November 2005
You may have seen the photograph of our trainee ringers in the latest issue of the Village magazine. The news was meant to appear in the Grapevine first but one way or another I missed the deadline last month. At least this gives me a chance to bring you up to date on the progress over the past few weeks.
Since that picture was taken we've had two more join us. This makes the tower rather crowded on a Tuesday night so we're running an extra Thursday night session with silenced bells to give everyone as much practice in handling a rope as possible. This leaves us with the Tuesdays free to let the advanced learners practise their timing by ringing in with the rest of the team.
The existing team have all been impressed by the progress that the learners have made and the effort they've put in. The early stages of learning to ring are not very exciting. You spend weeks learning to handle one end of the rope, more weeks with the other end, and then yet more weeks trying to manage both ends at once. It's a long process and we've been very pleased by the way that our new ringers have persevered. We'd like to thank them all for their hard work in turning up week after week.
The new members arrived just in time for the summer workload and their first job was the "Make Poverty History" event. The old team had two people working that Saturday, one on holiday and another just out of hospital. Without our new recruits we would not have been able to take part.
We've also been pleased by the general interest that's been generated by our campaign to rebuild the team. Many members of the congregation have thanked us for the efforts we put in every week and wished us well in our recruitment. There's been a lot of interest from the rest of the village too. Everyone has said that they like to hear the bells ringing. Even those who know nothing at all about the technicalities can tell the difference between the Sunday routine of ringing for services, the joyous sound of a wedding on a Saturday afternoon and the mournful tolling of a bell for a funeral. The sound of bells across the valley is an age-old tradition which makes the village feel like a community rather than a dormitory.
The first stage of our campaign has worked well and we are planning to build on it by taking a stall at the autumn fair. By then, all our current recruits will be part of the regular team and we'll be looking to introduce a few more villagers to the exercise of bell ringing. We hope to see you there.