A few weeks ago I went to Edinburgh to ring a quarter of Cambridge Royal with Ian, Barbara, Susannah and Nick. After Nick went home we practised Malpas, which is part of the Edinburgh band's project to ring Mark Davies' series of spliced peals. Subsequently they rang a quarter of Malpas, and Ian commented that Susannah and James were the only people with handbell performances of Malpas on BellBoard who were not related to other people with handbell performances of Malpas on BellBoard. The explanation for this is that apart from the Edinburgh band, which includes Ian and Barbara who are married, the only other recorded handbell performance was a peal by Graham and Janet John and Jack and Daniel Page.
I've started online ringing again with a couple of different bands. One band is myself, Simon Rudd, Jeff Ladd and Peter Randall. I suggested we try Malpas as I found it quite interesting, and today we duly scored a quarter. We're finding it tricky to arrange times that we can all manage, but we do have another date in July and the next method is Buckfastleigh. I will write about the method another time, but like Malpas it's one of the methods in Chandler's 23-spliced, and therefore quite tricky. One possibility for the band with Simon, Jeff and Peter is to ring quarters of all the Chandler's methods, which could lead to ringing the peal. I haven't rung Chandler's 23-spliced even on tower bells - in fact it's probably the most glaring hole in my ringing CV - but ringing it on handbells is very difficult and rarely done. That's thinking too far ahead, but meanwhile a project of 23 methods will probably suit the other three ringers as they have just finished ringing quarters of all 147 regular treble dodging minor methods at a rate of one per week.
