can’t believe i haven’t told you guys about my bell ringing lessons. i am learning to ring church bells. why? because it’s sick as fuck. and also i get a lot of joy from being a dirty little sinner ringing gods doorbells
the cafe i work at is part of my local abbey and the average age of the bell ringers there is about 70 so the head bell ringer dude is making it his life’s mission to bring that down by recruiting the entire cafe. he also thinks i don’t have a life (correct) and so decided i needed a hobby (correct) and now i pull a rope for an hour a week while gossiping
also head bell ringer dude casually dropped one lesson that his ex wife stabbed him once, and then never followed through on that fun bit of information apart from to tell me they didn’t get divorced until like 10 years later so. i also keep going in the hopes that one day he will fill me in on the rest of this
genuinely he would do numbers on tumblr dot com he’s wild
Sorry I just gotta
The art of change ringing is peculiar to the English, and, like most English peculiarities, unintelligible to the rest of the world. To the musical Belgian, for example, it appears that the proper thing to do with a carefully tuned ring of bells is to play a tune upon it. By the English campanologist, the playing of tunes is considered to be a childish game, only fit for foreigners; the proper use of bells is to work out mathematical permutations and combinations. When he speaks of the music of his bells, he does not mean musician’s music – still less what the ordinary man calls music. To the ordinary man, in fact, the pealing of bells is a monotonous jangle and a nuisance, tolerable only when mitigated by remote distance and sentimental association… His passion – and it is a passion – finds its satisfaction in mathematical completeness and mechanical perfection, and as his bell weaves her way rhythmically up from lead to hinder place and down again, he is filled with the solemn intoxication that comes of intricate ritual faultlessly performed.
- Dorothy Sayers, The Nine Tailors (1934)
Like everyone who accidentally absorbed it in the course of a detective novel, I’ve been lowkey fascinated by English change ranging for a long time, possibly because of this 90-year-old reference to THE RITUALS ARE INTRICATE. This whole passage is so funny to me that I practically have it memorised. Have literally tried to listen on YouTube to work out what the fuck the loadbearing Grandsire Triples are. You go OP have FUN
