On a recent Saturday afternoon, in a 12th-century village church only as wide as a sitting room, I watched my godson and his brothers and their father take off their suit jackets and place them, folded, on the flagstone floor in the corner. Tucking their ties between the buttons on their dress shirts, they stood at the back, near the entrance, and pulled on hemp ropes to ring the church bells for their grandmother. We were celebrating her life as she’d lived it, together, in music.

Music historian Katherine Butler – a campanologist – writes that come next weekend, bellringers in the nation’s 38,000 churches will stand in similar groupings. They will pull on similarly old ropes with tufted woollen sallies, colourfully striped on the diagonal, like boiled sweets. And they will count out similar patterns, or methods, to herald the country’s new king. Ringing the changes is a tradition so steadfast in these parts, Handel is credited with saying once, of Britain, that it was a “ringing isle”. You don’t need to be ecclesiastically minded to join in. Just Google “local handbell group”.

Striking an altogether more disquieting note, a medieval literature expert links Madonna’s recent forays into cosmetic surgery to monastic disfiguration in the 15th century. An environmental chemist, meanwhile, probes pollutants both in the ocean’s deepest depths. Our potential for beauty and destruction both, writ large in bell and face and sediment.

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