Op-Ed

Some activities are much easier than others to start learning. On holiday in the Isles of Scilly with my sister and her family, the children tried various watersports. Kayaking and sailing are easy to get started on, because you sit in a stable boat and if you do absolutely nothing...

You spend ages not ringing at all, then several nights come on you at once.  Last night reunited our original foursome, after a long stint of work-related and holiday-related absence.  It had been a while, so the plans were relaxed, and eventually, wine-soaked.

We reviewed some of our methods...

Apparently there is now a psychometric test to measure 'tough-mindedness' or resilience (a term which my informant prefers, and I agree with her).  Although long known in sports coaching, it is a concept which has, I am told, recently entered general employment in, er, employment.

It is the ability to...

Great as has been the progress of the Art of Ringing during the last decade, it cannot be contradicted that one particular feature of its exercise, and that not by any means the least important, has, if not altogether ignored, to a certain extent not received that amount of consideration...

Handbells, and why more people don't ring them, has been a subject on the Change Ringers mailing list over the last couple of days.  The debate has been fairly lively, not yet very conclusive, and so probably far from over.

In the midst of this, Lester Yeo, from the Guild...

Due to the mysterious (so our hosting company tells us) disappearance of the database, Learn to Ring Handbells will be down for a few more days while we completely reconstruct it.

In the meantime, take a look at our new website for the Mount Vernon Handbell Club.  We made...

I had forgotten how utterly nervewracking it is to ring with people watching.  The awareness of the audience puts me into this lightheaded state and suddenly it takes  massively more concentration to keep on the lines.

We were ringing, with Jonathan and Angela, for the Christmas Fayre at our local...

So, we had a late and a bit of a rushed handbell ringing session with Josy on Wednesday.  After the great practice we had last week, we had determined that it was time to put Josy on our usual practice structure of a quarter peal attempt followed by some plain...