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Pink etc
Last night’s blog was over 1500 words . . . plus the links. So I thought tonight I’d give everyone a break and hang some photos.
Which I think I had better number, given Wordpress’ villainous ways with photos. Siiiiiigh. How many updates have we had? How many times have they done nothing about this?
So, please meet Apocalypse, my third hellhound. (1) The small demure-looking one.* Who finally has her case.** What an epic that has proved to be.*** However, she is now suitably accoutred for travelling around in a pocket, and having keys and penknives absent-mindedly dropped on her head. Yes, the wallpaper on her opening screen is a rose.† (2) And yes, she’s sitting on a plant catalogue. J Parker’s Wholesale Autumn 2010 catalogue, to be precise.
But I thought we might have some photos of things that aren’t roses. Just so you’ll know. I do grow other stuff. Although pink is always good. (4) 
[Gaaaah. See footnote ** for photo (3) ]
This is Brackenridge Ballerina. (5) Speaking of pink. And I was thinking recently, in a rather dazed manner, that this year I’ve got all my dahlias staked. Which it’s a good thing, since BB is about six foot tall. Stop, stop! Four foot is plenty!
But the comprehensive staking of dahlias doesn’t happen in my garden(s). Although if it weren’t for the slug problem Recumbent Dahlias might catch on. I was using them as ground cover at Third House last year but the disbursement of slug bait was extreme. This is Rothesay Reveller (6) whom I love to pieces and grow every year—as the season progresses her swathes of white and purple will become ever more dazzling—and if you look closely you’ll see that the serrated quality is not just colouring. I swear by my copper rings for the thwarting and contravention of slugs, but anything that grows against something else has to be protected from circuitous assault. The Reveller grows up against the little picket fence that marks off the hellhounds’ courtyard, and the slugs had been doing an upper-storey cat-burglar number on poor Reveller when she was still only picket-fence height before I unhooked one of the copper rings and hung it flat against the fence. ::Tiny cries of slug indignation::
And here are my famous trailing petunias. (7) Have I posted this photo—or one like it, they’re into their second flush right now—before? It’s just that they are extremely eye catching, especially to me, since I walk out my front door and there they are. Trailing. 
Not. Covering up all that excellent plastic baggery which is in fact working a treat for keeping my hanging baskets from cracking like the Sahara this year—and while geraniums will put up with a surprising amount of abuse, petunias really need their water. Oh well. I have let down the posh elegance of my little street every year, why should this year be any different? It’s just that I prefer to let it down by deliberate affront, like the Reveller††, rather than by simply screwing up. But speaking of petunias and delicious affront, aren’t these good? (8) I hope they’re available again next year. They could become a regular, like the Reveller. 
* * *
*Although her default ringtone at the moment is barking. No, I mean literally, although that too.
** Of course it’s pink. Don’t be silly. However, when I was changing the hellhound bedding in the car recently it occurred to me that my pink thing could conceivably be thought of as out of control. [OH GODS. Do I number the photo according to its place in the text, which would make it (3), or do I number it for its position on the screen . . . which I don’t know yet because I write the footnotes as they happen . . . ] 
*** No postpersons have been killed, although the one this morning had a narrow escape.
† I was cruising the iTunes store for garden and plant identification apps—which is an entirely exasperating and unsatisfactory category, by the way, if there are any gardening programmers out there—and was offered Plants vs Zombies. Snork.
†† Dahlias still generally are so not done by serious gardeners. The same serious gardeners, pretty much, who won’t grow roses, although roses are slightly less déclassé than dahlias. Serious gardeners can stick it up their respective . . . noses. Even Peter, who after all married me, and while our courtship was brief it was intense and he can’t say he had no idea what he was getting into, had trouble with my instant attraction to dahlias. Roses he could handle^ but it took me a couple of years to force him to compromise his high principles and allow dahlias. He now grows them happily at the mews. I don’t even have to yell or pout or anything. Principles haven’t a prayer against a determined spouse.
^ Well, he thought he could, till I started putting them in by the hundred
Trilateral angst
I hadn’t exactly forgotten, but the implications of Niall being gone for a whole ten days had been a trifle muffled by the full on glaring shock of last Friday’s practise, when nobody suitable showed up that I could pass the poisoned chalice of mastership* to and was stuck pretending I knew what I was doing. With a lot of heavy cueing from Vicky.** It happened again this morning. There I am, on no sleep***, eight forty-five in the frelling morning, when no sane person should be awake, let alone dressed, preliminarily caffeinated, and arguing with several hundred pounds of metal on the end of a rope. And then there are all these beady eyes staring at you, waiting for you to say something. Something masterful. Gah. It doesn’t help that two of the beady eyes belong to Roger, who is grinning the grin of the retired-from-being-ringing-master-after-thirty-years-to-become-sane.† Gah.
And it’s all going to happen again NEXT week.
And then . . . whose idea was house guests? If this sounds a lot like whose idea was hellhounds?††, it is. Stop looking at me like that!††† It seemed like a good idea at the time! And I’m sure it was a good idea to get rid of three years’ accumulation of magazines!‡ And move the supplementary To Be Read Immediately book pile out of the upstairs hallway! And . . . never mind. There’s a limit to how much I’m willing to reveal in public of my shortcomings as a housekeeper.‡‡
Meanwhile . . . I have to go sing. My voice lesson is tomorrow because I have a train to meet Tuesday afternoon.‡‡‡ And I’m supposed to be singing in Italian again. Trying to make the notes and the syllables come out more or less even is bad enough when you know what the latter mean. When they’re things like ‘voglioamarvio’ and ‘chivagheggiarpuomai’§ it can get ugly. I should stick to Purcell.
* * *
* Ahem. So to speak. There’s probably some weatheraugury and clearseeing in there too. There’s certainly some talismanning: the bells themselves are large bronze fetishes. And some of us certainly climb the stairs/ladder to every practise or service ring praying to the bell gods and goddesses that we’re not about to make the most awful prats of ourselves—and hoping that’s not snickering we’re hearing from the belfry. Any of you who have read A Pool in the Desert will be aware that Damar has bells—parts of the northern border are kept rung in a complex sound-magic against invasion from the bad guys you may have met in SWORD and HERO. Damarian bells are alive^, and when you receive a new one for your bell tower, if it’s not alive, you send it back to the foundry. Very alchemical, Damarian bells. You’ll be able to read all about it some day in THE BELLS OF MAZAHAN.
Meanwhile, our generally-considered-inert-mwa-ha-ha-ha Hampshire bells are quite interesting enough to be going on with.
^ Or possibly inhabited. No one is quite sure.
** She missed her calling. She should have been a prompter. The kind with the electric cattle prod.
*** Possibly on account of an insufficiency of muffling.
Also because, after all day yesterday was made a burden by a rock concert^— they don’t usually have these things in town, go find some empty landscape and scare the cows—the Troll and Nightingale, my local pub, was having one of its live music evenings. Shouldn’t everyone be indoors closely watching the world cup, for godssake?
^ A seriously indifferent rock concert. Even through closed windows this much was clear. If it had been anybody interesting I’d’ve stopped planting roses/futzing about in the attic and gone.
† Vicky won’t let him torture me however. Kali also has a strong maternal aspect, you know.
†† Who had a magnificent run over the sports grounds a few sheep fields over from the mews this evening. I never let them off lead in town—they’re just too frelling fast, and it’s not worth the risk.^ But they found a tennis ball—they having now fully comprehended the Wonder that is Tennis Balls—and just about attained lift-off. They do this prancing, rocking-horse invitation-to-play thing that I swear involves levitation. And there was nobody around—inexplicably, a gorgeous late daylight June evening—and I was tempted, and I fell. And they had a fabulous time—back in the whippets’ day it was easier to lift one of them off the ground by their mouths around a tennis ball than my current guys^^—and we’re all alive to tell about it and I’m not even expecting any writs to be served on us tomorrow.
^ No one but another running-dog owner believes this. Normal dog owners look at you patronisingly and say, well, my dog is very fast too . . . leaving you to understand that your recall is being impugned. Well, that too. But their recall is actually pretty good . . . but whippets are pound for pound the fastest dog on the planet. Greyhounds are faster, but they’re also bigger. Your forty-pound seven-eighths whippet just let off the lead disappears. You blink and he’s gone. If he’s fond of you, fortunately, he’ll keep circling back. First Rule if you’ve lost your sighthound: stop where you are. He’ll come looking for you where he last saw you.+ You may have had a nervous breakdown by then, but he’ll be back—and will stoically bear the sobbing and hugging.
+ No, really. Jackie Drakeford says so. Jackie Drakeford is my Sighthound Goddess. http://www.amazon.co.uk/House-Lurcher-Jackie-Drakeford/dp/1904057349
^^ Yes, I’m sure this is very bad training. But we’re not training. We’re playing. Like the recall, they’re actually pretty good about ‘drop’ when told. There are lots of things they don’t do, but coming back and standing quietly to have their leads put back on, and dropping evil/disgusting/illicit objects when ordered are two that they do do. I can live with this.
††† Were you a ringing master for thirty years also?
‡ As well as the rather scary accumulation of geranium petals and cobwebs behind them, which were about to about to achieve critical mass and evolve. I’d already been through this once after Fiona hauled off sixty-seven bags of books to Oxfam last week. The geranium-petal-and-cobweb thing was pretty intense there too. It almost makes me rethink my devotion to indoor geraniums. Almost. After all, enough fallen geranium petals behind a radiator to morph into Frankenstein’s monster indicates clearly what heartfelt flowerers geraniums are. And the cobwebs . . . meh. Not much you can do about spiders. I’ve tried teaching them manners. They’re harder to train than hellhounds.
‡‡ Gah. Must change hellhound bedding tonight so I can get the hairy stuff washed tonight in the hopes of the ambient hellhound-hair mist having resettled sufficiently by Tuesday afternoon that I can hoover to some effect. Not to mention mopping out the inside of the washing machine. Sigh.
‡‡‡ This week has only been SIX DAYS! Weeks are horribly short enough when they’re SEVEN DAYS!
§ Which I have no doubt makes perfect sense to Italians. Even where the slurs run, which do not necessarily have anything to do with where the words break^, probably makes sense to an Italian.
^ That would be too easy.
Niall the Rotten Ratbag*
We were only six at bell practise tonight, including Cordelia** and Tanya, our beginner. I had got there early because I’d asked Niall if I could have a lesson in teaching beginners, assuming that he’d play the beginner in case of accidents, but he promptly said, certainly, come along early on Friday and you can guinea-pig Tanya.*** So I did, and both Tanya and I survived†. But it’s been a long day†† and having resigned myself to not ringing/disfiguring Grandsire triples or Cambridge minor I thought, hey! He’ll have to let us go early! Great! Maybe I’ll even take hellhounds for a final stroll in the (comparative) cool of the evening—we’re a little behind on hurtling, since it’s been pizza-oven hot all day—maybe I’ll take a quick turn past Third House’s garden and see what’s gasping for a drink†††. Noooooo. We rang the full hour and a half. And three of the four of us nonbeginners rang nonstop—when we were ringing rounds for Tanya, Niall stood out to give support and succour as necessary to Tanya. And as if this was not offense enough, I was (in my exalted position as Deputy Ringing Master) expected to engage intelligently with my Ringing Master on a post-mortem discussion on the practise just past and in what manner we could all be brought on further and more efficiently. . . .
So I’m shattered, and I’m not going to get back to my piano miniatures tonight. There are now three of them, each of them begun some Friday afternoon when Oisin has been late, and I’ve been dranglefabbing around on his piano. I carry manuscript paper with me these days‡ so I can write odd noises down as they come to me, supposing I can figure out which little line(s) to put them on/between, and/or decide whether they’re black or hollow and whether they have tails or not. The problem is that noise-scraps accumulate, and when I sat down with these particular three I had a strange murky sensation that they relate to each other—although whether they are going to relate in any way recognisable to anyone but me remains to be seen. And it hasn’t been a good week for making beautiful connections‡‡.
So I once again went for my weekly cup of tea, which used to be a piano lesson, with Oisin, without anything to show him. Have I told you that he’s now got the most amazing virtual organ? I hope whoever invented the software didn’t have to sell his‡‡‡ soul to anyone inappropriate. But conversations with Oisin are now perilous, because he may reach out a negligent arm at any moment and go BRRRRRRROOOOOOOMMMMMMM. It’s actually pretty funny because there are wires everywhere and various squatty toadlike amp things and a couple of unmatched keyboards Oisin simply had lying around§ and no pedalboard at all, while he waits for his official rack and roll§§ to get built. Plus a loose computer screen that has pictures of organ stops on it and goes ‘ssssh’ and ‘clunk’ when you ‘pull’ them out or ‘push’ them in—and the screen itself, being as jury-rigged as the rest of it, trembles faintly when he taps it—although what the ‘stops’ do is real enough. But to look at it’s clearly a Heath Robinson bodge up.
And then he plays something. Hold onto your hair. Yowzah. And of course the whole works is portable, so when there’s a wedding at one of the many tiny adorable organ§§§-free churches around here he can make a splendid noise for less money than it takes to hire a commercial organ.# And as I have said to him in my glamorous and seductive persona of Evil Cow, he is now equipped to take his Small Select Choral Group on the road. Have I mentioned the Small Select Choral Group? Most of the opportunities for group singing around here are either church choirs or amateur gangs putting on the gruesomely anodyne end of musical theatre. I feel there is a cultural gap, possibly even a niche market.
The first time I brought this up he looked thoughtful, so I added hastily that if I was going to be in it there had to be at least twelve. I mentioned this to a friend with a nasty mind who mwa ha ha ha’d at me and said that he’d start out with twelve and eight of them would mysteriously melt away into the shadows and I’d find myself in a barbershop quartet before I finished learning to mouth the words without making any noise.
I don’t think barbershop quartets generally have organ accompaniments.
* * *
* So what else is new? The backwards bob minor yesterday was his idea too. Of course.
** Although she’s decided to use bell ringing as part of her Duke of Edinburgh http://www.dofe.org/ so she’s suddenly paying more attention. Ah teenagers.
*** Standard set-up for beginners still just learning to cope with the rope is to ask them to come along early and practise on a silenced bell, both so that they aren’t wasting the rest of the band’s time and don’t have to do it with the entire band standing around and staring at them but also so that you’re not driving the neighbours crazy listening to a single bell going dong, which can be the auditory version of the Chinese water torture for susceptible individuals. Tanya is up to doing ‘sets’, which is to ‘set’ her bell a given number of times in a row: first you do ten in a row at handstroke, and then you do ten in a row at backstroke (which is harder). Every time you miss you start over. Tanya, like every beginning bell ringer who has ever lived, believes that she is the worst. She, like (almost^) every beginning bell ringer who has ever lived, is mistaken.
^ Remember Arlo Guthrie on the last guy? “But think of the last guy. For one minute, think of the last guy. Nobody’s got it worst than that guy. Nobody in the whole world.” http://www.arlo.net/resources/lyrics/pause-claus.shtml I often think of the last guy.
† Teaching a beginner chiefly means catching one stroke while they try to make the other one happen at the right time and in the right rhythm. You haven’t got this far on this blog without watching some bell ringing, have you? http://www.cccbr.org.uk/bellrecordings/video/ You see there are two strokes—the one when you grab the fuzzy handle thing called the sally, and the one when you’ve only got hold of the tail. You break this up for a beginner: first they grapple with the backstroke—because it’s harder for them to do any damage on the backstroke—and then the handstroke. You the teacher are yanking the other stroke and trying to counterbalance whatever mayhem the beginner is creating on the opposite one.
†† Got my final superfluous deadline met and mastered^ today, so maybe I can finally get back to my simple life of plants, piano and PEGASUS, not necessarily in that order, and psinging and phellhounds. And a few other pthings. Ppeter ppossibly.
^ ‘Mastered’ is perhaps overstating the case.
††† I’m not entirely mad and I only do little pots at the cottage.
‡ Why not? It’s not like it weighs
‡‡ She says, glaring. A certain winged being preens carelessly and then settles down comfortably for a snooze.
‡‡‡ I’m pretty sure I know it’s a his
§ You may remember he has a whole frelling recording studio in the not-much-more-than-a-crawlspace attic over his music room, which makes finding out what he can actually do up there all the more bizarre.
§§ so to speak
§§§ And bell-
# Did you know there were organ-hire firms? Geeez. What’s left? Hiring the bride?
.
SHORT DRANGLEFABBING MONDAY*, OKAY?
What is the matter with me? I keep saying I need to spend less time on the blog, I need to learn to write shorter, and if I can’t write shorter . . . I’m going to have to disappear, and will be discovered thirty years from now on an atoll with my sixty-seven hellhounds and 1,893,712 rosebushes (very good drainage on atolls, and lots of fish mulch) happy and content and having forgotten how to type.**
Oh . . . well . . . I guess I have to finish PEGASUS II first.***
So let’s try again with Short Mondays.
It is really really really dumb that here I am a writer who is also a compulsive reader who almost never mentions or recommends books. There are two reasons for this. One of them you know: that I am an evil cow. For every ten books I read, eight of them I throw against the wall.† One of them gets a ‘meh’. One of them I like. But over time that’s still a lot of liked books.
Which brings up the second reason. Which is that books matter and in my well-known when-I’m-not-being-an-evil-cow-I’m-a-little-damp-pudding-of-self-doubt way, I quail at the notion of doing it wrong. Of not doing it right enough. Of writing a bad book report of a book I really liked. A great big sticky reason why this blog is days in the life is because if I mess me up . . . only I will care. And I can cope with me in a bad mood. I do it all the time.
So let’s try to start a new trend. With a book that Peter gave me for Christmas. He found it all by himself. I read book reviews so erratically any more I never know what’s going on, even when it’s hot, so I didn’t know to ask for it. Peter saw ‘Gothic’, ‘velvety purple cover’ and ‘HP Lovecraft’ and knew I had to have it.
http://www.walker.co.uk/Salem-Brownstone-All-Along-the-Watchtowers-9781406320527.aspx
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pz8cgCDvskc
(Whoever wrote the opening blurb either hasn’t read the book, or has already read the rest of the series. Never mind. Look at the pictures.)
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/nov/28/salem-brownstone-john-dunning-review
I don’t know from graphic novels, but I liked this one a lot.†† There’s heaps of stuff out there on the net about it—the three links here should be enough to tell you if you want to hunt it down or not.
I’m looking forward to the next one.
* * *
* Yes, I went ringing at Colin and Anthea’s home tower tonight. Yes, I went with Niall. Yes, I rang Cambridge. I rang Cambridge without a minder. But I am SPARING you the details (like that I didn’t do it very well, and that it took two tries. BUT WE GOT THROUGH TO THE END ON THE SECOND GO).
** There’s a bell tower out back^ and a piano on the veranda.
^ I have been selectively breeding hellhounds for bell ringing ability
*** And trying to get back into it after three days^ of mostly being unable to make my eyes focus on anything smaller than a hellhound has been like trying to get into a pair of jeans two sizes too small. A pair of wet jeans two sizes too small. Backwards. And one leg has been sewed shut.
^ I am much better today . . . and trying not to race around at 200 mph and give myself a relapse. Um . . .
† As Dorothy Parker memorably said, This is not a novel to be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown with great force.
†† And this may be too obvious for proper graphic novel readers but one of my favourite bits of throwaway humour is that while our hero is having a conversation with Cassandra hanging upside down in a tree, her speech-bubbles are printed upside down. Maybe I amuse easily.
In which learning is not a curve
It’s a zigzag, a squiggle, a wriggle, a looping of the loop (and a biting of one’s own tail).
Last Wednesday—last Wednesday week, not two days ago—I told you I managed to call a really vicious ratbag of a pattern of call changes, thank you Wild Robert, thank you very much—I mean I succeeded in calling it. And at Sunday service I got through (and on no sleep) a touch of Grandsire triples ringing inside which was a bit like winning the Grand Prix formula one in my 14-year-old VW Golf.
Monday I made a mess of calling a much simpler course of call changes at Old Eden, as well as just generally ringing like a neurologically damaged axolotl.* This Wednesday at Ditherington we had a somewhat challenging band in that there were only five of us and only Wild Robert knew what he was doing. But he rises to occasions like this and at the end of an evening of call changes and plain courses in which I got to pretend to be a jaded old veteran who had seen it all, Wild Robert turned on me with a gleam in his eye and said, and now, Robin, you can call a touch of Grandsire doubles. —MEEP. You’re joking . . . you’re not joking.
And guess what? I did it**. I withdrew from my wounded axolotl aspect and reinhabited my half knows what she’s doing some of the time aspect. This is not a reliable transformation. It was especially impressive in this case because we had beginners on both the treble and the tenor who tended to wander rather. Even Wild Robert—who had been busy with the treble and the tenor and ringing two bells himself and therefore perforce left me to my own devices—was surprised.*** Have you done this before? he said to me. No.
I then made the ghastly mistake of mentioning my triumph to Niall and Colin last night during handbells—this partly because I had confessed to Colin a few weeks ago that this Deputy Ringing Master thing was unhinging my sense of self-preservation and that I had decided that I had to learn to call something, and he’d said in his jolly chirp-chirp manner, which is a great deal more appealing than Niall’s evil mwa ha ha ha ha manner, that there were a couple of dead easy touches that I could absolutely learn. Unfortunately Niall was there too, when I was telling Colin, and Niall said, predictably, mwa ha ha ha ha, you can call Grandsire tomorrow at New Arcadia practise.
And I did. I braced myself when I saw Niall coming and I did it. I called my little touch again.† Which begins to suggest that it—this tiny simple-minded touch—will become something I can, in fact, do.†† Notch on the butt of my gold-handled cane. If I had a gold-handled cane. I would, however, like to get to the point of not trembling so hard I can barely tie my rope up at the end, after I’ve said ‘stand’ and the bells fall silent.
Of course—back to the learning zigzag again—I then made an unlovely glurdge of ringing Grandsire triples inside . . . sigh . . . but I had help. Someone who shouldn’t be making glurdges made a glurdge, and I’m still only barely holding my line when everyone else is perfect. The joke came when I went humbly round to Edward, who had been calling it, while Niall was torturing one of our beginners, and asked if Edward would tell me what he’d been calling so I could at least figure out what I should have been doing.
I then made the really awful mistake of asking Edward how he kept track of a long touch and he started telling me. Numbers! Aaaaaugh! Numbers! The problem with these bell ringer chappies is that they loove their bell ringing so much that they can’t stop, even when their audience clearly wants to run away and hide . . . why are you looking at me like that?
* * *
* With a little help from the bells. I tell myself this is good both for my handling—a Truly Useful Ringer Can Ring Any Bell Accurately—and for my character. It’s good to fail. It keeps you humble. It also keeps you awake at night obsessively replaying being a dork in your mind’s eye.
** I’ve been trying to decide if I want to risk your sanity, not to mention your patience, by trying to explain what calling a touch means. Um. You’ve got it that method ringing involves patterns, right? You start out ringing rounds, which is the bells in order from lightest (treble) to heaviest (tenor), 1 2 3 4 5 6 (or however many: if you’re ringing doubles, you’re ringing a pattern involving five bells with the tenor always ringing last: every bell must ring once before any bell can ring again). Then the conductor yells Go [name of method]!, and the next ‘row’ of six bells will have begun swapping places, so—for the beginning of Grandsire for example—the three stays in third place for one more ‘blow’ before moving toward the front, seconds place, then lead, while the treble moves from second place to third place and the second bell spends two blows in lead before following the treble toward the back. These patterns are set. You learn them as such. Grandsire ALWAYS begins as I’ve just described, and each bell proceeds in a prescribed order through the series of swaps and zigzags (speaking of zigzags) which is that method’s individual hallmark. And yes, if you are not good at patterns or at Things That Involve Numbers, learning your first change-ringing patterns will crush your brain like a bug.
But this was not enough for those pesky method creators (who clearly were good at patterns and Things That Involve Numbers). They invented a further-mixing-up-the-bells system which is called a touch. A plain course is just the basic pattern where all the bells run through all the pieces of ‘work’ till they each get back to the point in the pattern where each individually started. A touch is when the conductor shouts Bob!, or Single!, before they get there, the purpose of which is to mix the bells up further and prevent them from coming back into ‘rounds’ as soon as they would in a plain course. Depending on where you are in the pattern, and whether a bob or a single is called, what you do next varies: but in the course of learning to ring a method, you have to learn this too, so you can ring a touch of the thing, whatever it is. Only sissies stop at plain courses.
However only total frelling madpersons ever take it a step further to conducting. The sad sweating conductor has to know when and what to call and where that then leaves everybody because said sad sweating conductor has to get them out of wherever that is again so that the band eventually do come back into rounds and can stop. Or be ringing forever like a kind of campanological Flying Dutchman^. . . .
I never wanted to be a conductor. I have had no aspirations whatsoever to being a conductor. And then they made me frelling Deputy Ringing Master. And suddenly . . . cheez. I’m scary when I’m aroused. Lock up your sharp objects.
^ This is actually mathematical nonsense. There’s a limited number of mixes you can make out of only five items, in this case bells. But there are a lot of other rules involved in change ringing. Which you will be delighted to hear I am not going to get into. Not tonight anyway.
*** I probably shouldn’t try to explain why I could do it, should I? It’s okay, if you have a headache you can skip this bit.
I’ve told you that in a plain course all the inside bells do all the bits of ‘work’ that comprise the pattern, following each other in what’s known as coursing order. As soon as you start throwing calls into the muddle, all kinds of untoward things can happen, including that one bell or another can get stuck doing the same piece of work over and over. The particular touch Wild Robert taught me involves the bell you-the-conductor is on cycling through only two pieces of work . . . and every time you get to the second one again you call. Then you just have to remember (a) whether you’re calling a bob or a single (b) what you called last time which helps with (a) and (c) how many times you’ve called either of the above so you know when you’re about to get back to rounds and can escape.
The reason I could do it is because the pattern is: single bob bob, single bob bob, and you don’t really need to use numbers. You can get away with: one thing. The other thing. The other thing again which means the first thing next time. Then the other thing and the other thing again and then it’s over. See? No numbers. I’ve broken down a lot of my (ahem) method ringing into these sub-number bits which is a lot of how I’ve contrived to learn change ringing at all. And yes, you could call it binary if you were feeling deeply unkind, but I wish you wouldn’t.
† But see previous footnote. I can do it for very specific reasons of not having to count anything. This does not pertain to conducting generally.
†† Vicky, who doesn’t go for the mwa ha ha ha ha thing much, said crisply, well done. And, somewhat dryly, added: We need more people who can call in this band. —Vicky doesn’t do disingenuous either, or I might accuse her of it. You can pretty much assume that barring St Paul’s and York Minster, all change ringing bands need more people who can call. Change ringing itself is awful enough. Conducting change ringing means you’re probably a danger to society. I’m sure MI5 keeps files on it.
