Ready at last
Published: Mon, 10/16/17
We got there in the end. The big room is now clear in our house and is ready to be used as a training space. There should be room for me to work with four people, six at a pinch, to practice stances, exercises and close quarter combat training. We did host a training session here on Saturday but the weather was so nice that we spent the time training outside with the staff and, in the afternoon, axe and nine guards with the staff. We have a large terraced area too and quite an expanse of grass to train on. As I reported a week or two ago at this year’s Stavcamp we had three tents and quite a large camper van in the garden and still had plenty of space for ten people to train.
The only complication on Saturday was that Ivar has been having his Lalandi trees trimmed which is not a small job. You may remember the scene in the film in the film ‘Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon’ where there is a fight scene in the tree tops with the characters stepping from branch to branch. It looked like fantasy in the film, but the local tree surgeon seemed to be doing something very similar in the hedge between the gardens, twenty feet up, with a chain saw, interesting but a little distracting. Then there was the noise of the wood chipper, I had to try and not think about the CSI episode where a body had been disposed of by just such a device. Nothing like that happened in our garden you will be glad to hear, but the machine did make short work of a huge pile of branches.
We still got some good training done and we are looking forward to hosting the next event on the 4th of November when I am planning to focus on the Axe. Axe training will have to be out of doors, if the weather is not kind then we will do some CQC training inside instead. If you are serious about coming then please do book promptly, I can only manage six people and three places are already accounted for. Details at http://www.iceandfire.org.uk/train.html
Our next project is to sort out a large room upstairs as a small dormitory for up to four people to sleep. Here is a picture of the training space http://iceandfire.org.uk/images/trainingspace01.jpg and one of me trying to look proprietorial http://iceandfire.org.uk/images/trainingspace02.jpg
regards
Graham
P S Thanks to everyone who sent condolences regarding the death of my Uncle. Much appreciated and, as I wrote previously, he was 89, had been ill for quite a long time and had lived a very full life. So, his release is as much a time to celebrate as well as for sorrow.