No Rest for the Wicked
So, Friday morning, I get this phone call from Niall, who wants to know if I got PEGASUS turned in. Niall does not ring up to chat, and I gave this query the shrift it deserved. What Niall really wanted to know is if we can have handbell practise a little early next Thursday because . . . wait for it . . . he’s going to ring a full peal on handbells with someone else after practise with Colin and me. Peals on handbells take less time than peals on tower bells—because you can wiggle a few ounces of metal a lot faster than you can pull several hundred pounds of it on the end of a rope—but it’s still three hours. It’s three hours ringing handbells having just rung handbells for two hours. Can you say ‘dangerous fruit loop’?* And while I am distracted with astonishment—and because he has me at a disadvantage because I cancelled handbells last week—he says (and I have discussed this with Colin, when Niall is about to try to pull one over on you he talks faster), wouldn’t you like to ring handbells with Titus on Monday?
I think I may have acquiesced to this. Oops.
I take hellhounds for a hurtle. I get back to a message on my phone machine from Colin, saying, uh, do you remember we were talking about another handbell wedding? It’s next week, and Mandy needs to know if we’re going to do it, because it’s her wedding gift if we are. —Gah.** Well, it’s nice of Colin to check, but I already agreed to it. I just didn’t know we were on. I was sort of hoping whoever it was would come to their senses.
Friday noon I have a frelling (tower) wedding to ring.*** I tottered down the road telling myself, it’s a wedding. We’ll ring call changes. No big deal. I get there and it’s seven good ringers and me. So we rang a twenty minute touch of plain bob triples, which is a long time to concentrate when you have no brain. I am, of course, on the treble, but I hold my line when one or two of the inside ringers show a tendency to drift. Colin, who was conducting, says to me afterward, the problem with you, McKinley, is that any time anything goes wrong you think it’s your fault. Odds are that it is, I reply.
Friday afternoon I have my coughcoughcough piano lesson with Oisin, the Extremely Adaptable Music Teacher†. He was playing the piano when I arrived. Name the composer! he sang out as I let myself in. No, no, I don’t do that! I said. It was very, very, very nice, however, whoever wrote it. He got to the end and I said, in my best appreciative-audience way, are you sight reading that, you abominable man, or do you already know it? Name the composer, he said. Very one track mind, our Oisin. I don’t know! I said. I can’t do composers! It’s okay, he said, you can have several guesses.†† Beethoven, I said, being fairly sure it wasn’t Beethoven, partly because Oisin is playing it (not a Beethoven fan) but also because it sounds more Beethovenesque than Beethoven, and if it were Beethoven I should recognise it. Nope, he said. Later. Schubert, I said, daring greatly. Yes, he said.††† So he let me live. After he’d pointed out how much subtler it is than Beethoven. And then he sent me home with two (easy! Not Schubert! Not Beethoven!) piano duets to learn. In the first place, I am missing actually playing. Time is time is time is not, and I tend to be composing—and, lately, singing. But in the second place, at present I have no brain for composing, so this is obviously the moment to reinstate some finger exercises. And I’m not sure when we came to the conclusion that duets are a good truncheon to belabour my stage fright with, aside from the fact that duets amuse Oisin‡, but in fact I like having him doing something besides sitting there listening to me. So: duets.
Friday night . . . I missed sacred home tower practise. What dregs of energy there were to spare had been burned up by the frelling wedding . . . and I had a friend coming today, Saturday, who doesn’t quite count as a tidy freak, but possibly only because she’s married to someone who makes me look like the ideal of Spartan simplicity. I stayed down at the mews while practise was going on because I couldn’t bear to listen to the bells when I ought to be there myself . . . by which time‡‡ I had entirely forgotten that I wanted to get back to the cottage early to do a little housework.
So I was hoovering the dranglefabbing stairs at rmggmble in the morning . . . went to bed late, got up early, as I count early, to get the hellhounds through stage one of the day’s quota of hurtling, bundled said (protesting) hellhounds (hey! That was only half an hour!) into the back of Wolfgang with seconds to spare to get to the train on time and . . . Wolfgang was making a funny noise. A very funny noise. A very very funny ominous noise. AAAAAAUGH. So I stopped at the mews and rang poor Molly‡‡‡ and told her to get a cab and I’d pay for it . . . and then I rang the RAC§. And then wasted the hour it took for them to arrive worrying that my rice krispies would start talking to me next§§ and/or that the chipmunk/alien colony§§§ under the fan belt would have moved on by the time he got there. Fortunately he found a piece of gravel tucked into the brake lining (?) and it was making a funny noise—Molly, the hellhounds and I had fled the scene and left Peter to cope. So we then had a car again in time for Molly to check the internet for sinister transport updates and lose her nerve about when she needed to leave to get back, because London is closing down on weekends between now and 2012 while they rebuild the frelling city for the frelling Olympics. ¤ So I took her straight back to the train station after tea at the mews which meant she never frelling saw the freshly hoovered at rmggmble a.m. stairs, I whooped home again just in time for my next ungleblarging wedding ring, saying to myself, it’s a wedding, we’ll ring call changes, we have months of weddings when we exclusively ring call changes. . . .
Not only was it another seven good ringers and me situation, it was seven good ringers and me and one of the good ringers was having a drastically bad day. There was one memorable moment when I think only Niall and I were in the right place—and I only knew I was because I was reasonably sure I was passing Niall and he gave me the ‘you and me against the universe’ nod—just before we fired out. Not me boss. Not meeeeeeee!
I still have to practise the piano and sing a little before I Go. To. Bed. Early. No doubt there will be seven good ringers and me at service ring tomorrow morning too.
* * *
* I find Niall a very relaxing friend really. It’s comforting to have a few people around you who are even more nuts than you are.
** I like Mandy. She’s a very, very good tower ringer, and patient and funny with it. I will even ring handbells for her friends’ wedding. On the grounds that she then owes me a favour for the rest of her life. Mwa ha ha ha ha.
*** She was going in as I came past with hellhounds. She looked incredibly nervous and . . . nice. I don’t see the brides I ring for up close all that often, and it’s not always a moment when I feel better about the future of humanity when I do. I admit I was predisposed in her favour because I’d already seen their getaway car and it was a perfectly ordinary car, if cleaner than average, with a few white ribbons on it^ but they were paying for bells. Good priorities. Excellent priorities.
^ And yes I know it was the getaway car and not the one that all the relatives they don’t like follow in, because I saw her and all her skirts climbing into it later.
† Last week, as I recall, we mostly sat in his kitchen while I drank his tea and raved about the insanity of writing as a career. He being another of these self employed free lance beggars himself he makes sympathetic noises with extreme accuracy.
†† How many is ‘several’?
††† One of the Impromptus. Sigh. Oh to be talented and have a lot of time to practise.
‡ Keeping the teacher amused is very important
‡‡ I was ordering Christmas presents on line. And socks. And . . . sheet music. Oops.
‡‡‡ I forgive the inventor of mobile phones for moments like these. And while if worst came to worst I’m afraid I would tell Peter to stick it in his ear, I would much rather have him happy and reassured by the fact that I carry the RaspBerry with me when hellhounds and I are cavorting in the empty far-flung reaches of the solar system, I mean Hampshire.
§ Royal Something About Car Rescue
§§ I have a foolproof way around this however. I don’t eat rice krispies.
§§§ In England, these are equivalent
¤ Not a fan
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