don’t make a promise you can’t keep

The art of change ringing is peculiar to the English, and, like most English peculiarities, unintelligible to the rest of the world. To the musical Belgian, for example, it appears that the proper thing to do with a carefully tuned ring of bells is to play a tune upon it. By the English campanologist, the playing of tunes is considered to be a childish game, only fit for foreigners; the proper use of bells is to work out mathematical permutations and combinations. When he speaks of the music of his bells, he does not mean musician’s music – still less what the ordinary man calls music. To the ordinary man, in fact, the pealing of bells is a monotonous jangle and a nuisance, tolerable only when mitigated by remote distance and sentimental association... His passion – and it is a passion – finds its satisfaction in mathematical completeness and mechanical perfection, and as his bell weaves her way rhythmically up from lead to hinder place and down again, he is filled with the solemn intoxication that comes of intricate ritual faultlessly performed.

- Dorothy Sayers, The Nine Tailors (1934)

Grandsire Triples is very much real but I've never rung it because we usually only have enough ringers for Grandsire Doubles. Grandsire is my favourite method actually - as far as I know it's one of the oldest methods & it's different from the others because there are two hunt bells but which ones they are can change depending on when bobs and singles are called.

triples - 7 bells because there are 3 pairs of bells that can swap with one staying in the same place

doubles - 5 bells (same as above because 2 pairs + 1 extra)

from 3 up: singles, minimus, doubles, minor, triples, major, caters, royal, cinques, maximus

(this is one of the things i love about bells - you get silly words to know)

sometimes ringers decide to ring for over 3 hours without stopping or repeating any sequence of notes. that's a peal! it's based on the time it takes to ring every order of 7 notes (7!)

A lot of bellringers are old and retired and can use html so there are some pretty good resources out there BUT they will be completely incomprehensible at first.

you can look at Dove's Guide to see if there's a ringing tower near you. England has an insane number of towers, the US has a few, Australia has like 60. pakistan has 1 apparently

you should be able to find an email address pretty easily & arrange to go and visit some bells. they are friendly (in my experience! it could be nasty sometimes i don't know!?)

do you find this beautiful and helpful

In my town we have a nice secular carillon that the piano nerds can go and punch out their little classical tunes on (apparently it's set out like a piano but instead of a keyboard you hit the levers with your fist).

I finished the book and um...

at this point convinced that the bells themselves are the ones killing people.