Tag: #coursingorder

Coursing through the veins

Image by Jeon Sang-O from Pixabay

As you know, I’ve been #bellringing for 40 years now, almost exactly to the day.  I class myself as a middle of the road ringer.  There are methods that I know well, there are those I have to learn every time I ring them and methods I stress over learning because I think I can’t.  I have called a few quarter peals of Plain Bob Doubles and only a handful of touches of Plain Bob Minor or Grandsire Doubles with someone stood behind me, digging me in the leg to prompt me to shout “Bob”!  However, I certainly would not call myself a conductor at any stretch of the imagination.

So, the idea of calling and conducting is something that every now and then I think I ought to do more of, understand more about and push to be allowed to do it. 

One of our local ringers asked me the other week if there were any books on Coursing Order.  Not to my knowledge specifically about that subject although I’m sure that it’s covered in many other books on calling and conducting.  What I did manage to find were two articles from the Ringing World in about 1999 in the Learning Curve series on Conducting and Coursing Order.

The first article discusses the basic concept of understanding what coursing is, one bell following the path of another from front to back and back again.  Keeping an eye on the coursing order is what helps conductors check on whether the ringing is still correct, particularly after a call is made, or there’s a bit of a fire up. 

The way coursing orders are written is confusing it its own right.  It’s written with the Tenor last but omitted and on higher numbers the coursing order of the back bells often (but not always) doesn’t change, so that’s omitted too. Whilst ringing the idea is to work out the part of the coursing order that changes and rely on knowing the order of the fixed bells.  Coursing order applies to the whole course and therefore you can use it at any point to check the ringing is still right.

By putting a call in, it changes the coursing order, that the clever amongst us could work out in their heads as they go along. Using coursing orders can help check whether the ringing is correct, help others who go wrong and help the conductor work out where to put the calls.

If you are a very clever person you may want to call quarters or peals.  My efforts thus far have been to put the Bobs in.  I can’t put people right if they go wrong and if I called a Bob in the wrong place, I wouldn’t know how to correct it.  Still, those who do manage it look at coursing orders as part of the composition of what they are conducting.  They write it out using a grid with the calling positions across the top then as each course progresses and a call is made, they write the new coursing order under the calling position.  I’ve seen C do this a million times.  It’s like gobbledegook for the likes of me. 

If I sat down long enough with a piece of paper and the right frame of mind, I could probably work it out for a simple method like Plain Bob. For now I’ll let the clever sticks deal with it.

Is #bellringing the pursuit of aimless joy?

Image by Pexels from Pixabay

I was reading an article about how a woman and her child walked round and round in circles in the deep snow like Winnie the Pooh and Piglet.  It had no purpose, barely counted as exercise and once more snow fell they’d do it all again.  Sometimes for over an hour.  #bellringing can be a bit like that.  We can go ringing, be it practice night, a quarter peal or peal attempt, a training day or service ringing.  Sometimes #bellringing can have no real purpose but we do it anyway.  When the child was asked why she was trudging in circles in the snow for ages, seemingly pointlessly, her simple answer was because it’s fun. #bellringing can be like that too!

Ask people who make sand sculptures, or balance stones, why they do that when they know their efforts will be lost to the elements, and they’ll tell you that it helps them shed stress, entertain others and in some cases “mess with people’s heads”.  #bellringing can be like that too! Once we’ve rung our bells, the sound is lost for ever (unless you’ve recorded it and uploaded it to YouTube). It was transitory; there and now gone.  But we do it for the fleeting joy of the activity itself.

We can spend a lot of time obsessing over personal goals and problems, feeling the weight of expectation and the fears that go with them.  #bellringing can trick us into take a break from all of that.  I often consider it therapy after a bad day at the office.  To be able to do something physical, that requires my full attention, and stretches my brain.  It can become a meditation, a moment to be in the present.  When we ring with others we can feel that we are part of something bigger but it’s equally as transient as our few moments or hours of #bellringing itself.

When we think of #bellringing vanishing into the larger scheme of space and time, along with any method mistakes we may make, we needn’t be afraid to try a new bell, a new method, have a go at conducting something for the first time.  In the few moments that follow, it becomes ephemeral and consigned to history.

When your brain refuses to engage

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I run a friends and family virtual #bellringing session on a Thursday evening.  We have methods of the month, so we have four or five weeks to really get to grips with them.  This has been successful to varying degrees.  At the beginning of each month when we start new methods everyone is a bit tentative but its good to see that by the end of the month everyone is much more confident, and we can get plain courses round and even sometimes venture into touches.

For July I decided to try splicing two of the methods that we had previously rung rather than try to learn another new method.  This was to help consolidate our learning of the previous methods and introduce some people to the concept of splicing methods together and getting to know the lead end order.

I, for one cannot recite lead end order of methods, not even the ones I know very well.  Therefore, I do struggle a little when we splice some together, although I find it easier on tower bells than on virtual bells.  I totally understand the theory of the place bell that you are at backstroke when the method is changed, but for some reason really struggle to see it on Ringing Room in either 5ths or 6th place.  I can see it better in 2,d 3rds and 4ths. This inevitable means that I go the wrong way, and there’s a bit of a hiatus and/or clash as the bell doing to opposite work is trying to do what they should be doing. 

As with all of these new methods we are trying, I’m sure towards the end of the month it will be much improved.  What was noticeable last week was that on the Thursday evening I really struggled, yet on the Friday morning at a different practice but ringing the same things, I got it so much better.  Maybe it’s the difference between a practice in the evening after a day at work when my brain isn’t in gear, to first thing on a Friday morning, when its all fresh and keen.  I don’t know.

It was lovely to see our “sometimes” visitor Will this week who we haven’t seen for a couple of months.  He has an open invitation to come along when he can, so we never know if he’s going to show up or not, and he takes pot luck on what methods we are ringing, but it expert enough that it doesn’t matter to him.  Apart from C and myself, he’s never met any of the others in our Thursday night group in person, but it’s lovely that everyone is welcoming and friendly, and he joins in with the post ringing chat.  We’ve had some cracking conversations.

As with real ringing, there’s an element of apres ringing, in a virtual pub instead of the real thing, but C and I do take the opportunity to crack open a bottle of beer.  It’s almost like the real thing. 

Like so much else we are waiting for the chance to get back to real ringing, practice nights, quarters and peals… and the pub!

Place bell, lead end or coursing order – what is the difference and how do they help?

Image by Hatice EROL from Pixabay

A topic of conversation at this morning’s virtual #bellringing session attempted to explain the difference between place bell order and coursing order. The explanation may have been perfectly fine, but for at least two of us, our failure to comprehend, left us dazed and more confused.

Place bells could have two meanings (why would we want to make it easy):

  1. is a way to understand at what point in the change a bell strikes.  Typically, starting with rounds: 1,2,3,4,5,6 bell number 3 is in 3rds place.  Now if we were to mix the order of the bells up a bit by ringing a method, the order the bells strike might be 1,3,5,2,4,6 so now bell number 3 has moved and bell number 5 is now in 3rds place, i.e. it’s the bell that strikes 3rd in the change.
  2. Is to describe the piece of work a particular bell in that place starts with and what it might be doing next. E.g. 3rds place bell in Plain Bob Minor goes out to the back, plain hunts down to the front and makes 2nds next time.  Understanding that comes with a whole bunch of learning the different parts of work in the method. So if the ringing was getting a bit scrappy and someone told at you that you are 3rds place bell, it should help you get back on track by knowing what the work that 3rds place bell does.

Lead end order is the order of the place bells in a plain course of any given method.  So, using Plain Bob Minor again, the order the bells do the work can be described as 2,4,6,5,3 (we ignore the treble for these purposes as it plain hunts without doing the method work).  We could therefore say that 2nds place bell becomes 4ths place, which becomes 6ths place, then 5ths place and 3rds place. It defines the order of work to be rung.

Not to be confused with coursing order.  This is where the bells follow each other around.  Your course bell is the bell that follows you down to the lead. The bell that takes you off the lead is known as your after bell. In the above example if you were ringing the 5th, your course bell would be the 6th and your after bell would be the 3rd.  Coursing order is cyclical, so the bells will always cycle round the method in that way until a call is made.

Coursing order becomes particularly important when you start to ring touches of methods, a way of shortening or extending the piece of ringing by adding things called “bobs” or “singles” (there are other calls as well, but we’ll not worry about those here).  This is called Transposition.  Its’ what clever conductors use to know what order the bells should be in when a call is made.  Every time a call is made, it changes the order of the bells. Transposition helps you work out what the new coursing order is.

I’m not going to try and explain that here because much cleverer people that I have explained it elsewhere but if you’re really intrigued here’s a couple to start with: