Last week I joked on Facebook that our 41 Minor would have been the featured performance on BellBoard, if it hadn't been for the those clever chaps in Cambridge ringing Chandler's in hand on the same weekend. Yesterday we were first, for a while, before being beaten out by a handbell performance in a toilet.
Good joke we may think, but the list of top rated performances on BellBoard makes interesting reading:
Our featured performance
Northern Universities Association
Stretford, Greater Manchester
Ladies' Toilets, Stretford Church Hall
Sunday, 18 November 2012 in 26 minutes (8 in C)
1260 Plain Bob Minor
Composed by Alex Tatlow arr. Rambo Ramsbottom
1–2 Alice "Lilah" Longden
3–4 Adam Brady
5–6 Louis Suggett (C)
Commenced at 00.47 - the disabled toilet was occupied.
Other highly-rated performances
| 10 Nov 2012 | Glasgow (1 Albany Quadrant) | 5040 Spliced Surprise Minor (41m) |
| 11 Nov 2012 | Cambridge (16 Godesdone Road) | 5152 Spliced Surprise Major (23m) |
| 13 Nov 2012 | Isleworth (All Saints) | 5040 London (No 3) Surprise Royal |
| 9 Nov 2012 | Adelaide (Room 407, Oaks Horizon Hotel) | 5024 Spliced Surprise Major (8m) |
Four out of five of these performances are on handbells. And they are pretty impressive - OK, OK, Plain Bob Minor in a toilet? Maybe not so impressive on the complexity scale, but another good contribution in the honourable tradition of drunken handbell ringing in unlikely locations. May they move on to lifts, triangulation points, classic cars, and other creatively pointless handbell venues.
That performance of Chandler's in hand - those ringers have joined a very small community indeed. In fact, half the band had only rung Chandler's in hand just back in April, and now here they are ringing someone else's first. Impressive. One wonders whether they will run out of challenges (although possibly not, that is the nice thing about ringing).
Then there is the spliced major in Adelaide, featuring a couple of Perrinses, David Brown (another Chandler's-in-hand club member), and Mike Trimm. Given the recent accomplishments of the Perrins family handbell machine (who we have admired for many years), a peal of spliced very nearly counts as a 'Yorkshire and score', business-as-usual kind of attempt. Wouldn't we all like to be ringing at that standard?
(We did manage our first quarter of 8-spliced last week at our first attempt - our first steps on another big project).
Why are so many handbell performances being 'liked' on BellBoard? Is it because the active players are all handbell ringers, and skew the results? Or is it because handbell ringers are ringing more interesting things, taking more risks, and not just going for stuff they know they can get?