Kathleen, Kage and the Company

Kage Baker always said that she enjoyed Faire partly because it was where she recharged her batteries as a writer. Ideas. characters, plot, landscapes, insane problems and demented solutions – Faire handed them all to her on a plate. All she had to do was file off the serial numbers and polish out a few dents …

Of course, it was a lot more complicated than that. Stories need to make rather more sense than days at either Renaissance or Dickens Fair, where unreality is king, fantasy is queen, and we all cling so hard to eccentric authenticity that the result might as well be an opium dream for the average customer. We work hard at what we do. It wears us out.

Kage survived to tell another tale while doing this because she did not drive – the ride home could be spent in a boneless doze, sorting through the images in memory. She rarely worked the Bar (though she was one hell of a fine bartender) and seldom waited tables – we found that her black-eyed glare at those guilty of making a mess on her nice clean table cloths was bad for business. And she didn’t play the Innkeeper – that was me; she wrote me into that position, carefully tailored the role for me and sat back to let it run on its own for 30-odd years. And then Kage wrote about what it presented her.

The only problem this has left is that – while I am still running on her script of the Innkeeper – I am also still doing the driving, bouncing, table setting, table clearing, wrestling with beer suppliers and tap supplies and ice deliveries and drunken customers and under or over enthusiastic actors … plus doing the writing.

This last weekend was our Opening. It was grand, Dear Readers, and I do hope some of you make it out to see us in the Cow Palace. But it was three days of total immersion insanity, with a thin lacing of dementia and lightly glazed with hot and cold running hallucinations … and I left it Sunday night falling down tired.

I’ve spent the last two night sleeping round the clock. I spend the days wading through the cubic tons of laundry produced by a weekend at Fair (bar towels don’t wash themselves, you know) and trying to manage some of the exigencies of real life – like, you know, eating meals and knitting and getting gas in the car …

So bear with me, Dear Readers. I have at least made my way back to this, our little story-telling corner, and I shall regale you with tales of life in the eternal tinselled twilight of Dickens Faire. Stories of how my gloves ate my fingers; of Harry the Parrot’s all girl fan club; of the characters in Dickens’ stories wandering through my Parlour in search of food, drink, aspirin and band-aides … tales of absinthe and rum sauce and beer.

But tonight I am just too tired. One more night of uninterrupted sleep and I shall be fine!

Until tomorrow, Dear Readers. May visions of sugar plums dance in your heads – a nice mazourka polka, maybe, or the venerable Sir Roger de Coverly.

Kage Baker was an old hand at Hell Week.

That is the week before a show opens, the last 7 days to make sure every set is fastened together, every stage manager knows their schedule, all the concessions stands are fully stocked. To make sure that no one in the local government is mad at you, and the fire marshal has approved the floor plan.

Dickens Fair takes place in San Francisco. So at least no one worries much about the reception of the Naughty French Postcards show, or the Green Fairies at the absinthe bar, or the terribly jolly girls at Mad Sal’s Dockyard Alehouse. And you can only hope for the best from the actors, who may or may not know their lines but will certainly improvise something absolutely brilliant if they forget the words.

I spent this past weekend  of Hell Week supervising the final dressing of my particular set, the Green Man Public House. We are a tremendously respectable public house; indeed, we cling to middle class values with nervous, palsied hands. But it gives us things like a very comfortable Parlour, wherein you can find figures as diverse as Fagin, or Prince Albert enjoying a quiet glass with his gentleman retainers. Ladies can find a cup of tea in a non-alarming situation – or, if they are that kind of lady, they can move across the Parlour and share champagne with dubious gentlemen.

There are usually  children playing on the hearth rug. Four times a day Mr. Dickens does live readings. Mr. Pickwick lunches with us; Mr. Scrooge takes his frugal dinner at our least convivial table. There are palm trees in pots and a parrot in a huge iron cage, for a touch of exotic Imperialistic ambiance. There is glass and china glowing on the Welsh dresser; there is brass and pewter shining on the Bar.

There are also something like 7 stories rising invisibly above the Parlour ceiling, wherein my family and our various lodgers, tenants, spies, local scriveners, alien lifeforms and God knows who else are housed. Or so the indefatigable  Neassa – who keeps a list of who lives where – informs me …

The original design of the Inn came from Kage Baker’s mind. Several years of rebuilding and redesign incorporated all manner of ideas from our folks – but everyone seemed to be seeing it through the prism of Kage’s mind, and fell in with her ideas. They still do, and it’s still happening. The new ideas fit with the old ones, enhancing the picture that began behind Kage’s eyes.

It comforts me. I feel like I’m still living in parts of her brain. I know how everything works in there – or, if its actual function still confounds me, at least the confusion with that bit is familiar.

There are pieces of deco hung on the walls whose origin no one remembers (even I am uncertain) but they are hung up and used because my folks have always done so. A weird bit comes out of a box, someone asks: “What the heck is this?” And someone else says: “Oh, hang it up by the Bar; we keep spare cups on it.” Maybe we’ve always done it; maybe we only did it last year. That makes no never mind, because it’s there, it’s ours, and our people have re-purposed it.

The whole Green Man is like that.

Many millions of  clever words have been written explaining how the past goes, never to return. How time is a river and you can’t enter it twice in the same place. How yestreday is unchangeable and tomorrow is unknown.

You know what, Dear Readers? They’re all wrong.

One down. And all the rest to go. Another town and one more show!

Time to Dance In The Streets.

Kage Baker got migraines. A lot.

I get them too. Not a lot, only now and then. But I have one now.

I am peering at the world through black and silver thorns – amazingly decorative, really – and feeling sick.

So I am going to bed.

Goo night.

Kage Baker never gave up on me. No matter what I did, or (more likely) failed to do, she was a true and supportive companion. And with the amount of disaster and sheer asininity that has followed me around, that is virtue on a scale impossible to describe in mere English.

I think maybe sisters are not allowed to actually give up on you, anyway. But they don’t have to like it, or do more than the minimum of saving your sorry ass. Kage and Kimberly have borne the brunt of the accidents that comprise my life, and they have both continued to offer even more help that I’ve needed. Home may indeed be the place where – when you have to go there – they have to take you in: but that doesn’t mean they have to still be speaking to you when they open the door. My sisters do and are, and always have.

Our quadrennial national psychosis is over now, and things are settling down somewhat. However, an extraordinary degree of personal animosity has remained, like some pollutant that refuses to dissolve in the peaceful waters of normal social discourse – it’s still out there, slipping through the domestic medium like ribbons of jellied acid: you’re swimming along contentedly, maybe searching for a nice recipe for soon-to-be turkey hash, and ZING! Something cold and slimy burns you to the bone; and it turns out to be someone unhappy with the election returns and unable to behave politely about it.

With the approach of the Year-End Holidays, I’ve found myself blocking or unfriending more people than in the past 6 years. Not that I have a huge gallery of friends online – I am both busy and lazy about maintaining social media. But I’ve actually had to cut a few semi-acquaintances right off at knee (as it were) because they seem to have developed uncontrollable rage disease. I can’t be having with that sort of thing.

Maybe it’s some form of the coming Zombie apocalypse? A form where people eat their own brains first, and then go hunting for the neighbors’? Man, there are some really vicious folks floating around out there in the aether, and I’d take oath that some of them weren’t like that two weeks ago. Hate rays from space? Brain worms? Pod people? I tell you, Dear Readers, if they are Pod People, those pods have been cross-breeding with Ghost Peppers; the result is Pod People with bulging eyes, foaming mouths and really bad tempers …

I miss the generous forgiveness of Kage Baker. When she thought you were wrong, she’d tell you so – but then she’d let the subject be. She’d give you a hand up and out of whatever puddle of stupidity you’d just fallen into; she’d help you write the “I’m sorry” notes, and lend you money for bail and a brand new ceramic chicken for that lady down the street … and she wouldn’t scream at you.

I’m so tired of being screamed at. Total strangers, friends of friends of friends, are consigning me to multiple hells this week. It’s just too much to take. I am going to concentrate on being grateful for the nice, quiet, polite, friendly folks that there really are so many more of in the world – the noisy aberrations can go gnaw on their own bones instead of mine.

So let’s do it all together, Dear Readers! Quiet comfort, peaceful smiles, fond indulgence of the little eccentricities that tempt us to brain our kith and kin – let’s be nice for awhile. Even if we’re right, damn it, and all those other people we love are just being stubbornly, deliberately, infuriatingly WRONG!!!

Let’s remember instead that they are the people we love. Postpone judgement for a few weeks. Pretend there is no naughty list, and use all that stockpiled coal we bought to throw at sinners to make a nice warm fire on the hearth instead.

Let’s be grateful. Let’s be loving. Let’s at least be quiet, and give the impression that we are as good as our relatives think we are. I know I could do a lot worse than trying to be what Kage Baker thought I was.

So I’ll try.

Kage Baker loved dawns.

While she also loved sleeping in, she liked being up to see the dawn. Many mornings that meant getting up to watch the solar rebirth, then toddling back to bed for a couple of extra hours of sleep. That was especially true as she got older, and tended to spend much of her nights sitting up and writing.

But when she was a child, she was an up-at-dawn type of person. Even as an adolescent – when even the most diurnal people spend some time being nocturnal instead – she couldn’t stand to waste a summer dawn. She’d be up and dressed and setting out for long walks in the Hollywood Hills as soon as the first colour bloomed in the east. A lot of summer days began that way, ending up in trekking down through the hills to Hollywood Boulevard just as the tender first light burst into the flame of real day, and finding someplace open enough to sell Coke and coffee and maybe some pizza …

I saw a lot more dawns than I wanted to, accomplishing these mad errands. I went along with it due to a suspicion Kage would walk off the end of the earth if unwatched during her rambles, and because I knew the stories born during the long walks through the Hills and along the Boulevard would be amazing. Besides, coffee and cold pizza is one of the breakfasts of champions.

The summer dawns that turned into day-long adventures were the best. The rest of the year, seeing the dawn was just one more side-effect of having to get up early enough to go to school. And who, from kindergarten to high school graduation, thinks that’s any kind of blessing?

Only people like Kage. Even then, she’d growse and grumble about getting up, but I think it was because the electrifying effect of rising with the sun was subsequently ruined by being compelled to attend school. In summer, she leap up and into jeans and out the windows on the roof with the alacrity of a young gazelle. When instead she had to get dressed in our fairly appalling blue uniforms and slouch off to the nuns, she showed all the enthusiasm of someone on their way to the gallows. And once at school, Kage was likely to spend her time describing that morning’s sunrise in careful prose than attending to Civics or Algebra or English …

She classified dawns in various ways. There were hot dawns, wet dawns (which had nothing to do with rain), runner’s dawns, dancing dawns … The scale was mostly based on colour – the celestial nursery scheme of blue and pink clouds was likelier to show up in July than in January; a silver-gilt and crimson tinsel dawn was almost always Winter. Intensity of light was another factor. Storms sometimes ate dawns entirely, and the light would grow, sadly and dully,  as grey-tinged and  mechanical as a rheostat. On the other hand, spring rains usually broke with daylight here in Los Angeles – those were sparkling dawns, immense clouds exploding in soft slow motion as the solar wind drove them from the sky, painting them until they were pouring down colour instead of rain.

Some dawns were described more in terms of emotion – I think, because I never got a clear explanation of precisely what a “bottle dawn” was. It might have been a bleak sunrise with the green light promising a winter storm; it might have been one where Kage was unhappily hung over. Not sure what a “white dawn” was, either, though I am fairly sure insomnia might have been a component; while cloud cover was definitely not. But they all had resonance and deep meaning for Kage.

I am not a dawn kind of person. In fact, I find sunrise to be downright depressing, especially if I have been awake all night and am suddenly aware that the stars are fading and the sky is going pale with the shock: so am I, probably. Dawns are pink and gold, to me: shallow, excessive, and even a little tawdry, with none of the majesty and glory of the sunset. Nonetheless, I’ve seen an awful lot of them – what with Kage, and going to school, and my own sleeplessness. Even though they often led to delight, I am still not overly fond of them …

Last week, in fact, I saw my first dawn in a year. Waking up early on a Saturday, with the necessity of getting from Santa Rosa to Pacifica by mid morning – I found my glasses and was staggering for the bathroom with my toothbrush when my eye lit blearily on the window above my borrowed bed.

The sky was scarlet. Nothing prim or cherub-supportive: a deep martial red, with an equally deep martial blue between the reaching fingers of the rising sun. Halfway up the Eastern sky it was gold evolving out of transparent silver, and the last star was an unlikely gem still shining through daylight.

It was – wow. Maybe because I hadn’t seen one in a year. Maybe because my eyes were only half focused. Maybe because for once I was seeing something of what Kage had always seen, without her even telling me what it was.

I saw it again this weekend. If this keeps up, I am really going to enjoy doing Dickens Fair, in a way I never have before. And that’s amazingly cool, at my age.

Thanks, Kage.

Kage Baker put her writing before nearly everything else in her life.

Writing was what she did – eating, sleeping, traveling, collecting fancy paper holiday collections and heritage tulips, playing Monkey Island compulsively for days on end … all those things were to pass time that couldn’t be spent writing. Or to recover from too much time spent writing too intensely. Or to generate new ideas of things about which to write in the first place.

With inhuman dedication and the attention span of the Sphinx, she managed to spend about 75% of her time writing. She balanced out days when she did the laundry or cooked dinner or shot electronic pirates, with other days where she wrote for 12, 14, 16 hours at a stretch: literally, until she fell asleep at her desk, and I steered her to her bed like a lifesized rag doll.

I don’t know how she did it, although she always said it was because she had harnessed her OCD tendencies. For all I know, she was right – does anyone really know what a compensated OCD complex looks like? We all have the image of the constant hand washing, the autistic withdrawal to a private world, the helpless counting of spilled sesame seeds that dooms Greek vampires – what happens when a slightly more normal human being learns to fine-tune that helpless high focus?

Lots of things, I’d wager. And one of them was Kage.

I lack several important ingredients in my own mental makeup. My focus is not as delicate or as strong as Kage’s: I’m distractable.  Kage could look into starry infinity and read the license plates on bacteria (as it were); I can find Mars, Jupiter and Venus, and if I squint I can read the small print on menus … on the other had, I don’t walk into lamp posts and absent-mindedly apologize. I can write for a 12 hour stretch, if it’s all at night: with dawn, I curl up like a stale French fry.

But I do persevere. In stubbornness, I am Kage’s match.

This week I have been writing like a madwoman, determined to turn in at least 1,600 words a day during November. It’s NaNoWriMo, and I mean to get 50,000 words down before the 1st of December. I’m at 24,425 as of last night – almost halfway there, and only a not-quite-third of the way through the month. So my plan is working, BWA-HA-ha-ha!!!

But last week rehearsals for Dickens Fair in San Francisco also began. That’s 12 hours a week on the road (it’s a thousand mile round trip commute), 24 hours a week rehearsing, building and then performing. Last weekend, there was a dear friend’s wedding, too (Happy Occasion!); this week we begin actually building the set of the Green Man Tavern.

And tonight, I go to a memorial. Old and dear and fabulous friends, mine and Kage’s, have been dropping like flies this year. Time is chipping pieces off my heart, and a talus field of love and grief is piling up around my feet.

Which is a very poetic, of course, but what it means in practical terms is that I have to go out tonight! And tomorrow I have to get up and drive North, drop another old and dear friend in her home in Livermore along the way, meet with my minions in the Cow Palace to make sure the last wall meets the first wall and the Inn will stay up, and and then sometime Sunday drive back to LA. And start over.

Talk to you then, Dear Readers. In the meantime – put your feet up, read a good book, play a good game, sleep. For me, okay? I need to concentrate on something else for a while.

Kage Baker loved to write. Not just to compose – the physical act of writing was an entertainment for her;  like Bilbo Baggins, she loved cryptography and cunning alphabets and codes. She loved calligraphy, and was in fact very good at it herself – despite the handicap of being left-handed, which necessitated that she make her fancy letters upside down and backwards lest she smear them with her own wrist.

Pens were a passion with her. She quite hated ball points – their coarse line, their scratchiness (she claimed she could feel irregularities in the ball right up her arm), their tendency to clots and embolisms. Fountain pens were good, but she felt they leaked too much; she never took to them as I did (they’re my faves, and I carry fountain pens to this day.) She was delighted when felt tip pens were invented, though she soon grew as picky about those as any other – Flairs were scorned, for instance. What she really loved in commercial pens were the needle points like Pilots; black medium point Pilots were what she took to signings and conventions.

Of course, better than anything – even better than a Koh-in-noor Rapidograph, which was as much a status symbol in our high school as a Corvette – was an actual, honest-to-Thoth steel nib on a well-crafted staff. She had a Rose’s Lime Marmalade jar on her desk, filled with various pen staves; and a Twining’s Caravan Tea tin full of 19th century steel nibs – booty from a closed-down criminal asylum in Salem, Oregon, fetched home in a plastic bag by an obliging relative shooting a movie there … anyway, Kage much preferred writing with a nib pen and a bottle of Higgins Black Ink.

A lot of her adolescent writing was done with nib pens – her favourite green staff still has her teeth marks on it from teenaged writer’s block – on those legal pads that are lined on pale green paper. The notebooks fit in her purse (a typewriter would have fit in her purse, to be honest) and carried her Rapidograph in case inspiration struck in boring places like the car or algebra class. She said the motion of the pen over the paper was sensual.

Kage liked it so much that the first draft of In the Garden of Iden was written that way. So are two trunk novels that will never see the light of day, on pain of her deathbed curse striking me – though I may mine them for a few things. By the time she was seriously at work, she had switched from legal notebooks to full sized loose leaf pages, so as to accommodate my typing up the manuscripts – though she insisted on using erasable typing paper, which made my life a living hell because every single ink she used smudged on it …

Kage only abandoned her dear pens and bottles of ink when I finally taught her to use a computer. The ability to write in light was irresistible, and the ease of cut and paste was the frosting on her authorial cupcake. Partway through Sky Coyote she changed a character’s name; I remember her crowing with delight and triumph when she changed 150-odd instances of it simultaneously. Man, that was a miracle of modern technology!

To the end of her life, though, Kage did at least some of her writing in long-hand. When we were places she couldn’t use her laptop, when we were on the road, or in an audience somewhere – the notebook always lived in her purse, along with one good pen. Or, as her health began to fail, in mine … we worked our back through various transcription methods her last year, when it got harder for her to sit up at her desk.

By the day she died, she was dictating to me and I was typing as she narrated – in between copious Mozart and Scolieri jokes, and occasional stretches of nonsense when Kage would get tired of plotting and race off neck and neck with reality. I’d keep typing whatever hysterical silliness she was reciting – the adventures of Missy Squirrel and Mr. Badwhiskers, the dapper wolf from Warner Brothers cartoons, for instance. Ultimately I’d crack up and lose my place, and Kage would make me delete all of it and haul us by main force back to steampunk adventures in Torquey …

Ah me, adventures in writing. Such times we had. Remembering it keeps me going as I pound my way through this NaNoWriMo project, aiming for a few thousand words every night.

I’d never manage it with a pen, but I do still carry a notebook in my purse. Just in case a story comes knocking. Kage would expect it of me.

Kage Baker is saying clearly to me: Mental Health Day.

The elections are over, but no one will shut up. I have a headache. The parrot, while cheerful as a little grig (whatever the hell that is; anyone know?) is making noises like a jukebox with hiccoughs, and every squeak and burble and whistle is going straight through my cerebellum.

And I need to write tonight. And I am out of licorice and chocolate. Fruit flavoured Tootsie Rolls turn out to be a hideous invention and no replacement even for those nasty red Twizzlers. No wonder the Trick or Treaters didn’t want them.

In the interests of retaining some slight tinge of sanity, I am going to turn off the computer and go read a new Lois Bujold novel for a while. And then later I will write a couple of thousand words and so redeem today’s pledge to NaNoWriMo …

Light a candle in the windows of your souls, Dear Readers! That shadow on the glass will be either me, lost as usual, or a really freaking big moth …

Kage Baker was a dedicated voter. She studied the issues, she marked her ballot beforehand, and she didn’t miss an election from when she could first vote as an 18-year old.

She never failed to vote. Not even when Mamma decided Kage had negated her own vote for the mayor of Los Angeles (back in the 1970’s) and became so incensed that Kage fled the house and went to live in the Hollywood Bowl for a week. That’s quite doable, especially if you have a sister who will , like a raven, bring you food and water every day …

When we were living in our car and friends’ living rooms, Kage voted by mail. When we began moving all over California, she re-registered every time we had an address for more than 6 weeks. And in 2008, when I was confined to a hospital bed, she got me an absentee ballot and the notarized statement to let her turn it in for me, and made sure I got to vote for the President in the most historic campaign of our lives.

It’s hard to realize that, though that was only 4 years ago, it was Kage’s last election. It’s been almost 3 years now since she died … and the hooraw’s nest that this election has become would have totally amazed her. Angered her, too; and yes, in a black way, amused her. Let’s face it, the zingers from this campaign have been Homeric. The villains and heroes (no matter which side you assign the labels to) have reached super-human status. The issues really, really matter. She’d have loved voting in this one, and I grieve that she didn’t get the chance.

Especially since, if healthcare reforms had started 4 years earlier than they did, Kage Baker would probably have been alive today …

She’d also have gotten en enormous, blood-thirsty giggle out of the voter suppression attempt on my own front porch this afternoon. Yes indeed, Dear Readers, voter fraud tracked me down and tried to nab me at my own door. Some fellow with an armful of stickers, hangers and unmarked ballots came to the door and informed me that he was a precinct worker tracking down voters who had not yet come in, and the records showed none us in my household had voted. Furthermore,  he would be ever so pleased to let me fill out a ballot right there at my own door, and deliver it to the polling place for me. Just my tax dollars at work!

However … my family makes a big thing of voting. We go all together, we vote together, we get our nifty sticker prizes together. And we had already been to our polling place, where I had actually seen the workers line out our names. And with a name like mine, it’s hard to make a mistake about that. I’d slid the ballot into the box with my own two hands, besides.

When I so informed the yob at the door and demanded his ID, he refused to show it to me, apologized abjectly, and scarpered at a notable speed. So I called the police and reported him, and proceeded to blare my amazing sighting all over Facebook. I must admit, there is a certain thrill out of seeing a mythological beast up close – a vote suppressor! Someone tried to mess with my vote!

The good part of loudly screaming out my news on Facebook was that a somewhat more level-headed friend directed me to the appropriate FBI number whereat to report such shenanigans (Thank you, Athene!) So I called the nice people at the FBI and reported my encounter. I’ll never know if they find him, I suppose, but I have done my duty twice today! I exercised my franchise, and I reported a voting cheat.

And it was really kind of exciting … I ought to be ashamed, but it was like seeing a shark in the water, or a really good UFO. I was nearly suppressed! Right at home!

Ah, what times we live in. Kage wouldn’t be surprised at all.

Kage Baker celebrated pretty much continuously for the last three months of the year. It was the season of lights and holidays, and she loved it. Halloween, All Saints’, Guy Fawkes, Thanksgiving – and then the long mania of Christmas and New Year’s!

We built bonfires on  Guy Fawkes and Samhain, whenever we had the chance and the room. Backyards can accomomdate all sorts of ritual dancing and leaping over the flames, but we did have to learn not to try it when the bonfire was in a hibachi on the second-story porch … we scattered grain and salt and wine on our doorjambs, pinned fortunate herbs to the lintels, set out spirit meals for the honoured dead.

Our neighbors occasionally asked cautious questions. We had the most tolerant UPS and FedEx men in the whole wide world, though.

Now that it is Fall, the unending glittering whirl of the year-end festivities is well and truely begun. In most especial particular, the wonders of Dickens Fair and Extreme Christmas began their tumultuous birth this Saturday past.

I spent most of the time in Pacifica, for the first weekend of rehearsals for the Dickens Fair and Christmas Spectacular – a most unique and splendid celebration of the genial season, which I encourage all of you, Dear Readers, to attend if, under any circumstances whatsoever, you can. (Discount tickets are available through me.) Returning to Dickens is very like sitting down in a nice warm bath: one which gradually heats up until the water is boiling but you are somehow acclimatized.

I always find that within the first few hours of commingling once more with my friends and minions, I am sitting up straight as if corseted, and falling effortlessly into Victorian English. Even as the bubbles begin to form on the sides of the enormous cauldron in which we are all swimming … some of it may be our faux English sang froid, but most of it is because we are all addicted to Extreme Christmas.

It was wonderful this weekend. The first weekend is especially fervent, full of the twin joys of surprise (where did they put my stage this year?) and dear familiarity. It never matters at all that most of us are still in our 21st century clothes, costumed as IT technicians and tax accountants and college students and housespouses … getting into character is a lot more than putting on funny clothes; a Giants cap (of which there were a LOT) doffs as well as a topper, and one can curtsey just as well with the edges of a shawl or a hoodie as with a hooped skirt. At least, we can.

And then, of course, today is Guy Fawkes Day. It’s about a lot more than those silly masks now used by Anonymous. I’ve known the appropriate verse since I was 3 (thanks to an British granddad). I’ll circle round a candle and chant about Gunpowder Treason, and then  sit down and mark my ballot for the American rituals tomorrow.

In between rehearsal and Guy Fawkes, there was the first night run of the season: running down I-5 for the comforts of my own bed, glugging coffee and snacking on Pop Tarts and Good and Plenties – all of us who make the 1000-miles-a-weekend commute have our favourite snack foods, and those are mine. I cheered the phantom cities by the road, I dodged the dragon-headed trucks along the long straightaways, I sang the sun down and stars up along the stretches of roads where there are no lights at all. Starlight lies like glitter on the dun hills, heralding the frost that will begin to form in weeks.

It was a grand beginning. I got from Pacifica to Griffith Park in 6 hours, which is quite a decent time. And I can hardly wait to do it again next week.