Another week in cyberspace

Three online quarter peal attempts again this week, but only two scored. On Wednesday we tried Yorkshire Royal in Ringing Room, but there were a lot of delays and it didn't go. Thursday was London Major, again in Ringing Room, which we rang very well. Actually that was my first quarter in Ringing Room. I used my Tim Hart 3D-printed dummy handbells and my Mac version of Handbell Manager, and they worked well. Finally, this morning we rang a quarter of Cambridge Maximus in Handbell Stadium, with the same band as last week's Kent Maximus. We didn't manage to ring quite as quickly as the Kent, but we squeezed in just under the one-hour mark. Much of the ringing was pretty good, but there were patches with significant delays which we had to fight our way through.

Also I joined the Handbell Stadium practice on Friday evening, and rang Double Oxford Minor, Plain Bob Minor and Oxford Major. I haven't rung Oxford on more than six for a long time. It's harder to keep track of than Kent because the 3-4 places at the beginning of the lead swap a pair of bells over, until they swap back at the end of the lead. And that's on top of the treble replacing the slow bell, which happens in the same way as in Kent.

So what happens in Oxford is that the slow bell is replaced by the treble in the coursing order during each lead, and the bells on either side of the slow bell in the coursing order are swapped over. Here are the coursing orders in each lead.

Lead number Lead head Slow bell Coursing order
1 12345678 2 8754136
2 14263857 4 8753612
3 16482735 6 7532814
4 18674523 8 5324716
5 17856342 7 5183246
6 15738264 5 8317246
7 13527486 3 8721546

This means that if you want to follow what's going on and be able to get the bells to lead in the right order, you have to do a coursing order transposition at the beginning of every lead. So the concentration level is higher. Also, of course, the pairs change position more than they do in Kent, so overall there are several factors counteracting the absence of wrong places in 3-4.