Grandsire Triples
So, do you want the good news or the bad news? The good news is that Chaos is better. The bad news is that he’s still streaming, just not as violently.* The good news is that I rang two touches of Grandsire Triples at practise tonight. The bad news is that I’m spending pretty much all day in one or another bell tower tomorrow.
My mild martyrdom on the subject of bells and Saturday began some weeks ago. You’ve got it that we have more bells and bell towers in this area than we have ringers?** Gallowglass has a wedding tomorrow with two major, ahem, strikes against it: first they want to ring the bride both in as well as out. Usually you only ring ’em out. Ringing them in too means getting there half an hour before the wedding is even due to start and beginning your hanging around and hanging around and hanging around, because the bride is late*** and the priest has too much to say and there are twelve more hymns as well as the trained seals that they didn’t warn your tower secretary about when they made the booking for bells, really early. At least, I suppose, if you sign on for ringing both before and after you know you’re going to be waiting FOREVER.† When you’re only ringing after you tend to fall into the error of hoping that maybe this wedding will run almost on time and you can get home again before the hellhounds have forgotten what you look like.
Billy explained to me mournfully that the bride’s dad is someone Gallowglass owes a lot of favours, which is why they want to lay on the extra ring for his daughter. But the second strike against this wedding is that tomorrow is the Maunderford Fair and pretty well all of Hampshire†† goes. Gallowglass has six bells. Let me put it this way: I’m surprised they’d found five people to ring and were only looking for one.††† But Billy is a good guy and has rung many weddings at Old Eden when we needed pairs of hands. Besides, he likes the hellhounds. So I said okay. I usually go to the Maunderford Fair myself once every other year or so; my liking for the critters and the craft stalls‡ is pretty bluntly balanced with my loathing for the traffic and the crowds.‡‡ I was due to go this year, but that’s all right; if I go at all, I tend to go last thing, when the mob has thinned, and the gatekeeper will let you in for half price, and if you’re lucky the craft stall magnates are putting stuff on sale so they don’t have to take it home. A one o’clock wedding isn’t going to run that late. . . .
And then tonight at bell practise I was innocently sitting down and pulling out my method book to do a fast hopeful brush-up of Grandsire Triples while latecomers straggled in. I made the mistake of glancing up and discovered that Vicky was fixing me with a gleaming and hypnotic eye. Uh oh. Could you possibly, she said in accents of deep and thrilling emotion, could you possibly let a visiting band into the tower tomorrow afternoon at 5:45? And out again at 6:30?
Rats. Well . . . yes. Or anyway I have not yet heard of a wedding that lasts four and a half hours‡‡‡ although there’s always a first time. Is it possible I had other ideas about my Saturday afternoon? The Maunderford Fair? Never mind, I’d probably only spend money. A few pages of PEG II? Planting some of the stuff that mysteriously turned up in a box yesterday§? Fribble. Clearly it is my destiny to hang out, and around, with bells.
Vicky, who would be dangerous at the head of an army, then inquired, lightly and offhandedly, if I was going on the Oxford trip next Saturday—forty two towers and six hundred and seventy six bells in eight hours—and I said no, I couldn’t be gone all day like that, whereupon she turned on me like a striking snake and said then could you let another visiting band in and out during the afternoon?
Sigh. A Deputy Ringing Master’s work is never done.
However. I had remonstrated with Niall during the drive over to my profound humiliation last Monday night with Colin’s frelling mini ring, that he wasn’t letting me ring Grandsire Triples on nights when we even had a triples band, which is by no means every Friday. I don’t care about Cambridge!§§ I said. New Arcadia is a Grandsire Triples tower! I need to be able to ring Grandsire Triples! And I only learn by grind!§§§ Stop pretending I’m going to pick it up by osmosis and a trance-like communion with the spirits of generations of previous New Arcadia ringers! I need to ring Grandsire Triples!
So tonight there were exactly eight of us (plus one whoops-where-do-I-put-my-hands beginner) by the time the early comers had got all eight of the bells rung up. And Niall looked around and said, Grandsire Triples! Robin, choose your bell!
It was, as I have said on similar beginning-to-catch-on bell evenings previously, not a thing of beauty, my ringing of Grandsire Triples inside. But I did it. And I did it twice, which means it wasn’t an accident the first time, and I did not have a minder, and I was not yelled at, although a certain amount of kindly prompting went on. I’m not going to be ringing Grandsire Triples inside for service any time soon, since clangs and caroms are frowned on for service rings. But since it was only about two months ago when I was still coming home from Friday eight-bell practise in despair that I was learning dranglefabbing Cambridge and couldn’t get my head around mere easy-going friendly Grandsire Triples, this is progress.
Now if only Chaos would crap solid.
* * *
* With hellhounds in your life, you learn to differentiate these things.
** I wish southdowner would send us some of her spares. I hear about these twenty-people-at-practise nights. That’s just greedy when we’ve got towers that can’t even hold regular practises for lack of ringers.^
^ This is aside from Madhatterington, where the burning angel with the pyro-alloy sword has written in letters of fire over the door of the tower, Thou shalt not have practise, for it doth Annoy the urban incomers who Think They Own the Place.
*** The bride is always late. The only time—the one in a thousand times—that she is not late, is the time that half the designated ringers get caught in the traffic jam caused by the articulated lorry containing 1,000,000 small plastic bottles of superglue jackknifing across all fourteen lanes of the M4611, which 1,000,000 small plastic bottles burst on impact, and all of Hampshire is now glued to the road.
† It’s okay. I have ARCs to read.
†† Unless it’s glued to the road
††† The bride and all her guests are clearly from away. The caterers are coming from Dorset and the flower arrangers from Luxembourg. And her dad is doting and said ‘anything you like, dear. Luxembourg? Why certainly. I will take a third job and a fourth mortgage. No problem. Would you like some trained seals from Zanzibar?’^
^ He had just had a cold call about them. The trained seals are a registered charity, giving shelter and career opportunities to marine wildlife left homeless by the latest explosion of totally safe and security checked BP oil-drilling equipment. Since when did being a charity or government funded or a worthy cause suddenly mean that they can put you back on the cold-calls-permitted list after you have gone to some trouble to get yourself and your husband on the no cold calls permitted roster? I had two of the frellers today. The first one was about putting a solar panel on the cottage’s roof, which I was actually willing to listen to till they told me my husband had to be present when the engineer came round to do the measuring and lay on the spiel. Frelling pardon me? My husband? The house is in my name and my husband doesn’t even live here. Nice talking to you. Go away.
The second one I hung up on. I had to hurtle a slightly runny hound again before tower practise.
‡ I also like to check out the flower arranging competition and criticise the roses and the judges’ intelligence.
‡‡ Peter wouldn’t go unless I threatened him with a sharp object, and then he’d probably only say ‘put it down, darling, you might hurt yourself’.
‡‡‡ At least not one where the ringers actually stayed.
§ I was looking for one specific plant. But you can’t just buy one plant, specific or not.
§§ I lied. But I needed to get the point across.
§§§ Niall knows this. He’s a by-grind ringer himself. It’s one of the reasons we get along. I don’t receive those utterly disbelieving looks from him the way people like me do from naturally talented ringers all of whom should have been drowned at birth before they had the opportunity to make the untalented miserable, but that’s another issue.
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