Cast into darkness

It wasn’t a biblical punishment but it was an unwelcome surprise.

Several of our ringers regularly ring changes in hand (ie we sit and ring two handbells each instead of standing with one tower bell each). We don’t normally ring handbells in church but we recently arranged to ring a quarter peal before a Monday evening practice so it made sense to do so. To avoid being disturbed if we over-ran, or if the other ringers arrived early, we rang in the Mezzanine Room rather than in the ringing room.

Five or ten minutes after we started a light went off somewhere behind me. I assumed it must be one of the motion sensitive lights downstairs that had timed out, and we ignored it – the room was still well lit and carried on.

A few minutes later the remaining light also went out and left us in the dark. Thanks to the emergency lights it wasn’t completely black. We could see each other in the gloom, and make out enough of the bells to see what we were doing. So we kept our cool, and again we carried on.

Fortunately the ringing went well and after another half hour or so of ringing in the dark we successfully concluded. If one of us had made a serious mistake it would have been much harder to sort it out, so we had a strong incentive to concentrate hard.

After we finished one of us stood up to put the bells in their case and the movement triggered the light to turn back on. And when the rest of us stood up the other light came on as well. Had we realised it was that easy to turn the lights back on then we could probably have done so while we were ringing – preferably before rather than after the light went out.

So mystery solved? Not quite. While we are ringing our hands and bells move continually. So why didn’t eight arms going up and down every couple of seconds trigger the motion sensor? That’s a mystery. Ringing a handbell is a much more vigorous gesture than (say) taking notes or speaking in a meeting, and we assume no one has problems in meetings. Maybe the motion sensors are ‘intelligent’ and the rhythmic action of ringing is so mesmerising it put them to sleep! We can only speculate.

John Harrison (November 2024)