More park thoughts.

As I have said recently, we are making the most of the weather and meeting for informal training in the park. Now, I should explain the setup of this. There are lots of groups around the City, but for some strange reason we don't meet up much. In an attempt to alter this, myself and a few people from another group are meeting. This is not the optimal situation. Although we have different weapon preferences and different backgrounds, our basic strategies are shaped by the instruction of our honourable maestro.

I do not think I'm giving too much away by saying that he is a fairly static fighter, holding a strong defence and waiting for the other to become impatient or knackered through running around. It's an effective strategy. In a lot of systems the defender is considered to have an advantage. Even the German concepts of Vor and Nach- where you gain the initiative by forcing your opponent to do something can be used to explain a deliberate defence (probably..I'm not too familiar with the German stuff). I may remember to explain this in a later post.

One of the strengths of HEMA is that it is still evolving. This can be perceived as a weakness, but sod those people- they have no imagination or understanding.

Why is this a strength? Well, we have hundreds of people across the country all looking at the same manuscripts and getting different things out of it. Is this a failiure, a sign we're doing something wrong? My answer would be no. Look at sheet music- that's a precise notation, yet you will get people playing the same notation on the same instrument in remarkably different ways. This is the nature of art. Art rarely means the same thing to different people. This means that different schools have different focuses and interpretations, something considered minor to one group can be very important to another. It's not a matter of right and wrong, this is an art after all.

George Silver says that to become a true master you should be able to hold your own against a drunk, because he will know no fear. Someone untrained but determined, because they will not be predictable and a master because they will be the better swordsman. Safety does not permit the first option and most of my fighting is against my esteemed maestro, or the occassional newbie.

With this in mind, I was rather glad to hear that someone I've been wanting to fight since I became competent with rapier was heading to this city and had some time to kill after taking in a few museums. I met Mr N once, about this time last year, my first impressions were of an intelligent man and a good teacher.

It sounds pretentious to call our little band of scrappers a study group, but I suppose we are. This title was certainly earned this week as we enjoyed Mr N "waffling on" (his words) at us about how to use the rapier and pointing out a few subtleties that I've overlooked. Once the others were in a position to engage in swordplay, I got the bout I was looking for.

I have been working on a little project, I suppose you could call it the viola of the rapier world, I don't really want to say much more than that for the moment, I'm still working on it, and I'd like the element of surprise to be on my side when it gets to competition time. So this fight was testing a few things. Does my interpretation hold water and do I think my skill is at an acceptable level, all things considered.

The answer to the former is, probably. I blatently need to do more drilling and become more competent with muscle memory, but I didn't get hit that much