Back in the days of ringing with Roger Bailey at Imperial College in the early 1990s, it frequently happened that handbell ringers visiting London would contact Roger and ask whether he could organise a peal for them. He was always happy to oblige. I have had it in mind for...

After discovering Nottinghamshire Delight as a major method with the key features of Fermanagh, I started thinking about other major methods that have key features of the royal or maximus methods that I'm interested in. There are lots of surprise major methods with Zanussi points at the back, but what...

The plan for Monday this week was to practise Fermanagh Surprise Royal, but we were one short because of illness. As Nottinghamshire Delight Major has a similar structure - Cornwall with some wrong hunting inserted into the frontwork - we decided to ring a quarter of it, and managed very...

Last week we rang a quarter of Plain Bob Major with Colin, which we had not quite managed to complete on handbell day. It went smoothly. For a change, I called this composition, which is a nice one-liner.

1280 Plain Bob Major

W  B  H  23456
--------------
-  2  2...

Handbell day went well, with a few quarter peal successes and a range of useful practice sessions. Everyone seemed to enjoy it. We had mixed results with the Top and Up. Jonathan's group managed to ring the whole touch of spliced maximus, while the other groups got as far as...

This is about methods in general rather than handbell ringing, but I came to it while pondering Buckfastleigh as a possible method to ring next time we find ourselves with only four people. It's one of the methods from Chandler's 23-spliced, but isn't rung very often by itself. I've never...

A couple of weeks ago I rang David Pipe's "particles" peal of spliced maximus, on tower bells at Tulloch. It's a cyclic 12-part consisting of methods designed to generate lots of music based on forward and backward runs of consecutive bells. Most of the methods are best learned from...

It's been a while, but now I can get back to writing about ringing, instead of writing about writing about ringing. First, though, let me report that we went to the Ringing Roadshow and sold nearly all of the books that we took. There were also quite a few sales...

We did it! Change-Ringing on Handbells (Volume 2: Advanced Techniques) is now available from Amazon.

Tina and I will be at the Ringing Roadshow 2022 on Sunday 4th September, launching Change-Ringing on Handbells (Volume 2: Advanced Techniques) as well as selling Volume 1 and mugs with the interlocking handbell design. We also look forward to talking to visitors about their experiences of learning to ring...