The rich complexity of life
So, guess what! The WordPress updates mean IE now crashes me off the blog as well as the forum. I love technology. I love the implacable Sisyphean awareness that as soon as you start getting close to the top of that hill, the boulder will leap out of your grasp like a rocket from a launch pad* and roll, sniggering, to the bottom again. I wonder if Sisyphus’ boulder sniggered?** Computers could give Molesworth lessons in sniggering.***
Sigh.
And then I’d managed to forget, in the wildness of despair, that the Lyke Wake Dirge is part of Benjamin Britten’s gloriously magisterial Serenade for Tenor, Horn and Strings–Oisin reminded me, when I took my first Lyke-Wakean scratchings in to him yesterday–so, just how fabulously superfluous can a flimsy little re-setting be? For my next trick I think I’ll rewrite Otello.† Oisin said, just don’t think about it. Uh-huh. There is no elephant in the room! There is no dead rat in the soup! There is no Bush in the White House!
On the other hand I rang a perfect (short) touch of Stedman Doubles last night, which I think may be my first–I did start to ring touches of Stedman, as opposed to fail to ring touches of Stedman, a little while back now, but I’ve generally continued to need someone to yell at me or at least hover at my elbow breathing heavily.††
And today I had a good ride–I mean school, not hack–on Connie, which is unfortunately a little more unusual on Saturdays, when we’re on our own, than on Tuesdays, when we have Jenny yelling at us.††† Can’t remember if I told you that I managed to damage a shoulder ringing a heavy bell down in peal a fortnight or so ago–entirely my own stupid fault, and the classic moment for stupid injuries, because of the physical facts of staying in your place in the row while you’re ringing down and the increasing inertial resistance of a bell that is swinging down from 360 degrees full-circle standing mouth up to hanging straight mouth down–so I’d reverted to the stronger bit to ride Connie in while my shoulder reconnected the loose wires and checked for shorts.
Today I put the plain snaffle on her for the first time since my aggravated-twit moment in the tower–and we did rather well. You do have to get used to the fact that she hangs on your hands something wicked in the easier bit, but she’s also–if you don’t simply go numb from hanging on back–more responsive to it. I came away thinking, gee, I may get this horse thing licked some day after all.‡ Jenny is also beginning to take Roland out on little short hacks to let him see some countryside under saddle and Miles is grumping that he and his (nearly) bomb-proof pony have to play nanny to Mum and her young gentleman. So I offered to go out with Connie some time. This could be pretty funny, since while Connie is a nice cooperative sensible middle-aged mare she also has her moments–and indeed Jenny had told me in some amusement that she’d had one of them last week when she was shying all over the landscape, at leaves, cows, crows, and invisible monsters. I’m delighted she does that with you too, I said. Oh yes, said Jenny. So this could be a case of the fruit loop leading the seriously deranged. But it might make a good blog entry.
* * *
* or a hellhound out the front door on the first walk of the day
** The version of this story I grew up with was out of the D’Aulaires’ book of Greek myths. That boulder is definitely sniggering.
The D’Aulaires are also responsible for one of the best sea-monsters I’ve ever encountered, and it haunted me when I was little. None of this serpenty dragony thing: this one is a gigantic maggot, with a horrible human mouth, big fat pink lips and big square white teeth. Shuuuuudder.
*** Molesworth totally rules. Anyone who doesn’t know this already, check it out:
http://www.stcustards.free-online.co.uk/
Although I admit to being a trifle disturbed by this site. Do they have permission to use all of this stuff? I never found the ‘about us’ button
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nigel_Molesworth
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v22/n04/jone01_.html
And this last is probably more than anyone but a hardened Molesworthian wants to know, and a hardened Molesworthian would be offended. Molesworth, the ultimate ghastly English public schoolboy, made me cry with laughter when I read him for the first time as a grown-up because I was a hardened anglophile–the hopeless wet kind of anglophile, mind you, who comes to England looking for Tolkien and the Shire–and, what’s more, finds them.^ I agree that Molesworth is almost unbearably cosy, but I’m an American–it’s an exotic cosiness and furthermore my particular chosen exoticism. I enjoy Molesworth, I suppose, as I enjoy cream teas or Christmas pantos–perhaps because they’re not my culture I find them easy to avoid worrying about the context of.^^
^ Can’t remember if I’ve done you any of my riffs on learning to live in this country, where you can still see Middle-earth and King Arthur among and behind the industrial estates and the relentlessly multiplying car parks. History–including imaginary history–is an extra dimension, as tactile and inescapable as height, width and depth.
^^ Don’t get me started on the royal family however, which is really only Molesworth taken to his ultimate evolution. Peter keeps telling me that Parliamentarian monarchy may not be a great system but there are worse ones, and I can’t feel that I should be waving the American flag as an example of honest, practical and effective representative government.
*** Or Monty Python. Or Beyond the Fringe.
† Yes, Otello. Verdi, not Shakespeare. Shakespeare can use the rewriting.
†† Stedman, as I keep telling you, is a very volatile method because while it has the tenor-behind to help keep you anchored it does not have a treble doing something similar at the other end–the treble in Stedman is ‘inside’ like the other four working bells, with the same jaggedy ‘line’ rather than the straight simple line of plain treble methods. When I was first trying to ring Stedman touches I just went wrong every time a ‘single’ was called. This is normal. Then I began to catch on to the ‘cat’s ears’ calls, which is also normal. The ‘coathanger’ calls^ are harder and I was beginning to have wobblies about the possibility that I wasn’t going to learn to ring them, that I was going to hit the ceiling of my limited bell ringing ability sooner than hoped^^. Then I began staggering through coathangers occasionally, especially when I had someone yelling at me. The stage I’m in presently, I’m afraid, is the Getting Through the Scary Coathanger and Then Going to Pieces Afterward stage. Sigh. I’m not sure this is normal, but last night gives me hope that I will get through it too. But I was very, very grateful when Edward called ‘That’s all’, which meant we were back to ‘rounds’ and at the end of the method. Another of Stedman’s peculiarities is that you can make calls almost anywhere and any time–which is another reason it’s so volatile: usually calls come at fairly specific points in the ‘circle of work’–and when it looked like we were rolling into our third course my heart sank. No, no! Let me have my perfect short course! If we go a third I’ll probably disintegrate! –But we didn’t and I did.
^ I know I’ve told you that these somewhat . . . fanciful . . . names have to do with the shape of the ‘line’ drawn on the page, except for the fact that the coathangers look nothing like coathangers.
^^ I want to ring surprise! Surprise are a whole drooling category of advanced methods, like the difference between being able to walk, trot and canter your horse and being able to do the capriole, courbette, and jump six foot fences.
††† I perceive a pattern. Yes, and I yell at myself when I’m writing stories. And, lately, music.^
^ Benjamin Britten did Lyke Wake Dirge! Find someone your own size to pick on!+
+ But I don’t think there are any musical gnats.
‡ Naaaaah.
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