This morning I came across an interesting blog post on productivity, which is titled 'The McDonald's Theory' (there's a link at the bottom of this post).  The theme is how to get started on a project, particularly a difficult, long, or still rather amorphous project.  The conclusion: just start, even...

In the face of tonsilitis, winter vomiting bug, holiday schedules, the midwinter bellringing blues and the continued absence of our increasingly awesome head conductor, we met again to ring handbells with Marcus.

(I know it is April and therefore technically spring.  But, you know, only technically.  The body clock is...

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.

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

I have been roadtesting our new set of amped-up Kidsplay handbells these past couple of weeks.

(We have gotten into the habit of calling these the 'toy handbells', but we really need a better name....any suggestions?

As I had hoped, these handbells have been very useful to the Handbell Club. ...

... Jonathan has a lovely new Whitechapel set, which he brought with him yesterday evening. It's a 12, size 15 in C, with a flat 6th to give a light 8, size 12 in F. We christened the light 8 with a nice quarter of 8-spliced; usual band placing, we...

After a tour de force of organisation by Tina, we have rung a total of four handbell peals in memory of Roger, involving nine different people who between them rang over 700 peals with him. All except the first were scored at the first attempt, and ringing three handbell peals...

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...

We're very sad that Roger has gone. We failed to ring a peal in his memory yesterday evening, but we managed a quarter afterwards. We'll try again for the peal another day.

Roger had a huge influence on my handbell ringing. I first met him in October 1991, when...

This Thursday past I started a new block of beginning handbell ringers at our local primary school.  They were a great group and it looks like they may progress well.  I couldn't help notice, though, that a lot of the children had a pretty good idea what I was going...

Quite a long time ago, I produced tables of the most popular methods for handbell peals of Major, Royal and Maximus, which showed that although Yorkshire Major is more commonly rung than Cambridge Major, the preference is reversed on higher numbers.

Just for fun, here are the five...