Twin fiends: handbells and technology

 

I'm writing this under an additional sticky layer of Unnecessary Stress.  GO AWAY!  NOT WANTED!  ESPECIALLY NOT WANTED NOW!*  Over the last fortnight or so broadband in both houses** has become increasingly unreliable.  Archcomputerangel Raphael was here yesterday and, of course, couldn't find anything wrong although he says it's worth grzzzbmfing the triggable to improve the cangblither at the cottage.  Yes, sir.  The cottage has the permanent disadvantage of being located on its cul de sac, where the phone lines are made of masking tape and tin foil.  Basic service at the mews is not too bad, as this area goes, although where it's going is downhill fast as more people sign up and the available band doesn't get any broader. 

            Lately, however, I keep falling off line.  It's usually Outlook that goes first.  I have always had a little live performance art in the lower right-hand corner of my computer screen at the mews, which is where Outlook comes on in various guises (Oooh!  I'm sending and receiving!  Oooh!  I'm not sending and receiving!  Oooh!  The nasty mean whatever has disconnected me!  I am valiantly trying to reconnect!  Oooh!  I have reconnected!  Oooh!  No I haven't!, etc), but up till about a fortnight ago it would play by itself quietly and rarely ran with scissors.  But it has increasingly bombed off line and refused to come back on without a lot of restarts and faffing around, and lately the internet has started going with it.  Splat.  Arrrgh.  

            Raphael told me a couple of things to try and to keep him posted.  During business hours, of course, all was calm.  By the time I was attempting to write my blog post I was more off line than I was on and I finally just stopped trying.***  Then I had to get on line long enough to post the sucker.†  This degenerated into a series of increasingly hysterical texts to Raphael—well, I wasn't going to phone him at 1 or 2 a.m., just in case he forgot to turn his phone off, and email was not an option—to brighten his morning.††

            Well.  I did post, as you know.  But I was a shaken wreck of my former self.   Hellhounds and I then proceeded out to Wolfgang to discover . . . him blanketed in a thick layer of frost.  It was not supposed to freeze last night!  It was NOT!  So we raced home and I started bringing the frelling jungle indoors.  What a good thing I'd asked Atlas to set up the Winter Table††† this week.  Somebody tell me to stop putting prunings in water in case they root, because too many of them do.  I've got more happy tender little blasted rooted-cutting things in pots than a medium-sized garden centre.  And if they're happy, they don't stay little.  By the time I went to bed, with plants all over the Winter Table, the sitting room floor, the kitchen table, the half-height refrigerator, the kitchen stool and the counter, it was exactly one degree above freezing . . . and that's as far as it got, by the evidence of the dahlias this morning, which are still dahlias and not mushy black Halloween monsters.‡  The one thing that is super-tender-plus turns out to be my new vast maroon coleus‡‡ which came indoors all tip-curled and shivering.  Frell.  The thing is GIGANTIC.  If it wants to spend the winter on a windowsill it's going to have to undergo severe pruning.‡‡‡

            . . . So I fell into bed again at one of those even-later-than-later times and fortunately I had turned the phone off because Raphael rang at 9 a.m. sharp.  Uggh.  This is where it gets even cuter:  Raphael said that the thing to do was change the router at the mews, and see if that worked . . . and Peter's provider, the lovely so-charming AOL, won't allow this.  Oh, no, no, no, said the tech at the other end of the phone.  Before you touch that router you first must perform the following sixty-seven tests, forty-eight sub-tests and two hundred and thirteen sub-sub-sub tests, and don't forget the chanting and the burnt sacrifices.  So I've been doing that all day and playing ping pong or possibly hide and seek with both email and the internet.  Joy.

            And Thursday is standard handbell night.  After last night I might be forgiven for looking forward to this with some gloom.  Never mind, I thought, after Algernon, whatever it is it'll be a snap, comparatively speaking.  Which explains how frelling Niall managed to get us seated—in my sitting room, you realise—in such a manner that I was ringing the 5-6 to bob major.  5-6 is the pair I don't ring.  One of the basic dreadfulnesses about handbells is that every frelling pair is nearly learning a whole new method.  In the tower, since you're only ringing one bell at a time, while if you're low-level mediocre like me you'll want to stick to ringing a new method from the same bell for a while, once you've got the hang of it you can ring any bell—each bell merely starts at a different point in the pattern.  That of course is also the case ringing methods on handbells . . . but you're ringing two bells, which, since each of them starts in a different place, INTERRELATE in a different way from any of the other pairs.§  Inside pairs—so the 3-4 and 5-6 when you're ringing major, which is eight bells total—are harder, generally speaking.  The 3-4 have been my party piece for a while.  I don't ring the 5-6! I said.  Niall and Colin just stared at me in that blank immovable way that upper-level ringers have when they're about to make your life a misery.   Gemma would have sympathised if she had realised the enormity of my situation.  She, poor thing, confuses me with someone who knows what she's doing.

             And, since you ask . . . yes, I did it.  By the end of the evening I was ringing the 5-6 and, if you will forgive me, feeling a trifle smug.  Methods on handbells are still a process of carving out the granite rock face with your plastic teaspoon, but over the years you do, with a creeping, not to say leaden, progress, build up a sort of understanding of how the entire wretched method fits together, and how to find your way through it with two bells—how the new pattern of the two unfamiliar bells has to be this way rather than that way because of what the other bells are doing.  It was not a pretty sight/sound (I had help with this) but we were getting through to the end. 

            Although I made the mistake of admitting that I wasn't going to Muddlehampton practise tonight§§ with the result that we rang for almost three hours.  Jeez.

            Okay.  Now let's see if on line is a possibility. . . . 

* * *

 * Tessa Gratton http://tessagratton.com/ in response to my 'announcement' post helpfully pointed out on Twitter that January is only thirteen weeks away.  Thanks, Tessa!  Thanks a lot!  You're a real friend! 

** Third House remains phone-based-technology-free because British Telecom still wants me to spend several hundred pounds to get a phone line laid in to this tiny isolated house in the Outer Hebrides.  With the ornamental phone jack in the kitchen.  

*** This seriously limits my forays into silliness.  I spend a lot of time on google.  

† Yes, of course, if it had come to that, I'd've slapped it on the memory stick presently containing MYSTERY NOVEL and therefore never more than two inches from my heart at all times^  and taken it back to the cottage and posted there.  But waiting up to two minutes for a page to load GETS OLD REALLY, REALLY FAST even if the on-line-ness of the waiting is stable. 

 ^Which is to say it rides in the little pink leather bag that Pooka lives in. 

†† I just hope he didn't turn his business mobile on till he got to work.  I have this vision of him idly checking for messages while eating his oatmeal and chatting with his children, and—AAAAAAUGH. 

††† Which stands over the hellhound crate and basically makes the crate weight-bearing^.  It also means only one hellhound at a time can get through the crate-side of the kitchen to the front door, and I have to go sideways.  

^ It's true.  I have kind of a fixation about horizontal weight-bearing surfaces. 

‡ Peter lost all his dahlias.  This is the difference of maybe a quarter mile. 

‡‡  http://www.flowerspictures.org/pictures.asp?id=1463&Maroon-coleus  Mine's darker and the yellow edge is less prominent, but this looks more or less like it. 

‡‡‡ And cut-off bits root really easily.  I've already discovered this.  

§ This does EVENTUALLY even out somewhat, when you start ringing touches.  The calls tend to shift pairs of bells into other bells' patterns.  But that's later.  And not all the patterns are the same. 

§§ I'm still trying to shed the end of this frelling lurgy.  The only place it's still really noticeable is in my throat.  I daresay the necessity of a higher level of maintenance screaming at technology lately has not been much help to this endeavour.