[r-t] Consultation

[King, Peter R]

One word of correction:

>>You saw the incredibly non-easy rule PRK gave for Albanian! You don’t learn a rule which is more complicated than learning the line. (It >>looked like a three-volume novel, rather than a simple rule.) Not all methods have easy rules - or even rules at all - for ringing them.

It wasn’t I who came up with this “rule” for Albanian. It was Andrew Johnson.

I think Don has a perfectly valid point about leadhead nomenclature. If I take a plain course of PB major then it might seem sensible to label the leadend/heads in order a,b,c etc as indeed is done. Except, on higher stages we haven’t defined enough letters, but you can just about accept keeping a for the first leadhead of PB and f for the penultimate and interpolating c1,d2 etc in between, although it gets a bit cumbersome. Now when you get to triples you might think that the first leadhead of PB (ie 13527460 would be called a, but no it’s p. Now you might not like PB7 because of the 4 blows behind, but there are plenty of “well formed” methods (like Abba Bob, to take the first in the alphabet) with this leadhead. Would it not be more sensible to have one set of codes for single hunt methods and another (the letters p,q etc) for twin hunt methods. I know there is historical baggage about method extension between even and odd (and vice versa) stages but if you were to think of ethods in their own right and not worry about relationships between stages then I don’t think you would have come up with this “system”.

I also realise that 99% of ringers wouldn’t recognise a “b type” method if it leapt at them in the dark, but that isn’t the point. Surely the point is to have a simple and easy to understand notation that would enable ringers to get into this stuff if they wanted to. I sometimes think we put many ringers off understanding methods, method structure, theory etc by using arcane terminology and rules.

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