No.
No. We didn’t get it. We didn’t get our quarter peal tonight.
Sigh.
But—let’s get this over with—IT WASN’T ME THAT FIRED US OUT.
I will say, now that it’s all over with a smell of burning and a sound of rafters crashing to the ground, that it always was a high-risk attempt. In the first place, we had our beginner. Although chances are that if he had strayed from last place, someone would have been able to shove him back to the end where he belonged.
But that still left the fact that Roger had decided to call this non-standard quarter. Usually for first quarters you choose something as dead square solid standard as possible, to raise your chances as high as possible for getting the freller. But for someone who rings a lot of quarters—like Roger—I daresay the prospect of yet another forty-five minutes of plain bob doubles or Grandsire makes the heart sink.* And of course I had to have put my big fat All-Star clad foot in it and ask about mash-ups.**
And that’s what did us in—the mash-up. After all the drama, shouting, and nightmares***, I was on the frelling treble. Well, someone had to ring it, and I had the short straw. We were about twenty minutes in, and Roger called us from Grandsire back to plain bob again at a place in the method that even I on the treble, where the real dramas of change-ringing pass you by, thought seemed a little odd . . . and all four inside ringers went wrong simultaneously.
So. That was that.† But I was just as exhausted as if we had got it—and that I’d been ringing inside—so I crawled home to the cottage and . . . got out my knitting.
I’d been thinking about this yesterday. Knitting is the perfect thing for a bell ringer waiting around for weddings to be over with. You are busy doing something†† but you can still pay attention to conversations going on around you, if you want to, or you can look like you’re still paying attention to conversations going on around you if you don’t.
Which perhaps brings up again the to-me-rather-surprising question of knitting in public. There’s been an interesting conversation on the forum (on the Ringing and Knitting thread) about this: that there is a clueless and unimaginative††† segment of the population who feels that knitting in public is rude, or distracting to other people or even ‘unprofessional’. That last one, claning, who first drew it up as a list, suggests may be an anti-women’s-cosy-crafts bias, which I’m afraid is my knee-jerk reaction too.‡
For the others . . . I understand the teachers wondering if knitters would be better off taking notes‡‡ in class. I can to some degree see the non-knitter wondering if the knitter is being rude—and here I would accept that there is some onus on the knitter to make it clear she/he is not being rude: making eye contact in class, for example, or adding comments to a conversation she/he is supposed to be part of. The woman who tried to teach me to knit twenty-odd years ago could knit, hold a conversation and keep her teenage daughter on track making dinner (we were sitting in the kitchen), answer her son’s questions about his homework, and tell her husband where she last saw the slibbergrunch, all without dropping a stitch or losing her rhythm.
But I’m not sure how much farther I agree that knitters have to bow to non-knitters. Blondviolinist says that if she sees someone glancing at her knitting repeatedly, she will stop knitting so as not to distract the other person. She says ‘I can live through one meeting without knitting.’ What if it’s your regular monthly department meeting? Will you say to them, ‘I notice that you keep glancing at my knitting, is there a way we can sit so that it doesn’t catch your eye?’ I entirely agree that you must be able to knit silently‡‡‡ . . . but why should the quiet, productive knitter be penalised because someone else can’t keep their mind on the business at hand?
I did use to doodle in meeting-type situations, but it was only a way of not going mad, it wasn’t productive and for me it wasn’t satisfying. Doodles such as the ones going on sale any minute on this blog take attention. Coming up with a new doodle takes concentration, but even whipping off repeats of a design already more or less settled on takes some attention. Plain knitting is just the fingers—and you have something you (probably§) want at the end of it. I’m a fidget, and it seems to me that the people who are distracted by knitting are fidgets too, or they wouldn’t be distracted. There ought to be some way to create a bond out of this, rather than get on each other’s nerves.§§
I don’t know. I’m still a new knitter and I haven’t run into much anti-public-knitter-ishness yet, so I mostly don’t know how I’m going to react. I’ve told you that so far it’s mostly the other way—people come up to me and want to know what I’m knitting and tell me that they or their granddaughter or their granddaughter’s ex-boyfriend knits, and what a good idea, to bring it along to x and have something to do. §§§
It’s also great therapy when you’ve just lost a quarter peal.
* * *
* Penelope, who does not ring that many quarters, has been heard to declare that plain bob doubles makes her lose the will to live.
** Although I didn’t say anything about service quarters or Monty’s first.
*** I did at least sleep last night. But the dreams were . . . interesting.
† Everyone else is full of plans for a rematch, but I may very well drop out. There are other sixth ringers out there. The angst and perturbation are just not worth it. I never wanted to ring a service quarter! And I don’t want to ring someone’s first quarter either! I know I’m unreliable, and worrying about it just makes it worse!
†† Something that you may not be clawing enough time out of your insane schedule usually to do enough of, so there’s an extra, satisfying little boost of accomplishment involved.
††† Just so you know where my sympathies lie
‡ Although if knitting in (for example) business meetings catches on with the (male) admin beware the directive that all attendees at meetings are required to knit, the official list of recognised patterns and the schedule for completion is appended, and anyone not meeting the minimum quota will have their salaries docked accordingly.
‡‡ If I ever manage to go back to homeopathy college to finish my last year, I doubt I’ll be able to knit in class. Sadly. But I am a classroom note taker. Or anyway if I got my knitting out I would be insulting the lecturer. Although I can think of a few of the lecturers I would quite like to have had knitting during. . . .
‡‡‡ Yaaaay wooden needles. And ‘silently’ includes no rustling of patterns or muttering to oneself or, for that matter, flailing about with a three-quarters-complete king size bedcover in orange fun fur.^
^ http://www.lionbrand.com/yarns/funFur.htm
§ I have some unique squares
§§ And yes, I realise ‘Let me teach you to knit’ is not necessarily the answer.
§§§ Penelope had not brought her knitting yesterday. Shock. What is the matter with the woman? Well, she may be a little distracted by imminent birth. Her chickens are due to hatch today.^ No, really. One of this year’s hens has been broody pretty much since they brought her home last autumn, and Penelope finally decided to let her go ahead and have chicks, and maybe this would get it out of her system.^^ So she’s got a job lot of live eggs off a friend and . . . we’re all waiting breathlessly. I will certainly get photos of brand new little cheepy things—speaking of every baby being new—if I can.
^ This-minute update: the first chick has been sighted.
^^ Otherwise, it’s chicken fricassee. You buy a layer to lay eggs.
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