Noises off
I was up too late last night reading* and overslept disastrously, partly from reading late and partly from ME, and have therefore spent the day stumbling around from one activity/hellhound** to the next, glancing at the clock and twitching as if stung. I’m disintegrating rather quickly at this point and I must get back to Just a Little Piece for Organ tonight: my music lesson*** is tomorrow, and the Little Piece just stops, it doesn’t end. The fact that I’m having to guess at what any of it sounds like is not helping matters, but I say to myself, how did Beethoven write all those symphonies? He not only didn’t have an orchestra on his laptop, he was deaf. The answer to which is: I am not Beethoven. I still want to get back to Little Piece. I had a good thump at it this afternoon and when I finished I decided that at least three chords out of three and a half pages were not totally bad. But still have room for improvement.
Then I had to hustle off to afternoon handbells. Colin and I came in at the same moment, saw that Niall had put cushions on the chairs this week, and both reeled back with a cry of, No, no! We did it last week! Niall tried (rather unsuccessfully) to look wounded and misunderstood and said, I just thought you might like to sit on cushions! And in fact it was very nice to sit on cushions even when we were only ringing short touches, possibly because our butts were still bruised from last week’s quarter peal.
I can’t help worrying about the competence gap between Colin and Niall and me; they’re stuck with me because there isn’t anyone else as immediately local. But they’re both basically kind human beings and natural teachers: Colin has taught so many people to ring tower bells that he goes automatically into Teacher Mode whenever there’s change-ringing in the vicinity, even when it’s handbells on which he is not (yet) an expert, and as a result has occasionally put me right just in time to go horribly wrong himself–and Niall is obsessed and will do anything to create another handbell ringer. But there are weeks when I think I should really put them out of their misery and say I’m giving up, and make them commute to ring with someone who isn’t hopelessly thick. This is not entirely me beating up on myself, you know: I’ve told you before that Colin has been tower ringing for over forty years and Niall coming up twenty on both tower and handbells–I’ve been ringing four and a half and have a brain full of fairy tales†, not mathematical patterns.
But this wasn’t one of those weeks. It was due to be, after the quarter last week–and after Kent and Cambridge last night in the tower–but it wasn’t. It was one of those weeks when I thought, well, you know, I might even eventually become the kind of upper-mediocre handbell ringer that I aspire to become in the tower. I think I’ve told you that it was listening to Niall ring Yorkshire on handbells–which is not only a seriously upper-level surprise method, you can’t ring it on six, you have to ring it on eight–that made me think, yes, okay, I do want to do that. This is a little like someone learning to post to the trot deciding to enter the Burghley Horse Trials. But hey.
* * *
* . . . a rather unsatisfactory book and I just wanted to know how it ended. This should be a genre, or at least a category: books you don’t really want to spend the time on but you still want to know what happened. ^ When I was younger I was one of those sad compulsive people who had to finish any book I started which, since I’ve always been a slow reader, was something of a trial, and made the starting of new books rather traumatic. I have at vast personal effort learnt NOT to finish something I am clearly not enjoying^^ but that leaves way too much grey area. The plot’s rather clever/the writing’s rather good but the characters all need boots up the backside/are all torn out of The Stereotype Handbook; the characters would be brilliant except the author writes like fitting LEGO pieces together: okay, four-spot yellow brick; two spot pink; another four-spot, green this time; ten-spot red, snap snap snap, see, I’ve made a book! –I’ve told you before that I’m a sucker for style, and I’ll read almost anything if the style makes me purr (and will not read almost anything if the style rubs me too hard in the wrong direction). At the same time I consider character the most important of the big three, style, character and plot, and a story that does badly by good characters makes me insane, aside from wanting to snatch them away from this troll of an author who doesn’t appreciate them and do something for them myself.^^^
Last night’s book–and no I’m not going to tell you what or who so don’t bother asking–is by an author I really have to give up reading. The first thing of hers I read, several years ago, had bags of style . . . and just about killed you with its worthiness: It was so sensitive! It was so perceptive! It was so . . . irritating! But it had sequinned silk bags of scintillating style. This one was less irritating. It was also nowhere near as sparklingly written: you could see the LEGO glinting through the whitewash. But it had one interesting character, and I wanted to know what happened to her.
Also there’s that thing sometimes called readability, which might be a fourth to the big three: the can’t-put-it-down factor, the must know how it ended ingredient. This book had a light, not unattractive dusting of must-know. There’s a whole group of authors who fail all plot, style and character considerations, and whom I won’t even pick up in a dentist’s waiting room or off the shelf of a self-catering cottage because if I do I’ll still have to finish, cursing myself for time wasted: literary heroin. I do tend to be one of these annoying people who wants to get something out of the books she reads. Delicious distraction will do admirably–Diana Wynne Jones and Georgette Heyer come to mind here–but the mere excision of a few hours out of my life is not sufficient. There are no hours I want excised without trace.^^^^
^ There should be a data base of spoilers
^^^The books that are the most frustrating to lay down in defeat at last are the nonfiction ones about something I would really like to know about and can’t stick the particular telling, because it’s tedious or badly organised or appallingly written . . . or just too frelling hard to get my brain around.
^^^^ This might be another way of looking at SPINDLE’S END. Nobody could be as wet as the original Sleeping Beauty. Obviously she’s been betrayed by her tellers, and needs reclaiming.
^^^ Remind me again why I have to sleep?
** There was a loose dog chasing balls on one of the rec fields in town this evening. We’d already had one encounter with it when it came over–ball in mouth–to check out hellhounds, hellhounds springing along in courbette while other owner shouted ineffectually. (At least he was shouting.) Dog eventually peeled off to have its ball thrown again and hellhounds subsided to bouncing on all fours. Next thing I knew I was being yanked round one-two, Chaos hit the end of his lead first but Darkness had shot round behind me which meant when he hit he was dragging my arm and its attendant shoulder across my back, which is not good for human physiology. Idiot other-owner had thrown the ball toward us which meant that the dog was streaking past about six feet away. Usually I’m brighter than this. Other dog owners reading this will guess why I wasn’t paying attention at the crucial moment: I was searching in the long grass at the edge of the field with my black plastic bag at the ready . . . it is here, it’s right here, I saw him, why do they like long grass? . . . I did, of course, but I can’t really blame hellhounds for a little overexcitement.^ But if pulling on a bell rope tomorrow night is bad, I am going to teach hellhounds to ring handbells. You only need three ringers. And I admit I’m starting to want an excuse to have my own handbells.^^
^ I blame them more for their desire for long grass
^^ NO! NO! NOOOOOOO!
*** It’s manifestly not only a piano lesson any more, although there ought to be a term for it more redolent of obstinacy, frustration and despair than ‘music lesson’.
† and vampires
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