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Bleeeeerg etc
It has not been a good week, barring skylarks. You heard about Monday on Monday. Computer Men said they would return yesterday, bearing Peter’s computer and my printer, but they have decided they are coming tomorrow. They will, I hope, be able to return me to printability* here at the mews, but I have a Friday more Fridayish even than usual tomorrow, and so I will not be available to enable them to dedragon** the cottage desktop of its various little ways, like denying exit from the nuraddin address*** and refusing to open Windows all the way, so an open window scampers around the monitor like someone playing hopscotch. Nor can they investigate why the Walkperson refuses to take both CDs of an opera instead of merely overwriting the first with the second. Hey, it’s the same title, isn’t it? And the ‘disc 2’ probably gets lost after the repetition of the credits, containing as they usually do sixteen sopranos, a counterbassoonist, and the kookaburra for the mad scene at the end of the second act. I want my Gluck.†
Tuesday I bollixed my voice lesson. Whimper. I half knew I was going to; I was way too tired, I’d found two small but sordid inconsistencies in PEGASUS that I had to solve in exactly the same amount of space they were made in—your publisher will probably let you get away with resetting a very occasional line at the page proof stage, but that’s the limit—and the awful truth is that the five-star marketing plan is scaring me.†† So I went in there jumpy, distracted and underrehearsed, and sang like a person who was jumpy, distracted and underrehearsed, and it was pretty discouraging.†††
Wednesday I went to Ditherington bell practise for our first meeting on the sad new schedule of only second, fourth and fifth-if-any Wednesdays . . . except that it didn’t happen. Niall, Denis and I showed up . . . and spent an hour and a half ringing handbells—Niall never goes anywhere without his handbells—in a freezing cold transept because there was no one else there. I went home, emailed Marilyn and Wild Robert, saying, what happened?, and got a really annoyingly chirpy email back from Marilyn with a copy of the email she had sent all of us about the fact that there was only one Ditherington practise this month. Which Niall and I had both failed to write down.‡ Denis isn’t on Marilyn’s list; his honour remains unimpugned.
And I didn’t have a guest post.‡‡
Today because Colin cancelled and there were no handbells this evening‡‡‡ I decided to give myself a half day off from reading proofs and finish, or semi-finish, or get through draft 2B of, Frost and Fire and Ice to take to Oisin tomorrow: I will probably die of a broken heart if I frumple two music lessons in a row.
I’m a good girl: I hit ‘save’ a lot. I’d been working three hours or so, and was getting pretty tired, but I was also near the end of draft 2B and was feeling reasonably chirpy—ready for a hurtle, a cup of tea, and a return to page proofs. I was pretty sure when Oisin played it back to me tomorrow I’d go, yerp, what was I thinking of, at intervals, but that’s okay. I had something down to work with, and there were actual bits of it I liked. And I’d quite recently hit ‘save’ when I got an error message saying that Windows had a fit of the vapours coming on and was going to close Finale down. Yah boo sucks, I said, as it went KACHUNG off the corner of the piano, but, no big deal, I prodded it with a stick after a minute and woke it up again. And started resignedly putting the last few minutes’ work in again.
And noticed that there was kind of more missing than I was expecting . . .
It had eaten my entire afternoon’s work, despite the fact that I had ‘saved’ about ten minutes before the crash.§
I wasted about fifteen minutes trying to find a ‘contact us’ on the Finale web site that was a ‘contact us’ instead of a come on for lists of dealers and how you can follow them on Twitter and Facebook§§ or join their blog—GAAAAAAAAH—and then I emailed Oisin and a Wise American Friend, both of whom have suggestions for the possibility of ferreting the saved version from the bowels of the beast . . . but I still had to hurtle, read proofs, and write a blog entry, and I’m also a coward. A, furthermore, incompetent coward.
Maybe I’ll try their suggestions now.
Maybe I’ll just go to bed.§§§
* * *
* To the extent that I am ever ungleblarging printable
** Debug is nowhere near powerful enough
*** System Administrator says you’re a bad person and must not be allowed to run at large among the innocent populace
† I want my Gluck Orfeo with my Marilyn Horne and my other Gluck Orfeo with my Janet Baker—if the Walkperson can’t cope with 2 CDs of one opera it’s really going to have palpitations if I expect it to take on more than one recording of the same opera.
I can’t remember now when I watched the much-hyped Met production of Orfeo ed Eurydice on Sky. Recently. I do try to be colour/gender/poundage blind—if someone can sing and act I will avert my attention from the fact that they won’t see forty or a size twelve again, and are playing a tubercular seventeen-year-old. But the k d lang look wasn’t doing our short-Coke-machine-shaped Orfeo any favours, whose acting also had a strong Coke-machine flavour. However I would have encompassed all of this—since she did have a big, thick, rich—one might almost say chocolaty—voice . . . until we got to Che Faro Senza Eurydice^, an aria so familiar that even people who wouldn’t know an opera if it bit them on the leg^^ often recognise^^^, when she kumquatted the ending. What? —Yes, my reaction exactly. WHAT? You mess with Che Faro, I hunt you down and kill you. A Metropolitan Opera mezzo can’t possibly be unable to hit a top F, for pity’s sake??+ So what happened? Goblins in the TV crew?
^ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=brGYq97Of6w
^^ And often assume it wants to when it’s only trying to, you know, play . . .
^^^ What is that? —Wasn’t it that ad for drain cleaner?
+ Even I have a top F, although no one in their right mind would call my voice thick, rich or chocolaty. I’ve been trying to ignore questions of range because as soon as I’m aware of being above C-above-middle-C I start closing myself down from sheer funk. But Blondel pointed out this week that as soon as I have a reliable G I can sing Dido’s Lament. Oh. Okay. Goal. Goals are good. Meanwhile, speaking of goals and Gluck, I have a new one: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paride_ed_Elena
I am shamefully unfamiliar with all but about four of Gluck’s operas—the fact that he seems to have written almost as many as Handel is a trifle daunting—and I knew nothing about Paride ed Elena till Radio Three played one of Paride’s arias the other day which stopped me dead in my tracks. Want. To. Sing. That. It will be good if I can manage to find the frelling music; it’s not something that rolls to the top of your average search engine.
†† And then there’s stuff like the latest edition of SUNSHINE which I’ll show you as soon as I have a copy in my hot little hand. But due to Screw Ups By Persons Who Shall Remain Nameless^, this is having to be pushed through at the speed of a hellhound after a hellbunny, and I fall over too easily. This evening I got an email from my editor saying, hi, we need this cover text now. I sent it back to her in about an hour. But I’m still shaking like a leaf.
^Neither me, Merrilee, nor the editor in charge, which is all you need to know
††† And it may be just as bad next week, because I’ll only have just turned in the PEGASUS corrections on Monday, and will still be looking around trying to see where I left my life. I did tell Blondel that my so-called life has spells like this. But the week after that I’m planning to be brilliant. Um . . .
‡ We ring too many handbells. Really it’s bad for you.
‡‡ I have mentioned this on the forum, but just so no one gets the wrong idea, NO, even if no one sends me any guest posts between now and the 2nd of November, I am not going to keep printing bits of PEGASUS on Wednesdays and Saturdays.
‡‡‡ So last night was a good thing really.
§ And while this is not in the same category of meltdown, as I was typing that sentence, my email pinged. And when I went a few minutes later to look and see if anything cool was coming in^ I discovered that someone I have already put on my ‘blocked senders’ list has frelling come through again, as he/she has done several times already. What the bleeding (*&^%$£”!!!!!!
^ The Tyranny of the Ping
§§ Bite me
§§§ And furthermore Philip Langridge died. He actually died last Friday, but I didn’t hear about it till Monday and only caught up with the obituary yesterday.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2010/mar/07/philip-langridge-obituary
He was, speaking of acting singers, an actor. Last time I saw him he was scaring you silly as the witch [sic] in Hansel and Gretel: an opera I’ve never had much use for, partly because it’s usually played for a high smarm level. Not this one. More Bluebeard’s Castle than Goldilocks. I have him on CD singing Britten’s Peter Grimes and the weak, venal captain in Billy Budd . . . both of which are so brilliantly evoked I find them hard to listen to: I like the occasional speck of dawn in my unrelenting darkness. I love Britten, but he was maybe a little too good at the snake pit that is humanity.
I never met Langridge, nor know anything about him but what I heard in a few interviews, but I feel like I’ve lost a friend.
Cambridge
I rang Cambridge last night.* My first surprise method, that holy of holies and scary of scaries.
Well. A little bit of Cambridge. But even that is a substantial miracle, like . . . managing to sing for Oisin tomorrow afternoon, supposing I do. It was also an excellent example of Wild Robert at his maddest. I think I wasn’t blogging yet when he pitched me into Stedman after I’d been ringing about a year and a half and could just about struggle through bob doubles on a good day. Stedman was like yanking the toddler off her tricycle and entering her in the Tour de France. Gah. However, the grind mechanism was engaged and I did, in fact, learn Stedman. Grind, grind, grind. Eventually.
Ditherington has been going through a bad patch for practise night ringers and Wild Robert clearly had a rush of blood to the head when there were more ringers than bells last night . . . and the fact that only three of them could ring Cambridge—himself, Niall, and Ditherington’s fearless tower captain Marilyn—he waved airily aside, and told Michelle and me to learn the line. Now. Right then. This moment. When we weren’t ringing little stuff for the learners, that is. GAH. Do you know how long learning a complex line takes?** Gerald, it must be said, should have been learning the line, but he is one of these people—all occupations have them***—who fancies himself a good deal more competent than he is, and I only mention it because his unique contribution makes our eventual semi-success that much more heroic. We got through about half of it, and since the standard means of learning surprise† is by individual lead, of which Cambridge minor has five, we obviously all get medals.
The other interesting†† thing that happened last night is that I had to call some bob doubles. You hardliners who actually read these posts when they’re about bell ringing may recall that Wild Robert informed me, like a clap on the ear, about a fortnight ago that I was to call a touch of Grandsire. I did this successfully, to everyone’s amazement††† . . . but I could do it because for this particular touch you the conductor, by the calls you make, are calling yourself through a very easy sub-pattern within the entire method. The other ringers are performing the sweaty bits. Last night Wild Robert, grinning maleficently as he snatched my diagram book out of my hands, open, as it was, to Cambridge, stated that for my next trick I would call a touch of bob doubles. Oh, I said warily. I’ve been reading up, you know‡, and I ventured a remark about having perhaps some clue about the bob doubles equivalent of that Grandsire touch the other week. No, no, said Wild Robert, grinning even more maleficently, Denis gets to ring that bell. You have to call it from an affected bell . . . in other words I would be ringing all the sweaty bits and trying to remember to shout BOB at the correct intervals. And learn Cambridge in my spare time.
I admit that my calling was not quite the clean victorious sweep that it was for the easier Grandsire touch. But we got through and I shouted BOB and . . . and I can learn this. I really can. I understood what I was supposed to be doing—I understood the concept. How did this happen? It’s a bit like realising a few months ago that I was, in fact, going to make it to ringing surprise—how did that happen? And while I have thought that I ought to learn to call something, I wasn’t looking forward to the prospect with any enthusiasm. So the second thing about the experience is that . . . calling is actually kind of cool. So, yeah, okay, I’d like to learn to call a few touches. . . .‡‡
I blasted out of bed this morning still slightly overheated (morally anyway) by last night’s unexpected manifestations of ability. Which doubtless explains why today has been one long downhill skid. Sigh. However it began at the beginning of the month with me remembering that Wolfgang’s annual road test is due in February and dutifully booking in at the garage . . . who couldn’t fit us in till tomorrow. Arrgh. ‡‡‡ And then Peter also wanted to go visit Luke § and there was some backing and forthing about this and it turned out to suit them if he went up for evening visiting hours today, and comes back tomorrow. Which left me dealing with Wolfgang. In the sluicing rain—usually I use either picking up or dropping off Wolfgang as an excuse to hurtle hellhounds in the other direction. And because I don’t wake up anything like early enough to get him out there tomorrow morning for 7:30§§ I was going to take him in tonight. Okay, I thought, we can hurtle back in time to let Colin and Niall into the cottage for handbells at five, handbells at 5 o’clock being my usual Thursday excitement . . . until I noticed that we were ringing at four and at Niall’s house, which is about a twenty-minute walk from here . . . and did I mention the rain?
And then we couldn’t ring anything. Toward the end of our two hours of self-immolation Niall looked at the other two of us and said, We aren’t usually this bad, are we? Noooooo. Sometimes we get through entire minutes without going, Crash! Frell! Sorry!
And have I told you we’re trying to learn Cambridge?
* * *
*Translation: I won the lottery. I was crowned Queen of England. They just gave me the Nobel Prize for Literature. I discovered the Elixir of Happy Creative Middle Age that Lasts Longer Than a Few Decades.^ I found the answer for world peace.^^
^ See previous blog posts for remarks about how old is better.
^^ It was behind the sofa.
** Hint: it took me months to learn Stedman. Although that was my first diabolical method, and nothing can be quite that diabolical again. It’s like learning to ring inside for the first time. You will never learn it and furthermore it is going to kill you. And then it doesn’t. Oh.
*** I find the level of self-delusion rather interesting. Lots of people think they’re, oh, say, better, ahem, writers than they are. But bad writing does not literally go CLANK.
† Which includes knowing in advance so you can have studied the line before you came to practise
†† I am so living in interesting times
††† And then Niall the Ratbag made me do it again at New Arcadia
‡ Steve Colman, The Bob Caller’s Companion, http://www.ringingbooks.co.uk/ No self-respecting Deputy Ringing Master would be without.
‡‡ WHAT DID I JUST SAY????
‡‡‡ Note to self: next year remember in January.
§ No real change. Please keep those candles burning.
§§ AAAAAAAUGH
Wet Thursday
Okay, we are not coming from the best place I’ve ever been in terms of morale and achievement. It took me FOUR HOURS to write two paragraphs of PEG II today. Mind you, they were pretty interesting paragraphs, once I got them nailed to the page so they couldn’t escape.* But it was not a happy four hours and this has cast a pall.
Also it’s been tipping down rain most of the day, to hellhounds’ and my lasting unjoy and antidelight. At least the garden(s) got watered; I have been noticing the last few days with something like shock that some things are beginning to try and grow, despite the fact that we’re still getting down below freezing about one night in three, and things that grow tend to need water. Yesterday I was staring at the plants in pots on my front steps at the cottage and muttering, I object to using watering-cans outdoors in February.** Feh.
Handbells this evening. Hellhounds and I arrived back at the cottage only moments before Niall; I’d been waiting for the rain to let up so we could walk. Ha. Eventually we walked anyway, so I was still in mid-towelling-off stage when Niall knocked on the door.
So, how did you enjoy handbells on Tuesday? said Niall.
Wet dog, I said briefly, still towelling.
You need to ring more bob major, said Niall.
I need dry socks, I said.
You did really well ringing the trebles, said Niall.
And the floor is a lake, I said.
The trebles are really hard, and your striking was very good***, said Niall.
I HAVEN’T GOT TIME TO RING HANDBELLS MORE THAN ONCE A WEEK, I said, hanging wet socks and dog towels over the Aga railing.
You should come again, said Niall, I know you’ll pick up major† really quickly.
Fortunately Colin arrived at this opportune moment.†† And we wasted some time talking about conducting. Grrrrraaaaaugggh. . . .
* * *
* The image that comes to me involves cats, cat carriers, and vets. In a relatively low-cat existence, I’ve nonetheless had some very exciting times in situations involving cats, cat carriers, and vets.
** Indoors, of course, I spend half my life carrying watering-cans around. There are afternoons when I’m running late^ when hellhounds and I walk back to the cottage, stay just long enough for me to water the plants^^ and then turn around and go back to the mews.
Nontraditional use of small heavy lamp. Originally I had the hippeastrum turned around the other way, so the lamp was merely propping it. But the second stem has been growing over-enthusiastically toward the light, so I figured I’d better turn it around. Which meant bondage.
I am going to be in so much trouble when the roots on these get going. 
Those of you with gardens and too many plants making a mess on your window sills will know the way that however many pots you have, of all sizes, shapes and materials, the one(s) you want will have moved to Montana when you weren’t looking. Unless you live in Montana, in which case they will have moved to Sri Lanka. This is what there was.
And these too.
Aren’t these pretty glasses? I love the swirl through the stem. 
But what the hell do you do with them? They’re for champagne, and I realise that if you give grand parties where there are lots of ladies in wasp-waisted dresses and crimson lipstick and gentlemen with slicked-back hair and dubious moustaches and the champagne flows like the rain in Hampshire flat glasses are probably elegant and fashionable. But those of us who nurse our one or two glasses of champagne over the courses of long evenings at our computers^^^, want flutes.# I float broken-off flowers and pruning accidents in these glasses occasionally, or pot pourri, which is to say handfuls of petals from my garden. ## But I HOPE we’re getting late enough in the season that when these flower-stalks start diving over the brims I can just prop them against the windows### without coming downstairs to hyacinthicles some morning after a cold night.
^ ie most afternoons
^^ tripping frequently over hellhounds, who have taken up locations in the middle of the floor the better to glare at me since they want me to come upstairs and sit down at my desk so they can lie in their favourite bed in my office.
^^^ SIGH
# Cheap flutes. So if we break one, we’re only crying over the champagne.
## They will dry out nicely if you remember to stir them with a finger every time you walk past
### And I wonder why my windows are so smudgy
*** Horsemucky, just by the way. My striking was not good. What was remarkable, however, was that while I was chiefly being dragged through by the other ringers, I did have some concept of the shape of the pattern and what was happening. This is bad. This means I want to do it again.
† Major is eight bells, remember. The point about Niall’s Tuesdays is that there are enough people—enough people who know what they’re doing^—that we can ring major. Colin, Niall and I on Thursdays can only ring minor because there’s only three of us, and so six bells.
^ Especially Fred. Fred is a Legend in His Own Time. Fred would be scary if he weren’t so nice.
†† My neighbours across the road often return from somewhere while our Thursday evening handbells are going on. I never draw the sitting-room curtains—only my across-the-road neighbours could see in anyway, their house is very well set back and the cottage’s ground floor is a long half-stair up from road level. If they can see us at all through the heavy windowsill foliage, they will see three heads bent forward in a kind of circle, nearly motionless and clearly intent. They might conceivably see the occasional flash of a raised bell. It amuses me to imagine what they might surmise we’re up to. . . .
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.
PEGASUS Friday
I was late giving hellhounds their final hurtle this evening and was therefore streaking around town because I was going to go bell ringing, I don’t care if PEGASUS is 6,723,598 pages long.* As we were bolting uphill on Market Street, which is one of those extra-wide streets from the days of farmers’ markets that involved entire flocks of sheep, a woman came out of her front door on the opposite side of the street. This happens. People live here, and they do things like go in and out of their front doors. I do it myself.
However she started across the street toward us saying, Excuse me. Oh gods, I thought. If someone is leaving dog crap on your doorstep It isn’t me. I miss on footpath margins sometimes when the landscape all looks like dog crap, but I never ever leave dog crap on pavement.**
I braced myself as she approached. She looked at me earnestly and said, Do you have strong hands?
Uh. . . .
I should have strong hands, she said. I’m a pianist.
I almost said, And I’m a bell ringer. Playing the piano and ringing bells go together really well. You should learn to ring. You’re right down the street from the tower.
But, she went on, I can’t get the handle of my central heating to turn and it’s so cold.***
Not to mention 7:20 on a Friday evening. Yes. So hellhounds and I followed her across the street and into one of the tiny, terrifyingly bijou residences that this old part of town specialises in: the exposed beams and One Exquisite Piece of Furniture per room system. †
She ushered all three of us into her sitting room.†† I turned her central heating on with my strong bell-ringer’s hand.††† We left her settling down for a quiet evening in front of the TV. Lady! You could be learning to ring bells!
We then blasted home where I shoved hellhounds through the door and took off again for tower practise.
I am barely upright and/or breathing. I had a Very Bad Night last night, worrying about Fedex and PEGASUS‡ and when the alarm went off at the appalling hour of eight a.m. I was like, kill it! I don’t care, just kill it!
But the Fedex man did arrive.‡‡ In fact he arrived at ten o’clock.‡‡‡ Peter and I did not have to spend the day passing the claustrophobia baton back and forth—ordinarily I like being shut up in my tiny cottage so long as there’s plenty of books, tea, hellhounds and broadband, but when I’m waiting for something suddenly the cottage is as small as everybody else thinks it is.§ Peter starts breathing a little harder as soon as he crosses the threshold here and the whites of his eyes show more.
I sent him home again. §§ And went off to hurtle hellhounds. And then put my head down over PEGASUS. Yes, I did break for a short cup of tea§§§ with Oisin and I went to bell practise. But especially when you are holding your brain in place with green garden twine, you can barely get hellhound leads clipped onto their d-rings because your hands are shaking so badly from all the caffeine, and you’re hallucinating# pegasi in the corners##, you need breaks.
Bell ringing was not going to be good. And Niall Our Gallant Ringing Master called for a touch of Grandsire Triples and Penelope the ratbag nailed the treble. You didn’t move fast enough, she said, smirking. Which left me to ring inside. I’ve never rung a touch of Grandsire Triples inside. I can barely get through a plain course. Oh, it’s just like Grandsire doubles, they all said, the way frelling ringing people do. Oh it’s just like . . . except. Yeah. Except it’s on seven bells instead of five and you’ve got two more dodges to keep track of. And if you’re used to counting to five, counting to seven is a lot. Especially if your conductor calls something and blows you off course.
It was not a thing of beauty, my first proper touch of Grandsire Triples, but it was recognisable, and I had at least a third of a clue most of the time what was happening, and was sometimes already looking in the right direction before someone shouted at me—and, crucially, we got through to the end. This counts as victory.
And I can maybe manage another few pages of PEGASUS tonight before I fall irrevocably face down in my keyboard. . . .
* * *
* Which it isn’t. Quite.
** Which is to say pedestrian sidewalk. And while it’s legal to let your dog crap in the street, I pick it up there too. I mean . . . ewwww.
*** It is too. It’s gone below freezing again, the sneak. Somebody tell me why all my hardy fuchsias have croaked.
† My kitchen has both exposed beams and one exquisite piece of furniture, but no one would mistake the cottage for bijou. Even if hellhounds didn’t disqualify me, the hellhound crate would.^ And the poor old tallboy badly needs restoring. And then there’s the two foot pile of magazines. And the kitchen magnets which say things like ‘Housework is evil. It must be stopped’ and ‘A mind is a terrible thing to waste on housework.’ And the fact that the cobwebs are dense enough to cast shadows.
^ There are beautiful wooden crates in an assortment of fine finishes available for those with taste and a bank account the size of Lake Superior.
†† Saying, please excuse my sitting room, it is the smallest sitting room in the world. No it isn’t, I said, mine is smaller. It can’t be, she said. It occurred to me later that mine in fact had been bigger, before I put bookshelves on all the walls that don’t have either a window or a fireplace in them.
††† Which was bogus. It was one of those situations as where you can’t get the lid of the jar off, and you can’t and you can’t and you can’t, so you pass it to someone else who takes it off easily, because you’d actually just done it and had given up too fast.
‡ Aggravated by this book I’m reading. It’s one of these, yes! This is the best! Best bestbestbestbestbest!, and you are a FOOL if you don’t read it! Occasionally I fall for these things. I fell for this one. And something totally horrible happens to the female lead—why? It’s grotesque and gratuitous and why? Well, so she can exact grotesque and gratuitous revenge, which I think we’re supposed to applaud. I have the nasty feeling that this whole show is supposed to demonstrate feminism and how women Don’t Have to Take It. Uh. No. That’s not what’s being demonstrated. Not least because the grotesque and gratuitous revenge is also totally implausible and pretty damn silly. The episode did, however, serve to raise my blood pressure and make it that much harder for me to get to sleep.
‡‡ And it was PEGASUS he brought. At 5 a.m. you can imagine all sorts of hazards.
‡‡‡ I tweeted this at the time. See what you’re missing?
§ Colin, Niall and I are plotting trying to entrap a fourth person—my old ringing master, in fact—into handbell ringing with us. We usually ring at my cottage. We have occasional one-offs but we’re wondering if we could fit a fourth person in on a regular basis.
§§ He tried really hard not to look tremendously relieved.
§§§ Caffeine! Yes! Caffeine is your friend!
# Well . . . I think I’m hallucinating. . . .
## This is also bogus. I’m always hallucinating^ characters and landscapes and monsters and things by this point of finishing a novel. The characters and landscapes tend to be from the novel. Some of the monsters are new and original.
^ I think it’s hallucinating. . . .
