ll find out if she has a lawn she needs a nice young man to mow at an extortionate rate.  You too.  Bye.”  She sighed.  “Sorry.  I know you only said coffee and didn’t say anything about a teenage boy.  But I think Eats has a spell on it, or I do.  I can’t walk through the door without being instantly ravenous.  And it’s true, there isn’t anything in the house for a starving sixteen-year-old boy to eat except microwave popcorn, never mind it’s because he’s already eaten all of it.  It’s frightening, keeping a teenage boy fed.  And he has friends . . . they’re like a plague of locusts.  I expect to come home some day and find them barbecuing pieces of furniture because I didn’t get back from the store fast enough . . . oh, there’s a Godzilla Food at the mall, if you need anything.  When you need anything.”

            “I need a car,” I said, looking regretfully at my empty plate.  The food was divine.  I was going to take up long-distance running so I could afford the calories.  Another approach to the gas-price problem.  “I’ve only got the van for two more days.  I was going to ask Hayley tomorrow if there’s a used-car place around here that will sell me something that runs for longer than it takes to drive it home.  And starts the next morning and stuff like that.”

            “No,” said Serena bluntly.  “Rick at Odin’s Autos is a lying snake who will steal your ass and sell it back to you.  Let me ask Jan.  He knows things like who has a car for sale.”  Billie had reappeared at our table.  “Double of the special steak platter to take home to Gus,” Serena said.

            “Double green beans?” said Billie dubiously.

            “No, single green beans,” said Serena, “but double cherry pie.  And I’ll have a piece while we’re waiting.”

            “Me too,” I said.  “Do they provide wheelbarrow service back to the Friendly Campfire?”

            “The fresh air will do you good,” said Serena, digging in her knapsack.  “You want an appetite for breakfast tomorrow.”  She pulled out her wallet.

            “No, hey,” I said.  “This was my idea.”

            “Coffee was your idea,” said Serena.  “Besides, I recognise the signs of a woman in crisis.  Or aren’t those all your worldly goods in a van only slightly larger than a four-slice toaster?  Given that I work for somewhere that displays neon campfires in public I will pass silently over the interesting logo.”

            I winced at the reference to the size of the van.  “Is it that obvious?”

            “Possibly only to someone who’s been there.  It gets better.”

            I smiled faintly.  “I’ll be sure to specify a lawn that will need mowing regularly to Hayley tomorrow.”

            “Gus—short for Angus, by the way—will be thrilled.  I forget what he’s saving for this week.  It might be the class trip.  It varies.”

            “Say hello to Mrs Jennings for me.”

            Serena stood up, cradling the huge brown-paper parcel Billie had just delivered to our table.  After the cherry pie, which had been the most divine thing of all, I wasn’t sure I could stand up.

            “I will,” said Serena.  “She’ll appreciate it. . . . You’ll forgive me if I run.  I might just get this home while it’s still warm.”

            I had just a moment to wonder about the look she gave me before she turned away, pushed the door open, and disappeared.

In the first place:  

http://a2.sphotos.ak.fbcdn.net/hphotos-ak-ash4/s320x320/423615_272724886138698_100002035654088_610973_443590055_n.jpg

 Hee hee hee hee hee hee hee.  (Peter’s publishing daughter sent me this.) 

Okay.  That was your light relief. 

Now, in the second place, a lot of you will have seen this already, including anyone who follows me on Twitter: 

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/13/business/in-e-reader-age-of-writers-cramp-a-book-a-year-is-slacking.html?_r=1

The headline reads:  In E-Reader Age of Writer’s Cramp*, a Book a Year is Slacking.  And any sane author’s reaction is:  Killlllllllllllllllllll Meeeeeeeeeee.  (Maureen Johnson’s retweet says:  Here’s an article in the [New York Times] about how everyone is trying to kill authors.)    

            Well.  Yes.  I would love to attain a novel a year.  Or a novel most years.  Or a novel every eighteen months.  Or something.  And there are writers—a few—who can write two novels a year at least occasionally** and still stab you in the heart with their amazingness.  Or if you’re producing stories that genuinely aren’t supposed to do anything but while away an hour or two—I hope I’m not getting myself into too much trouble here, but I do think there’s a place for stories that are only trying to divert:  and, if I’m not getting myself into too much more trouble, I might suggest Agatha Christie as the sort of thing:  I don’t think anyone goes to Agatha Christie for empathy or catharsis, do they?—then maybe, that’s maybe, you can write more than one book a year and keep your quality (and your pride in your work) up.*** 

            But for the rest of us . . . for those of us who essay the occasional well-rounded character, who wish to evoke rather than report, who hope for readers who don’t quite shake the dust of our stories off their page-turning fingers at the end . . . I’m a slow writer.  I know I’m slow.  But I flatly don’t believe any mere human can produce two good books every year and go on doing it.†

            I had a lot of lovely tweets from people†† saying they’d rather wait for books that have been written rather than not wait for those that have been churned out to an anti-human schedule.  And I don’t really have a choice:  this is how I am.  This is how I write.  If this doesn’t work, I am going to have to run away to the circus.†††  I tell myself that the world has always claimed to be on the brink of final breakdown of one sort or another—I imagine this dates back to gossip around the fire just after that seditious object the wheel had been invented.  But I admit that the particular part of my world that is disintegrating as a result of what is in many ways a great invention, the internet, worries me . . . more than a little.

            To end this post on writery things, I give you, in the third place:  http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/13/books/review/the-writer-in-the-family.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1

I don’t, in fact, agree with a lot of it, but then I’ve also never been a member of the standard family, with growing-up children I’m somehow part responsible for and all that, so my view is skewed.  But I love the exchange:  ‘Would I have read anything you’ve written?’ from some clueless dweeb you’ve just been introduced to, and Rosenblatt’s reply, ‘How should I know?’  I’m going to remember that one.‡

            But the paragraph that had me in hysterics is the one about E L Doctorow trying to write an excuse slip for his daughter, who had missed school the day before.  YEEEEEEEEEEEES.  This is exactly what happens when you pull your specialised, carefully conditioned, writery bits out of the rarefied atmosphere of fiction and try to make them produce a grocery list or a thank-you note or an email to the department store that sent you a toaster instead of an electric blanket.  Yesssss.

            Hee hee hee hee hee hee.  Which is a much better place to both come in and go out. 

* * *

* Which should be recategorised anyway as writer’s repetitive stress injury 

** Peter did this more than once 

*** Is this writing as craft rather than art?  Sometimes you don’t want to be engaged.  Sometimes you just want to sit quietly and drink your tea and read a rose catalogue.^  Sometimes you want your chair to have four legs and a seat and not be a dazzling heirloom for the ages when you stagger downstairs in the morning and reach for your electric kettle. 

^ Credit card engagement is a different issue. 

† Even Charles Dickens, for example^, took holidays, and the quality of his writing is drastically variable, from the mind-explodingly tremendous to the diabolically awful.  

^ I’m reading Claire Tomalin’s biography of him right now.  I knew he was—erm—a complex character and not all of it good, but the thing I probably find the most fascinating is how narrow the line is between socially aware and engaged literary genius with some personal issues and WHINING, SELF-ABSORBED COMPLETE TICK . . . who by the way wrote some fabulous stories and did some amazing things.  You may have guessed I incline to the latter opinion.  It’s all about him, all of the time.  And I don’t deal well with the sins of the extrovert. 

            Fascinating book however.  I recommend it.  And it’s not that Dickens didn’t have to cope with more than one human’s fair share of bulltiddly:  he did.  I’d have drowned his unspeakable father, for example, and I’d’ve had apoplexy if I’d been trying to earn a living as a writer back in the days before there was an international copyright law.  I am riveted by the standard accusations thrown at Dickens when he had the balls—and good for him—to stand up and say stealing people’s work is wrong.  He is being greedy, sneered the newspapers, and he should be grateful that people want to read his books.  Plus ça frelling frelling change.   And we’ve even got, or anyway had, international copyright law for quite a while—although the whole e thing is busy taking that to bits too. Greedy?  Grateful?  How, pray tell, are us storytellers supposed to earn a living?  How do you think we frelling eat and pay the mortgage if we don’t sell our stories?   Leprechaun?  Printing press in the cellar for counterfeit money?  Wealthy indulgent lover?  What?  What?  I get really bored with people who think that all writers are wealthy, but at least these people are acknowledging that being a professional writer involves money.  The people who think that writers^ are supposed to give it away and be grateful if anyone wants it . . . should frelling try it some time.  Show me someone who is giving it away and doesn’t have either another, paying job, a trust fund, or a joint bank account with a Fortune 500 CEO, and I’ll show you a hologram, an alien from another dimension, or a homeless bag person who is about to die of starvation.

            Which is more or less where we came in . . . 

^ I assume that painters, sculptors, jewellery-makers, knitters and so on have the same problem.  Maybe it’s that we work in words that it seems to me we get so much (wordy) stick.   Maybe it’s just that I’m a writer, I notice writer-aimed stick more. 

†† Including a gratifying rant from our own Maren.  Thank you.  And a horrified fellow-feeling my-fingers-are-shrivelling from Jodi, who had already seen the article. 

††† And to you who tweeted me about this too:  hellhounds would love the circus, once they got a little used to the uproar.  And if New Thing’s heroine can haul a rose-bush around in a pot, why can’t I?  I can put it (or them) on the steps of my trailer every time we stop. 

            Peter, I admit, is a problem.  I don’t think he’d like the circus at all.  

‡ I can hear Merrilee clutching her forehead.

IS NOT OVER.  You will be glad to hear.  Well.  You are probably blinking slightly, having not realised there might be a question that it was over.  Let me repeat:  last Wednesday’s practise was really, really, really bad.  Bad bad.  Bad to the bone.  B-b-b-b-bad.  I’d been planning to go to the pub after and . . . I told you I ran out of there.  I ran out of there because I couldn’t face the rest of them.  Granted I’m a trifle thin skinned about things.  Still.  It was bad.  And I really did come home and wail and moan and wring my hands and consider spending more time on origami.*  Gemma was a little late to handbells on Friday, so I had time to do a Sarah Siddons** at poor Niall, who was feeling a bit low himself for having been (according to him, although I’m not sure I believe him) instrumental in losing a (tower) quarter (peal) the previous Sunday.  We had got to the point where we were about to swear off tower bells forever and cleave exclusively to handbells, and in another few minutes we’d probably have nicked our fingers and made a blood pact, but fortunately Gemma showed up.  She was quite startled at my Lady Macbeth imitation.***  She must be a fabulous family doctor†:  she does that calm, patient, rational-as-if-you’re-rational-too-and-just-had-a-bad-minute-there thing superbly.  She very nearly cheered me up.  And she did at least convince me that my ignominy Wednesday evening had not been complete.

            As previously (often) mentioned, I sometimes think my single virtue is frelling obstinacy.††  Sheer mindless persistence I can do.  So there was never any real doubt that I would show up at the abbey for Sunday afternoon service ring . . . but I can’t say I was looking forward to it.  The not looking forward was getting pretty disagreeable by last night and by the time I got out of bed this morning I wanted to change my name††† and run away.  It’s a beautiful gardening day.‡  I could stay home and garden. 

            What if I turn up and they stare at me in disbelief and say, For pity’s sake go away?  —Even if Gemma keeps insisting this isn’t going to happen.

            In the first place there were only, and exactly, eight of us.  Including me.  Which meant that with me they could ring triples.  Without me they could ring doubles or minor with the seventh sitting out.  Triples is much better.  So yaay.  I’m useful.  (Which has been one of Gemma’s strongest arguments right along:  they need Sunday afternoon ringers.  You get lots of brownie points if you ring Sunday afternoon service.  As well as more time on a rope.)  So we rang Grandsire Triples—with me (relatively) safely on the treble. 

            But the best thing was that I had a chat with Albert.  I wanted to tell him I wouldn’t be there for practise next Wednesday‡‡ but that after last Wednesday I thought I should probably revert to doubles and minor till I had adjusted a little more to the (frelling) abbey’s (frelling) bells.  And he looked surprised and said oh no, you don’t have to do that, everyone has trouble getting used to these bells, they’re not the easiest bells anyway, the ringing chamber is huge, and the sound is muddy and erratic.

            Well . . . yes.

            And, he added, last Wednesday was a bad practise.  People who have been ringing Grandsire Triples for thirty years were going wrong.  It wasn’t your fault.

            Oh.  Um.  I had actually thought there was a little variability elsewhere, but . . .

            But the thing he said that really sent me away with a song in my heart if not precisely on my lips, was that when he’d first been ringing here he’d had trouble focussing on each bell rope because, the blasted room being so big, the ropes were so far apart.

            Focus.  Yes.  That’s exactly the right word, and it hadn’t occurred to me (so not a word person as I am), because it’s counter-intuitive.  Ropesight is the ability to see which bell you should follow next by PRECISELY where the person ringing it is in their stroke (since everyone ringing will be in a slightly different place than everyone else).  Part of the problem at the abbey is that since it has ninety-seven bells, if you’re only ringing six or eight or ten or twelve, you’re in more of a queue than a circle, and you have got used, in smaller towers with fewer bells, to ringing in a circle,‡‡ and your ropesight has probably developed from looking around a smallish, more or less circular, group of bellropes.  You would think that having them more spread out would mean each comes into much sharper individual focus but in practise, as I have dreadfully discovered, it seems to have the opposite effect:  they all blur together.

           So Albert and I have something in common besides being bipedal air breathers with opposed thumbs.  Yaaay.  And then he said, let’s ring a couple of plain courses of Grandsire Triples, and you ring inside, and you can practise looking.  So we did that. 

            I may still have a future as an abbey ringer. . . .           

* * *

* I was just writing to a friend that I’d bought a couple of books on basic origami to remind myself what folding feels like, for SHADOWS, since Maggie is a folder, and a couple of books of extreme origami to see what the . . . er . . . extremists can get up to, and that I could feel the attraction of another obsessive-friendly activity but that I didn’t have time for any more all-consuming pursuits and would probably stick to cranes, which are hard enough, frankly, if you are over-equipped with thumbs.  The mere fact of possessing twelve thumbs wouldn’t stop me, you understand, since I don’t hold out for things I have some talent for.  See:  bell ringing. 

** http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarah_Siddons 

*** Out, damned bell rope!  Out, I say!  One; two: why, then, ’tis time to do ’t.  Hell is murky, just like my ropesight! 

† Which is what she is 

†† Not just plain obstinacy.  The frelling kind.  Which is much gnarlier.  

††† Possibly to K MacFarquhar.  Hee hee hee hee hee hee. 

‡  Old Blush is out.  Barely the middle of May is early even for her.  It’ll be another fortnight or so before she’s in peak hurrah, but she’s got three roses full out now.   And I have two robins again, so there must be a second nest in prospect.  Robin #1 was rushing around yesterday dispensing mealworms but robin #2 sat in the apple tree and stared at me as I galumphed haphazardly, potting things on and swearing.  Robin #2 is gigantic.  I am not seeing anything about size differential between the sexes in robins—having just hit three robin-info sites^—but if it’s true that dad sticks around to feed the fledglings, the gigantic one is mama.  And she’s probably deciding if she wants to risk me.  I don’t know if robins re-use their nests?  I won’t clear this one away till the end of the year so it’s available at a very reasonable rate, not to mention all the mod cons, like trays of mealworms on the balcony. 

^ One does mention that robins are so crazy about mealworms they will take them from human hands.  That does, however, mean that the human hand has to be holding the mealworms.  I will pick mealworms up when I drop them+ but the idea of standing there . . . um.  Peanut butter for the chickadees back in Maine was less lacerating to one’s delicate sensibilities.++  

+ And did you know they CLIMB?  You want to be certain of your containment vessel.  

++ When I first moved over here one of the things I missed the worst was all the wild critters I was used to.  Chickadees were very high on that list.  It’s hard not to love something that little and cheeky.  British robins are out of the same box:  little and cheeky.  And the funny thing is that I feel that I’ve always lived with British robins.#  I know my love of skylarks and brown hares and beech trees is only twenty years old.  British robins . . . I can’t imagine life without them.  

# American robins are fine.  But British robins are the real deal. 

‡‡ Fiona and I are going to get into trouble.  Unfortunately there were only tickets available for trouble on Wednesday evening. 

‡‡‡ Mind you there are some fairly strange layouts in small towers too.  But the small part does limit the grievous possibilities.

The problems began when I got to Bergen.  I first got lost (I had to call my sister who went online and found out where I was and how to get to the boat I was supposed to take), and then I found out that I had looked at the wrong schedule for the boat. There was no boat on Saturday afternoon. Now, this is the problem with having such travel anxiety that you can hardly see straight. You’re sure to get at least some of your planning wrong.

Read more (PDF): The Odyssey, Part Two.

The Story So Far… 

NINE   

At home—I mean, back in the city—I’m one of these people who comes up from the subway and invariably turns in the wrong direction, even if I’d done the exact same thing last week and the week before.  And the year before.  What I learn from my mistakes is that I keep making the same ones.  It’s six blocks from the subway stop to my editor’s office at Dirigible Books.  I usually made it in twelve.  On a good day, ten.

            I took a deep breath as I paused on the sidewalk at the edge of the Friendly Campfire parking lot.  The Eatsmobile was straight down this street.  I didn’t have to turn or anything.  How hard can it be?  I’d got this far, hadn’t I?  Yes, but that was in daylight with the GPS murmuring reassuringly.  And my lucky rose-bush in the back of the van.  Gods, I was tired.  Maybe I should just eat the van’s troubleshooting manual and go to bed. 

            As I was dithering—I was less concerned about the nutritional quality of the manual than I was about the rusty tea bags in the Friendly Campfire’s welcome basket.  Could I possibly find my tea in the back of the van?—I heard a sound behind me and turned around.  The perfectly normal person was just letting herself out of the office cabin.  The friendly campfire was still burning in the window, a little beacon in the darkness, guiding tired wanderers to their neon haven.

            To my surprise, she waved.  I didn’t mind waiting another minute.  I was sure the snakepits between me and the Eatsmobile weren’t going anywhere.  She heaved a seriously large, and apparently seriously heavy, knapsack over one shoulder.  Woman after my own heart.  “I hope you’re comfortable in your cabin?” she greeted me.

            “Yes, thanks,” I said, and added experimentally, “after I turned the friendly campfire off.”

            She laughed.  “Yes, they’re gruesome, aren’t they?  Jan’s a decent boss though so I don’t tell him what I think of his logo.”

            “Are you from around here?” I said.  She somehow didn’t sound like someone from New Iceland ought to sound.

            “No. Boston.  But it’s cheaper here.”

            Yes.  I might even be able to live on Flowerhair and Aldetruda.  “I was pretty startled by the house rental prices.”

            She looked at me again.  “Then you are going to be here a while.”

            “A while,” I agreed noncommittally.  She was obviously curious, but she was equally obviously hitching up her knapsack straps and rolling forward onto the balls of her feet in preparation for staggering off somewhere (habitual overloading of a large knapsack produces a characteristic posture).  Home, probably.  Without much hope I said, “You in a hurry?  Can I buy you a coffee—or a beer—and cross-examine you about local mores?”

            She hesitated, looking at her watch.  “Sure.  I can text the offspring that I’m going to be late.  You going to the Eatsmobile?”

            “Well, it was recommended by a local,” I said, smiling. 

            She laughed again.  “I’ve only been here ten years.  I’m still the single mom who moved into old Mrs Jennings’ house, who is probably rolling in her grave, poor old thing, she never held with those newfangled inventions like divorce.”

            “So what’s so great about old Mrs Jennings’ house that you’ll stay despite the disapproving moans from the cupboard under the stairs?”

            “The way the light comes in the big windows in her living room,” she said promptly.  “Fortunately she’s not a big moaner.  And the cold patch in the front hall is really nice in August.”

            We had crossed the street and were moving purposefully in what I was willing to believe was the direction of the Eatsmobile.  No visible snakepits.

            “I like to imagine I’m an artist,” she went on ruefully.  “But the offspring and I have to eat, so I moonlight as a receptionist and bookkeeper at the local motel.”

            The Eatsmobile was a big shiny diner:  the front of it had been done up to look like the biggest Airstream that ever lived.  I loved it on sight.  My heart lifted for maybe the first time since Gelasio had interrupted Flowerhair’s adventure with the attack mushrooms, as we walked up the little stair and opened the door.  I took a deep, appreciative breath of strong fresh coffee and deep fat frying as we crossed the diner’s threshold.  “I can recommend the meatloaf,” said my new acquaintance the bookkeeper-artist-ghostbuster.  “If you’re into meatloaf.”

            We slid into a booth.  “I think I’m probably into anything this place serves,” I said.

            “Good answer,” she replied.  She added, “Hey, Billie,” when one of the waitresses waved.  “I’m Serena,” she said to me.  “One of the great misnamings of the modern era.  My mother had four kids and fostered two more, and I was more trouble than the other five combined.  So she often told me.  What does the ‘K’ stand for?”

            I hesitated.

 . . . Most of which regular blog readers will have seen before. 

Mrs Redboots posted a link in the forum last night, to a blog post by a friend of hers who also has ME: 

http://dawnknits.livejournal.com/13423.html?view=40559#t40559

Much worse than mine.  As I keep saying, mine is a mild case.  I know what she’s talking about though—I had eighteen months on the sofa when I first went down with acute ME after two years of regularly recurring glandular fever, which is a very common lead-in.  But then I started finding things that worked for me, and I started being able to get up off the sofa occasionally.*  And oh, glory, how I know about things like avoiding your kind supportive neighbours because you haven’t got the energy to chat.  You get horribly selfish with a disease like ME—or you may do—because suddenly you have so much less livable life at all, and you can’t bear to waste what little is left to you.  I’m a cranky introvert anyway—even in my pre-ME days social stuff was tiring, even when I enjoyed it.  Now?  . . . Don’t even ask.  It’s hard to be a nice person when you have a chronic freller. 

            I want to put in a word on the well-meaning but clueless world’s behalf however.  Dawn mentions acquaintances saying jovially that they’d like a ride in her stair lift, that it looks like fun.  Well, I’d snarl too, because I’m not good at being patronised, and of course you wouldn’t be using a stair lift if you didn’t frelling have to.  But . . . there’s another thing that happens, and sometimes I recognise it when it does:  the person who puts their foot in it may be trying to include, or re-include, you into the human race.  Oh, a stair lift, oh, okay, no big deal, it looks like fun.  From your angle it is a big deal.  From their angle, they may be trying to say that it isn’t—in the way that counts.  They’re trying, clumsily, to close the gap between you:  to say that the important thing is that you’re both human beings. 

            I get something like this kind of a lot when I am so unfortunate as to have to try to share a meal with someone.  Uggh.  I’m dairy intolerant, chemical sensitive, and on the rheumatism diet,** and when my digestion is in a bad mood (and it is more than it isn’t) I avoid gluten too.  You’ll have to take my word for it that at home, with my organic grocery boxes coming twice a week, it’s not that big a deal.***   Out in the real world . . . I am hell to feed, and I rarely enjoy the attempt.  Which leaves me, sometimes, reluctantly having conversations with people who stare at me, trying not to let their mouths drop open at the idea of not being able to eat pizza or brownies or milk in their coffee† and after a dumbstruck silence they’ll say something like, Oh.  Yeah.  Um.  My sister-in-law is allergic to spinach.  So we can’t have spinach quiche when she comes to dinner.  At which point you have a choice:  you can kill them.  Or you can recognise they’re trying.  They’re trying to close the gap between you.

            Uggh.  Of course, you’d rather there wasn’t the gap. ††

            Slightly similar, in that it’s a perspective thing, is something from the article I posted the link to last night, that I was going to mention and then, because I had so many other things to moan about, I didn’t get around to.   Someone told the journalist anonymously that a GP at her clinic had suggested that she take up meditation as therapy.  I may be reading this wrong, but my impression is that she—and the journalist—felt that the GP was telling her it was all in her mind.  But . . . it sounds like a good idea to me.  It’s well known (isn’t it?) that a regular discipline of meditation has enormous physical benefits—as well as calming and centring your butterfly mind.  ME is a real disease—we’re not whiny self-absorbed victims who only need to get a grip—but mind and body are one critter.  Any disease is a disease of the body and the mind.  Let’s not forget that, in our necessary attempts to get the respect—and the research—that we need.††† 

* * *

* In my case chiefly vitamins, homeopathy and Bowen massage.  I had a friend with fibromyalgia^ who sent me to her doctor.  For which I am still, twelve years later, grateful, since he took me seriously—and started me on vitamins.   The very first thing that made a difference to my pain and energy levels was magnesium supplements.  This won’t be part of everyone’s answer but it was the first thing that gave me some hope that there was something that I could do—that there was a way to alleviate some of the worst symptoms.  And I remember the terrifying shock of that first small improvement—the shock of hope.  This was also years before the NHS had been dragged, kicking and screaming, into recognising ME as a real disease.  My friend’s nice doctor was private, and I couldn’t afford him after the first few visits—and my NHS doctor ‘didn’t believe in ME’. 

^ Speaking of neuro-immuno-whatsits as syndromes:  fibro is another one.  I read up on fibro too because the overlap with ME is considerable, and the boundaries of both are fuzzy.  

** No tomatoes, potatoes, eggplant, peppers, or (weirdly) mushrooms, except Shiitake.  They’re all nightshades, except the mushrooms, but mushrooms are still on the list.  Dairy is on the list for some people—turns out it is for me too, but I was already off it for other reasons.  But I gave up my once/twice a year ice cream blow outs when they started giving me severe joint pain.  Feh. 

*** Peter is mostly pretty tactful about eating the stuff I really miss, like toast, or ice cream, when I’m not around.  This is not a household rule, however, nor is the ice cream hidden at the back of the freezer or the bread in a cupboard I never look in.  I don’t want any more walls around me than I absolutely have to have, even when they’re for my benefit. 

† I’m violently allergic to coffee.  Just by the way. 

†† Personally I do have a lot of trouble with the ‘you don’t look sick!’ thing—which I also get kind of a lot, because I don’t (usually).  This presses my buttons so hard that I can’t tell if this is another clumsy effort to close the gap between me and the healthy moron who just uttered those words, or whether they are telling me I’m malingering.  And I guess that as I’m at the high-functioning end people have trouble with my issue about driving:  driving is exhausting because of that constant, split-second awareness you must maintain behind the wheel, and that healthy people don’t even notice they’re squandering.  I have to kind of crank myself up for it—and I can do it, but it costs.  So I do it as little as possible.

            I suspect that my fury about the enforced-exercise so-called ‘treatment’ is partly fuelled by the fact that morons who know or recognise me as someone who is ‘naturally’ physically active seem to think that it would suit me—that I just need a little prod toward pulling myself together again.  This is not an attempt to close the gap.  This is being a flaming asshole.  The irony is that—see:  Lack of Slack Syndrome—that you do need to keep as physically fit as your illness allows because it makes good days as good as you’re capable of and it’s a fragile but crucial buffer on bad days.  Normal healthy people can do their twenty minutes’ exercise three times a week and then go for a fifteen-mile hike on the weekends.  I can’t.  I do a couple of hours a day, every bloody day, with attendant hellhounds—and some days we cover seven or eight miles.  Sometimes we cover one.  Sometimes we keep going a clip (rather to hellhounds’ annoyance.  They like mooching).  Sometimes we sit down a lot—or, lately, with the drought rivering past our knees, lean.  I try not to force myself a micro-millimetre past what my body is willing to do that day—but I try not to do much less than a micro-millimetre of what it’ll bear either. 

††† And one of these days I will take a deeeeep breath and write about depression.  Do I know about depression?  I sure do.  Speaking of uggh.  Very, very big uggh.

Hey.  People.  I read the forum.  But you don’t seriously believe I’m going to post the second part of Corellia’s saga right away, do you?  Blow off two guest posts in a ROW?  If I had two nights in a row off I’d have established a habit of lying on the sofa covered with hellhounds during blog-writing time, eating bonbons and reading trashy novels.  Marabou-trimmed satin lingerie optional.  No, no, no.  Besides, torturing blog readers is one of my few pleasures.

            . . . ‘Pleasures’ certainly not including bell ringing.  Oh gods.  Practise tonight at the abbey was unbelievably awful.  Awful.  As I said to Albert as I raced out the door* to escape as soon as possible, this habit of taking one step forward and two steps back is getting discouraging.**  Profound and utter humiliation is disagreeable at best but in this case I don’t know what to do about it.  I’ve only ever learnt . . . well, pretty much anything, but particularly bell ringing . . . by grind.  Relentless grind.  You don’t get to grind at the abbey—there are too many ringers at too many different levels (especially upper) to have time for grinding any of them.***   I’d been hoping that I was far enough down the ringing road generally that I wouldn’t need to grind the way I used to . . . wrong.  But the big spiky unmediatable situation here is that it’s specifically the abbey that’s the problem:  those bells, that frelling ringing chamber, the fact that it’s the abbey.  I can ring Grandsire Frelling Triples at other towers—not gloriously well, but I can ring it.  Or I could.  I think I’m forgetting, because what I’m chiefly doing lately is failing to ring it at the abbey.  I cannot begin to tell you how WILDLY FRUSTRATING it is to listen, or to stand behind and watch someone else ringing, something that in any other tower I’d give my eyeteeth† to have a go at—I should be consolidating my Grandsire Triples and practising bob triples and major, Stedman triples, Cambridge minor, treble bobbing to surprise major.  But I can’t ring at the abbey. 

            I wasn’t even expecting the worst tonight.  Usually I’m horribly good at expecting the worst.  Tonight when I pulled off the bell felt familiar—it is not, in fact, the bells, it’s the ballroom-sized ringing chamber and the abbeyness of it.  And I thought, pulling on this familiar bell, oh good.  I’m getting there.  I’m making progress.  This is, or at any rate is going to be, my new home tower.

            Does anyone have a bridge handy that I could throw myself off? 

* * *

Meanwhile . . . @cambridgeminor/CathyR tweeted me this today: 

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-2141230/All-mind-Why-critics-wrong-deny-existence-chronic-fatigue.html 

I know there have been ME awareness weeks—possibly every year at this time, one of the symptoms is really bad memory—but I’d missed we were having one now.   And ME, like way too many other badly understood and/or scary don’t-want-to-think-about-it-because-it-might-happen-to-me afflictions and ailments, can use all the good press it can get.  Yes, it’s a real disease.††  No, we’re not all malingerers.†††  Hurrah for journalists who write articles‡ saying that ME is a nasty kick in the head from fate and to take it seriously.  And I’m very glad to see someone making a noise about the appalling so-called ‘treatment’ of enforced exercise, which I’ve railed about here before.  If you have ME the last thing you should do is force yourself to do stuff.  That only makes it worse.  As I’ve also said—but to me, being someone with ME, this is all worth saying again—there may be a few ME-diagnosed people out there for whom enforced exercise worked . . . but I’d personally doubt that in that case what they did have is ME.  It’s a fairly slippery disease/syndrome and there’s a lot of overlap with other fateful kicks in the head. 

            But I want to add (again) that my experience of it is also that what energy, physical and mental, you do have you MUST USE, because if you don’t it will not only go away again—but you’ll feel worse, just like if you forced yourself to do too much.  The Lack of Slack Syndrome.  One of the things this article also mentions, and good for her, although I’d put quite a few underlines around it too, is the good days and bad days thing—you may also have good half days and bad half days, good hours and bad hours . . . good minutes and bad minutes.  She mentions people who have to put their lives on hold because they can’t do anything consistently.  Yes.  This is one of the big ratbags about managing it—and leads to why I seem to get away with so much.  I’ve told you (often) before there are a lot of smoke and mirrors on the blog—well, if I have to lie down for an hour or a day, I just do it.  I don’t have to tell you or my boss about it—and the hellhounds adore it, of course.  But one of my bottom lines is that I have no stamina, despite all that hurtling.  I gave up horses (several times) because I can’t ride regularly enough.  I don’t ring quarter peals because I never know when I’m going to have a bad day or a bad hour, and you’re letting down five or seven other people if you fold up unexpectedly.  I don’t travel for a variety of reasons, but head of the list is the ME.  Managing it on the road is . . . well.  I’d rather have bell practise nights like tonight, when throwing myself off bridges seems like a rational reaction, than cope with a bad ME day away from home.

            This is one of the things I’d like to see more recognition of—that most people with ME are still capable of doing something—and most of us want to:  who wants to be helpless, hopeless, dependent and bored?—but we need SLACK from the healthy, functioning world.  We need FLEXIBILITY.  The business/working/income-oriented world is still lousy about people who don’t fit their pattern.  It’s like the colossal waste of energy and talent of parents who want to, you know, raise their kids themselves.  The corporate world still seems to think that kids are something you do in your spare time, and that making widgets and earning money is the real centre of the universe.  What is wrong with this picture.

            Everybody would be happier if they could work and live to a model that suited them better, you know?  You don’t have to have ME or little kids.  Elasti-world!  Now all we need is a logo and catchy tag line. 

* * *

* Not a good idea from this tower.  GERONIMOOOOOOOOOO! 

** I’ve also started wondering again how long before they tell me not to come back.  

*** Except in terms of ‘into little pieces’.  I came home in a basket.  

† As if anyone would want these eyeteeth.  I did, however, get my crown glued back in today. 

            Dentist from R’lyeh was on holiday, so I saw An Extremely Chirpy female dentist.  Extremely Chirpy.  Except that I guess you aren’t allowed to make jokes about doctors on drugs I’d say she’s on drugs.  Nobody is that chirpy without chemical assistance.  I commented, as I produced the small offending object, that it was remarkably clean, as was the post-stub it used to be stuck to.   This is, in fact, a crown put in by Dentist from R’lyeh himself, so they could look it up in their records and the chirpy dentist went off into peals of tinkling laughter when the assistant declared that he’d glued it in originally with Glurpbggg™ ^ which is a temporary cement.  Oh, that’s why the crown was so clean! sang Ms Nitrous Oxide.  Temporary cement always dissolves over time!

            Erm, I said, spitting out the crown, which she had spronged back in place to check rapport and congruity with the surrounding teeth, and then couldn’t dislodge again, why?

            Oh, because it’s such a good fit! she trilled.

            Um.  From where I’m sitting . . . the temporary cement was always going to dissolve?  Therefore I was always due to be back here in this chair having spent x number of days chewing on one side of my mouth and worrying there was something actually wrong, and then spending an afternoon I might have spent getting on with novel-in-progress schlepping into Mauncester to have it put back in?

            Um.  Why?

^ I can hardly wait to see what WordPress does to the TM symbol.  I wonder if I need popcorn. 

†† Although I personally think it’s a syndrome.  As I keep saying.  If I were going to guess more, I’d guess that it’s caused by a variety of sensitivities to the extremely not-what-we-evolved-for life we lead now.  A kind of uber-allergy.   

††† Note that of course there are malingerers among us.  It’s like some accountants embezzle.  That doesn’t mean the definition of an accountant includes ‘embezzler’.  

‡ Although please the frelling gods couldn’t they have hired a PROOFREADER?  Text as bad as this undermines both the message and the professionalism of the journalist or the paper or both . . . or maybe that’s just that I’m a professional writer with ME.

I am not a dog person. I love all animals (except snakes), but the only animals I worship and adore are cats. I also hate travelling. Which makes it even harder to understand why I would spend the last part of my Easter holiday travelling across half of Norway to get myself a new dog.

Read more (PDF): The Odyssey, Part One.

EIGHT

I’d managed to remember to put my toothbrush and hairbrush in my knapsack (with my laptop and iPad) but . . . I wondered, staring into the depths of the very full van, that’s very full, that’s, maybe, very very very full, if I had any chance of finding a plastic bag that had underwear and a t shirt in it.  Of course I should have thought of this before.  I should have thought of a lot of things.  I should have hired a larger van.

Meanwhile, I could put the rose-bush on the porch (in the absence of ponies.  In my horse-mad, living-from-one-summer-horse-camp-to-the-next youth, I had learned that ponies will eat most things, including hamburgers.  I was sure a broad-minded pony could eat a rose-bush).  It could catch some rays tomorrow morning.

It was odd about the rose-bush . . .

I’d had no intention of bringing live plants to Cold Valley.  In the first place, the roof garden had been one of the features in the sale brochure, and was part of the deal with the new owner.  (Yes, there was a sales brochure.  Gelasio isn’t on the Forbes 400 list, but give him another decade.)   Some minion of the new owner’s lawyer had already been through with a (digital) clipboard and a magnifying glass, noting the damage done by the movers (‘one black smudge mark easily the size of a bisected flea, one chip of paint visible only through a 3x lens’) and I was sure he’d not merely checked the plants against a master list, but counted every leaf, bud, twig and the depth of the dirt in the various pots and timber-walled beds.

But the evening of the day I’d opened my atlas and stuck a pin in a place called Cold Valley I’d bought myself a half-bottle of prosecco and put it and a water glass, being fresh out of champagne flutes for some reason, in the freezer.  When they were so cold they hurt I took a glass of fizz out onto the roof.  It was too early in the season to hang around outdoors and the air was bitter.  Everything about me was icy:  my hands,  my body, my heart, my future.  But it wasn’t like I was going to see another summer here.  Now or never.

The problem with the Upper West Side is that you don’t get to see the sunset over Central Park.  And I wasn’t much of a dawn person.  Well, occasionally from the wrong end.  Usually when there was a deadline looming, under which circumstances I wasn’t much in the mood for natural beauty.

Except for the bougainvillea the garden was pretty art house.  Our gardener had ambitions.  He’d even made the bougainvillea look sort of tortured and eloquent.  When Gelasio had hired him, however, he wanted the work and was more tractable than he became.  Which is why Gelasio got his bougainvillea.  And I got my roses.

I know nothing about growing roses.  I just like the way they smell.  So when Ford asked me about my ‘vision’ of the garden, I said, “I don’t know.  But I would like roses, please.”

He wrote down ‘roses’, probably grinding his teeth.  Another damned soggy female with a rose fetish appeared in a thought bubble over his head, although only I saw it.  Gelasio and I had only been together about a year at that point.  Gelasio grabbed  my hand and squeezed it.  His thought bubble said:  Roses.  How romantic.

Ford was a mean man with a pair of secateurs.  This time of year the roses were still tiny stubs, although the first leaves had cautiously unrolled and were testing the air.  I sipped my fizz and shivered.  And had another stupid idea.  “You know,” I said to the rose-bush standing next to me, “Maybe I could take one of you with me.   Mr Diamond-Studded Shoelaces won’t miss one of you.”

The night was absolutely clear and absolutely calm.  There was therefore no reason why there was a sudden wild shudder of air—which, furthermore, seemed only to affect the rose-bushes—and a murmur as if a lot of people in the next room had said meeeee.  I looked at my glass.  No, this was my first one, and it was only about half empty.

I looked up again.  “Sorry, guys,” I said.  “But Mr Diamond-Studded Shoelaces’ gardener will take good care of you.  You get to see sunrise over Central Park every day and your barnyard fertilizer will only be from pedigree chickens.  The gallant heroine who comes with me will probably die in the first raid.  And I’ll have this one,” I said, turning back to the rose-bush standing next to me in her pot, “because she’s the smallest.”  Nothing like small enough when I was wrestling her into and out of the freight elevator, and hoisting her into the back of the van.

Nonetheless.  Here she was.  I bent to embrace her, staggered to the porch and set her down.  This was obviously a lucky thing to have done, because when I went back to the van a plastic bag had fallen out of its cranny onto the spot where the rose had been sitting, and the bag contained two t shirts, three pairs of underwear and four pairs of socks.