Britain went on lockdown this week, about a month later than it should have done, three weeks later than my parents, and a week after my household. I have some thoughts, as you may imagine. But everyone else on the internet has thoughts too so I won’t blame you if you skip mine. There won’t be a quiz at the end. 

Thought #1: You have ONE JOB. 

Unless you are working on life-critical tasks, like healing the sick or providing food, your ONE JOB is to reduce pressure on the health services. That’s it. You can do this by delaying or preventing getting sick, and avoiding accidents. Staying home, not going shopping unless you are literally running out of food, and being super-careful about washing your hands, is quite possibly the best chance you’ll ever have in your lifetime to actually save lives. 

The problem is that staying home and washing your hands doesn’t feel like doing anything. But it really, really is. Because staying home is hard. It’s not glamorous, and it’s not sexy (though I predict a baby boom in nine months time), and it’s very hard to see the results of your (in)action. Imagine how much easier it would be if you got a message every now and then saying thank-you from a person who will live because you stayed home. It would feel so much more worthwhile. But we just have to trust the data. Human beings respond very well to feedback, but this staying-home business doesn’t provide it. Tough! Do it anyway. This article may help you understand why it’s necessary: https://medium.com/@tomaspueyo/coronavirus-act-today-or-people-will-die-f4d3d9cd99ca

Thought #2: Stay physically healthy. 

This is part of your ONE JOB. This involves exercise, eating healthily, sleeping well, and so on. You know how everyone has panic-bought all the bogroll in the world? Well, if you’re eating right, and squatting to dump (as you should), then you need much less of the stuff! And on the subject of bogroll- half the world doesn’t use it. Literally. There are many other ways to clean your arse. So don’t panic if you run out. 

If you’re stuck for exercise ideas, my solo training course may help. It’s usually $500 (plus tax), but I’ve dropped the price to $20 (plus tax) for the duration of this crisis. You can find it here: https://swordschool.teachable.com/p/solo-training And if you can’t afford the $20, email me and I’ll send you a discount code to get it for free, no questions asked, no judgement. A lot of my friends and students are out of work until we’re out of lockdown, and that $20 is needed for food or other essentials.

Thought #3: Stay mentally healthy. 

This is also part of your ONE JOB. It’s reasonable to be upset, depressed, sad, angry, annoyed, or frightened in the current circumstances. But none of those things are fun, healthy, or helpful so do what you can to avoid them. This has a great deal to do with what you focus on, and your sense of agency. Here are some ideas and examples that may help:

1) Focus on your area of control. You don’t control the epidemic, or the weather. You do control whether you did push-ups today, or how you speak to your housemates. This article on area of control is helpful if this is an unfamiliar concept: https://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2013/10/07/how-big-is-your-circle-of-control/

A great tool for becoming better at choosing what you focus on is mindfulness meditation. I’ve written up a super-basic guide here: https://guywindsor.net/2015/12/how-to-start-meditating/

2) Watch out for the cognitive error of grieving for an imaginary future. It’s well established that winning a gold medal at the Olympics feels great (at least at the time), winning bronze feels great (because you got onto the podium). But winning silver usually makes you feel like crap because you’re grieving for the lost gold, not happy about doing better than every other person on earth bar one. This podcast describes the phenomenon in some detail: https://www.happinesslab.fm/season-1-episodes/a-silver-lining

Yes, a lot of people are facing a much worse future than they might have had if this epidemic hadn’t occurred, but being miserable about it won’t change it. And that future would probably never have happened the way they think anyway, because people can’t predict the future. This comes back to focussing on your area of control. 

3) Make Good Art. Neil Gaiman was, and always will be, right on this.

I don’t know what your art is: writing code, painting, baking cookies, it could be anything. And it may well be that it feels like you can’t do your art right now (if your art is the flying trapeze, you can’t do it because all the flying trapeze tents are shut. Or should be.) For laughs, here’s me on a flying trapeze. About as scared as I’ve ever been in my life.

But there are related things you can do, to prepare for when your trapeze tent re-opens. Area of control?

And ideally, whatever it is, share it. Which brings me on to my next thought:

4) Help others. There is nothing more empowering. It can be super-simple. Patrick Stewart, Captain Picard himself, is reading one Shakespeare sonnet per day aloud. I think it’s only on Twitter, but here’s a screenshot:

It’s very interesting to compare this shot-at-home Sir Patrick sat on a sofa in comfortable clothes reading out of a book, to the more polished professionally produced sonnet readings of his you can find on Youtube. To be honest, I actually prefer the homemade version.

Joe Wicks (aka ‘The Body Coach’) is doing a half-hour PE class for primary school kids every morning at 9am UK time. Good man. 

You totally don’t have to be producing content like this. There are a million ways to help people, the most important one right now being STAY HOME.

If you can afford it, it's also a really good idea to continue supporting any creators, local businesses, or other services you'd like to see survive the crisis. There will be massive economic problems created by this epidemic, and unless there is major support from governments (which seems frankly unlikely), thousands of businesses will close because they can't weather a several-month catastrophic drop in income. So think about what you usually spend money on, and see if you can keep sending it to the same place. Of course, if your job is at risk, or you've already lost much of your income as so many have, then this doesn't apply.

So what am I doing? Fair question. I’m STAYING HOME: we took the kids out of school before they closed and went into voluntary lockdown about a week before the government got off its fat arse and acted responsibly. I’m limiting food shopping trips to one a week maximum (food delivery services are overwhelmed here, and so it seems fair to leave delivery slots for those more at risk). It will do us no harm to be out of bread or milk for a few days.  No, we haven’t stock-piled anything- I think that’s antisocial. If you’re the sort of person who always has a year’s food supply in the house, then good for you. Stockpiling in times of plenty is fine, but panic-buying in an emergency when you’re not actually short of food is simply bad behaviour, unworthy of a martial artist.

I’m being careful about doing my breathing exercises, eating healthily and not too much, taking cold showers to boost my immune system, maintaining my relationships (sooo much skype! I even have my phone not-on-silent, which is totally new and bizarre), and I’m working on several projects (hopefully making good art): 

My latest book From Medieval Manuscript to Modern Practice: the Longsword Techniques of Fiore dei Liberi is going to press this week. Hurrah! It will be released on May 1^st, but if you want to support the work you can pre-order the hardback (expected in a few weeks) and get the epub right now here: https://gum.co/longsword It’s not cheap- these limited pre-orders are to raise money to pay my editor and graphic designer. Sales are limited to 75 total. If you’re short on cash, then just wait until general release in May.

I’m starting up an online coaching program. We had the first couple of sessions this week, which has been really useful to find the bugs- the biggest barrier right now is the technology: data transfer speeds not sufficient, sound quality, and so on. I’ll write it up properly later.

I’m also doing a ton of woodwork (I have a blog about that coming- turns out we sword people have a lot in common with our crafty colleagues). I’m currently working on a Pilates ladder barrel for my wife, and making a box for transporting tools for me.

I also helped my 11-year-old daughter make a desk surface to fit under her high-sleeper bed. I did most of the sawing, but she decided the size, shape, and the decoration, which she did entirely herself, including sanding and painting. Good huh?

So, the days are just packed!

One final thought (for now): laugh every day. It’s good for you. This motivating speech from Scottish First Minister Nicola Sturgeon dubbed by Janey Godley is perfection:

 

Train at home, obviously!

The current situation regarding the corona virus is not unprecedented. Plague has swept various parts of the world regularly since time began. What is new is that we are experiencing this phenomenon with a completely safe and so-far quite reliable way of communicating with each other. I know that many of my Italian friends are stuck in their homes, unable to get out to work, let alone get out to training. The Helsinki branch of my school has suspended classes for the time being. This has never happened before in the 19 year history of the school- indeed, it will be shut on its 19th birthday, March 17th.
I have been wondering what I can do to help my students and friends. Then it struck me that I have an entire online course dedicated to training alone, so if you are stuck at home and want to train anyway, I have a course that will help.
But it’s very expensive- $500, more if you have to pay tax on top. That’s just not affordable to most people, especially those who are currently at risk of losing their jobs because their companies are going out of business.
So I have decided to make the course available for just $20. That’s just enough money that it will make you likely to actually use the course- if it was free, hundreds of people would grab it quick and then never watch the videos or do the training. But it’s at a level where just about anyone who might need it can have it.
If you need it but don’t have twenty dollars, email me and I’ll send you a discount code so you can have it for nothing. No judgement, no questions asked.
If you’re currently sitting comfortably on a pile of cash, then please feel free to pay the regular price, subsidising your less affluent peers. My online courses are my primary income stream, so they literally pay the bills, but this is not a time for making money out of things people need- and I’m pretty sure that a lot of swordspeople need this course right now.

You can find the course here: https://swordschool.teachable.com/p/solo-training

Scroll down to the bottom of the page to find the “Corona Special” option.
Feel free to share this offer with everyone in your sword-circles.
And I mean it about giving it away for free if you need it.
I hope this helps.

The proof-read draft of my new book previously titled “The Longsword of Fiore dei Liberi” came back from the proof reader on Friday literally tied up with red tape!

I’m thinking of re-titling it “From Medieval Manuscript to Modern Practice: The Longsword Techniques of Fiore dei Liberi”. This describes the book better, and hopefully using the not-so-accurate word “techniques” (instead of the more correct “plays”) will make more sense to people who are not currently Fioristas.
With luck this will be in layout by the end of the week…
In the break between applying the editor’s corrections and getting the manuscript back from the proof reader, I’ve been mostly doing woodwork: building some Pilates equipment for my wife, a box to keep medicine in for my father, and finishing the second bookcase. I also built a shooting board, which is a critically useful tool especially for working on small pieces of wood. Its primary function is planing the ends of pieces of wood square, or at exactly 45 degrees (for mitres).

I followed Paul Sellers’s method, as shown here.
Why am I telling you all about my woodworking? Because it got me thinking about compounding errors. Any error in the shooting board will be repeated in anything I cut on it. That’s a simple repeating error. Bad, but fix the shooting board and the error goes away. We need fixed reference points to measure our work against and woodwork makes this exceptionally clear.
When dimensioning wood by hand, we always proceed as follows:

1. Create one flat surface (usually by planing). This is the ‘reference face’.
2. Create one flat surface square to the reference face. This is the ‘reference edge’.
3. Create one more flat surface square to the reference face and parallel to the reference edge. This is just the other edge. It’s worth nothing, never measure off it.
4. Create one more flat surface square to the reference edge, and parallel to the reference surface. This is just the other face. Never trust it.
5. Cut one end square to the reference face and edge.
6. Cut the other end square to the reference face and edge, at the right distance from the first end. These ends are also not usually used as reference surfaces, though there are exceptions such as cutting dovetails (hence the need for a perfect shooting board).

All future measurements on the timber will be made in reference to the reference edge and face. Yes, if you’ve done the work properly, you can mark a line square all round and it will meet up perfectly. But you still don’t trust that other face or edge. Because the slightest errors there will compound.
When cutting a dozen pieces to the same length, you always pick one for your reference length, and make each other piece match that length. Or indeed make marks on your bench to offer the pieces up to. Hence ‘benchmark’. That way, if the tolerances are 0.5mm, and you’re accurate to within .25mm (a very generous margin in fine cabinet work), then if one piece is short by 0.2mm, and another is long by 0.2mm, they are within 0.4mm of each other, and so within tolerance.
But if you measure each piece by the one before it, you could be out by 0.25×11, or 2.75mm!
What on earth does this have to do with swordsmanship, I hear you ask?
Let me remind you of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 116:

Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O, no! it is an ever-fixed mark,
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth’s unknown, although his height be taken.
Love’s not Time’s fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle’s compass come;
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.

In the search for benchmarks, we are looking for the ‘ever-fixed mark’; the ‘star to every wandering bark’ (a ‘bark’ in this context is a ship).
Simply this: what are your fixed marks against which you measure your art? Your reference face and edge?
Mine include but are not limited to the following:

1. The historical source in question. Books don’t change (though our understanding of them can and often does).
2. Simplicity. In a sword fight, you control the opponent’s weapon and hit them. That’s it. If it requires complex explanation, then it’s probably wrong. Immediately I say this I hear Thibault devotees jumping up and down… but you can relax. Thibault knew what he was about when it comes to fencing, no question. He chooses to break everything down and build up all sorts of intellectual fancies around his art, but at the end of the day every one of his techniques (at least that I’ve seen and tried) can be explained in very simple terms- he just chose not to, preferring to justify his art according to the most sophisticated academic tools available to him.
3. Mechanics. Principally grounding, and power generation. Can I connect my blade to the ground through my body, and can I deliver power efficiently from my centre to the blade? This can be rather subjective, so I tend to hit things hard every now and then just to make sure it’s all working correctly.
4. Point control. Can I hit the inner ring on my point control target ten times in a row at speed with every weapon I have, both with just the extension of my arm/arms, and with a foot action appropriate to the system (eg lunge and/or pass)? If not, things have slipped, and I need to work on my point control some more.

There are other benchmarks, of course, and I have a similar set for my general health- range of motion, tolerance for CO2, pull-ups, and so on.
I hope my musings on benchmarks amused you, and perhaps made you ask yourself what your ‘ever-fixed marks’ may be. By all means let me know in the comments below!