At the most recent practice at St Mary’s in Edinburgh, Ian Bell dubbed me Alison “pull the handstrokes less” Stevens. I think he would agree that I’ve been on a mission almost since I moved here to get people to pull less in general!
It’s normal in ringing to overpull a small amount most of the time, so that it’s possible to make some adjustments closer to when the bell actually strikes. If you don’t pull enough, too bad—there’s nothing you can do until the next stroke. If you pull a little bit too much, you can compensate if needed by resisting the rope on the way up.
I’m more or less resigned to that kind of overpulling. I think sometimes ringers get complacent with it and could benefit from continued work on minimizing that small amount. The amount of overpulling that can be compensated for decreases a lot for heavy bells. If you get into a habit on lighter bells of overpulling and correcting, you may struggle somewhat on heavier bells, or even on lighter bells when ringing for longer periods of time.
But what I want to write about today is a different kind of overpulling, a kind I think is far more important to address. Let me give some context!
Ringing faster means ringing down (a little)
The rate at which an individual bell rings depends on how high up it swings. Ringing a bell up causes it to swing higher and higher, meaning the bell swings in a larger arc, meaning it takes more and more time. Ringing a bell up slows it down. Ringing a bell down speeds it up.
(Huh, I never noticed before that we use opposite prepositions here—ring up = slow down. English is weird!)
If you’re ringing an up bell, and you want to ring a bit faster for whatever reason, the efficient thing to do is bring the bell down a tiny bit.
How do you bring a bell down a tiny bit? By pulling less.
Put less energy into the bell so that it doesn’t swing quite as high, and it will come back down and ring a bit quicker! Easy, right?
The problem
Unfortunately, sometimes the moment you realize you want/need to ring faster is also the moment you realize you are already going to be late on this stroke aaaaaaaaa panic!!!!!
Okay I pulled that handstroke too much and my backstroke is going to be late, let me resist this rope, now yank the backstroke down in hope of getting it early enough…phew that wasn’t too bad, oh no gotta keep the bell from bouncing, argh I pulled the backstroke too much and now this handstroke is going to be late! Better pull it down early too…
Do you see where this is going? In attempting to fix the immediate problem—my next blow is going to be late—I have put energy into the bell rather than taking energy out, so that even if I’ve “fixed” the next blow, the one after that is now also going to be late! My attempted solution has actually made the problem worse. I’ve gotten into a vicious cycle of overpulling.
There’s a compounding factor in this that I only noticed last year. If you let a bell rope fall at its own pace—meaning your hands move just with it rather than pulling it—it moves very slowly at first! Especially if you’re anywhere near the balance point. A gentle pull actually takes a surprisingly long time!
A solution
The strategy I use to prevent or interrupt a vicious cycle of the type described above is: accept that my next blow will be late and focus on being suuuper gentle so that the bell will be at the height I want going forward. Solving the immediate “problem” of a blow being late risks causing the worse problem (to my mind at least) of my bell being way too high. So I address the bigger problem, which is probably what caused the immediate problem anyway!
I think it is sometimes possible to fix both problems at once—to correct both the timing of the next blow and the overall bell height in one swell foop (ahem, one fell swoop). But this would require a great deal of precision and control in handling! Honestly, a big reason I adopted the strategy just described is not for the ringing itself, but to train my response to panic. If panicking causes me to do something that makes me panic more, that’s bad! Then I’m in a vicious cycle of overpulling AND panic! I’ve attempted to train myself to respond to panic while ringing by relaxing, being more gentle, if I’m going to make any physical change at all. I think I’ve done okay at this, so I might now have enough control to actually fix both problems at once. But I probably needed the time spent knowing my next blow would be late and just allowing that before I could get to this point.
Know your tendencies
I still get moments of what I’ve been calling panic, which is a very mild, “oh no I’m in the wrong place / aaaa I pulled too much” (less often “oops I didn’t pull enough”). I’m much less often confused or lost now than in my first couple years of ringing. But confusion will do just as well as panic for causing the issues I have described in this post! I’ve seen many ringers…well, basically have a sort of default ringing speed, and any time they’re confused that’s the speed they return to. Or maybe they have a default thing they do when confused—with recent learners, it might be a handling issue that they’ve mostly fixed but that creeps back in when they’re distracted.
Of course ideally we wouldn’t have these moments of panic or confusion, but I don’t think they can be avoided entirely. So it’s worth preparing to deal with panic and confusion, and working to respond to them in ways that don’t make things worse. If your natural response to confusion is to hold your bell up and ring more slowly (a very common response!), you can easily end up in a vicious cycle similar to what I’ve described here. You can work on preventing the confusion in the first place, but also working on responding to confusion by relaxing and staying at the same speed might do a whole lot to reduce the confusion!
Alison has an epiphany
I don’t think I’d realized until writing this that my strategy for dealing with a vicious cycle of overpulling is also my strategy for regaining control of my body when it’s doing something I don’t want. But now that I’m thinking about it, I believe having a strategy for generally altering your actions is far more important than any specific handling technique! All the handling advice in the world won’t help if habits or confusion or panic get in the way of applying it. I think we sometimes underestimate how complex a skill “doing something on command” is, but it is absolutely a skill worth working on in its own right.
Among Sallies and Bobs 