We were four today; Andrew, Jane, Maggie, and Randy. I haven’t posted in a while, and while we have been learning a lot of things, we hadn’t rung a plain course of Bob Major lately. We tried last week, and struggled! We did get it on the third or fourth attempt. So this week we decided to ring a plain course of Bob Major.

Jane was on the trebles, Maggie on 3/4, Randy on 5/6, and Andrew on the tenors. And we nailed it, thankfully. So we decided to try a touch.

For the touch, Maggie and Jane swapped bells. Andrew called the touch. It was something simple and we got through it fairly easily. Except that somehow the 2 and the 5 swapped positions. And so it didn’t come round at the end, sadly. But it still sounded nice, and we had fun.

After chatting a bit about other ringing we had done, we decided to ring a triples method. We had never rung anything on 7 bells, or if we have it has been a long time. For those who don’t know, ringing triples is actually rung on 8 bells, but the tenor never changes position, so effectively you are ringing 7 bells. This was fun, and we struggled to get a full plain course (all of 2 * 7 * 5 = 70 changes), but we did finish a plain course after three or four attempts.

From that point, Jane decided that we should try to ring a plain course of Grandshire triples, a method that she detests, mostly because her father (may he rest in peace) thought it was overdone and so didn’t like ringing it. But she explained the method to us, and off we went. This is an interesting method, because you treat the trebles as a single unit; they are always coursing, and when you get to the end of a lead, the bell in thirds place needs to make thirds. And since it is a triples method, the tenor is always in the eighth position. Again, we struggled with this method some, but got it right on the third or fourth attempt. And with that, we called it a night.