There Is Hope*
I was climbing through eight hundred years and forty-six thousand miles of church history this evening, which is the system for gaining access to Forza’s ringing chamber, and thinking, you could want to join this tower for its scenic approach alone. Or possibly as an exciting addition to your fitness programme. I dragged myself through the last arrow slit, which is at the top of a spiral staircase so tight that even the outsides of the steps are only long enough for Flower Fairy feet, and collapsed fainting on the floor . . . next to Charlotte, who, by her gasping breaths, had clearly only just arrived before me—and who is also a visitor. Maybe you get used to it. Maybe the members have a secret lift.
I had spent a good bit of today telling myself briskly that I was going to Forza tonight** and that it was just another tower and the years, the miles, the thirty-seven bells and the Rhode-Island-sized ringing chamber*** are all incidental. Then I got there. I suppose the fact that your first view of it, every time, is from the floor with a red haze of oxygen deprivation and lactic acid build-up clouding your vision, may have a demoralising effect. I lay there tonight thinking, well, I did bring my knitting . . . †
And I did not get off to at all good start with a bell rope in my hands. Which is to say I once again made a drooling foozle of Grandsire Triples. ARRRRGH. It was so drooling a foozle that even standing behind someone ringing it accurately I still couldn’t see what was frelling going on. I’m going to develop a complex. I can ring it perfectly well †† in other towers. But put me in an 800-year-old abbey with a ringing chamber you need satnav to negotiate and I lose my mind.††† ARRRRRRRRRRRRRGH. If there had been a sword I’d’ve fallen on it. You’d think in a ringing chamber the size of Rhode Island there would be at least one sword hanging on the wall somewhere, wouldn’t you? But nooooooo. Just peal boards,‡ notices,‡‡ and handbells.§ So I crawled away and hid in a dark corner.‡‡
I was hauled back out again by a call for plain frelling hunt on ten. I can’t do ANYTHING on ten. Ten is too many, even when it’s just plain hunt. The thing about ten is that you have to hold up and wait, every frelling blow, because there are so many other bells in the row to ring before it’s your turn again. So it’s bong and then you stand there with your arms over your head thinking you could have got half a row of knitting done while you’re waiting§§, and then it’s bong again. Also there’s always a bit of necessary speed control adjustment—not only do you ring more slowly going out than going in, you also ring closer over smaller bells and with more of a gap over bigger bells.§§§ When there are ten of the frellers all of this is very exaggerated, which makes it additionally difficult for notable foozlers like me.
And then . . . it wasn’t too bad. I was actually getting the hang of the holding-up-and-WAAAAAAAITING thing. I tied up my rope at the end without having a last despairing look round the walls for a sword.
I hung around watching people ringing things I should to be able to ring, but probably can’t at Forza.# And then finally, at the very end, I was offered a rope of my very own again, to ring bob minor. Dear miserable gods of ringing and disgrace, I OUGHT to be able to ring bob minor. I ought to be able to ring bob minor dead, drunk, asleep, and suffering severe lactic acid overload.##
And, indeed, I did ring it, despite being alive, sober, awake and maybe a little lactically acidulated. I also did despite the fact that someone else was going wrong, this being the true sign of knowing a method, being able to hold your line when other people are failing to hold theirs. I was not ringing it beautifully, but I was ringing it—and I was ringing it in one of Forza’s horrible queues, and since I was on the four I had several### people on each side, which means you need 358.5° vision like a horse (or a robin).
So. Yaay. There is hope. I will go back next week. Note that I am announcing that here in public. I am going back to Forza for next Wednesday’s bell practise.
And tomorrow I start the third draft of SHADOWS.
* * *
Aaaaaaaaaaaaaand . . . look what arrived in the post today:
- I think I may have heard a rumour somewhere that it was published yesterday
* * *
* Maybe.
** After all I had told the blog I was going to Forza tonight.
*** Sure it’s a small state.^ It’s a VERY LARGE ringing chamber.
^ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhode_Island
† I have half a leg warmer on my needles. Maybe even two thirds of a leg warmer.
†† sometimes
††† Maybe I have lactic acid build-up in my brain.
‡ My situation was made somewhat more precarious by the fact that the Scary Man was in charge tonight. They have a kind of rotating ringing mastership and you don’t know till you get there on the night who’s going to be beating you with the knotted rope . . . I mean, who’s going to decide what methods to ring and who’s going to ring them, and whapping you up longside the head when you . . . I mean, who tries to wrest a modicum of order out of campanological chaos. I confess to feeling a little fragile about ringing admins at the moment but he hasn’t done anything to me yet . . . except give me bells to ring and say I’m welcome to come again.
‡‡ Full peals are these ghastly feats of ringing endurance, and significant ones frequently get painted on a varnished plank—the names of the method and the ringers, the date, and sometimes the time it took, which is usually around three and a half hours—and hung on the wall of the ringing chamber involved.
‡‡‡ ‘On 18 February there will be a sale of all the umbrellas, bicycles, spectacles, spectacle cases, mobile phones and small children left in the abbey grounds, proceeds to the after-service cake fund, the canons have been complaining about the shop biscuits’
§ I have no idea. If I keep going, I’ll ask.
§§ It’s almost as bad as that frelling stoplight on the way to Nadia.
§§§ Yes. It’s horrible physics. And I don’t think you can even get any of the fun quantum stuff out of it. It’s all that unpleasant fellow Newton.
# I’ve told you on previous devastatingly humiliating evenings I’ve spent there: in the first place because there are SO MANY FREAKING BELLS if you’re only ringing six or eight of them, they’re in a queue, not a circle, which is maddeningly confusing for those of us who are easily confused and are used to ringing in a CIRCLE,^ and also, I assume again because of the frelling SIZE of the ringing chamber there’s something peculiar about the acoustics. Which in my case is to say I can’t hear a thing but a kind of smudgy blast of noise.
^ Remember that you’re always looking frantically around for the next bell to follow. Your sheer frelling depth perception is off if you’re suddenly looking along a line instead of across and around a circle.
## Gemma was there tonight and said to me after, of course we can ring bob minor. It’s ringing it on only one bell that is challenging.
### All right, my definition of several is a little loose.
Mostly coherent. And with lots of footnotes.
b_twin_1
Eeek. I’m so conflicted. I want the rest of the week to go sloooooow for you but I want it to go fast for Jodi.
It was less than a fortnight ago that I finally really noticed that Jodi’s frelling* novel** is coming out on the SAME GLAMFARBING DAY THAT SHADOWS IS DUE. How frigglegobblasting unfair is THAT?
http://ya-sisterhood.blogspot.com/2012/01/exclusive-reveal-incarnate-by-jodi.html ***
* * *
I rang handbells tonight—rather to my own astonishment. What’s worse is that the other three ringers are getting steady enough that It Was Decided—not by me—that it was time for some evil fiend or other to start calling bobs—you remember bobs (and singles)? It’s not bad enough you have to learn the frelling method line in the first place, or rather, in handbells, lines, plural, and each pair has a different set of lines with a different relationship between the two bells so in a minor method with six bells it’s like learning three different methods and in a major method with eight bells it’s like learning four different methods, at the point when you’re beginning to get through a plain course more often than you aren’t, someone starts calling bobs. Bobs mix up the order of the bells so that what bell two or three was doing is now being done by (say) bell five or six—which also changes the tune, which is a clue you’ve come to depend on without realising you’re doing it. Bell methods are all basically canons, you know? Everybody rings the same pattern, it’s just each bell starts at a different place in the pattern.† But how you swap places when some ratbag calls ‘bob’ ALSO VARIES. Ohmigods, he just called a bob, do I run in, make the freller, run out, am I unaffected, can I just burst into tears and dash out of the room?††
I won’t say we did it well.††† But we were doing it.‡ And I noticed something. The big boys, which is to say Colin and Niall, are always handing us peons great steaming heaps of . . . twaddle, for example that it’s actually easier to ring on eight bells than it is on six. Don’t make me frelling laugh. Counting to six is sordid enough. Eight bells means two more chances to go wrong. Except . . . if you live long enough to be ringing on eight at all, to have (more or less) learnt all four of the plain courses on the four different pairs of bells for your method, in this case bob major . . . they have a point. Things don’t happen quite as fast on eight bells as they do on six, because eight bells have to ring in each line before anything else can happen in the next line. Calling it ‘more time to think’ is a bit extreme‡‡ but . . . well . . . we did stagger through a short touch.
I find it pretty funny that bell ringing is one of the things keeping me sane right now. But with the counter-computer effect there’s also the feeling that I need to go on believing in myself as a bell ringer while I get used to this no-home-bell-tower thing. So I scrape myself off the seat of my chair and go ring. Last night was one of Wild Robert’s wandering monthly spectaculars‡‡‡, this month, crucially, at a tower I could find in the dark, so I went. And it was okay. It was good.§ And maybe my new footloose status is an opportunity to ring for Wild Robert more often. . . .
ENOUGH WITH THE CHAT. BACK TO SHADOWS.
* * *
* . . . says the author who HATES ALL AUTHORS who have books coming out till she gets her frelling manuscript FINISHED AND TURNED IN.
** FIRST novel! For anyone coming to the party late, this is Jodi’s FIRST EVER PUBLISHED NOVEL!!!! A brand new shiny fresh just-published book is always a major chocolate, champagne, velvet, rhinestones^, heavenly choirs and beautiful young man/woman driving the Rolls event, but your first book . . . well. Despite the ghastly ravages of Menopause Brain I totally remember the whole run up to BEAUTY’s publication.
^ Really good rhinestones. Possibly attached to All Stars.
*** I think it’s a really good trailer too. Mostly I don’t like trailers. I know they’re all the rage and anyone who is anyone has trailers^ but mostly I don’t like them. I like this one.
^ I don’t have trailers
† While you’re singing ‘row, row, row, your boat’ the person ahead of you is singing ‘gently down the stream’
†† This is fairly easy to do with handbells. It’s a little harder to perform effectively in the tower.
††† Some of us did it better than others.
‡ And I kept thinking of things I have to go back and do to SHADOWS in the next five days while we were ringing plain courses, so maybe bobs were a good idea. WHA’? WHA’ YOU SAY? What are you doing in my sitting room? Why am I holding the leather strap-handles of two little bronze bells?
The problem with turning a book in unfinished is that it’s . . . unfinished. I know it’s unfinished, Merrilee knows it’s unfinished, my editor knows it’s unfinished, the janitor’s boyfriend’s dog knows it’s unfinished. But I want the storyline to read roughly the way it’s supposed to even if I use ‘ecphonesis’ three times in the same paragraph^ and the scene with the eggplant and the philosopher really should come out altogether. So I keep making notes of the things I need to stick a temporary storyline patch on, to get it through (I hope) its exam next week.
^ I don’t think I do use ecphonesis three times in the same paragraph. Maybe twice.+
+ I mean, I use ecphonesis, usually rude, frequently. But I don’t often hang around to label it as such.
‡‡ If you’re bungie jumping off the Chrysler Building instead of the Empire State, the 200 feet it’s shorter isn’t really going to matter if your bungies break: you’re still going to die.
‡‡‡ Where several people said to me, hi, Robin, how’s it going at New Arcadia?, and I said, ah, hmmm.
§ And I was still holding my line when everyone else went horribly wrong in the Cambridge. Wild Robert was, of course, mad to be trying to ring Cambridge at all with the people he had available, but this is Wild Robert’s way: and you will probably find you can ring all kinds of ridiculous stuff with Wild Robert’s beady eye on you. I was, for example, ringing Cambridge despite havoc in other areas of the ringing chamber—and I’m pretty sure the woman who was the most out of her depth went home saying, you know, I got through three leads of Cambridge, I wouldn’t have thought it was possible, but that’s Wild Robert. . . .
I sang. I rang.
Yessssssss.
I got up this morning convinced I was doing a really dumb, time-wasting-when-I-have-even-less-time-to-waste-than-usual, thing, going to my voice lesson when I’m still totally croaking.* I told myself that I had to go to Mauncester anyway, to pick up more organic composted farmyard manure for the garden(s) so I might as well tack a voice lesson on the end of it.** I looked dubiously at my music, which positively has dust *** on it, and decided to take the easy end of it along in case Nadia wanted to recommend this pathetic baby thing rather than that. And I took my notebook, of course, to write down her pearls, rubies and sapphires of wisdom.
So I got there and she said blandly, I think it would be a good idea just to attempt to warm your voice up a little—I may be able to advise you about how to work this week. Croak, I said. That’s fine, she said. We’ll start with the nnnn sound. We can add an actual pitch in later.
Nnnn, I said. . . .
Teacher magic. It’s amazing. Oh, I still have a throat full of crud † but my larynx isn’t made of cement after all and by the end of the hour I was SINGING. I was not singing well††, but I was indubitably SINGING. Nadia said (possibly a trifle smugly) that one of the reasons some of the notes just weren’t there—open mouth, nothing comes out—isn’t about my throat at all, but about the fact that because of all this emotional stuff I’ve shut down, and specifically I’ve shut my voice off from my air supply. And she taught me the Lip Trill, which she says is very good for reconnecting with your air supply because it’s so hard to maintain. All you singers out there will know the Lip Trill. What it really is is a blowing-horse imitation: you blow out through your lips so they go Pbpbpbpbpbpbpb††† It’s also supposed to relax the muscles around your mouth.‡ Which probably explains why I can’t do it. So now it’s homework. I have to learn to pbpbpbpbpbpbpb. She also made me do the opening-curtains thing to make me more positive, and the drinking-a-glass-of-water-on-a-hot-day‡‡ thing, which I hadn’t done before, to open my throat. Why does this stuff work. It is insane.
I had already noticed that what notes are available—and they’ve been creeping home one by one like party-goers after dawn, the last two or three days—are mostly the upper-middle of my register. I’m not even trying the top end, but my voice starts cutting out again around middle C, and I should have a whole octave below that. Nadia kept coming back here and I’d go croak and she’d move back up again. Finally at the very end of the hour something shifted and I began singing in my chest voice—usually, as these things go with me, the gear change into chest voice is not all that big a deal. Ah, she said, that’s what I was hoping for. And I was thinking chest voice = speaking voice = not speaking up for myself = duuuuuh. As I had said to her in my email asking to come for a non-singing singing lesson, I even wonder if the appalling revealingness of singing, depressingly unconnected with any excellence of said singing as it is, is the reason my body chose this method of trying to get my frelling attention.
Nadia said, I was planning on getting you singing today, you know . . .
I had about an hour between singing lesson and Penelope and Niall picking me up to go ringing at Glaciation.‡‡‡ Whapwhapwhapwhap: person trying to reorient. Whap. Which—ringing—felt totally normal . . . and really, really weird and sad and creepy. I haven’t got a tower any more. I’m just some random bell ringer who knows some people in this area. Brrrrr. But ringing rounds for beginners is always grounding as well as making you feel you’re contributing to the community§ and we managed to ring Cambridge even if I then went on to make a pig’s ear of an innocent touch of Stedman which I ought to be able to do in my sleep.§§ Slightly in my defense I was ringing on the one remaining bell I don’t know for Stedman—the three—and there are always moments of vertigo as you figure out where you are on a new bell in a familiar pattern. But mostly I just blatfarging botched it. But they didn’t tell me not to come back, so hey.
And I have gone around today thrusting my knitting under everyone’s noses and saying, Look! Ribbing! Real ribbing!
* * *
* Although there is a little Freelancers Must Stick Together too. Nadia doesn’t charge for legitimately missed lessons, so she’s losing money when I don’t come. This preys on my conscience.
** Going to the local farm shop would have absorbed about forty minutes out of my day. Plus voice lesson made it about three hours. Being really, really bad at arithmetic^ has its uses.
^ Possibly I mean ‘logic’ here.
*** And hellhound hair. But everything in these households has hellhound hair on it, including me, and I am in almost constant use.
† ::Grossness alert:: And I was gacking up horrible gunge on the drive home, after having all those secret inner bits stirred up by Nadia’s intervention. MAJOR DISGUSTING EWWWW. One of the oddities of this illness anyway has been how obsessively focused on my throat it’s been so I didn’t even know there was all that crudiferousness lurking. I find myself wondering if I went down a few archaeological layers and was ripping out stuff from some previous occasion when I didn’t speak up for myself when I should have.
†† But then I never sing well. Sigh.
††† When in doubt, YouTube. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gt7eTRyRKpA
‡ I don’t think there’s any of me that DOESN’T need relaxing. My hair needs relaxing. My fingernails need relaxing. Possibly especially a week before the book I’m working on is due.
‡‡ Beer if I preferred, she said. No, I said, the way I get into this nonsense of yours, I need to be sober to drive home.
‡‡‡ My voice lesson got moved later when it got made an hour long, and Colin’s practise has had a quarter hour added to the front end because he has a nice fresh growing crop of beginners who need cultivating. This is not ideal for me. On a bad ME day I’ll have to miss Colin, although give me a shooting stick to lean on and I can probably ring rounds for beginners even if I’m seeing double.
§ Contributing! To the [ringing] community! AAAAAAAUGH!
§§ Although given how well I’m sleeping lately. . .
Another Day After
As I posted fairly early on last night, as the first rush of sympathy arrived on the forum, and before I started trying to go to bed,* you guys are the best. I don’t want to get into a major watch-Robin-wallow fest here, and I don’t know that I’m all that good at sticky-free gracious**, but thank you all very much.***
At least one person on the forum posted that she went through something similar and regrets not having written a letter of resignation. Well, if it’s any comfort, remember that such a letter opens you to reprisals. I received a pin-my-ears-back, singe-my-eyebrows letter from one of the admin.† I’m such a bad girl. Bad me. Some of you reading this must have been in (psycho)therapy? One of the first things a good shrink warns you of, as you begin to get to grips with whatever brought you into their office, is ‘change back’ behaviour. Probably the first thing they’ve wanted you to take in is that the only person you can change is YOURSELF. That’s the rule, and that’s the rule you’ll be working by in therapy. But as soon as you do manifest change, any and/or everyone around you who is invested in the status quo is going to start giving you change back! messages. People who care about you will go with what you need to do. People who prefer you crippled, subservient, non-stroppy, silent, whatever makes their lives easier, will not like it at all, and will let you know they don’t like it at all. This letter is a big fat change back! message.
Um. No.
katinseattle wrote
New Arcadia wouldn’t accept the money because they disapproved of the way you’d raised it? It sounds like you went street walking for it.
SNOOORK. I know there are people with minority tastes who pay for sex with people pretending to be French maids or Tony Blair or kangaroos or something, but is there a market for skinny, wrinkly, cranky old women? . . . No. On second thought, there probably is, and I don’t want to know.
LRK
It’s hardly as if you’ve been selling improper drawings of… er… dubious morality… so to speak… thus tarnishing the good name of New Arcadia
SNOOORK. Now, I could do something with this. Naked hellhounds. Bat orgies. Improper uses of bells never before considered by humankind. Things that fanged muffins get up to when no one else is around. You know, I bet I could pull real money for these. . . .
EMoon wrote
. . . people who drive friends of mine into such misery–GRUMP! But not to worry; I’m sufficient thousands of miles away that all I can do is GRUMP across an ocean at them, and they won’t know or care.
I think a well-focussed GRUMP sent from a good rocket-launcher might very well arrive as a functional whole. Thank you. Let me send you the geographic coordinates.
I hope the book now agrees to be written really, really fast.
SO DO I. Whimper. I did not need dramas right now.
Re Williams
Years ago, after a horrid day at grade school which involved me not doing something like the ‘in’ crowd and hence suffering their ridicule, I remember thinking, “I can’t wait until I’m an adult so all these silly games will stop.”
I SO REMEMBER THIS. I SO REMEMBER THIS. And then they don’t. And you think, wha’? What happened?
DrDia
. . . And – hello – you’re getting a monetary gift from a world famous author who got this gift by selling her books & autographs to her blog followers – not like she went out & extorted money from people.
Sigh. Unfortunately this may be part of it. There’s a contingent of the population—and I met it in America too, it’s not a British peculiarity—who believes that all authors are either egomaniacs, nuts, or both^, and behave accordingly. You can’t prove otherwise because they’re seeing everything you do through this perception. And, you know, my ego probably is a different shape from an accountant’s, because I frelling use it differently. But it’s a bit like mistrusting a blacksmith because he or she has big bulgy arms and they’re more likely to punch holes through your walls because they can. Blacksmiths have big bulgy arms^^ from their job. It doesn’t make them better or worse people, although it might make one a good friend to have when you need to move the furniture.
I don’t know this. But I think it’s possible that my desire to have the work I’ve done both recognized and accepted is being translated as the insane vanity of an author, and they all know what authors are like.
^ I think some form of this happens to everyone who manages to sell stuff they make, it’s just being an author is what I know.
^^ Which I think are totally hot, just by the way. I don’t like the gym bunny look, but muscles from use? Hot. Very hot.
The mind-body connection IS very strong and, as a homoeopath, you have trained yours to be even stronger – a double edged sword right now.
This aspect of it hadn’t occurred to me—that by using homeopathy I’m training my mind/body to talk to, er, itself and me more clearly. I’ve been startled by the bluntness, the non-metaphoric-ness of my throat closing, hurting and opening, but I hadn’t thought about why it was being, or able to be, so, um, candid. Now maybe I can get the new communicative mind/body to explain to me about a few other things I wish I could persuade to go away. . . .
I’m going to let Aaron have the last word. Yes. Bells are alive, and the sound they make is more than just a (more or less accurate) bong. I’ve been saying this for years. And I’d like to think my contribution didn’t stop the moment I’m not ringing my bells any more.
Thank you.
The next time you hear the local bells I want you to listen carefully. If you think back to how they sounded when you first heard them you should be able to hear a little more tolerance, an improvement in their determination to show up and ring even on a bad day, a greater degree of care for the nurture of new ringers, and a thousand small things that you did right while you were there, a thousand more that you helped others do right, and, just possibly, a thousand beyond that that the people still ringing will be inspired to do right in the future because you were there.
The things you put into those bells are still there and they are the better for it. When you listen, don’t listen to the echoes of your parting, listen to the joy, and sweat, and care that you put there and which still rings out.
It is still a joyful noise.
* * *
* I slept lying down last night. LYING DOWN. Body horizontal, head on pillow(s). I cannot tell you how thrilling this was. I’ve been sleeping sitting up for something like the last fortnight—which is not fun and certainly not restful, and six pillows was only barely enough.^ More than once as I woke up already half strangled by a coughing fit I thought, all I want is to be able to sleep lying down. It’s nice to have simple wants occasionally.^^
^ Someone on the forum—and I can’t find it now, it was a few days ago—asked if I’d considered the possibility that I had strep throat. Yes. With alarm. But . . . after the first few days of fever and sparkly edge-of-vision hallucinations and drenching sweats and other lovelies, I was mysteriously not really sick enough. I’ve had strep—not in about four decades, but I’ve had it—and you’re sick. One of the things that was really forcing me to look at the fact that it was centred on my THROAT, with some head and ear involvement, is that the rest of me was not all that bad. I was keeping hounds hurtled and I was working on SHADOWS . . . and I was writing blog entries. I didn’t feel good, and this is not my usual level of madness, but with proper flu you’re prostrate.
^^ Mine usually run to cases of Taittinger’s, yearly best-sellers+, self supporting horse farms and five acres of Hampshire countryside securely fenced in for off-lead, aggressive-other-dog-free, hellhound hurtling. And a cure for ME and a thirty-six hour day.
+ Which includes, of course, the fact of writing a book a year.
** Anyone who is bailing now, if you need a suggestion what to do with yourself in the time that you usually spend reading Days in the Life, allow me to recommend back issues of xkcd, possibly starting here, which I have blatantly stolen from rainycity1’s tag line on the forum: FairyTales – http://xkcd.com/872/ Then you can just go on hitting ‘random’ till you finish your coffee/tea/porridge/jellied eel.
*** And to those of you who are thinking, actually, I did want my doodle four months ago . . . I’m very sorry. I’m constitutionally a deadline-misser, but this last year has been worse than usual, even for me.
† Not the one I was expecting, just by the way.
I am not looking forward to writing this post
Okay, the good news. I’m better. I’m still a whole lot less than optimum, and I doubt I’ll be having a voice lesson this Monday either, but I’m definitively better.
I started getting better pretty much the moment I put my resignation letter through the door of the tower captain of New Arcadia.
Yes. You read that right. I’ve just quit my home tower. My beloved home tower, where my beloved bells live. My beloved bells that I’ve been breaking my butt to raise some of the money for the restoration of. My beloved bells that from where I’m sitting tonight I may never ring again.
It’s a long story, really dating back seven years, when I joined. New Arcadia is one of those towers where Things Are Done A Certain Way. There are a lot of human groups like this. It’s one of the reasons I’m not a big group-joiner; I’m mostly really bad at doing things A Certain Way Because That Is The Way They Are Done. What? Why? But . . . bells. I love ringing. And you need other people to ring with. Okay, I can do this people thing. Probably. And it’ll be good for my character. Probably.*
Fast forward to the beginning of this year, when we found out that our bells needed a big expensive whack of restoration work, and considered ways and means to raise the money. In hindsight I can now remember (also I’ve discussed my no-win situation with people with better memories than mine) that there were several good ideas that were buried without trial because This Is Not The Way This Was Going to Be Done.
Those other good ideas, however, mostly needed more than one person to make happen, and I was still free to go off in my own clueless little rogue way and try to raise money to my own (clueless) little rogue system.
You know how that ended.
In hindsight, hindsight being wild and wonderful and perfect and beautiful and a big pain in the ass, we—that is, you my readers and I—were a victim of our own success. I suspect that if I’d raised £15.76 they’d have taken my money with a pat on the head and a kind smile. But noooooo. I had to go and raise a lot.** You know, like, a conspicuous lot. Somebody CONSPICUOUSLY doing something Not The Way It Has Been Decreed It Will Be Done!!! Arrgh! The Empire may fall!***
Sometimes my body is brighter than I am.† I find it interesting, now, with the savage lens of that relentless ratbag hindsight, that this lurgy first whapped me up longside the head last October, which is when the first crunch between my potential donation and the—ahem—unwillingness of the bell fund admin to view my nasty rogue money and me with any favour became visible or possibly I mean audible. CRUNCH. But in the first place, the sale/auction was already launched, and in the second place I loved the idea of drawing silly doodles to earn money for my bells. And in the third place, I can be dumb as a post when I want to be.
Well. There’s more, but I’m veering wildly over the line of discretion as it is. There’s been other stuff that has cast doubt on my future tenure at New Arcadia, but this business of the bell fund is the big one. And I’m a homeopath and I totally believe that the mind and body are the same critter—and that if the mind is being dumb as a post the body may well try to get its attention. I’ve had a swallowing-razors sore throat for a fortnight—something that never happens to me††, just by the way—so I can’t talk? Er—what is my body trying to tell me?
So I’ve resigned. The last paragraph of my letter is as follows: ‘I have had a lot of time to think this last fortnight, while I’ve been ill. And what I have decided is that I will no longer remain somewhere my loyalty, commitment and hard work are not appreciated.’ And as I said at the beginning of this post, after two paralytic weeks, the lurgy finally started shifting pretty much the moment I put my letter through the tower captain’s door.
So, where does that leave me—and you? Especially the many of you who are still waiting for your books and doodles? I have done no doodles since I’ve been ill these last weeks; Fiona was due to come next week, but I’ve put her off because while there’s plenty of other stuff she could be doing, what she ought to be doing is hauling the last or at least the second-to-last load of sale/auction stuff to the post office, and that’s not going to happen. I doubt I’m going to achieve any major inroads on the doodle backlog till I get SHADOWS in some shape to be read by my editor. It has really not been a good year. The overlapping story to this one is about PEG II crashing and burning last summer—remember ‘dumb as a post’? I didn’t want to notice why PEG II wasn’t cooperating, even when not noticing was driving me to that final edge of despair that I might not be a story-teller any more—and then frantically starting SHADOWS because I need to get paid. Because of PEG II and SHADOWS I††† was late getting the sale/auction stuff organised for Blogmom to put up; by the time the orders were in I was hip-deep in SHADOWS and by the time I realised the bell fund was doing the Icy British Ignoring Thing . . . I couldn’t deal with that too, so I didn’t.‡ Subconsciously . . . this is a lot of the reason I’ve been so slow getting on with the orders. I’ve blamed SHADOWS, and yes, SHADOWS is eating my life. But it’s less SHADOWS than creeping demoralisation. Doodling is fun. But I’m supposed to be doing this for my bells, and . . .
Okay. The money is still the money, and it’s still going to go to bell restoration. There are lots of bells out there that need work, some of them even local. When I’ve calmed down a little, when I’ve got used to the idea that I’m no longer a New Arcadia ringer‡‡, when I’ve got SHADOWS and the rest of the doodles done . . . I’ll investigate other options. New Arcadia has a few—ahem—unique problems. Generally speaking I’m not expecting most bell admins to feel that money a writer raised by selling doodles, books and other oddments to her readers is unsuitable. I’m hoping that I might find a local-enough tower that I might even ring there occasionally.
And me? I’ll keep ringing. I can ring for Colin on Mondays. I’m going to make another attempt to start ringing somewhat regularly at Forza: according to Gemma, Forza needs ringers, even dubiously mediocre ringers like me. My old home tower also meets on a Friday; it’s too far away from New Arcadia to go every week, but I might try to go occasionally. I can’t, at the moment, imagine joining another tower and getting involved in the day to day and week to week running of it, or even getting put on the ‘regulars’ list for ringing weddings. But I’m pretty burnt out.
Burnt out hell. I’m angry and baffled and miserable. What I said about lying in bed last Sunday morning listening to my bells and weeping? Yes. Big time. I knew, last Sunday, that I was going to be writing a letter to put through the tower captain’s door this week.
Handbells tonight with the usual crowd was somewhat soothing to the broken heart.
But my bells. My bells. . . .
* * *
* It hasn’t been good for my character. But that’s another story.
** The grisly truth is that I still don’t have the final sums—partly because I’m so behind in getting stuff out and therefore can’t have the final postage figures. But I promised the bell fund £2000, which I think is pretty near accurate.
*** You know, the Empire fell a while ago.
† Not that this always takes a lot. I haven’t tested it in maths however. Yo, you, leg, what’s the hydrolateral of the isosceles particle of the square root of parsley? Okay, maybe that’s botany.
†† It did once. After it went away I eventually discovered I had ME. This is not a story to cheer me up right now.
††† That’s SHADOWS, I, Robin, not SHADOWS VOLUME ONE. AAAAAAAAUGH.
‡ I’m so American.
‡‡ Waaaaaaaaaah