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...
This isn't a handbell article, except in as much as we might hope eventually to ring on handbells anything that we are ringing in the tower. But I want to write about some compositions, so here goes.
We've assembled a Scottish Association spliced surprise royal peal band, finally trying to...
I sometimes enjoy a cryptic crossword, but yesterday we were filling in the gaps in the grid of Remus. This has been our surprise royal project for a while, with the usual interruptions and diversions. Yesterday's session was quite satisfying, considering that we have had a break of several weeks...
Yesterday we rang a peal of Bristol Royal, which was a good achievement by all the band. I thought the method-ringing was noticeably better than in our two previous peals of Bristol Royal, with fewer trips overall, fewer big mistakes, and much less need for conducting.
However, there was a...
We've had a few sessions of practising Remus, making some progress, but yesterday we tried a different approach. It was partly inspired by one of Mary Jones's blogs. What had been happening was that we were ringing in "quarter peal mode" even though we were still at the stage...
Last weekend I rang a tower bell peal at Guildford, which had originally been planned for June 2020, cancelled because of covid, eventually rearranged for April this year, cancelled again because more and more of the band were catching covid, and now finally scored. I arranged to stay for the...
This week we finally managed to get a ten-bell band together, and we succeeded with a quarter of Fermanagh. Like many of the methods I've been advocating as a modern surprise royal repertoire, it has a clear separation between frontwork and backwork. There are also many minor and major...