It's Lincolnshire week! Yesterday I attempted a quarter of Lincolnshire Royal in Ringing Room, with Mike Purday, Simon Rudd, Simon Humphrey and Alban Forster. It was going really well until just before the end of the second course, when we were hit by such severe delays that we had to stop. Delays in Ringing Room are different from Handbell Stadium - when it gets really bad there can be pauses of a couple of seconds, after which all the bells pile up in a great rush. It's very difficult to keep going. In Handbell Stadium, delays seem to get spread out through the change more.

Encouraged by the attempt, we met again this afternoon, and succeeded with a nice quarter in 44 minutes - under 3 hour peal speed. We managed to build up quite a good rhythm for most of it.

Mike Purday called a composition that I don't think I've rung before.

1282 Lincolnshire Surprise Royal

W  H  23456
------------
   2  34256
s  s  52436
s    (32456)
------------

I rang 5-6 and it was nice: two and a half courses of 5-6 position, then a course of 3-4 position. 3-4 get the 3-4 and coursing positions, with half a course of 7-8 position towards the end.

I was briefly confused by one of Mike's conducting comments. When approaching the lead end 1089674523 a little bit of confirmation was needed, and he said "one ten lead end". For a moment I thought he was giving an instruction to plain hunt instead of dodging (i.e. ring place notation 10). To announce that particular lead end, I usually say "handstroke roll-up" or "roll round at handstroke", but everyone has their own style.

We agreed that Lincolnshire is the easiest of the three common right-place surprise royal methods - certainly it's much easier than Yorkshire. Cambridge has the advantage of familiarity, but the structure of Lincolnshire is easy to follow.