Alarums and Excursions

Right: Leicester Cathedral

Ask anyone who knows me—I hate alarm clocks. I’ll do almost anything to avoid having to wake up to any sort of buzzing or beeping. Sometimes “anything” includes getting to work late, but don’t tell my boss.

In England, though, one is much more likely to wake up to church bells. Every city has a cathedral, and every village, town and market town has at least one church. Sizeable towns and cities have sizeable numbers of them, and that means that you’d have to be pretty far off the beaten path not to hear church bells announcing every hour of the day, and specialized bells for canonical hours, to call the faithful to prayer. As I’m not faithful, I don’t know one of these tunes from another, except to say, “Oh, it’s that one. Nice.”

The executive flat where I’m staying on this trip to Leicester has about four times more space than my hotel room at the Travelodge, where I stayed week before last, about six times more than my London hotel room between trips, a kitchen, a leather couch, a huge television, and Leicester Cathedral. Well, the latter’s not actually in the flat, but just a little way outside where I can see and hear it, and by hearing, know the time.

Bells have a certain authority that mere clocks lack. Let’s face it: your kitchen clock can say one thing, your oven clock another, and your bedroom clock something unlike either. One can quibble with a clock, but bells are another matter; they leave no doubt what o’ the clock it is. They give the clock a voice. And they give a tired traveller a buzzless, beepless way to wake up in time to get to her seminar.

So today was the first day of Chris Hall’s three-day seminar on “The Paradoxical Nature of Change” at the lovely old Ramada Jarvis Hotel here in good old Leicester, wherein our heroine learned that problems are paradoxes, and “stuckness” is a result of not knowing how to resolve them via a sort of unified field. Golly. Wonder what I’ll learn on day two?