A Sunday Adventure
I’ve told you that after service ring* I go down to the florist’s, who is mad enough to open on Sundays, and scarf the . . . uh, and buy a few cut flowers**. Peter usually meets me outside the church door with his bicycle, and we trundle down to the florist’s together***.
The florist has a few potted plants with all the cut flowers. I’ve been known to indulge in these too.† Today Peter took a fancy to a salvia. Oh, it’ll go in my knapsack, he said. Er—don’t you want me to take it back to the cottage? I can bring it down in the car later, I said. No, no, he said. It’ll be fine in my knapsack.
* * *
* Suddenly we have people. We have not been having people and there have been some pretty grim times, both practise and Sunday service. Lately we’re overflowing. This has its good side and its bad side, and both of them are called Grandsire Triples. I will never learn to ring triples unless there are seven other people who know what they’re doing to ring with me. Often. I don’t learn anything except by relentless grind, and seven (or six working plus tenor-behind) other people who—crucially—know what they’re doing and come to practise^ are in short supply around here, especially as this area is rife with six-bell towers, so people tend to learn to ring six-bell things. And you can have twenty-nine people who know how to ring triples in a six-bell tower and you can still only ring six-bell methods.^^
The other problem with learning triples is that you’re not at all likely to have exactly seven^^^ other triples-ringing people at a practise; and the more people there are, the more different things are going to need to get rung to keep everyone happy, which means us lower echelons get less time on a rope. So I have been despairing lately about Grandsire Triples, which I must learn to ring, because New Arcadia is a Grandsire Triples tower. By far our most commonly rung quarters~ are Grandsire Triples quarters.~~ Meanwhile I’m stumbling on with Cambridge Minor—six bells, so I’m getting some time in at other towers—and while I still can’t ring it reliably, it is obvious that I will, eventually, and this is not at all obvious about Grandsire Triples. Which is a bit like being an aspiring Formula One driver when you’re still falling off your tricycle.
Last Friday Niall offered me a nice touch of Stedman doubles and I said, sweating, could I please have another go at Grandsire Triples (having bollixed the penetralia out of it the first time), and he blinked a couple of times (I love Stedman doubles) and called for Grandsire Triples.
And it wasn’t exactly a triumph, but it was a bit like the G in Dido’s Lament. It sounded pretty awful, but it was 
recognisable. For the first time. There’s enough there to work with (I hope). Now if seven people who can ring it will please keep showing up for New Arcadia practise. . . .
But the point about today at service ring is that there were enough of us to ring Grandsire Triples. And I went to my usual humble place on the treble with better heart than recently. And at the end we rang down all eight bells in peal and it was brilliant.
^ Very very very large pet peeve is the really good ringers who can’t be bothered to come to practise and provide ballast for beginners.
^^ Niall likes to saunter in to bell gatherings and declare that he rang major (eight working bells) at Ditherington (six bells) or Madhatterington (five bells) and when everyone looks at him like he’s lost his mind, grin. I don’t fall for this any more. He means only three other people showed up, so he forced them to ring handbells. Niall never goes anywhere without his handbells. I dread being present at these occasions because of course I can ring handbells, which makes it much harder for the other one or two to weasel out. Even Niall is a bit challenged by trying to get three people who haven’t a clue all pointed in the right direction on handbells.
^^^ Better yet eight, so you can have a minder.
~ Not that I ring quarters—much—but it’s the principle of the thing
~~ Our quarter for Daniel the other week was Grandsire Triples. And I noticed just yesterday that my first limping, terrified quarter, on the treble to bob doubles, back in my previous existence, was rung in honour of Daniel’s retirement—I have the official quarter announcement in a cheap plastic frame leaning against a bit of wall at the cottage not covered in bookshelves. I’d forgotten that bit. This was a good joke too because Daniel kept de-retiring. He had three or four quarters rung to his retirement over the years.
** Since I can’t bear to cut my own. I couldn’t bear to cut my own even when I had two and a half acres of ’em.
*** Possibly stopping at the newsagent’s to buy chocolate. Mostly Peter orders Green & Black’s Mint by the fifteen-bar shop display box^ but occasionally the system breaks down.
^ I would not joke about a serious matter like the possession of a sufficiency of chocolate.
† We’re probably also slightly suffering from the day after the day before. We went to one of the private-gardens-open-to-the-public-for-charity yesterday and it just about knocked our socks off.^ I am turning into an Evil Cow on many fronts, however, and I kept thinking, how many frelling gardeners are involved in this work of art? Among other things there was an astonishing amount of topiary, which is fabulously labour-intensive—it was also pretty charming, because there were teeny weeny blobs of topiary tucked away in corners all over the place, like there is a colony of gnomes living in the cellars, who rush out with their clippers as soon as all the dull humans are asleep, like the elves and the shoemaker.
And further on the subject of Evil Cows, my single tiny, hard pruned, semi-espalliered apple tree looks better than their orchard which furthermore has no 
peaches at all. Maybe the gnomes don’t like peaches. This fell off into my hand today. There are, I think, four or five more where it came from. Not bad for a tree two foot high that lives in a pot.
^ Perhaps that’s why I’m in sandals today. Nothing to do with the sudden return of hot.
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