On one of my trips last year, when looking for something to read on the plane, for a change I browsed the business section of the airport bookshop instead of the fiction section. I picked up a book called What Got You Here Won't Get You There, by Marshall...

Among the quarters we rang on the most recent handbell day was one of Plain Bob Major, which was Colin's first quarter away from the tenors. As I often do for Bob Major, I called the standard 720 of Bob Minor (i.e. Wrong Home Wrong 6 times, single Home half...

That's a difficult question to answer. Who should we try to count? Everyone who can ring plain hunting on a coursing pair? Everyone who can ring Plain Bob Minor from the trebles or tenors? Everyone who rings handbells regularly?

Instead we can answer an easier question: how many people have...

As mentioned on the blog previously, I followed Richard Johnston's instructions to convert a set of coloured toy handbells into a decent set of practice bells by fitting them with better clappers and leather handles. Here's what you end up with:

It's amazing how good they sound, considering that the...

Yesterday evening we rang with Marcus; we had agreed to go for a quarter of Pudsey. I decided that we all need more practice at all the positions in Pudsey, so I put together a composition in which each handbell pair rings at least a whole course of every position...

On Monday we made some more progress with what is becoming our regular 10-bell band, with a peal of Cambridge Royal. We rang Jonathan's new bells, so they have now been properly christened. The peal wasn't perfect by any means, and the speed was a little variable, but it held...

It so happens that Simon's mother has lately taken up handbell tune ringing (or, as the rest of the world seems to know it, English handbell ringing).  Last weekend we went to see her in concert with her group, the Alton Handbell Ringers.

This was an outdoor affair, part of...

I have managed to squeeze another handbell ringing session into our already packed schedule. One of our ringers in Glasgow, Iain, has returned to ringing in his retirement after learning to handle at Inveraray a long time ago and then spending many years working abroad. He is keen on trying...

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...

Our seventh Scottish Handbell Day started with Plain Bob, finished with Glasgow and in between there was a lot more Plain Bob, fun with other plain methods, extremely satisfactory plain hunting, and well, just more fun.

We had a smaller pool of ringers on this day, which sometimes isn't a...