Diversity

One of the things that makes HEMA stand out from other things, is the diversity. Not just the range of weapons and schools, but also what ypu wish to take from it... Now, I'm an ok fighter. I enjoy freeplay and admit that it is essential to working out interpretations. I'm not big on competitions and only really use them for pressure testing. My academic skills are... better than average, but not by much. I've grown up with middle/early modern English and I read it as fluently as I read current English. I have a drive to see how systems work and I guess that's where my focus is. Others are really good fighters, concentrating on physical fitness and perfectionism, putting the art intto martial art.. others, translate and digitise documents- so we can all work from them.. The more I concentrate on my work and cross referencing with sources, the bigger the HEMA scene appears. All these cogs working together to produce all those ways of coming out of a fight in one piece. (BTW, this was going to be something about the day of lectures at the Wallace- and why I'm not there, because there's only one talk I'm particularly interested in, abouut the books, and even that doesn't grab me all that much.- I only really want to know about context in the way that it affects a fight. The same with the construction of the sword- that kind of history is fine and dandy and all that, but I'm still trying to find the undescribed guards mentioned in Swetnam.. to me, that's more important than anything which isn't the content of the manuals)

Now on Twitter

Well, I have no idea what I'll be saying on there, but since the club has an official twitter, I thought I'd better create an account and follow them.