Saturday was the Fourth Scottish Handbell Day. It went well. We scored a total of six quarter peals, including a first (the traditional Plain Bob Minor), a first of Surprise Major (the traditional Yorkshire), a first on ten (Kent Royal) and two firsts of Surprise Royal (Yorkshire. Is that traditional? Not sure. I find Cambridge easier.)

We didn’t quite achieve the goal of a quarter for everyone, but it wasn’t for want of trying, and everyone seemed happy in the end.

It’s always difficult to plan the programme for the handbell day. Like most ringing events, a few more experienced people would make things easier, although perhaps it would just shift the same difficulties to different goals: we might be puzzling over how to get two simultaneous 10-bell quarters, instead of how to get two simultaneous 8-bell quarters. However, I think we managed a good balance between trying to extend our frontiers and ringing things that we could achieve confidently.

Something we’ve started doing for the last couple of handbell days is including practice sessions, usually with more people than a single band, and often with the aim of preparing for a quarter in the subsequent session. This time, some of these practice sessions worked very well, and others less so. One of them seemed to involve too much sitting out (not for me, but for others) –  a sign of too many people, I suppose, or it could be because it often takes more than one attempt to ring a given touch.

To round off the weekend, on Sunday we rang another quarter of Yorkshire Royal with our regular band plus Nick, who wasn’t able to come to the handbell day this time.