[r-t] Anything Goes vs Peals Mean Something

[Don Morrison]

On Fri, Aug 8, 2008 at 9:13 AM, Graham John <graham at changeringing.co.uk> wrote:
> RAS wrote in reply to me:
>
>>> But people ring false quarters, that doesn't make them acceptable.
>> Do they?  Intentionally?  That's news to me.
>
> One example that comes to mind is that people have rung quarters of Little
> Bob Minor, without splicing it with an Alliance method, or using variable
> hunt.

The comment I'm about to make is probably irrelevant to the immediate
goals of our current discussion, as we are discussing what people
consciously set out to ring. But somehow it seems a vaguely useful
piece of context to bear in mind.

I believe people ring a lot of false peals now, never withdrawn. And
probably not needing to be withdrawn according to the standards most
peal bands really use. A dirty little secret we keep in the family,
essentially. Examples include

a) If we ring a peal of triples and there is any minor trip in it that
causes one pair of bells to strike in the opposite order to that
intended, just once, the peal is almost certainly false. It would
require a remarkably fortuitous compensatory error somewhere else to
make it true again.

b) I'm sure it has happened that someone calling a complicated peal of
spliced has accidentally misremembered, say, a lead of Lincolnshire as
Cambridge, and called it that way, without ever being aware of it, and
without anyone else in the band ever being aware of it. In some cases
he or she will be lucky and it's true, but often, probably in the
majority of such cases, it's false.

c) In (b) what is reported to have been rung actually differs from
what was rung. But you can nearly as easily get the same effect
without changing a word of what is reported. Imagine mistakenly
remembering a course of a calling as LNCPS as LCNPS. Doesn't change
the report of what you've rung at all (modulo it might change the
atw-ishness, but if the correct version weren'r atw), but likely makes
it false. And what are the chances anyone, including the conductor,
would ever know if it weren't noticed at the time?

I'm sure there are lots of other cases.

It appears that our standards for what we set out to do are
considerably higher than our standards for what we really do do.
Whether this is a good thing or not I don't really know. It does seem
mildly ironic, though.



-- 
Don Morrison <dfm at ringing.org>
"Organic chemistry is the study of carbon compounds. Biochemistry
is the study of carbon compounds that crawl."           -- Mike Adams