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.
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...
Handbell Stadium, UK
Thursday, 21 May 2020 in 49m
1282 Cambridge Surprise Royal
1-2 Lesley H M Boyle (Reach)
3-4 Gareth Davies (Reach)
5-6 Graham A C John (C - Brimpton)
7-8 Simon Humphrey (Wetton)
9-10 Simon J Gay (Glasgow)
First of Royal on Handbell Stadium.
I'm still helping Graham John with his tests of Handbell Stadium. On Sunday we tried to ring a quarter of Cambridge Royal, but we lost it twice, first for technical reasons (one of my bells got stuck) and then with a good old-fashioned fire-up. We were having problems with network...
This week's Ringing World contained a review of the handbell book, written by Bill Croft. He likes it! The review gives a good summary of what's in the book, and comments favourably on the style and presentation.
The headline summary of the review is worth quoting:
Like a thoroughly experienced...
Three weeks ago, Graham Firman posted on BellBoard and YouTube about a handbell-ringing robot he has made. Subsequently he has written an article for the Ringing World about its construction, including the fact that it is controlled from Abel (I didn't know it, but apparently Abel can send signals on...
During the coronavirus lockdown, BellBoard is dominated by handbell performances. There are also a few performances on newly-developed remote ringing websites such as ringingroom.com. Real handbell ringing, however, is restricted to people who have ringers and bells in the same house. Some people are lucky enough to have 6-bell or...
Now that we've published our book, I want to write about some aspects of how we produced it. Maybe you will find them interesting.
We produced the book using LaTeX, a piece of software that I use for most of the writing I do in my day job...