The Five O'Clock Handbell Club

Most of my online ringing in the last couple of months has been with Gareth Davies' Five O'Clock Handbell Club. The way it works is that Gareth sends an email on Thursday with suggested quarters for the following week. Everyone who wants to can say which quarters they would like to ring. On Sunday, Gareth sends an email stating the band for each quarter, and designating a convenor who takes charge of negotiating the band placing and making sure there's a conductor. The quarter then takes place in Ringing Room, or occasionally in Handbell Stadium.

Last week we scored a quarter of Kent Maximus, which was the 50th quarter by the club. The methods have gradually got more ambitious as we have all gained confidence with online ringing. Sometimes everything goes smoothly, and sometimes we get severe delays that make it impossible. Sometimes we lose quarters because of good old-fashioned fire-ups.

This week has had the most ambitious schedule yet, and unfortunately the success rate has been correspondingly low. On Monday an attempt of Glasgow, which I wasn't in, was lost 4 leads from the end when someone's motion controllers stopped working. On Tuesday we went for Cambridge Maximus, as the next step from Little Bob and Kent, but struggled with a combination of delays and imperfect method ringing. We rang half a course a couple of times. Today was Bristol Royal, which again suffered from network delays. After a few attempts we rang a plain course quite well, so there is definitely potential for another time. Tomorrow I am in an attempt for Stedman Cinques, and then on Friday there's an attempt of Deva which I am not in (Tina, Dorothy and I have started kayaking on Friday evenings).

After our successes with Little Bob and Kent Maximus, which I called, I was asked to call the Cambridge Maximus. I decided that possibly the easiest handbell composition is sW, sH, sW, H. In this calling, 5-6 only ring the 5-6 and 3-4 positions, and 3-4 ring two courses of the 3-4 position followed by half a course of coursing.

I also found myself calling the Bristol Royal. There was quite a lot of demand for coursing pairs, so we decided to start at the snap and call sW, W sW, W. This keeps 5-6 coursing throughout, and 3-4 ring two courses of 3-4 position followed by two courses of coursing. After abandoning the quarter, the plain course we rang also had a snap start, and we managed it, so we were getting more familiar with the method.

Looking back at the records of my online quarters on BellBoard, I was surprised to see that the Five O'Clock Club started all the way back in June. We have all become much better at online ringing since then. The first quarter I called was Lincolnshire, and I found it really difficult. But now I am able to look at the screen to see the coursing order, which helps.

It's frustrating when we are hit by severe network delays, but I have to remind myself how amazing it is that online ringing works at all, and how lucky we are that a few ringers have been able to develop resources such as Handbell Stadium and Ringing Room to keep us all going. The latest development, which Simon Rudd told us about yesterday, is a "bot" (software ringer) for Ringing Room, which can ring any composition taken from CompLib and automatically adjusts its speed to compensate for variations in the ringing. Maybe I will write more about that another time, when I've had a chance to try it out thoroughly.