Going to bed early
I am going to bed early. Which is going to be a good trick, because it’s already late. It’s always late on a Friday (so to speak) because of bell practise. It’s August* and everyone’s on holiday, so practises are rather hit or miss lately, although I’m worrying that this area seems to be having a downturn in ringing numbers generally. They cancelled last week’s Wednesday practise, and that tower never cancels. And slow tool that I am I need my second practise a week. As well as my once-a-month third: and last Monday Niall and I were stiffed for the second month in a row** by that ringing master–or anyone else with a key to the bell tower–and I won’t be going back next month. Niall was happy, however, he got one of the other two would-be ringers in a head lock and dragged her home to ring handbells with him and me. Local handbell ringing is in even worse shape than local tower ringing.
I’ve recently realised that I’ve crossed one of those invisible boundaries. I am pretty much still in the category of Any Time on a Rope Is Good Time in terms of practise, and even the stuff I theoretically know still needs shoring up, but the stuff I’m really trying to learn now requires skilled support from the rest of the band. I can spend weeks, sometimes, never getting out of my comfort zone, because the available band, which is to say the people who showed up to ring, isn’t up to it–except that there is no comfort zone in ringing, you can always have a mental spasm and go wrong. And I frequently do.
Tonight we were only seven–which means ringing on six bells–and five of us, which is to say them, were some of our good ringers. When you’re the only wavery one the others can kind of straitjacket you in place. First we rang bob minor, which is one of the methods I should know, but I’m kind of out of practise–which is the other drawback to learning new methods; the fools and hopeless optimists around you expect you to remember what you’ve already learnt–so I was glad of the opportunity. Now the terrible, mind-rending, 3 am and sweating thing about bob minor is the Dreaded Three-Four Down Single, when you’re quietly coming down toward lead with a little, harmless three-four down dodge on the way, and the Evil Conductor calls a single. Calls make a mess, it’s what they’re for. So if you’re about to do a three-four down dodge in bob minor and Evil Conductor calls a single, you hang around in thirds place for two blows and then turn around and go up again. Trust me, this is horribly confusing, including the physical confusion of making a u-turn and going back the way you came. You ring a little differently going up (slower, because there’s one more bell coming between you and the front at each blow) and coming down (faster, because there’s one fewer bell, etc, as you all weave your way through the pattern), and while good ringers place their bell perfectly every stroke, for those of us who are not so good, momentum is also an issue with several hundred pounds of bell. And I had four three-four down singles in a row. I was preparing to stand my bell, leap across the room, and strangle Niall–who was conducting–when he called a fifth.*** Yes, all right, it was great practise. And I did get through all of them.
And then near the end Niall–who is ringing master in Edward’s absence–called for Grandsire. I dove–hopefully–for a rope, because Grandsire is slightly my bête noire–the method I’ve never really had the opportunity to learn properly but ought to know by now, by osmosis or something. The terrible horrible no good really bad call in Grandsire is a single when you’re making seconds, because then you have to make long thirds–four blows in thirds place–which come at you from a funny angle and then sort of duck and dive at you while you’re trying to balance in thirds place and it’s surprisingly hard to count to four. Which is one of the reasons double dodging (which you also do in Grandsire) is so gruesome–you can just about remember under, over, under (as you swap places and then back again with the bell you’re dodging with). . . but do you do it again or have you already done it again? It’s not like you have time to think, when you have two-thirds of a second to pull on your rope so your bell goes dong in the right place. There is only one right place and there are so many wrong ones . . . Anyway, this was a long touch with lots of calls and I galloped through any number of long thirds and came out the other end in the right place–good heavens, what am I doing here? At the end Roger, who had been conducting, complimented me. I don’t think he meant to sound surprised. . . .
But, speaking of bells and galloping, I have to go to bed early because I have a horse to ride tomorrow morning, followed by a wedding to ring at my Wednesday tower–because they’re so short handed they haven’t got enough locals–in the very early afternoon–having hurtled hellhounds first thing so they’ll let me. Usually after a walk they’ll crash out, but Chaos has taken to standing by the door gazing at me mournfully as I suit up to do something that does not involve hellhounds. Aaaugh. I’m already staying home for the next fifteen years on account of their undomesticated digestion, this dog cannot be making me feel guilty.
* * *
* Although you’d never know by the weather. It’s been RAINING AGAIN^ and while today has been a really beautiful day it’s been a really beautiful autumn day and everybody is putting their duvets back on their beds, except those of us who never took them off. I like to complain as much as the next person, and I feel pretty silly wearing wool in August, but if you’re asking me I’ll take chilly summers to hot ones any year. The hellhounds agree.
^ This is one of those towns that has a municipal hanging-basket system, where anyone who lives or has a shop front anywhere on the two main streets can hire a pre-planted hanging basket. You’re expected to do the deadheading, but The Man comes round with a tanker, and waters them. The tanker is this extraordinary little vehicle, about the size of half a Smart Car+ whose engine not only trundles it along but also pumps the water up through the hosepipe and thus into the short access pipe buried in every overhead basket. I love the nuts and bolts of things. Hanging flower baskets on Main Street are a great idea, very Town Pride . . . unless people forget to water them++ in which case they’re a very bad idea and will repel all those money-spending tourists every town wants.+++ Hence the motorised Gunga Din: he’d need shoulders like an Olympic shot putter if he didn’t have a pump, let alone an engine. You see him out there in all weathers, including torrential downpours. Um. I figured, okay, you’ve paid for your hanging basket and you’ve paid for it to get watered, so by golly it gets watered. But he says it’s not as silly as it looks: rain runs right off because the baskets are so densely planted.++++ Oh. They really are densely planted too. It’s perhaps slightly a pity however that they are densely planted in job lots of whatever was cheapest at the Hanging Basket Store. This year’s would have just about got away with the all available shades of pink, purple and blue colour scheme . . . till the scarlet geraniums on top started flowering. Ow, my eyes.
+ Not sure what they call them in the States. Those little half-length things that you can pull frontwards (or backwards) into a parallel-parking situation and have room for another one of you in the other half
++ Or go away on holiday and their neighbour forgets to water them
+++ Barring the odd curmudgeon living up a side street
++++ Well hurrah for carelessly home-planted hanging baskets that do get watered by rainfall.
** And a month ago it wasn’t even August
*** Note that the way methods fit together, every time a call is made, all the bits of work in that method have to be made by some bell. Some methods you can cushion a beginner a little more than others–my first quarter (peal) of bob minor, for example, Edward called around me so I never had to ring a Dreaded Three-Four Down Single. There are also various practise patterns where the poor suffering learner is made to ring The Thing She Fears Most over and over and over again. But in the ordinary free-for-all of a touch no one bell should be expected to ring the same beastly bit of work over and over and OVER again. But these things happen. Conducting is a total mystery to me^ but I have these visions (especially at 3 am) of bell geeks bending over bits of graph paper and cackling madly at the prospect of calling their next touch of Splendiferous Dork Major.
^ And I plan for it to remain that way
October in August
It’s another cold wet October day . . . except for the fact that it’s August.* And a day or three ago we were sweltering and I was whingeing about being tired of watering. You have more potted plants in a dry spell, it’s one of those laws of the universe, like bread falling buttered side down. Especially you have more little pots, especially little, porous terra cotta ones that dry out again in about two hours. As soon as it starts raining, all seven hundred and forty-four of these morph into half a dozen large plastic or fibreglass pots. If** the weather dries out again, the half dozen large plastic or fibreglass pots start producing small terra cotta pots, like gladiola bulbs developing bulblets, and just as prolific. It’s rained so much in the last two or three days that my some-people’s-houses-are-smaller-than-this ecologically correct renewable timber water butt at Third House is full again, despite the fact that Third House’s gutters are mostly blocked.
When I was riding Connie yesterday I couldn’t see through my glasses. Fortunately she’s very capable of minding her own feet. And I could still see Large Pale Blurs that were the fences, I mean the kind that you jump over. The risk there is that Connie likes jumping, so when you’re working her around fences she’s always hoping you’ll ask her to change direction slightly and pop over one. Or two. Have I said this before? She started her career as an open jumper, so she has all these neat clever habits that a good show jumper needs, like being able to clear a fence from almost any angle, including the ridiculous. I was working her around the in-and-out*** a few weeks ago when I was still getting used to the idea that I had a really good horse to ride, and coming between the two fences like we were drawing the diagonal line in the middle of a capital letter ‘N’ and Connie was still waiting alertly for me to say ‘Yes, now’ and hook a left over the fence. A horse like this, when your glasses are running with rain, you want to squint really hard to make sure you’re directing her toward the empty side of the uprights.
I was distracted from meteorological effects yesterday by the presence of a friend, here just for the day† but today it’s back to business. Plink plonk splash. Here’s a controversial subject. And I hate it when nasty clichés appear to be true. We’ve had a group of ‘travellers’ as they’re called here–itinerants who live in trailers and mobile homes and occasionally proper gypsy carts, although real gypsies are rare. They’re allowed to camp on verges and common land and on footpaths when there’s room. This particular group have been around off and on most of this year. I’ve gotten to kind of know quite a few of them–all male and mostly young–because they like my hellhounds. Travellers and lurchers are another cliché–lurchers were ‘the poacher’s dog’ originally. I avoid travellers’ encampments on principle because of the likelihood of unfriendly loose dogs and . . . I’m a little bit twitchy about being a not very large or intimidating middle aged woman wandering around in the (comparative) middle of nowhere with no more protection than two spectacularly over-friendly 50-pound hellhounds (and perhaps a minor turn of speed). Most of the mythology about travellers is the scary kind. But I see these guys in town and the truth is that I’ll talk to anyone who likes my hellhounds. And furthermore . . . I like them. They make me laugh. They talk to me as if I am one of them, because I have longdogs. They are such hustlers, and the ones I talk to are very open and good natured about it–with that faint edge of defensiveness that the young and on the make often have anyway, especially the male of the species, but in this case heightened by their obvious awareness that they are officially personae non grata. A couple of them, their faces positively light up when I recognise them and say hi. This would automatically make me defend them.
But . . . the farmer that owns the land adjoining the bit of verge that has been their favourite encampment goes round with his fork lift after they’ve gone, to clear up after them. The last time he did this he took two farm-size trailerloads of rubbish away. The honour-system farm shop has been ripped off so often they’re thinking about closing down. Other things have disappeared. A woman who rides out from Jenny’s yard swears they tried to steal the whippet who accompanies her and there’s a rumour she left the yard because of it. There’s quite a bit of more of this kind of thing that I can’t personally vouch for . . . but this is enough. Meanwhile they’ve moved again, from the edge of my standard hellhound-hurtling and hacking out on Connie range to right bang in the middle of it. Everybody is warning everybody else not to walk that way, and kids with ponies are being forbidden to go out without at least one grown up. I walked that way this morning–but hellhounds and I stayed on the top of the ridge and didn’t turn down our usual path.
I’m middle-aged and middle-class and the only time I ever lived on anything remotely resembling an edge it was more or less my choice.†† And I know culture collision can be harrowing. I want to defend their right to live in a way that doesn’t appeal to me in the least, and I’ll even go with the idea that they have a right to live in a way that middle-aged middle-class folk find annoying. But I can’t condone stealing–that farm shop is a little object like a very large nest box by the side of the road because the family who runs it doesn’t have the money or the staff to run a full size one–or trashing the landscape. When I thought they were doing their own cleaning up–and I saw (from the relative safety of my car) what their campsite looked like when they were living in it: two farm trailers of rubbish is about right, and it would still have to be a large trailer–I could think, oh, well, at least they tried. But the land is bald where they were, as if it’s been sowed with salt. And now they’re stripping another piece of our beautiful landscape, as well as wrecking their involuntary neighbours’ peace of mind. I even wonder if their carbon footprint is smaller than the average middle class working stiff with a house and a gas boiler. And in my middle-class way I feel that I get to say ‘this is wrong’ about a culture one of whose tenets is explicit disrespect of the cultures it lives among. I know the my tribe/your tribe thing has been a human problem since we first climbed down out of the trees/walked up out of the ocean, but we’re into the globalisation era and if we’re going to survive we have got to learn to get along.
It’s all so depressing.
* * *
* I’m just back from ringing handbells^ with Niall and Clio. Clio was wearing shorts. It’s August, she said grimly.
^ For anyone late to the party, we ring methods–change ringing–on our handbells, like in the tower only quadruply horrible because you’ve got two bells to keep track of, and it’s an exponential kind of thing. In fact, what’s after ‘exponential’? Clio fell down and broke her elbow ice skating two months ago+ so handbells have languished rather till Clio got out of plaster again. Niall travels for his handbell fix, but Clio and I are out of practise. Poor Clio, who is the least experienced of us, said darkly, as we lurched through bob minor, I remember now why I broke my elbow.
+Yo, Blackbear, should we let her into the Spaz Club?
** I say if
*** which is, as you might expect, two fences quite close together. In my cough cough cough open jumper days, which were a very long time ago, the standard in and out had one stride between; you can also have two or even three–or a ‘bounce’ where you haven’t got a stride at all.
† I was late meeting her train because of riding Connie^ and late getting her back to her train because of a late-running wedding for which I was ringing.^^ Hmm. I was very glad to see her. I hope she comes again.
^ In spite of getting out of bed tragically early so I could both hurtle hellhounds and ride Connie first
^^ She said bell ringing looks daunting. Oh good. I’m always afraid it looks rather stately and simple-minded till you actually get on a bell rope.
†† Although this kind of thing does tend to develop a dangerous momentum
. . . for you to go out and look for it.
It was, however, raining again by the time we got back to the car.
. . . when it stops raining long enough . . .
. . . is still there . . .
