Last weekend was an intensive ringing weekend, although not quite as intensive as originally planned. It all started with an invitation to attempt Cyclic Six Maximus on handbells as part of a weekend of peals celebrating the 25th anniversary of the first performance of David Pipe's classic composition. That was...

Our trip to Loch Sween House, formerly known as Dun a' Bhuilg and location of the second and third Scottish Association handbell peals, is coming up very soon. We will have nine good surprise royal ringers, so it's an opportunity to work on a 12-bell project and we have Bristol...

Yesterday we rang a good peal of Bristol with Estella Haynes and Jack Page. I had been planning to get Estella to come over from Edinburgh for a peal, and then it turned out that yesterday she was working in Glasgow for the day and also Jack is visiting for...

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...

Today we gave our refurbished Taylor bells a longer tryout with a good peal of Bristol, arranged at the last minute. It was fairly lucky that we managed to get the band together, as Alex had train problems coming from Dunblane and Julia was nearly flooded off the M74.

So...

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...

Yesterday we rang a quarter of Bristol (Major) because Peter wanted to practise the 3-4 position. Around this time last year, Jonathan asked for a composition in which one of the pairs wouldn't ring the coursing position - he was going to call a quarter in which one of the...

For once, everything proceeded exactly according to plan!

We started by slotting in an extra quarter on Friday evening. When I discovered that Matt would be arriving relatively early, I thought I'd better organise something to occupy us for the evening, so we rang Bob Major for Zoé's first handbell...

On Monday we had an expedition to Angela's house, for the first time in more than a year, and rang a quarter of Bristol Royal. This was very satisfying - although we rang a quarter with Nick a couple of years ago, after several attempts, we had not previously practised...

Monday this week (22nd March) was the 120th anniversary of the first peal of Bristol Surprise Major. Ideally the occasion should have been marked with a 5120 of Bristol, but we can't ring in person at the moment and I didn't have the energy to try to arrange and...