Urban Magic

It’s been a few days since I blogged, and the reason is that my hand, currently looks like this:

It is not, I hasten to add, a life-threatening injury!  There’s nothing broken, nothing bleeding, no bits are going to fall off.  All I have are some rather bruised knuckles, and an impressive swollen thumb – hardly life threatening, but a real bugger to type with.  I acquired these injuries while doing escrima, the martial art which I am continually surprised to find myself enjoying.  I haven’t been hurt doing it before, and doubt I’ll be hurt doing it in time to come, as the instructors are alert and the students, generally, very careful.  But it was while doing a drill with a rather more experienced student, that I realised there are certain key things required to be really good at martial arts.  There’s strength… perhaps more debatable with weapons based combat, since a big stick is a big stick regardless of who’s holding it… there’s speed, agility, technique, focus – courage, I’d argue, is also useful as you need to be confident enough of yourself and your adversary to walk up to them with a cry of ‘come on with your big stick if you dare’ and thus hopefully avoid having to use all of the other qualities – and finally there’s awareness.  The person I was sparring with has strength – lots of it – and technique – plenty, and enough focus that I sometimes wonder if he’s trying to fry an invisible ant on my forehead whenever we spar.  What he doesn’t necessarily have, is a wider awareness of the rest of the room.  Thus, when the teacher said ‘now block a side attack’ I went to block a side attack, and was startled to discover a stick coming inbound for my head.  The good news is that the stick did not hit my head.  The bad news is that to save my skull, I sacrificed a few other bodily parts en route.

Once through the initial indignity of physical distress, this entire experience is also a reminder of how difficult it can sometimes be, being the junior kitten in a room of senior cats.  I am still fairly new at escrima, and so if someone with better technique, more experience and a look that could cut through titanium, decides that he’s going to swing his stick at your head when you’ve just heard the teacher ask him to try and take out a few ribs instead, what can a girl do?  I did politely point out, while hopping with pain, that I expected him to go for the side rather than the top, but he informed me he believed he was doing all-round attacks and when it’s junior kitten’s word vs. senior cat’s word, and when senior cat has just removed junior kitten’s right thumb, I ask you again, what is a girl to do other than grin, bare it and hope there’s some arnica at home.  I like to tell myself that the fact this man entirely failed to notice that I was now clutching a rapidly swelling limb, as he came barreling in with his next, very strong and beautifully executed attack, is more a reflection on my warrior spirit, than on his being a plonker.

Make no mistake – I still enjoy martial arts and don’t particularly blame my sparring partner, in the sense that it’s unusual for an attacker to declare their intentions before attacking.  It turns out – and no one should really be surprised – that I am better at weapon fighting than close-quarters wrestling, owing, I suspect, to the fact that I lack any kind of strength or endurance, but can move quickly if pressed to and have a great advantage in terms of reach.  However, considering that I am, in all other ways, forms and means, an utter wuss, I might just carry on thinking about these things as purely an academic exercise…

Ronald Searle died a few weeks ago, and this is a brief blog entry to commemorate the fact.  For those who don’t know, he was an artist, most famous for the Molesworth books and St. Trinians – he also drew a series of very famous images from his time as a Japanese POW during the Second World War, when he traded portraits of his captors in exchange for paper and charcoal, creating a stark and rightly renowned visual documentary of his time as a prisoner of war.  He was also, via marriage, my Great Uncle, and though I barely knew him, a drawing he did of my Grandfather’s cat, sits in pride of place above my parent’s mantlepiece, and a fatter, more indulged blue-grey moggy you can barely imagine.  As a primary school kid, I was introduced to Down With Skool, one of the wittiest, most charming books I have ever read, as an incentive for attending dyslexia class in what was, I now realise, a sublime piece of convoluted psychology on my mother’s part.  As it turned out, I wasn’t dyslexic in the least, but it hardly mattered as I had been introduced through this experience to some of the most brilliant drawings and cartoons I’ve ever met.  For anyone who hasn’t seen any of Ronald Searle’s work, I suggest you go looking, and it will doubtless last for many generations yet to come.

Argh!!  Hate ‘em!  Hate ‘em hate ‘em hate ‘em!  I hate the automated voice that goes ‘Hi there!’ and the way it announces, ‘right, I’m just waiting for that…’ as if it’s anything other than a binary algorithm designed to weed out that percentage of the population with a high blood pressure and dubious coronary system!  I hate the tinned music they play at you as if somehow phoning your electricity company is an inspiring and life-affirming event, I hate the relentless bureaucracy that always wants my name, age, martial status and financial prospects before it’ll tell me how much I’m being robbed, I hate – oh and this is something I REALLY hate – I hate the way they continually take money from my account even when, by their own admission, THEY owe ME several hundred pounds!  I hate being invited to get paperless bills and then not receiving them by email, hate the cheerful, chipper font and happy smiling cartoon-figures pasted over the paperwork with which they eventually do inform me that they’re raising prices despite their obscene profits in the last financial quarter.  I hate arguing with them when they’ve got it wrong, hate moving from one to the other when they try to claim that such a thing Cannot Be Allowed, hate the calls from my providers informing me that if I was a new customer, I could get this amazing package, followed by the incredulity – no, the indignation! – at discovering that I’m already a loyal customer and thus can’t receive anything of any note whatsoever.  I hate the difference it makes between getting two different types of people at a call centre – the chipper cheerful ones who I really do feel guilty about arguing at, and the dour, sour, more-than-my-jobsworth gits who perpetually put you on hold without saying a word, and inform you that they Do Not Have The Authority To Authorise That Transaction.

I hate utilities companies!!

I saw a film a few days ago, which ended with these words:

“Please use your liberty, to help promote ours.”  It’s a quote from Aung San Suu Kyi, the leader of the Burmese National Democratic Party and the film was, appropriately enough, a biography of a large part of her life.  I went to see the movie for a number of different reasons, not least the presence of Michelle Yeoh who, as readers of this blog may recall, is one of my idols along with Grommit (of Wallace and Grommit fame).  Without wanting to say much about the film, I can comfortably reveal that I wept buckets, which is not something I’m prone to do.

The quote at the end was as much a statement about the woman it originated from, as it was about the movie itself.  My life is, for the large part, comfortable, safe, secure, and the state is ethically obliged and socially expected to be looking out for my interests, even if I sometimes believe the methods that the state deploys and the ideology that it uses to decide how to look out for my interests, are flawed.  It’s very easy, under such circumstances, to sit back and say, ‘isn’t it terrible what happens in…’ and there the thought process ends.  The events on the other side of the world are, to most people in a hurry at nine a.m., as to nothing compared to the agony of trying to get on a crowded bus, or the indignation at a parking ticket – it can be hard to think yourself into another person’s shoes, let alone shoes that have walked such distant soils.  Yet if the twenty first century brings anything, it is the technology to learn of a world beyond your own, and arguably, the act of knowledge brings with it a degree of obligation.

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