Music, various
Every Sunday morning 8:45 service ring gets earlier. Although it’s particularly early on mornings that it’s already hot by 8:45, like today.*
There were five of us to begin with, five being the magic number for ringing real methods rather than Dreaded Minimus on four, although doubles methods on five are a little volatile because you should have a sixth ringing tenor-behind. But the interesting thing about today is that it was four of our good ringers—and me. Our three weakest ringers—Penelope, Leo, and me—are, with Vicky and Niall, our most regular Sunday ringers, plus Leo’s daughter Cordelia who only rings call changes. Which leaves Vicky and Niall badly outnumbered. But lately Penelope has this dranglefabbing job that keeps manifesting on Sunday mornings** and Leo and Cordelia are on holiday.***
So this morning was McKinley and four ringers who know what they’re doing. I was thinking about it as I went sweating down the road to the tower†–that one of the measurements of the acquisition of a skill is the Dread Level, and in performance skills this is often, What can you do in public? In bell ringing it’s, What can you ring for Sunday service? It’s always hairy when you ring something for service for the first time. And then it goes on being hairy for an undefined period based on how quickly you learn and how easily you panic. I learn slowly and am prone to panic. I spend my bell ringing life longing to be able to ring the next thing, whatever it is, for service, and then spending months of Sundays after I have begun to do so worrying about it. You know, nobody has threatened to throw me out of the tower in five-years-next-month of ringing but I’m still braced for it.
I’m now at the stage, theoretically at least, that I can ring the standard†† service methods, so five or six ringers with me among them can in theory just get on with it. Which is what we did this morning. It was exhilarating, nerve-wracking and creepy to be . . . just another ringer, when the ringers in question are Richard and Dorothy and Vicky and Niall, and later on Roger. Yeep. Nobody asked me if I wanted to ring the treble or inside; no one gave me first choice of bells. We just rang. Yeep. Even my somewhat cataclysmic striking was better than usual. I generally am better with a good band, for the obvious reason: if they’re perfect, I don’t have to adjust, I only have to fit in, which is easier. I’m still the one rendering the rows less than perfect. But today Dorothy complimented me on my ringing on the two. It’s a difficult bell, she said: it’s odd struck††† and the wretched rope is still bouncy after months of use.‡ I stared at her as if she’d lost her mind. Getting complimented on my striking—I mean complimented as opposed to the polite version of ‘well that was less sodding awful than usual’—is a first.
Then I dragged hot, sulky hellhounds out on a brief walk facsimile and we all went down to the mews. I mostly spare Peter’s family appearing in these virtual pages but . . . Peter’s violin-playing daughter was here this weekend. ‡‡ She’s brought her violin here occasionally before, when she was working toward a performance—she plays with a variety of little amateur groups, which ebb and flow and reform, as little amateur groups often do—but this time I asked her to bring it. I’ve been—ahem!—more or less dared to write something for the violin ‡‡‡ and my protests that I don’t know ANYTHING about the violin and can barely tell a violin from an accordion or a hellhound § have been met with the brutal ‘you can take time to learn’. Oh. So I asked if Nadia would please bring her violin and explain to me why it isn’t an accordion§§, and, furthermore, what it is, and what it does.
Fortunately Nadia has a lively sense of humour and a willingness to play Walter Lewin to my back-row nerd§§§ and she claims to have enjoyed the experience. The only blight on this happy scene is that she was obviously expecting me to play something—perfectly good piano sitting there, what do I use it for then anyway? It’s not at all an efficient shelving system, even for sheet music, and as free-standing sculpture goes it’s rather unoriginal—and she is looking forward with interest to this violin piece I claim to be going to write. You know, life was a lot simpler when I kept things to myself, instead of blowing them off in public blogs and being forced to attempt to manifest aspects of my imagination much better left to fantasy.
* * *
* Yes. The hellhounds have stopped eating again.
** I was right about her heinous role in the handbell wedding. She confessed on Friday to suggesting handbells to the café owner. Then she had to stop her from agreeing to cover that day at the café when someone asked for the day off.^ You’re going to your daughter’s wedding, Penelope said. The café owner looked blank. I’ll cover, said Penelope. Which means Penelope can’t ring the Old Eden wedding that day either. Vicky breathed a long forlorn sigh at Friday practise when the news was broken to her that Niall and I are going to be ringing handbells for a wedding on 18 September—the 18th of September being another Friday, which means finding ringers at all is going to be difficult. Vicky said nobly that she guessed it was harder to find handbell ringers than tower bell ringers. The thing that amuses me abundantly is that of course Niall is taking a day off work^^ to ring handbells. It’s not even a question.
^ Some feeble excuse about her ticket having come up for the time machine and she doesn’t want her miss her chance to sightsee the Early Cretaceous.
^^ Colin took early retirement and still dabbles in consulting. And I . . . am finishing a novel. I am.
*** I hope they’re somewhere with a bell tower, and turned up for service ring.
† Today I left early enough I did not have to sprint.
†† This is going to vary enormously by area. I ring the standard six-bell methods for this area.
††† I don’t know how much bell jargon to keep redefining, so forgive me when I get it wrong. Odd struck means that the bong happens at a nonstandard point of your pull. The rule is that the bong you hear as your thumbs pass your nose—as your hands follow the rope up and down—is your bell. But a lot of bells don’t sound at precisely that moment, which means if you want good crisp even striking—and you do—you have to adapt to your bell.
‡ New ropes are always bouncy. It’s like ringing with Slinkies.
‡‡ It is really too ridiculous to give aliases to Peter’s kids, but I can’t help myself. Everybody has an alias on this blog, except Peter and me. And Merrilee. And possibly the occasional editor. So Peter’s violin-playing daughter is going to be called Nadia, because there don’t seem to be any famous women violinists with amusing names, and Nadia Boulanger is one of my heroines. http://www.nadiaboulanger.org/
‡‡‡ None of you reading this would know anything about that, of course
§ I’m pretty reliable about hellhound identification, but the accordion might be challenging.
§§ I think I can wing it why it’s not a hellhound. Although I suspect their dogfood ingesting habits are similar.
§§§ http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/19/education/19physics.html
Or, for that matter, Nadia Boulanger to my Aaron Copeland
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