Consulting Swordsman
If you stick your head above the parapet, someone will take a shot at it. This is true and always will be. It doesn’t matter who you are or what you’re doing, or how well you’re doing it, if enough people see it some of them will hate it. It’s just how people are. But … Read more
I take ethics very seriously, to the point of writing a short book on them. As you may know I have recently begun offering online courses, in addition to the free videos on my wiki, and the books that I write. When I emailed my list about the Medieval Dagger course, I got this reply: I’m sorry … Read more
I employ freelancers a lot, for artwork, layout, editing, copywriting, sword-making and all sorts of things. Basically, anything I need to get done but lack the skills to do myself. In the light of the recent grotesque Fiverr advert, a platform that connects freelancers with clients (like me- I found the person who transcribes my … Read more
To Share or Not To Share? A good martial artist is responsive, not reactive. This is one of the key life benefits from martial arts training, so I’ll explain in some detail. Recently, some anonymous fool posted a long and completely valueless article dissing HEMA on the grounds that it is not optimised for street … Read more
My younger daughter is something of a handful, so I’ve been thinking a lot about things like obedience, virtue, loyalty, and authority lately. These are often associated with martial arts training, so I thought I’d share my views here. I think it is important to distinguish between skills and virtues. Skills are abilities cultivated by … Read more
A student once asked me, “when can I call myself a swordsman?” I think he was expecting my answer to be a certain number of years spent training, but I said “when swordsmanship is your primary means for analysing and solving problems.” This was not what he was expecting. It is why I think of … Read more
2016 was a hell of a year in all sorts of good and less good ways. Celebrities apparently dropping like flies and some seriously crazy political developments put my own experiences of the year into some pretty sharp relief. Be that as it may, I’ll run through what I did last year in the hopes … Read more
The New Year is upon us, and with it, a new opportunity to do interesting things, and a time to perhaps take stock and think about what’s important. That would be lovely, except right now I’m totally overwhelmed with stuff to do. You might be to, so here’s how I deal with it. First, let … Read more
In “Following my own advice” I described how I try to get something important done every day before checking emails, because prioritising the important over the apparently urgent is key. In that post I rather blithely referred to concentrating on ‘creating assets’, and loosely defined assets as “anything that adds value to your life. Value … Read more
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