Last Monday I opened the handbell bag and moths flew out. Honestly, I am not joking! We have a bit of a moth problem at Albany Quadrant, with a few holes in the carpet, but now they have invaded the handbell bag too. I will redouble my efforts to eradicate...
During the pandemic I found myself regularly ringing online with a band containing three Simons: Rudd, Gay and Humphrey. We conceived the idea of ringing with a band consisting entirely of Simons, and worked our way up to a quarter of Little Bob Fourteen. Some time later we thought of...
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...
I wrote a little about choice of peal compositions for London, after our peal, but there's more to say. I searched BellBoard for handbell peals of London to see what other conductors have called. The Henry Dains composition, and Middleton's, appear quite a lot, along with two others that...
Back in 2015/16 we rang a series of peals with Mike and Ian, working our way through the right-place methods from the standard 8 surprise major; a couple of years later we rang a peal of Bristol with Mike. As part of this year's campaign to get more people to...
This visit took place in Staffordshire while celebrating the 80th birthday of my dad, Phil Gay, but they do say that the best parts of Derbyshire are in Staffordshire.
The original plan didn't involve handbells at all. I was invited to ring a tower bell peal on dad's bells, which...
Peter King's composition of 23-spliced treble bob major was recently rung on handbells for the first time, having been rung only twice (I think) on tower bells. The band was Jonathan Agg, Lucy Warren, Julian Howes and Alan Reading. Posting in the Bellringers Facebook group, Philip Earis wrote:
The...
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...
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...
I have seen some discussion on Facebook about the fact that 17th December this year is the 65th anniversary of the death of Dorothy L Sayers, author of the classic bellringing-themed mystery "The Nine Tailors". Some people might be planning commemorative ringing. 17th December is a Saturday and the Albany...