July 5, 2009

Itty Bitty Triumph, Medium-Sized Disaster

 

I have no hot water.  After no hot water—when was it?  Thursday?—I twiddled with the controls* for a while, which usually makes the boiler snap to attention, and it did.   It seemed to have reset itself somehow which I knew was not a good sign, but it was roaring and gurgling again and I figure you let roaring-and-burgling boilers lie.  By morning I had hot water.  Last night . . . nothing.  Twiddled again and . . . nothing.   No roaring.  No gurgling.  Not even a whimper.  No, the whimpering was from me.  Of course this happened on a Saturday night.  And not only a Saturday night, but a Saturday night when I’m going to London on the following Monday and can’t wait in for an emergency plumber, even if there was one on offer. **

Nor did I have forty-five minutes in which to boil my tiny electric kettle 1,000,000 times and to get one medium-large pot of water slightly more than tepid on my plug-in burner . . . going to bed half frozen is not conducive to a good night’s sleep.***  So, as so often on a Sunday morning, when the alarm clock† went off I was not clawing my way back toward wakefulness in peak condition. But clawing and wakefulness did occur.

Two cups of black tea later I went juddering off to the tower.  But we were ringing at Old Eden today for arcane Anglican reasons too complex for me to fathom and, furthermore, I still had the tower key from yesterday’s wedding.  Oh, I said to myself, ah.  I had better get there early—I tend to roll up with .05 seconds to spare at our home tower, panting rather from the thirty-second flat-out sprint from the cottage door—or Vicky will worry.††

I got there ten minutes early.  Vicky was already there.†††  Well, I tried.

We were four method ringers and Cordelia, which meant call changes on five.   And then [    ] showed up, who I’m going to have to give a name, because suddenly he keeps turning up.  [    ] . . . okay, let’s call him Felix . . . is a really excellent ringer, but he leads a complicated life ‡ and for about the first two years I was ringing here I thought he was a myth because I never saw him.   I heard rumours that he rang quarters of Toplofty Plushness or Zenobia Supreme when they were having trouble getting a band‡‡, but this is nothing that concerns the hoi polloi like me.  I was quite startled when some ordinary-looking middle-aged bloke showed up one Sunday morning and everyone else called him Felix and was very glad to see him.  Oh.  Felix.  He’s not seven feet tall and I don’t see any wings.‡‡‡  Anyway maybe he’s wound up his consultancy in Japan because he’s come to more Friday practises and Sunday mornings than he hasn’t, this last month or so, and he came again this morning.

So that made five method ringers.  We rang call changes on six for a while, while Cordelia made heavy weather of the Old Eden bells, which are not the easiest or most forgiving bells in the ringing world§, and then Niall, who was in charge, suggested doubles without the tenor behind, and asked Felix if he would call it.  There are lots of doubles methods but the two commonest basic ones are plain bob and Grandsire.  Plain bob is easier.  Plain bob is safer.  Grandsire is prettier to listen to.  Most people prefer Grandsire.  Okay, said Felix.  What do you want?  Grandsire? 

Everyone turned and looked at me.  Well, Niall, Vicky and Penelope did, because they’d all been there a few months ago, which is the last time I tried to ring Grandsire inside without the tenor behind on a Sunday morning and it had been a really ugly disaster.  Breaths bated.  Someone could have told me to take the treble—as we stood, Penelope was on it—or I could have been sensible and knocked Penelope off it.  But for pity’s sake I should be able to ring Grandsire inside by now, even on a Sunday morning without a sixth bell to cover.  And on the Old Eden bells which are not, as previously observed, the friendliest?  McKinley, how death-defying are you feeling here?  And have I mentioned that I’m not at my best in the morning?  The holes that the ME leaves in your neural pathways seem larger and more abyssal in the morning. 

Robin? said Vicky.

I’m thinking, I said.  Okay.  —And I grabbed the two.

And I did it.  I rang a touch of Grandsire doubles on a Sunday morning without a cover bell and it had Horrible Singles in it and I had a Most Horrible Single, which is when you hang around in thirds for a very long time and then have to remember to go down to the front and lead again.  Long thirds in Grandsire are like the Evil Three-Four Down Single in bob minor:  the hobgoblins of little ringers.  Us little ringers can hear them gibbering in the rafters. 

But I did it.  Beam. 

And the awful truth is, because I am an insane bell junkie, that in balance, I’d probably rather be able to ring Grandsire doubles inside for Sunday service than have a boiler that works.  You can just fix a boiler.  Well, eventually.  I’ll phone tomorrow morning and see just how long I’m going to be taking showers at the mews. 

* * *

 * It’s one of these cascading menu things.  Almost none of the choices make any sense to me, so I tend to press the button up and down a few times like a kid on a lift/elevator and then choose at random.  Down at the bottom of the little black box—although in this case it’s beige—in large emphatic letters it says:  consult manual.  Generally speaking my predecessor was brilliant about keeping crucial paperwork—she kept all the Aga stuff, she had the phone number of her carpenter^, the installers of various windows, double-glazed and Velux, the names of the paint she’d used both indoors and outdoors^^ . . . but if there’s a manual for the boiler, I never found it. 

^ Who when applied to did not want to build millions of bookshelves 

^^ I’m pretty sure I’ve mused here previously on the enigma that is other people’s taste as manifested by my predecessor’s choice of decorator colours..  The indoor was—was—lavender grey, sort of Caucasian zombie skin, and guaranteed, if you lingered carelessly in its company, to make you look as if you died six months ago too.  The exterior paint is Caucasian sunburn.+  I perceive a pattern . . . and not a commendable one. 

+ I still haven’t had the outside repainted.  I was going to do that and put in granite kitchen counters—speckly grey-white, not black—and then I bought Third House.  Oops.  Meanwhile the cracks in the plastic or vinyl or whatever it is they make ordinary kitchen counters out of, that is at the cottage now, are getting rather extreme.   The plastic countertops at Third House may be moderately hideous but they aren’t cracked.  I want to say ‘unfortunately’ but I can’t afford to replace any of this anyway so it’s all moot. 

** Twenty four hour emergency call out plumbers do exist.  If you want to take out a second or fifteenth mortgage to pay for them.  I may be taking a lot of showers at the mews in the near future.  Or even the not-so-near future. 

*** I turned my electric blanket on.  In July.  Although it’s perfectly true the English weather might necessitate this, it was not the weather in this case.  I also turned the Aga back on.  This was more of an adventure than I wanted at that time of night/morning, but it did eventually deign to forgive me turning it off and refire.  Which means I could boil a lot more water tonight . . . but I think I’ll have a shower at the mews. 

† Which is to say my 24-hour digital kitchen timer.  We’ve had several conversations on this blog about measuring the passage of time. 

†† Ahem.  Or rather, Vicky will toast me over a slow flame.  A bastion of the old-fashioned virtues, is our Vicky, and punctuality is one of them. 

††† But I didn’t get toasted. 

‡ My feeling is slightly, don’t we all?, but it’s true that I don’t do consultancy work in Japan. 

‡‡ Vicky, speaking of Vicky, has decreed that we should ring a quarter for Peter’s OBE.  I thought it was a great idea till I found out Vicky is assuming I want to ring.  Gah.  The thing is that I would like the quarter, you know, successfully got, more than I would like to ring in it.  If I were a better ringer or I didn’t have ME, or preferably both, I’d be learning Zenobia Supreme right now.  I suspect Vicky is going to do her Carrying It All Before Her thing and I’ll find myself in a quarter band the end of the month, and if we lose it because I fold two-thirds of the way through, I will have to find a pond to drown myself in. 

‡‡ Bat or feathered.  You have to be cautious about the sources of genius. 

§ Among other things they are on plain bearings.  Someone—drat her—actually did ask me what plain bearings were and I’ve wasted some time trying to find a better definition than the one I would give you—and, preferably, a diagram—but I have failed so far.   Very roughly, a plain bearing is just a metal ball that grinds back and forth in a little groove cut into the bell frame.  The preferred modern alternative is a ball bearing, which is a practical attempt toward frictionlessness.  Plain-bearing bells are not only heavier to pull, they’re more erratic:  heavy one stroke, flighty the next.  You’re either frantically trying to keep them from coming down on you or frantically trying to heave them back from overbalancing in the other direction—which means bashing the stay.  Bash the stay too many times, and you break it.   Whereupon you will be tied up in the belfry while a very, very, very long peal is rung.

July 5, 2009 | Filed Under bell ringing, perversity of life, real world 

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Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better. -- Samuel Beckett