76. Art of fighting

R and I are almost finished an intensive beginners kendo course. Neither of us can quite remember how the idea first started but it also involved G potentially doing ‘Italian’ fencing. The latter didn’t happen but now five hours a week R and I are learning to perform very specific cuts to the head, wrist, stomach and throat. In the first few weeks our instructors at the dojo didn’t draw attention to kendo’s roots in the samurai era of feudal Japan. Everything was very technical - ‘aim your strike at the wrist/head’. But now when we learn to perform cuts they describe the effects of each cut in more graphic detail than before when we perform them incorrectly - how the bamboo shinai flexes when a steel katana would slice through bone - and how our incorrect cut would only inflict a flesh wound and too easily open us up for a counter attack. It is intensely hard - it turns out that older age has ruined my sense of balance when I have to correct my footwork. Moving feet, arms, in a coordinated response to commands in Japanese is hard! Unlike other martial arts, kendo’s grading system doesn’t solely use the demonstration of skill or sparring bouts to progress, instead there is a minimal time you also need to spend in training and study. The highest rank cannot be obtained without spending 10 years at the previous level meaning all the most awarded and skilled are all as old or older than me. The age range of people is wide and the mix of genders is too.

But right now I am missing two classes.

I just finished the 18 hour leg of my first long haul flight since 2020. Australia is very far away from Europe and these days I am out of practice. Stopping over briefly in Darwin - rather than a usual stopover in Singapore or Dubai - we tracked north west over Pakistan and then skirted the southern shore of the Black Sea. Odessa, Kharkiv and other cities we know about because they have been bombed and invaded by the Russians began to appear on the inflight map. Before these cities would have passed without care - but now they have a new meaning. These inflight maps have been standard on new-ish planes since the late 00s and I’ve been interested in their choices to reveal specific towns as well as cities, deep ocean topography - seamounts, trenches, fracture zones, and shipwrecks. They aren’t always obvious major places. Instead these choices reveal the historic risks of long distance travel and reconnect aviation to its nautical origins.