Bells, Books, Baths

 

I SHOULD BE CLIMBING INTO A HOT BATH* RIGHT THIS MINUTE.  Barring a few good pages of SHADOWS it's been a stupid day.  I was out this morning bashing on with some I-should-have-done-this-last-autumn tidying of the cottage garden and noticing with dismay that this last really cold spell has taken out a good deal of stuff I wouldn't have expected to lose—including at least one species-type rose that I wouldn't have thought could be killed by mere weather.  I'll cut her back hard a little later in the year and see if she comes back.  But I was reminded that I have never quite got my spring plant orders in and decided, in breaks for SHADOWS-related thought to flow back into numb brain channels like getting up and stamping around when your leg has gone to sleep from sitting on it for too long**, to try and finish these off.  I find I have to do my plant-ordering in as few giant clumps (so to speak) as possible, so I can at least half-remember what I've already ordered and where, without endlessly having to look it all up again.  Of the five web sites I tried to order from . . . one of them ate my order.  One of them refused to accept my order, demanding further credit-card identification numbers that don't exist.  One of them crashed off the air halfway through the check-out process—and my order had disappeared when I yanked it out of the darkness again.  One of them has a bizarre system of postage that was going to charge me more for shipping than the order was worth.  (Um.  No.)   I managed to order from one. . . .  And it's pretty much the least crucial.  Of course.

            So I thought I'd leave you with a couple of BELLRINGING links.  The first one is via Ajlr and CathyR and you'll have to forgive the roundaboutness of it, Facebook and I are not the best of friends, and I can't figure out how to do it more efficiently. 

http://www.facebook.com/pages/Robin-McKinley/149327572983#!/photo.php?fbid=10150587106108087&set=a.10150587106103087.376566.144515158086&type=3&theater  

. . . Although the first photo reminds me, there's a newspaper article I pulled out a while back that I was going to complain about because it's some idiot celebrity claiming that she used to like to ring bells when she was a kid, because the danger of it appealed to her:  you know you can get DRAGGED UP TO THE CEILING AND BREAK YOUR NECK.  You're a lot likelier to be hit by a meteor simultaneously with being killed by a terrorist*** than dragged to the ceiling of a ringing chamber and breaking your neck.  Has anyone ever broken their neck this way?  If the stay breaks and the bell tips off its balance point backwards, yes, if you're holding the rope, it will pull you off your feet and you will find yourself on your way to the ceiling.  I should know, I've done this (once).†  And you know what?  You let go of the rope. 

Southdowner sent me this one: 

http://smgcbr.heralded.org.uk/?q=node/194 

YES.  WHAT HE SAID.  ALL OF IT.  And he's still left a few things out:  the odd struck bell, for example, which doesn't sound at the point in the rhythm of pulling that you'd expect it to.  Which you then have to adjust to by ringing one or the other stroke (since bells are generally not evenly odd struck on both strokes:  that would be way too easy) either sooner or later, so the bong SOUNDS in the right place in the row.  Bells are highly individual:  it is not that unlikely that a good ringer will be unconsciously adjusting very slightly FOR EVERY STROKE because every bell in the tower is very slightly odd struck.   This is the sort of thing that makes us mediocre ringers cry in our beer.  (Beer is very important in bell ringing.  See previous link.) 

            And then there's weather.  Quite well-mannered bells may become possessed by demons in very wet or very cold conditions, and the ones that are less than well-mannered to begin with may become . . . indescribable in inclement weather.

            But you get the idea.

            Now I have to go take my bath.  I was supposed to go to bed early tonight because I seem to have agreed to ring handbells tomorrow evening and I need to get my stint of SHADOWS in first.  And maybe a little Japanese.  And maybe even a little entanglement.†† 

* * *

* With a good book.  Hey, did you know that in Japanese, the word for book, 'hon', is the same word as for real, genuine:  'hon'.  It's the same kanji too—the same not-Roman-alphabet character.  Or at least it looks like it.  Japanese is bung full of traps for the unwary, both because any other language(s) than the one(s) you know is and because this one has such a different cultural base—plus that you'd be expected to learn 1945 characters [sic] if you wanted to read the newspaper.  Fortunately I don't.  But the characters, except for the brain-blasting aspect, are fabulously cool.  I'm beginning to feel about Japanese the way I feel about Oisin and the pipe organ:  if I were thirteen and talented I'd be learning both.^

            But 'hon' of course makes me think both of 'hon' as in The Hon Mrs Peter Dickinson and 'hon' as in short for 'honey'.  I can totally call favourite books 'hon' as I pull them off the shelf, and 'honourable' is always good, except when it's a bogus title you have no, ahem, genuine claim to.   But here's one of those what? things about another culture's approach to language.  I've seen/heard it in several books/web sites/podcasts now that you mostly try to avoid both 'iie', no, and 'anata', you, because these are both too direct for the Japanese concept of politeness.  But 'anata' also means honey, sweetheart.  So you call your beloved something that is too blunt for either strangers or friends—and which parallel behaviour here in the West, where we use 'you' freely, you'd probably get punched out by an offended beloved for.  Wowzah.  Who needs aliens and feys when pure human nature can come up with such delicious variables? 

^ I was thirteen when we left Japan and I've never been back.  It is strange in a lot of ways to be cough-cough studying Japanese almost fifty years later, even at this slippery superficial level, the stuff it throws up about who I was when I was a kid, and how much I've changed, or haven't.  One of the things that hits me hardest is that I genuinely believed (which might be hon shinjimashita but I wouldn't count on it) I was too stupid to learn Japanese and therefore let most of it flow past me without trying to catch  it.  Sigh.  Being a kid is rough.  

** I've told you before that I'm almost incapable of sitting in a chair the way you're supposed to sit in a chair, with your butt on the seat and your feet on the floor.  I tend to sit on an assortment of pillows . . . and an assortment of my own limbs.  Which periodically go OW OW OW OW OW.  I have no idea how I survived all those years in school.  It's possible that one of the reasons I found education more trying than educational was the effort it took to sit straight on all those chairs.  

*** Some of you will remember the 'women past 40 are more likely to be killed by terrorists than get married' study:  http://www.salon.com/2006/05/24/newsweek_marriage/

It took a surprising time to get debunked however, while all of us late-30s single women were looking at each other, raising our eyebrows, and muttering about fish and bicycles.^ 

^  http://www.answers.com/topic/a-woman-without-a-man-is-like-a-fish-without-a-bicycle 

†  Yes, it's like knitting and riding.  You have to break a stay . . . but in the ringing world you're only supposed to break a stay ONCE.  Once is PLENTY.  Stays are expensive and a major ratbag to replace.  Not that pulling out a lot of rows of knitting is something you want to do often. . . .^

            . . . AND IT WASN'T MY FAULT when I had my little ride to the ceiling.  I was still a beginner, and someone else's beginner had been hammering that bell, and had cracked the stay. 

^ When I told Fiona I'd had to rip out eight rows she heartlessly said 'Be glad it wasn't twenty'.  

†† http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_entanglement  Speaking of OW OW OW OW OW.