My elder grandson (15) is mad on bell ringing. He has now rung in nearly 130 towers and 2 cathedrals (it may be more). Last night he rang a quarter peel in Newmarket.
See https://drive.google.com/file/d/1873O6zPsert2bTsPCLItIGJ2QtAf4pMW/view?usp=sharing.
Basically, I am against wealth and privilege simply as a result of who your parents were. Much wealth came from the slave trade centuries back, which I find abhorrent. That is history. What matters is how we are today.
Overall, I favour a much slimmed down monarchy much closer to the people. Those that work for the UK get the royal purse. Hangers on do not. There is no doubt our history and traditions are worth millions in tourism and help stability.
UPDATE 0841z: Our church bells are ringing.
UPDATE 1400z: A good service and parade that passed (thank goodness) without incident. It rained....again! Why does it always seem to rain on Coronations?! I am old enough to remember the last coronation in 1953 and crowding around a tiny, snowy, picture on a black and white TV in a neighbour's house.
In general, the whole preparation for the coronation feels very low key. I am old enough to remember the 1953 coronation of Queen Elizabeth II!! I guess we were still getting over WW2 and this was a bit of light relief.
I remember going to watch the coronation on a neighbour's tiny TV screen in black and white. We did not have a TV until 1957 and that was just one channel and back and white. At the time we thought it was amazing. Before then, we used to watch a snowy TV picture whilst sitting on the floor a a local radio/TV shop. At that time we were about 150km from the nearest TV transmitter.
He has rung now in about 50 churches. He has a YouTube channel called Ringer Luke.
Currently he is doing a project on unringable bells. These are bells that cannot be rung in the conventional way as they are no longer safe. Today we went to Impington near Cambridge, where some of the bells were damaged by water dripping.
Today we took him to Dullingham, UK. The bells here are not ringable in the conventional way. Instead they pull ropes at the back of the church in a way that one person can ring all the bells.
Our elder grandson loves to ring bells. He has now rung in 40 towers and, as I write, is ringing locally for a wedding.
One of our grandsons is mad on bellringing. The very short video shows him ringing at Fulbourn, near Cambridge, recently.
This morning our grandson rang the church bells at Bottisham about 5 miles from here. He has now rung bells in 4 places.
When our grandson (14) stays with us he likes to go bell ringing hunting. We tried 2 places today, but both had no bells ringing. He did capture the 10am chimes at one.
One of our grandsons lives in London. When he is with us we seem to have got into a groove of visiting local churches so he can record the bells ringing. At first, the videos were a bit jerky, but they are now much better.
He has a YouTube channel called "Ringer Luke". Today we went to Mildenhall (not ringing) and Freckenham that was (surprisingly for a small church) ringing. This tower has 5 bells, but 3 were being rung today, by one man!
We have had a strange year and it was so good to hear the bells ringing out again this morning at our local church. We are still some way from the "new normal", but this is a step on the way. My grandson made this video.
It is comforting to hear the church clock chiming again. Sadly, the chimes are about 13 minutes early! I am not sure how old the clock is.
The main tower bells have not been rung very often in the last year. When they return we will be back to "near normal".
As we were in London to see "Guys and Dolls" at the Tower Theatre with our village theatre group, I decided to take this photo of ...
