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Another day, another drama
I’ve only barely reunited Bronwen with her vehicle* and set her back on the motorway to weave and o’erleap 1,000,000 roadworks on her way home**, and it seems to be nearly one in the morning and I have a blog entry to write. Oops.
It’s not all Bronwen’s fault. The day probably went irrecoverably off the rails early on, when I overslept by an hour***. Hellhounds and I then had to blast out on our hurtle† to get me home in time for my make-up appointment with the osteopath.†† Have I mentioned that it has finally deigned to rain? Yes. We had a useful bit overnight, which was lovely, and meant, on this epic day, I did not have to water the garden, but I would have been grateful if the black, black clouds seen rolling and thundering and chasing each other at speed to the north hadn’t taken a hard right and come streaking back to dump a lot of rampant wetness on an already-cranky woman and her two rain-allergic hellhounds. Hellhounds, among the sweetest††† of creatures under most circumstances, grow sullen when wet.‡ I think they actually absorb water, like sponges, which is why they get so ungleblarging heavy, dragging at the furthest ends of their leads and glowering. Feh. Bah.‡‡
With the result that we got back to the cottage late and I looked wildly at the clock and decided that I didn’t have time to change my sodden jeans because I was not going to risk Rajan thinking for even thirty seconds that I was going to miss another appointment. I sprinted down the street and through his door and . . . he emerged from his inner sanctum to say that he was running about a quarter-hour late. I should have gone back to the cottage and changed my jeans. I did actually turn back in that direction . . . but was instead drawn inexorably through the door of a new dress shop that said sale in its front windows, the way dress shops will, where I was much entertained by the other clientele and absent-mindedly fell in love with an adorable little denim jacket which I—gleep—bought.
It was a good twenty minutes before I got back to Rajan’s and . . . he wasn’t running fifteen minutes late. He was running nearly an hour late.‡‡‡
At which point the day had definitely gone off the rails. §
So I wasn’t surprised at all when I got off the phone with a very good friend having a very lousy time §§ and the phone rang again instantly and it was Bronwen saying that she was in her 674th roadworks queue and was going to be about half an hour late. I may have said something soothing like ‘of course you are’. I then rang Niall to warn him that our replacement third for handbells, Colin being disloyally on his way to Wales, was going to be half an hour late . . . to be informed by Penelope that Niall had told her that handbells had been cancelled tonight. GAH. ARRRGH.
Bronwen was not, in fact, half an hour late—she too was an hour late. Niall (having been mercilessly tracked down to where he was hiding§§§ and dragged relentlessly to the cottage with his handbells) and I had solved most of the problems of the world# by the time she arrived, and had a cup of tea and begun disposing of the cake. We still got a few touches of bob minor in before Bronwen and I had to hare off to tower practise at Crabbiton, Bronwen having declared when she first planned this repeat southern madness that she wanted the complete bell experience this time. Bronwen has never met Wild Robert, who teaches at Crabbiton on Thursdays, and this seemed like a good opportunity given that she was driving down from Orkney to ring bells at all—and as I’m missing Wild Robert pretty badly myself since Wednesday Ditherington practise is no more, I was somehow susceptible to being talked into this double bell whammy.
And therefore it is perfectly logical that Wild Robert was not at Crabbiton this evening. . . . Never mind, said Bronwen. I’ll come back again. Although probably not next week.##
Hey, it’s tomorrow. Yesterday is over. And maybe today will be better.
* * *
* She is White Van Woman. Be afraid.
** Wait a minute. Fiona was only here yesterday. I’m not becoming . . . social, am I?^
^ See next footnote, on the subject of the sure signs of reincarnation.
***. . . Oh I’ll just lie here a minute listening to the nice radio. Have you read about how leaping out of bed as if shot^ when the alarm goes off is bad for you? No, you’re supposed to lie there and gently regain consciousness over the course of several minutes. Which is, or would be, all very well, if that’s what happened. I’ve looked at those imitation-dawn lamp-clock things that brighten over the course of like fifteen minutes so you wake up naturally. In the first place they are Very Expensive. In the second place they are Very Ugly. In the third place, if I ever believed that I was waking up on account of the increasing light of dawn on my face I would know I had died and been reincarnated as someone else, and I’m sure that’s even worse for you than leaping out of bed as if shot when the (old-fashioned) alarm goes off.
^ Or gnawed in a friendly fashion by a hellhound.
† Wait—wait—clothing. Glasses. Shoes. Humans are so feeble. Hellhounds are ready for combat and excitement from the moment the crate door opens.
†† He needs a name. Let’s call him Rajan.
††† If a trifle intemperate
‡ And, speaking of cranky, I will also remark that I am tired of guaranteed waterproof Goretex shoes that leak. I might as well wear All Stars. Which are cheaper.
‡‡ Also it’s been so dry for so long that the water doesn’t soak into the ground. It bounces, and then waits at its leisure, swinging back and forth in the various grass- and leaf-pockets and the elbows of trees and hedgerows^, ready to dump itself generously down the backs of hellhounds and the jeans-legs and un-waterproof Goretex shoes of cranky women.
^ I think it also floats, in little wet bubbles like invisible water balloons, but I have thus far failed to accumulate sufficient evidence to support this theory.
‡‡‡ Not that the time was wasted. I read a very interesting article on pruning.
§ However having, as it proved, totally crippled myself watching my bat roost empty on Monday—this body does not stand still with its head raised at a sharp angle for half an hour at all graciously—there was no question that I was going to stomp off in a huff. For one thing stomping is beyond me at the moment. Although I can still do the huff.
§§ Is frelling Mercury in frelling retrograde or anything? There are too many people having unusually lousy times right now. The count stands at two sudden deaths and a terminal illness and the week’s not even over yet.
§§§ People who don’t want to be found really need to learn to turn their mobile phones off. However it would have been very embarrassing if Bronwen had got here and there had been no handbells—have I mentioned that she lives in, like, Orkney, so when she pops down here for a spot of handbells we’re talking hours on the road? Even barring roadworks—so I’m glad Niall’s phone was still on. And that he wasn’t on his way to Wales. With or without roadworks.
# At least those involving bells
## And it’s not like Crabbiton wasn’t glad to see us. They were thrilled. We made the fifth and sixth pairs of hands, so they could actually ring something. But it wasn’t quite the transcendent experience ringing for Wild Robert usually is.
Post quarter
Yes, we got it—the quarter. The quarter peal that I’ve been obsessing about all this last week, the quarter peal to Daniel’s memory*, the quarter peal that Vicky managed to end-run me into organising. Forty-five minutes of Grandsire Triples with Colin conducting. Yes, we got it.
But it was not a thing of beauty, and that, I fear, was my fault. I was only ringing the treble, so straight out to the back and straight down to the front again with no scary zigzags, and no even more scary changes of the pattern when Colin makes a call. But I could not find my rhythm. Could. Not. Find.
Sigh. When success is not victory.
It wasn’t dreadful, and I didn’t get yelled at or anything; I didn’t go wrong, exactly, I just wasn’t particularly right, and as a result the band never settled down and the Grandsire was more of a stagger than a song. SIIIIIGH.
I phoned Niall later on to moan, poor man, and I could hear him trying to figure out ways to be tactful. Insofar as he had any advice, regular blog readers will be able to chorus the answer: Ring more quarters.
Which leaves me in an interesting quandary. In pure, absolute terms, he’s right. The best way to ring good quarters is to ring lots of quarters. Works like a charm. But I don’t ring quarters because of the ME;** I don’t do anything that I can’t suddenly sit down in the middle of. It doesn’t happen often out on hurtles, but it happens, and hellhounds just flop down too and wait for me to reintegrate my component parts. I haven’t had to pull Wolfgang over and wait for the glitter-fairies to stop dancing on the windscreen so I can see the frelling road in a long time—but it has happened and it could happen again.
Quarter peals are scary because they’re planned and organised and scheduled, and you’re letting down the rest of your band if you splinter one. If you go wrong during a touch during practise or even service ring, the band just stops, and either tries again or does something else. It can be very exasperating, but you haven’t wrecked anyone’s day. And because quarters are planned and organised and scheduled, and you will be the Jerk That Blew It if you blow it***, I can’t help obsessing about it. Almost everything annoys the ME, but obsessing annoys it more than most things.
The only way to obsess less is to ring more quarters. You see the problem. But . . . another but . . . the forty-five-minutes part is perhaps less of an issue than I’ve made it. Yes, it’s a risk, especially because I go in there terrified of the forty-five minutes, and terror is tiring. But I’ve rung pretty frelling nearly nonstop at thinly-attended practises at all my regular towers—and practise lasts an hour and a half. I was surprised when I heard the bells come back into rounds this evening and Colin say ‘that’s all’. I didn’t think we were anywhere near the end yet. So I may have a bit more slack about this than I think.
Hmmmm. . . .
Meanwhile, however valid or invalid the cause, I’m shattered.†† And then there was a little trouble about the champagne. Well, of course there was going to be champagne, right? Did any of you doubt it? Peter fished one of the bottles I’d bought on sale at Tesco’s††† a while ago out from the cupboard under the stairs.‡ It had come in a box. He opened the box and discovered . . . the bottle is wearing one of those big plastic tamper-proof stopper thingies over its cork, so we can’t actually open it.‡‡ Fortunately we are not a one-bottle household: Peter went back under the stairs and found another bottle of champagne. And he’s offered to ring up Tesco’s tomorrow and try to find someone to reason with. No of course we don’t have the receipt from several months ago.
Daniel rang in my very first quarter, eleven years ago, when the rest of the band carried me through trebling to plain bob doubles. I haven’t come as far as I might like, but I am a ringer. Thanks, Daniel. One slightly wonky quarter of Grandsire Triples and a champagne toast to you.
* * *
* One of several. Colin’s already run one at South Desuetude and Rupert, my old ringing master from over ten years ago, has organised one after the funeral at East Persnickety, my old tower and Daniel’s home tower. Those are only the ones I know about; I bet there are others.
** I was having a bleak moment, as one does after one has not lived up to one’s own standards, and wondering if I should be ringing at all. There are of course two answers to that: yes and no. And even I admit that ‘no’ looks a bit like ‘if you can’t do it PERFECTLY then NEVER MIND,’ and we just had a lecture about that in Black Bear’s guest post last night, which a lot of forum members seem to be agreeing with. And ‘yes’ includes not only that RINGING NEEDS RINGERS but that I have the first, crucial virtue, which is that I keep showing up.
*** The correct ringing term is ‘fire out’. You lose a quarter, you fire out. A quarter that fires out in the final few minutes ruins everyone’s day big time.
† I called a tiny harmless touch of plain bob doubles at service ring this morning and it went on forever because being the conductor makes even tiny harmless touches go on forever, partly because with every successful call my terror level cranks up a notch: Oh gods I’ve got this far. . . .
†† I’m also half-sick with adrenaline aftermath—no, nothing to do with bell ringing. I took hellhounds out for their final perambulation^ after the quarter, and was doddering along behind them when I heard someone using a loud dog-commanding voice: the kind of loud dog-commanding voice that tells you immediately that the owner of the voice is not in control. And I dragged my weary eyes up and there was a frelling off lead Rottweiler standing there looking at us.
We have more or less unpleasant encounters with aggressive off lead domestic fauna^^ rather too often, as you know. But most of the time as I’m bracing myself for grappling hooks and hostile boarders, I’m thinking, okay, it’s a spaniel, it’s a (small) terrier—it’s usually a frelling terrier—it’s a frelling-frelling Lab—we’re probably not going to die. I do not feel this way about certain breeds: Alsatians. Staffies. Bullies.^^^ Rottweilers.
I crank my guys in and we stand dead still. The woman with the loud voice follows her four-legged killing machine as it walks slowly toward us. I’m looking at those jaws . . . and she gets a lead around it. GAAAH. ARRRRGH. SERIOUSLY RUDE RELIEF-EXPRESSING LANGUAGE. But it is, furthermore, worse than that. The mews is set well back from the main road, tucked away behind the Big Pink Blot which still looks like the local big house but is now condominiums. The wall around its parkland is still there, as is the avenue of trees. There’s a nice wide swathe of grass between the wall and the trees, then the pavement/sidewalk and the road. The busy main road. No one with the sense the gods gave a quahog would let their dog off lead along this stretch. And yet several of my ugliest encounters have been here. As today. My stomach hurts just thinking about it. Quarter peals are nothing to the fight-or-flight hormone surge caused by being in the company of your friendly goofball hellhounds and seeing something like this coming your way. One of the additional points is that if you meet death on legs out in the middle of nowhere you always have the final resort of letting your guys off lead: nothing is ever going to catch hellhounds. But you can’t do that with a busy road right there.
^ They probably wanted a hurtle, but I wasn’t up to it.
^^ Actually this does include cats. But that’s a rant for another day.
^^^ I love bullies.+ I love Staffies.+ I love Alsatians. I love Dobes and Rotties. But they scare the crap out of me sauntering stiff-legged and off-lead toward me.
+ And yes, I know they’re terriers too. But you rarely die of being bitten by a Jack Russell.
††† The moral to this story is, support your local independent grocer and wine shop.
‡ The mews has a cupboard under the stairs. Unlike some people’s cottages.
‡‡ Just by the way, what is the point? If you’re the kind of person who pinches bottles of champagne, you’re probably the kind of person who will just break the neck of the freller. The big plastic dealies on clothing make more sense; you can’t get them off without damaging the fabric.
An Unscheduled Night Off
So I got back from home tower practise* and found this in my Twitter feed:
tessagratton In Which My Friend Sends a Piece of God in a Pink Envelope: http://tinyurl.com/232y7g3 @mstiefvater @robinmckinley
And I figure if your sins** have caught you out, you might as well get a free guest-post substitute out of it.*** Furthermore, how often is a hellgoddess† truly granted her rightful divinity?†† This is obviously a moment that should be commemorated as widely as possible.†††
PS: Tessa, I hate your fingernails. Because I am horribly jealous. I stopped bothering with make up way early.‡ But I would have liked to play with nail varnish. I can’t: I’m allergic to the stuff. It makes my fingernails fall off.‡‡ Curses.
* * *
* I have to ring a quarter peal the day after tomorrow. Somebody. Please. Shoot me. Just a nice little tranquillizer-dart gun. You want to do it Sunday morning, so someone has an opportunity to discover my unconscious body and find some other eighth ringer by 5 o’clock in the afternoon.
** I still haven’t decided if that should have been ‘who’ or ‘whom’. As you will notice by its strange indecipherability. Pretend it’s like Vina in The Menagerie.^ It will be whatever you want it to be.
^ Pathetically geeky ST: The Original reference. Menopause brain has wiped out most of my higher learning. Star Trek, however, remains.
*** It’s also here: http://tessagratton.livejournal.com/563891.html I’m dubious about how many times a link will copy and paste and stay linky.
† You will note the pink envelope. I almost sent her a red one in acknowledgement of her position on the arc of unusual public personas, but I decided that no, the hellgoddess should be manifest in this case.
†† Mind you, I read it and went ‘eeep.’ Although I read her original BEAUTY post and went ‘double eep.’ Possibly quadruple eep. I’m also very impressed that she had the generosity of spirit to be willing to read anything that contained a so obviously drippy useless heroine with a serious skin condition and pink horns.
††† Although I wish to point out that I am never weird, as regular readers of this blog already know.^
^ Except on days beginning with M, T, W, F, or S, and between the hours of midnight and 11:59 pm.
‡ I’m creeped out by the choice of photo that seems to be everybody’s favourite for copying, which is from the wedding I went to two years ago in which I am wearing lipstick. Ewwww. Okay, my fault for posting it, but how was I to know that would be the one?
‡‡ Speaking of ewwwww.
Three glasses of champagne
I am exsheedingly drunk. Three glashes of champagne on an empty shtomach will do that to you. Well, there washn’t anything on the menu that I could eat.
It began innocently enough with handbells. No, no, handbells are never innocent. It is a crucial part of the definition of handbells that they are evil. That they drive quiet, law-abiding human beings to drink. *
All right, I’m too drunk to work this out. ** I think it all began a few weeks ago when Alicia emailed me that she was going to be in this area overnight. I haven’t seen her in forever; she’s been perversely hanging around Yorkshire or somewhere. There are bell towers up there, I believe, but apparently a total dearth of handbells.***. Alicia, partially under my malign influence, has finally begun learning to ring† in the tower, but of course that is only the beginning of one’s tintinabulant moral destruction, and I have been extremely frustrated by her remaining tantalisingly out of reach of further corruption. When she said she was going to be here on a Thursday, Niall, Colin and my handbell evening, her fate was sealed. †† I told Bronwen, who does get here occasionally for handbells, although not often enough, that Alicia was coming, whereupon Bronwen said, Hey! Great! I’ll come too!
This turned out to be a very good thing when Alicia and I embarked on interdimensional awryery. ††† Her meeting got out late, she caught a later train . . . and I turned up to fetch her at her hotel and when I didn’t see her in the lobby had to wait a quarter hour in the check-in queue because there wasn’t a concierge type person‡ to ask.‡‡ When I got to the head of the queue . . . they had never heard of Alicia. There are a variety of ways of spelling her last name. They didn’t have her listed under any of them.
Oh good.
So I went back outdoors again and endeavoured not to be run over by cars trying to get into the car park while I grappled with the RaspBerry. I almost hadn’t bothered to ask for Alicia’s mobile number: what could go wrong? What could go wrong is trying to locate a frelling signal around here . . . When I finally reached Alicia she said, Didn’t you get my email saying yes, please, pick me up at the train station?
By this time we were well into rush hour.
And by the time we got to Niall’s, Bronwen’s blood pressure was up by seventeen points and her eyes were beginning to bulge. We all turned as one to the fresh sacrifice, Alicia . . . whereupon Niall and Colin sauntered off to have a nice cuppa or read this week’s Ringing World or some damn thing‡‡‡ leaving me to try to explain the mysteries of plain hunt while Bronwen held down the third pair of bells. I made the most awful hash of it, of course, and eventually Niall rescued me, or, more to the point, Alicia, from my total ineptitude.§ And the really interesting thing is that by the end of the evening we were ringing plain hunt on ten. Ordinarily you don’t really talk about ringing plain hunt ‘inside’ (ie more sodding difficult) because the pattern is so basic everybody is ringing exactly the same thing, merely starting at different points of the circle. When you’re ringing bloody handbells it counts as inside. And tonight is in fact the first time I’ve ever successfully rung plain hunt on ten on one of those horrible inside pairs that split up and move through the pattern in all kinds of hideous asymmetrical ways. Or that Alicia had ever rung on ten at all. And it was all Bronwen’s fault. She kept saying, oh, come on, let’s do it on ten.§§
So clearly Bronwen, Alicia and I had to go off to the pub after and celebrate.§§§
And if this post seems choppier and more disconnected than usual, it may, of course, be the fumes of alcohol, but it may also be the getting up for a pee every ten minutes on account of the vast quantities of water I am drinking to flush the fumes away.
* * *
*Although I don’t require a great deal of driving when it’s champagne.
** This may be a short entry. That would be novel. Hmmmmmmm. No, no, no, I do not want to encourage three-glass champagne nights. Never mind the brain cell destruction, think of the money.^
^ And it isn’t short after all. Whew.
*** Apologies to any handbell-ringing Yorkshirepersons reading this. Alicia may just hang out with the wrong crowd.
† And that bell-ringing charm I slipped into her handbag the last time she was here cost. Speaking of money. Blowing a ringing is irresistible rune stencil lightly on the backs of their necks is cheaper and works better, but her hair is too short, and you don’t want other people noticing and possibly alerting the victim.
†† It is proof that the charm is working that she didn’t suddenly remember a previous engagement in Latvia, and how she wasn’t coming to Hampshire at all.
††† A situation that is awry. That should be perfectly clear.
‡ This is a brand-new glossy hotel in a chain striving to go up market. And by the time I got to the lobby it was already on my hit list: there is no way for pedestrians to get from the car park to the front door of the hotel except by straggling, hoisting or pulling any attendant luggage, down the car lanes. This means that to get into the car park you have to dodge a lot of people and their suitcases, and then once you’ve parked, you have to dodge a lot of cars to get back to reception. Hotel FAIL.
‡‡ Of course I arrived with a large cluster of businesspersons, all trying to outdazzle each other with their shiny designer scurliches and dires and talking in loud braying voices about their important dendoblans and glerks. I took a particularly virulent dislike to the fellow two ahead of me in the queue who had a very carrying voice, way too many way too white teeth^, hair like Bill Clinton’s, and wearing a pink gingham shirt with the label of a very fancy shirt maker on it—I know because I get their catalogues: if I found myself wanting to pay £200 for a shirt, I’d know I’d been taken over by an alien intelligence. Well, maybe not intelligence exactly—and carrying a garment bag emblazoned with the name of a fancy bespoke Savile Row tailor. Spare me. As he moved up to the desk for check in the fellow he was with murmured something and brushed a hand across Pink Gingham’s shoulder. Pink Gingham looked around and then down . . . and there was a little scuttling spider running for cover. I, of course, expected a look of outrage and/or horror and Death of a Spider on the bottom of a designer shoe. Pink Gingham picked one foot up and put it down very carefully and then turned round again so he was once again facing the desk, and, the spider having changed direction, moved his other foot . . . so he was now standing awkwardly splay-legged at the desk while he filled in his form, looking like a jerk . . . so a spider could make her escape. I decided maybe having white teeth and Bill Clinton’s hair was not a hanging offense after all.
There was actually kind of a lot of wildlife around this evening.^^ I got a moth down my shirt during handbells, requiring me to leap to my feet with a strangled yelp and rush off to the bathroom so I could rip my shirt off. Gah. Colin thought this was hilarious. Colin’s mother wears army boots.
^ Although the state of my own teeth may have a little to do with my aversion.
^^ Possibly something to do with the weather. We’ve now had an inch of rain in twenty-four hours. Yaay. Yaay except for superfluous wildlife streaming indoors.
‡‡‡ Oh, all right, Colin was mulling over a quarter peal pattern for Sunday. But he didn’t have to be doing it then.
§ I don’t want to learn to teach! Like I don’t want to learn to conduct! Like I don’t want to organise any quarter peals! Or be Deputy Ringing Master!
§§ Next time she can ring a hideous middle pair.
§§§ Alicia also has a glamorous new Android phone which Bronwen and I were both deeply interested in. But it doesn’t have Fingerzilla! How can I love a phone without a Fingerzilla app! I guess I’ll just have to wait for the iPhone. . . .
Oh, and Alicia wielded her booking confirmation number over the phone at the hotel, and they decided they had heard of her after all.
Further Trials of a Deputy Ringing Master
My life is a festering morass of bell ringing.* I kept thinking yesterday must be Sunday because I had two service rings, so when the alarm went off at an unreasonable hour this morning it was like, no! No! Not more bell ringing! I’m taking up water skiing! Now! Well, as soon as I find a large body of water and a motor boat! And some skiis! And someone to tell me what to do with them!
Yesterday morning wasn’t too bad, except for the fact that we were ringing in the middle of when I am usually hurtling hounds, which meant that I had to get up early to hurtle beforehand, which is inclined to make me testy. But since we were ringing before the service at least it happened on time, and ended on time. Feh. The afternoon ring was for a wedding and . . . if I weren’t a total romantic, and if I didn’t still get a little frisson every time I pull off and the bell music begins as the newly married pair march down the aisle, I could learn to hate weddings. Also, this one was at Old Eden, which does not have a window into the church so you can not only see when to start ringing you can see what everyone is wearing, especially the bride.** You have to have a spy who will bolt upstairs stage-whispering Now! Now!, and we all fly to our ropes—and chances are you’ll miss the bride completely, since the point is that you keep ringing till they’re all gone. Unless they loiter in a boorish and inconsiderate manner. In which case not only will we eventually stop—since it’s probably half an hour to forty-five minutes later than it was supposed to be anyway and we all want to get home to our tea/double whiskies—but the wedding party will find itself infiltrated by six or eight sweaty, exceptionally casually dressed people with strange streaks of rope-callus across their palms.
Yesterday’s wedding was an extreme case. Not only did it run over an hour late*** but it was ferociously posh and they were holding the post-vows whatsit, you know, with the food and the champagne, in the field opposite the church. Us ringers were all sitting around out front watching the catering caravanserai setting up its regal tents and muttering to ourselves as the quarter-hours ticked by.† It was a beautiful day, if you like it hot, and Old Eden’s ringing chamber has no windows that open. We already knew that ringing till they left wasn’t an option, and when Vicky opened the envelope with the money in it she discovered they’d overpaid us. This, just by the way, never happens—and on a hot day when you’re over an hour late you may almost resent having some of your grievance snatched away from you like that. We were actually a pretty good band and could have rung proper methods, but unless we’ve all rung sixty weddings in the last month and are feeling a little crazy, the rule tends to be we ring call changes, which the hoi polloi, even the posh hoi polloi, often prefers: call changes are sort of easier to listen to because the order of the bells changes more slowly. And I for one was very grateful because it was so hot I was feeling more than a little light-headed.
But the thing is that we rang really rather well. Call changes, because the order of the bells changes more slowly, not only do you have the opportunity to get your striking exact, you really need to, because errors stand out more—and really good exact call changes are harder to perform than you think. And because of the money, and the fact that the frelling reception was going on twenty feet from the tower, we rang longer than we might have, and I, for one, was an excessively unlovely object†† by the time we tottered back out into the daylight and the relative presence of oxygenated air again. But at least we didn’t have to duck and run along behind rows of tombstones to avoid being recognised as the cads making that appalling racket—I’ve rung one or two weddings where tombstones were necessary. I may have eyed the trays of frosty champagne a little longingly, but since no one actually came over and offered us any I restrained myself and went home cold sober. Well, hot sober. But perhaps somewhat flushed with not only the heat but the sense of a job well done.
Which probably explains why I was so frelling easy a mark this morning. Vicky came sidling up to me after service ring and started talking about a quarter peal for Daniel. Next Sunday, she said, we had an opening for a quarter peal before evensong. Would I like to ring in it? —As I’ve told you, I don’t ring quarters because of the ME; kind of the working bottom line for me has become that I don’t do anything I can’t suddenly sit down in the middle of, and a quarter peal is forty-five minutes non-stop pulling on a bell rope—and I overring (pull too hard) because I’m a nervy, anxious, overwrought personality. But I managed to ring the quarter for Peter’s OBE and . . . yes, I’d like to ring for Daniel if I can.†††
And then I suddenly heard her saying, well, you want to get your conductor first.
WHAT? I’M ORGANISING IT? WHAT? HOW THE FRELL DID THAT HAPPEN?
And then Vicky scampered down the tower ladder with a smile and a wave.
I’m organising my first quarter peal. Eep.
* * *
*Okay, and roses.^ And hellhounds. And PEG II^^. And Peter. And maybe a little music when I’m being driven utterly mad^^^ by some of the rest.^^^^ I’m also reading the ms. of a friend’s fabulously creepy and thrilling novel which I will tell you about as soon as I’m allowed.
^ And little mysteriously-still-green things accidentally unburied that should have been potted on months ago, and so entirely swamped by neighbours’ foliage that I thought they were—potted on, I mean. The determination of certain plants to survive is quite remarkable. Lavender, for example. Go on! Forget to water us for weeks! Ha ha ha ha ha ha! It is nothing to us! Rien! Ce n’est rien! Pas de anything! We are going to run away and join the French Foreign Legion as soon as we learn to walk (and given how far our roots have struck out through the drainage holes it won’t be long)! There’s also a purple sage+ finally in the ground at Third House that has more lives than a cat.
+ No riders, though. I was just looking it up on Wikipedia . . . it can’t possibly be as silly as I remember it . . . can it? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Riders_of_the_Purple_Sage
^^ aka The Ratbag
^^^ Yo, PEG II! I’m talking to you.
^^^^ Operatic heroines dying at the tops of their lungs are presently very popular. Tuneful arrrrrrrrrrrroooooooouuuuuuuuuugh.
** That’s why people go through the whole wedding thing, right? For the clothes?
*** We’d been warned it was going to run long. We hadn’t been warned there were fourteen readings, sixty-seven hymns and a concert performance of Lohengrin.
† I got on with THE SUBVERSIVE STITCH which is fine and interesting and everything but was secretly longing for an iPad so I could’ve loaded my friend’s ms on it and kept reading. I don’t guess the occasional ms is sufficient excuse for an iPad. Although if anyone finds and sends me a link for a pink leather case I’m probably dead meat. No, no! Must buy iPhone first!^ Supposing the freller ever comes available!
^ I already know there are hard pink cases for iPhones.+
+ Superba was here today with her brand-brand-brand-new iPhone (but her company bought it for her. She’s not some poor miserable little individual schlump like me). It is so brand-new she doesn’t have a case for it yet. So she is keeping it in a sock. Very sensible. Although given the usual state of my knapsack/pocket I would need a sock, an Ace bandage, and some splints.
†† Cobwebs stick to you worse when you’re sweaty.
††† Also, there’s sure to be several quarters for him. If I lose this one for the band, there will be other opportunities. I don’t have to fall on my sword.
