SHAAAAAAAAA. . .
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA AAAAAAAAAAAADOWS*.
AND IT’S THE 30TH OF JANUARY. NO. IT’S ALREADY THE 31ST. AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
AAAAAAAAAAA AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGGGGGHHHH.
* * *
* I did go to my voice lesson. I told you yesterday, I’m getting even stranger, bent over my computer twenty hours a day^, and I thought it might even be good for me to go get strung out in a different direction, even if SHADOWS is frelling due frelling tomorrow.^^ Also I only just started singing again last week and—I wanted to go. It’s been a slightly dubious week in terms of practise—there’s still crud in my throat and all this emotional-aspect stuff makes me kind of jumpy—if you manage to miss with the carving knife you go to A&E, get some stitches and a lecture, come home, mop up the blood, keep the bandage out of the bath, be a little careful of yourself till the stitches come out, and hey voila, there you are. Another interesting scar. But when you’re trying to patch yourself together from some kind of immaterial wound, where and how you put the stitches in, and what constitutes the kind of bath you should keep your damaged limb out of—and what exactly the limb is—is not so straightforward. So I’ve been singing sort of cautiously, and of course I’m wildly out of practise and I have no time.^^^ Also, my voice still keeps disappearing on me—less than it was doing before, but every time it does I’m convinced that this is The End and I’m too old to be reaching for this nonsense anyway.^^^^ Nadia waggled her eyebrows at me in that disbelieving-teacher way and said, now as I remember it we found out last week that the chief reason your voice was dropping out was because you were letting it get cut off from its air supply. Oh, I said. Um.
So she made me frelling breathe for a while, and connect, and all that really annoying stuff you shouldn’t NEED to be told over and over and over and over and over and OVER. But you do, because you’re a moron. And then she ran me up and down some scales and some exercises and kept reminding me to breathe and to connect, and I could actually feel the air sinking down and lying with this lovely rounded, grounded weightiness at the bottom of my pelvis, and every now and then I also remembered to let it out again, and carry my voice with it. I had already admitted that occasionally this week when I wasn’t convinced I still couldn’t sing and was therefore producing a self-fulfilling prophesy of squawks and silences, I’d made a few noises that were fuller and freer than what I’m used to . . . and with the teacher-magic she teased them out of me today, and convinced them to bring friends. I was singing back up at the top of my range again—which I haven’t even tried at home since before I was ill, because I have been too busy feeling fragile, convalescent and overworked—and I was loud—me! Old no-voice me!— the kind of loud your average local amateur choir would be happy to have yelling from its benches—loud the way I don’t sing, especially at the top end where my brain is busy saying, no, no, wait, we don’t do that. Nadia stopped me where she did not because my voice was failing, she said, but because my brain was closing me down.
But. There’s life in the old cow yet. Mooo. Yaay. And I came home again all exhilarated and threw myself into SHADOWS.
^ That leaves two for hurtling hounds and two for sleeping. Other crucial activities like eating chocolate can be performed coincidently while typing.
^^ Later today. Shut up.
^^^ And the twenty-fifth hour is for singing practise.
^^^^ I actually raised this with Nadia today. How big an embarrassing moron am I being, taking voice lessons at nearly-sixty? For some reason I’ve heard like half a dozen times this last week that sopranos lose their voices really early and it seems sort of fated to be hearing this over and over again when I’m convalescent from the throat infection that had stopped me singing altogether—and ten months off my sixtieth birthday.+ And she said, two things: there’s no reason you shouldn’t last a good while yet as a choir singer—it’s professional sopranos that fold predictably early because of the colossal demands they put on their voices—and you’re lucky—you’ve got all the alto notes too. If you need to slip down to sing alto, you can.
::Beams:: Good. On with the voice lessons, then.
+ And before you answer that, I added, let me say that while this is all contingent on you being willing to teach me, I’ve already figured out that I’m in it for the journey. Never mind that thirty years ago I’d’ve had no voice to train either, all this trying to bind yourself together in a seamless whole to produce a sound is fascinating, even if the resultant sound is nothing much.
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. . .
The Tourmaline Ring
So it’s twenty and a half years ago. Peter and I have decided to get married.* All the important stuff has already been decided, like that I’m going to emigrate.** But that means we have to get married: the fiancée’s visa only lasts for six months. That’s not a problem: we’re both old-fashioned: we want to get married, and I’m the kind of old-fashioned that furthermore wants a proper ring to go with the deal. Hey. I like jewellery.
I’d originally assumed we’d find one suitably old and hoary and glamorous and possibly mad in an antique shop somewhere for an engagement ring; wedding rings to be practical need to be plain and could be dealt with separately when we knew what the flashy one looked like. We spent some time in this pursuit*** but we were finding nothing nearly unique and fabulous enough, I had to finish DEERSKIN and we wanted to get on with the moving and the new life and so on.
I can’t now remember who recommended this jewellery designer to us. But we went to see him and explained we wanted something definitively Maine for me to wear in England. He suggested Maine tourmalines—I think I didn’t know about Maine tourmalines at that point—and we eventually agreed that he’d design and make not only an engagement ring with the tourmalines, but wedding rings that would all fit together as part of the same design. Peter felt this was mostly my show† and I did try to tell the bloke the sort of thing I liked: flowing lines, mainly, swirly or woven or floral. Maybe sort of art nouveau. I liked the stuff in his shop. And I liked the idea of the Maine designer working with the Maine tourmalines.
We went back to see the stones when they arrived. I don’t know if the designer bloke asked for triangular, or if that was what he could get. Okay. This would make it unusual. And pink and green are excellent.
We never saw any designs. We saw the rings themselves when they’d already been cast (if cast is what I mean) and although they weren’t finished yet it wasn’t like we could go backward and say, uh, no, I meant Charles Rennie Macintosh, not Cecil Balmond.†† The wedding rings had these little hooks in the middle like the two ends of a twist tie bent together—and with the squared-off ends sticking out up and down your finger. Can you say CATCHES THE FRELL ON EVERYTHING? My tourmaline engagement ring fit down over the top ensnaring bend of my wedding ring, but that still left the sharp bottom edge to cause havoc and mayhem. They were certainly . . . different. But they were not sensible, and while many of the details of that whole era of the beginning of my life with Peter are blurry with exhilaration and terror, I do remember Peter telling the bloke that he works with his hands a lot, he spends hours every day in the garden, doing carpentry and cooking and he needs a ring that won’t get in the way.
The man smiled and nodded. These creative types. They’re so in their own little world.†††
But part of the swoop and breathtakingness of a runaway romance like ours is that you do kind of want it to glide as far as it can before it founders on some ineluctable aspect of ratbagging reality. The wife in the attic. The outstanding warrant. The gerbil fetish. The chocolate addiction . . . And I don’t think the designer bloke was cheating us in any overt way: I think we paid an honest amount for his time and his materials. He just didn’t listen.
Almost the first thing we did after the wedding was over was . . . run to the nearest ordinary jeweller and buy two utterly plain smooth gold rings and wear them. The barbed designer versions came out for fancy occasions and the rest of the time lived in my jewellery drawer. Sigh. This had not been the plan . . . and while the plain gold ones worked fine as wedding rings‡ I was rather wistful about my Maine tourmalines wasting their glory in a drawer.
I think it was around our tenth anniversary that Peter said, for our twentieth, we’ll have the tourmalines reset.
So that’s what we did. And this time we went to a jeweller we’ve been going to for . . . twenty years. He listens. He made my fabulous silver whippet belt buckle.‡‡ And we saw designs. We saw several designs. I wanted my new ring to look like it fit next to the plaited-gold-with-tiny-diamond-chips ring that was my fiftieth birthday present‡‡‡ and which I now wear as my wedding ring. And it does, doesn’t it?
This time it worked.
Mmmmmm. ::Beams::
* * *
* And our friends and family are all going, what? Well, it was a somewhat precipitate decision. We’d known each other maybe sixty hours in total.^
^ I’ve told you how we met, haven’t I? I was on a Literary Tour of England and he was one of the speakers.
** Somebody had to. Peter originally suggested we divide our time, but I knew—and I’m sure I was right—we’d both hate it. And Peter had lived in this area of Hampshire over forty years at that point, had four kids, the first two grandchildren, three brothers and their families, eight first cousins and . . . I had a whippet, and a background as a peripatetic military brat.
*** This was the occasion of one of our most important Bonding Moments. THELMA AND LOUISE had been bigger than god, Spacelab and Boris Yeltzin for months, and it was playing at a theatre in Portland, Maine, where we’d gone to cruise antique jewellery shops. I’ve told you this too, haven’t I? We walked out. We walked right after the dumb one spends the night with Brad Pitt the robber on the lam AND THE MONEY IN THE FRELLING DRAWER while the smart (!!?!??) one goes off to have a deep, sensitive evening with her supportive boyfriend.
† He’s got a much better eye for jewellery than he thinks he does—see: silver whippet belt buckle, below—but it’s true that this was my Big Symbolic Thing about leaving Maine to live in England with him.
†† http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-14027083 Okay, I don’t know what Balmond was doing twenty years ago. Designing engagement rings, possibly.
††† I do wonder if Designer Bloke already had this idea in his mind and he wanted to use it, whether the triangular stones inspired it, or what. But he sure wasn’t too interested in the interface with his clients.
‡ Anybody aware of the standard behaviour about such things of English gentlemen of Peter’s vintage will be gobsmacked that Peter wears a wedding ring at all. Well. Yes. I don’t think it ever occurred to me that he wouldn’t—I wanted us both to wear them—and that’s what happened. It wasn’t till later that I realised that Peter was humouring me about this too.^
^ I tell myself that if I have to choose I’d rather he wore a wedding ring than remembered to shut the door behind him.+ I perhaps tell myself this rather often. But romance over practicality? Sure. Why do I have sixty rose-bushes in a garden the size of a large ping-pong table?
+ This includes refrigerator doors. Just by the way.
‡‡ I hope I’ve told you this story. I told Peter I wanted something significant and wearable for my fortieth birthday.
‡‡‡ Also bought in Maine. Hmm. My sixtieth is next year . . .
Christmas
Yes, I worked on SHADOWS today.* Next question**.
The front door of the mews since last night after dark.
Wreath. Tactful, Peter-placating***, reusable wreath.†
Tree. You will note Large Box to the right.
I admit I didn’t manage to hang every ornament we own on it, but it’s definitely decorated. The important baubles are up. The robins. The horses. The roses. The bells. Some time between yesterday and New Year’s I’ll probably finish getting the tinsel over the lampshades, picture frames, candlesticks, and piano.
Another view of Large.
Yes. It’s Large. Peter said, You wouldn’t buy me a microwave. I said, No, I wouldn’t, and it doesn’t weigh enough, unless they’re now making plastic microwaves in which case I’m not going to buy you one twice.
::LOUD RUSTLING AND RIPPING NOISES::
Highlights:
Gasp!
Yes. It’s true. I bought Peter a Kindle. Now all we have to do is figure out how to use it. Georgiana and Saxon will be here tomorrow: I’m proposing they do it. Hey, I bought it. My job is over.†† But the point is that you can dial up the typeface size, and even with his reading specs Peter finds tiny mass market paperback type size trying.
Oooh! Roses!
Peter bought me a book on roses. How . . . surprising. Okay, so I’ve been eyeing it on line for months. But the gorgeous slipcover is a surprise—as is the fact it’s signed and numbered.
Yes, it's still a thrill when other people sign their books.
I had assumed it was just another drop-dead-glam coffee table book full of glossy pictures but it’s a lot more, well, beautiful than that, and a pleasure to handle as an object and never mind its subject matter.††† It’s smaller and fatter than a coffee table book—like a book you would, ahem, read—and the edges are gilt!—and the pages are matte not shiny, and it’s paintings not photos. You even have a sewn-in bookmark.
La France. Usual historical suspect for first Hybrid Tea. Blah blah blah.
I grew her at the old house. She was a frail heroine, prone to fits of the vapours, and a terrible head-hanger.
The GUARDIAN is always full of helpful suggestions this time of year, and look at what I found only a few days ago on offer at http://www.tattydevine.com/ :
Hee hee hee hee hee hee
I immediately turned to Peter and said, don’t you really want to buy me a Perspex bat necklace? What? he said.
Oh and the large parcel/small coffin/medium-sized old-fashioned maiden aunt?
It's a bin.
No, really, this is a great present. We have terrible bin luck at the mews. This kitchen is where most of the heavy cooking happens, and you want a serious bin with a lid, and you want something that it doesn’t take both hands to open. We’ve had a series of expensive foot-pedal-lid-opening bins which are the joy of our hearts for about six months and then they break. But they’re so expensive you don’t just rush out and replace them. Well, the last (broken) one is over a year old and . . . I saw this in a catalogue (yes, I have some strange tastes in catalogues) and it had all these rave customer reviews and . . . ask me in six months.
. . . And now I seem to be extremely full of turkey and champagne and Christmas pudding and brandy butter and . . . I forget . . . zzzzzzzz . . . .
Hope yours was merry.
* * *
* Not, perhaps, for very long. But on four and a half hours of sleep I’m doing very well. Bells were rung, hellhounds were hurtled, SHADOWS was gently drawn a little closer to being finished . . . oh yes, and it’s Christmas.
For the first time in my life I have a Christmas cactus blooming on Christmas. By garden centre error and mismanagement. On one of those raids last autumn, when I went for a £2.99 replacement spool of green gardening twine and came home with so many plants I could hardly wedge them all in Wolfgang, I bought another Christmas cactus. I need more Christmas cacti like I need . . . uh . . . more rosebushes. At least the roses live outdoors. But this one was a particularly pretty pink with white edges. It was just starting to come out. So I bought it and brought it home.
And all its flower buds immediately fell off. ARRRRRRGH.
Christmas cacti are generally extremely tough so I assumed that it would be fine next year but that this year was going to be a bust. Nope. About a month ago I noticed it was producing little pale tippy knobs . . . a fresh lot of flower buds. Yaaaay. I’m not even going to complain that it’s reverted to the standard pale pink of which I have lots. I have lots because fallen-off or pruned-back branches root really easily.
Stop press! A Christmas cactus blooming on CHRISTMAS!
** And yes, I’ve been singing. But I haven’t touched Dove Sei in three days. I’m singing Christmas carols.
*** ‘I don’t need a wreath.’
† With my eccentric bent for befriending inanimate objects, I find this is another advantage of things like fake, that is, reusable, wreaths and trees. So every year it’s like, hey, how are you, how’s it going?, good to see you again.
†† I told the archangels when they were last here that I’d bought Peter a Kindle for Christmas and it was so sleek and shiny that if he didn’t like it I’d take it over. Raphael and Gabriel exchanged a long look. Robin, said Raphael after a minute, do you really want another piece of technology in your life?
No. And besides, Astarte has Montezuma too.
††† Well, okay. Do mind the subject matter.
In which Mercury stops being retrograde at least briefly
CAMBRIDGE MINOR! YAAAAAAY!
The day did not start off brilliantly when I slept through my alarm again. Or no, I didn’t sleep through it: I said, oh, stuff it, I’ll get up in a minute, turned it off . . . and the post didn’t come through the door till eleven o’clock today. YAAAAAAH. On the other hand I wasn’t due at the mews to meet Raphael till 11:30 . . . *
And when, having rung Raphael and obtained a half-hour reprieve, hellhounds and I shot out down the front steps for a brief hurtle, I discovered that some redolent ratbagging rhinoceros butt has broken another of my big plant pots. May a fragment of pottery be working its insidious way into the tyre that did the deed, and may said tyre go flat at the worst possible moment—perhaps when they’re lost in the Scottish Highlands, they had left the spare in Hampshire to make more room for suitcases, the last house they saw was twenty miles ago and it was empty, it’s after sunset, their mobile phone can’t get a signal, and the vampires are getting closer.**
However, I do have my old laptop back wheeeeeew. So at least I can SEE what I’m doing today.*** And Oisin put his teacher hat back on long enough† to sympathise with my traumatic Wednesday, saying that it was not even all that surprising that I was knocked off my perch by all the strangeness and that he guaranteed that Nadia was not going to fire me and did not say to her husband that night that she loved teaching singing except for that elderly neurotic American git who furthermore has no voice worth training.†† And (Oisin added) I should be brave about hearing an unbearably fabulous opera singer have a whack at Dove Sei tomorrow at the Met Live.
Tomorrow is a long way off. First I had to be brave about being in charge of tonight’s tower practise. Gemma had asked yesterday if we were having practise and might she come, and I told her that I was torn between begging her to come and telling her not to waste her time, since with Niall and Penelope absent we might end up with three people, cut our losses and go home. It didn’t look good for about the first ten minutes: there were only four of us. We got four bells up (ready to ring) and started making bad jokes about rewriting Doohickey Panjandrum Maximus (twelve bells) for minimus (four bells)†††. But then, lo!, there were feet on the ladder, and we were six. Eventually we were eight.
I hammered poor Monty harder than I meant to. He’s learning his first inside method—plain bob doubles, it’s always plain bob doubles—which tends to be the first method you learn to call too. I can call weeny touches of both plain bob and Grandsire doubles, but I’ve got a bit stuck calling ‘observation’ which essentially means that you the caller sail grandly through the method making your calls so that everybody but you has to do something funny and you’re ringing all plain courses. This is somewhat acceptable for a first-conducting learner—it’s appalling enough having to remember to call at all, and trying to remember how many times you’ve called and how many calls you have left before the wretched method comes round—and when it does come round, to call THAT’S ALL which I almost invariably forget to do. But Roger, who is an evil grinning troll, said that it was past time I learnt some other touch where I’d have to play too. Grrrr. Well, I know the theory, so I declared that I would do this—and in the best best-value tradition, I put poor Monty to ring inside again, so that we could both practise something. Having, sunk in my own torment, forgotten that Monty doesn’t know how to ring a touch . . . fortunately one of our good ringers was ‘minding’ him so no blood was shed, although there may have been a certain amount of burning-the-deputy-ringing-master-in-effigy after it was all over. After Roger called THAT’S ALL because I forgot. . . .
We had, as I say, eight ringers, but only four of us knew what we were doing. I wasn’t sure we were safe for ringing even plain courses of Grandsire Triples, but I put Monty on the tenor and distributed Leo, Gemma and me variously around the rest—and I rang two courses on two different bells I had never rung before, which is one of those things you’re supposed to do—not get stuck on ringing only one bell: you SHOULD be able to ring a method you claim to know from ANY bell‡—so I was feeling fairly chuffed after this, when I risked saying, since we only had about fifteen minutes left, Any requests?
Edward looked consideringly around and said, we could ring Cambridge Minor. I had thought of this myself, and had discarded it instantly. Furthermore we rang it on the back six (bells)—Edward’s idea—which meant Those of Us with Overringing from Terror Problems have a real artery-bursting situation when we’ve yanked something into the stratosphere that weighs seven or eight times more than we do as opposed to three or four times (on a smaller bell), and then have to try to haul it back down again without totally losing our place in the row. Ahem.
BUT I DID IT. YES. I RANG A FULL PLAIN COURSE OF CAMBRIDGE MINOR AND NOBODY YELLED AT ME EVEN ONCE. And, not to boast unattractively or anything, I managed this in spite of several other people going wrong at various points along the way‡‡.
After this I may even get through Rodelinda and Dove Sei tomorrow without bursting into tears. Hey, how many of Nadia’s other students can ring Cambridge minor?
* * *
* Remind me to go to bed early tonight. Well, earlier. Earlier ought to be possible.^
^ I say this every night.
** Or the rabid hyenas. I’m not fussy.
*** Predicted arrival of new laptop now the middle of next week. Siiiiigh. However, Archangel Corp is only Raphael and Gabriel and they’re always doing umpty-jillion things at once, only possible for archangels, who have special auxiliary time and dimensional clearances not vouchsafed to the rest of us.^ And I know from experience that if I’m in real trouble they’ll take an extra fold in the time-space-gluon-sensitive-dependence-on-initial-conditions^^ continuum, and rescue me.
^ I’m not sure archangels sleep either.
^^ Hey, I’m suffering with this self-education schtick. Therefore you have to suffer too.
† I have got so accustomed to his taking-the-mickey hat—over a pot of tea as we discuss how the world and our respective weeks have gone horribly wrong—that sometimes I forget.
†† He’s just saying that to make me feel better.
††† You can do this kind of thing—I can’t, I hasten to add, but posh conductors can—but it’s a manifestation of despair and the presence of only four ringers/bells.
‡ But then I would never claim to know Grandsire Triples.
‡‡ You may get away with this even when you only somewhat know what you’re doing if the unscheduled behaviour is happening at the other end of the row from you. One of my favourite/unfavourite things is when two or three of the really good ringers get into an argument WHILE THEY’RE STILL RINGING about what’s gone wrong.^
^ These are all people who never forget to say ‘that’s all’ at the end of a touch they’re conducting.