I am ridiculously chuffed at having got away with Sunday service ring this morning.

The disadvantage of having our ringing master back again—he’s been gone several weeks, he and his wife touring their baby to friends and family—is that he makes us work on Sunday mornings.  Sunday service ring is frequently a little short of pairs of hands to pull ropes, and the irony is that our weakest ringers (very much including me) are among the most loyal Sunday ringers, so the necessary ballast of good ringers to drag the rest of us through is also short.  So lately I’ve been able to turn up Sunday morning more or less brain dead and no one notices because we’re ringing a lot of rounds and call changes for our one kiddie learner, who comes most Sundays, and the highest we fly is probably a touch of plain bob doubles, which is that First Simple [sic] Method that everyone learns* and eventually  really does get dug into the synapses, even when you have synapses like mine.

            Our ringing master lives a few towns away and he has an under-one-year-old daughter so he tends to arrive on Sunday mornings a few minutes late, looking like he was asleep ten minutes ago . . . and in fact still is.  This doesn’t stop him from ruining the protective balance of less good** ringers to good ringers, nor does it stop him from instantly calling for a touch of something that is not ringable in a brain dead state.  AAAAAAAAK.  Feel that sharp little ping as your adrenals spasm and frantically spit adrenaline.  I’d kind of forgotten.  Well, with teeth, ME, and further hand impairments, I’ve been getting points the last few weeks for turning up at all and the condition of my brain has been left tactfully in the shadows. 

We’d already rung the bells up this morning (since there’s actually nothing particular wrong with me*** for an hour or two—the dressing came off my stab wound for I hope the last time yesterday—and we had only four ringers to begin, to ring up six bells, I volunteered to ring up the six after we’d done the first four together in peal, and it’s like, oh, yes, lots more hundreds of pounds of metal there, put your back into it, girl, we haven’t got all day) † and were settling down to a nice cosy touch of bob doubles when our ringing master lurched into the chamber.  He let us get on with the bob doubles but then flung us into bob minor, which is all six working bells and no nice steadying tenor behind, ow ow ow.  I’m supposed to know bob minor—I’ve rung a quarter [peal] of it, for pity’s sake—but it has not been driven into my synapses yet. I still have to think about it, which is dangerous on Sunday mornings.  And speaking of being unattractively cheered up by other people’s failings [you are reading the footnotes, aren’t you?] one of the other inside ringers went wrong†† and I did not.  In bob doubles I may conceivably stagger on if someone else is having a senior moment but holding my line against the odds in bob minor is little less than miraculous.  One of the additional depressing things about being a weak ringer is that if anyone else goes wrong you inevitably go straight down the tubes after them.  A good ringing master and a steady band can usually fish one person out of a hole but is unlikely to be able to fish two of them.  In this case we pulled through the bobble and finished our touch.  Hurrah. 

            And then we rang Stedman doubles!  A touch!†††  The man is mad!  —And survived.  Adrenaline is a wonderful thing. ‡  Anyway, I thought that while I’m still high I should write an entry for today before I disappear, with a glooping noise, into that gluey mushy pile of proofs.  By bedtime‡‡ I’ll have reverted to liverflukedom again.  Furthermore this gives me a great lead in to a link Wanda in AL posted:

Okay, you've had me curious for a while, so I went over to trusty YouTube and found examples of change ringing. I even found one referencing your Stedman principle.
/>http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DK8uMGT01wA&feature=related

I don’t know how long this one’s been up but my experience of YouTube is that things don’t always stick around too well so anyone who’s interested should probably get over there now rather than later.  Neither the sound nor the picture quality is too wonderful but it’s nonetheless a brilliant clip:  you can really see what’s going on, so any of you who are completely confused and nonplussed about this change ringing wheeze, here’s your chance to acquire a clue.  You can also hear the rounds—which is just the, in this case eight, bells ringing in order, treble-two-three-four-five-six-seven-tenor, over and over, and then hear the conductor say ‘go Stedman’, which is how it happens.  You start out ringing rounds and then the conductor says ‘go [method]’.  If you listen carefully here you can also hear the conductor say ‘bob’, I think twice, which is one of those pesky calls that mixes the bells up further within the pattern.

            And no, bell ringing is not exclusively a middle-aged to elderly male domain‡‡, and in my geographical area down here among the peons there are probably as many women as men ringing.  But it’s true that the crack teams—of which this lot is an example—are often at least almost exclusively male.  Some of this is the lingering stupid tradition that ringing is only for the boys—I don’t think there are any towers left that won’t let women ring, but there are certainly women ringers ringing now who still remember when there were—and some of it, I think, is that the bell-geek brain-shape is rather likelier in the male of the species.  I could be wrong about this.  Maybe it’s only that the male bell geeks are more likely to do the Ancient Mariner thing at you about ringing.  Especially if you take your life and sanity in your hands and express an interest.

            There’s another briefer ‘how to bell ring’ video bracketed with this one which isn’t as exciting but it does show you a little more about the very basics.  The Stedman triples video starts (or it does on my computer anyway) when they’re already ringing rounds.  The brief one shows a band pulling off and starting to ring rounds, so you can see how that works.  The ringer on the treble says (or should say) something like ‘look to,’ ie get ready, ‘treble’s going, she’s gone’, bong.  Followed by bongbongbongbongbong, if you’re ringing six.  The other thing about this video (aside from the conspicuous presence of actual women), if you’re this interested, which you almost certainly are not, is that you can see where the shift from tenor back to treble happens.  If you watch the ropes going down, each rope comes down a foot or so later than the previous (this is ropesight, by the way, seeing which bell you’re following:  the more you can do it by ear, however, the better).  And then somewhere in the circle, whoops!  Here’s a bell doing exactly the opposite of what the bell he’s ‘following’ does—that’s the treble following the tenor, and starting the new ‘row’ of six dongs.

            Here also (I’ll shut up in a minute, I promise) is displayed the difference between handstroke and backstroke.  You start on handstroke:  when you pick up your rope and get ready to pull off, you have your hands raised and you’re holding the sally, which is the fuzzy striped thing.  Backstroke is when the sally is way overhead, and you’re pulling on the tail end.  Both of them produce a bong.

            Okay.  Have to stop fooling around.§  Proofs. . . .  

* There was this fabulously encouraging piece in The Ringing World^ some time last month from someone who claims to have been ringing for ‘years’ and to be still not able to ring bob doubles ‘inside’.  I know I’ve told you about ‘inside’.  In standard doubles (ie six bells and five of them ‘working’ ie shifting around in the pattern:  six is kind of the bottom limit of number of bells to make a good noise, although you can change-ring on fewer^^, and six is usually what beginners learn on first) methods you have a treble, whose line of ‘work’ within the specific pattern is straight out to the back and straight back in again.  Trebling to doubles is the first thing you learn after you can handle a bell well enough to go faster and slower (while looking desperately around for what new bell you’re following each stroke).  Then you have a tenor, who just goes ‘dong’ last every row, and then the other four bells are ‘inside’ bells which means they go out to the back and down to the front like the treble but they have wiggles in their work lines, which are ‘dodges’ and things.  It’s the wiggles that kill you. 

            Possibly our most famous practical writer on the subject of ringing, Steve Coleman, at whose feet I worship and all of whose books I have, including the one that will never be relevant because I’ll die of old age before I get that far in my ringing, is very good about reminding his readers that EVERY ringer goes through patches of thinking they’re the dumbest non ringer in the universe and they will never learn.  He even reminds us that most of us will believe that we really are the dumbest etc and it’s not just that everyone feels this way.  Well I REALLY AM.  Except that there was this essay in RW . . . and there was a letter a week or two later on the letters page saying that they were another one, they’d been ringing bob doubles for YEARS and still couldn’t do it ‘inside’.  I’m convinced the original article and the letter are a set up, probably by Steve Coleman, but . . .

^ Yes.  We have our own mag, and it’s a weekly.  I think I’ve told you this before but you may be resisting taking it in.  We’re all geeks, have you got that?  People who aren’t geeks mostly don’t stick with ringing.  It’s way too much like work, and it’s especially way too much like some freaking twisted peculiar kind of work that isn’t like anything else and it makes your brain hurt.   If you’re hugely talented you can learn it without being a geek, and I believe there are a few of these people around, but generally being talented is its own peril and you become a geek about it without realising until it’s too late.  I think most of the good ringers I know are in this category.  I am a geek without the talent.  Sigh.  The only thing to be said about my shape of brain, however, is that I’m used to being an obsessive, so geekhood is an old familiar companion and I don’t have to waste time worrying about being one about something else.  Except for the part about ‘only twenty four hours in the day’. 

            And just by the way, most of RW goes straight over my head.   

^^ Hence Dreaded four-bell Minimus methods on Sunday mornings when we’re really short.

** I first typed ‘lousy’ but that’s unfair to the other people involved. 

*** Barring the prospect of spending another day turning into a liver fluke over my proofs.  And another dentist appointment tomorrow.

† I also contrived to ring the six down again.  We ring up and down ‘in peal’ when we have enough ringers, which I’ve told you about before, which means all the bells together.  And it’s harder than you think, because you have to stay really close to the bell in front of you—closer than when you’re change ringing, when every bell does a 360 degree circumference with every stroke—and meanwhile you’re trying to deal with getting several hundred pounds of metal a little bit farther up or down on its circle with each yank on the rope in parallel with all the other bells who, of course, weigh different amounts and respond differently to the yanks.  And on a bigger bell you have less margin for error.  I got down not too badly but missed my final bong:  the tradition is that when you’re all ‘down’ and just ‘chiming’ you miss one and then ring a final note.  The treble counts it down:  three, two, one, miss . . . catch . . . and you all grab your ropes again, dong.  Except bigger bells swing—ahem!—that little bit slower than smaller bells, and you have to catch it at the right point of the swing.  With the result that our final row went:  bongbongbongbongbong . . . bong.  Oh well, let’s pretend it was deliberate. . . . .

            Readers with vice-like memories and the brain shape favourable to learning change ringing^ may be muttering six bells?  Hasn’t she said her home tower has eight?  Yes.  But we don’t ring up the last two unless it looks like we’re going to have enough bodies to ring all eight.

^ Beware!  Beware!

†† But she has earache, poor thing, so she doesn’t just get points for turning up, she gets a medal.

††† Although I’m still ringing ‘unaffected’ which means when the conductor ‘calls’ only some of the other bells have to do something different.  It does mean that I’m now following the other bells in a different order, but that’s still a lot easier than being one of the ones that’s swapped around.  Especially in Stedman.

‡ . . . which is why I have ME.  Sigh.

‡‡ And no, I did not get to bed early last night.  I seem to have forgotten how to get to bed early.

‡‡‡ I know most of you have never met or seen a photo^ of me, but I really am a girl/woman/decrepit crone yes really, and all those ‘she’s I refer to in our tower, this is not just me changing details to preserve their anonymity. 

^ Which for readers of the New Blog will soon CHANGE

§ I keep hearing an ad on radio three for tonight’s ‘words and music’, which programme happens every Sunday, and tonight’s subject is ‘happiness’.  They run through a list of all the things the programme is going to address that make people happy, including love, sex, food, etc . . . and golf.  Bell ringing is not mentioned.