Andy's Blog

Sunday was very much a “Grand Ol’ Duke of York” day; When I was up, I was up.  When I was down, I was down.  Today I’m neither up nor down.  I was going to title this post “Four seasons in one day, part II” for pretty much the same reasons as the original post.  A rollercoaster of emotions varying from pain, joy, sadness and pride although not necessarily in that order.

The joy of getting my students to their next level, especially all the new brown belts, was tinged slightly with the realisation that I wasn’t going to be able to make my own progression.

Despite eminently wise words from Sensei, and other friends, about priorities; one can’t but feel that the ‘ongoing buggerage’ has won this little round just before I deal with it ultimately.  As noted to my Sensei, “at least it gives me more time to practice my sanseru and sepai“.  Although truth be told my heart really wasn’t in it.

I think, if nothing else, the two weeks “off” I’ll be having will give me time to charge up the ol’ batteries.  I have already started to fill up my media player with an almost obscene amount of musical tracks and the kindle is starting to groan under the weight of books that have been loaded on there.

It’s also good to know that friends “have your back” and that if nothing else things will be ticking along whilst I’m not there.  The hugs have been rather lovely too :¬)

I won’t be online though.  Recently, and I mean very very recently, it’s almost been too hard to keep things in check; grading, as I said, was too much of a rollercoaster – and funnily enough I think Sensei was very much aware of that fact… as did my tough love guardian angel (as always)!

you can’t go on thinking nothing’s wrong
who’s gonna drive you home tonight?

The answer, as always, is ultimately “me”, but you can’t help but wonder somtimes…

I can’t exactly remember if this is something I started doing once I began my travels down the road of Karate’dom, or was as a consequence of my travels up the colour spectrum, however the desire to start practising strange moves in open spaces becomes sort of overwhelming.

It doesn’t even need to be that open a space; sumo stance whilst brushing your teeth, chudan/jodan tsuki combo’s against the inanimate bath gown hanging on the bathroom door, slow sidekicks against anything remotely upright and substantial, kata in the kitchen, and mae-geri front kicks….

Whilst awaiting the kettle to boil in the kitchen I decided my mae-geri front kicks needed a bit of work on them.  Face the wall, extend the leg to get the distance right so I don’t break the toes on the hard immovable object, I’m not *THAT* stupid, and practise a few snap kicks.

Foot on standing leg stays turned in slightly, raise the knee sharply on the kicking leg and snap a kick towards the wall and back to the starting position.  Repeat.

All was going well, some minor adjustments needed but none too shabby if I do say so myself  …and then the unconscious ‘good’ idea sprang into my mind whilst I wasn’t looking.

Snap kick decided, mid-way, to turn itself into thrust kick.  Foot on the standing leg turned from pointing slightly inwards to swivelling on the ball of the foot and thus giving me an extra few inches of kicking distance…. just enough to make toes and immovable object (wall) get intimate with each other.

‘Fortunately’ brain figured this out before the two could get carnal.  Unfortunately gravity and socks then took over.  Kicking foot sharply stopped and pulled itself back from the brink, standing foot continued its socked swivelling and then gave up its attachment to the laminated flooring.

There’s a strange point in this ballet of stupidity, when one see’s both of your own feet in front of your face, time stops and you think to yourself;

.oO( those shouldn’t be there! )

…and then time restarts.

.
.
.

Leisurely looking up at the ceiling from the comfort of the horizontal and, whilst buttock cheeks complain loudly and persistently, contemplating the patterns and swirls of the rendering upon it, I couldn’t help but muse that this wasn’t exactly what Sensei had in mind when he said that karate shouldn’t be practised solely in the dojo.

The wise saying goes that karate isn’t a race, but a journey.  Unfortunately some of us have forgotten to switch on the sat-nav :¬\

A new month is upon us and.. oh my tis gonna be a full adventure packed one this year!  June, it has to be said, definitely had quite a few more downs than ups and really took a nose-dive as it approached its ultimate whimper.  The blog, as ever, suffered from a lack of updates but sometimes life is very rude in its attention grabbing; and these really weren’t things I could ignore.

So I start the new month off looking for some ‘new adventures’… let’s leave it at that for the moment, and contemplating a month of pain(s)…. of various unique flavours.

The little buggerage that is cancer is having the local quackery peek, poke and “hmmmm” at it first thing with a view to finally giving it its marching orders;  scalpel and eye-watering equipment at the ready!

Before one can even clench one’s but-tocks at that thought I shall be throwing myself, and number one sprog, into the competitive art of funny poses and grunting in a japanese accent.  I would call it Karate, but that really is doing the fair martial art a disservice… at least on my part.

What’s more worrying is that I shall be pitting my questionable skills against a large number of other practitioners, with some very VERY dark coloured belts, all in the name of becoming world champeeen!

Get that over and done with and I will age an extra year almost immediately… literally!  Nope, not in some abstract sense of the word, I will actually have aged another year.  That is if I haven’t already aged prematurely when number one sprog officially enters his teenagedom the week before.

There’s a bit more to tap out into this post, but I can’t seem to compose the correct combinations of letters and punctuation marks into something vaguely coherent.

Ah well, cometh the end of July and I’ll be pretty much offline for a few weeks; no on-line presence, no work, no karate, no updates, no cancerous lumps bumps ‘n other stuff? no idea… we’ll cross that bridge when we get there though.

First day of the month!

Risk is something we manage every day on an almost unconscious level; Do you pull out from the junction now, or wait until that red car passes by?  Sip upon the blessed caffeine bean straight away or blow on it to cool it down just a tad?  Stand and block an attack or step forward and sideways to go on the offensive?

All made fairly quickly and without being verbalised as a series of competing options and therein lies the rub, the verbalisation.  When the risks are said out loud it’s suddenly a decision that cannot be made unconsciously as it sits in front of you with a quizzical “so?” on its face.

“If you don’t do x, y could happen.  However there’s a risk with doing x that may result in y”

It all looks a bit like a mathematical formula at this point, especially when percentages are thrown at you to “help”.  Risk now moves from a personal set of choices to an impersonal set of numbers with some unpalatable consequences attached to them… or not… maybe.

So now I am left to face the calculation of “could” vs “may” and all that entails.

There’s a lot to be said for ignoring the whole issue and just throwing yourself into the elsewhere, delaying the inevitable and concentrating on those things that you can influence.. but the quizzical face is still there.

So?  Block vs Strike?  Could vs May?  Do vs Die?

I am looking at a blank screen, an amusing cartoon picture of myself smiling like the idiot I am, Black Stone Cherry playing in the background, an overused backspace key whimpering on my keyboard and a headful of nothing which is successfully making an appearance on this blog.

This post started off life as some form of apology for the sometimes teasing, sometimes sarcastic comments I tend to come out with, morphed to an amusing story about double glazing salesmen, light-hearted texts and then double-backed to the perils of playing with words.  Somewhere in the middle of all of that it became a little darker and whinier…. and I now find myself gravitating that way again!

I really should stop trying to write a blog post when I really don’t know what I want to write and begin to just splurge on the page, the results are somewhat more navel gazing than I am comfortable with.

If I’m honest I think, deep down, I’m still a little scared about the whole Cancer thing even though I put the whole happy face on (as ugly an image as that is), and the upcoming visit to the quacks in July for the latest prognosis.  Also, this post has also got an awful lot of sentences beginning with “I”, which is both very lazy and a little “me me me”.

I’m (there I go again) also worrying about my next grading, whether my karate is sufficient for the task or whether I can actually *make* the next grading.  As I said “dark thoughts indeed” and not something I am overly comfortable with.

I think I need to change the track…. in all senses of the word.

Julie McKinnon was the unrequited love of my teenage years.  Long blonde hair, legs that seemed to stretch forever (and the fashion back in the 80′s was for tight jeans!), and killer looks. *Sigh*… give me a moment.

…just a little longer

OK, back again.

Unfortunately back then I was a bigger Muppet than I am now, hard to believe I know, and my body would do its very best to make me look as idiotic as possible whenever she approached;

• Remove all fluids from mouth?  Check!
• Rush of blood to the facial area?  Check!
• Independently sprung limbs?  Check!
• Brain cells evacuated through ears?  Check!
• Sudden growth spurt on chin hair to enforce that ‘Shaggy from Scooby Doo’ look?  Check!
• Zits?  Check, check and for good measure, check!

Yeah, as you can imagine I was HUGELY popular with the ladies when I was younger, especially with that little gamut of reactions – it was almost Adrian Mole‘ish!  The end point being that I never did get the nerve to ask the delightful Julie out.

The point of all this?  Only a salutary tale for a certain younger member of my readership that your first steps into, and out of, affairs of the heart can sometimes be strewn with cowpats from the devil’s own satanic herd.

Unfortunately it doesn’t always get easier when you grow up, but as the old adage goes “It’s better to have loved and lost than to never have tried and wonder what if”… or something like that.

I feel all old and wise now… well maybe not wise, but certainly old… and flatulent.. I think I’ve just described myself as Yoda?

I was nauseous and tingly all over. I was either in love or I had smallpox.
~ Woody Allen

My life would look sooooo much more interesting, than it is in real life, if some stranger were ever to read the texts on my phone and assume the rest of my life was the same.

In my text life I am, well quite frankly, some form of sexual god or at least a successful perv… which is somewhat worrying.  To date I am;

1. A sexy woman’s “first man”
2. Able to call favours upon another young woman, although to be fair there was some very specific small print in that text.
3. The recipient of updates regarding the state of dress, or lack thereof, of some bloke stuck on the M25.  Dave, please, stop!
4. ..and who can forget the offer of some fun in the car park!

Unfortunately, or fortunately in the case of item 3, there were no pictures attached to any of these.  It also has to be said that had I not deleted some texts before and after these specific ones, the context of the above may be somewhat different to the way they are read individually …apart from item 3!   Seriously! Dave!

Finally if that imagined person who is reading my texts didn’t know what a Sensei was, there are some serious inbreeding issues in certain parts of Northampton town, then my texts could read like me being some EXTREMELY busy prostitute reporting back to my pimp.  The mind boggles as to what stock I’m buying for that little venture then!

Ah well, unless you see me hanging around street corners in a natty little skirt, which has been known… the skirt wearing that is… well kilt… HONESTLY IT’S A KILT!  …then just assume that my normal hum-drum life is still nowhere as exciting as my textual one :-/

Although one can but dream.

Keeping your guard up is almost one of the first things you learn in karate.  I probably extend this further than was originally anticipated although the physical aspect of this seems to escape me as Sensei readjusts mine yet again…. and again.

Despite the very few, who however good your guard is just seem to poke, punch and jab at your vulnerable areas, the guard remains and protects.  Letting it drop shows how scared you really are, and that’s just not the done thing.. not that I ever admitted to being the smartest biscuit in the barrel.

.oO( I am not entirely sure what type of biscuit I would be if I had to choose one, but there is unanimous consensus that the Chocolate Hobnob is the undisputed king of biccies! )

I digress.

Advancing a stage seems to bring with it a host of new experiences, things to overcome and a whole world of unique pain.  Sitting down, standing up, lying down, strike a stance, perform a kata, slouch on the floor… all are accompanied by some part of your body wanting to gain your attention in as startling a way as possible.

…but the guard remains.

“When the tides of life turn against you and the current upsets your boat, don’t waste those tears on what might have been, just lie on your back and float.”
- Anon

It’s wet and muggy today, and the end to another long karate weekend.  Come a grading weekend I never seem to be out of the Gi much, what with teaching on a Saturday morning and Grading on Sunday afternoon, there’s precious little for anything else apart from hitting the sack.

Celebrating an engagement, at least for a little while, was a nice exclamation point to the week and breather before the weekend in white pyjamas began …although once the crazy gang arrived it gave me the chance to slip await quietly.

Grading is a full on exercise for the students and the mugginess just acts to put them under that extra bit of pressure; it’s hard to give 100% when the very air you breath seems to be be doing everything it can to not reach your lungs.

Unfortunately all this makes for a ‘flat’ kumite session, the students just too shattered to put up much of a fight.. I even had to practically chase one potential red belt around the dojo to get him to spar me.  I’m really not that scary!

However what makes your day is seeing a little 6 year old girl giving it her all to achieve that next belt.  Despite the mugginess, despite always seeming to be the smallest in the room, despite the tears of frustration when she ‘perceives’ she can’t do quite what you ask of them,  and repeating this at least 5-6 times a week,  still doesn’t give up and puts everything she has to gain that next milestone…

Kinda makes you a little embarrassed at the navel gazing you let yourself indulge in every so often.  Thankfully nobody was looking too closely at me as she ran up to get her shiny new red built and certificate, I do have a reputation to maintain… or at least I like to think I have one.

Well done Georgie!