This week we are taking a holiday on the island of Arran, staying in the lovely village of Lamlash. Arran doesn't have any tower bells, but Timothy Billings, who comes to the mainland from time to time for tower bell or handbell ringing, has started a handbell group. Yesterday we...

On Sunday we had a surprise minor session with Alison, who came over from Edinburgh. She had previously rung a quarter of Cambridge on the trebles, and wanted to practise the other pairs. After ringing courses on 5-6 and then 3-4, we kept her on 3-4 and worked our way...

We've been making steady progress with our daughter Dorothy, and we recently reached the point of practising touches of Bob Minor in which she was unaffected. She has taken to the 3-4 pair in preference to 5-6, so instead of calling three homes with her on the tenors, we tried...

Handbell day went well, with a few quarter peal successes and a range of useful practice sessions. Everyone seemed to enjoy it. We had mixed results with the Top and Up. Jonathan's group managed to ring the whole touch of spliced maximus, while the other groups got as far as...

We had a session with Jessica and Colin this afternoon. We have previously worked on some exercises leading towards Kent, especially treble bob hunting and Bastow, so today we decided to intensively practise Kent places. This is in preparation for out handbell day on Saturday, when I have scheduled both...

I have mentioned before that we have been ringing handbells on Sunday afternoons with three of the Glasgow ringers: Jessica, Colin and Zoé. Yesterday only Colin and Zoé could come, and Tina was busy with Dorothy, so we had a six-bell session. We started with a 360 of Bob Minor, which...

This afternoon we rang Jessica's first handbell quarter: Plain Bob Minor with her on the trebles. We had an attempt a few weeks ago, which was going well but we had to stop when we realised we had miscalculated the time available before needing to drop our son Thomas off...

In the campaign of trying to understand the structure of methods by thinking of them as compositions, let's move on to treble bob. Now the base method is treble bob hunting instead of plain hunting, and again we will consider variations with respect to pure treble bob hunting as if...

In Little Bob, the treble turns round in 4th place, causing two bells to dodge above it. Apart from that, it's the same as Plain Bob. Now I think of it, it's not obvious that turning the treble round in 4th place produces a method with Plain Bob lead ends...

St Clement's College Bob Minor, to use its full title, is another method with a simple structure that we can understand as a composition.

As always, the initial coursing order is 124653. The 6th, 5th and 3rd in turn make 3rds, jumping over the 2nd and the 4th as they...