It all started several years ago, when Jonathan Frye and Angela Deakin asked if we were interested in forming a handbell band, including teaching Angela to ring handbells. We had been trying and failing to do just this for many years (for reasons far too boring to go into), so we said ‘YES’.
(Really, it all started when Mike Clay began some regular handbell practices with some of the students in Edinburgh and various other handbell ringers in the area, including Jonathan. One day our schedules will mesh enough to all ring together – but in handbell ringing, patience is everything.)
Our journey from those first beginnings to where we are now has been both fun and interesting. Also, we learned a lot about teaching handbells to people at various levels of ability. Through it all we have discussed theories of how people learn, best methods of learning (we don’t always agree), and how to transfer some of this expertise into the bell tower.
The blogs below are about that journey, our progress and the progress of other bands by guest authors. They describe the ups and downs as they happen, as honestly as we can.
Several of the Five o'Clock Club quarters have involved myself, Simon Rudd and Simon Humphrey. We speculated about the appropriate collective noun (possibly an "excellence") and then thought of trying to ring a Simons quarter. Simon Linford was the obvious fourth person, as he has been doing a lot in Ringing Room...
It seems to be more than a month since my last blog, so what have I been doing? Plenty of online ringing in Ringing Room with the Five o'Clock Club, occasional visits to the Friday evening Handbell Stadium practice, Tuesday evening sessions in Ringing Room with the Glasgow tower bell band...
We didn't get the quarter of Bristol on Monday. I got a bit lost in a way that would have been easily recoverable in live ringing, but proved impossible to retrieve with the constraints of online ringing. It was a good attempt though, with accurate ringing up until the big kerfuffle...
Yesterday evening was the weekly Handbell Stadium practice, which I joined after having missed a couple of weeks. As usual there was a lot of interest in Double Norwich, so I rang a couple of courses. Then there was a suggestion of Duffield.
If you're not familiar with Duffield, it's a major...
Two lost online quarters this week, in contrast to the three successes last week.
Yesterday was an attempt for Cambridge Major, silent and non-conducted. The idea was to meet in Ringing Room and not set up an audio channel (usually we use Zoom); also not to use the chat in...
Lots of handbell ringing, in person and online:
There have been some posts on Facebook recently about ringing-themed designs for fabric, ordered from www.printmepretty.co.uk. You can upload a basic square design and get it printed onto fabric, repeated in a checkerboard pattern (or a few variations).
I decided it would be fun to try this with the...
Yesterday we rang a quarter of Lincolnshire Royal, which is what we had been planning to ring way back on 16th March just before the lockdown started. 18 weeks, feeling like a lifetime ago. We suffered a bit from ringing in a large not-quite-circle - it's definitely more difficult when...
Now we are allowed to meet with three households indoors, we got our handbell band together in person this evening. We set out a large triangle with Jonathan and Angela at one vertex, Peter at another, and Tina and me at the third. With a suitable assignment of pairs (Angela 1-2...
Online ringing with Ringing Room becomes more difficult when more people are involved, because there is more variation in the internet delays and more people who have to cope with it. Of course it's normal for ringing on more bells to be more difficult, but in Ringing Room, ringing on...