[Transcribed by Emily Watts]

Poem about 5 years of podcast content

[00:00:00] CATHY: In the world of bell ringing, we explore, 

With English change, a tradition we adore. 

From the UK to across the globe, 

Fascinating facts, we joyfully probe 

History and modern simulators we unearth, 

Mobile belfries and the Ringing Room's worth 

Artists and musicians, sharing their tale. 

Tower grabbers and enthusiasts, they never fail. 

Leaders, learners, men, and women alike. 

Teaching methods innovative, we strike. 

Bell founders we meet, handbell tunes, we stray, 

Pragmatic tower topics fill our day. 

Finding creepy crawlies and things that sting, 

Knowing what clothes to wear to ring. 

From recruitment affairs to funds that we raise, 

140 people recorded in various ways, 

The ringing community never fails to amaze, 

From before, during, and since the COVID days.

Ringing by the Society of Cambridge Youths

Celebrating the Fifth Anniversary of Fun With Bells Podcast

[00:00:54] CATHY: Hello, I'm Cathy Booth and this is the fifth year anniversary episode of the Fun With Bells podcast. In this episode, Emily Roderick interviews me about the podcast and we recall some of our earlier episodes. ​

Understanding the Fun With Bells Podcast

[00:01:08] EMILY: I'd like to start by asking you if you could give me more of an introduction about Fun with Bells podcast for any new listeners.

[00:01:16] CATHY: Fun with Bells is about and for bell ringers. And I think this episode will give people taster of what it's about.

The Audience of the Podcast

[00:01:24] EMILY: I know I asked for a kind of introduction for new listeners. But do you have a specific audience that you're aiming the podcast for?

[00:01:34] CATHY: Yes. I have in mind that it's people who've only just taken up bellringing. Who don't know everything that's going on in the bellringing world. But then again, I think it will be interesting to any bell ringer who's interested in knowing what other bell ringers are doing.

[00:01:53] EMILY: I would absolutely agree.

I think especially coming across some of the episodes randomly and thinking, "Oh my gosh, I didn't even think that was part of the community." That yeah, there's a nice sort of unearthing that the podcast is doing. So as part of the five year anniversary episode, we're also gonna, chat with different podcast clips from some previous episodes that we've highlighted between ourselves and had a chat about which ones we've enjoyed or want to unearth or revisit. 

[00:02:26] CATHY: The first one was, it's quite a recent one, some local bell ringers who've taken it up this year as part of the conversation.

Excerpt: The Joy of Bells: New Ringers Reflect on Their New Obsession

[00:02:32] CATHY: Ring for the King. And they had a discussion, which I think was very entertaining. They were very enthusiastic. And, this is one of the clips from what they said. 

[00:02:42] JESSICA: The ring for the king for me was, it was like, not even just ringing for the King. There were so many things that were fabulous about the day. Ringing with our band. This is what we'd all been working towards. So many people from the group came and rang, watching the coronation on the TV at Easton. The crowd that were there and everyone was like super happy and jolly and cake and bells were going everywhere. We were absolutely exhausted by the end of the day. I had my first set of blisters.

The Joy of Learning Bell Ringing

[00:03:11] EMILY: I think it was really interesting to hear the process of a new learner, and that's something that I think, especially being able to understand the depth of the learning process and actually all the little joys that come with learning, and really actually showing that ringers, even when you're very new to it, you can still be involved in these big events these are all new ringers chatting together about what they've learned, 

and really sharing an insight into that. So I think that was, that's what I really enjoyed about that episode in terms of. I guess also it goes back to, I think I would put myself in that position and think, "Oh, what did I learn when I first learned to ring? what, what stuck with me?" And even like the blisters, it's oh yeah, definitely there's been a time where I'd go ringing and obviously just get blisters every week because it's a new thing and your hands aren't used to it.

So yeah, I think it's a sweet way to look into it. Yeah.

So moving on to some more questions for you, Cathy. 

The Inspiration Behind the Podcast

[00:04:19] EMILY: What inspired you to set up the podcast?

[00:04:22] CATHY: Well, it was a kind of light bulb moment really, but several things came together. One was that I was looking for a new project to take up my time. But it was to do with the fact that my husband listens to a particular radio station, a chat radio station constantly, and I don't like it. And the other thing he does is he does projects to do with bell ringing.

And I thought, what would stop him listening to this chat radio station? Maybe it would be a radio station about bell ringing. And it just popped into my head. I know I can do a podcast about bell ringing. And that was it. And then from then on, I just worked out how to do it. Yeah.

[00:05:04] EMILY: Oh, that's brilliant. I love that. Take the matter into your own hands. I'm going to make you listen to this instead.

[00:05:11] CATHY: Yes. Yes. 

The Origin of the Podcast's Name

[00:05:12] EMILY: and one question that actually, came into my head and I obviously have my own understanding of the answer and what I think your answer is. But I'm very curious where the name of the podcast came from.

[00:05:24] CATHY: Okay. So the name of the podcast came from, we are big fans of The Big Bang Theory 

[00:05:30] EMILY: Yes 

[00:05:31] CATHY: and yes and when we were thinking of a name, we thought it's the same sort of thing as Fun with Flags, which is features in the Big Bang Theory with, Sheldon Cooper and Amy Farrah Fowler, who do a live.

Video show, which obviously we're not doing, but, and that's where the name came from.

[00:05:53] EMILY: I love it. I even thought, I think as soon as I wrote down that question, I thought, oh, I hope it's Big Bang Theory.

[00:06:03] CATHY: And now we've got another one of the clips from the past. 

Excerpt: Remarkable PhD study of Cambridge bellringers' pay and habits

[00:06:05] CATHY: this one, thinking about academics, It was a PhD study that Gareth Davies did, and he, talked all about Cambridge, bell ringers pay and habits. 

[00:06:19] GARETH: part of my research has been to try and identify how often the bells were rung, and I'm just looking at the Church of Great St Mary's in Cambridge, and so far I've identified about 10, 000 occasions when the bells rang, and more than half of those were for paid ringing.

So to give you an example, if we take in the currency of the time, their total income that year was just under £90. Now if we convert that to today's money, a straight conversion suggests that's around about under £6, 000 today. That would be just in terms of its purchasing power. Converting from 18th century currency to 21st century is quite difficult.

You can look at what it bought, but equally it's about how much the money they earned would have given them status. Imagine looking at a scale of earnings, earning that amount of money in 1807 would be the equivalent of earning about £80, 000 today. 

[00:07:24] CATHY: Yeah, so Bellringers earned a lot of money.

[00:07:28] EMILY: My gosh. That clip always gets me as well, because I just think, wow, how things have changed.

[00:07:37] CATHY: Yeah.

[00:07:41] EMILY: Gosh.

[00:07:41] CATHY: Yeah, so it's quite interesting the history of, bellringing, how it was rung for a lot of secular occasions because the church was very much part of the community and the community had other things to ring for besides services and goes into those in the episode, a lot of them are political occasions and things like that.

How Cathy Started in Podcasting

[00:08:02] EMILY: I wanted to ask how you actually started in podcasting. 

[00:08:05] CATHY: I was self taught. I just decided I was going to do it. So I read up about it. I listened to podcasts about podcasting of which there are a lot. and I did a little trial podcast called starting a podcast where I recorded what I was finding out about having to do it and just practising doing it that way.

So yeah, that's how I got started.

Cathy's background

[00:08:29] EMILY: Brilliant. And, can you share your background and how it influenced your podcasting journey?

[00:08:35] CATHY: My professional background is being in IT and auditing as well as user research. And all of those jobs, involved technology and interviewing. So that's the background that I have that I brought to it. So I just like both those aspects of the podcast, playing around with technology and pushing the boundaries of what we can do with the podcast that way.

And, and also interviewing people, which is something I very much enjoy doing.

Excerpt: Recording your bells

[00:09:08] CATHY: Being somebody who was interested in the technical side of recording, I was particularly excited to record David Richards, who does the recording for the national 12 bell competitions, and he gave tips on how people could record their bells.

And, there's a lot of really useful information in the interview that he had, but here's a little clip from it. 

[00:09:32] DAVID: Where are you going to record this sound from? As we've said, the Belfry is one option, and certainly many recordings for Bells on Sunday are done like that. But there are also plenty of other opportunities.

If your tower has a void, so that is a sound mixing room, either above or below the ring chamber, then that can be a good place to record from. Then tower staircases can sometimes work, and sometimes it can work from the body of the church. Then 

more occasionally, it can be good to record from outside the church, but do be careful there's not a lot of additional noise. 

[00:10:09] CATHY: Some really good tips there and you chose that one as well. 

[00:10:13] EMILY: For me, I think it was still along the lines of exploring the more technical side of ringing and I think perhaps what inspired me to choose this episode more specifically was within my art practice and as an artist actually, and I've been working with bells as part of that.

And, that's another episode to listen to as well.

[00:10:38] CATHY: Yes, yours. Yes, of course.

[00:10:42] EMILY: But, I think that's really learning the in depth technical skills around recording the bells is something that I absolutely want to do and I'm going to do. And I found that actually the, that episode was really useful and gave some tips. In quite an easy kind of approachable way to be able to do those kind of quite in depth and tricky recordings.

Bells are loud. It can be very hard to record something like that well. And so being able to use this episode as a bit of a guide was really good.

[00:11:24] CATHY: Good. One of the things I liked about it as well was that he pitched it at different levels. There was either, the professional recording it, or you could actually just use your smartphone and this is the way you would use your smartphone. So it was good for everybody.

[00:11:40] EMILY: Absolutely. 

The Process of Creating Each Episode

[00:11:41] EMILY: So looking more at the behind the scenes of Fun With Bells. I'm curious what the process is, for each episode. And how it comes from idea right to when it's launched and released. 

[00:11:56] CATHY: First of all, we brainstorm and get ideas on what topic or guests we're going to have. Then it's a matter of contacting them. Not everybody says yes, but most people do. And then you and I talk about what questions we might ask them. I usually do a technical check with the guests to try and get their recordings set up as, as good as possible.

And then we have the actual recording and then all the post production comes into play. So there's quite a lot of people involved in this. Roger and I always listen to an episode once it's been edited and then you do a thorough edit, And then, John Gwynne, listens to every episode.

Check, we're not saying anything controversial. And, he often feeds back things, that he observes as well, which is really useful. And then Anne Tansley Thomas writes the show notes and she's done that from the beginning. So they've all got the same tone and she always puts, five takeaways, which are really useful things for people to look up, that are inspired by the podcast itself.

And then Emily Watts, she finalizes the transcripts. And she's done that for about half of the episodes. It's a lot of work and, I'm really grateful for her to doing those. Then when it's ready to publish, we then have to think about, the website, letting people know about it. So we now do an article for the Ringing World and all the social media. 

[00:13:24] EMILY: Wow, so it's really quite a long process. Obviously I know the process, but I'm reflecting for the audience. It can take quite a while from beginning to end for an episode. And yeah, how far in advance. Are you thinking about these episodes before they come out?

[00:13:41] CATHY: Brainstorming, often we have a list of episodes that we might do but when they start coming into play, I maybe contact people a month before we want to record, then record the following month. Then there's the post production the month after that, and then it gets released and then for the following month.

We'd be advertising that particular episode. So it's several months that any one episode is in play. So we're probably juggling about four episodes at a time at different stages. Yes.

[00:14:13] EMILY: An art, yes. 

Choosing Topics and Guests for the Episodes

[00:14:14] EMILY: And I'm curious how actually the topics, the different topics and guests are chosen for the episodes. Like how do they come to be? What's the process of that?

[00:14:25] CATHY: Originally Roger and Leslie Belcher, who was the chair of ART at the time, and myself brainstormed on all the different ideas. But since then, they've just come from all different directions, really. One thing we do whenever there's an Association of Ringing Teachers conference is, we have a tradition of having a live discussion and those, episodes are pretty popular.

The 15 striking tips and connecting with your bell. And we're going to have another one at the next ART conference. And then other things might be, you know, somebody mentions to me down the pub (one of my local ringers) a particular set of ringers are very active, the Pebworth ringers. I'm hoping to get hold of them and I've been inspired by the ART awards and interviewed people from that, but just, it actually is just whatever comes into my mind and what people prompt me for.

And I think, yeah, that would be interesting. Yeah.

[00:15:25] EMILY: Brilliant. And if someone, would you encourage people to reach out to you If they've got ideas for episodes as well.

[00:15:32] CATHY: Absolutely. I can't guarantee that it will happen or it will happen quickly, but it definitely give me the ideas. And, that would be great. Yeah.

Excerpt: What ringers wear

[00:15:41] EMILY: Brilliant. So now we're on to our next episode clip, which is from What Ringers Wear, if I'm correct?

[00:15:49] ALEX: I just remember pulling down on the rope. And the glasses came flying off of my face, and just about took out the ringers of the third and the fourth. I was on the second at the time, I think I got more of a shock than they did. 

[00:16:01] ELIZABETH: There's the ringer's rules, which says But if you ring in spur or hat, sixpence you pay, be sure of that.

[00:16:11] MICHAELA: Reminiscent of the saucy seaside postcard or carry on film which involved men's trousers falling down. And it seems some were accidental and some where there were rather mischievous people carried on calling touches on and on and on until the trousers had actually fallen down.

[00:16:30] CATHY: Yeah,

[00:16:33] EMILY: Oh gosh, no, I think, I love this episode. I think it is one of my favourites, I think. Purely because the anecdotes that come with it and the, both historically and anecdotes of ringing today, I think. And I'm always curious about, what people wear when they're ringing. And, I think that growing up in a ringing family, I definitely would try on clothes and think, "Oh, I can't ring in that.

Oh, maybe I can ring in that." Kind of thing. So it's definitely, something to think 

[00:17:06] CATHY: about.

And I think that's quite a good one as well for people to listen to who only just started ringing because then they'll, it makes them aware of what they need to think about. So it's quite practical as well as being entertaining.

[00:17:18] EMILY: Yes.

[00:17:20] CATHY: Yeah.

[00:17:20] EMILY: My 

Memorable Moments in Podcasting

[00:17:21] EMILY: next question is, have there been any unexpected or particularly memorable moments in your podcasting journey so far?

[00:17:29] CATHY: Yes, definitely the most memorable one was with COVID. It was a shock to everybody, wasn't it? But I remember thinking, bell ringers suddenly couldn't ring and then at the same time, VE Day 75 was coming up, Victory in Europe Day, and this would have been something that Bellringers could have rung for normally, but of course there was lockdown, and at the same time, the prevalent fact from history is that bell ringers couldn't ring until VE day.

And so I ended up contacting Alan Regin about it and he said, "no, actually they rang earlier in the war than that." And I've got a series of articles that highlight what the situation actually was. And he sent me a whole load of ringing world articles from during the war, which were all written in the lovely 1940s tone.

And they just took it through and I thought this is a fantastic story because, it talked about how, first of all, bell ringers couldn't ring at all. and we're saying, it's our duty not to ring. And then Winston Churchill himself said for the victory at Al Alamein, he wanted all the bells to ring.

I should say why the bells couldn't ring was because somebody had decided that bells were going to ring in the event of an invasion to warn everybody that there'd been an invasion. So they were to be silent. Yeah. this was why they weren't going to ring. They weren't allowed to ring.

[00:19:11] EMILY: My gosh, I definitely, yeah, misremembered that. Okay, yeah, brilliant.

The History of Bell Ringing During War

[00:19:16] CATHY: So bells couldn't ring. And then the idea was that, the sort of popular history is that they weren't ringing at all until VE day because of this ban because of the, that they were going to be the alarm for invasion. But, Winston Churchill decided that the victory in Al Alamein had been such an amazing victory that the bells should ring to mark that occasion.

So then the president of the church bell ringers puts an article out in the press saying we're a bit rusty, please forgive us. And, Then also in the press, there's an article about how a Whitechapel bell foundry was saying, "we're getting all these demands from churches all over the country, trying to put their bells in order."

And of course, afterwards there was, "We rang for that. Can't we ring for something else? Can't we ring again?"

The Process of Creating the Episode

[00:20:07] CATHY: So this is the, the episode and, oh, and the other thing was that, to put it together, I thought it would be a bit boring me just reading out all these things. And I had found that, people recording into their mobile phones could get a reasonable audio quality.

The Involvement of Different Bell Ringers

[00:20:24] CATHY: So with the help of Rose Nightingale at ART, we farmed out each of the articles to different bell ringers and they each read them out. So we had 30 voices altogether in the episode, going through, each of these articles. Anyway, this is part of it. 

Excerpt: Thirty voices, seventy five years, one story

[00:20:39] NATALIE: The Prime Minister's great speech in the House of Commons altered everything.

The Battle of Egypt must be regarded as in historical victory. In order to celebrate it, directions are being given to ring the bells throughout the land. 

[00:20:56] CATHY: Pressure was on the then President of the Central Council of Church Bell Ringers gave a statement that was to be printed in the national press.

[00:21:06] SIMON: May I, through you, ask the public to be indulgent in their criticisms of any ringing on Sunday morning. Ringing is an art, which requires much practice, and for nearly two and a half years there has been none. 

[00:21:19] ANDREW: The Evening Standard, Mr. A. Hughes, who is of the Whitechapel Bell Foundry, said, This business of ringing the bells is not quite as simple as the government's instruction make it appear to be.

Our telephone is going every ten minutes, and the calls are all coming from churches which want their bells put in order at short notice. just cannot be done.There you are, another message from the country has just been put in front of me. They want ten clappers installed tomorrow. 

[00:21:48] CATHY: What was ringing like after years of silence?

This letter in the Ringing World explains 

[00:21:55] STEPHEN: After the welcome news that the ban had been lifted for the Sunday morning, we could only muster four ringers at the outside. At least we thought so. But by Saturday evening, nine men had promised to come. At least two of these ringers had not handled a bell for upwards of twenty years.

there was a certain amount of rustiness, the ringing on the whole was good. now the ringing was good to lift the ban. 

[00:22:25] CATHY: The letters pages were buzzing. 

[00:22:27] STUART: Dear Sir, every effort should be made so that the church bells can ring on Easter Day. 

[00:22:34] RICHARD: Dear Sir, ban on bell ringing is still in force.

Why, I for one, cannot say. 

[00:22:41] CATHY: And 

The Experience of Bell Ringers During War

[00:22:42] CATHY: there was quite a lot about, what they did when they couldn't ring, ringing hand bells and looking forward to after the war, what they were going to do. And it was quite nice because there were parallels between COVID. Not being able to ring and then looking forward and what could they do in COVID if they couldn't ring and of course, ringing them as well as handbells came into play there.

The Story of a 101-Year-Old Bell Ringer

[00:23:05] CATHY: But, at the end of that article, I interviewed, Dennis Brock, who is 101. about his experience on VE day, he was a prisoner of war. So he was in Germany and the guards had disappeared. And so he tells the story of making his way to the allied lines and then back home. And then the bell ringing when he got back to his village.

And then I also interviewed Eric Hitchens about ringing his first peel, which was on VE day. So that episode was quite an epic one, but it was great fun to put together.

The Parallels Between Wartime and COVID

[00:23:36] EMILY: Yeah, that's especially like hearing that, little clip back again, I think the parallels, as you were saying between then and COVID really pardon the pun, ring true. My next question is

The Decision to Start a Podcast

[00:23:49] EMILY: Why a podcast and not something else? And, I guess to add to that, I'm curious about the move to include videos now with, Fun with Bells.

[00:23:58] CATHY: Okay. So splitting those two questions apart, why podcasts are not something else? The only other thing that might've been possible at that point was doing a blog, but I'm not a writer. It was just that idea of a radio station and therefore a podcast came to mind. and I wouldn't have included videos at an earlier stage because I didn't have the technology available to me.

The reason why we're doing it now is well, for two reasons. One is my editing software has acquired the software that records video. So it gives me at no extra cost, which is always a good thing and in podcasting forums, for other podcasters that the continual question is how do we get more people to listen to our podcast?

And a perennial answer is go to YouTube and put it on YouTube. Yeah, I'm following the trends there. Yeah.

[00:24:59] EMILY: No, I think it's a good trend to follow. 

The Importance of Accessibility

[00:25:01] EMILY: And, it, I think also from my sort of background in accessibility in the job that I do, it's expanding the audience in a very useful way. And I think we've already been creating the transcripts with Emily Watts, for the episodes.

So I think it's a really nice step forward in terms of reaching out to people that actually, might prefer to watch a video and there'll be captions there because you've already done the transcript. So it's perfect.

 So that brings us on to our next episode clip.

Excerpt: Young autistic bell ringer and historian

[00:25:34] CATHY: Yeah, so this is Oliver Lee who spoke to me. He's an autistic bell ringer, but he's also very interested in the history of bell ringing. And in my episode with him, he gave us a lot of very interesting facts about bell ringing.

So here's a little clip from that.

[00:25:54] OLIVER: I think the most fascinating thing I've found personally is that in many towns the ringing chamber hasn't always been in the same location as it is now. That's what I found fascinating because during the 18th century it was common practice for many towns to have gallery rings which were often shared with the organ or the band if a church had one.

But during the 1870s just like a bell for a form are taken out because they don't like having them in there because they clutter up the church and they make it look unsightly. In many cases, they either made these towers ground floor rings, or they moved the ringers slightly higher up. And, I can tell you of one famous example where this happened in the 1870s at Hertfordshire, there was an old, 18th century ring gallery that had been there for, for quite a few years I think. But in the 1870s they took the floor out and they made them a ground floor ring. Apparently this made them very difficult to ring because of the long draught, and in those early guides it wasn't a thing that they had.

So in the 1880s they put the camera back in again and it's been at that level ever since. 

[00:26:42] CATHY: So he's, yeah, he knew a lot of very interesting facts, yes.

[00:26:50] EMILY: Completely, and it yeah, that episode was just packed full of little facts about, ringing, the networks of towers, and unearthing the, so many different areas of history within ringing. But what really struck me about this episode was also talking to younger ringers as well, which I think was really great to show the expanded community of ringing and that no matter what your age, you can learn to ring and it's very exciting and cool and interesting.

Yeah, I think that was something that really shone out for me in that episode. so moving on with my questions, what did you want to achieve when you started Fun With Bells?

[00:27:36] CATHY: I find this hard to answer but, one,

[00:27:38] EMILY: No, it's fine.

[00:27:40] CATHY: one thing was to stop Roger listening to that radio station, which hasn't happened. He's still listening.

[00:27:45] EMILY: No!

[00:27:48] CATHY: But, I would meet bell ringers down the pub or whatever after ringing and they were, it was, they were always interesting people to talk to.

And I thought it would be good to share that more widely. And to encourage the strengthening of the bell ringing community. And that's really what I've wanted to do to add another angle to the tapestry of it. 

Really it was Roger, my husband, is very involved in lots of different aspects of ringing and I wanted to communicate that to other bell ringers, not just what he does, but what bell ringing community generally does, he's involved in so many different things. We have a mobile Belfry, we have bells in our garage, we have handbells that he rings not just for change ringing, but for tune ringing and he was recently very involved with getting the Heritage Lottery funding for some bells in a local church that had burnt down in 2014, where they needed to raise money to put the bells back in.

And a local church that they ring in, the bell has cracked. So he's been very involved in getting the insurance money to put the bell back there. The mobile belfry, we have the Charmborough ring, There's a new Mark II mobile belfry. Going to be called the Touring Tower.

So 

[00:29:16] EMILY: Oh,

[00:29:16] CATHY: You'll get used to that name, the Touring Tower. And this one is quite exciting because rather than it take an hour to put up and five strong people, to put it up or down, it's got a hydraulic lift. And it's a lot lighter so a lot cars will be able to tow it.

He's very involved with that as well so lots of different things.

[00:29:37] EMILY: That's brilliant. Yeah.

[00:29:38] CATHY: He's on the ART management committee. And so I mentioned earlier that, we go along to

Excerpt: 15 tips to improve your striking

[00:29:45] CATHY: the ART conference where I typically record a discussion. And the first one of those was the striking tips where I interviewed Stephanie Warboys, Colin Newman and Lesley Boyle, top strikers or have coached top striking teams about their striking tips. Got a little clip from that one. 

[00:30:08] LESLEY: Find a tower with a simulator or a dumb bell you can and use and you can do the exercises yourself. Go to a tower where there's better ringing and make it known that you want to improve your striking and they'll be only too keen to help you. I think ring handbells. What else would you do? 

[00:30:26] STEPHANIE: Ask for feedback, request feedback, never get miserable when you get the feedback you're given is not what you want to hear.

[00:30:34] LESLEY: Hopefully you get positive feedback, helpful feedback. 

[00:30:37] COLIN: But don't expect immediate success either. Learning to ring well takes a very long time. It's not something that you can pick up and be excellently good at in six weeks. if you're ambitious, you want to make progress, go out and find the opportunities, but be patient and consolidate at every stage. 

[00:31:00] CATHY: Yeah. 

So they had, there's lots of tips in that episode, which it was an interesting discussion and we've had one more recently about, connecting to your bell, about improving handling as well.

[00:31:12] EMILY: Yeah. I think these episodes specifically, that look more at learning to ring and the tips around that are really useful perhaps to just have. Other voices outside of your tower that you're learning in as well, in terms of other sorts of influences and tips that perhaps someone in your tower hasn't thought of yet.

And, you can bring that back for when you're learning. We've heard a lot about Fun With Bells podcast and the kind of history of it and some episodes. 

The Future of Fun With Bells

[00:31:44] EMILY: I'm curious about, future of Fun With Bells, specifically I think there's perhaps things you might want help with.

[00:31:51] CATHY: Yes. There are things that I want help. But we've just recently done two big new developments. One was the website we completely redesigned. So the website now I'm very excited because you can see a picture of each of the people that I've interviewed on a page. So you can just look down and see, Oh, so and so was one of the people that Cathy's interviewed.

Which episode was that in? And you can click on it and see the episode. And...

[00:32:18] EMILY: I love it. 

[00:32:19] CATHY: really like that. And there's other aspects of the new website that are quite good to look around and there also you find Anne's, takeaways on each episode. So there's a lot of rich information in the website that you wouldn't get from just listening to the podcast.

And the other thing we've done of course, is coming on video. Which, yeah, here we are.

[00:32:40] EMILY: Yeah.

[00:32:43] CATHY: But going forward, yeah, things that I would like help with. 

The Need for Volunteers

[00:32:47] CATHY: it would be good to have more help with the analytics. So this is looking at which pages of the website are people looking at particularly, and which episodes are getting most downloads and, social media, are we hitting that as well?

I've never been able to really learn from those things and I think it would help to guide what we do in future if we had more help with the analytics. And, it would be good to have somebody who really knows about analytics to help set it up and then maybe it would be somebody else who would do the ongoing monitoring.

That would be really helpful. Social media, it would be great to have more help with social media. I'm not an expert and I try to juggle it all, but it would be great if there was more help on that. And then, we've also got the idea of having a map on the website so that if people wanted to say, oh, I'm going to visit such and such a place, they could click on the map and see, ah, there was an episode where that particular bell tower that I might, might want to visit was described.

And be able to then listen to that episode or to see was, is there anything in my local area that, has been discussed on the podcast before? yeah, I'd really like a map that cross reference to the episodes. 

[00:34:02] EMILY: If people are interested in volunteering, how would they go about that?

[00:34:07] CATHY: They just need to email me at funwithbellspodcast at gmail. com and that email is on the website as well, funwithbells. com. Yeah. Yeah.

[00:34:21] EMILY: And looking into the future, is there a podcast episode you're really hoping to do?

The Future Podcast Episodes

[00:34:25] CATHY: it's always the next one. I'm looking forward to doing the one at the next ART conference which is going to be about the future of ringing, and there's a lot of discussion about with the Yellow Yo Yo project and project 2030. But I have lots of ideas.

[00:34:43] EMILY: We'll have to keep listening and, see what comes out, yes.

[00:34:46] CATHY: That's it. 

[00:34:47] EMILY: Should we, call it there? 

[00:34:49] CATHY: Yes. 

Thank 

[00:34:50] EMILY: you, Cathy.

[00:34:50] CATHY: Thank you very much, Emily. 

 If you've enjoyed this episode, then please share it. 

This podcast was put together by a team. Special thanks go to Ann Tansley Thomas, Emily Roderick, John Gwynne, Emily Watts, the Society of Cambridge Youths for the ringing at the beginning of the show. And for the video at the end of the show of the ringing by the Lilliputter's Guild, YouTuber, Simon Edwards. 

Thank you.

[bells ringing call changes]