We rang a peal of cyclic spliced maximus in the tower recently, which is beyond what I can ring on handbells at the moment although while learning the methods I did try ringing two bells on Mabel with varying success. I find that practising on handbells is a good test...

Last week I had a trip to London, as I had been invited to attend Alastair Donaldson's inaugural lecture as Professor of Computing at Imperial College. (I have seen the name Alastair Donaldson on BellBoard, but this is a different one!) The connection is that Alastair is a graduate (BSc...

This week's online handbell ringing got off to a good start with a quarter of spliced Yorkshire and Kent. Yes, you read that correctly! Apparently the idea came up a while ago when a band couldn't decide whether to ring Kent or Yorkshire for a safe quarter, and someone suggested combining...

We did well with our quarter of CYNR this week, so I would like to go for a peal of it during the handbell weekend that I'm planning in April. Here's a survey of compositions to choose from. First, some essential criteria. I'm looking at tenors-together all-the-work compositions. It's possible to...

We've just come back from a short visit to Penrith, where we rang a peal of Cambridge, Yorkshire, Lincolnshire and Rutland with Julia Cater and Nick Tithecott. That makes six peals from six attempts for me, and five out of five for Tina - surely the longest winning streak in...

Browsing peal compositions of Spliced Surprise Major, for example at www.ringing.org, reveals several compositions of the "Nottingham 8". This collection of methods was proposed at least 20 years ago as an alternative to the "Standard 8".

The Standard 8, of course, are London, Bristol, Cambridge, Superlative, Yorkshire, Lincolnshire, Rutland...

There is a possibility of going for a peal of spliced Cambridge, Yorkshire, Lincolnshire, Rutland and Bristol in the near (or maybe distant) future. The idea is to take the easy four of the standard 8, and add Bristol as a step towards the full set. (We would be thinking...

If I had delayed my previous post by one week, I would have been able to end the post on a higher note (see Getting to grips with Horton's 4).

After not quite getting a quarter of Horton's 4 in the days immediately following our successful tower bell peal...