Reflections

Teaching by Stealth. Cooking, Sailing, and Swords.

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  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

Don’t be good. Be visionary.

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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

Unexpected Help, and dragging HEMA into the 21st Century by its hair.

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I’m a Luddite, it’s true. I resist the march of technological progress because I think that most new technologies aren’t labour saving life enhancing devices at all. I was saying this back in the ‘80s when people were extolling the new ‘desktop publishing’ thing. “What used to take two weeks can now be done in … Read more

Mission Accomplished.

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Sixteen years ago, I was at a crossroads in my life, so I went and sat on top of a hill in the Scottish Highlands, and meditated for a sign. A voice in my head said “go to Helsinki and open a swordsmanship school.” So I did. Now that school has become “The School”, and … Read more

Dread

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I am right now in Ipswich looking at potential homes for my family. I travel a lot, and have the practicalities pretty much down to a fine art, but the night before this trip I was consumed by a deep and abiding sense of dread. I feel like this the night before just about every … Read more

Errors of Judgement

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Training happens in the brain, and in my experience, the biggest barriers to training exist between a student’s ears. One of the most common problems I have seen (and experienced myself), is the tendency to stop and make judgements when things aren’t going well. For example, I’m practising my still-imperfect mandritto fendente, as part of … Read more

Do you own it, or does it own you?

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I like reading about lifestyles I have no intention of emulating, but might learn something from. Such as the “travel the world for ten years with only one pair of underwear” minimalist types. It’s all very “I’ve got an ultralight laptop and that’s all I need”. Which is fine if you’re only a writer or … Read more

To boldly go… thoughts on the new International Armizare Society.

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It is an exciting time to be a Fiore scholar; the Getty recently released hi-res scans of the treatise, Michael Chidester of Wiktenauer fame has just released his concordance of the techniques in the four version of the manuscript that survive, and Freelance Academy Press has announced it is bringing out a scholarly edition of … Read more

The Cargo-Cult Theory of Security

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During the Second World War, some tiny Pacific islands were suddenly strategically important, and inundated with Japanese or American service personnel and material. In the years following the war, islanders started dressing up like servicemen and doing parade ground drill with wooden rifles, carving headphones out of wood and sitting in control towers wearing them, … Read more

Gun and shovel not required.

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Ten days after I first arrived in Finland, back in 1994, I met a girl. Not very long after that I met her mother Kexy, a civil servant who was a serious horsewoman, and had hunted with her father when she was younger. Rosy, the girl, told me that her mum was nervous about meeting … Read more