Hee hee hee hee hee

 

Niall and I stopped at our—this entire section of Hampshire's—favourite pub on the way home from Glaciation.  We do occasionally stop at a pub after ringing, usually when we're deep into a conversation about—for example—exactly where the ordinary plain-bob bobs dump you back into the pattern when you're ringing (say) St Clements College Bob or Double Oxford Bob or Little Bob as opposed to Plain Bob.  All very well that you negotiate the interstices of the call itself* if you don't know where to go once you're out the other end.  If you're leaping from one escalator to the next, I don't care how beautiful your leap was, you'd better know in advance which way the one you're now on is going.**  Now imagine an escalator that behaves like the road in Grand Prix Legends 4,928:  The Terminator, and you have to have memorised the twists and turns before you begin.***

            So we were just settling down to our (half) pints and I had got Pooka out to check method details† when I realised that Niall was nearly bursting with his Hidden Agenda.  We weren't sitting around having a companionable half pint and a bell chat.  Niall wanted to make sure Algernon hadn't put me off ringing handbells.  It's true we'd rung handbells the very next day with Colin and Gemma—and that I'd had my 5-6 epiphany—but I could have still been in shock at that point.  And then I hadn't seen Niall Friday or Sunday in the tower due to blood on the kitchen floor.  I could have been having all kinds of deleterious thoughts without constant haras—I mean nag—I mean input from Niall.  Well, I might.  But as I tell him at regular intervals, clenched teeth optional, I've got waay too many hours in this handbell madness to give it up now.  I was tempted—briefly—to string him along a little tonight but . . . oh well.  I didn't. 

           Niall had seen Thormond again on Sunday when they rang (handbells) with Titus and Thormond, apparently, was a little anxious about my mental health also††.  He told Niall that he had even warned Algernon that I hadn't ever rung touches of bob major before, and that that's what I wanted to practise—and to be gentle.  All I can say is if that was Algernon's idea of gentle I don't want to see him in a peevish mood.

 * * *

Voice lesson today was less awful than anticipated.†††  I'd been getting along pretty well last week and then . . . Darkness happened.‡  Saturday I had no voice at all and Sunday I had a range of about three and a half notes.‡‡  Frelling frell this 'your instrument is your body' thing.  This morning though my wandering and capricious voice was more or less back ‡‡‡ which was absurd in another direction because it was as if I didn't know what to do with it—like someone handing me a (squealing) greased piglet.  Whoa!  Wait!  What is this thing!  And of course what I'd been practising had crashed big time but hey.  I went in today not expecting anything, just wanting to sing.§

            And it wasn't too bad.  This is largely due to the fact that Nadia is brilliant with the consequences of emotional adversity and just takes you as you are, all three notes or three octaves as may be.  Every singer I've ever known says that you sing with the voice you've got, that day or that hour, and while of course the boundaries change about what you have to be able to winkle out of yourself if you're a professional, the basic fact remains. 

            At the end of torturing the Italian of and hacking out a facsimile of the tune of Non lo diro col labbro (again), Nadia said, you've done a lot and learned a lot with that song.  Go home and sing it for fun for a few weeks, and meanwhile . . . here, have a new song.

            ::Beams::           

* * *

 * If I understand it correctly, and I wouldn't be at all surprised if I don't, the entire family of plain bob methods use the same calls^—the same means by which to mix the bells up further—which involves the conductor shouting Bob! or Single! at the moment the treble is leading, in a given series of courses.  

^ The really attractive thing about the plain bob methods is that the calls only involve the front few bells.  This means that by the time you get to royal, say—ten bells—the majority of you don't have to do anything when the conductor shouts.  If you're lucky you can just go on ringing plain courses, with the other poor frellers around you shimmying back and forth.

            This is also a teaching method, of course.  When you ring your first touches of plain bob anything, the conductor will call when you're at the back and unaffected, so you can get used gradually to the other bells shifting their path through the course before you have to do it too. 

** I said some time recently—the memorable Sunday service ring when the very first call of the very first method involved me having to ring the diabolical Grandsire Long Third Single, which, I said, was second only in horror to the Dreaded Three-four Down Plain Bob Single.^ CathyR on the forum begged to differ, saying that Grandsire Long Thirds are four blows^^ in the same place before you are allowed to escape, and the Dreaded Three-four Down Single is only two. 

            I don't care.  It's a whole lot easier to turn around and go down again than it is to turn around and go up.  When you're going up—'out to the back'—you're having to pull harder on the rope to get the bell 'higher'—not in its frame, obviously, but relative to the pattern you're ringing.  I know the good ringers are always going on (and on) about letting the bell do the work, but even a good ringer may admit after a second pint at the pub that 'turning' a big bell—ringing it in the pattern, not ringing last every row, as tenor-behind—requires some physical effort.^^^  And they're good ringers.  I am not a good ringer, and the more anxious I am the more I over-ring—which is to say pull on the rope too hard so I'm having to catch and yank like a madwoman every stroke to keep the poor thing under some kind of control and where I should be in the frelling pattern.  There's nothing like the sound of 'SINGLE' as I'm approaching my three-four down dodge in plain bob to make me panic. 

            Inertia is your friend as you trundle down to the front.  It is not your friend as you toil up to the back.  Also the four blows in long Grandsire thirds give you a couple of seconds to wrench your brain onto its new track:  okay, I'm going back down to the front again.  I can do that.  Two blows in thirds is not enough time to get your pitons back on to reclimb that frelling cliff.

            Okay.  Sorry, all you glazed-over non-ringers.  Stopping now.  

^ and at 8:50 in the morning on an emotional par to waking up and seeing Freddy Krueger bending over you.  

^^ It has always kind of fascinated me that pulling on the rope to make the bell go 'dong' is called a blow.  Who's whacking who here?  

^^^ There are also fabulous ringers who can ring gigantic bells in spite of looking like they would blow over in a strong breeze.  Wild Robert is one of these.  I've seen a few others, including one tiny little old lady who made me look like Arnold Schwarzenegger, speaking of the Terminator.  That level of skill is just . . . gah.  

*** Method bell ringing.  Whose idea of fun was this? 

† The post-Saturday-morning blood-on-the-kitchen-floor adrenaline-spike backlash is still making me stupid two days later, and I managed to forget to bring my method books to practise tonight.  So when Colin called for St Clements I got Pooka out:  Mobel, the iPhone ringing ap, has forty-six million methods on it, way more than any book I own.    I thought a few of our senior members—all of them, let me add, better tower ringers than I am—were going to kill themselves laughing.  A bell-ringing programme on a smartphone!  I considered challenging them to handbell bob major at dawn but I decided this would be counterproductive.  We're already short of good ringers in this area as it is. 

†† Hey.  I ring handbells. 

††† Expect the worst?  Me? 

‡ Darkness who is crashed out happily in a tangle of tails and limbs with Chaos in the dog bed.  He seems to be good as new—although I've got a week's worth of pills for him, so the vet is obviously taking it seriously.  I could use some good-as-new pills for me.  Probably not the same ones however. 

‡‡ Leonard Cohen time. 

‡‡‡ Possibly as a result of Darkness' first normal looking evacuation since It All Happened.  You wanted to know this, right? 

§ Although I'd brought hellhounds along, and backed up Nadia's drive so I could see the car from her window.  I wasn't expecting trouble but I was still sufficiently freaked out I wasn't happy about leaving them alone at home in the kitchen that long.  After the initial horror of, You mean we can't come with you?, you mean you're leaving us in the car?, no little faces in the back window means all is well.