Showing posts with label church bells. Show all posts
Showing posts with label church bells. Show all posts

Thursday, 23 April 2009

Patriotic bells on St George's Day

This morning, at the end of my drive into work, I heard the sound of church bells. St George's Church is within earshot of my office - and today being St George's Day, the church was doing its patriotic best to annoy me.


I like church bells. The idea of enthusiastic, sweaty campanologists exerting themselves in not-quite-perfect synchronism is a splendid concept, and imagining a group of them in earnest, muscular concentration at the foot of St George's modern bell-tower should have brought a patriotic glow to the cockles of my cynical heart. But it didn't, because I knew that these were not real bells. The cacophonous impingement on my morning serenity was likely initiated by someone pressing a button - or perhaps even by a pre-programmed timer*.

So what, you ask? Why should it bother me that these were not real bells? Because I care about what is and isn't real; about what's true and what's false. Because every single fake thing calls into question the genuine article.

But maybe I shouldn't be surprised - this noise was coming from a church. Fake bells from a fake god - what did I expect?

*Actually this is more probable, as the 15-minute ear-assault was repeated at 12 noon and 3 pm (and for all I know 6 pm as well, though I'd escaped by then).