Floating down to Camelot

Pretty, but not the sight you want to see when you're 10 miles from the car and didn't bring a waterproof because, fool that you were, you believed the weather forecast when it would be gloriously sunshiny all day, with rain just a distant memory.



Yesterday, on the other hand, said it would be gloomy all day, but was sunny and warm all afternoon, except for on the seafront, when it was cold, windy, gloomy and an entirely different season from 200 yards inland.

Weather is weird.

(Photo taken on my phone, so a little fuzzy. On the extreme left, atop the Downs, is the Ashey Seamark, which is fast approaching Holy Grail status in my recent bout of "walk all the paths" expeditions. About 6 times now, in recent weeks, I've parked within 2 or 3 miles of it and have expressed my intention to get to it, only for one path to lead to another to lead to another, and I end up in a village 10 miles in the opposite direction, or up to my ankles in a marsh or scurrying across an airport runway ("groups should cross in pairs") many miles away. One day I will get there. One day. And then, perhaps, I will never be seen again by mortal eyes.)

Gosh. What a long time since I've posted. Or read anything, really. Looking back, I think it's because when working from home, I was based at my desktop computer upstairs. When I went back to work in June, this computer therefore felt like "work". Unfortunately, the desktop computer was the only one logged into LJ using the new password I created some months ago, and the admittedly very tiny amount of work involved in remembering the new password long enough to log in on my phone and laptop was, apparently, too much for me. "I'll sort that out it in a minute," thought I repeatedly, whenever reminded of the fact that I had no LJ access on my phone or laptop, only to..., well, not.

Anyway... Here I am. And here is an account of the holiday we had a few weeks ago in East Sussex, during the brief heatwave. It seems a world away now that I'm sitting here shivering in the gloom, wind and drizzle.

( Sweltering in Rye )

I always have great trouble with potatoes sprouting, so tend to buy only small packets and ensure that they get eaten within a week or so. But back when we were in peak panic buying season and all the shelves were entirely devoid of starchy carbohydrates, one of our half-hearted concessions to panic buying was to grab a small (750g) bag of potatoes despite having no immediate plans for it. To address the whole sprouting issue, I put it on the ex-garage (the coldest room) under a sheet of sewing fabric.

I then forgot about it for a few weeks. Remembering much later, I checked them and found that none of them had sprouted - yay! - but one was going mouldy - boo! But I was busy in the same room recording a video for work, so decided to deal with it later.

And then forgot.

Later that evening, after a few glasses of wine, we went into the ex-garage and noticed a rather unpleasant smell. The potatoes? But strange, if so, since they'd been there for weeks and I'd noticed no smell earlier that day. The pile of unsorted LARP kit? Same argument, except that it had been sitting there for months. The fact that the external door had been open and untended for a while the night before, and local cats might have wandered in and left unwanted presents?

Anyway, just in case it was the potatoes, I decided to move them to another room, for Science. Pretty basic Science - i.e. did the smell move to a new room along with the potatoes? - but hey. Note that I still failed to do anything at all about removing the mouldy potato. Oh well...

Next day, I'd planned to have half the packet of potatoes for dinner. I went to the garage to get them. Where were they? Oh yes! We'd moved them.

But where?

We'd had some wine when we moved them, but honestly not THAT much. We both clearly remembered the entire conversation. We just had no memory at all on where we took the blasted things afterwards.

We tried obvious cool, dark places: the cupboard under the stairs, the utility room. Nothing. Kitchen cupboards. The fridge. Nothing. We tried a bit of role play. "Okay, I've had a couple of glasses of wine. What would seem a sensible thing to do with a bag of potatoes?" Surely we wouldn't have put them in a bedroom or living room, given the whole nasty smell thing that was the entire point. But time was ticking on, and I was getting increasingly hungry (I fall apart when I'm hungry) and they were definitely not anywhere sensible, so on we went to stupid places.

Underwear drawers. Inside the food bin. Outside, to search under all the easily accessible shrubs. The car. The recycling wheelie bin. Drawers we'd opened 3 times were opened for a 4th, just in case a different result was achieved. Underwear drawers again. Inside shoes. Inside boxes plainly too small to hide them, but they had to be somewhere. THEY HAD TO BE SOMEWHERE?

BUT WHERE? It was getting really quite surreal. They had to be somewhere, but we'd looked absolutely everywhere FOR AN HOUR! In the loft? No, we'd remember THAT - as I say, it honestly wasn't that much wine, and the rest of the evening after the potato incident was clear and vivid in our minds. The very fact that we'd forgotten all about it suggested that we hadn't gone far or put in any real effort - had probably done it casually while talking about something else, barely even noticing what we were doing.

But I was getting too hungry to wait, and though I refused to give up the search, something had to be done, so we grabbed some frozen parmentiers and popped them in instead.

Whereupon, naturally, Pellinor promptly found the missing potatoes. I'd put them on the dining chair I always use, protected from the room's bright sunlight by the cushion that always covers the chair. The dining table is currently set up for Gloomhaven (an endless board game) and we'd fully intended to play it that afternoon - hence, presumably, my assumption that I didn't have to bother trying to remember where I'd put them, since I'd discover them by sitting on them. ("Oh yes," said Pellinor, "I said something about the princess and the pea. I remember now!")

Oh, and the mysterious smell? It didn't move to the dining room, but it had also disappeared from the garage, so who knows? It is a Mystery, but after much questing and many daring adventures, the potatoes at length were not.

Here are typo stories for the last several days. There was no story yesterday, though. Instead I drew a picture for what I hope will be an occasional series of novels with one letter changed. (This is different from the typo stories, since with the typos, letters can only be changed to one adjacent, or very nearly adjacent, to them on the keyboard, whereas the "one letter changed" thing can change it to anything.)

( Stories )

( And a picture )

The storm was drawing nearer, the thunder nearly constant. Lightning flared and wind hammered—

No, not the wind. There was somebody at the door.

"Not again!" Sarah groaned, but it was no good ignoring them. They'd just hammer away doggedly until the end of the storm, and once the rest of them started to arrive, things could turn very messy indeed.

She stood up. Beneath the tatty blanket, the lump quivered, burrowing deeper into the cushions.

Reaching the door, she fastened the chain then twisted the latch, opening the door a cautious crack. "What is it?" she demanded.

They had robes on, this lot, and were standing three by three. "We bring a sacrifice!" the leader intoned, raising aloft a chocolate rabbit and a butter knife. ("Best we could manage at short notice," whispered the young one at the back of the group.)

A car pulled up at the end of the drive, and tall men burst forth. "Away with you, you heretics!" boomed the tallest as he endeavoured to don his impressive hat. "We alone follow the One True Path! Let us drape the Great One with garlands!" (The third tall man did an about turn and hurried back to the car to rummage anxiously in the boot.)

"Stop it!" Sarah admonished them, for the lady with the butter knife seemed to be about to use it, and not on a chocolate rabbit. "I refuse to have a religious war at my own front door."

A circle of dancers was forming up in the garden, their dresses diaphanous and soggy. "We sing our paeon of the praise to He Who Bestrides The Narrow World Like A Colossus!" they sang in seven part harmony.

"Enough!" Sarah shouted, as thunder cracked above them, and lightning blazed so brightly that for a moment afterwards she could barely see. "Enough," she said. "No sacrifices, please. No fighting. He hears your… respects and is pleased with them. Now go away. But," she couldn't resist adding, "he doesn't really bestride anything, you know. He's just a dachshund."

She closed the door, bolted it twice, and returned to the couch. The lump was shivering, emitting pitiful whines. Sarah sat down beside it, touching it soothingly. "Poor little sausage. It's only a storm, and it'll be over soon. There's no need to be sacred."

Typo (or homophone or malapropism) story of the day. I genuinely saw this particular error online once, many years ago, where it entirely ruined the effect of an angst-ridden fanfic.

The chalice lay toppled on the table in a spreading puddle of red. Golden serpents twined around its stem, rubies for their eyes. They blinked and glimmered in the light of the flickering candles, almost as if alive.

Peterkin tried again. "…it's because they're serfs, sire. Serfs." His bells jingled sadly. The stick of his pig's bladder was slick in his hand. "Sire?"

Nothing. The king was barely upright in his chair, his face blank with incomprehension. There was more life in those fire-sparked rubies than in the king's living eyes.

"An English serf, an Irish serf and a Californian one?" Peterkin prompted. "It's a pun, sire. A play on words. It's about incongruity and anachronism. That's why it's funny."

Still nothing. Go on! the physician mimed at him urgently. Don't stop! The king's hand was like the carved stone claw of a grotesque, unmoving on the arm of the chair.

"So when I said…" Peterkin said. "The Californian fellow in my story, I mean. When he said, 'ah, that's my serf board, it was…"

He was almost in tears. He so desperately wanted to caper. He wanted to mutter rude comments about the barons, knowing that he was the only one in the entire realm who could get away with such things with impunity. He wanted to fall over and hit people with bladders and make rude noises until he was blue in the face. He wanted… Oh, he wanted…

"It's because they sound the same," he tried desperately. "Serf. Surf." Oh, but this was unbearable! You never had to explain a fart joke or a custard pie. He appealed to the physician, almost weeping. "Just one little caper?"

"No." The physician was stern, unyielding. "It is as I said. If he doesn't get the anecdote, he will die."

We've been in this house for over 18 years - which is scary enough in itself, since in the first 18 years of my life, I lived in 5 different houses and in each of those houses, it felt as if I'd lived in them for years and years and years - and for that entire time, our fridge has been hinged The Wrong Way. It has been quite unambiguously The Wrong Way, since the fridge is right next to the door, and when open, the open door faces out into the hall rather than into the room like any sensible fridge would do.

If we ever consciously noticed this, we just shrugged and put it down as One Of Those Things - a minor irritant, but what could you do? But my Dad, when visiting, seemed to find it quite outrageous - an offence against nature, almost - and asked why on earth we hadn't dropped everything the minute we moved in and changed the hinge to the other side, and what sort of human were we that we could tolerate this - were we man or animal? We didn't quite dare admit that we hadn't actually realised that changing the hinge direction was possible - although, really, the fact that the fridge door has handle-inserts on both sides should have been the clue. "Um, we're used to it now, and it would be confusing to change," was all we managed.

And so it went on. Years passed. The Wrong Hinge issue became something one just accepted, like gnats.

But then our CD players started to die. ( CDs and fridges )

Gosh. I've not posted for ages. But the other day I went looking for something on my LJ of some years ago, and got distracted en route by reading - and chuckling about - various posts detailing small, amusing incidents. All totally inconsequential... but all things that would have been forgotten and gone forever had I not written them down. So for 2020, I really need to get back into the habit of posting things no matter how small and silly. If nothing else, they might amuse me in some years time.

So. I was just browsing through a book of Weird Things Customers Say in Bookshops. Many weird things get said in libraries, too, of course, and most I have already forgotten, but the book caused me to remember a few, all of them from years back, when I spent my days on the desk in the children's section.

( Weird things said in libraries )

I'm re-reading Harry Potter at the moment. I am spending quite a bit of the time being annoyed by such things as the blatant abuse of the house point system by all the teachers, "good" as well as "bad," and the silliness of quidditch rules. But I am also getting very distracted by trying to work out how owl post works.

( Owls, ravens and other mysteries )

Two months on the same series!

I first gave this series a try over a dozen years ago, when several people appeared to share my reading tastes were raving about it. I was so confident I'd like the books that I bought 4 compilation editions straight off, this being in pre-Kindle times when American imports took ages to arrive, so later volumes needed to be secured in advance. I read two books – the first Miles book and the first Cordelia one – and while I don't remember disliking them, I remember being disappointed by my failure to love them. I don't think I consciously gave up on the series, just never felt inspired to read on.

Much more recently, though, I read and loved many other books by the same author (Lois McMaster Bujold), so I thought I'd try the Vorkosigan books again. It still took me several books before I went from a mild "this is okay, I suppose, and I'm determined not to give up so quickly this time" to a realisation that I was hooked. But I did end up loving them, and have spent the last two months reading my way through the whole series.

( Series overview for people who haven't read them )

( My reactions to invididual titles, with spoilers )

Walking through town today, picking my way through the shingle, seaweed and random pieces of tarmac that had been strewn hither and yon by the storm, I passed a cheese shop. You can tell it's a cheese shop because it says so in its name. [Owner's name], it says, "cheeses from home and abroad." Despite this, whenever it's open, it has a chalk board propped up in its window, with a "message of the day" which always reads - or, at least, has always read whenever I've seen it - "yes, I do sell cheese."

I am sure there is a story here. Is it a defiant, even aggressive statement. "Yes, I DO sell cheese! What's it to you? Eh? Eh?" Has the owner been harangued by hired thugs from the health food shop down the road, horrified by his support of fat-filled food stuff, or by militant vegans?

Or is it the excited cry of a man who has dreamed of selling cheese from childhood and after years of drudgery in a grey office, has finally achieved his heart's desire.* Every day, when he wakes up, he feels again the thrill of a dream fulfilled. "I sell cheese!" he cries, as he picks up his chalk and heads for his chalk board. "Yes! I DO sell cheese!"

Or is it a weary "yes, I DO sell cheese," written after the 101st clueless tourist wandered in, stood there surrounded on all sides by mountains of cheeses, and tentatively asked, without irony, "it's probably a long shot, but I was wondering if you happened to have any cheese?"

I can well believe this last one, actually, having had years experiencing the mind-boggling lack of observation skills displayed by library customers.** Just as easily as I can believe that people would stand knee-deep and cheese and still doubt that they were in a cheese shop, I can also believe that he would get people who would wander in, enshrouded in cheese, and say, "is this the estate agent?"

Perhaps I should go in one day and actually ask him. But it's far more fun just to speculate.

* "No one has as many friends as the man with many cheeses," says the cheese-seller in the game Divinity: Original Sin. He says it repeatedly, so it must be true.

** My favourite example of extreme unobservance: We were entirely stripping out everything in a library, pending the replacement of its floor. Just as we'd finished and were slumped on the floor in an almost-empty room having a last cup of tea before moving to the temporary location down the road and rebuilding everything, a woman appeared, who must have moved aside several plasic barriers and clambered over a large pile of boxes in order to reach where we were. "Oh," she said, looking at an entirely empty sheel of a room, "are you open?"

*** I have a theory that whenever any slightly unusual phrase pops up in conversation, it is either a band name, a craft beer or a Booker prize-winning novel. The Emphatic Existence of Cheese is, of course, a novel. Emphatic Cheese is a musical genre.

Gosh. It's ages since I've done this. Let's see...

( Books read since forever ago )

Gosh. I've not posted forever. I do need to post about last week's holiday (a cottage in Noke, near Oxford, in which we visited Many Museums, marvelled over how familiar yet utterly changed Oxford was, and Some Of Us ate a ridiculous amount of cake.) I also need to post about What I've Read over the last month. (In case I don't get round to it, I'll list then later.) I also have an exciting, much delayed, triangular patio area with associated flowerbeds, which I've been planting today, and a scary Big Walk looming in a mere 2 weeks.

But for now, I'll just post about the Mother's Day card I sent to my Mum this year. My Mum is a massively keen gardener, who has always prided herself on being a rugged, horny-handed heaver sort of gardener, not a fragrant dead-heading-on-a-kneeler one. Although she's having to be more careful nowadays, due to being almost 80 and suffering from balance issues, she's still never happier than when out with a spade, covered in mud, winning a battle of wills with a recalcitrant shrub. So this year, I bought her a card with various gardening related images. Since I know that her Favourite Tool is a spade, I drew in a spade to the various items depicted. I added some rugged mud to the flowery wellies and pink gloves. I tried to add some warring blackbirds, but they grew too big, so I replaced them with an assertive robin.

And then I added a dead rat. You see, a recurring theme of her recent phonecalls has been the rat visitor which she growls at, snarls at, and generally ill-wishes all the evils of all the world upon. "It's not dead yet!" has been fairly constant. So I thought a garden-themed card for her would be brightened up with a dead rat. As I walked with a colleague to a nearby library that was moving house, I said, "I've just drawn a dead rat on my Mum's Mother's Day card. I wonder if anyone else in the world has ever done that." ("Um... WHY?" was his eventual response, after a long moment of silence.)

Anyway, my Mum was delighted by the card. "How on earth did you manage to find a card that included my Favourite Tool, a spade?" "Um... I drew it on," I admitted. "I mean, they don't actually sell cards with dead rats on." [Silence.] "You didn't think the dead rat was suspicious?" "Well, it did seem a bit odd," she admitted, "but you get some strange things in the world today." "I bought it from Sainsbury's!" I told her, "not from some underworld Mafia boss card shop, where every greeting card delivers an ill-concealed threat."



What I've read, to be expanded in a separate post. One Day.

The Just City trilogy - Jo Walton (re-read)

Spinning Silver - Naomi Novik

The Raven Tower - Ann Leckie (loved it!)

Sorcery and Cecelia series (re-read)

The Power of three - Diana Wynne Jones (re-read, because we were holidaying on Otmoor. But we found no Dorigs. Only hares. But I like hares. :-D)

Newt's Emerald - Garth Nix

And possibly something else I've forgotten at the moment. Now rereading Coronets and Steel by Sherwood Smith.

I really am bad at this "once at week" thing, aren't I?

( Mostly books, but also Gloomhaven, finally finished )

In justification/defence, a bus journey between Portsmouth and Waterlooville is not a very exciting one, and one has to fill one's mind somehow.

( Rambling rambles prompted by a bus announcement )

I've just finished reading Bookworm: a memoir of childhood reading by Lucy Mangan, which does pretty much what it says on the tin. Like her, I was a voracious reader who grew up in the 1970s and 80s, although she's a few years younger than me. However, the main thing that struck me was how little our childhood reading overlapped. I've had plenty of "I can't believe you didn't read....!" conversations to know that I inexplicably failed to come across certain books that many of my contemporaries adored, but I thought I'd sampled most genres. She, too, seems to have been a wide-ranging reader, so it's all the more surprising that we overlapped so little.

She liked Narnia, but hated The Hobbit and never tackled Lord of the Rings - or pretty much any other fantasy, it seems. She had no historical novels, so none of the Sutcliffs, Harnetts, Treeces, Treases and Welches that were so important to me. She had a thing against talking animals, so no Winnie the Pooh or Beatrix Potter or Sam Pig or Watership Down. The 2 years she spent obsessed with Blyton I spent obsessed with Swallows and Amazons, which she apparently never read. She failed to get to grips with Roger Lancelyn Green's retellings of myths and legends, whereas I loved them, I enjoyed Jennings, but inexplicably didn't read Just William, whereas she loved William but didn't read Jennings. She read loads of girl's school stories, and I don't think I ever read any, except for What Katy Did At School. She read lots of pony stories, and I read none. I read my way through Nancy Drew, the Hardy Boys and The Three Investigators, none of which she mentions.

I don't really have a point. I just find it interesting that two very keen readers at more or less the same time can have such a wildly different repertoire of books.

I read this at the weekend (In Histories of the Unexpected by Sam Willis and James Daybell) and found it so interesting that I've been telling people ever since. A few of them have found it almost as interesting as I did. (The rest nodded politely.) So I might as well share it here, too.

It matters where you put your signature.

From Enimie of Idlenesse by William Fulwood (1568) - a manual of letter-writing etiquette.

Siging your letter "...must be doone according to the estate of the writer, and the qualitie of the person to whom wee write: For to our superiors wee must write at the right side in the neither end of the paper, saying: By your most humble and obedient sonne, or servaunt, &c. Or, yours to commaund, &c. And to our equals we must write towards the middest of the paper, saying, By your faithfull friend for ever, &c. Or, yours assured, &c. To our inferiours wee may write on high at the left hand, saying: By yours, &c."

The book (Histories of the Unexpected) is full of brief little snippets like this, always happier to move on to the next one than to delve into things in any depth, so it doesn't examine how much this was actually adhered to. However, it does mention a series of very grovelling letters written by John Donne very early in the 17th century, in which he did indeed leave a large amount of space between the text of his letter and his signature, which was squeezed up against the right-hand edge of the page.

The weather forecast hadn't looked conducive to walking, but after the excitement of last night's stormy weather, this morning was sunny, and the BBC was promising nothing more than "light showers." So off I went, although in a concession to last night's drenching, I decided to stick to paved surfaces. I even planned a route that would bring me back home at lunch time, so I could abort if the "light showers" were too vexing.

( They were. I didn't. )