All Bells All the Time
I didn’t oversleep this morning. Whereupon Fate said, whooooa! Can’t have that! —So the first thing that happened is that the t-shirt (because it’s still hot at noon) and little sweatery cover-up (because it will be cold by tea-time, and probably in various towers) I laid out last night will not do together in daylight.* Feh. Blundering noises, accompanied by helpful hellhounds.
And then when we finally got out there, I having decided that we still had time to get in Wolfgang and go somewhere scenic for our morning hurtle, all the vehicles in southern England were on the roads around New Arcadia. It can’t all be the frelling fair, can it?** And having finally slunk down a farm track I have slunk down successfully many many times before*** I met a great dranglefabbing tractor the size of an aircraft carrier hauling a cart the size of two aircraft carriers. Whereupon I had to back up about a mile and a half, because he certainly wasn’t going to, and farm tracks are often a trifle under-furnished with passing places generous enough to get all of your modest little elderly Golf wedged into so three aircraft carriers can squeeze by.
I still made it to Gallowglass in plenty of time. One of the tangential pleasures of ringing before a wedding is mingling with the waves of arriving attendees.† Lots of really good dresses at this wedding, including a few eye-popping dazzlers of the better-her-than-me variety.†† And mostly everyone looked like they were ready to have a good time. I have by now rung a lot of weddings, and it’s interesting—and a little dismaying—how many wedding mobs look at best ill at ease and at worst miserable. Cheer up, guys! There’s going to be cake!
There were in fact only four of us bell ringers to begin with. Four, as I have cause to know from too many Sunday mornings at New Arcadia, sounds a little thin. But the picturesque factor at Gallowglass is extreme: four bells with this background will do—and there was a pelting of feet on the stair and then there were five. We rang the bride in (she was late, of course) and then the other four rope-pullers either put their fancy shoes back on and slid into a pew, or went out and lay in the grass. I stayed in the tower and read an ARC.†††
The wedding ran long (of course), but whoever it was who had too much to say got a good laugh for their pains, as I could hear through the floor, and it gave our sixth ringer time to come panting in from her first wedding of the day—which had run late ( . . . of course). And then I had positively two whole hours!!! before I had to sprint off to my next campanological appointment.
They were early. Gah. I got there and found my tower wreathed in visiting ringers staring at the locked door. Their boss lady must have seen the expression on my face—the expression of someone having an inward vision of being drawn and quartered for failing to let a visiting band in expeditiously—because she said hastily no, no, don’t worry, we’re early.
Vicky had told me that they were a good band and it would be no hardship to stick around and listen to them. I had my (second) ARC with me, but I was pretty riveted from the boss lady’s first call, which was for Yorkshire: gleep. Yorkshire is what you ring when you can ring touches of Cambridge in your sleep.‡ Actually I aspire to Yorkshire. A lot of those ratbag ‘surprise’ methods are just horrible mind-destroying Lovecraftian‡‡ monsters, but I had had a kind of road to Damascus moment over Yorkshire, several years ago now, when Niall had taken me off to a tower I hadn’t rung at before, and they rang Yorkshire. Have I told you this story? That was back in the days when I was still assuming that I was going to be a nice little middle-of-the-road Grandsire and plain bob ringer—I wasn’t going to ring Kent, let alone Cambridge, let alone anything beyond Cambridge, and I was absolutely not going to learn to conduct.‡‡‡ And I had been standing there listening to the home band ring Yorkshire when I was suddenly seized by the hideously inconvenient notion that I wanted to ring that some day. Whatever it was. Yorkshire Surprise Major? Oh. Okay. Give me a few years. . . . Must be something about the air around that tower. I haven’t been back.
Today’s visitors invited me to ring with them. This was after the Yorkshire and an extended touch of Stedman Triples and a few other vertiginous feats of agility and supernatural skill. No, no, I squeaked, you have plenty of ringers and I don’t want to deprive you. You’d be very welcome, said the boss lady. I did not say, not after you heard me ring, but I thought it. And I locked up after them and crept home to some hellhounds who felt that this going off and leaving them trick had gone quite far enough. And at present I’m hoping that we do not have exactly eight ringers tomorrow morning, or Niall will call for Grandsire Triples and they might try to bully me into ringing inside. . . .
* * *
* This is a quotidian problem. I am generally speaking a lot more awake at night when the light is untruthful than I am in the morning when I need to be getting dressed. The last thing I need in the morning is to have to make deep, far-reaching decisions like what I’m going to wear. I thought I was ever so clever when I hit on the laying-out-the-night-before wheeze. Some Sunday mornings I just have to go to service ring in clothes that should not be seen together!!!! And the wrong All Stars!!!!! and sort it out later.
** Do the craft stalls now include bespoke kitchen design, Astroturf and a choice of fittings and dimensions for sewer pipes? I’m less sorry to have missed it this year than I thought.
*** Which helps to explain why poor Wolfgang keeps needing new tyres. The rims, I mean, which bend. What do they make them out of? Recycled chewing gum? It’s not like I’m carrying seventeen concrete-enhanced Rottweilers in the back seat and hitting the ruts and potholes at 60 mph.
† It also means that if you haven’t been to that church in a while and have approached it by a slightly unusual route^ and have been instructed to park in an unfamiliar car park, you don’t have to worry about where you’re going: you just follow the fancy clothes. People dressed for weddings tend to look like they could only be on their way to a wedding. Or a Buckingham Palace garden party, but that’s less likely in Gallowglass. Unless, of course, I was very confused by the storm drain lorry^^ and am in London. No, no, this doesn’t look like London.
^ See: storm drain lorry
^^ And the bespoke kitchen design and sewer-pipage vans.
†† No pink though.
††† Long wedding? Great. Stop apologising and go away.
‡ An additional barbarity about Yorkshire is you can’t ring it on fewer than eight bells. Cambridge minor—six bells—is turning my brain into rice pudding. The idea of Cambridge major (eight bells) makes me cry. Yorkshire . . .
‡‡ What Lovecraft could have done with method bell ringing.
‡‡‡ Nor was I going to wake up one morning with a splitting headache and remember that I was now a Deputy Ringing Master.
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