[r-t] Minor Blocks

[Mark Davies]

Robin writes,

> There are several, but here's one. Consider Single/Double St. Hilda's
> Bob. This is simply Plain/Double Bob with the lead-ends re-labelled. A
> 'plain' is re-labelled a 'bob', and vice versa to give, nominally, a
> three-lead triple hunting course.

This isn't anything to do with my "Option F" is it? Option F concerns 
lead divisibility and rotations of methods only.

> As reagards aliases, this is all very well but do we want to encourage
> this in the future? As an example, my lad noticed a 1319 of Stedman.
> This needs an 'odd' start. Do we want to encourage a new name for this,
> 'New Stedman' even?

This is a good point, though. It seems to me that it would be an 
excellent thing to recognise "old" aliases, such as Plain Hunt/Original 
and Bastow/Cloister, and that in some cases we have discussed (Magenta, 
Morning Star) the use of aliases would neatly solve the lead 
divisibility problem, too. However, do we really want people giving new 
names to rotations of existing methods willy-nilly?

I think this might well be a major problem, since (a) rotations of 
Stedman, and snap starts in Surprise, are frequently rung, and (b) 
ringers really like giving new names to methods. So we'd almost 
certainly end up with eleven new aliases for Stedman, as well as 
innumerable new Surprise Major names. This, as you point out, is unhelpful.

So yes, I think you are right. The use of aliases for new rotations of 
existing methods seems problematic, so (please Tim, Matthew!) I would 
like to change Option F to cover lead divisibility only. This means that 
Original and Plain Hunt could both appear in the libraries, as well as 
any variants of Magenta or 6th's place Morning Star with the shorter 
lead length, but New Grandsire, Cloister and St Helens would not, nor 
would it be possible to name new rotations.

I think that's better. Ringing a variant of a method with a multiple or 
factor of the lead length is only likely to happen in the extreme cases 
we have discussed, where it actually makes sense to do so. I think?

MBD