I moan better than I ring

 

Wedding ring this afternoon.  I've told you that I get a thrill every time I pull off for a wedding—it doesn't get old, somehow.  The fact that it's a wedding makes it new all over again every time*.  A bit like babies:  no matter how many babies you've seen, each one is new.  So, wedding ring this afternoon.  Only about half an hour late:  whoopee.**  I was on the two, and the treble and the two are on either side of the little window we in the ringing chamber have to the inside of the church, so Daisy on the treble and I were the ones who could see what was going on. 

               We pull off when the newly married pair are halfway down the aisle.  Here they come.***  Daisy and I spring to our ropes.  Treble's going, going—gone.

                DING DONG CRASH BANG THUD CLANK. . . DONG.†

                 Sigh.  I hope this is not any kind of forecast of tomorrow's quarter.

Mrs Redboots wrote: 

I am really looking forward to Monday's blog post in which our Hellgoddess will admit, after a lot of bluster and smoke-screen, that the quarter-peal went off superbly, without a single hitch!

And Cathy R wrote:  Ditto!!

Um.  Guys.  I really appreciate your vote of confidence—I can use all the positive thoughts I can get†† but . . . I have lost quarters before now:  I personally have screwed up and lost the quarter for the entire band.  I hope tomorrow's quarter goes brilliantly and we all have a good time and the striking is at least reasonable and we light a fire under Monty about bell ringing that will last the rest of his life††† but . . . well.  Keep those positive thoughts coming.  Please.‡ 

* * *

* And no, I don't particularly care if it's a first wedding or if anyone's a virgin, or any of that.  With the occasional exception of a glinty-eyed gold digger, of either gender, which we don't see a lot of in our little church in our little town, I think most people bother to get married because it means something to them.^ 

^ Yes, I'm a hopeless romantic.  Sue me. 

** Yes, I had brought my knitting.  I know I keep mentioning this, but new converts tend to be noisy and enthusiastic.  I BROUGHT MY KNITTING!!!! YAAAAAAY!!!!!!  

*** Very nice bouquet this bride has.  Pink roses. 

† I have no idea.  Pulling off is one of those ought-to-be-easy-but-is-surprisingly-hard-to-get-really-accurate skills that bell ringing is so distressingly rife with.  And three of the eight of us were not from our regular band, and several of our bells are audibly odd-struck^, and all bells are variously deep set^^ and so some volatility may be expected in the first rounds.  Still.  These were all experienced ringers and we sounded like a scratch band of drunken beginners. 

^ Which means they don't strike quite where you expect them to, so you have to pull your rope a little quicker or a little more slowly to get the 'dong' in the right place. 

^^ Which is how hard you have to pull to get them tipped off their perch and swinging, aside from how much they weigh.  A deep-set light bell may take more effort to pull off than a lightly-set heavy bell.   Which is aside from the fact that really big bells have to be light set or you'd never get them off at all—which probably means they're going to be extra ratbaggy to persuade, when the conductor calls 'stand', to get back up on their perch and stay there. 

†† Have I mentioned yet in this post that tomorrow is a service quarter^ and I DO NOT RING SERVICE QUARTERS?  

^ I never know how often to repeat this ringers' jargon stuff.  A quarter peal is approximately forty-five minutes of non-stop ringing to a blow-for-blow precise pattern, as organised and called by the conductor.  It's usually a single method, which is how I've tended to describe quarter peals before, but Roger, who's conducting tomorrow, has had this dumb idea that it would be amusing to do a mixture—there are rules for this too, but I don't know what they are, only that if you want to claim you've rung a quarter you have to follow them—so we're going to be doing some mash-up of two methods, plain bob doubles and Grandsire doubles.  This is, I grimly admit, partly my fault, because back before my idea of practise quarters crashed and burned+ I was asking him about doing mash-ups as a way for those of us who don't ring very many different methods to ring slightly different quarters.  But it seems to me a really bad idea for someone's first quarter:  what you want is to get the quarter, which means you want to ring something as simple minded as possible.  Tomorrow is Monty's first quarter.  He'll be on the tenor, so all he has to do is stay last.  Which is still harder than it sounds.

            And a service quarter means that we're ringing it before a church service.  I've told you that I get very cranky about ringers who can't be bothered to drag their sorry asses out of bed to ring Sunday morning service, which is what we're for:  in return for the honour and pleasure of ringing tower bells at all, we're supposed to be on the spot to ring the faithful to service.  You're only supposed to ring what you can ring for service—you don't want to mess it up.  The ME makes me very unreliable.  Therefore I don't ring service quarters.  And tomorrow is not only Monty's first quarter, so you want a strong band to make sure he gets it, and I'm not a strong ringer, it's a frelling service quarter. 

+ I'm still hoping to resurrect it, but that's another story

††† Surviving things like discovering girls^, which is going to happen any day now.

^ Or, possibly, boys

‡ AJLR wrote:  

When he's figured it out he'll email the method line to everyone and then they'll all meet on the day and ring a peal of a brand new method none of them has ever rung before. 

It makes your brain hurt! Good grief, woman, you're up in the pantheon of notable ringers so far as I'm concerned.

You poor thing.  Never mind, you'll get over it.

My brain is going ta-pocketa-pocketa-whirr-graunch-clang!!! just reading that. 

Oh, Walter Mitty.  Thank you for reminding me of Walter Mitty the night before this wretched quarter.  Tomorrow I will murmur 'pocketa-pocketa' to myself just before we pull off . . . and for at least thirty seconds I will feel better. 

Cathy R wrote:

And then there's ringing "silent and non conducted". Eric (my version of Robin's Wild Robert) has told me about peals where they draw lots for which bell they are going to ring, and then the whole thing is rung totally silently. No calls from the conductor, no corrections given. Ten whole pulls in rounds, then start. That means they must all have learnt not only the blue line for the method, but also the composition/arrangement for that particular peal (ie when the bobs would be called by the conductor). Now that makes my brain hurt! 

ta-pocketa-pocketa-whirr-graunch-CLANG!!!!