Jake Wallis Simons tracks down the oldest bell in the world . . . to a small village in Hampshire

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“Church bells have been ringing in England for more than thirteen hundred years. The English ringing technique – in which a bell is swung through a full 180 degrees to allow it to sound mouth-up, projecting its voice upwards out of the tower – is quite unique; it can only be found in the British Isles, a few former colonies, and the area around Verona in Italy.

Traditionally, English bells are rung to summon the faithful to worship, to celebrate weddings and festivals, and to mark national thanksgivings. At funerals, and at times of disaster, the bells are sometimes muffled; during wartime, it’s agreed that church bells will not be rung except as a warning of invasion.

One cold January Saturday, I came across the oldest bell of this kind in the world, which dates back to the year 1260. It is a handsome treble bell, cast in solid bronze, its face mottled with the distinctive grey-green patina that has protected it from centuries of atmospheric corrosion.

Surprisingly enough, this bell is not kept in the British Museum, or in any museum for that matter. Instead, it still hangs in the belltower of the tiny Hampshire church for which it was originally intended more than seven hundred and fifty years ago . . .”

The thought of the 75-year-old actor Brian Blessed on a narrowboat is one that should immediately bring a smile to your face. It certainly did for me. In my mind’s eye he sits there like a thespian Captain Haddock, roaring with ebullient laughter. And British Waterways, who have got Blessed on-board (so to speak) to publicise a new campaign to attract volunteers, are hoping that once you have stopped chuckling, you will be inspired to volunteer as a lock keeper.

Given the stagnancy of the housing market and the paucity of credit, first-time buyers are having a tougher time than ever. Gemma Morris, 23, and her partner Paddy McBride, 27, are looking to develop their first property. “We feel we need guidance,” says Gemma. “Otherwise we wouldn’t be brave enough to take the plunge.”

Over the years, this iconic Modernist text has been written about and written about. But one of its most important lines is not often enough discussed. It occurs in Episode 3, Proteus: “remember your epiphanies on green oval leaves, deeply deep, copies to be sent if you died to all the great libraries of the world.”

By the time he scrawled those words, James Joyce had long been working to claim the term “epiphany” on behalf of secular literature. Hitherto, the word had an ancient, and predominantly religious, history. It has its genesis in ancient Greece (ἐpιfάνeιa), where it was used beautifully to refer to the first glimmer of dawn, the first sight of the enemy in battle, or the first vision of a god. It became Judaised in 2 Maccabees, when it was used to describe the God of Israel, and was Christianised in 2 Timothy, where it mainly referred to the Second Coming; thereafter it came to describe the personal realisation that Christ was the Son of God. In AD 361, the Roman historian Ammianus Marcellinus used the word for the first time to refer to a Christian feast (epiphanion). In the centuries that followed it was mainly used in connection to a variety of Christian festivals, which were celebrated differently, and at different times, by the different Churches.

Joyce, however – an atheist with profoundly Catholic roots (which he described as “black magic”) – felt that the term could more usefully be applied in a humanist context. Each of his Dubliners stories is structured around a central epiphany. Moreover, his less widely read autobiographical novel, Stephen Hero, contains an explicit exposition. Epiphany, Joyce writes, means “a sudden spiritual manifestation, whether in the vulgarity of speech or of gesture or in a memorable phase of the mind itself.” It is for the “man of letters” to “record these epiphanies with extreme care, seeing that they themselves are the most delicate and evanescent of moments.”

(Several years prior to writing this passage, Joyce himself had begun to create a group of seventy-one fleeting, disembodied epiphanies, ranging in content from the supoernatural to the mundane. Forty of these survive in manuscript form, and are collected at the American Universities of Cornell and Buffalo; they were reprinted in the early nineties by Faber.)

Continue reading on the Independent website

My family and I live at the top of a short but very steep hill. Bowling down it on an eco-friendly Dutch cargo bike – a 2.6m-long pushbike that can seat up to four small children in a box at the front – was surprisingly easy. I had expected the weight of my four-year-old daughter and two-year-old twins to make the bike difficult to handle, but in the event it was smooth and responsive.

“The girls have experience on their side, and will be a much better functioning machine,” one of the team’s organisers, a Johnny Depp lookalike going by the name of Kinky Stuntz (real name Matthew Heales), told me over a pre-training full English breakfast in the nearby bikers’ haunt, the Ace Cafe. “They have a lower centre of gravity, so they can absorb the knocks without going down. And they can hit pretty hard too.” Just how hard remains to be seen.

Roller derby, a full-contact game featuring two teams of five skaters, is one of the fastest-growing sports in the world. The rules are notoriously complicated. The bout is split into two-minute “jams”, during which each team nominates a “jammer”, who — wearing a helmet emblazoned with a star — tries to lap the opposition, gaining one point for each opponent they lap. The rest of the skaters try to block those on the opposing side while allowing their own jammer through.

Huge in 1950s America, when it attracted crowds of thousands, roller derby became over-commercialised in the 1960s and died out. Then, in 2000, it was resurrected in Texas by the feminist punk counterculture. There are now 1,135 teams worldwide, spanning every inhabited continent, with 73 in Britain.

This tough new generation of skaters wear Gothic clothes, paint their faces like horror-film extras, and take on outlandish alter egos like “Fishnet Stalker” and “Attila the Nun”. Bouts take place to blaring heavy metal music and frequently result in injury. The game has an anti-corporate “DIY” spirit, open to everyone, regardless of athletic ability. Last December, the England team came third in the first ever Roller Derby World Cup, in Toronto.

Crucially, modern roller derby is all about third-wave feminist girl power, where women present themselves as a dominant force, sexually in control. Until now, the sport has been strictly women-only, with men restricted to refereeing and coaching. One popular joke is that the only difference between a rollergirl and a lesbian is two drinks. But things are starting to change. The bout I’m to witness between Southern Discomfort and the London Rockin’ Rollers, one of the top British women’s teams, marks the first time in Britain that women have lined up against men.

Read the full article on the Sunday Times website (subject to paywall restrictions)