Another one bites the dust
Published: Fri, 11/24/17
So, another name from my youth passes away this week. David Cassidy was not that much older than me, less than ten years anyway. I was not really a fan, his main following at the height of his fame were definitely teen age girls who got very excited about him. I remember being a little bit bemused in the early mid 70s at the way young women seemed to get obsessed with very pretty boys such as Cassidy and the Bay City Rollers and others I have long forgotten. Although it would only take a snatch of a song to bring a name and faces back in an instant. At least groups such as Sweet and Slade seemed to be made up of grown men, even though, it being the era of ‘Glam Rock’ they wore their hair long and dressed up in ridiculous outfits. And there never will be a severe enough punishment devised to match the crime of recording and releasing ‘Here it is Merry Christmas’. We will inevitably be thanking you yet again this Christmas Mr
Holder.
Sometimes it is hard to remember how weird the later part of the 1970s became, socially, politically, economically as well as artistically. Perhaps the insanity of punk rock and the whole punk scene was actually the only sane response to the pretty long haired boys that the girls we fancied seemed to think were gods.
There was good stuff in the 1970s. The Japanese started selling some seriously good motorcycles during that decade. Yes, it was a shame for the British bike industry but most European bike manufacturers just were not keeping up. Some great films got released at various times too, beginning with Easy Rider in 1970 and the decade finished with the Star wars films. Then there were the Bruce Lee films which made a huge impact. Enter the Dragon is not a great film, it isn’t even a good one really. However, ETD might well have been the single most effective advertisement for martial arts ever. It certainly seemed like it at the time. Shame that, in my opinion, Bruce Lee’s actual legacy is to have created a hugely distorted idea of what martial arts actually are. Many instructors certainly benefited from the interest that Bruce Lee had generated. The question was to what extent they felt the need to imitate him. I was lucky that
my first instructors, George Mayo and Graham Horwood under Professor Chee Soo were well established in their knowledge and teaching and did not need to jump onto fashionable band wagons.
I am looking back into the past because the past seems to keep catching up with me. On Tuesday evening after the Kung Fu class which I attend locally I got into conversation with an older Gentleman called Dave with whom I had been training. Dave told me that he had been training in London with Professor Chee Soo during the 1970s before bringing the Lee style kung fu and tai chi to Yorkshire. We must have been on some of the same seminars and Dave remembered my teacher Graham Horwood. Dave and I have followed very different paths since and then ended up training together over 40 years later. I guess that is just nice to know that some of us realised that martial arts could be a lifelong path, that there would always be something new to learn. We still get older but I like to think that the regular training keeps us in better shape than we would be otherwise.
Writing my book has also been an exercise in excavating my past. I reached 50,000 words today and the end is in sight for the first draft. Just goes to show what you can manage if you just get on with it, I surprise myself sometimes.
Why not surprise yourself by getting along to some Stav training. I think I am full for the course on the 9th of December but you are welcome to book up for the next event 6th of January, see http://www.iceandfire.org.uk/train.html
regards
Graham
PS If you really want an experience to look forward to, enjoy at the time and look back on as a high point in your life come to the HDC event in June next year http://iceandfire.org.uk/hdc.html