On Thursday the handbell band in Beeston, Nottingham, rang a quarter of Numbers Royal. Recall that this is Christian Peckham's idea of ringing blocks of plain hunting at the front or back, while the bells at the other end of the change dodge in pairs. Every block of plain...
In my previous article, I mentioned this composition of 14-spliced surprise royal by Richard Weeks, which came up in CompLib as a composition that contains Vincula.
The Richard Weeks composition is a cyclic 9-part with no calls, therefore using a link method to achieve the change of coursing...
A long time ago, in 1991, I came up with the method Vincula Surprise Royal (diagram on the right, from CompLib.org). It's Cambridge Major extended to royal by adding two more hunt bells, the 2nd and the 3rd, one coursing ahead of the treble and one coursing after the treble...
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...
I've mentioned before that I've started online handbell ringing again and have found myself in a ten-bell band with David Wilson, Jeff Ladd, Cara Capewell and Tom Farthing. The original idea was to progress to maximus, but we don't have a sixth person yet so we have mainly been ringing...
Earlier in the year I wrote about a touch called 4, 5, 6, 7, which is a kind of spliced based on stitching together blocks of plain hunting and dodging. I subsequently found out that the idea first came from Christian Peckham as a way of constructing cyclic touches of...
Cyclic spliced is occupying me at the moment. I've just published a video on YouTube to mark the 25th anniversary of the first performance of David Pipe's Cyclic Six Maximus. A couple of weeks ago I had an article in The Ringing World (issue 5923) about cyclic spliced...
I've joined an online band, following a question from David Wilson on the handbell ringers Facebook group. The original query was looking for someone to practise Phobos, but so far we have focused on Bristol Royal, attempting a quarter a couple of weeks ago and then succeeding yesterday. It had...
Last Monday we finally rang a quarter of Sgurr a' Chaorachain Surprise Royal. It's taken a while - according to the blog, our first practice session was on 19th June 2023. I should say though that we haven't been exclusively ringing Sgurr a' Chaorachain all that time. There have been...
We're spending Christmas and New Year in the Washington DC area, visiting Tina's family. Thanks to Tina's presidential blog, our presence was detected by Bryn and Leland Reimer and Myles Dakan, who are all coincidentally spending New Year nearby. They are based in Northampton, Massachusetts, so this was another...