Ringing Forums

I try not to think about it too much...

one of the 'disruptive events' that I considered in the final article on Thinking The Unthinkable was the effect an energy crisis would have on a ringing community that has become dependent on car travel, see: https://jaharrison.me.uk/New/Articles/Unthinkable/10.pdf

a series worth re printing in the RW.

We had all the same points made when the cost of petrol rose from 60p/gallon to £1/gallon. Messages of doom permeated the Ringing World - "The end is nigh . . . district meetings will be killed off . . . what about our senior members who can't afford it . . ." and so on.

When I started ringing petrol was around 4s.10p (24p) per gallon, that's around 5p per litre and I put 4 gallons into the tank of my 1954 Ford Popular for less than an a quid.Things change, life moves on and we are still ringing.

On a similar theme, a peal met short this weekend because one member of the band's electric car did not have enough juice to get them there, and two charging points en route were broken. Has anyone had that happen before in ringing context?

A very sobering read; even more so given that so much of what that series discusses is still a problem now.

yes, but some things have already been improved or are in the process of being improved. Look at the reform of the CC (which some societies are thinking about trying to follow) and the framework for method ringing. We still have some of the harder problems to tackle though.

On a related note, whereas in the past Central Council committees might have met face to face on a regular basis, with travel expenses being a significant part of committee budgets, since I have been President I think there has only been one. There doesn't seem to be a lot to be gained from dragging people around the country to meet face to face compared with the benefit to individuals of retaining more of their personal time. So we are saving money and enabling volunteers to be more efficient.

Yesterday though I went from Birmingham to Wells on CC business (an eight hour round trip), and was able to calculate the marginal cost of getting there and back compared with the CC expenses policy. I made a small loss.