Yea my nails are plain and simple today. Nails Inc Eaton Square, am itty bitty mini from one of those 'pay so much get this free' sets. It's actually rather more pink than it looks in the pictures.
The reason for this (the plainness not the colour discrepancy, that's site to poor lighting and laziness) is two fold. One, I'm going away for a few days next week so am trying to get ahead with at least the challenge manis for the week. And two, ringing. Ringing ringing ringing. A lot of it. I'm busy revising furiously for a particular thing we're doing on Sunday. A particularly terrifying thing lol.
The thing with ringing is.... You never get to rest on your laurels. You start and they teach you the two strokes, hand (pull the fluffybit, rope goes up) and back (pull the ropey bit, rope comes down). Then they get you to do them together. Then you do it lots and lots roll you're reasonably reliable at doing it without causing chaos.
At this point you can go yippee o know how to ring a bell.
Then they add in a whole bunch of other bells. This complicates life cos you have to learn to for in with a rhythm and keep your Bell striking in the right place. At this point we're still just thinking of the physical act of moving the Bell, the bells simply ring in order from 1 to 8 (or however many the Tower has). Then they start yelling things. And this changes the order. So you happily ringing the forth Bell after the third Bell might suddenly find the fifth has butted in ahead. This means not only do you have to learn to change speeds, you have to think at the same time and try to keep up with the instructions and what order the bells are in.
Phew that was hard work. But hey, look I'm making pretty music now. I've mastered call changes.
Then we move into the world of plain hunt. Instead of being told what to do as you go along you have to learn and remember. There's not a huge amount to it, on five bells if you're ringing the 1 you ring over 2453 and then repeat. This has the effect of putting you in first place (where you start) second, third, forth, fifth. Then one more in fifth and back down, forth, third, second, lead (first place). And all the bells do pretty much the same but starting at different points.
So with a mad mixture of those two things you find you're gradually able to slot yourself into the right holes.
The next thing is they get all the other bells to do something different while you keep plain hunting. You do the same thing essentially, 1-5 and back but do it several more times and ring after different bells...bye bye 2453- you can cling to it for a while in that the order goes 2453 repeat, 3245 repeat, 5324 repeat and so on.... Then they call 'Bob' and even that goes out the window.
Eventually after much practice your a fairly competent treble (number one Bell) ringer.
So they chuck you 'inside' onto a different Bell and get you to do what the others have been doing while you've been happily plain hunting. It's similar. But very, very different also. It's plain hunt with twiddles. So you might start of ringing first, second, third, fourth but then hop back to third before continuing on to fourth and fifth. This is called a 3/4 up dodge and is one of many fun things one can throw into patterns we call 'methods'.
The simplest has just a 3/4 up dodge, a 3/4 down dodge (the opposite as the name implies), for behind (hang around in fifth place for four strokes) and seconds (ring twice in seconds place then go back to first place).
And now we know plain Bob.
But that's only the start. Then that mysterious 'Bob' reappears. And instead of doing what you've learnt so diligently every time someone yells it you do something entirely different. Well maybe not entirely but different enough. And then move to a different part of the pattern and continue from there.
Just as you've desperately learnt all this in neat little lines and tables and think wow I can do a touch of plain Bob doubles that sounds clever they mess things up in new ways. They add in extra bells. Our they change the twiddles. They might change the rules for bobs.
So gradually you build up a repertoire of different patterns, aka methods.
Some of them are pretty difficult methods and you can be pretty pleased with yourself when you remember them right.
Sometimes you might be the one to yell the bobs at everyone else. And that's a whole new set of rules to learn.
But finally, the real kicker, the thing that is causing this long terror induced ramble: they introduce splicing. You sit and carefully learn several different methods. Then you chop them up at designated points. Then shuffle them and put them back together in an order specified by the conductor (that's the Bob yelling guy (my predictive text thinks that should be 'git', I'm saying nothing lol). And your brain leaks out of your ears.
And I love it. Not so much the terror I must confess but the general ringing thing. It's amazing. In fact I love it more than polish :p.
This of course is totally nonsensical. And thoroughly boring if you don't happen to be a ringer. And pretty boring if you do happen to be a ringer since you know it already lol.
But the really important thing about this post is this: it allowed me to procrastinate for a good twenty minutes ;-). Night. X
No comments:
Post a Comment