Last weekend was an intensive ringing weekend, although not quite as intensive as originally planned. It all started with an invitation to attempt Cyclic Six Maximus on handbells as part of a weekend of peals celebrating the 25th anniversary of the first performance of David Pipe's classic composition. That was going to be at the famous handbell address of 19 The Green, Romanby, Northallerton - Jennie and David Town's house. The plan for the weekend evolved to include first a tower bell peal of Cyclic Six on Saturday at Stockton, and then a Friday evening handbell peal of Cambridge Royal in Northallerton.

Things turned out a bit differently. First the handbell peal of Cyclic Six evaporated, for reasons that I won't go into. Next the Friday evening peal was changed to Bristol Major because illness removed a member of the band. We rang a very good peal with only about half a dozen trips in total. As it was relatively short notice I called the Roger Bailey composition instead of revising the Mark Davies composition. We also rang a good peal in the tower on Saturday, but the difficulty was getting from Penrith (I stayed at Julia's after the Friday evening peal) to Stockton through the snow.

It would be good to go and ring handbells in Northallerton again, especially if I can combine it with something else. It's quite a journey, but more practical than going to Reading. In any case we want to organise a handbell Cyclic Six with a northern band - I really did a lot of practice in advance of this weekend and I don't want to waste it. Watch this space!

For one reason and another, we seem to have an ever-increasing number of different combinations of people coming to ring more or less regularly. There's our "core four", of course. Despite trying to coordinate Seph with the core four in order to do some 10-bell ringing, we've slipped back into...

One of the things that came out of the aftermath of Roger Bailey's death and subsequent memorial arrangements was that Marcus Wheel has officially come out of handbell retirement.

Our sitting room - several sets of handbells and the Handbell Club hunting charts

Four of us met last night for a pretty lighthearted evening of ringing, which included courses of Cambridge, Yorkshire and Lincolnshire...

Roger Bailey ringing handbells

The Bear has left us.  That prolific, amusing, travelled, entertaining, exasperating and sometimes grumpy one more often known as Roger Bailey has left us.  For us, it is an enormously personal loss, as it will be with so many other handbell ringers.

For Roger rang with just about everybody, and...