Ringing and knitting
Despite Montezuma and the latest core dump from Book Depository* I managed to get to bed early enough last night to hurtle slightly confused hounds this morning before going off to ring up the gargoyles at Old Eden that have bent themselves into hollow cup shapes so as to be mistaken for bells. Niall was there before me. Still grinning. STOP GRINNING. He’d already had a call-out. What happened? I said.
Oh, the hammerslammer had come loose from the dorpling feed, so they had to grazumle up the glorfrex valve and let all the bracksumpnidge down. Common sense really, he said.
Oh, of course, I said, taking two or three tries to get the gigantic old-fashioned key** into the bell tower lock and turned. I didn’t seriously think I had the wrong key: Vicky had given it to me. Vicky, unlike certain Deputy Ringing Masters I could name, does not do things like give people the wrong keys.
Fortunately, since Niall is a bloke, I could make him ring up the five and the six. If it had been another girl, as Person in Charge, I would probably have had to do it.*** So I had to be nice to him in spite of the grin. And in spite of the fact that I’m the one that always gets stuck doing the phoning when Vicky can’t—in this case for the wedding at New Arcadia we only just found out wants bells next Saturday. ARRRRRGH. And it’s frelling August, and everyone is on holiday. If anyone knows any bell ringers in Yorkshire or Vermont who are free next Saturday afternoon at 2:30 GMT, ask them to get in touch.
The wedding itself went okay from a bell ringer’s point of view, except for the inevitable half-hour delay because the bride was late and the service ran longer than expected.† I knitted. †† The other ringers kept asking me what I wanted them to do and I kept thinking, why are they asking me? The answer being, of course, that I’m supposed to be in charge. I can see people like Amy, an extremely experienced and kind tower captain, deferring to me in what you might call an educational manner: the way you raise up new tower captains is by making clueless and resistant deputy ringing masters fulfil accidental occasions of being in charge, and make their own decisions. Gah.
Nobody died. Everybody got paid. I am trying not to lose the key before Vicky comes home and I can give it back to her.†††
* * *
* No, the sort that come through the mail-slot in your door, THUMP! CRASH! I’m still brooding intensely over the question of what to Kindle-ify on Astarte.^ My latest working theory, although I haven’t started putting it into practise yet, is to begin with the books on the NPR list that I want to read. That’ll keep me busy at least until next year and next year’s list.
^ Yes. Astarte. Sex and war, as I told you. SIIIIIGH. However, one does not argue with things about their names. Perhaps especially techno-things, which are only barely holding their line in this world against being taken over permanently by fanged, flaming creatures from the demonic realm. Maybe techno-things need names like Apocalypse and Astarte. It could be I got off on totally the wrong track by naming my first computer Serena.
KaelinDesign wrote:
This one isn’t a bat goddess per se, but empress of heaven Tien Hou Sheng, the calmer of storms, surrounded by bat as a symbol of good luck seems very auspicious. She also saves people from drowning and brings droughts to an end. Probably for her celestial roses.
http://chinarhyming.blogspot.com/2008/12/chinese-pirate-flag s-goddesses-and-bats.html
This is brilliant. Thank you. It’s too late for Astarte who arrived saying ‘My name is Astarte. Listen up. Are you listening? My name is Astarte.’ But something will walk or otherwise ambulate through the door one of these days that still needs a name, or is willing to negotiate.
I don’t suppose you have any idea how to pronounce it?
Those of you who reminded me of the Egyptian goddess Bat: yes, I know her. But she was about cows. I do not have cows in my roof. I hope. Wiki says of Bat:
The epithet Bat may be linked to the word ba with the feminine suffix ‘t’. Ba means something like personality or emanation and is often translated as ‘soul’ . The word can also be read as ‘power’ or ‘god’. . . . ‘I am Praise; I am Majesty; I am Bat with Her Two Faces; I am the One Who Is Saved, and I have saved myself from all things evil.’
Which would be excellent chi, to mix my religious/philosophical systems in a reprehensible manner, for some techno-thing or other.
** The kind that weighs as much as your iPhone and your pocketknife together, so when you’re carrying it in your tiny pink hellhound-hurtling bag you feel that you’re wearing a third hellhound around your neck.
*** Vicky, who comes to my shoulder if she stands on tiptoe, rings up our two-ton tenor if there are no blokes around, although she would prefer not to. Fortunately there usually are blokes around.
I hate being in charge. Although if I were in charge I could have sung out the names of four other ringers—plus Roger and Monty—for the frelling quarter next frelling week, and adjured them to fill in. Last night Niall was in charge and he just stood there grinning. He’s in the quarter. He likes ringing quarters.
† INSERT FAMILIAR RANT HERE. I don’t know why it’s not in our contract-equivalent that (a) we’re told if it’s a long or a short service and (b) we in our turn declare that our clock starts running at the agreed time that the wedding is due to end, and that an hour from that time we leave. If the frelling bride was forty-five minutes late and the service runs over another twenty minutes . . . there are no bells.^ As it is, agreeing to ring a wedding is writing off your afternoon. Which is a little additional hurdle to finding people to ring weddings.
^ One of the reasons this doesn’t happen, I imagine, is because we’d all feel sad and guilty if we didn’t ring. I don’t know about everybody else but I get a thrill every time I pull off for a wedding: making that glorious noise as the new husband and wife come back down the aisle they went up three or seventy-six hours ago as two random+ single people.
+ Okay, not random exactly.
†† Maren tweeted me this a few days ago:
You want the second item. Yes. I’ve always been pretty shameless about whipping out a book, but knitting is more adaptable for a lot of occasions^: it takes less light, and it’s less anti-social—and you can do other things at the same time. You can keep chatting in the desultory way of ringers waiting to ring a frelling late wedding, for example, which without additional stimulation/distraction MAKES ME CRAZY. It’s kind of an interesting collision of priorities and circumstances: I don’t mind being anti-social at the opera, I don’t know any of these extremely well-tailored people anyway, but the light is seriously inadequate for reading. Most of the ringers I ring with regularly are friends, or at least the kind of acquaintances you want to know if their daughter had her baby yet or they’ve seen the diplodocus at the bottom of the garden again. You can perfectly well make these inquiries whilst knitting. If I had a not-line-of-sight seat at a concert some day I’d get out my knitting. And I use wooden needles^^ which make no noise. I’m still awaiting the day when someone objects to my knitting: thus far my experience continues to be that people are interested and curious, and will often tell you stories about their grandmothers who used to knit sleeping bags for polar expeditions. And in these days of multi-tasking everyone should be au fait with the idea that you can knit and still pay attention to what’s going on around you.^^^
^ Except when you get out your Travelling Square and find that you didn’t put it away carefully enough last time and it’s come off one of its sticks. This is how you learn to solve problems. This is also how you learn not to swear loudly in public.
^^ I’ve just ordered another fabulous pink pair on Etsy.+
+ And by the way, where is it written that all knitting needle cases must be alarmingly retro? I don’t want a Mary Quant or Peter Maxx case, thank you very much.
^^^ Except when you’re trying to figure out which of those dratted little loops you should be feeding back on to your empty needle again. Snarl.
†† †† And, speaking of knitting and of bats, Ajlr wrote:
But I need mosquito netting by next May.
I’m sure that Jodi, or Blondviolinist, will know of a knitting pattern for a large (and probably stripey) net.
No. They’ll probably try to make me learn to crochet.
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