“Better never than late”

Before I learned to ring I did a lot of contra dancing, which is what Americans did to English country dances. One caller would say at the end of his beginner lessons, “the rule is ‘better never than late’.” The music and the other dancers aren’t going to slow down or stop, so if you miss something in the dance, it may be better to just skip it and get ready for the next thing!

One way I apply this phrase to ringing is with learners catching the sally. If you fumble or miss the sally, making another attempt often throws off your overall rhythm and messes up the next stroke as well. Far better, in my opinion, to give up on that handstroke so that you can focus on the next backstroke and make sure it’s really good.

I want to write here about another context in ringing where I think “better never than late” applies: ringing by ropesight.

What if the person you’re supposed to follow isn’t there?

One of the biggest issues with ringing by knowing who to follow—whether it’s methods, plain hunt, call changes, or even just rounds!—is that your accuracy depends on the other ringers being accurate too.

This issue is one of several reasons many teachers, myself included, recommend working on ringing by rhythm and/or by knowing what place you’re in.

However, you don’t have to switch entirely to a different ringing strategy (even if that were possible, which it probably isn’t) to avoid this problem! It’s also not necessary to just abandon your ropesight skills. You can take a small step in the direction of ringing by place and rhythm by having a good strategy for the times when, for whatever reason, you can’t see who you’re supposed to follow.

The strategy I recommend is: just like fumbling the sally, if you “fumble” seeing the rope to ring after, give up on seeing it for that stroke, ring anyway, and start looking for the next rope you’ll be following.

If your response to not immediately seeing who to ring after is to hold up your bell and keep looking, it’s very likely that even if you do see the rope and try to follow them, you will have rung late. Maybe they were late and by waiting for them you’re correct relative to them but the whole row is stretching out now! Or maybe they were in entirely the wrong place so now you are too! Or maybe they were correct, but by the time you saw them it was too late to actually ring your bell correctly right after them.

If instead you simply ring anyway and focus on preparing for the next stroke, it is entirely possible that you will ring at exactly the right time! It’s nice to feel like you know precisely what you’re doing, but it’s not actually a requirement for accurate ringing.

A very specific example

I have extended my own advice in this post so far as to have given up almost entirely on seeing who I follow specifically when I’m in 3rds place on my way down to lead. Leading is such an important point for maintaining the overall rhythm and making sure I’m in sync with everyone else, and ringing accurately in 2nds place is also super important for keeping up the overall rhythm! So I want to have all my attention available for ringing in 2nds place, leading, and ringing in 2nds place again. It’s not that ringing accurately in 3rds place isn’t important, it’s that 3rds place (on the way down) might be the worst place to get distracted from what’s happening next. I’m generally more likely to know in advance who I take off lead, which is who I’ll follow when I’m in 2nds place, than who I’ll follow when I’m in 3rds place. This might increase the temptation to look around when I’m in 3rds place, but it also makes it easy to just move on and start looking at the person I’ll follow when I’m in 2nds place.

Practicing moving on

It has just occurred to me that an exercise I did a lot as a new ringer may have been a big help in learning to stay with the overall ringing rhythm even if I made a mistake.

We called the exercise “whole pull stand”, but an important component was that the tenor didn’t stand. Everyone would ring a whole pull, then everyone but the tenor would try to hold their bell at the balance point while the tenor rang a whole pull, then we’d ring rounds again for a whole pull, then wait at the balance while just the tenor rings, etc.

In this exercise if you don’t manage to stand your bell when you should, you don’t keep trying to stand it! You ring four blows and THEN try to stand again. Once you’ve failed to reach the balance point, that opportunity is gone because the rest of the ringers won’t wait for you. As soon as the rope starts coming down again, your goal shifts: ring in front of the tenor this whole pull, ring in rounds the next whole pull, and only then try again to stand. It’s exactly “better never than late”!

I don’t remember much of how I experienced this as a learner, but now I think I’d actually appreciate the fact that if I don’t stand this time, I get a little moment to just ring before I try to stand again. It’s freeing to accept that that was in the past and I can’t change it! Now I must redirect my attention to the immediate future where I can change things.