Goat Notes

Step One: You identify a practical problem, which you don't know how to solve.  

Fortunately, just lately you remember dipping into an excellent book, which will most certainly contain the solution. 

Unfortunately, you can't recollect quite what the book was, or where you found it.

Step Two: You spend several minutes pottering about, and trying to catch a glimpse of the elusive memory out of the tail of your eye.

Step Three: You identify the book.

Fortunately, you now know exactly what it is, and when and where you last saw it.

Unfortunately, Catmint's Compleat Encyclopaedia of Mechanical Parts is still, as far as you know, in the basement of that bookshop in Oxford, Midatlantica, where you set it aside about 4.15 am last Wednesday in favour of a spirited discussion with your fellow-browser Teddy Roosevelt.

Thirty-six weeks out of the fifty-two, I work as a biology technician in an English high school - a job whose limits in the better establishment are largely dictated by budget, energy, and imagination.  I now work at one of the markedly better establishments, possibly as karmic compensation for certain hijinks at one of the others.  But there are limits.  In particular, I am not in the waking world really responsible for looking after a bunch of indolent and moth-eaten lions in the central court.  Last night, that was just part of the background to a most exhausting dream-faring.

Because we have a new Head of Chemistry (really), and he has some slightly odd ideas about what his tech department ought to prepare for the dog-end of the school year (really), they had decided to outdo Biology by shipping in some young tigers for unspecified class activities (not really).  The chemistry technician is small and slight (really), and so I helped her move the crates upstairs (not specifically true, but typically so).  Unfortunately, our suppliers were arses (ditto), and decided that sending adolescent tigers by post in large cardboard boxes was a really good idea (probably true if ever put to the test).  Unsurprisingly, the tiger clawed through the packaging.  More surprisingly, she took a great fancy to me and insisted upon dancing with me at once.  A tiger is a very good bipedal dancer, because of all that cat grace and the balancing effect of the tail (do not try this).  She displayed a great and greatly inappropriate crush, much to my perfidious colleague's amusement, and by no means wished me to stop dancing and go about my business.

I was somewhat divided in my mind.  On the one hand, she really was a very attractive and personable tiger, as tigers go.  On the other hand, for me, this does not go very far.  On the third and fourth paws, she had all that cat restraint and cat selflessness, and a big set of scimitar claws in excessively close proximity to my viscera.  I escaped, to simplify matters somewhat, by remarking, "Oh look!  A school of flying fish, out that window!" and waking up before my treachery was discovered.  I think the original idea was to hide in the lions' den until a butterfly flew past the tiger's nose and distracted her, or some such.

I wish it to be clearly understood that I did not find the tiger-lady in Fritz Leiber's The Wanderer hot at all, nor found that entire subplot other than creepy and disgusting.  I can think of no other literary examples of being hit upon by big striped militant moggies, nor is it apparent to me where else this nuisance may have had its genesis.

But it is at least mildly interesting that I have an annoying, militant, and not especially attractive adolescent girl in Killer-Kate who is surnamed Tiger, as a tribute to her violent and enthusiastic temperament as well as her aptitude with knives.  It's true that, because I neither much like nor yet sufficiently understand her, I haven't been inviting her to all the dramatic dances I had originally intended.  There has been a certain amount of trying to go about my business instead. 

If this is really what all this rigmarole was about, then all I can conclude is that my subconscious is, like Jack Shit, not very subtle.

560 words: holly, Yule gifts, a squash-faced tabby cat.

In a recent post, I made a throwaway joke about an Arthurian fanficcer, whose handle implied that he/she was into shipping Nimue/Balin in a big way.  I pulled this particular combination completely out of my ear, and promptly forgot about it.

Last night, pleasantly torpid with butter chicken and saag, I drifted into a dream in which the Doctor, Romana, and I were desperately attempting to stop the quantum cats destroying the universe.  We failed, they did this thing, and I was pitched into a new dream in a darkling faerie underworld.

As Sir Balin le Savage.  This is seldom a good sign.  And the lovely Nimue was riding at my side...

The reason you are hearing about this is because the shipper turns out to have got it so totally wrong.

I was forty-six - which is slightly more seasoned and experienced than I actually am.  Nim was precisely half my age.  Romance completely failed to strike me as a possibility.

And anyway, it later emerged that Nim was gay - not through her actually meeting a nice girl, but through her batshit super-controlling sorceress mother's pressing her to settle down and marry, and then throwing us both into the dungeons with much cursing and lightning-chucking when she found out why this was not happening.

Luckily, Launcelot du Lake came by and helped us to bust out.  In this reality, he had Lake magic to throw around too: could have taken down a tank in fifteen seconds.  I'm not sure he didn't.

Unluckily, the Lady of the Lake weighed in for the rematch - I think she was batshit mother's big sister.  And the Lady of the Lake did not like me, because I was Balin.  And she was a much, much more powerful enchantress than both my friendly magicians together.  Jail again!

Separate cells, this time.  But I was Balin, so I was super tough, and busted out of my dungeon and went creeping through the underwater catacombs to find her, or my friends, or someone.

But I was Balin, so a blood-guilt was on my head; and presently I found the mangled corpse in the crypt, and I shivered with guilt and grief and knew that my sins had found me out, and I was cut off from all good-hearted folk like Nim and Lance forever.  That left killing the Lady.  But it was the Lady whose head I'd cut off in the first place - which, in retrospect, is no doubt why she didn't like me much.  On a rocky shelf of dream-logic I sat down and wept.

Behind me came a noise like a gurgling, hungry bandsaw.  I leapt up, my sword hopelessly in my hand.  The Lady had invoked the Furies, and one had found me!

I defy anybody to stay asleep in the shadow of a Kindly One.  I woke like hell.  I was not sorry to do so.

Deep in the pre-dawn dungeons, my downstairs neighbour was snoring like Fury.

This doesn't score very high on my "Best Dreams Ever" list.  I didn't get the girl.  There wasn't another girl for Nim to get.  The cats got my first universe.  I was just about to get dead and damned in my second.  Also, I turned out to be a murdering shit.  By any objective measure, all of these must certainly rank as downers.

All things considered, I feel remarkably refreshed and tranquil.

But that is what I got, for inventing the idea of Nimue/Balin fanfic!