As a band, we have continued to take it in turns to run the ringing throughout the year – again my thanks to everyone who has got involved.  However, personally I feel that this year we have lost some of the common threads of the prime ring and taking time to concentrate on striking.  Furthermore, the principle of structured learning for individuals to allow us to improve standards across the whole band seems to have suffered.  I suggest we reconsider this approach at the AGM.

We are continuing to have teaching sessions at the start of our Tuesday practice nights – newest recruits, Hannah Newman and James Hill have both nearly mastered the basics.  Hannah has just achieved Learning the Ropes Level 1.  My thanks to our teachers: Terry Williams, Tina Stoecklin and Jonathan Frye.

In May, we entered two bands in the SACR Striking Competition and retained the Inveraray Trophy for a second year.  We are also lucky to have the St Andrew’s Shield for the best call change band in the tower at the moment thanks to local ringer, Thomas Gay, who won it ringing as part of the SACR Youth band, the Spartan Tartans.

As well as normal ringing for Evensong on a Sunday, we have rung regularly in the morning on third Sundays.  We have also rung for Ascension Day, Pentecost, Christmas Morning, Christmas Eve Carols, Epiphany, Candlemas, Easter Sunday and Maundy Thursday services.

In September, we supported the Cathedral Doors Open Weekend and this year we took about 70 visitors right up into the bells to allow them to explore the tower in full and a get a view up the inside of the spire.

We rang for one wedding and hosted the October, January & March SACR ten bell advanced practices.

As a local band, we have rung twelve Quarter Peals throughout the year marking a number of special occasions including twice for the 90th Birthday of the Queen in both April & June.  We rang to celebrate Andy Murray’s win at Wimbleton and to congratulate our ringer, Iain Milne on his confirmation.  We rang to mark the 10th anniversary of Kelvin’s appointment as Provost at St Mary’s Cathedral and also for BBC’s Music Day.

Poignantly in June, we rang a quarter peal for Kerr.  Kerr learnt to ring at Glasgow and was elected a member of the tower at last year’s AGM.  He was really pleased to have been able to join us in the tower for the quarter peal despite his illness but he sadly died in July.  We rang for his funeral in the Cathedral and appropriately raised a glass to him in the Bon Accord afterwards.

In September, we rang Ruby Delight for the 40th wedding anniversary of David & Jan Dobson, winners of a sponsored quarter peal arranged by Bishop Idris retired Bishop of Glasgow & Galloway for the Rotary Club.

At the end of September, we rang a quarter peal of Bristol Royal to say fare ye well to Sue Wilkinson – who was moving back to Yorkshire and to Jonathan Spencer, who had finished his summer studies at Strathclyde University.  It was first in method for them both and a real achievement for the local band.  We will all miss port & cheese parties at Sue’s Hobbit Hole and wish her all the best in her new job.

The local band has also rung three peals – in June, we rang to congratulate local ringer, Jennifer Tomkinson and her husband, Mike on their Golden Wedding Anniversary.  In December, we rang 8 Spliced Major and in April, we rang the collection of methods know as the Nottingham Eight to congratulate Thomas & Inga from the Bon Accord on birth of their son, Thorfinn.

We have a Glasgow & Paisley Tower Outing to the Ringing Centre in Tulloch planned for September 2017.

Ruth Marshall

It is 6.45am on a glacial morning in early March. The streets of Glasgow are still and silent, the city only just beginning to wake up. I turn into my local park beneath a sky that is turning pink and gold. My lips feel frostbitten. It has been a long and dark winter, but, when I look across to the church spire that lies beyond the trees, the sun is coming up.

“I step out of the ordinary,” croons Heather Small from my MP3 player. “I can feel my soul ascending.”

In my head – and only in my head — I am a gazelle.

For a time, I am utterly content with the world and my place within it.

I am not the fastest runner, and I have often not been the most consistent runner, but for the last ten years, my running shoes and the streets of Glasgow have been where I’ve gone to work off bad days, and to fly high on good ones. I’ve muddled through frustrations, and prayed for wisdom, and re-centered my world whenever I’ve been living through things that have made it tilt a bit. If the streets of Glasgow have been unavailable, the streets of really anywhere at all will do. I’ve been able to soak in the fresh air and the glory of creation all over the world, in ways that I wouldn’t have if I’d not been a runner, from the banks of the Clyde to the trails of the Scottish islands to the streets of Shanghai in the rain. And when I’ve stopped, it has always been to find that in some way I’ve never tried to articulate before, the miles I’ve covered been good for my soul.

Of course I would be lying if I said that I didn’t also enjoy the more tangible benefits of being a runner – the personal bests, the race bling, and an enhanced ability to enjoy all manner of deep-fried Scottish deliciousness. These are all wonderful things, but on their own they wouldn’t be enough to keep me lacing up my trainers.

I run because I find surprising things on my runs. I’ve come to a delighted halt in the falling snow after happening upon two horses all dressed up in their quilted jackets. I’ve arrived back at my front door to discover that the essay or speech or research that I’d been wrestling with has written itself in my head while I’ve been gone.

I run because when I do, I’m more — more focused, more aware, more content. I’m better able to control – or at least, better able to productively channel — the manic gleam that I tend towards when it feels as though everything is falling apart and I’m standing in the middle of the maelstrom. I’ve lived with at least one person who would say bluntly that I’m less grumpy. In short, I am more of the things that make me more of the person that I want to be.

And I run because it is a transcendent and transforming experience.

I was not an athletic child. I was uncoordinated, wheezy, and far more likely to be found with my nose in a book than wielding a hockey stick. In my school reports, I was an “absent-minded professor” who had been given up on by the PE department. It has been twenty years and I remain a clumsy and distractible bookworm, but I am now a clumsy and distractable bookworm who has run a marathon.

To run 26.2 miles is to go on a journey that is much, much further than that. To run any distance at all — and perhaps especially if you’ve grown up thinking that you couldn’t — is to become a different person.

It’s to become someone who can believe in the possible. If you can do that, you can do anything. You can change the world.

I’ve said that I haven’t always been the most consistent runner. The commitment I made to myself during Lent year was been to become one, knowing, because it has happened before, that I am a better version of myself when I do.

There are some people who would say that I’ve missed the point of Lent, and that Lent shouldn’t be a self-improvement course.

But – why not?

After all, Christianity is a self-improvement course. A lifelong commitment to becoming who we really are, and aspiring to the fulfilment of our God-created and Spirit-inspired potential.

In that forty-day trek through the Lenten wilderness, we stripped ourselves bare, we became our most raw and real selves, and in doing that, then, yes, Lent can be a place where we can come to find ourselves and start over. And if we can do that, then, just maybe, we really can build the kingdom of heaven on Earth.

I turn for home. Heather Small is still singing in my ear, “I’m on my way, can’t stop me now, and you can do the same.”