Robin McKinley's Blog, page 88

MGBs and other animals

 

Have I told you that Colin is another MGB owner?*  My poor darling hasn’t been out of the garage in about four years, and for at least the last three years I’ve been trying to screw myself, the ambiguous nature of ‘screw’ as a verb here is painfully embraced, to sell her.  I’ve got the name of Colin’s MG specialist garage owner off him at least twice but keep bottling out of ringing up and saying ‘please take the last remnants of my mad youth away, polish her up and sell her to a good home.’  Colin has been listening to me whine about this now for—probably three years.  Last Monday he said, do you want me to mention your MG to Mr Wartsila-Sulzer?  Yes please, I said.  —I have no shame.

            Today when he showed up for handbells he said, Can I have a look at the MG?  Because when Mr W-S says, what does it look like, I’d like to be able to say something more comprehensive than ‘Robin says it’s covered with dust’. 

            So I took him up to the garage where my MG is, indeed, covered with dust.  And he looked her over and as he did so his eyes got brighter and brighter and he went um, ha, hmm, and then he said, Why don’t you just get it sorted and keep it?  This is a really nice car.

            NOOOOOOOOOOOO.

            Why not? he said, reasonably, although the mad MGB-owner glint in his eye was conspicuous.

            Because the hellhounds won’t fit in the back seat! I said.  I never quite got around to creating—or rather, hiring Atlas to create—a dog containment field for the last generation, but it was possible.  These guys . . . not.

            You don’t always take the dogs with you, Colin said, still reasonable and still glinty-eyed.

            The problem is . . . he’s right.  I don’t.  And then he started in on how cheap they are to run** and how much fun they are to drive and and and and and . . . and Niall, drat him, was no help whatsoever since he was fielding another on-duty phone call which took FOREVER and I was thinking . . . I bought my little cream-coloured darling originally to go bell ringing in.  When I first started ringing twelve years ago.  Which is when Peter started playing bridge seriously again because I started being out kind of a lot of evenings.  Whereupon we needed a second car.  YAAAAAAAAY.  My excuse at last.  So I rushed into—New Arcadia, as it happens, to an old-car garage that no longer exists, and their eyes lit up and they said, no, we haven’t got a classic B at the moment but we’d be more than happy to find one for you, and they did. 

            See, I used to have to drive to go bell ringing.  And then I moved to New Arcadia where I was two garden walls over from the bell tower and . . .

            And now . . . um . . . *** 

skating librarian

Robin, please explain how bells at the Abbey are part of the Olympic opening ceremony, as I can hardly imagine they can be heard in London, no matter how many there are. 

SNORK.  Sorry, but . . . SNORK.  I guess I haven’t made it plain just how much of a frenzy the Olympics have plunged our rather small island into†—and how any conceivable manifestation of celebration is embosomed.  Just as there were towers up and down the country ringing like dervishes as the torch galloped hither and thither, there are towers up and down the country ringing as a local greeting and acknowledgement of the opening day ceremonies in London.  Sox Episcopi raised the money to have a village barbecue—which is entirely free.  Usually all those village fete things exist as a way to raise money for some worthy project or other—the food may be donated, but the eaters pony up.  But the teeny weeny local council decided they wanted to have a party for the Olympics . . . and so they are.††  If they don’t get rained out.  Sigh.†††   But there’s a lot of this going on.  I have no idea who the dewy-eyed idealist is at the abbey who decided we should ring for it.  Ours not to question why.  And I’m saying ‘yes’ any time the abbey wants ringers.  I have my own agenda. 

katinseattle

As I was driving in—as I was, in fact, belting 70 mph down the motorway—there was something tickling my wrist. I glanced down and there was a GIGANTIC FRELLING SPIDER WALKING UP MY ARM.

Don’t stop there, please! What did you do with the spider? Did you just let it walk up your arm until you got to the abbey?

AAAAAAAAAUGH.  No.  I think I probably screamed.  I then blew it off violently and it disappeared into the darkness of the passenger footwell.  The only problem with this is that this meant that it was still somewhere IN THE CAR.  I haven’t seen it since . . . but I am still thinking about it. 

            This wouldn’t happen in a MGB roadster with the top down. 

* * *

* His is blue.  I’m sorry, but the only acceptable colours for MGBs are red, cream^ and British Racing Green.  I’ve never told him this. 

^ What the description of mine calls ‘Old English White’ 

** Which is, perhaps surprisingly, ridiculously true.  They’re too old and too, you know, modest^, to attract much official attention.  You don’t pay any tax on them.  Insurance is cheap.  They even get decent mileage. 

^ They were never front runners in any shape or form.  I’ve always said they were sports cars for poor people.  They are, of course, a cult.  Those of us who love them would rather have a B than a 1962 Ferrari.+ 

+ Although I admit I’ve always secretly wanted an MGA.  Too, that is, not instead of.  But the thing about the Bs is that they aren’t so old they are a whole other country for those of us who aren’t serious dedicated car people.  As kind of are.  

*** We’re still running on NOOOOOOOOO.  If I got her sorted and kept her, that means I have two cars, since Peter doesn’t drive any more, which is well beyond absurd^ for someone who works from home.  And has hellhounds who wouldn’t fit in the back seat.   But . . .

            And where I’ve come up with this ‘remnants of my mad youth’ I have no idea since I was forty-eight when I bought her.  I suppose some people’s mad youth hangs on more tenaciously than others, but . . . 

^ And conspicuously consumptive, even if a B is a cheap thrill. 

† Mockorange

But the amount of tax money our precious government has shovelled into this tumefied spectacle makes me sadder.

Hee! I see you have gone native in this fair kingdom of ours. 

When you’re paying taxes^ you do start feeling rather personal about how the money is spent. 

Agree with you about being thoroughly demoralised about the Olympics however. I was quite pleased (since I don’t live in London) when I first heard we’d got the games. 

I nearly lost a (n American) friend who asked me why I didn’t want the Olympics to come here.  YAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH.

But all the administrative shambles, security theatre, 

I can’t even . . . as the saying goes.  It seems to me we could solve current unemployment in about forty-five minutes.  Sign up the 2 million (or so) jobless to be Olympic security personnel.  Two large squawking birds with one cream pie.  And maybe we could put G4 Security out of business.  Hmm.  Although that would mess up our perfect unemployment solution.  No, it would be worth it.

strong-arming of Olympic-themed trademarks (which other people have been using for decades) by corporate sponsors, 

Some of this is so extreme it’s funny—since I have no intention of going.^^  You have heard, I assume, about how you are not allowed to consume x comestibles unless they bear the logo of y Olympic corporate monopoly?  In some cases you may remove your choice of brand comestible from its native packaging and bring it to the Olympic grounds in a Plain Brown Wrapper.  Snork.  

celebrity torch-hogging (at the expense of ordinary people – some of whom had been promised a turn with the torch and were then turfed off so some irrelevant ‘celeb’ could carry it instead), 

I did want to put in a word here for some local councils, including ours, who really did hand it round to ordinary people.  We had some very ordinary people who were so life-enhancingly excited that I felt positively curmudgeonly.  For about thirty seconds. 

and the waste of money have totally soured me on the whole deal. I am clinging onto a tiny shred of hope that once the sports actually start it might get interesting again, but for now I am sick to the back teeth with it all. 

I’m interested in the Jamaican eventer and the British dressage team.  And that’s pretty much it.

            I’ve done my little tap-dance about having been to the Tokyo Olympics as a kid, haven’t I?  My father was in the US Navy and he was stationed in Tokyo, and his posting at the time was such that he was able to nail some good tickets.  He and my mother went to more than I did, but I did go to the opening ceremonies ( . . . and the show jumping).  And it was amazing.  Some of this no doubt was being a kid.  But some of it was just that the whole corporate sponsorship—or the security—thing wasn’t quite the monster fifty years ago that it is now. 

^ Especially at a rate that your upbringing declares is communist 

^^ And there are a surprising number of me—and, I assume, you—around:  there are tickets to pretty much everything still available, including the opening and the closing ceremonies.  

†† This is another of those things that makes me feel like a curmudgeon.  For thirty seconds. 

††† ajlr 

It seems we may get a bit of ‘normal’ summer soon, if the Met Office is right about the Jet Stream finally shifting north a bit and so also shunting further north all these low-pressure systems that have been hitting us. I certainly hope so – I’m distinctly damp and mouldy round the edges myself at the moment. 

I’LL BELIEVE IT WHEN I SEE IT.   ::wringing out hair, All Stars, hellhounds::

 

Previous generations’ alcopops. Feh.

Oh I say, that’s not quite fair. One can have Pimm’s that isn’t unduly sweet, it just depends what you mix it with. I used to enjoy the No 3 as well as the No 1 (which is good made with soda water and with borage flowers and cucumber chunks in it). 

CUCUMBER CHUNKS?  IN A DRINK?  Ewwwww.  To each her own.  Although I think I may have (a) been exposed to the Wrong Sort of Pimm’s when I was still a tourist^ and (b) shot out of my depraved early experiments with rum and coke^^ and Scotch and ginger ale^^^ with a Bad Attitude.# 

Have you read last week’s ‘The Ringing World’, with the front page article about the mania…er, devoted handbell ringers who have completed long lengths of Minor, Major, Royal and Maximus in one day? I thought this was a lovely way of putting it: “This would need over 18 hours of ringing: a fairly full day.” I am not sure that humans who can do that are really of the same species as the rest of us. 

I as you might say failed to read it.  I ring handbells.  I don’t want to know.  I don’t even want to know that Niall and Colin are going to be ringing a full peal of bob major with a couple of other loonies next Thursday . . . which is just fine with me, Peter and I are going out for our anniversary dinner.  Our relationship is twenty-one on the 26th of July and old enough to vote.  It will not be voting for David Cameron.  

^ Possibly because I was a tourist. 

^^ This is the only time and occasion in my life I did drink coke, mind you. 

^^^ GODS.  The things one does when one is culpably young and even more culpably stupid.  This was before I discovered single malt, however. 

# And I do like my cider somewhat warmer and furrier than extra-dry.  But . . .

 

Raining

 

 It’s RAINING.  Why is it RAINING?  I know, I know, it’s the frelling jet stream, it’s not streaming, it’s settled down in its deck chair with its Pimm’s* and isn’t going anywhere.  But for the last three days the national weather report has declared that all the rain is in Ireland and up north.  THEN WHY IS IT RAINING HERE?  Hampshire is about as south as you can get, unless you want go down to the edge and fall in the Solent.**  It will remain dry in the south, says the radio.  It will not remain dry in the south.  It hasn’t been dry in the south in about two months.  It rains EVERY DAY.  Sometimes it rains more and sometimes it rains less, but it rains.  I am expecting to wake up some morning and discover that the hellhounds and I have turned mossy green overnight.  Getting laundry to dry . . . eh.  Even with the Aga on*** you can just about feel water droplets forming on your face if you walk in the bathroom after I’ve hung a load of laundry on the overhead airer.  Airer.  Ha.  The fogger.  The moister.  It’s kind of interesting, in a depressing sort of way, what’s happening in the garden, which I haven’t got out to do any work in . . . probably about two months.  There’s the stuff that says YAAAAAAY RAAAAAAIN WE LOOOOOOVE RAIN and is growing six or eighteen times its normal size.  And there’s the stuff that’s drowning.  But trying to make my work-for-pay schedule align with the whimsy of the heavens, so I could get out and do some weeding and some rescuing, is not on:  plus if there’s a break in the downpour I probably need to try to hurtle hellhounds.  Hellhounds are not at all good natured and cooperative about getting wet and clearly feel that something should be done about the frequency with which this undesirable occurrence is foisted upon them.  I couldn’t agree more.  I’m just a little at a loss about how to implement it. 

            I certainly failed today.  We drove out to Warm Upford (in the fantastically reliable Wolfgang) for some different soggy landscape.  I had just been listening to a weather report saying dry in the south as I parked under a tree and it started raining.  Arrrrgh.  We hurtled anyway.  I wasn’t going to waste the drive, and it was indeed a different soggy landscape.  However one of those moments of Utmost Humiliation occurred.†  We were stopped under another tree while I was texting to Niall about how I wasn’t going to accept his almost irresistible offer to ring handbells with his fancy Wednesday group tonight when there was an unexpected opening, which doesn’t happen very often . . . because I am not going to blow off abbey practise till I RING BETTER and also they’ve accepted their fate and made me a member††.  There was some urgency involved since it was only about eight hours hence and, as Niall knows, Pooka hangs around my neck pretty much 24/7. 

            But as I was texting, standing under a tree out in the middle of nowhere in the beautiful Hampshire countryside with two wet cranky hellhounds and the rain trickling down my glasses, a runner went past us.  A serious runner, clearly, from his tall skinny frame to that lope that only long distance runners have to the spandex running gear which was absolutely devoid of any little rectangular pockets containing mobile phones.  And as he sped past us he gave me exactly the look of contempt I have given other slaves to technology on similar occasions.

            Sigh. 

* * *

* Humans don’t like Pimm’s and deck chairs in the teeming rain.  We’re funny that way.  

** Which you would hardly notice.  Oh yes, you’d say.  This is very heavy rain.  We’ve had a lot of it lately.  

*** And why wouldn’t it be on when the ambient temperature tends to hang out in the fifties?  (That’s the low teens somewhere in Celsius.)  July you say?  Maybe it’s not the jet stream, maybe some of the eastern Australia winter got lost and fetched up here?^ 

^ And has joined the jet stream with the deck chairs and the Pimm’s+.  They’ve discovered they’re twin souls and now we’ll never get rid of them. 

+ You all know your Pimm’s, yes?  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pimm’s   It’s one of these fabulously English things that I as a lifelong Anglophile# have always known.## 

# Yes, lifelong.  It has survived emigrating here which is pretty robust of it.  Real life is a kick in the teeth to most misty ideals.   Hey, England is still the only country with lots of change-ringing bell towers.  Even if this somewhat begs the question about how/why I learnt to ring in the first place.  A silly-with-it Anglophile who moves to an area of this country whose local chapter of the ringers’ guild runs to dozens of towers~ (even if not all of them are managing to maintain either a band or the ringability of their bells, sigh)?  I was doomed.~~ 

~ Tonight at the abbey went reasonably well.  I got through my de rigueur touch of Grandsire Triples better than sometimes which is to say that I held my line when other people were losing theirs.  Arrgh.  Scary Man was not there tonight so some of us peons were revolting.  Gemma stood her bell after successfully ringing an unaffected touch of Stedman Triples and said to me, wouldn’t you like to give it a shot?  Oh, go on.  And I said, no, no, I haven’t been asked.  Gemma, while a proper member and booming up through the ranks with speed and panache, is still a lower-level ringer, but at this point Linnet joined us, found out what we were talking about, said to me, would you like to?  And I said I would love a shot at Stedman Triples here, so Linnet, who is an upper-level ringer said, I’ll have a word with Albert.  Who did his slightly-stunned look and said okay.  I had a minder, and I didn’t do it perfectly, but I did it and I clearly can do it.  Even at the abbey. 

           I’m also sure that my rather startlingly successful evening at New Arcadia last Friday was an aid to progress.  The abbey is not an easy tower.  I was talking to one of the other upper-level people—one of the ones who can actually turn in the monster abbey tenor, which is to say ring it as part of a method rather than just bonging behind—and he said that one more thing about ringing there is that all the bells are more or less odd struck, which gets increasingly interesting the more and the bigger bells there are.

            Although speaking of turning in the tenor—we had a visitor tonight.  This modest young slip of a lad who looks like he spends his spare time helping little old ladies cross the street.  And who belongs to one of these elite ringing groups so occult we revolting peons aren’t allowed to know its name, let alone its secret handshake.  They rang Cambridge major for him to have the opportunity to turn in our tenor.  I am pleased to report that while he did it admirably he had the decency to have to work at it a bit, and to look a little overheated by the end.

           However I am even more pleased to report that our tower captain, trolling for bodies, asked me if I’d ring for the Olympic opening ceremony they’re laying on Friday week.  Gemma and I were discussing the pros and cons of going to the pub (we went) when he strolled up and asked ‘if either of you ladies was available’.  I think this counts as being asked.  I proudly wrote my initials on the chalkboard. 

 ~~ Have I ever told you the story of the weekend I spent in Hampshire with that fascinatingly peculiar writer Peter Dickinson and his wife?  Peter’s first wife was already ill at that point but Peter and his elder son took me sightseeing, which included footpaths, thatched roofs, flint-and-brick architecture, beech trees, oak trees, cider, Morris men and change ringing.  I suspect this is another of those how many times have I told you . . . oh well. 

##Not that I’m one of its supporters, mind.  Single malt Scotch, yes.  Pimm’s, no.  Previous generations’ alcopops.  Feh. 

† No, not being caught having a pee in the hedgerow.  This has already happened.  

†† If they ever do.  Sigh.  But see previous footnote about being asked to ring. 

Kes, 27

TWENTY SEVEN

I signed forty-six dozen pages—no, forty-six hundred dozen—requiring my thumbprint in blood plus a small lock of my hair as collateral or hostage, further promising to enter into indentured servitude for a duration equivalent to thirty-two times the length of the stipulated term plus the value of pi to 1,000,000,000 places applied to the square root of the tower at Rose Manor if I ever fell more than 6.2 hours behind on the rent or failed to maintain fresh offerings on the altar to the unknown goddess, which was probably down around Yggdrasil somewhere.  I’d look for it after I moved in.  What these offerings were to be was not specified.  Perhaps they would come to me in a vision.   Contracts.  Gah.  They’re all alike.

            While I was getting my breath back and drinking a cup of tea to replace lost fluids (forty-six hundred dozen thumbprints is a lot of blood), Lena said, “Excuse me,” and handed me an envelope with ‘Kes’ written on the outside.  I had been staring into the depths of my mug and wishing for Golden Tippy Froufrou Hoohah, although as corporate tea went this wasn’t too bad.  I goggled at the envelope.  I don’t know anyone in New Iceland to scrawl my first name familiarly across an envelope.  “Serena brought it,” said Lena.  “Serena from the Friendly Campfire.”

            Oh.  What. . . . There was a motel rule that forbade rose-bushes on the cabin porches.  One of the other paying guests had gone off in fits at the sight of my van and was suing me for emotional distress.  The international Weird Neon Logo Inc development team and sales force were coming to New Iceland for their annual meeting and they needed my cabin back tonight.  I opened the envelope.  Don’t do anything rash, Serena had written.  Jan has a car for you.  Well, a vehicle.  Serena.   I wasn’t sure, by the phrasing, if this was good news or not. 

            I looked up.  Sally was back in her office.  She had a phone in a cradle on her shoulder and was staring at her computer screen.  Hayley fooped a stack of pages down in front of me (well, what do you think that smack of pages sounds like?  It’s sounds like foop to me) and said, “There’s your copy.  Sally’s trying to get your bank to talk to our bank.”

            “Did she remember the strawberry shortcake to placate the guardian dragons?” I said. 

            “Oh yes,” said Hayley, straight-faced.  “She’s good at that.  The robot ninjas with the heat-seeking shuriken are more of a problem.”

            “Oh dear,” I said.  “I hate robot ninjas.  Especially with heat-seeking shuriken.”

            “—But if she succeeds,” Hayley went on, “and she probably will, you can have the keys tomorrow.”

            “Tomorrow?” I squeaked.

            “It’ll take a week or two for all the final hard copy to come through, but you don’t have to wait.  It’s in Mr Demerara’s contract that we can accept a tenant on his behalf.  He’s also never home so it’s a good thing.”

            Tomorrow.  Well, I had to unload the van somewhere.  Forethought had been a little thin on the ground since Gelasio first told me he was leaving.  Although forethought had never been a strong point.  It was a characteristic I shared with Flowerhair although so far my poor choices had resulted in fewer evil magicians than hers.  Although hers involved fewer cockroaches.  I should have hired a (larger) van for longer, of course . . . but apparently I had both a house and a . . . vehicle.  Real life.  Eeep. 

            Hayley was looking at me anxiously.  I managed to smile.  “Thanks,” I said.  “Um.  Can you tell me how to find the mall?   I need to buy.  Food.  Light bulbs.  Stuff.  Cushions for those grim chairs.” 

            “Oh yes, of course.   If you turn left at the Friendly Campfire and keep going on Dane Avenue, as you start coming out of town again you’ll see the sign for the Majormojo Mall.  Everything’s there—Godzilla Food, Ironman Hardware, Elysian Household, Moriarty’s Department Store . . . there are a lot of little shops too.”

            “Thanks,” I said.

            “Done!” called Sally.  We both turned toward her. Lena was crouched over her computer, possibly doing battle with some robot ninja of her own.  There was another woman at another desk who had not, so far as I could tell, looked up once since Hayley and I had returned, clicking away furiously and deploying her mouse like a rapier:  thrust.  Parry.  Thrust, her eyes never wavering from the screen.  I guess you learn powers of concentration if you work in an open-plan office.  I’ve always been a oh-look-there’s-a-cloud/cockroach/crack in the ceiling that looks like my fourth-grade teacher/I wonder what’s in the refrigerator kind of worker. 

            Sally walked toward us, beaming.  “Let me welcome you again to New Iceland, Kes,” she said.  “This time as a neighbor.” 

 

DOGS. WHOSE IDEA WAS DOGS.*

 

They’ve redesigned the worming schedule.  I have as little truck with Big Pharma as I can, on both sides of the canine/human species border, but worming critters is totally necessary, and while I know there are herbal and homeopathic ways to do it, in this case I am a craven coward, and I go for the heavy chemicals.  I just hope that the veterinary worm-icides are less destructive to the hellhounds’ wobbly guts than a gentler, less Sherman’s-march-to-the-sea, more holistic method would be, which (probably) allows a few escapees. 

            You used to worm your dog three times a year.  Last time I went in to the vet clinic I was told that they’d changed the ingredients or the proportions or something, and you were now only supposed to do it twice a year.  This should be good news—if it works—if they haven’t just jacked everything up by 800%**  and it’s now taking the top six layers of gut lining with it, and forget the friendly flora, they’re history. 

            The visible management difficulty with hellhounds is that as they get near time to be wormed they stop eating.  Of course.  Hellhound default position is not eating.  But I’m trying not to work slowly round the year backwards, so last year first worming was March and this year it was February and next year it will be January.  On the new six-month system hellhounds are due the end of July.***  But hellhounds have been becoming increasingly resistant to food for the last several weeks and I’m running out of stratagems and flimflam.  There are various herbal and homeopathic remedies (speaking of herbal and homeopathic) which help.  But most of what armoury I’ve got relates to waiting.  You put the food down.  They don’t eat.  You move the bowls.  They still don’t eat.  You move the bowls again.†  They continue not to eat.  You offer small bits of chicken††.  They had better eat these. †††  When you get to the point where they won’t eat small bits of chicken . . . you panic.

            Today at lunch (never our best meal) we reached the refusing-small-bits-of-chicken stage.  Whereupon I went round to the vets, got the wormer, came home and . . . since they won’t eat, I had to poke the pills down their throats.  Previously I have (usually) managed to get them wormed while they were still eating, so the pills went down with some food.  The frelling new pills clearly gave them giant stomachaches—I could hear Darkness’, whose insides are the more deplorable, gut objecting from two rooms away.  AAAAAAAUGH.

            It took four hours, two homeopathic doses, and some raw liver to get them to eat their lunch.

            They ate dinner with enthusiasm.‡

            I am a gibbering wreck.  Dogs.  Whose idea was dogs. 

             . . . But they’re warm and furry and cute and lying on the sofa without them just wouldn’t be the same. ‡‡  I am doomed.

* * *

* Meanwhile yesterday was the only day all week it didn’t rain.^  And it was a Sunday, so the world and his wife were out enjoying the countryside.  I was expecting the world, his wife, their six untrained Labradors plus a Rottweiler who slipped his lead in Canterbury and has been making good time, and possibly an allosaurus escaped from the Centre of the Earth or the Lost World or the Land That Time Forgot, or a mad scientist’s back garden, where he’s been breeding them because Rottweilers^^ aren’t scary enough.   What I—we, the hellhounds and I—got were hordes of off-road bikes, the leg-powered kind.  Yet another category of self-absorbed idiots who think they own the planet, or at least that they should.  This particular division had all been to a sensitivity training seminar which taught them to say ‘hello’ to pedestrians.  Say it brightly and charmingly AND THEN IT DOESN’T MATTER IF YOU RUN THEM OFF THE TRACK.  I’m happy to crank in hellhounds to one side of a double-width track for anyone, be it horse, bike, motorbike, or 1927 double-six Daimler.  I am not happy to be driven into the hedgerow by some thug on something with wheels who clearly believes this manifestation of modern technology gives him priority and we can get the hell out of his way or be mown down, because he needs to maintain his momentum.  This doesn’t usually happen, but yesterday they all (cheerily) said hello as they sailed past, flecking us with mud in what was no doubt a comradely way.  Grrrrr.

            At one point, on a particularly overgrown track^^^, this errant creep with muscles to match his attitude shouted, in the designated cheery manner, Good morning! twice as he bore down upon us at no lessening of speed.  As he came beside us—as hellhounds and I scrambled to get the hell out of his way—he said, scintillating with outraged virtue, You can say Good morning!  I, with rare presence of mind, replied:  You can get off your bike!

            You can f*ck off! he shouted back over his shoulder.

            So much for sensitivity training. 

             There are so many ways that dog ownership is a never-ending delight.  I keep remembering that romcom cliché for meeting people:  buy a dog and take it for walks.  Oh, you will meet people all right. . . .    

^ It is raining now.  It has been raining all day.  Ringing at Glaciation tonight . . . it’s the 16th of July, I am wearing a wool cardigan, and I turned the electric fire on. 

^^ Word allows ‘Rottweiler’ but not ‘Rottweilers’.  Please.   And it doesn’t know ‘allosaurus’.  I would have thought all computer programmers, including those involved with spellcheckers, were dinosaur geeks when they were kids. 

^^^ And then there’s the, ahem, thorny issue of local council upkeep of public tracks. 

** It makes me nervous when Big Pharma does something apparently against its own interests, like cutting back on a treatment.  They’re not hugely bothered about delivering good health.  What they’re hugely bothered about is delivering a good profit. 

*** Just like SHADOWS.  

† I have no frelling idea why moving the food bowls works.  But if they’re stuck in a non-eating posture they absolutely won’t eat till you move them.  Moving the bowls means keeping the possibility live. 

†† Slightly larger than the infinitesimal dice of (usually) chicken mixed up with the cereal-free kibble in their bowls.  I chop it up as small as the width of the knife blade will let me or Chaos in particular will simply eat the chicken bits out.  Hellhounds have prehensile tongues.  But this is still just another kickstarting ploy:  the trick is to get them to eat anything.  I don’t know what is literally going on inside a non-eating hellhound, but empty stomachs apparently make them feel ill—which means they’re even less likely to eat.  Which is why they have three meals a day.  Which is why I make myself meshugga^ trying to get them to eat three times a day. 

^ Feh.  Word doesn’t know ‘meshugga’ either.   Bunch of goyim.+ 

+ SNORK.  IT ACCEPTS GOYIM.       

††† Their final meal of the day is gold-standard kibble only—the stuff that you cry when you pay the bill and genuflect when you open the bags—and we’ve got to the stage where I’m having to allow an extra hour for getting to bed, because of the hellhound eating situation.  Arrrrrgh.  These are not hugely useful hours, you know?  I’m too busy feeling crazy.  But I’m catching up on old issues of TIME and THE RINGING WORLD which is I suppose something.     

‡ But dinner is our best meal.  Ask me tomorrow morning, after pre-bedtime supper.  See previous footnote. 

‡‡ And Kes has just met the SWD.  This is happening a lot of eps from where you are.  Mwa hahahahahahaha.

Return to New Arcadia (sort of)

 

When I quit the New Arcadia bell tower back the beginning of the year, that was, I knew, the end.  I quit knowing that I was not going to be able to ring my bells again, that the foremost irony of the situation was that I was quitting, finally, over the staggering mishandling of my (rejected) attempt to contribute to the bell restoration fund.  So I was not only not going to be ringing my bells, I was not going to be ringing my beautifully renovated, refurbished and restored bells.  And, because I live two garden walls over from the churchyard, I was going to have to hear them ringing—every Sunday morning, anyway,* even if I was careful to arrange to be down at the mews with the doors and windows shut on Friday evenings.** 

            And I started ringing at the abbey.  Which unequal struggle has been well documented here. 

            But my understanding of human groups is not very good, partly because I’m just stupid about human groups but partly because I haven’t actually had a lot of experience of human groups.  I’ve spent most of my life dedicated to staying out of any occupation that requires teamwork because your average human is as daft as a brush*** and daftness rises geometrically when constrained in groups.  I do know the ringing world is a small one and (inevitably) the local ringing world is even smaller.  But . . .  

            But I wasn’t expecting my other ringer friends not to lay off talking about New Arcadia.†  I wasn’t expecting to be asked to ring for a few occasions when New Arcadia were short-handed, although I was grateful to be invited to ring at the two funerals of people who meant something to me too.  Probably most of all I wasn’t expecting the sheer bloody-minded persistence of Niall.††  He has this misleadingly mild-mannered affect, but he is a [censored.  Censored censored].  Mind you I was very very grateful that the ringing master of New Arcadia was still talking to me at all††† but . . . shut up, Niall.  Shut.  Up. 

             I’m not sure when I decided okay, whatever, I’d come to tower practise again . . . some day.  But the abbey goes on holiday for most of August, and it’s mid July already‡, and I need somewhere to ring.  I’m not even sure when I decided this was the week for a dramatic return, but when Niall pointed out that it was Friday the 13th . . . clearly this was an omen, and I had to come. ‡‡ 

             And then . . . as when I’ve been there on invitation . . . the admin said hello immediately, so that was all right.  And then . . . you know how every now and again the fates throw you a chocolate chip cookie instead of a flaming brand? ‡‡‡  I had a really good evening.  I’d been assuming I’d be fairly paralytic with anxiety but was hoping that I’ve been ringing enough years for pity’s sake to get through some basic method or two without total humiliation, whereupon the First Return Jinx would be over with and I could go on from there (or not).  And then . . . well, insofar as an essentially mediocre, wrong-shape-of-brain, rhythm-challenged, jerky middle-aged ringer is ever golden, I was golden.

              It was great.§

              On my way out I heard Vicky saying (to someone else) that they were going to be short on Sunday.  Nooooooo, I thought, let’s not rush into anything.  But I actually found myself up and dressed this morning and halfway through a cup of sustaining caffeine when, if I were going to ring at New Arcadia, I’d need to be putting my shoes on.  Nooooooo, I thought, let’s not rush into anything.  But I heard the bells going up—five.  Oh, well, five, I thought.  Five’ll do.

              And then one of them went away.  They were ringing minimus!  Four bells!  Four bells is sad!

              I put my shoes on.  I sprinted for the tower, as I have sprinted so often before.  Vicky started laughing.  Minimus, she said, means ‘Come. And.  Help.  Us.’  Bong.  Bong.  Bong.  Bong.  The missing ringer returned.§§  We rang doubles and minor.

               I had a good time. 

               I have no idea where this is going, except that I still want to join the abbey if they’ll have me—if they’re desperate enough for ringers who will show up to ask me.§§§  But if there’s a way to ring informally, unofficially, dismemberedly, at New Arcadia . . . without anyone getting in anyone else’s face . . . I’m up to give it a try.  I’d like to give it a try.  That tower is still two garden walls over from my cottage, and those are my bells.            

* * *

* Sunday mornings have been bad.  Even after I learned to sleep through the ringing—mostly—with my bedroom door shut, the bathroom window closed, and a pillow over my head.

            Not bad enough, however, to make me ring early service at the abbey.  There are limits to self-inflicted trauma.  And Gemma does keep telling me that early service is reasonably well attended.  It’s the afternoon service ring they’re chronically short for.  Which suits my getting up in the morning style very well. 

** Which of course didn’t work, especially after we started ringing handbells at the cottage Friday evenings right before tower practise.  The tower bells are ringing by the time I’ve put stuff away, washed the tea mugs and stuffed hellhounds into harnesses to hurtle back down to the mews—and the sound hurtled after us.  I tried simply fleeing out the door immediately after Niall and Gemma left, but then the Marie Celeste quality of the untouched post-handbells cottage when we got back again at bedtime was too depressing. 

*** Which deliciously insane phrase is another reason to . . . well, maybe you don’t have to live in England, but you have to be English enough one way or another to use this phrase without looking . . . erm . . . as daft as a brush?  

http://www.guardian.co.uk/notesandqueries/query/0,,-2706,00.html 

† Indeed Colin came closer to major blood loss on one or two occasions than perhaps he realises. 

†† Whose head I really did take off at the shoulders fairly soon after I left, in response to an ill judged remark.    

††† And—ahem—ringing handbells with me 

‡ AAAAAAAAAAUGH 

‡‡ I was planning on slinking in behind Niall and Gemma and then Gemma came up with this meretricious plan to visit her mother.  Couldn’t she have visited her mother on Saturday?

            Niall thought it was very funny I wouldn’t go up to the ringing chamber in front of him.  Feh. 

‡‡‡ And you almost drop it because you were expecting the flaming brand. 

§ We started with St Clements which I barely know.  It’s not difficult and I ought to be able to ring it, but that doesn’t mean I can.  And we cracked through a beautiful course of it.  Roger was positively startled.^  They had a good turn-out^^ so we got to ring triples and major (seven with tenor-behind, and eight working bells).  I rang a FLAWLESS^^^ touch of Grandsire Triples.  YAAAAAAAAAAY GRANDSIRE TRIPLES.  I rang a plain course of bob major, which is another of these things I ought to be able to ring but# . . . I rang a plain course of Stedman Triples.

            I live.  I am a ringer.## 

^ In a good way. 

^^ One of Niall’s moans is that the band is so weak.  I keep saying, every time I hear you you’re ringing something fancy on eight, don’t give me the poor mouth.  And he says they’re entirely dependent on their visitors.  Okay.  I see what he means. 

^^^ . . . what passes in my case for flawless.  I was in the right place all the time and my striking wasn’t too dire. 

# “It’s just like bob minor only with two more bells”.  Uh huh. 

## Sometimes. 

§§ Niall is on call.  He managed to convince whoever it was that no one was going to die and that his bell tower needed him worse. 

§§§ It seems to me however that the moral to my story is that ringing at the abbey is very good for . . . my ringing elsewhere.  Sigh. 

 

The Organ of Eglise Notre-Dame La Dalbade – Part III

Guest post by equus_peduus

PART THREE

We got to see the insides of the organ – hundreds of pipes in all different sizes crammed into a fairly small space – and we could only see about 1/3 of the pipes (there’s not a lot of space in there for visitors, and access is via a trap door and a rickety wooden ladder).  There are both metal and wood pipes.  The pipes can be tuned (this is not a job I would want!) by means of adjusting curls of metal on the metal pipes, or adjusting a sort of stopper thing on the wood pipes‡‡‡.  Not all the pipes sound by means of air moving past appropriately shaped holes  – some have a vibrating piece inside instead.

Just a few of the smaller pipes. The pipes in the foreground are about waist-high.

Note curls on metal pipes. These can be rolled to varying degrees to tune these pipes.

Note handle above wooden pipes and slot in side with a slidey thing inside. The stopper can be moved up and down to tune these pipes.

Another view of the handle/stopper tuning mechanism of wood pipes.

The vibraty bit for some of the pipes.

The organists of Toulouse rotate churches they play in on a regular basis.  Mr. de Miguel was amazing to watch as he navigated the several manuals, pedal board and stops (often reaching arm-over-arm to pop a stop in or out as he kept playing with the other hand, as well as manipulating the tone color with his feet), and kept track of music with THREE staves (as a primarily string player, who only has to keep one track of one staff at a time, I found it dizzying to just follow along).  There were Post-It notes on the music to help him remember what stops he wants set on this instrument, and hand-written markings all over indicating when to change the stops.  We were treated to demonstrations of some of the versatility of this instrument.  It can do the full-out classic organ sound one associates with Bach’s famous Toccata and Fugue… or a light, fluty sound suitable for Fauré or Debussy… a symphonic richness for orchestral rearrangements… music reminiscent of an oboe concerto… the list goes on and on.

Anybody who wanted to was also allowed the opportunity to play a little on the organ.  I was surprised at how easy the action was – it felt more “solid” than a piano, and had the peculiar quality that it didn’t matter how hard I pressed the key, it didn’t affect the volume§.  Each manual has the same octave range as the other two (the pedals seem to be what play the deep bass) but based on how the stops are arranged, one can get a full range of notes, from almost-inaudibly low to tooth-achingly high, as well as imitating the sounds of different instruments.  I was also surprised at how quickly the sound responded.  The quiet wooden shuffle-clack of the Barker mechanism behind the bench was a little distracting at first, but apparently do their job well, as the sound was almost immediate when the key was depressed.  The sound was a little muted from the vantage of the bench, compared to elsewhere in the organ loft, but easily audible and it was not at all difficult to hear what I was doing (and realize when I’d made a mistake!)

What’s easily visible of the Barker mechanism. The “wall” behind the organist is actually a sliding door which hides this. The “room” where we were with all the pipes is above and behind that.

I’m not much of a keyboardist – it’s been months since I’ve had access to a piano, and years since I’ve played much – but I made some attempts at the first third or so of Bach’s cello suite in C§§, a few lines from a Mozart piano sonata and the first section of Für Elise§§§.  The organist adjusted the stops as I went – it was fascinating to hear how the different pieces sounded and changed as the stops went in and out.  It was very much fun.  I didn’t do much with the pedals – played a few notes just to do it, but what keyboard ability I own lives in my fingers, not in my feet.

All in all, the afternoon was wonderful.  Apparently Saturday was National Organ Day, and Toulouse, being the second most organ-populated city in France, had to do something, and this is what was planned.  Mr. de Miguel was very passionate about how the organ has declined in popularity, and how many instruments are unplayable (including another, almost identical Puget organ in a theater in Paris), and is hoping that publicizing and demonstrating this amazing instrument, more people will become interested in learning more about the organ.

There’s apparently going to be an organ concert at the Basilique Saint-Sernin next weekend… *

* * *

‡‡ Boyfriend thinks they said over 3000 pipes.  We do know that they ranged in length from less than a foot to 32 feet in length.  The stops are labelled, plus we could see them.

‡‡‡ Mr. de Miguel mentioned that they had tuned most of the pipes Friday night in preparation for Saturday – a task that took two people over six hours, and lasted til past 1am.

§ This is sort of like many unsophisticated electric keyboards – but those are “bouncy” and difficult to play in my experience.  This keyboard was much more substantial.

§§ I started with that on the theory that it’s really hard to mess up a descending C major scale, followed by some broken chords before it got to the more interesting bits, and I thought I could probably mostly sound it out as I went along.

§§§ It happens that at one time, I had all of the afore-mentioned piano music memorized… about ten years ago. It was kind of embarrassing how little I could remember.  I so need a piano.

* And did you GO?  –editor, who has taken forever to do her job.  Well, I wanted to get three guest posts out of this fabulous effort and long division [sic] is not my thing . . .

 

KES, 26

TWENTY SIX

“Rose—Manor?” I said.

            “ . . . contracts,” Hayley was saying to Lena. Lena looked even younger than Hayley did, and was perhaps the current part-time college student.  Lena hadn’t been at her desk when I’d first come in, and I saw her now looking me over, from the beat up leather jacket with the unravelling cuffs (fortunately she couldn’t see the lining) to the fraying All Stars (All Stars are at their very best during the last few months before they disintegrate) and the thought balloon over her head said “They’re perfect for each other.”  And she didn’t even know about Caedmon.  Then she glanced up a little farther and saw me watching her (I may have been smiling in a sardonic, middle-aged way), blushed even redder than Hayley, and started scrabbling furiously through the file folders on her desk.

            Hayley turned to me.  “I’m sorry,” she said.  “I should have pointed it out to you.  It’s on a plaque over the front door, but it’s dark under the porch roof.  It’s your mailing address too.  There are no house numbers in Cold Valley:  your house is Rose Manor, Reuel Street, Cold Valley.”

            “Although,” said a new voice, “after you’ve lived there forty-eight hours, the postman will know who you are, and letters addressed to ‘Kestrel MacFarquhar, Cold Valley’ will arrive unerringly in your box.”  A dark-haired woman had emerged from the office at the back.  I could see where Hayley was getting her dress sense.  Grey pin stripes.  Looked like a tailored jail cell to me, but I’m the one in jeans.  The dark-haired woman held out her hand with a friendly smile.  “I’m Sally Hutchins.  Welcome to the area.”

            “Thank you,” I said.

            “I’m sure Hayley is taking excellent care of you,” said Sally, “but if you need anything further, or if Hayley isn’t available some time, anyone at Homeric Homes would be happy to assist you.” 

            “Thank you,” I said again, repressing an urge to curtsey.  Or ask where I could hire a rent boy.

            “Do you know anything about a big old solid-fuel stove at Rose Manor?” said Hayley.  “It’s not on the inventory.”

            “What?” said Sally, looking disconcerted.  I hoped Hayley wasn’t going to get, ahem, raked over any coals later for exposing high-level weakness in front of a paying customer.  “No.  Mr D has agreed to a woodstove, but not until the house had a tenant.  And Bob would have told us if he’d sold a stove for one of our properties.”

            Bob of Hephaestus’ Grotto, no doubt, and Hayley’s uncle.  Or possibly Sally’s.  Or Lena’s. 

            “And Ron would have said something,” Hayley went on.  “He was there today.   Something about the electricals.”

            Sally’s brows snapped together, and she had her mouth open to say something and changed her mind.  She turned a professionally smooth face back toward me.  “Ron is a treasure,” she said, “but he is a trifle . . .  wayward.  I suppose I will find out what it’s about when he sends his bill.  But you’re right, Hayley, if there’d been a new stove installed, Ron would have been involved.”

            “It’s a very old new stove,” said Hayley.  “If I was guessing, I’d guess it was about the same age as the house.”

            His name is Caedmon, and he’s friendly, I wanted to say, but I didn’t.  It would probably be worse than asking about rent boys.

            Sally and Hayley were staring at each other and then Sally’s eyebrows snapped together again, and this time they stayed snapped.  “Don’t be ridiculous,” said Sally.  She looked back at me, regaining the professionally smooth face with some effort.  “Hayley is very imaginative,” said Sally.  “She reads a lot of novels.”

            You cow, I thought, smiling pleasantly.  “That can do it to you,” I said.  I had noticed that when Hayley tossed her briefcase on her chair she kept hold of her shoulderbag, which had FLOWERHAIR THE INVINCIBLE in it.

            “Fantasy novels,” piped up Lena, and briefly my right hand flexed, as if expecting a sword hilt to grasp, to run this toadying peon through.  But Lena went on:  “She’s got me started.  My economics exam is next week, and last night I was up after midnight reading a book Hayley loaned me.”

            I looked back at Sally, working on a smooth professional face of my own behind which to gloat and saw . . . a middle-aged woman doing the best she could, and whose life maybe hadn’t turned out quite as she planned.  She looked tired.  Okay.  I got it.  Sally said:  “It’s true.  I am old and boring and I do needlepoint and read gardening magazines. Lena, have you found the contracts for Rose Manor?”

            “Yes ma’am,” said Lena, and hit a button on her computer.  A machine at the back of the room made a noise surprisingly like arrrrgh and started chomping out a page with printing on it.

 

Other People’s Dogs

 

I.  Am.  So.  Angry. 

            This morning hellhounds and I went out for a hurtle.  As usual.  And we usually have our main walk first, and a littler walk or walks later when we’re all getting tired from the demands of the day.*  But I was particularly determined that we have a good walk with some countryside involved this morning, because the weather is Doing Its Thing again** and it was going to be increasingly lurid this afternoon.   So we set off down the hill to the footpath to Old Eden.

            And met a dog.  People with dogs come, and people with dogs go, and some of your problems disappear when Henry or Carlotta gets bored with walking the dog and stops doing it.***  This particular dog is one of the replacement problems that has appeared in the last few months.  It used to be kept on lead.  But its owner has evidently taken it to six half-hours of obedience training for dog owners who want to feel that they’re doing the right thing without having to work too hard on it, or equivalent, and has therefore started letting it off lead because it now does what it’s told, right?  Six half-hours of obedience training is enough, isn’t it?  There were twenty other dogs in the class (which is why they never practised the recall off lead) so every dog is now perfectly socialised to other dogs as well as perfectly obedient, right?

            We’ve met this flower of canine discipline before, but in 20/20 hindsight I realise it’s been getting increasingly out of control, we just hadn’t met it under sufficiently malign circumstances yet.  We saw it today at the far end of a long stretch of path with a hedgerow on one side and a big estate fence on the other—there’s nowhere to go.  And it saw us.  And I didn’t like its body language at all.

            We stopped.  I cranked hellhounds in on short lead, one on either side of me.  The man shambling along behind it—I already know this guy’s a jerk, but that’s an old story—eventually perhaps registered that it was that evil cow with her two dogs standing there, the evil cow who doesn’t acknowledge his perfect right to have the footpath to himself  so he doesn’t have to deal with his dog in any way.  Anyway, he called the thing.  Rudolf, maybe, or Rudolfa.  It ignored him.  Well of course.

            This was still all happening at some distance.  I know that you don’t turn your back on an aggressive dog and walk away if it’s close.  You hold your ground, don’t look it in the eye and hope that there won’t be blood on the ground shortly.  Rudolf(a) was doing that half-mincing half-stalking thing that is usually bad news.  The jerk was still calling it.  It was still ignoring him.  I thought it was worth turning calmly and walking back the way we came . . . this is where the ‘getting increasingly out of control’ comes in:  I had thought that walking away would give jerkface a chance to collar the bugger.

            No.  Wrong.  Jerkface was now screaming at it.  We kept walking (calmly) but I did glance back over my shoulder, and it was now streaking toward us with its head out and ears flat.  OH *&^%$£”!!!!! GREAT. 

            And Jerkface stopped calling it.† 

            What saved us is the dog’s own personality, which is that it’s a lower-level bully rather than an upper-level bully.  I’ll take what I can get, thanks.  I was at this point looking over my shoulder kind of a lot because if it was really going to jump us from behind, I wanted it to hit me first:  I have a much better chance of suing the ass off Jerkface if I can demonstrate teethmarks in my leg.  But it would get about twenty feet from us and then oh-my-goodness there is such a fascinating smell emanating from the hedgerow right there.  So it would investigate the hedgerow till we got enough ahead of it that it could morph back into the Incredible Hulk and come after us again.

            Yes.  It chased us all the way back into town because by that time I was streaming with adrenaline and in no condition to make any further decisions.  Even at what passes in our case for a stroll†† we soared past some people we’d met on our way out—people with a dog on lead—and I said to them, there’s an off lead dog behind us, I should perhaps warn you, and it’s not friendly, and the woman said miserably, oh dear, yes, this happens so often, Tootles/Tamerlane has been attacked so many times he’s very nervous of other dogs—at which point Tootles/Tamerlane went nuts, and while my confused hellhounds shrank back against me†††, I commiserated—and kept going.

            I have no idea what the end of the story was with Rudolf/Rudolfa and Jerkface.  Once we were back among houses again perhaps it finally slunk back to its owner like a domestic pet rather than a jungle thug.  Tootles/Tamerlane and his people were coming along behind us—on our new route—and I looked back again and they remained unmolested.   But we had a town walk when we wanted to have a country walk and while hellhounds cheered up, which is the hellhound way, the hurtle was permanently ruined for me.  And we’re going to see Jerkface and his bloody dog again.  And sure, I won’t turn around and walk away this time, but . . . then what?  How developed is the bully side of its nature becoming?‡ 

             I hate this SO MUCH.  That irresponsible [insert sexual perversion of choice here, preferably including excrement and dead things] owners can wreck it for the rest of us.  Which is exactly what they are doing.   The aggressive off lead dog situation has been relatively low-level for a while . . . but it’s getting worse again.  And there is absolutely damn-all we can do about it.‡‡ 

* * *

* Holding down the floor of the dog bed is very tiring.  

** On my way to tower practise last night suddenly there was lightning and thunder and fists of rain beating on the roof of the car.  Frelling frelling.  And small but alarming flash floods in the dips in the road.  If I’d been going any farther I’d’ve turned around.  My All Stars were still soaked through in the two-minute sprint—speaking of sprints to your tower—from car park to abbey tower door.  I’m sure ringing with wet feet does not help your concentration.  There.  I knew I had an excuse. 

*** And then can’t understand why it’s destructive in the house or mounts people’s legs or bites the children. 

† I was so hysterical with rage that when I got home I rang up a friend with dogs—and a local dog problem—so I could bay at someone who would understand.  And at this point she interrupted and said, Blokes don’t like losing face.  And he was losing face.  I bet he not only stopped calling it, but turned around and walked in the other direction, telling himself that that’s what whoever ran that six-half-hour obedience course told him to do if he ever lost control of his dog, and not because he’s a gutless piece of dog crap. 

†† Again in hindsight we should have walked more slowly.  But we don’t walk slowly.  We were walking slower than we usually walk, exactly for this reason, which puzzled hellhounds, who were more inclined to get under my feet.    

††† For which I am very grateful because my logical dog, which is to say Darkness, has defensive aggression problems of his own. 

‡ I’m also hoping, rather urgently, that Jerkface doesn’t attempt to tell me how to behave around dogs.  This has happened once or twice after some incident with some other human-ruined dog:  that some pontificating moron wants to tell me I’ve got it wrong.  Generally speaking I suffer from l’espirit d’escalier like most of the rest of us, but if I’ve had a chance to brood about something and then someone says something ill-advised—you will hear me in Albuquerque. 

            It’s not worth it.  I’d rather use all that blistering energy on SHADOWS. 

‡‡ PS:  Yes.  The weather this afternoon was diabolical.

Shattered by bells*

 

 

The frelling Olympic torch has been dodging around Hampshire today, although I think it and its frelling cohort** are sleeping in Salisbury tonight.  But a lot of local towers are ringing its passage up and down the country.  Today this included the Forzadeldestino Abbey.

            They’d been sweeping out the corners and under the carpet for volunteer ringers because it was the middle of the afternoon in the middle of the week and most people are at work.***  So I put my name down.  First hurdle:  parking.  I frequently miss the practical convenience of ringing at New Arcadia:  parking is not an issue when you live a two-minute sprint from your tower.  I drove in today over an hour early, ready to circle like a piranha or park in Dorset and sprint really hard. †

            And then the torch was late.  Of course.  First we had the Group Photo(s) of the Olympic Torch Team, standing atmospherically surrounded by bell ropes in our ringing chamber, and then we had the phoning to variously placed external spies†† asking if anyone had seen anything yet.  The abbey’s ringing chamber is way way way too large to sustain anything resembling claustrophobia††† but it’s true there are no windows, at least not any you can either get to or peer out of.‡

            Finally, about forty minutes after we were due to start, there was a sighting in southern Oxfordshire of a milk float emblazoned with the Olympic logo so we stood to our bells.  There were twelve of us, which, with forty-nine bells‡‡, is fewer than desirable, but it’s enough to make a loud bewildering noise and most people outside are not going to say, hey, doesn’t the abbey have forty-nine bells?  I only hear twelve.  But there were exactly twelve of us which, in the first place, means that I wasn’t being a pathetic wannabe by showing up‡‡‡, and in the second place it meant we all had to ring all the time.  Which turned out to be thirty-five minutes without a break.  EEEEEEEEEEEEEP.  All we rang was plain hunt§ and call changes, although the call changes were a bit of a revelation to me as I didn’t think you could ring call changes at the abbey because of the AMBIENT NOISE.  You have forty-nine—er—twelve bells going in a ringing chamber notorious for peculiar acoustics and hearing the conductor saying anything is challenging.§§

            But we did it.  Which is to say everyone else sailed gallantly through and by minute twenty-three or so I, who am still intimidated to mind-disintegrating terror by ringing at the sodding abbey at all, was thinking, okay, how much longer can I go on without screaming and/or falling over.§§§

            I will however draw a veil of discretion over tonight’s practise, which was not one of my finest moments.  I was tired, okay?  Thirty-five minutes of extreme trepidation is very draining. 

            But the torch was rung.# 

 * * *

* With all due respect to John Betjeman.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Betjeman

And, more to the point, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Summoned_by_Bells  It should not be ALLOWED that you can write an autobiography^ called SUMMONED BY BELLS if it’s not going to have a lot of CHANGE RINGING in it.^^ 

^ In or out of verse 

^^ Me?  Blind fanatical prejudice?  What are you talking about? 

** There are like eighty-three support vehicles, cars, vans, buses, trucks, milk floats, pony traps and palanquins, and a regiment of human staff, drivers, navigators^, press release writers, media interface specialists, security personnel, osteopaths, foot-rubbers and tea ladies.  Plus several dozen long-legged actors in fashionable brand-name running gear wearing their best earnest uplifting expressions, a crate of Olympic-style torch replicas and a hell of a lot of matches.^^ 

^ aka satnav disputers 

^^ Me?  Blind fanatical prejudice?  What are you talking about?+ 

+ ALMOST EVERYTHING ABOUT THE OLYMPICS IS SO BOGUS~.  I’m trying to decide which is more bogus, the Olympics or the royal family.  It’s a tough call. 

~ Chiefly excepting a lot of blood and sweat from a lot of the athletes.  Which makes me sad.  But the amount of tax money our precious government has shovelled into this tumefied spectacle makes me sadder.  

*** And some of the ones that aren’t . . . wait for it . . . are out in the street, waiting to see the torch go by.  

† And then found a spot at my very first secret-local-knowledge place.  And had to go to the yarn store , which is in the right part of town, to kill some time.^ 

^ I didn’t buy anything!  Really!  But I had a great fondle. 

†† I’m told that before there were mobile phones there were walkie-talkies.  What the ringers did before walkie-talkies to find out when they should start ringing for special events I have no idea.  

††† Although if you’re thus inclined, I do not recommend the final stair. 

‡ Nor can you hear, for example, rain drumming on the roof.  The weather is often a shock when you descend from your campanological hideaway and re-enter the world. 

‡‡ jjmcgaffey

forty-nine bells and two accidentals

Um…is that literal? I have a bell-ringing (change-ringing and handbells) friend . . . and we were talking about you and the abbey and how many bells it had. Also I can’t visualize the room – I’ve seen bell-ringing chambers, so I can get the general atmosphere, but my visualization go from dots-on-a-football-field (either kind of football) to five feet of space behind (since you say it’s large – as opposed to some I’ve visited where it’s more like five inches…). 

ajlr

The abbey has a formidable number of bells, certainly, but I think Robin was trying to convey a picture of the seeming over-abundance of bells at the abbey compared to ‘normal’ church towers. 

Hee hee hee.  I’d like to insist on the forty-nine but . . . no.  Ajlr is right.  And I haven’t been in either Hereford or York Minster so I don’t know, and photos are often misleading, but the abbey ringing chamber looks bigger by some margin than either of the photos Ajlr posted links to.  The abbey ringing chamber really is ridiculously large, even if I’m exaggerating a trifle about number of bells.  I tell myself it’s better than ringing chambers where you have to breathe shallowly and keep your elbows pinned to your sides at all times (which gives you a very funny stroke) so as not to whack into your neighbours, but . . . 

‡‡‡ I was also the only non-member of the abbey band present.  They have to know by now I’m trying to cultivate them. 

§ I cannot count that high.^ Periodically I’d find myself thinking, nine?  Eleven?  What?, and ringing by the pattern, which, in plain hunt you can do.  Fortunately.  And which consideration for the feeble among our number was no doubt also in our conductor’s mind.  

^ You’re supposed to count your places as you ring (methods).  So if you’re ringing on eleven (if the twelfth is the tenor-behind, as here, you don’t count it because it’s always last) you have to count your way through whichever method, up to eleven every row.+  Counting your places is one of the ways you learn to prevent yourself from going wrong.  Well, that’s the theory. 

+ Unless, for example, you’re ringing the treble to little bob royal, as I did tonight, where the treble only goes to fourth place every row and then back down to lead again, although there are ten working bells involved.  Are you confused yet?  Good. 

§§ When you’re ringing a method you only have to hear him/her when he yells bob! Or, single!, which are those mix-up-the-frelling-line-further jollinesses in ringing.^  For call changes the conductor has to call every change in order, and you have to hear which bell he’s calling to do what because you never know when it might be you. 

 ^ Or when he yells FOUR!  DODGE WITH THE SIX AND GO DOWN TO LEAD!  THREE!  CLOSER AT BACKSTROKE!  FIVE!  A PINT OF BEST BITTER AND A DOUBLE ORDER OF CHIPS! 

§§§ The answer is, thirty-five minutes, on a good day, when all I’m ringing is plain hunt and call changes.  With twelve bells.  

# Barely, as it turns out.  The torch came by the abbey, finally, at about minute thirty-one, we found out later.  But it had been sashaying around the town for a while by then so fine, whatever, we rang the freller.

The organ of Eglise Notre-Dame La Dalbade – Part II

Guest post by equus_peduus

PART TWO

Again, there was somebody practicing at the keyboards as we wandered up the center aisle.  There were very few people there – maybe a half dozen at first, though there were perhaps as many as fifteen or twenty by the time we left.  Shortly after we sat down in the pews, a man came down, asking if we were here for the organ?  We were.  Were we organists?  No… Ah well, come on up anyway.

The organ. Unfortunately the best picture I got was crooked.

Initially, after climbing the twisty wooden steps to the level of the organ loft †, we were led into the galleries along the right (as you face the altar) side of the church.  The organist, a young woman from Japan, played an arrangement of a CPE Bach cantata (I think).  The acoustics of this spot were different from where we had been on the floor of the church and the difference in how the echoes reflected back to us was audible.  I also was able to see the stained glass windows around the church better from this elevated viewpoint, and noticed some of the little carvings at the tops of the columns and other details that had not been visible from ground level.

View from galleries.

After the Bach, our little group was then treated to an informal couple of hours of playing, demonstration, and explanations by the professional organist, Mr. de Miguel (the instructor I’d seen up there the day before) and a young man who we believe to be an apprentice organ builder.  Unfortunately, my French was unequal to the task of comprehending everything that was said, but even the 1/3 – 1/2 that I understood was extremely interesting.  Anything I get wrong is entirely due to the fact that I know almost nothing about pipe organs to start with, the men who explained things talked really fast, and my understanding of French is as yet rather imperfect.  Many thanks to boyfriend, who, as a native of this country actually understood most of it, and was later able to explain things to me that I didn’t quite follow at the time.

The pipes from the organ loft.

Eugène Puget, the second of four generations of organ-builders in Toulouse, built this organ, which was inaugurated in 1888.  Its most recent restoration, about two years ago, was due to damage during the droughts and heat of 2004, and cost more than €500,000.   It is apparently unusually playable, having a relatively light action ††.  There are three manuals, a pedalboard and fifty stops, each labeled with a different instrument and pipe length.  It also has the ability to control dynamics and has a number of “effects” pedals which affect the tonal quality of the instrument.  These features provide this organ an extremely versatile range of tones and colors, and allow for everything from a simple, pure sound to a fully symphonic sound.

The keyboards and stops.

 

The pedals. The flat wood pedals in the center above the keyboard pedals control volume. The metal pedals on either side control other effects.

An electric air generator now replaces the original man-powered bellows, forcing air up toward the organ’s pipes continuously.  When all the stops are in, airflow to the pipes is blocked, and no sound emerges if you press a key.  When a stop is pulled out, a particular “instrument” is activated, and air flows to the pipe corresponding to the key pressed by opening a hole by means of some really very clever mechanics.  The more stops are opened, the more “instruments” sound when a key is pressed.  As I understand it, each manual corresponds to some of the stops, and you can hook things up so one manual controls more than one manual’s worth of stops†††.

Stops in and out.

The current organ has been modified from its original design.  At one time, there was a small organ that was in the same location as the keyboards.  This is a holdover from a time when organs actually were portable instruments! ‡  The pipes associated with this organ have since been moved inside the main instrument, and are surrounded by a series of vertical levered wooden slats which can be opened and closed by means of two foot-pedals to control the volume of the sound produced.

* * *

† The floor of the loft trembled slightly as people moved around.  I found this somewhat alarming at first, though I did get used to it.  Being a Californian by upbringing, all I have to say is, thank goodness they don’t seem to get earthquakes around here.  Most of the city would be rubble.

†† Mr. de Miguel, the organist, mentioned another organ in town (I think this one) that is very difficult to play due to the heaviness of the keys, which is related to the mechanism that transmits the key movement to the air-opening-bit of the organ.

††† It’s rather odd to watch someone playing on one manual (or the pedals) and seeing other keys on the other manuals moving simultaneously).

‡ From poser (to place), it is called the “positif.”  Again according to the website above, the positif of this organ is mostly what’s left of the Moitessier organ.

Stay tuned for Part III, coming soon to a screen near you.  –ed