Consulting Swordsman
I just uninstalled the Facebook app off my phone. Shock! Horror! How could I do such a thing? Well, yesterday I gave a class to some students on a professional writing course at the University of Suffolk here in Ipswich. The topic was time management, and my advice boiled down to the following key points: … Read more
“If you haven’t got your health, you haven’t got anything!” Truer words were never spoken, certainly not by Count Rugen anyway.* Way back in the dawn of time when I began training martial arts, I was enraptured by the idea of martial arts training being a balance between breaking people and fixing them, by the … Read more
Teaching is, and often should be, a stealth activity. Let me take a charming example: my kids learning to cook. Cooking is one of the most important skills a human being should have. If you can cook, you can exert some control over your diet. Your diet represents probably 40% of your long-term physical … Read more
I get asked this question rather often. Here is my answer, and my reasons for it. YES! The underlying assumptions behind the question (which like many assumptions are gross over-simplifications and largely wrong) are that women are physically weaker than men, and less aggressive. Either one of those is apparently a disadvantage in a fight, … Read more
Every now and then I come across something that expresses an idea I sort of know and believe, and snaps it into sharp focus. Neil Gaiman’s “Make Good Art” speech did this for me.* You’ve probably seen it already, but I thought I’d break it down into parts, explain why it’s such outstandingly good advice, … Read more
Speaking as a teacher, there is nothing more satisfying than finding out that your students have used your material to materially improve their lives in some way, be that as simple as getting better at swordsmanship, or as complex as re-evaluating the entire course of their life. I believe in giving credit where it’s due, … Read more
When my second child was born at the end of 2008, everything went horribly wrong which resulted in my wife losing 7 litres of blood (all of her own and a whole lot of someone else’s), and ending up with an emergency hysterectomy. It was all such a mess that they took an ovary with … Read more
Sensible people look at what they have and work from there in the direction they want to go. Visionaries decide what they want to do, then gather the resources they need to do it. Let’s take a common example. You want to start a company to make an app/make a widget/make a difference, and you … Read more
Safety Guidelines for the Practice of Swordsmanship These safety guidelines come from my Recreate Historical Swordsmanship from Historical Sources Course (included in our Mastering the Art of Arms and Solo Training packages here) and have been adapted from guidelines in The Medieval Longsword, The Duellist’s Companion, and The Theory and Practice of Historical Martial Arts. All … Read more
You may recall I went to Scotland a couple of weeks ago, and on that trip a select few got to travel to Glasgow to visit the Museum Resource Centre. There we met a curator, Dr Ralph Moffat, who kindly opened case after case of swords, guns, and armour, for us to (literally) play with. One … Read more