I love brass band music and it got me thinking about quintessential British sounds that I love. I remember about 30 years ago on a Thursday evening when I attended swimming classes in a final effort to get rid of my fear of the water (and yes it did work as I can now swim - albeit badly).
On those Thursday evenings you could hear a pipe band and the bells of the parish church. When it comes to pipe bands I just can't make up my mind. I guess that means I'm pretty neutral about their music, but it does evoke a certain feeling of nostalgia.
Church bells are another matter. I love them and they really do shout Britain to me. I have been to see the Hethersett bell ringers on a number of occasions. It's a tough hobby campanology. From a mathematical point of view it's always been fascinating. It's rather stating the obvious to say that the more bells you have in your belfry (as opposed to bats), the more combination of bells can be rung.
If you have two bells your ringing options are two. Add a third bell and the options increase to six. Add a fourth and it becomes 24. It's a simple process. You just multiply all the digits. So four bells would give a combination of 4x3x2x1. Westminster Abbey has 10 bells which gives it 3,628,800 possible permutations. Would you believe that St Peter Mancroft in the centre of Norwich has 14 bells.
That means a staggering 87,178,291,200 (that's over 87 billion). A group of bell ringers once took 18 hours to cover all combinations of eight bells and that was just 40,320 combinations. To do the 14 bells would take (well you work it out). Let's just say it would take centuries.
So the next time you hear church bells being rung just think about the amount of time it would take to ring all the combinations.
My other British summer love is brass bands as I have already stated. They seem to sum everything up in a simple and tuneful way. I love the broad sound and I guess that's what attracts me to prog rock music where everything is rich and swirling.
I love the way brass bands can adapt such a range of music from classical to pop, jazz to rock and many more. And I just love what brass bands do to one of my favourite pieces of music MacArthur Park. It's almost as if Jimmy Webb wrote the piece for a brass band although, of course, he didn't.
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Yesterday spent the day with my friends from the Le Paradis Commemoration Group. It was our first meeting for some time and we had a lot of ground to cover. A major part of our meeting was discussing the future and how to keep the website going as none of us are getting any younger.
I always think that is stating the obvious. I've never known anyone get younger (although some seem to look younger).
Keeping things going is a tough gig (as they say). It's often very difficult to attract new blood or younger blood to a group and, in Hethersett, we saw the demise of a number of support groups and organisations when lockdown was eased. Some of these groups just had nobody willing to run them. Organisers were a couple of years older and no longer had the energy or will to continue organising. In some cases they had found other things to do and in others they had just lost interest or run out of energy.
For those not aware, Le Paradis was a massacre by Nazi troops in the Second World War. Ninety nine (I still never start a sentence with a figures) British troops (mainly from the Royal Norfolk Regiment) were marched into a field after surrendering and machine gunned. Two survived. The website: www.leparadismassacre.com tells the story of the massacre and the survivors.
Alongside the website we are hoping to have a book published in the near future. But what happens with the website when we are no longer here? Who will be the custodians of it? That's a thorny question to which we need to find the answers.
In many ways it was a quirky day and I will tell you a bit more about it in tomorrow's blog.