Hello! It's that time of year — July and the sun's out — and making time for ringing requires some concerted effort...
On Wednesday in another first I rang Grandsire Triples, and that was EXCELLENT; it felt like I knew what I was doing. The nice thing about more bells is that things go slower1 and you have more time to think. It's inspired me a little to keep going with higher bell numbers, and with a bit more practice on 8, I might start going to a 10-bell practice in September.
And then later on at Waterloo I called some touches of Plain Bob Doubles, my first foray into another sub-skill that I want to get good at — conducting. And my gosh does that add an extra dimension; you need to start tracking what other bells are doing, which requires that you be solid in what you are doing...
The whole reason for "touches" or "calls" is to explore the whole permutation space with a given number of bells. In Grandsire Triples with 7 moving bells, a "plain course" only goes through 70 combinations of the possible 5040. Thus you have a "Bob" or a "Single" that changes the order of some of the bells, so conducted correctly you can go through them all (and ideally in the most musical way possible). Doing all 5040 is called a "peal" and takes about 3 hours depending on the bells (I've only done a few quarter peals so far).
And today after a seaside weekend in Kent, I rang at 2 local churches this morning: St Peter-in-Thanet, and St John the Baptist in Margate. It was a lovely group (they invited me back! :D), and we did some rounds, call changes, plain hunting and a little Bob Doubles at the end.
Until next Sunday!
- Nick