Hi! And greetings from stormy Kansas. I arrived on Wednesday night after a more eventful than is ideal trip. There was a medical emergency on the plane (I’m the wrong kind of doctor to be useful there, but the right kind of doctor literally ran across a row of seats to get to the action); then there was a queue at passport control that took over 2 hours, while I had an hour and 40 minutes to catch my connecting flight; which was fortunately delayed just long enough that I made it, though my...
22 days ago • 3 min read
Hi! Guns in Helsinki While I was in Helsinki my friend Jan Kukkamäki took me shooting, with his family. It’s the first time since leaving Finland in 2016 that I got to shoot my own guns again. Here they are: A Ruger Mk II 22/45 semi-automatic target pistol; a Ruger bearcat .22 revolver, and a Ruger GP100 .357 Mag. revolver. That was much fun… but then Jan introduced me to the Remington New Army (1860s, reproduction) percussion-cap revolver… It’s a lovely gun, which you have to load chamber by...
about 1 month ago • 2 min read
Hi! I know, the world is going mad. The newsletter isn't due out for another week... but why wait to let you know about two things I think you'd want to know about?The first is Safety Tips: a HEMA experiment. They say: "This is designed to answer the question of how different styles of tipping actually affect safety in HEMA—a question that, as of yet, is not supported by any conclusive proof. We aim to solve that, and have designed a series of experiments that test multiple variables when it...
about 1 month ago • 1 min read
Hi! and greetings from Helsinki, where I’m writing this after a marvellous weekend teaching two seminars for Auri Poso’s (of episode 131 of the podcast) Gladiolus School of Arms. On Saturday we spent many hours marinating in sweat (it’s extraordinarily warm here: the temperature inside the hall got well into the mid-30s (Centigrade), which is like 100 degrees for Finns). The goal was to improve everyone’s freeplay skills, or rather, give them the tools to improve their skills themselves over...
about 2 months ago • 3 min read
Hi! This is just a quick note to let you know about an amazing show in London that I saw last night. It's a stunning exhibition of physical prowess, daredevil skills, humour and fun. "Sophie's Surprise 29th Birthday Party" has half a dozen world class circus performers, who you get to see up close and personal doing simply unbelievable things. Sit in the front row and acrobats will zip past your nose. I'm not doing it justice, but put it this way- how often do I email you about a show in...
2 months ago • 1 min read
Hi! In my last newsletter I promised you an update on the results of my DEXA scan, which I had on Friday 10th May, at Baseline Scans, in London. I went up to London and lay on a bed, and the machine did its thing, and told me some unpleasant truths. The short version is, I have a bunch of visceral fat (between my organs and muscle, not between muscle and skin), that I need to shift. The problem with hard data is you can’t really argue with it. Richard Feynman famously said “The first...
2 months ago • 2 min read
Hi! I hope this finds you well. First up, a couple of time-sensitive things: I’ll be in Helsinki for the first weekend in June, teaching two seminars, on improving your longsword freeplay (Saturday June 1st) and on how to teach (Sunday June 2nd). You can find the details (content, exact location, price etc.) here: Improve your Freeplay How to Teach Historical Martial Arts And, if you’re more into the medieval German stuff, my friend Michael Chidester is running a crowdfunding campaign for...
3 months ago • 4 min read
Hi! Home at last! I left Melbourne on Monday and arrived home about 30 hours later, last night. So if this isn’t the classiest prose you ever read from me, forgive me. I spent the longest leg of the journey (14 hours non-stop from Singapore to London) watching the whole of season 1 of the Game of Thrones prequel House of the Dragon, and still had time for a long nap and an episode or two of other things. I’ve got to say, that franchise has simply the worst sword training scenes in televisual...
3 months ago • 4 min read
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...
4 months ago • 3 min read