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.