Not a Social Creature
I’ve finally got rid of all my friends! Yaaaaay! No more friends! Go away! Leave me alone!*
I put the last one on the train back to London this afternoon** between opening the tower for a visiting band of ringers and going back to lock up after they’d left, then raced down to the mews for something resembling lunch and back to the tower to ring this weekend’s frelling wedding. This weekend’s frelling wedding would have been quite popular with me since the bride went in on time . . . and the wedding got out only fifteen minutes late*** . . . but unfortunately we were a good band. The bitter aloes in this case is that the goodness of the band is significantly my own fault: Vicky had gone off to Outer Mongolia† leaving me an incomplete band for this wedding she had ordained I was responsible for. Which meant—I am/was sure I blogged about this but I can’t find it—I was frantically phoning round last weekend for The Eighth Ringer, when all the usual suspects were going on one of two bell outings scheduled for today.†† And when I finally found someone who said yes††† a cold clammy thought briefly slimed across my consciousness, to wit, all of these people are good ringers. We could ring a method with me quailing on the treble. No, no, I said to myself bracingly: we ring call changes for weddings, it’s safer.
But the truth is that we usually ring call changes because we usually don’t have a method band. Edward looked around thoughtfully at the assembled this afternoon and said, we can ring Grandsire Triples!
I moaned quietly. Last weekend, when I was having cold clammy thoughts, I was feeling relatively frisky. Today I was on autopilot, and not top-end autopilot at that, but the clothes-pegs and baling-twine model.‡ Here I had been sitting on the grass verge outside the church going limp(er) with relief that all of the other seven ringers had showed up‡‡ and Edward has to go and spoil it.
Having ME is also a bit like being a pre-prince Cinderella: what can you get away with without your wicked stepmother finding out? In this case I got away with Grandsire Triples, although it was a bit like walking hellhounds on ice: whoop whoop whoooooooop. And it wasn’t the best Grandsire Triples you ever heard: we were a good band but we were not a band who’d rung together before, and while crack ringers ring perfectly on any bells and with any other crack ringers, the rest of us need to scrabble our way into the style of the rest of the band. But this wedding should have felt well belled, and that’s what matters.
The next thing that matters is surviving Sunday service ring. . . .
* * *
* Come back! But not all the same week when I have a novel due in two and a half months!
** I don’t think I’m even going to get a blog post out of this one. Feh. She reads the blog but she’s not a member of the forum. I think she has a life. We don’t discuss this the way one does not discuss Uncle Barnabas who went to Kashmir to live among the wild yaks.^ In this the new Blog Era of my life-facsimile I find myself identifying with the t shirt that says: A LIFE? Cool. Where do I download one of those?^^
^ I think Uncle Barnabas sounds pretty interesting, but then a SF&F writer+ isn’t a topic for conversation in much of polite society either.++
+ Genre cooties! Ewwwwwww!
++ Second most common question after ‘Where do you get your ideas?’ is probably ‘Have you ever written a real book?’ Answer: Have you ever considered surgery to remove that foot from your mouth? I realise it’s a drastic solution but . . .
^^ Have I told you that I went to an astrologer a little over two years ago? She came highly recommended and I thought she might provide a new angle on the blasted ME, since addressing it as an illness wasn’t getting me much of anywhere. Most of what she told me about my background, my character and my weak places was not news, which is to say she is good at her job, and I was rather hopeful of any predictive geometry she might supply. But the thing which at the time I thought proved she’d got her charts crossed was that she said that the biggest thing in my near future was in the eleventh house and it concerned groups and my relationship to groups and that a group would become very important to me. A group! I said. No way! I don’t do groups! Bell ringing is about bells and it’s just too bad about the people! One person over for tea is straining the system+!
Six months later I started the blog.
+ And several people in quick succession is rude. I’ve just had an email from a friend talking about a manic weekend including a party for fifty and I’m thinking *+&^%$£!!!!????? FIFTY? At the old house we sat down about 25 to dinner very occasionally on high days and holidays and that was waaaaay enough, thank you. Remember I said that when we moved out of the old house we decided we wanted small this time? Three small houses means bookshelf space but a total inability to seat more than about six people at a time. And that’s at the mews. At the cottage I can no longer get the third person in because of the hellhound crate.
*** Can we pleeeeease have a system whereby once the wedding has been beaten out successfully on the anvil of in-law expectations we mere bell ringers can be informed whether it’s the brisk no-nonsense model which lasts about half an hour or the version which includes six hymns, four readings^, three solos by the bride’s cousins^^ and a sheep herding demonstration by the groom’s dog which will go on for a good forty-five minutes at least, so we can judge our timing?
^ I will refrain from listing My Top/Bottom Five/Ten Least Favourite Soppy Readings, Which I Am Glad I Am Too Far Away to Be Able to Hear. I will remark however that weddings seem to bring the worst out in a lot of people who are perfectly sound citizens in other arenas of endeavour.
^^Which serve mainly to demonstrate imperfect mastery of their instruments
† I think Uncle Barnabas gets to Mongolia occasionally. I should have given her his mobile phone number.
†† There was no doubt some other wedding ringer organiser cursing the outing that brought twenty ringers to our tower today.
††† Poor Amy had only just got back from holiday about two hours before and her resistance was low.
‡ I’d already forgotten the change to make it possible to pay everybody. Sigh.
‡‡ I knew there were at least two of us: driving back from the mews I caught Niall creeping along the hedgerow and nailed him. But I don’t have Vicky’s authority: when she asks you to do something, your hand reaches of its own volition to write it down in your diary. People could say ‘yes’ to me and never have quite got their attention turned away from the fact that they have fifty people coming to dinner next weekend. I acknowledge that if I had fifty people coming to dinner even Vicky couldn’t distract me from running away from home.
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