In Which I Am Saved by Footnotes
It’s been a long, crummy, pustular kind of day for a wide, sky-embracing rainbow variety of reasons, most of them unrepeatable*.
. . . In fact it’s been such a lousy day** I can’t think of anything blog-suitable that I have the energy to write about.*** So maybe I’ll just go to bed early.† . . . Although perhaps after I scare myself a little more with He Was Despised. I suspect Blondel wouldn’t wear it if I rearranged the accompaniment so the singer doesn’t have to keep coming in by herself. Meanwhile they’ve taken away my computer with Finale on it, I forgot to print out what I’ve been working on so I can’t work on it, and I have my protean music lesson with Oisin tomorrow. Maybe he could help me with the accompaniment to He Was Despised.
* * *
* But I had rung Penelope, who gets home earlier, to ask her to remind Niall^ to bring the milk for handbells^^ this evening^^^ and she said that Niall had a vicious head-cold and had come home from work early yesterday and was still fairly grotty when he went to work this morning and might cancel. Be still my heart, I said, or words to that effect. I could so use another two hours to try and drag this day out of the toxic swamp of real life.
But, as Colin said when they showed up, Niall cancel handbells? You’re raving. —He’s right. Of course I was. Niall will be climbing out of the coffin at his funeral and trying to interest the assembled in a little plain hunt.^^^^
But Colin further made the mistake of asking how I was and I started telling them and they got this boy look on their faces (oh gods! Girl stuff!) and it very nearly managed to make me laugh.^^^^^ And then practise was going to be a disaster because I haven’t had any time for some reason to do any homework this week^^^^^^ but I had promised that after we got through last Friday’s wedding I would agree to try to learn something new. Well, new-ish, in this case a touch on a different pair of bells in the eternal, the monumental bob minor.
This is one of the horrors of handbells: every pair of bells within a method is a whole different Matterhorn to scale with a blizzard in your teeth and a yeti yanking at your ankles. In the tower, while taking the plunge of ringing a different bell than the one you’ve learnt a new method on can be pretty hairy, it’s still the same method, you’re just starting from point C or D instead of point A or B. With handbells you have to remember A AND B or C AND D, (or E and F, and if you have four ringers, you also have G and H to worry about, and if you have five . . . ) as they proceed in their diabolically non parallel ways through whichever method you’re torturing yourselves with. Okay, next time I start rampaging about handbells, I’ll post a method with the double handbell lines running through it for your delectation.
So I was pried off my trebles (one and two) and put on the tenors (five and six) and at first I was ringing like someone who has had a crummy day and a book due in a fortnight and then by tea break I had somehow inadvertently got through the touch we were practising. And after tea we rang it again, and first Colin went wrong and then Niall went wrong!!!!! —But he has a head cold. So it doesn’t count. But it counts that I did not go wrong. (Only because someone else went wrong first, but as I said a little earlier/a little lower, whatever works.)
^ Look, whatever works. I’m a practical feminist.+
+ Yes, all right, to a lot of us those are fighting words. But you do choose your battles, and in this case I’d rather have the milk.
^^ Which Hannah, writing to congratulate me on a wedding well rung+ typed ‘hangbells’. I like this a lot. I may adopt it.
+ And there’s another one in the offing. Saints preserve us#, we’re beginning to become known. It’s another of these treacherous wife deals too, as I understand it: someone Anthea had been shooting her mouth off to then approached Colin about a wedding in another of these frelling churches that ought to have bells and don’t. What this country needs is more bells in its bell towers.
If Peter tells me in high glee some day that one of his bridge club members has some offspring getting married and the only thing missing is that the church has no bells, and that he said well, my wife rings handbells . . . I shall grow violent.
# No, preferably saints carry us away and hide us. Me anyway. Niall and Colin decided, while I was making the tea, that I am elected to try to fascinate Marilyn into learning hangbells. Seduce your own nubile virgins, say I. . . . Although it would be nice to have four. Hmmm. Maybe Niall and I can gang up on her next Wednesday tower practise.
^^^ Happy to provide the tea-type food.+ You want cow juice in your tea, however, you have to bring it.
+ Today we had chocolate cake and cranberry-white-chocolate-and-pecan cookies.
^^^^ He will have stipulated being buried with his hangbells, of course.
^^^^^ That was before Colin told us there was some wretched woman sniffing around about another handbell wedding.+
+ I know I’m protesting too much. But anyone with paralytic stage fright who has successfully brought off a public performance of a difficult skill will understand where I’m coming from. In the first place, what’s the point of learning a difficult skill if you’re not going to demonstrate it somehow?# And I consider music, including bell music, something you’re supposed to share. Geez. There’s nothing like self-persecution. I’m going to be buying a bed of nails soon. You can get anything on eBay.
# I still do not understand why I fell for handbells to begin with. Why? Why? I know I let myself be entrapped initially (as I’ve told you) because I felt I owed Niall for all the towers he went to with me when I was a baby ringer and desperate for more time on a rope%, but it doesn’t explain why I didn’t gnaw my way out of the trap at first opportunity%% and hightail it for Buenos Aires.%%% There must be easier ways to stave off senility. Too late now.
% And a baby ringer is a lot more welcome at a tower not her own if she’s bringing a good ringer with her
%% Possibly because there have been no opportunities.
%%% Where there are no hangbells. They’re confiscated at the border.
^^^^^^ I am, arguably, with piano, composing, voice, and two kinds of bells, taking a full frelling course load, as well as pursuing two hellhounds and a literary career. Oh, and the thirty roses. And the bulb orders have started arriving.
** Toads! Wasps! Basilisks! Missing car keys! Mmmph! Mrrrmmph! Mmmrrrrgggglepppph!
*** There are times when you don’t really want to disturb a strapping, well-knit case of the doldrums with cheeriness and light.
† With a few more chapters of TWICE BORN. Yaaay.
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