Yesterday was the Scottish Handbell Day, which went very well. We rang 8 quarters, which is more than we have managed for quite some time, and there were several good firsts. There were a couple of sessions that I had designated as practice or quarter, because someone was trying a method for the first time - one was Yorkshire Royal and one was Bristol Royal. In each case, I said we would start with a plain course and if we got to the end nicely, I would make a call and proceed with a quarter. So that requires a composition that has the whole plain course at the beginning. For Bristol, the composition I would use anyway is sW sH sW sH, which fits the bill. For Yorkshire I needed something different from the usual sM sW sM repeated. One that works is sH sW sH repeated.
The Yorkshire went surprisingly well and we did ring a quarter. Bristol is more difficult and it took us the whole session to get through a plain course, but in the end we managed it capably. Later there was a Cambridge Royal session, which I had scheduled as a quarter because it was preceded by a practice, but again I said we would start with a plain course because the practice session had only managed half a course. We did ring a quarter with the same composition as the Yorkshire.
We had arranged to ring a peal of Yorkshire Royal this morning, but after the end of the "official" handbell day programme we rang a course of Bristol with the peal band, and it went so well that we decided to ring Bristol for the peal instead. We succeeded and it was the best peal of Bristol Royal we've rung so far.