Listen With Others

Well, this one was intriguing, on a subject of which I am almost entirely ignorant!

Thanks Vismut!

I recall tens of years ago someone at work once bringing in a book of bell-ringing ‘sequences’ (I am sure there’s an official word I should be using here!), with ‘his’ bell highlighted down the pages in squiggly fashion.  I’d never seen such horizontal lines being given names, though!

For most of my time solving this puzzle I wasn’t sure that the ‘sets of six’ in the preamble meant 1ac-to-13ac, 14ac-28ac etc and had been assuming the sets of six could be any combinations of six answers.  As you might imagine, this slowed me down somewhat!  Eventually I had cold-solved enough clues to start jigsawing them together: it then became clear that many of the entries were in their expected places.  And only then did I really see what was going on, once jumbles of JOKERS, PRIORY, KENNET, QUEENS appeared as the added letters in consecutive sets of six!

I was also initially surprised by the order of the second set of answers – and only realised much later on that there were (at least) two ways of considering the given number sequences, namely:

(a)    Unjumble the letters in each six and write down the order.  This seemed to give
ROUNDS (then take the nth letter it gives the sequence 123456 (to spell ROUNDS)
QENUES (then take the nth letter it gives the sequence 142536 or 145236 (to spell QUEENS)
JREKOS (then take the nth letter it gives the sequence 154326 (to spell JOKERS)
PIRROY (then take the nth letter it gives the sequence 132546 or 142536 (to spell PRIORY)
KENNET (then take the nth letter it gives the sequence eg 153426 (to spell KENNET)
ULLORP (then take the nth letter it gives the sequence 543216 (to spell ROLLUP)
All matched the entry order except QUEENS, which seemed to go in as 135246.

(b)   Take the name of the sequence, write the sequence for it alongside it and then take out letters from it in that order.  This seemed to give
QUEENS (whose sequence is) 135246 (and whose letters in that order are) QENUES
JOKERS (whose sequence is) 154326 (and whose letters in that order are) JREKOS
PRIORY (whose sequence is) 132546 (and whose letters in that order are) PIRROY
KENNET (whose sequence is) 153426 (and whose letters in that order are) KENNET
ROLLUP (whose sequence is) 543216 (and whose letters in that order are) ULLORP
These all match up with the orders of the extra letters derived from clues.

From (a) I was expecting to see the name TITTUMS or JACKS (I think they were) for set 2.  But from (b) it seemed all to be OK for it to be QUEENS.  It is still slightly baffling me why this works one way round and not the other – perhaps just coincidence, or perhaps all the others ‘flip’ between two letter-orders when that sequence is applied?  Not sure!

Thanks again to Vismut – I loved it!  

Cheers & stay safe,

Tim / Encota