(B)ring the Jubilee*, continued

 

I rang three times in three different towers yesterday.  I rang three times in three more (different) towers today.  I am shattered.  And I have handbells tomorrow evening and the abbey practise Wednesday.  And handbells again Thursday.  Also I have a novel to finish.  I won’t be doing much gardening this week.**

            I was halfway through tonight’s final ring when it occurred to me I was about to disassemble into my component atoms.  It was our normal Monday night practise, except it was at the wrong tower, because the village had asked if we’d finish with a ring for their beacon-lighting***.  I made it.  Just.  But today’s first tower was entirely my own fault.  Yesterday after the quarter† Mandy was hustling for ringers for Pinnacle’s Jubilee fete this afternoon.  Pinnacle doesn’t have its own band, so like New Arcadia covering when Old Eden wants its bells rung, Mandy, tower captain at neighbouring Trollhill, has to scrape round when Pinnacle wants some ringing.  Trollhill doesn’t have many ringers itself, so Mandy usually has to scrape further afield.  She looked at me and said possibly regretfully, it’s a long way to come from New Arcadia.

            But I have history with Pinnacle.  I rang my first quarter there, on the treble to bob doubles, with Rupert and his band prodding me through in the relentless way a master band can shove a beginner through whether she has a clue or not.  I also rang in the Millennium there.  It’s also a very beautiful, very Victorian—which is to say if high Victorian architecture brings you out in a rash you won’t like it—church, on the top of a hill, and with an unusually tall pointy spire that you can see from Canterbury††.  Various Apollo astronauts noted the presence of a very tall spire-like structure emerging above a green hill in central southern England, although this didn’t get much press coverage, which is a pity, it might have got Pinnacle a few ringing recruits.†††  And yesterday after the quarter I was on a serious high‡ so I said that I had a sentimental attachment to Pinnacle and if she was still short, I could come. 

            The nice thing about Pinnacle is how easy it is to find.  You just set out in the right general direction and start scanning the skyline for spires.  It’s also a lot closer than I was expecting—I don’t think I’ve rung there since I started ringing again six or seven years ago—so I had a nice comfy knit and admired the view while I was waiting for everybody else to show up.‡‡ 

            Then I had to go home and try to squeeze some work in before rushing off to my next critical Jubilee ring.  I’m sure it’s the work that’s making me so tired—not the ringing.  One of the things I said to Niall on the way back from the final tower of the evening is that even after seven years I’m still so negligible a ringer that every different tower and every different bell in every tower takes me an effort of brain, will and muscle to adapt to—the clever ringers do it without even noticing they’re doing it.  Sigh.  But it’s been fun, the last two days.  And I never did get those blisters. 

* * *

* Are people still reading BRING THE JUBILEE?  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bring_the_Jubilee   It was an important book when I was a teenager discovering SF for the first time.  I read it absorbedly—it was one of the first alternate-histories I’d read and I was all woooooooow—but I had mixed feelings about it and it didn’t survive one of my comparatively early culls, although I’m pretty sure it drifted back into ownership via garage sale at least once.  It did leave a mark on my story-teller’s mind. 

** But the baby robins hatched yesterday.  Jubilee robins.  They will grow up with a curious blue and white border to their red breasts and their songs will sound astonishingly like God Save the Queen.  I’m putting out mealworms anyway. 

*** This was supposed to happen across the country all at the same time like ringing all the bells all over the country was supposed to happen at the same time yesterday.  It hasn’t quite worked out like that. 

† !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

 †† You may need binoculars. 

††† Rant rant rant rant rant.  Now it’s perfectly true that we need ordinary people to want bells rung but it makes me NUTS that there are so dispiritingly few of those ordinary people willing to put in the time to learn to ring themselves so that, for example, when their Jubilee fete wants some bell ringing it’s not an issue.  I admit that serious method ringing is possibly the joy and sanctum of the dangerously cranky, but any fool can learn to handle a rope and ring call changes.  And it’s such a nice noise.  

‡ And I hadn’t even rung Grandsire Triples inside at the abbey yet.  ::still beaming::   . . . Although I haven’t told you how I made a complete hash of ringing the treble to Grandsire Triples a little later.  Poor Scary Man must have wanted to kill me.  But I can tell you what went wrong:  it was just one frelling thing too frelling many in a long adrenaline-heavy day.  New Arcadia is a Grandsire Triples band:  any time they’ve got enough people to ring it, they do.  Grandsire is the only triples I’m at all accustomed to ringing the treble to.  And I had just spent forty-five minutes less than two hours before this concentrating like mad to ring treble to plain bob triples.  I’d then spent what remaining brain I had available ringing Grandsire Triples inside and shifting back to the treble was One Frelling Thing Too Frelling Many.  It was still pretty embarrassing.  Scary Man, by the way, is one of these absurd good ringers who shout, Listen!, when things are going less than well.  As if this was ever useful to anyone but (possibly) another absurd(ly) good ringer.  Yes!  I can hear that it doesn’t sound right!  And your sodblasted point would be!  —Yarrrggh.  If I knew what to do to fix it, trust me, I would. 

            Scary Man also came and stood at my elbow while I was ringing bob minor (inside, but I can more or less almost ring inside, even at the abbey, on only five or six bells) and tried to improve my striking by whispering sweet nothings about which bells at which point in which row I should strike a little sooner/later over.  I wanted to laugh, except I was so busy trying not to go horribly wrong.   This is like trying to teach brain surgery to someone who finds getting a plaster/Band Aid out of its little paper packet challenging, and has never yet got it on the wounded member straight.

            Mind you, I like Scary Man.  I like his slightly twisted sense of humour—and his dedication to ringing.  And I’m very grateful for at least one manifestation of his extreme ringing skills:  he knows that it’s my ropesight that is doing me over—that I do know the method line.  Everyone has bad nights/months/seasons/eras but someone who comes to practise week after week after frelling week to learn a method and hasn’t done her homework and learnt the line, is a toad or a worm or pond scum or all three.  If it’s just she can’t get used to a ringing chamber the size of Westminster Abbey she may be pathetic, but she’s trying.  I have no idea how Scary Man can see this, but I’m still relieved.  I’d much rather be pathetic than pond scum.  

‡‡ I then made the mistake of telling Mandy that it was closer than I realised, and she said, Great, how would you like to ring a wedding at Trollhill next Saturday?  Oh—eep.  Okay.  Except that I’ve now looked it up on the map and can’t frelling find it.  There’s a Trollhill in, like, Norfolk, which is not terribly helpful, and around here there’s Troll Dike, Troll Snack, and Trollhillingtonworthy.  Arrrgh.  I know it exists—I even thought I knew it exists as Trollhill—because I rang there in my previous life, when Rupert was my ringing master at East Persnickety.  Next Saturday may be interesting.