[Closed] Church Bells - anyone like them?

The Mohhamedans don't come 'round here wavin' bells at us! We don't get Buddhists playing bagpipes in our bathroom! Or Hindus harmonizing in the hall! The Shintoists don't come here shattering sheet glass in the shithouse and shouting slogans...

Great memories from my childhood - staying at grandparents and listening to church bells across the valley. Thanks for reminding me!

Did the presence of a bell tower two doors away from your house not set, excuse me, alarm bells ringing?

I live next door but one but one to a church (house comes with job - not a choice- well it is but you know what I mean!).

youre a VICAR, or you bat for the other side and youre a catholic

It's Thursday nights here. 2 hours at 7pm. If I had kids I would even less impressed because its load, turged and relentless. Why can it not be practised at reasonable hour when most of the working world is trying to relax/have dinner/get their kids to sleep?

Another grumpy atheist.

youre a VICAR, or you bat for the other side and youre a catholic

The Vic has got the right idea and lives further down the village. Looks like a cooshy job - spends most of the daylight hours under the landy he is doing up. Dog collar and boiler suit is a good look!

Err, was the church there before you bought your house? I'll take a wild guess & say it was.
It's like people moving into a house next to a railway line then complaining about the trains making a noise!

If It's that bad, get another job. 😉

At times like this, I like to think of the words of the great Lord Denning

[i]In summertime village cricket is the delight of everyone. Nearly every village has its own cricket field where the young men play and the old men watch. In the village of Lintz in County Durham they have their own ground, where they have played these last 70 years. They tend it well. The wicket area is well rolled and mown. The outfield is kept short. It has a good club house for the players and seats for the onlookers. The village team play there on Saturdays and Sundays. They belong to a league, competing with the neighbouring villages. On other evenings after work they practise while the light lasts. Yet now after these 70 years a judge of the High Court has ordered that they must not play there any more. He has issued an injunction to stop them. He has done it at the instance of a newcomer who is no lover of cricket. This newcomer has built, or has had built for him, a house on the edge of the cricket ground which four years ago was a field where cattle grazed. The animals did not mind the cricket. But now this adjoining field has been turned into a housing estate. The newcomer bought one of the houses on the edge of the cricket ground. No doubt the open space was a selling point. Now he complains that when a batsman hits a six the ball has been known to land in his garden or on or near his house. His wife has got so upset about it that they always go out at week-ends. They do not go into the garden when cricket is being played. They say that this is intolerable. So they asked the judge to stop the cricket being played. And the judge, much against his will, has felt that he must order the cricket to be stopped: with the consequence, I suppose, that the Lintz Cricket Club will disappear. The cricket ground will be turned to some other use. I expect for more houses or a factory. The young men will turn to other things instead of cricket. The whole village will be much the poorer. And all this because of a newcomer who has just bought a house there next to the cricket ground.[/i]

Note I've linked for the Python sketch and not the video that someone has used...

We stayed in a self catering place in Burford a few times, it was lovely apart from the bell ringing from the church next door. I always thought the local genteel would be less understanding if I was to open a mosque in the town, then become an muezzin and called my Muslim brothers to prayer at the same volume. I would also need to practice this for two hours every Wednesday evening.

Err, was the church there before you bought your house? I'll take a wild guess & say it was.

You don't read good do you (sorry, I'm grumpy - having your brain raped by the noise of satan does that)? Not my house - just live here. Yes, living here makes very (very) good financial sense - so this is something I just have to suck up. Doesn't mean I can't grumble about it though - I'm a middle aged atheist - it's what I was born to do!

^^ Denning - the great man himself.

Atheist here, and I love them. Church is a few hundred meters from us and its a pleasure to hear them on Thursday evenings and Sunday mornings. The one downside is that Ms Markie Jr also thinks they're ace and now goes to church every Sunday in order to be allowed to ring one herself once the proper bods are done.

I don't think they'll be able to make a believer out of her but the chance of her becoming a botherer is higher now than it was a year ago, not least because a few weeks back the vicar blessed the wine, the wafers and her snack tub of cashew nuts...

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I' wonder what would happen if I wanted to put in a planning application for a new meeting hall for a club that i have formed in the centre of a town. It would have a massive tower and several times a weeks we would ring the bells from the massive tower so everybody in the town could hear them. Tis would be for the benefit of a tiny majority of people who wanted to be in the club

I don't go to church, can you tell?

Hmm, Sinatra - I reckon there's a difference between ringing some bells, and wiring up a loudspeaker on the church tower saying "god is great, come and worship god, there is no other god, you must come and pray to god, there is noone else worthy of worship than my god, all other gods are rubbish"

I only started ringing to get into the local community, and they all went to the pub afterwards. 🙂

The mid week ring could sometimes be a bit testing if listening as you are practicing a new call change, training up newbies or generally having an off night.

ninfan - blah blah blah blah blah

I know we can report folk for blatant racism.. but what about those idiots that just pop up occasionally to spout xenophobic bollocks - utterly betraying what goes on inside their squalid little minds, but never actually saying quite enough to cross the boundaries of decency..

is there anything we can do about those people..?

I agree ridiculous stupid noise pandering to declining numbers. Can't help but think of Vivian on the Young Ones with a hangover "SHUT UP YOU BAS TARDS"

It's stopped......I.will.never.be.in.on.a.Tuesday.evening.again!

Thanks God, you have ensured at least one night a week is compulsory training night.

Yunki - WTF?

OK, tell me [b]exactly[/b] which part of the Adhan is not represented there, and it Was Sinatra who brought up the subject of Mosques - and WTF Xenophobia has to do with either cricket, race or religion I don't know

Maybe you need to learn to read rather than act like a reactionary idiot!

ninfan - Member

Hmm, Sinatra - I reckon there's a difference between ringing some bells, and wiring up a loudspeaker on the church tower saying "god is great, come and worship god, there is no other god, you must come and pray to god, there is noone else worthy of worship than my god, all other gods are rubbish"

I would expect the call to prayer to be considerably more soothing than church bells.

just going by some crap I remember you posting on other threads too..

Lived near a church as s kid hated the bloody noise especially on a Sunday morning. All of the houses I have bought have been nowhere near churches or bells 😛

So, made up in your own head and extrapolated out of your arse then!

(PS. in case it escapes you, you don't have to be foreign to believe in a particular sky fairy or be another colour)

So, made up in your own head and extrapolated out of your arse then!

yerp.. exactly that
I see you don't deny any stuff from other threads though.. I think it was the birmingham EDL thread that I remembered your schtick from, and your name stuck in my mind as there can't actually be many people willing to admit that they are nin fans.. 🙂

Couldn't agree more. Bloody racket!

APF

[i]I would expect the call to prayer to be considerably more soothing than church bells.[/i]

That depends on who's doing the [s]howling[/s] calling & who's doing the [s]clanging[/s] ringing.

The bells, the bells FTW.

Yunki, I see you don't deny thats what the Adhan says either 🙄

See, the dichotomy is that you think that objecting to someone shouting "my gods better than your god" is intolerance, whereas objecting to someone ringing a bell to praise their god is acceptable behaviour!

no no.. you're completely right..

a total overreaction on my part based entirely on my preconceptions and prejudice

id imagine if the bell ringers didnt practice - weddings in the church would be a bit awful sounding .....

I see you don't deny thats what the Adhan says either

FFS Zulu-Eleven, the call to prayer is hardly 'offensive'.

http://islam.about.com/cs/prayer/f/adhan_english.htm

[i]I bear witness that there is no god except the One God.

I bear witness that Muhammad is the messenger of God.

Hurry to the prayer[/i]

Crikey.

Where I come from (Cambridgeshire) bellringing has got bugger all to do with religion. At least, not in the minds of the bellringers, anyway.

To answer the original question, I guess I do quite like them, in a nostalgic sort of way. Now I live next door to a football stadium though...

So, made up in your own head and extrapolated out of your arse then!

I'm gonna use that at work tomorrow

I used to live near a very large Church, every Weds they would ring, every day it would chime, Sunday mornings would be a cacophony of ambient chimes.

I blooming miss it.

id imagine if the bell ringers didnt practice - weddings in the church would be a bit awful sounding .....

That's just it - they never seem to use them for real - plenty of weddings, funerals and normal god bothering but never a peep out em. Just Tuesdays and always the same 2 or 3 second round (is that right?) again and again and again - for 2 frigging hours. Got to admire their endurance!

Lynch, not him, told ya before, nice try!

Who said it was offensive?

Mrs Convert always complained about the noise but thought she was talking rubbish. Bloody asshats! 2hrs of the same frigging repetitive god awful shit.

5 sessions a day of Allahu Akbar! how ****ing awful is that!

they never seem to use them for real - plenty of weddings, funerals and normal god bothering but never a peep out em.

You want them to ring the church bells for funerals ? 🙂

Just to enter the weird religious side debate and seems to have arisen... I spent a couple of years living in Turkey. Strangely I quite liked the azan when there. But then again I wasn't living on top of the friggin thing.

Lynch, not him, told ya before, nice try!

Oh yeah sorry, I forgot...........you're not Zulu-Eleven 😉

You want them to ring the church bells for funerals ?

Do they not do that? In a solemn bong, bong, bong not jingly jangly happy chappy sort of way? Clearly I'm campanologically ignorant!

Convert do you live in Cheadle nr Stockport. I'm staying nearby St Mary's, they are really giving it beans.

I like them, the sound, the simplicity, the history. Keep em ringing I say. I'm not a church goer by the way. Love them ringing away in my village.

You can put mufflers on the bells for funerals.

Townies 🙄

Every Friday at 13.00hrs, I hear a call for prayer which goes like this, 'all stations, unlock for muslim service'. Usually get a good turnout too, about 100 muslims out of 810 prisoners in total. Not many christian types go to chapel on a Sunday though.
No church bells, no wailing either.

Convert do you live in Cheadle nr Stockport. I'm staying nearby St Mary's, they are really giving it beans.

I like them, the sound, the simplicity, the history. Keep em ringing I say. I'm not a church goer by the way. Love them ringing away in my village.

No - South Downs, Hampshire.

Maybe my boys are just a bit crap - it's the repetitive nature - the volume means you just can't escape or talk over it. I've done the whole white noise interrogation training shizzle when in the mob in my youth and I think my bell ringing friends have got the edge.

You can put mufflers on the bells for funerals.

Do you think builder's expanding foam that 'fell' in them would have the same effect.....just to take the odd 30 decibels off the the volume.

Live next to a Church, they have bell ringing practice every Thursday for two hours. It's annoying bit it's either bell ringing or listening to the call for prayers at the local mosque!

I live directly opposite the village church. Weekly bell practise, services, AND chimes every quarter of an hour - because God may be omnipotent and all-powerful, but for some reason He needs to be constantly reminded what time it is. Maybe He's gone senile in His old age. That would explain a few things. 😀

(Don't really mind the bells to be honest. Can be a bit annoying when putting our 6 week old baby to sleep though)

Congrats on your baby graham.

Do the chimes of bells not qualify as nuisance noise? Imagine someone playing music loud enough for the whole district to hear, for two hours! It wouldn't be tolerated.

Campanologists ...

The creepy old sod who purports to be a vicar in our village explained that we have chimes on the quarter hour to let the workers in the fields and factories know the time in between the hourly strikes. It's almost as if the Casio digital watch had never been invented.

The local ringers here are truly, truly woeful. They're completely out of time with each other and themselves. Sunday mornings are an insult to music and their practice sessions on a Monday evening seem only to reinforce their utter ineptitude. It's funny that this came up now as I'd intended to go and record their rubbish on Sunday and make a case for the vicar to put the ****s out of their/my misery.

Round here, Sunday is a day of peaceful rest and making any kind of loud noise is basically illegal.

Thanks for waking me up on my Sunday morning peaceful lie in.

Used to live in Holland before. Musical chimes on the town hall clock tower every 15 minutes. Except on a couple of national holidays when there was constant musical chimes all day, but at least they had a few different tunes.

The creepy old sod who purports to be a vicar in our village explained that we have chimes on the quarter hour to let the workers in the fields and factories know the time in between the hourly strikes.

Did he explain why sometimes they randomly decide to toll out the hour in the middle of the night?

Ours sometimes go off at like 3am. Is that a special chime for the night shift?

*Reads GrahamS's post earlier in thread.
Realises I've missed some important news!*

Congratulations, old chap!

Cheers Flashy (and jekkyl) - and same to you I believe Captain?

(Second time around for me, so bit less of a fanfare, more just a feeling of [i]"Christ what have we done??"[/i])

"Christ what have we done??"

That's the worst thing about being an atheist, surely. No one to talk to when you're having an orgasm.*

*Note - That was what you had "done" to get another BTW. In case you hadn't noticed! 🙂

(Fast growing at Casa Flash. Crawling's for losers. Standing up is where it's at now!)

Good work - skiing next then? 😀

See "that" thread, Graham! 8)

I live opposite a church and they ring the bells on a Thursday night. Not really my cup of tea but the church has been there since 1400 AD so I guess I'll just have to suck it up.

We did it at a local church with 20 Explorer Scouts earlier in the year, the whole village must have loved the oh so tuneful ringing going on that night! The church in question had some form of noise dampening in the bell tower, not much use tho as far as I could tell.

Cheers,
Jamie

@GrahamS - they run 24/7, I checked by staying up very late in the pub and walking past the church at all hours of the night.

They do, however, provide a good good reference point as to just how big a bollocking I was in for when I got home.

Congratulations to the breeders on STW.

I am from Scotland, here we have bagpipes, I have no sympathy for you.

I am from Scotland, here we have bagpipes, I have no sympathy for you

See, I love bagpipes. 2 years ago when last I was up at the Nairn Highland games and my old man should have been at the front of the massed pipe and drums procession through town with some of the other old codgers because of various things he was involved in. He was too ill to take his place so they asked if I'd stand in for him. 120 odd pipers - ace - makes the hairs on the back of my neck stand up - in a good way 😀

Always wished I'd learnt to play them myself - but I'd find a field far far away to practise (or in my bedroom in the room next to my neighbour's kid as apparently is socially acceptable for DJing as long as you stop by 1am as it's part of the give and take of life as discussed in previous threads).

I just bought a new HiFi. Extraneous outside noise is now a thing of the past.

Yes, living here makes very (very) good financial sense - so this is something I just have to suck up. Doesn't mean I can't grumble about it though - I'm a middle aged atheist - it's what I was born to do!

Bloody townie scum.

Hey, I was born with muddy boots on! They might not have had English South Downs mud on them, but they were muddy never the less.

If you could not interpret a little tongue in cheek in my post(s) then either I have lost the ability to project through the written word or you need to tune up the old literal analyser.

Yes, heaven forbid centuries of earnest hand ringing were to end - it's what southern England was built on!

Sorry, I do realise there was a fair degree of tongue in cheek, but it rather touched a nerve, there's more than a little of the "right, I like the location, but that muddy farm lane/noisy church bell ringing/noisy cockerel, smelly pig farm* spoils it, so I'll just hava a word with my poncy friends, and get it sorted out" situation goes on around here. That's the problem with living in nice countryside like the south Cotswolds, people think it should be a nicely manicured theme-park, rather than a place where people live and work.
*delete which applicable.