Like most of the world since March, we have been in lockdown, and so haven’t rung face to face in quite a while. But we decided that today was the day. It’s beautiful here in SoCal – the sun is shining, there’s no smoke in the air, and we could meet outside in Jane’s garden and ring with masks and appropriate distance.

Jane decided that this was not the time to rest on our laurels, and so introduced us to spliced methods, which we have never done. Of course, to do spliced methods, you need to be comfortable with multiple methods that you can splice between! We have rung Bob major multiple times (including some touches), and had started practicing Little Bob major before we stopped meeting. So today, we decided to first work on Little Bob until we were comfortable with it, and then splice that with Bob major.

Now, remember that we have never rung any spliced methods before. We had heard of them, and wondered. And had even asked Jane about them. She would give us a straightforward explanation, but explanations only go so far. You need to actually try to ring a splice to really understand them.

So, after a short explanation, we started ringing. The first attempt was short – we started with Bob major, spliced to Little Bob major at the first lead end, and then spliced back to Bob major at the next lead end. I believe that’s 40 changes? But we got it!

I can’t tell you what else Jane called, and we weren’t successful every time. If you remember what it was like when you first started ringing splices, we would sometimes forget which method we were ringing! But we had fun.

And then Jane decided that we needed to ring a touch splice. We weren’t successful at any attempt of that. But that just means we have good stuff to learn. And we will continue ringing splices and touches, both in ringingroom.com and face to face.