I hosted our district virtual #bellringing practice last night. It’s tricky in that you’re never sure who is going to turn up and what their ability is. There are some who positively indicate they’re coming then don’t turn up and those who don’t indicate they’re coming and do turn up. We ended up with 8 ringers, we did have 9 but she had internet issues so logged off.

One lady was new to us, we’d not seen her before or knew where she was from but we made her very welcome. We enquired where she rang and what sort of thing she was capable of. That really is one of the best things about #bellringing, you can pretty much pitch up anywhere and join in and are generally made welcome.

This particular lady said that she could ring plain hunt doubles, one of the first more complex things that you start to learn, it forms the basis of everything to come as you progress through more complex stuff. I assigned her to one of the bells and other ringers around her and off they went. She rang really well. To be honest I was pleasantly surprised.

With other people we rang a range of different things, some with greater success than others, but some of that was technical issues. Then I asked this lady if she’d ever tried plain hunt minor, the next step up from what she’d rung earlier. She said she’d never rung it before but recited the pattern perfectly using places rather than what number bell to follow. I assigned her to a bell and the rest of the band and she proceeded to ring it flawlessly. She said it was genuinely her first attempt at it. We rang some other things then I suggested she had another go at it from a different starting position. Again, she rang it brilliantly. I think she was also very pleased to have done it too.

To join in with a different group of ringers you don’t know takes some guts, especially as a relative learner. To then ring something you’ve never rung before as well was just fantastic. I do hope that she feels able to join us again on the next virtual practice. I think she could gain a lot from ringing with others apart from her own band.

There’s so much clap trap out there about how we must be joyful and have happy and meaningful lives. There are courses designed to help you find your inner happiness and top tips on the best ways to find joy in every day life. Type “finding joy in life” into Google and it offers you at least 259,000,000 results. But what happens if you don’t know what makes you happy?

I’ve been told before that I must LOVE #bellringing because I do it all the time and I get involved with the organisation and running of things, and if I’m not actually ringing I’m at a meeting about ringing, or writing a report or article about ringing. So I must love it right, to be investing so much of my time and energy into it?

I like ringing, for sure. I like the challenge of making a bell ring in the right place and learning complex methods. I like the social aspect of meeting new people, or even the same people each week. I sometimes like the challenge of writing an article or report, and even sometimes attending meetings can be entertaining. I like listening to a good piece of ringing (and have judged my fair share of competitions). I have lots of books about ringing. I play at least twice most weeks on a virtual #bellringing platform with different groups if people. I follow lots of different people and towers and associations and the Central Council of Church Bell Ringers on social media. I enjoy a good ringers tea, or apres ringing pub session. I’ve gone on ringing holidays, I’ve travelled overseas and been ringing, I’ve travelled around the UK to ring in peals or quarters. I used to organise the Essex Ringing Course, I’ve been a Principal Officer of our Association and I’ve taught multiple people how to ring. I’ve been a student on courses, I’ve helped on courses. I’ve looked after ringing when the tower captain has been absent. I’ve managed international projects about ringing. I’ve been interviewed and filmed about ringing. I’ve been quoted on the front page of national broadsheets about ringing. I spend a LOT of time on ringing related stuff.

Does it make me happy? Do you know, sometimes it doesn’t. Sometimes it’s too much like hard work having to get up on a cold, dark, miserable Sunday morning to ring for Service. Sometimes meetings are boring and go on and on unnecessarily. Sometimes other people wind me up (as I’m sure I do others). Sometimes I could quite happily tell it to do one. Go on, take a hike.

I had that opportunity once when I was 19 and moved away from my home area. I thought ‘great, this is my time to give it up. Nobody knows me here so they won’t know if I don’t turn up”. I’d moved up on the Saturday morning and in the afternoon I wandered into the town centre. Now, anyone who is a ringer is somehow automatically attuned to the sound of bells. You can hear them a mile off. When you hear bells on TV or radio you find yourself stopping what you’re doing to listen. When I went into the town centre I could hear bells. Instinctively I walked towards where they were coming from. They were ringing for a wedding and the bride had just come out of the church so I figured they probably wouldn’t ring for more than about 10 mins. So I hung around. When the ringers descended the tower and came outside I looked them straight in the eye and said “hello, I’m a ringer and I’ve just moved into the area”. Doh! what was I thinking? Of course, ringers being the friendly folk that they are, stopped for a chat, explained what night practice was on, and there you have it. Far from giving up, I’d just committed myself to a new tower and a bunch of strangers. The rest, they say, is history and it has become a way of life.

So, does #bellringing make me happy? I guess on the whole it must do. 😁

Not everything goes to plan first time around. Both #bellringing and #baking have their moments when you have to start over. Baking cakes is fraught with all sorts of danger from ingredients that aren’t quite right, to oven temperatures being a bit erratic, to mixtures coming out too wet or too dry. Icing might not do what you think it should and taste and final aesthetics may not be how you envisaged.

Bellringing often requires a start-stop. Learning new methods is hard work. A lot of homework theory is required before you even try it out on real bells. And of course, at the moment when using real bells isn’t an option for some, the cooperation of technology isn’t always available.

Yesterday I was very lucky to have been invited to participate in a quarter peal attempt on RingingRoom with some very illustrious ringers. That in itself was worrying enough, but if you don’t say yes to these things when they are offered you’ll never get asked again. The method was straight forward, Grandsire Caters, something which if we’d been ringing in the tower would have been second nature.

The trouble virtual #bellringing is that a lot of the visual clues that you would ordinarily get by virtue of the movement of the rope, the rhythm of the ringing and the faces of your fellow ringers, just aren’t there. Therefore ringing something that you are very familiar with gets more complicated.

In the tower, whilst ringing this particular method, I would barely be noticing what place I was in, counting my place would only happen in moments of doubt. However just to make sure, yesterday I counted every single place I was in. That’s not to say that the instruction from my brain to hand to keyboard necessarily struck the bell in exactly the right place, I did my share of clipping.

We had a false start to begin with when a couple of bells swapped position but that was very early on, so we started off again. We’d been ringing for quite a while the second time around and there had been a few technical lag issues and a few bells not quite in the right place but they seemed to get sorted out quickly enough. However, things came to a grinding halt about two courses from the end. Something wasn’t quite right so it had to be stopped.

Disappointing though that was, that’s the longest single piece of virtual #bellringing I’ve done, and only the second time I’ve rung on ten bells in RingingRoom, which does sound very different and your rope sight does require adjustment.

The plan was to have rung a quarter peal to mark the Central Council of Church Bellringers AGM taking place on Saturday and rung by Council members (+1). Not to be deterred, we have rescheduled it for later today to try, try again.