Ringing despite obstacles
I had to get out of bed what passes in my case for early this morning to get hellhounds hurtled before I met Vicky at Old Eden to ring the bells up for the wedding this afternoon. Hellhounds are accustomed to opening one eye and then closing it again while I race around Sunday mornings, moaning and making extra-large extra-strong cups of tea, but they weren’t going to be happy about my leaving them behind at what they think is hurtling time. So we got out earlier than usual and thus met a whole different shift of idiot people and their manic off lead dogs. Well, that woke me up nicely. Just as effective as black tea if not nearly as much fun.
I’d promised Vicky I’d be home by ten. She was going to phone me as soon as Maud went down for her nap—Vicky has two of her granddaughters visiting. I was nursing a second cup of post-off-lead-dog-encounter tea and reading about great autumn plant sales! on all the gardening web sites I’m stupid enough to be on the email lists of when the phone finally rang. “Maud doesn’t want to go down for her nap,” Vicky said briskly, the sounds of a small person very determined not to go down for her nap highly audible in the background, “so I’ll have to bring her with me.”
Ah. Hmm. I wondered how this was going to be managed—I was having an interesting mental image of a child chained to the wall—but Vicky had brought her husband with her as, um, wrangler. Maud was more or less self-attached to Vicky’s leg and had that dazed, furious look of a kiddie who needs its nap but is beyond being able to sleep: and anything you offer is the thing it most of all doesn’t want. We limped variously up to the ringing chamber—Maud was not going to be carried, she was going to WALK despite the fact that the risers are nearly as tall as she is and she was reeling with tiredness—and then poor Albert got her in a . . . well, something not wholly unlike a stepover armlock camel clutch . . . while Vicky and I rang up the bells in twos. Louisa, by the way, Maud’s elder sister, behaved impeccably. She is going to grow up to be Prime Minister.*
By the time we had to reconvene at the church for the wedding, it was just Louisa with Vicky. Both Albert and Maud, we were told, were out cold.
Ajlr wrote:
. . . .but I am going to go out on this nice firm sturdy limb here and say there is nothing else like learning method ringing. Nothing. Else.
Totally agree.
Oh good.
When I was doing a Master’s, a few years ago, there were far fewer demands on my brain in the sense of sheer processing and association than there are now, learning the baby inside steps (so far as ringing methods goes) of the two to Bob Doubles. It’s the combination of fast mental agility and physical co-ordination that’s so hard – and that makes it so fascinating.
Given that I am uncomfortably aware that I had some influence on your decision to learn to ring I am very grateful for that fascinating. It is though, isn’t it? Fascinating. It bends your brain into a pretzel and rather than having the sense to run away and dedicate yourself to soap-carving or origami** you go oh, that’s cool. I’m also a bit chuffed that it feels that way even to a computer geek: don’t try to hide it, I know you’re a techno whizzy in your day job. The fact that I find method ringing riveting could just be a sad late life reaction to a long passionate dedication to almost anything that doesn’t involve numbers or logic.***
Monty, however, is going to boil through learning inside like Desert Orchid chasing for the Cheltenham Gold Cup.
I know it’s not nice for a grown woman to hate a teenager for no good reason
No good reason? Woman, hating teenagers for manifesting their dazzling superiority in things like bell ringing is one of the things that keeps us elderly feeble dodderers still limber and ready for battle.
but I’m afraid I may be heading that way. I’m doing exactly the same thing as Monty, except I’ve been doing it for three practise nights now and I still haven’t got it right. Arrgggh! I get so caught up in trying to keep counting my places that I forget who to ring over. Someone pass me a spare brain, if they’ve one to hand.
Three nights? Three? HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA . . . sorry, that just came out. Okay, at conservative estimate it took me 1,207 practise nights to get it right . . . and that was on my second try, this time, with New Arcadia, when I finally succeeded. And—hang on to counting your places. (Say I.) The rest will come.
Audrey Falconer posted about calling out what she was ringing to help a beginner understand how the pattern works:
. . . Seemed to help her follow it. I learnt it recently enough myself to remember how I learnt it and do those things that I wished people would do for me back then.
This is such a monster. I consider it one of the big central issues with ringing, learning to ring, and teaching ringing generally: how you learn, and how people experienced enough to teach so often have forgotten what learning was like—or are talented ringers and don’t know how to adapt to those of us who aren’t. Niall, for example, has been giving Monty dodging practise. You can learn the line on the page all you want but the like-nothing-else rhythm of dodging, where you’re jerking your bell around to go forwards and backwards, so one split second you’re ‘holding up’ or pausing and the next split second you’re ‘pulling in’ or yanking like the dickens—and then you have to frelling hold up again (or pull in again)—and chances are when you’re first learning to ring inside your ropesight isn’t exactly powerful yet either, so who you’re supposed to be following gets lost in the yakkety maelstrom of dodging. I didn’t get dodging practise. And I’ve mentioned before that I’m rhythm-challenged anyway. I’m sure lack of preliminary dodging practise is the cause of at least a few hundred of those practise nights I needed before I started getting bob doubles inside (occasionally) right.
Not everyone can learn by standing at someone’s shoulder and watching what they do. I can, for example, and Penelope can’t. But for those of us who can, someone who is willing to call out what they’re doing as they’re doing it is golden. Not to mention the rest of the band who are stoically not listening to someone else’s counting so they don’t go wrong.
Oddly, other ringers seem to think it would be hard to call out the place they’re ringing.
People count more or less at the fronts of their minds, I think, depending on what kind of ringer they are, what clues they rely on, and maybe how experienced they are. I totally cling to my counting, I’m a very front-of-mind counter, but I’m also aware that the less sure I am of my ability to ring a method the more emphatically front-of-brain my counting is. Dear gods do I ever count Cambridge. And then there are people (whisper it! It is too terrible to say aloud! ) who . . . don’t count their places. I dare say there are brilliant natural ringers who don’t need to count but for us rank and file . . . you start counting as soon as you’re learning plain hunt and you count your places like your life depends on it, because it does. If you skive off by learning the numbers . . . you have a very nasty piece of remedial work to do later on. I’ve seen this, and it’s not pretty.
Cathy R wrote:
I still remember vividly the feeling of absolute and total certainty that I would never, ever, master bob doubles!
Yes. That’s one of those memories I have no nostalgia about whatsoever.
Progress is so often two steps forward, one-and-a-half steps backwards!
Only one and a half? You lucky person. I tend to take three steps backward for a while and then have a lot of catching up to do. But I did start counting from the beginning. . . Even if I didn’t always know what I was counting. . . .
* * *
* She’s already ahead of the field: she has red hair.
**Remind me, Mrs Redboots, some time, but not right away, to tell you why your forum suggestion made me laugh and laugh.
*** The fact that my algebra II class was first after lunch, by which time my algebra II teacher was too drunk even to copy problems out of the book accurately may have had something to do with my dislike of the field.
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