ups and downs

How wretched of me to let so much time go by with­out writ­ing.  But I am sadly sub­ject to a tummy com­plaint that hits me now and then — usu­ally when there’s some­thing I can’t “stom­ach” or I have a lot to “digest” or I’m try­ing to trust my “gut” instincts about some­thing.  In other words, every once in awhile, some sig­nif­i­cant worry that floats through my life joins forces with a coin­ci­den­tal bug or virus — that kind other peo­ple are too tough to suc­cumb to — and decides to take up res­i­dence in my tummy and make me mis­er­able.  Some­times it lasts a very long time indeed.  This time was only a week.  But what an unhappy week it was, to be sure.

All I could do in the way of phys­i­cal activ­ity was to ride my bike every day, gen­tly, with John.  The views of our bike path along the river were restorative.

It has been a beau­ti­ful autumn here in Lon­don, with unusu­ally bright, beau­ti­ful leafy color.  We often wish we were back in New Eng­land for the tra­di­tional incan­des­cent foliage, but this year in real Eng­land, we could not complain.

Over the week­end, though, giant Hoover­ing trucks trun­dled down the road into the vil­lage, which had been cov­ered with ankle-deep piles of orange leaves, and sucked them all up.  The side­walks are bare now, wait­ing for the last few crunchy bits to fall from the trees.  The wind, too, has changed from a brac­ing fresh­ness to a lash­ing damp­ness that turns hands on bicy­cle han­dle­bars into red icy paws.

The best thing for icy paws is hot soup.

Broc­coli Soup With Nut­meg and Gorgonzola

(serves 6)

2 tbsps butter

4 cloves garlic

1 large shallot

2 heads broc­coli, sep­a­rated into florets

pinch fresh nutmeg

chicken stock nearly to cover (per­haps 4 cups)

3 tbsps Gor­gonzola or other creamy blue cheese

3 tbsps creme fraiche

sea salt and lots of fresh black pepper

In a heavy saucepan, melt but­ter and add gar­lic, shal­lots and broc­coli, sprin­kle the nut­meg over and stir to coat every­thing in the but­ter.  Pour in enough chicken stock nearly to cover, but not quite.  You do not want the soup to become water.  Sim­mer for 20 min­utes, stir­ring occa­sion­ally to make sure you get all the broc­coli under the liq­uid.  When broc­coli is soft, remove from heat and puree with hand blender.  Add cheese and creme fraiche, place back on heat and stir until cheese is melted.  Sea­son, being sure to add plenty of black pep­per till soup is slightly spicy.  Serve hot.

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My paws have been par­tic­u­larly occu­pied with adven­tures in bell-ringing!  This crazy activ­ity of mine — half sport, half musi­cal instru­ment — has been both a joy and a curse.  Some­times, as I wake up on a Sun­day morn­ing to find some­thing decent to wear, hop on my bike and turn up at my dear St Margaret’s to spend an hour pulling ropes and exhaust­ing myself, I think, “Why on earth am I putting myself through this?  I could be sit­ting qui­etly with Hello! mag­a­zine, or even sleeping.”

The rea­son I per­se­vere is partly pure stub­born­ness!  I can’t bear the thought of hav­ing put all this effort into learn­ing the craft only to drop it.  This week is the six-month anniver­sary of my first les­son, and it has taken just this long for me to feel a true mem­ber of the com­mu­nity.  Last week eight of us gath­ered to ring for a spe­cial Even­song, cel­e­brat­ing a local com­poser who had been awarded one of Eng­lish Heritage’s “blue plaques.”  The church itself was mag­i­cal in the crisp darkness.

So was the bellcham­ber, with my beloved teacher Howard bring­ing down the “spi­der” that holds all the ropes.

The band gath­ered around — me, plus seven men, muf­flers wound round their necks, blow­ing on their hands.  We rang.  The church­go­ers appeared in their Sun­day best, bring­ing chil­dren over to admire the bell-ringing.  I sud­denly felt an enor­mous pride in my being able to turn seven ringers into eight, to make us a full band, a ringer for every bell, a full octave present.  I was a needed, valu­able part of my small, cho­sen community.

Last week­end saw me at the ulti­mate crazy activ­ity: an entire day out in the Sur­rey coun­try­side, in the remote and beau­ti­ful vil­lages of Limps­field, Mer­stham and Bletch­in­g­ley, ring­ing ALL day long in training.

As dif­fi­cult as the day was, six straight hours try­ing des­per­ately to learn “Plain Hunt on Six” and “Plain Hunt on Eight,” it was an accom­plish­ment.  Sur­rounded by lovely peo­ple, gor­geous archi­tec­ture and coun­try views.

It was just my luck — I think! — that I was given the tough­est, most expe­ri­enced ringer in all the United King­dom to spend the day with, hav­ing my every move­ment scru­ti­nized, and yes, being shouted at.  He rang at the Royal Wedding!

The exhaus­tion com­ing home was tan­gi­ble.  Mus­cles I didn’t even know I had, hurt.

And up first thing in the morn­ing to ring for our beau­ti­ful Remem­brance Day services.

There is no doubt in my mind that my new voca­tion has pro­vided a very sat­is­fy­ing dis­trac­tion from my other pri­mary activ­ity: watch­ing my teenage daugh­ter grow up and away.  She cel­e­brated her 15th birth­day this month, with new head­phones, a sil­ver bracelet, piles of books.

Fif­teen is a real mile­stone.   For one thing, I remem­ber being 15 myself!  I was  my real self that year, the self I am now.  So I know that the daugh­ter I gaze upon now is the real per­son she will live with, all her life.  I like very much what I see.  She is immensely funny, a great debater, a truly lib­eral thinker, and a loyal friend who views gos­sip as a behav­ior only slightly more civ­i­lized than lit­ter­ing.  She has an envi­able sense of style, even if some­times it expresses itself through poems writ­ten in ink all over her hands.

The other side of this shiny coin is, how­ever, the grad­ual with­drawal of the lit­tle, depen­dent, hand-holding child I was used to all these years.  Of course this devel­op­ment took place grad­u­ally… one day she sim­ply brought her­self home from school alone and that was that.  She took her first taxi ride alone, her first Tube ride alone and turned up safe and sound.  Stuffed ani­mals no longer went along on sleep­overs, her book­shelves became filled with books I have not read, her Face­book page filled with peo­ple I have not met.  The sort of cringe-making school pho­tos she always hated are replaced with pro­fes­sional head­shots, taken for her act­ing agency.

In short, the child I poured so much of myself into, spent so many seem­ingly end­less hours read­ing to, march­ing peo­ple in and out of her doll­house, arrang­ing mag­netic let­ters on the fridge to spell her own per­sonal ver­sion of “Mommy,” has meta­mor­phosed into a young lady.  I find the tran­si­tion com­pletely baf­fling, and while I know it has taken place over a num­ber of years, some­times the new Avery seems quite unbe­liev­able to me, dig­ni­fied, intel­lec­tual, a bit remote.  As much as I cher­ished every stage, they all sped by any­way, leav­ing me with an inde­pen­dent near-adult.

Now, Avery and John will roll their eyes as I say this, but… there is a very use­ful par­al­lel in this process to bell-ringing.  Stick with me here.

What makes Eng­lish bells unique is that they live on a wheel, which lives on a frame.  Euro­pean bells just live on a frame and hang down­ward all their lives, being able to chime only in a very lim­ited back-and-forth motion.  Eng­lish bells can live down­ward OR upward, as we choose.  Some churches store their bells down­ward, some upward.  Here are the bells of St Matthew’s, Beth­nal Green, Lon­don, in the down position.

Bells are safest when they are down, because grav­ity has had its way.  Bells, given their own way, would always stay down, as these Mel­rose School bells in Brew­ster, New York are.

The Eng­lish like, in every­thing they do, to push the intel­lec­tual lim­its, to make the sim­ple com­plex, to make the trans­par­ent clever.  So they devised a way to get the bell all the way UP, and keep it there, as long as we like.

Here is a bell in the up position.

When a bell is “up,” it is lean­ing rather pre­car­i­ously against its bal­ance, wait­ing to be asked to fall again.  Here is a whole bel­fry full of bells in the up position.

A bell in the “up” posi­tion is an essen­tially unsta­ble thing, a very dan­ger­ous thing, because all it wants to do is go DOWN.  If you pulled the rope of a bell you thought was down and harm­less, and instead it was up and ready to COME down, that bell would come crash­ing down uncon­trolled and then — inevitably — momen­tum would carry it back UP, and you with it, per­haps tak­ing off your fin­gers if they were stuck in the rope, or pulling your shoul­der out of its socket.  We take “up” bells very seri­ously indeed.

Now you under­stand “up” and “down” bells.

Bell-ringing is entirely about con­trol.  What the begin­ning ringer learns to do is to approach a “down” bell and take its long length of rope in hand, the rope made into tidy coils.  Then you start to pull your rope, and as the bell goes higher and higher toward the top of the frame, you let out the coils.  You grad­u­ally have less and less rope hang­ing down as the bell takes more and more of it up into the bel­fry, finally fly­ing up as high as it can go, point­ing its great mouth straight upward, and at the moment you stop pulling and “set” your bell at rest.

The whole process, tightly con­trolled, should take more than a minute.  You must put all your con­trolled strength into PULLING that rope, because depend­ing on how heavy your bell is, you could be try­ing to pull more than a TON of weight from its happy “down” posi­tion to being 180 degrees in the oppo­site direc­tion.  Bells don’t want to go up.

As I have thought of Avery grow­ing up, from a baby until her teenage years, I now see the whole process as an attempt on my part to get her from the “down” posi­tion to “up.”  How we push them to turn over when they would just as soon lie still!  “Stand up, baby!” we urge, hold­ing their lit­tle hands insis­tently when all the baby wants is to plop back down on its dia­pered bot­tom!  Then walk­ing, chew­ing instead of drink­ing, hold­ing a spoon, going to school, SHAR­ING.  All the things a lit­tle child would rather not do.  They’re hard.

How I doted on all these stages!   The hours I spent dri­ving her to bal­let, to horse­back rid­ing, the end­less evenings spent read­ing aloud from pic­ture books, then watch­ing her choose her own chap­ter books and read alone.  I got her bell “up,” in other words.  My task was bliss­fully clear.  I was to pull steadily, get her bell “up,” no mat­ter how the process went against iner­tia.  And it worked, beautifully.

But what I’ve dis­cov­ered as the mother of a teenager is that what goes up…

The bell wants to come down again, filled with all the power of grav­ity.  And now the job of the ringer is to help the bell come down safely, steadily.  You hardly pull at all, just enough to get the bell off the bal­ance, and then you watch OUT!  Because those hun­dreds of pounds are filled with all the poten­tial you’ve put in them, get­ting them up there.  You can’t let the bell fall on its own, or the rope swings wildly, smack­ing into the other peo­ple in the bel­fry, fly­ing upwards with uncon­trolled, unguided power.  It can’t con­trol itself.  You have to learn how and when to coil the ropes to keep the bell com­ing down in a steady, safe way.

You see where I’m going with this.  All that pulling, all that power you’ve invested in your child — all designed to make her a happy, inde­pen­dent per­son — come back to roost.  The child WANTS to come down, swing on her own.  And you’ve got to fig­ure out how and when to coil the ropes with just the RIGHT amount of con­trol.  Lit­tle steps down.

It’s a fact of bell-ringing that some peo­ple pre­fer to ring up, some to ring down.  Some peo­ple like the chal­lenge of get­ting a bell to do some­thing against its nature, to go up, and some like the chal­lenge of con­trol­ling a very heavy, pow­er­ful force of nature in its inevitable path.

I am a more nat­ural ringer-up.  I like the clar­ity of the task, and the fact that none of it will hap­pen with­out my try­ing really hard.  I am more intim­i­dated by the coming-down of the bell, full of its own power.

But the fact is, you can’t be a proper ringer with­out being able to do BOTH.  My church rings all its bells UP at the end of a ses­sion.  They live in the “up” posi­tion.  But when I ring at Chiswick, they ring their bells DOWN at the end of a ses­sion.  I can’t pick and choose.  What my teach­ers tell me is that even­tu­ally, I’ll be good at both.  I might always pre­fer one job over the other, but I’ll be safely capa­ble of both.  I still panic a bit, now, every time some­one tells me to “ring down.”  But I can do it.

I am lucky that my par­tic­u­lar, per­sonal “bell” is ring­ing her­self down really beau­ti­fully.  I am so proud of her.  I don’t always know when to step in and help con­trol the rope and when to let grav­ity take its course, but I’m grad­u­ally learning.