The day after a good day

 

YOU PAY FOR THE GOOD DAYS, YOU KNOW.   Of course you know.  We all know.  I know.  GAAAAH.*

            Handbells this evening.  All thrilling four of us were there, which means we were trying to ring bob major**.  I have been totally hot, excited and chirpy at the prospect of finally learning major . . . but then of course you have to do it.  Furthermore, Niall, who is sinking fast in my estimation, made me ring the 3-4:  I can't ring the 3-4.  I can maybe sort of ring the tenors and slightly less than that sort-of sort-of maybe ring the trebles.  The 3-4 and the 5-6 are in the middle.  The middle pair or pairs are the waking nightmares, where your red-and-blue method lines twine themselves around you like hungry boa constrictors and squeeze until your brain bursts.  I literally couldn't do it:  I had to ring off a little piece of paper with the lines drawn on it, which is my one peculiar talent, reading.  Never occurred to me one way or another, but a lot of real ringers can't bring their lofty intellects back down to the lowly earth of printed pages.  They can't ring and read at the same time.  Snork.  Being as how most of these people don't need to read their lines it all gets pretty moot, but it is true that when you've got a new band or a new member—Fernanda, in our case—or are learning a new method, it's useful to have a couple of steady ringers:  which would be Niall, of course, and, in this case . . . me.  Sort of:  even reading off the page I find it difficult to count that high.  Seven!  Eight!  No!  Rows are supposed to stop at six! 

            It was all particularly annoying because for once in my frantic, disorganised little life I had looked at what we were likely to be ringing, ie bob major, over the week.  I had looked at the trebles.  So with the general horror of having a middle pair sprung on me was my foggy half-memorised understanding of the one-two, which I was just about keeping separate from my nearly-almost half-skill on the seven-eight . . . the three-four really put the cat among the pigeons, and the pigeons were pretty sick to begin with.***

            And then . . . shock and trauma have driven the exact chronology out of my mind.  But Penelope was there tonight† and at the end of tea break when she was about to withdraw into the kitchen and put her hands over her ears again, I said that I hoped I'd see her tomorrow night—at New Arcadia tower practise.  She said, Well, if we get back in time.

            If . . . WHAT?

            I went roaring back into the sitting-room where Niall was spinning straw into gold or transmuting lead into handbells or some damn thing—I didn't notice—and I said, WHAT IS THIS ABOUT YOU MAYBE NOT BEING THERE FOR TOWER PRACTISE TOMORROW NIGHT?  YOU AREN'T ALLOWED TO SPRING THESE THINGS ON ME.††

            Oh, said Niall vaguely.  We're going to visit my mother.  Here, he added, extracting a Very Large Envelope from some hidden crevasse, You'd better have the keys.

            THE KEYS? I screamed.

            Yes, said Niall.  The keys to the church.  Vicky††† isn't going to be there tomorrow night either. 

            . . . Have I told you about the keys to our church?  The main part of St Radegund is old, and the outside door into the vestibule containing the ladder to the ringing chamber and bell tower is the original Visigoth-repelling fortress door, closed with several bolts as big around as my brawny, bell-ringing forearms, and a bar that looks like it belongs in a BBC production of IVANHOE.   Once you've secured the Visigoth-repeller you have to retreat out through the church proper, through both the screen into the nave and a slightly less formidable door at the far end—one which actually has a key, although said key is about the size of your hand, and the sound it makes when it turns is heard in the next village.  At this point you find yourself in the New Wing with the requisite hall, kitchen, modern toilets, etc, and some rather more comprehensible locking mechanisms.  The church and tower end involve secret cupboards, light switches which only appear if the correct incantations have been uttered and the correct obeisances made, and groping around behind the altar and/or under the organ for the bits that aren't hanging where they should be in the secret cupboard.  I have opened up or closed down maybe twice and each time required an intensive three-day seminar in church architecture and gargoyles first and took years off my life.‡

            Oh, said Niall.  And Monty will be there at 7:10.‡‡

            I think it was at this point that I crumpled into a little heap on the floor and curled into the foetal position.  Monty is one of our beginners.  He's a strapping lad and when he gets all his various limbs organised‡‡ he'll probably ring beautifully.  At the moment he's still pretty much in the NO NO DON'T LET GO OF THE TAIL END stage while the hapless teacher dives for the wildly flailing rope.  I am not dealing with Monty by myself. 

            I am at present hoping urgently that if Niall, Penelope and Vicky aren't there . . . we won't have enough, and I can cancel practise.  But I think I'd better phone Monty's dad tomorrow. . . .

            Niall was going to tell me sometime, wasn't he? 

            I hope Niall's mum throws them out EARLY.  If I had her phone number, I'd ring her.           

* * *

 * However this is a further excellent sign that the Cherub will be a success.  I wouldn't have to pay for him if he was going to be a terrible mistake, right? 

** Instead of three people, six bells, and bob minor. 

*** I should admit that I'm telling the story this way because I am going to jump on Niall with both feet here in a minute.  In fact it was fun, in the numbing, why-do-I-do-this-to-myself way that all handbell ringing is for me, Fernanda is clearly the Right Stuff, and even ringing off a piece of paper, getting through major after all this time ringing minor is a buzz.^  Indeed this is about rapidly to become the problem:  the other three of them are all way frelling upper level madly experienced tower ringers, and Fernanda is picking up handbells with appalling speed, just the way Colin did. 

             And then there's me.  Who labours extremely to learn anything.  They've all rung full peals^^ of bob major in the tower.  I've never rung it at all.   

^ One might even say a major buzz.

^^ Full peal = three and a half hours or so of continuous ringing of a given method or methods according to strict rules, run by a conductor who has to get it right, or it's not a peal, it's just some random time on a rope.  People get very depressed when they 'fire out' and don't make their peal. 

† Mostly hiding in the kitchen, no doubt with her hands over her ears

†† For recent readers:  Niall is ringing master.  I'm frelling deputy ringing master.  If Niall isn't there, I'm in charge of practise.  This is a bit like a three-legged Shetland pony leading the Charge of the Light Brigade.^ 

^ Which wouldn't have been such a bad thing.  They wouldn't have got near enough to the cannon to get killed.  For better or worse however New Arcadia at the end of 2010 bears very little resemblance to the Crimea of the 1850s, and I know very few Shetland ponies, even those with a full complement of legs, who are method ringers.  

††† Who usually opens up 

‡ I am not at all sure what lives behind the altar and under the organ.  Whatever they are you can hear them talking to each other when you're stumbling around in the dark looking for inscrutable propitiatory objects, because of course you have not succeeded in the incantations and the obeisances, and the bits are not hanging in the secret cupboard.

‡‡ He's a teenager.  Most teenagers find their bodies alien, uninterpretable, and of dubious cordiality.  It's not his fault. 

‡‡‡ General practise starts at 7:30.  I usually get there at about 7:29.5