Believe it or not
Published: Mon, 10/30/17
If I had a pound for every time I have started to write a book I would have enough for, well, a fairly good meal. I have started again, I am determined to write a book about my approach to martial arts and what I have learned over the past 50 years plus. I realised that my earliest lessons go back to when I was 5 years old. I don’t mean formal lessons at that time, just realising that other people will use force and threats of force to get what they want from you. Sounds pretty obvious to an adult but it was a revelation to me when I started infants school.
Another incident which has come back to me as I was writing the second section goes back to when I was 14 or 15. I got started with formal martial arts training when my school engaged a well known martial arts teacher by the name of George Mayo to teach girl’s self-defence during PE periods. The school also paid him to teach an after school Karate class for a year. For most of the year I was the only one who turned up to train. I guess I was the Karate Kid with my own Mr Miyagai. I wasn’t being selfish and I did tell anyone who would listen how good a teacher he was and try to get them along. Even the ones who did come seemed to just find it hard work and repetitive, which martial arts training often is of course. The strangest response though was from a boy in my class who simply said the he did not believe that such a thing as a Karate class could possibly be happening in the school or he would be there. I remember being
bemused rather than angry at such a response, what was I doing for an hour every Thursday afternoon? Having a dream brought on by watching the Kung fu series on TV with David Carradine? I must have suggested he just come and see for himself but I suppose he refused on the grounds that he already knew the facts and I must be mistaken or lying. That was another lesson for me, that although the educational establishment I attended was supposed to be a Grammar school some very stupid people still managed to slip through.
Scepticism is healthy but to refuse to verify a simple fact by accepting an invitation to walk through a gym door still strikes me as rather perverse. Or maybe my class mate was just ahead of his time with his suspicion of ‘fake news’. As I wrote a week to two back, the issue is still with me regarding Stav. Over the years and recently people will tell me that there is no such thing as Stav, okay that is up to them, I am just reminded of the fact that people believe what they want to believe and that explains a lot of why the world is the way it is.
Anyway, it is a fact that I have a training session scheduled for this coming Saturday, let me know if you want to come http://www.iceandfire.org.uk/train.html .
regards Graham
PS George Mayo died in 2004 aged 86. Here are some pictures of him in action. This is at least 14 years before I knew him but I am pretty sure that the dojo is the same venue as I trained at in the mid 1970s http://myweb.tiscali.co.uk/soundmanfilms/mayoshindo_uk/highgate_kyushindo_judo_mayo.html