Sunny Spring Sunday*
I am not sleeping very well lately** so 8 a.m. was earlier this morning than it sometimes is.*** It was one of those ‘remind me about clothing’ mornings. I can build dangerously strong cups of tea in my coma, but getting dressed is harder. All that fine motor control. Also I like clothing. This means that if I finish waking up several hours later and discover that my earrings don’t match† and furthermore that pink does not go with that green aaaaaugh I will be deeply unhappy. I try to get around this by laying out Sunday morning’s clothing Saturday night, but the problem there is that things look different in daylight. I woke†† up this morning and discovered—horrors—that that yellow shirt CLEARLY did not go with that yellow cardigan†††, what can I have been thinking of? I was still trying to decide if the embroidery on my black shirt is orange or scarlet as I tottered toward the tower—it had better be orange, the cardigan I am still wearing is orange‡—at which there were eight of us ringers, I mean proper method ringers who could be expected to ring . . . proper methods. Whereupon Leo and I dove for the treble and the tenor‡‡ and we spent most of our forty minutes ringing Grandsire Triples‡‡‡. During the pause before the final touch Vicky, on the number two bell, said, I’ll just swap with Robin at the end and we can go straight down—in other words ring down in peal, all eight of us together. Which, as I’m sure I’ve told you (many) times before is the most thrilling and terrific noise—if you get it right. But it takes insane amounts of precision control and listening, and I’m (a) physically jerky and (b) have no ear whatsoever.§ Ringing up and down in peal has been one of the various banes of my existence since I started ringing again five and a half years ago.
The funny thing is that I’ve only just noticed that my ringing-up-and-down-in-peal nodule has got a tiny bit lumpier. The frustrating part is that whatever it is it’s all happening at some kind of sub-intellectual, instinctive level, and while I’ll take what I can get, what you want as you learn stuff is tools so that you can rebuild when you break something. The new bulge on my nodule means that I’m following better—you want to stick to the bell in front of you in perfect delayed parallel unison§§—but I don’t know why I’m following better, so the next time I fall out—and there will be a next time—I won’t have any better an idea what to do about it than I did before my nodule ate its Wheaties and grew.
I was not, however, ready, this morning, as we were ringing rounds at the end of our final touch, for Vicky to say, with a gay, careless laugh, oh, Robin can lead down. —Eeeep. However, seven of us knew exactly what we were about, and there’s an argument that there were seven people ringing down in peal with Vicky leading, and gods only know what the treble was up to. But—no—it wasn’t that bad, largely due to my doing exactly what Vicky told me to do.§§§ But it actually sounded pretty nice.#
. . . And not only did the hellhounds get a sunny hurtle this morning I got out into the garden this afternoon.## The frelling weather clouded over at lunchtime and I was dancing around yelling, No! No! No! No! —and apparently this was the correct supplicant presentation because the sky cleared off again. At the cottage I’m kind of in that early-spring lunatic phase where there seems to be so much empty space, THIS year I’m really going to get the garden ORGANISED . . . but all the stuff I’ve ordered has only barely started streaming in. And there are also something like thirty heeled-in roses waiting expectantly at Third House. . . .
* * *
* It’s Luke’s birthday today—and it’s sunny and springlike where he is too.^ His family—including, by special dispensation, the dog—are having a party at the hospital. There’s been a little good news in the last fortnight, but it’s in the ‘okay, well, that’s hugely better than nothing’ category rather than the ‘YAAAAAY! He’s going to be all right!’ category. Please keep those candles burning.
^ It’s also three months to the day of the accident.
** I’ve ranted my rant to you about The Wisdom of the Body, haven’t I? I am not impressed at the wisdom of any system wherein, when the victim is having a worse, rather than a better, time with her disease/condition/syndrome/whatever the hell ME is, one of whose major defining symptoms is exhaustion, she can’t sleep.
*** AND IT’S GOING TO BE REALLY, REALLY, REALLY EARLY NEXT WEEKEND when the UK goes on Let’s Muck Around with the Same Daylight Time. And it’s going to be even worse than that because Niall seems to have got my blood-stained signature on a contract to ring ungleblarging handbells next Saturday morning. I’m pretty sure I’ve told you about Titus—I must have told you something since he already has an alias—he’s one of these seriously amazing ringers, but he had a stroke twelve or so years ago and only has one ringworthy hand left.^ He’s lately started ringing handbells—both bells in one hand—and Niall goes to Saturday morning handbells at Titus’ every week. I keep saying I’ll go—for one thing I like Titus and don’t see him any more—and then finding ways to weasel out of it. Saturday morning. And it’s a schlep over there, and one of the ways I attempt to keep my bell habit under control is by refusing to commute. But they’re going to be short this weekend. Oh . . . well, I said. Okay. I guess . . . at which point Niall said great simultaneously with Vicky saying, you two aren’t forgetting the wedding ring at 1:30, are you? —AAAAAUGH. We’re just going to have to go earlier, so we can get back earlier. I’ll pick you up at 8:30, Niall said, waving the contract in the air so the blood would dry faster. I have to hurtle hellhounds before I go.^^
Perhaps this will make going to bed early Saturday night easier.
^ His home tower is my old home tower, the last flight of stairs to the ringing chamber of which is a ladder up a tunnel. The boys got together and figured out a pulley system . . . and Titus would have one of the bells next to the wall, and brace himself against it and . . . He was still one of their best ringers.
^^ Look, 8:30 is seriously early to me. Niall, who not infrequently gets up at 5:30 for work+, tries not to snigger.
+Like Diane in MN for dog shows. If I had to get up at 5:30 to go to a dog show I’d change dogs.~
~ There are a lot of lurcher shows around here. No.
† Unless of course I want them not to match
†† ‘Woke’ used in its most generous, all-inclusive sense
††† Although it may have been my eyes. Yellow on a Sunday morning is probably kind of a stretch.
‡ Dark orange. Almost scarlet orange.
‡‡ The easy bells, right? I don’t know what Leo’s Sunday-morning braindead excuse is. —Yes I do: three children.
‡‡‡ This is the big problem with being a grind. At the moment I’m grinding at Cambridge which means I haven’t rung Grandsire Triples inside in probably a couple of months . . . which means I do not want to have a go at it on a Sunday morning. Especially on a Sunday morning on less than my usual amount of less-than-usual-because-it’s-Sunday sleep.
§ Yes. Very challenging for someone who attempts to create music of any sort.
§§ Except of course if they fall out of their proper place in which case you smoothly shift to following the bell in front of them. HA HA HA HA.
§§§ If it’s only the treble that’s being a trifle erratic, for ringing in peal, the other seven heavier and deeper-voiced bells will pretty well drown you out. This is not the case in method ringing, when each bell sounds individually.
# It’s therefore for Luke. I’ve really got into the retroactive dedication business, this last three months. Almost anything that goes well is hastily pledged to Luke. A good ring, certainly. But a good hurtle counts, especially when it includes a good recall—the kind where hellhounds are nearly invisible on the far side of the field and you call them and they spin in their tracks and sprint toward you—definitely worth a dedication. A good cup of tea—since I take my tea seriously—that goes for Luke. A particularly good evening’s study of homeopathy when I feel I’ve learnt something . . . a good bar or four or twelve of music, either composed or performed . . . and certainly a good day at PEG II.
## Maybe all that extra fresh air will help me sleep tonight.
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