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...

Earlier this year, Simon Aves alerted me to the fact that the number of handbell peals rung in Scotland was approaching 200. We have a complete record of handbell peals by the Scottish Association, but finding all the peals rung for other associations takes a lot of work - which...

Yesterday we had our first session with Sgurr a' Chaorachain. We've rung it in the tower, but not since 2020, and I rang it a bit online in 2021. It looks rather spiky, but most of the spiky parts are good landmarks because they involve many bells simultaneously: the pairs...

We rang a quarter of Remus this week, which was satisfying. We've been working on it since the beginning of the year, although far from every week - along the way we've rung a few other quarters of surprise major and royal as well as practising Cambridge Maximus.

We've decided...