Hi!

Greetings from Middle Earth! I’m here in Wellington, New Zealand. Did I say Middle Earth? It seems more like Discworld:

This extraordinary sculpture is right outside the front door of my home for the next few days.

Historically, stopping off in Singapore on the way to somewhere else was pretty common- it was international trade that turned Singapore from a jungly island with a couple of villages into the extraordinary city-state it is today. Still pretty jungly though. One of the highlights of my visit was my kind host Simon taking me on a 7km walk through the Bukit Brown Chinese cemetery. It’s an extraordinary place, with graves ranging from the headstone in the jungle, to elaborate mausolea. Some of it feels like a park, and some of it feels like real jungle.

I was in Singapore to teach seminars for PHEMAS (The Pan-Historical European Martial Arts Society), set up nearly 20 years ago by Greg Galistan and Chris Blakey, who came to Finland to train with me for a month back in 2005.

It was a delight to be back. On Saturday we studied Fiore, beginning (at the students’ request) with some Abrazare:

Before moving on to longsword, especially how to apply Fiore’s art to someone from a different style. One thing that may not be obvious is that both Fiore and the German masters generally taught in private. So their styles must work against people who are trained differently. Otherwise, there would have been a tiny circle of Fiore’s students all killing each other, or getting killed every time they fought outsiders. So of course Fiore’s art works against Liechtenauer, or common fencers, or pretty much anything that doesn’t involve missiles. Moving beyond the comfortable German v German or Italian v Italian, and actually applying the art to whatever situation you find yourself in, is a critical stage in any historical martial artist’s development.

And I went to the Tea Chapter, one of the oldest tea houses in Singapore, and (I’m 99% sure) the place where I was first introduced to real tea nearly 20 years ago, by Ken Quek. My tea-making skills aren’t up to Ken’s (yet), but I took my host Giles Holtby (who organised the seminars) and introduced him to some pretty fancy stuff. We started with some first flush Dragon Well green tea.

I’m pretty sure Giles enjoyed it- he bought a proper teapot afterwards! The little teapot you see in the picture is big enough for four cups of tea, Chinese style.

On my last evening, I also got to introduce Giles to Audatia.

I'm happy to report that Lady Agnes murdered Jean le Maingre, twice! once with a ligadura sottana, and once with a counter-attack, mandritto fendente from tutta porta di ferro. Hurrah!

Going back a few centuries, Alix Evans (whom you may recall from episode 175 of the podcast) is launching a new ensemble called Ignota made up of graduates of the Peabody Institute - one of the best early music programs in the world. She's doing with music what we try to do with swordplay.

There are very, VERY few ensembles focusing on music that goes back as far in history as the 12th century - most early music groups perform baroque and sometimes renaissance compositions - so Ignota hopes to add to both the musical performance world, and advance musical research as well. Ignota is now crowdfunding their first EP, of medieval love songs. Sound like your sort of thing? go support them at: https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/ignota-medieval-music​

This week on The Sword Guy: Me! reading from From Your Head to Their Hands

This episode is unusual because there’s no interview. Instead, it’s an extended sample from my new audiobook, From Your Head to Their Hands: How to write, publish, and market training manuals for Historical Martial Artists. The book is designed to be short, clear and to the point, with zero fluff! Listen to this episode to get a good idea of what’s in the book.

The chapters from the audiobook that this episode includes are:

• Introduction: what is a training manual?
• Clarity
• Things that get in the way: procrastination, imposter syndrome, fear, and other things
• The publishing process
• Publishing platforms
• What is marketing?
• Content marketing

To buy the book, head to swordschool.shop, or you can find it on your usual audiobook retailer.

You can find the episode here:

yours,

Guy

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