I spent the first week of October on a data detox. No emails, no whatsapp, no socialz, no scrolling. It’s been a lovely mental break. My initial reason for trying this was to allow my inner visionary to be heard, as per this post.
The single biggest surprise is how little I missed it. I was really looking forward to it, and enjoyed the lack of distraction very much indeed. Days one and two were very relaxing. For reasons I can’t pin down, but which may be related to withdrawal, I was grumpy as hell for days three and four. Oddly though I didn’t have any urge to get online, so I don’t think it was withdrawal exactly. Then things perked up immensely on days 5-7, and I got a bunch of things done that I’ve been meaning to get round to. More on that below.
So what filled the void created by the data detox? That gaping chasm of boredom and ennui that our marvellous machines cover up with clicks and scrolling?
1. I’ve thought a lot. It’s actually nice to be back in my own head a bit more.
2. I’ve did a lot more actual sword practice, in addition to my usual physio/fitness/strength stuff.
3. Coincidentally (I think, because these were planned ages ago) I went to the actual theatre, and met friends for lunch in the pub (yes I’m still off booze, 50 more days to go), and been to a talk (given by Roland Allen, of The Sword Guy and A History of Thinking on Paper fame). All analogue, real people in a room together, offline goodness.
I should point out that I was not religious about this. I used my wife’s laptop to print out crosswords, and fired up my phone to be able to navigate to drop off my daughter at a friend’s house for a party (I don’t have a paper map of the area, which I should!). But outside some very sensible exceptions, I’ve kept the phone turned off, and did not check any messaging apps or email when I did turn it on. The computer was not turned on at all.
I finished making my mum’s birthday present, put a new base on my pell so it stops falling over when it’s windy (see the photo above), and rearranged my study such that I could get my point control wall target up (it needs a sturdy wall to hang on, and room in front and to the sides for footwork).
I also planned a new launch, thought about the overall structure of my business, and got a bunch of CEO stuff done. I don’t think my visionary woke up particularly, so I need to think about how to make that happen.
One of the things I’ve been thinking about is how we have all sorts of social rules and norms around other addictive behaviours, such as drinking and smoking. If someone offered you a glass of wine at 11am you might say “it’s a bit early for me”. Because these days it’s normal to avoid drinking during the day. Likewise smoking. It used to be everywhere, all the time. But now it would be very very rude to light up inside someone’s home without asking, and most smokers would automatically go outside.
But watch any TV show from the 80s and just about every rich person is having a drink at 10am, and everyone rich or poor is smoking indoors at all hours. These healthier rules around smoking and drinking are relatively new, and relatively unconnected with legislation.
I do well with rules if they’re my own. (I do much less well with other people’s rules.) Both phones and computers are incredibly useful. But they are inherently built for distraction. So here are my rules for using my computer and my phone.
Rules for the Computer
1. Be a cat. I’ve borrowed this from Jaron Lanier’s excellent 10 Arguments for Deleting All Your Social Media Accounts Right Now. Cats don’t try to please people. They just pursue their own agenda, and allow the people in their life to serve their needs. If a cat wants stroking, you’ll know. The computer belongs to me. It’s a critically important tool for writing books, editing video, running my business, and communicating with people.
But it’s been warped by the internet into also being a major source of distraction. So I will approach my computer the way a cat approaches the humans that feed it. I’ve always had all notifications turned the hell off, but that doesn’t stop me from getting distracted.
2. Decide what I want to do before waking it up. That could be work on the next book, or some critical business task like paying a freelancer, or emailing someone about something. Then do that thing first. After my week away I have a long list of things to do, including drafting this blog post, that comes ahead of checking my emails. Happy to report I’m following my own rules.
3. Unless I have a good reason, don’t open any communications app before 2pm. Exceptions include scheduled zoom sessions (running a trainalong or doing crosswords with my mum are both good reasons), or if I’m expecting a time-critical message about something actually important.
4. Turn off all comms apps at or before 5pm. Exceptions as per rule 3. And take at least one full day per week off all comms. I think probably Thursdays, which I generally keep free anyway.
5. Be a cat. It’s worth an extra rule to be reminded of the first one.
What do I want my Fondleslab Distraction Engine (aka “phone”) for?
There are many excellent things about the phone that I want to keep, that I missed during the data detox. In no particular order they are:
Camera
Podcast player
Music player
Sound recorder (when recording videos etc.)
Maps/navigation
Payments
Wallet for tickets, boarding passes, etc.
Calendar
The Sword People app for keeping in touch with my sword people and posting sword photos
Calculator
Notes app for when I don’t have a notebook or pen with me. Rare, but it happens.
StrengthLog app for tracking weights workouts
Family Whatsapp channel. I’d like to move it to Signal, but I don’t think we’d get everyone on board with it (my siblings, their kids, my kids, it’s actually quite a lot of people).
Some friends prefer Signal, so I have that for talking with them.
One dear friend, and my godson only really use Discord, so I have that too.
But other than those excellent things, why would I want to be continually distracted?
Rules for the Fondleslab Distraction Engine
1. Be a really fucking grumpy cat.
2. Delete all addictive apps. No games, nothing that makes me likely to scroll (Ebay, Vinted, Chrono24, etc.). No emails. I have the accounts still there in the system settings, but I’ve turned off the email function. That way if I need to be able to check email on my phone for some reason, it’s easy to turn back on, but it’s not on by default.
3. Turn off all notifications. All of them. Especially badges (those red things that flag the app's icon). I’ll check the apps when I want to. The phone still rings if you call me, but that’s it.
4. WhatsApp, Messenger, etc. are strictly friends and family only. I have SwordPeople for work-related messaging. (Feel free to sign up there if you want to be able to message me outside email.)
5. Switch off the phone completely for at least one full day per week. So e.g. turn it off in the evening, and not turn it on until the morning of the day after next.
Final Thoughts on the Data Detox
I’m also thinking about getting a new phone number, and relegating the current one to a no-data phone, so I can use it for two-factor authentication, and as my “business” number, and keep my other number entirely private, so only people I’ve actually given it to will have it. My current number is clearly on too many databases, given the number of spam calls and texts I get.
I’m not alone in fighting this fight. Useful resources are the aforementioned Jaron Lanier’s 10 Arguments. Also Cal Newport’s Deep Work, and for non-algo-poisoned tech solutions, the Creative Good forum has all sorts of options and suggestions. Once you have all this distraction-free time you'll need to learn to prioritise, so you may find my post about deciding what to focus on helpful.
It's worth explicitly stating that I welcome emails from my students, readers, friends, family, and even some newsletters and other things. Email isn't the problem. It's letting it spill out of a confined space to take over my brain that’s the problem. The same is true for messaging apps generally. I've broken the cycle of reflexively checking for anything new coming in with my seven days off, so now I need to keep that cycle broken. Or I'll end up having a (metaphorical) whisky and a cigarette for breakfast again.
Every project, no matter its size, needs five people. Most of us have only one: ourselves.
I was chatting with a friend the other day, and he mentioned a framework that his dad, a very successful entrepreneur, came up with. According to him, the five people every company needs are: The Founder, The CEO, The Project Manager, The Engineer, and the Builder.
For some reason this stuck with me, to the extent that I’ve been making weird pentagonal drawings on the back of random printouts:
It's always a sign that something is brewing when I start spontaneously doing geometry. For weeks I couldn't get this idea out of my head. It explains many of the challenges I've faced running my business, and has highlighted some areas I need to work on.
The catch? In my world, and probably yours, all five roles are played by the same person. But they are very, very different roles requiring unrelated attitudes, aptitudes, and skills.
The aptitudes are:
Vision,
Execution,
Management,
Design, and
Craftsmanship.
Very few people possess all five personalities and skillsets. I certainly don’t. But using this framework I can see why and how I’ve ended up outsourcing the things I’m not good at, and also confirmed what I absolutely must not outsource.
Case Study: The project roles you need when writing your book
Let’s take a concrete example that many folk can resonate with: writing, publishing, and marketing a book. These are separate processes, so while the visionary and CEO are hopefully leading the way, and the project manager is coordinating the three processes, it makes sense to treat them separately, as the design and craft teams are different.
When we think of “writing a book”, we tend to focus on the craftsman: the writer actually putting one word after another, like a bricklayer building a wall. But what colour bricks, in what pattern? Where should the wall be, and how high should it go? That’s up to the designer. In this case, the overall structure and content of the book. What does this book need to contain, in what order, to what depth of detail?
Most writers act as both Designer, shaping the structure, and Craftsman, laying down the words, but a developmental editor can help with design while a copy-editor polishes the craft. So you will only need to wear your writer hat to get this part done. And most writers I know identify only as writers. This is the hat they want to wear. But here's how it should go:
The Visionary has the idea. I want to create this thing. A single book, perhaps. An entire business, for another perhaps.
The CEO figures out how the vision can be made manifest in the real word. What project management, design, and craftsmanship will we need? It’s in a CEO’s nature to veer away from the vision towards the practical. So the visionary must keep an eye on things and make sure their beautiful idea doesn’t become watered down for business or other practical reasons.
Taking a step back, who decides what book, when? How does this specific project fit into the overall strategy of the business that is being an independent author? Many writers, including me, just write whatever they want, when they want, according to no plan of any kind. But most of the really successful ones have a strategy in place. This series in that genre, spread out over this timeframe, for this business goal. That’s CEO territory. My CEO quit a long time ago in frustration and disgust. But once the decision is made, the order comes down: this book, now.
The project manager steps into office. Ok, I’m going to need the following: a writer, a developmental editor, a copy editor, a layout designer, a photographer, an admin assistant to handle the publishing platform accounts, oh, and a marketing team when we’re ready.
Then the designer (or developmental editor) looks at the brief and decides what the overall structure of the book should be, and why. Some writers just start writing and see what structure emerges (‘discovery writers’); others plan things out in detail (‘outliners’). So the designer and the writer must get along pretty well, and pass the job back and forth as necessary. Unlike creating an engine or a building, you really don’t need detailed plans in place before starting work on a book if that’s not the way your brain works.
I’m a woodworker, and when I make a piece of furniture I usually start with the overall dimensions so it will fit where it’s going to go, and that’s it. No detailed drawings, no plans, no measurement. I’m a bit more structured when it comes to books (I usually sketch out the table of contents first), but I’m nothing like Saul Bellow, who famously planned his (Nobel Prize-winning) novels “down to the last flicker of an eyebrow”.
The draft emerges and goes through the necessary rounds of editing until it satisfies the project manager. Not the writer. Writers generally don’t like people messing with their words. But they are not in charge of this bit. The fight is usually between the craftsman wanting to tweak more, and the project manager who can see that the project meets spec and so should be pushed out the door.
Then it goes to layout, and the designer, writer, layout person, and editors fiddle about with the laid-out book until again the project manager signs off, and out it goes to the publishing team.
Publishing your book
Creating the book itself, the actual print files, is down to the graphic designer. Again, some writers can do this themselves, but most really can’t, or shouldn’t. Graphic design is its own thing. This, I would say, is still craftsmanship, but in a field that most writers have no knowledge of. For simple text-only books there are tools like Vellum which put simple book design within reach of the graphically unskilled, but for more complex projects (like my From Medieval Manuscript to Modern Practice series, or my workbooks) you absolutely need a professional.
Then who organises the planning, writing, editing, and layout, and gets the finished files uploaded to the right places, so the book is actually published? That’s project management, pure and simple. A lot of Indie authors do this for themselves too, and many stumble at this point. Because it’s hard, not least because emailing an editor to say the book is ready to be edited, or sending the edited files to the layout person, feels like handing your baby over at the daycare centre.
Then it goes to layout, and the designer, writer, layout person, and editors fiddle about with the laid-out book until again the project manager signs off. The writer, layout person, and editors, are all craftspeople, with their own areas of expertise, which often expand into design territory.
Then it goes to the admin assistant for publishing. The careful uploading of all the right files to all the right places, with metadata and all the rest, is a craft.
Marketing your book
At some point in the publication process the marketing team gets to work. Usually some time before the book is actually finished, sometimes before it’s actually started. Tragically often, after it’s already published.
The marketing team report to the project manager. What kind of campaigns should we run? Paid ads or no? Content marketing? If so what kind? The marketing approach should be engineered to fit with the vision, the overall strategy, and the project management of the book itself.
Most writers have a severely under-developed and under-staffed marketing team. The writer says “I’ll mention it on my socials” or “I’ll let my email list know” and that’s that. The question really is how does the marketing strategy fit with the overall strategic vision? If my strategic vision is “I want to write my books and don’t care how they sell”, then no marketing plan is required. If my strategic vision is “these books should pay the mortgage”, then a marketing team (usually still just another facet of the single person doing all these roles) needs to make that happen.
A common problem with marketing teams is that they mess up the vision, just like CEOs. It may be part of your vision that your work is at the luxury end of the market (super-fancy $100+ special editions), or that it’s as accessible as possible (hello free ebooks), or some combination of both. But the vision will determine the price-point, which is the starting point for the marketing. It’s easier to persuade people to buy a $10 book than a $100 book, but pricing is related to value, so you need to have a clear idea how much value your books will deliver.
My books are generally much more expensive than novels (my paperbacks go for about $30), because I’m not selling a few hours of entertainment to a broad range of people, I’m selling months or years of utility to a narrow range of highly interested people. That comes from the vision, which determines pricing. I also have premium-end books (in the $60 full-colour hardback range), and ebooks priced to be accessible for anyone who really wants the information ($10). I make about half my income from book sales: they literally feed my children. That’s both a product of the pricing strategy, and one of the reasons for it. But my marketing really needs work.
If you're looking for help writing, publishing, or marketing a book, my marketing team would lynch me if I didn't mention From Your Head to Their Hands.
How much time does each project role get?
80% of the work is done by the craftsman. Typing out the right words in the right order, deciding what images are needed and where they’ll go, producing the file that goes to the editor and then to layout.
10% is done by the designer. Organising the material, making sure the whole thing will hang together.
7% is project management, getting the craftsman, designer, editor, and graphic designer talking to each other.
2.9% is the CEO making sure the project manager is on the right track. Once the team is assembled, the CEO is really only there to keep things on track with a gentle hand on the tiller.
0.1% or less is the actual spark of vision. The visionary can literally be done and dusted in a second. The idea strikes, and that’s that.
Let’s put this in a Fiorean framework, just for fun (Fiore was a 14th century master of knightly combat). The Visionary is Ardimento, boldness. It takes courage to see through what is to what might be. The CEO is Avvisamento, foresight, the strategist. The Project Manager is Presteza, speed, making sure everything actually gets done on time. The Designer is Forteza, strength, which comes from structuring everything correctly. So who is the Craftsman? Every single master, remedy master, counter-remedy master, and scholar in the treatise. They are actually putting the plan in action in the real world.
The most obvious thing I’ve noticed in my own work using this framework is that my craftsman, designer, and project manager are getting lots done. I produced six books and two online courses in 2024. This year so far I've produced four new online courses (Vadi Longsword, Vadi Dagger, Body Mechanics, and Introduction to Historical Martial Arts), and one or two more books are expected out by the end of this year. I think that counts as “lots”.
But my CEO is usually on holiday, and the visionary gets almost no time at all. Which is ironic given how this all started, with an actual vision on a Scottish mountain a quarter of a century ago.
Wearing All Five Hats as a Solo Creator
This framework matters because it is very useful for making decisions. Which of the five project roles should be to the fore, which hat should I be wearing, when I decide a book is ready to publish? Really, it should go through all five.
Does this book come from an authentic vision?
Does this book meet our strategy goals?
Is this book technically ready to publish?
Is this book well structured, so it will do its job?
Is this book well made, in terms of writing, editing, and graphic design?
My current work in progress is From Medieval Manuscript to Modern Practice: the Dagger Techniques of Fiore dei Liberi. It’s with the editor now, and available to pre-order here. See? The marketing team is on the case even while the publishing team is in play. The vision is clear: this is 100% on-mission, making my interpretation of Fiore dei Liberi’s art of arms more available and completely transparent (the book includes every single dagger play in the treatise, with the image from the manuscript, my transcription of the text, my translation, my interpretation with academic justification, and a video of how I do the play in practice).
The CEO thinks it aligns with the strategy.
The project manager is keeping an eye on the editor and has the layout professional ready to go (and in communication with the editor directly).
The designer is happy with the structure and overall content.
The craftsman was sure he was done tinkering and needed a second opinion before further improvements could be made, so agreed to send it to the editor.
Phew.
I’m also working on a new facsimile project, similar to my Flower of Battle. It will have the straight, unaltered, facsimile of Philippo Vadi’s De Arte Gladiatoria Dimicandi, and a second facsimile with my translation superimposed, and a link on each page to a video of my interpretation of the play. It’s a lot of work, but most of it was already done for other projects. The translation comes from The Art of Sword Fighting in Earnest (with minor edits that will also result in an update to the book), the video clips come from my Vadi Longsword and Dagger courses.
The project manager was perfectly happy just using the videos as they are; all of the dagger plays are edited page by page, but the longsword plays have a video each (they are more complex to set up and explain). For this project, I really ought to create a new set of title cards, and re-edit the videos so that there’s one video per illustrated manuscript page. That’s about 56 videos.
The project manager was horrified by how much time that would take, for what is basically a cosmetic improvement.
The craftsman told him to bugger off.
Which role is not getting their fair share of my attention?
As we've seen, from the project manager on down everyone is working pretty hard. But the CEO hasn't got a lot of my attention lately. The last formal CEO thing I did was attend a business seminar with Joanna Penn and Orna Ross on The Creator Economy in 2022. And when was the last time I sat on a mountain?
To give the visionary a fighting chance (and maybe to get the CEO to return to work) I’m taking a week off from all screens and inbound traffic. No email, no socialz, no phone. Which means no actual making stuff unless it’s woodwork or bookbinding. No writing unless it’s pen on paper. No distractions. Give the inner voice a chance to be properly heard. We’ll see what comes of that. My feeling is that anyone who knows me well enough to need to contact me urgently will also be able to contact my wife and/or kids, so can find me that way. Everything else can wait a week without the sky falling.
I’ve done similar retreats before, but this one will be a bit different, as I’ll be home, and not on holiday in any way. It’s work, just of a different kind. Meditation, exercise, writing, reading, thinking. Not typing, editing, or responding to external requests for my time. That’ll run from Wednesday October 1st to Wednesday 8th because I have a regular zoom call with my mum on Wednesday mornings where we solve cryptic crosswords together, and I’m not cancelling that. But it’s all screens off the moment we hang up, until it’s time to get cracking again the following week.
The visionary’s whisper can’t be heard over the noise of constant production.
So whether you’re writing a book, starting a historical martial arts club, or building a shed, ask yourself:
Alison Balsom is retiring this week, quitting after 25 years at the very top of the classical music world. She is probably the most famous classical trumpeter of her generation, and certainly ranks with the greats: André, Marsalis, Hardenberger, Harjanne (go Finland!). She’s 46.
I have several of her 17 albums, and she is an astonishing player. I've played the trumpet enough to really get how fabulously skilled she is.
So what? You may very well ask. Here’s the thing that really caught my attention. When asked by Classical Music magazine what she was going to do next, she said:
“I’m not going to be a world-famous anything else I don't think, but I really want to paint. I really want to make things, I really want to draw and learn another instrument… I have these recurring dreams about playing the viola and the cello and the violin… also I just have always wanted to design things. I just want to sit quietly and design things. That's what I was maybe supposed to be, a designer.”
She’s world class, and she’s quitting at the very top of her game. I have to respect that, and also, isn’t it an extraordinary thing that she thinks that maybe she should have done something else? She also said:
“I’ve followed my particular path, very honestly and with authenticity and I feel that I've come to the end of that path.”
Knowing when to quit is one of the most important skills in life. Dropping something even though you’re good at it (and she is the best), even when you’re successful, just because your heart isn’t in it any more.
Go Alison.
The night after I found this out, I had a weird dream in which I was at a concert where she was playing, and she was having all sorts of crises of confidence. I told her two things (just to be clear there is absolutely zero chance she would ever come to me for advice. This was my subconscious telling me something).
1. Your true fans care about your wellbeing more than about any one performance.
2. Play the music of your heart.
I’m not in her league in any field, but I am pretty well established in my profession. And yet every now and then (not less than once a month) I wonder whether I’m still doing what I’m supposed to be doing (whatever that means). Am I following my particular path with authenticity?
The one thing that reliably makes me feel like I’m in the right place doing the right thing is teaching in person. Having a classful of students growing in the art with a little help from me. Everything else, the writing, courses, all the extra stuff, is a maybe.
I’m not sure where I’m going with this, but it feels like a clear reminder that above all else I should be playing the music of my heart, whatever that is.
Swordschool turned 24 years old yesterday! March 17th 2001 saw the very first class I taught as a full-time professional instructor, at the Olympic Stadium in Helsinki.
Not the whole Olympic Stadium. A small room somewhere inside it. I was expecting about 6 to 12 people, and something over 70 showed up. Some of them are still training now.
I don’t have a photo of that very day, but digging around through the archives I found some golden oldies.
Here’s what a rapier class looked like in (I think) 2002:
Guy leading a rapier class a very long time ago
And the photoshoot for The Swordsman’s Companion in 2003 was very serious.
Jari Pallari, Topi Mikkola, and me.
And lots of hard work.
Nikodemus, Ville, me, Topi, Rami, and Jari going over the photos.
And nobody fooled around because it was serious hard work.
Ninja versus Falchion. Miika and Nikodemus “training” while Zach watches.
The School depended so entirely on the goodwill and trust of those early adopters, who had no good reason to believe I knew what I was doing, but turned up to class anyway.
So to celebrate Swordschool turning 24, you can use the code SWORDSCHOOL24 at checkout to get 24% off all digital products (not printed books, t-shirts etc, sorry. They cost too much to produce!). You can find courses at courses.swordschool.com, and books, audiobooks, and print-at-home pdfs of my card game Audatia at swordschool.shop
Just use the code at checkout to get the discount. The code expires on March 31st.
Thanks for coming along on the Swordschool ride, whenever it was you started!
In 2011 I dedicated my book The Medieval Dagger to “Lenard Voelker: Gentleman, Scholar, and an inspirational Martial Artist.”
A few days before Christmas I got a call from Lenard’s grandson Kyle to let me know that my old friend had died. ‘Old’ in both senses- we have been friends for over 20 years, and he was into his eighties. You may not know who he was, so I’ll sketch out for you the reasoning behind that dedication. It will give you a sense of the man as I knew him.
I first met Lenard at one of the early ISMAC events, probably in 2001. He was instantly identifiable by his profusion of white hair, and his posture- he was pretty tall, and a lifetime of politely stooping for us short-arses had left him a bit of a hunch. He was very easy to underestimate, a mistake I never made again after our first fencing match. Smallswords. But not the delicate stand-offish fencing that those who don’t understand smallswords might be thinking of. No. Lenard ‘fenced’ smallsword the same way he ‘sparred’ with a knife. A vicious flurry of aggression and speed, completely at odds with his usual gentle demeanour. Let me put it this way: fencing with Lenard was a pleasure and an education: but there’s no way in hell I’d ever want to fight him.
It says a great deal about the man that at the same event where we had a little ceremony presenting him with a sword celebrating his 50 years (so far) of training in martial arts, he paid me for a private lesson. I was about 30. He would have slaughtered me in any kind of fight, but he was happy to learn from anyone, and very excited by the growing field of historical martial arts. He epitomised the humility that is supposed to go along with being a martial artist, but very rarely does. Inspirational martial artist, indeed.
He was generous and kind in all sorts of ways. At (probably) the second event we were at together, he brought a couple of books for me. Just because he thought I might like them. And this became something of a ritual. We met at many events, and he would always have something I would never have thought to pick out for myself, but which were always interesting, and often useful. One such book was restauranteur Danny Meyer’s book Setting the Table. Another was Plato’s The Last Days of Socrates. I reciprocated with Ellis Amdur’s Duelling with O-Sensei, and others. What a scholar, with a breadth and depth of reading you don’t find often.
The last long conversation I had with him in person was in his garden, drinking beer and eating barbecue with him and his lovely wife Mai, and some friends, just chatting about martial arts and everything else, putting the Universe to rights. Even though we hadn’t seen each other in person for far too long, it was somehow entirely in Lenard’s character that the grandson he helped to raise would, in the midst of his own grief, take the time to call in person to let me know of his passing. What a gentleman.
Most of our in-person meetings occurred before social media was really a thing, so I don’t actually have any photos of us together. If you happen to have one, please share it with me.
7 Countries. 4 Continents. 6 books. Two online courses. And one really good idea (I think).
It’s kind of absurd to summarise an entire year in a single blog post, especially such a busy and yet somehow still productive year as the last 12 months have been, but I need to get a handle on what my actual choices were. It’s all very well to say you prioritise x or emphasise y, but looking back you may well find that you actually prioritised z.
It seems that this year I’ve prioritised pushing books out the door (sometimes faster than they should be), and travelling as much as I can handle. Leaving aside family travel (such as starting the year on holiday in Italy with my wife and kids, taking my wife to Porto for a weekend, and the whole family to Spain for a summer holiday, and visiting my mum in Scotland (which is a whole other country)), in 2024 I went to:
Helsinki, in February and again in May, teaching seminars for the Gladiolus School of Arms (which I’ll be doing again in mid-January 2025)
Singapore in April, to teach seminars for PHEMAS
Wellington, New Zealand, in April, to teach a seminar for a friend’s club (I segued through Melbourne on my way home to catch up with friends)
The USA: Lawrence, Kansas to shoot video with Jessica Finley, Madison Wisconsin to teach a couple of seminars, and Minneapolis likewise
Potsdam, Germany, for Swords of the Renaissance
Mexico City for the Panoplia Iberica, and then Queretaro for a smaller event.
That’s a total of 73 nights away from home for work trips. Damn. I’ve loved it, and will be doing some travelling in 2025, but both my daughters have major exams coming up in June (A-levels for one, GCSEs for the other), so I need to be home for much of at least the first half of the year.
In January 2024 I published From Your Head to Their Hands: how to write, publish, and market training manuals for historical martial artists. Perhaps the nichiest book I’ve ever written, but it was there in my head in between editing drafts of the wrestling book (see below), so I got it out of my head and into your hands. See what I did there?
In March I published the long-awaited and technically “first” volume in the From Medieval Manuscript to Modern Practice series: The Wrestling Techniques of Fiore dei Liberi. Only 4 years after what will become the third volume (The Longsword Techniques of Fiore dei Liberi). It took me that long because the pandemic stopped me from going to Kansas to shoot the supporting video material with Jessica Finley. Well, that’s my excuse and I’m sticking to it. It was also just bloody hard to write.
The second volume (on the Dagger Techniques of Fiore dei Liberi) should be out in early 2025, and at that point I’ll re-cover the Wrestling and Longsword volumes and make them look and behave more like a book series.
Proof if ever you needed it that there’s no need to do things in order.
In August I published Get Them Moving: How to Teach Historical Martial Arts. This is another super-nichey book. I’m not aiming at the mass market here, just clearing things out of my head so I can get on with other things. Books do that: they simply insist on being written and published, and won’t let me alone until I’ve got them out the door.
I also managed to edit all the new material for my Medieval Dagger Course, which I had shot in Kansas. I also have a bunch of longsword material to publish, and an entire course on German Medieval Wrestling (Jessica Finley’s work).
In September I published the celebratory 20th Anniversary edition of my first book, The Swordsman’s Companion, and I’ve made the ebook free on all platforms. The book is hopelessly out of date as regards interpretation, but it’s an interesting window into the state of the art as it was in 2004. And it got a lot of people into historical martial arts.
In November we published the magnificent facsimile of the Getty manuscript, with my complete translation. Unfortunately that ran into some bizarre technical problems after the first 50 or so orders had come through, so at the time of writing we are fixing the problem and reprinting the books. I also created a companion volume which includes the complete transcription as well; it’s not intended as a standalone, but it is finished and has been sent out to all the buyers of the facsimile, so I guess that counts as two more books, taking the year’s total to a somewhat absurd 6. If you consider that my first book came out 20 years ago, and in that time I’ve written and published about 18 books: a full third of them in this year alone.
Of course, publishing comes after writing, and a lot of this year’s output were mostly or at least partly written over the last few years; they just happened to be ready all at once.
My podcast The Sword Guy hit 200 episodes in December 2024, and I’ve decided to pause a while to think about what I want to do for the next 20, 50, or 100 episodes.
Business stuff
I had two main goals for 2024: to figure out how to open up my platform to other instructors, and to create partnerships with other businesses serving the HMA community. I’ve made progress on both those fronts.
Esko Ronimus’s course “Introduction to Bolognese Swordsmanship” went live on courses.swordschool.com in October this year. This is different to the collaborations I’ve done before (such as Jessica Finley’s Medieval Wrestling course) because I was not directly involved in creating it. I didn’t direct the shoot, edit the video, or take part in the production in any way. I just provided a platform to host it on, and some advice on structuring the course and marketing it. So far both Esko and I are happy with the results, and I’m open to requests from other instructors…
If you’ve bought a sword from Malleus Martialis in the past year you may well have got a discount code for one or other of my online courses, or a code to get one of my ebooks for free. This kind of thing is good for Malleus (they can offer more to their customers at no cost to themselves, and make an affiliate fee on any course sales), good for the customer (they get free or discounted stuff they are likely to be interested in), and me (I get some of the course sales money, and someone who may not know my work becomes familiar with it, and may go and buy a bunch more of my books). So if you’re in the business, and want to set something up, let me know.
Research stuff
This year there has been one significant change to my interpretation of Fiore’s Armizare: the three turns of the sword. This doesn’t change much about how we actually do things, but it affects the underlying theory behind the art, and solves a mystery that has been plaguing us for decades. Full credit to Dario Alberto Magnani. You can listen to the entire conversation here.
It also meant updating my translation of the Flower of Battle: I deleted one word. A very critical word. “Also”. Yes, it makes a difference.
Plans for 2025
I came back from Mexico with one clear vision of a problem to solve. Namely, I travel about a lot giving seminars, and so I get to see a lot of students, but only every now and then, and many of them I’ll never see again. This is unsatisfying. I don’t get to see the long-term effects of the things they have learned from me. I don’t get to see them develop over time. Of course there is some continuity, especially when I go back to teach at clubs regularly, but it’s not ideal for either me or the students.
So what to do about it? The thing that blows the students’ minds most consistently are insights into swordsmanship mechanics. Ask Leon in Mexico or Rigel in Singapore about the rapier guard quarta, and how stringering works. The look of utter startlement on students’ faces when they get it is the absolute best thing. I’m thinking about creating an online course that goes into the absolute fundamentals (ie the most important but least flashy) of how sword mechanics work, and making it free: but required for anyone signing up to one of my seminars when I travel. This will let me cover a lot more stuff in the class itself, and prepare them better to actually make use of the insights. And it will hopefully bring them more into my orbit, make them more likely to show up on swordpeople.com with good questions, more likely to come to the next seminar, etc.
I also want to create an online course on Vadi’s longsword (might as well shoot my interpretation of the entire manuscript while we’re at it) [Update: we did! We created the Vadi longsword course, the Vadi dagger course, and filmed my interpretation of every play, which you can find on the Syllabus Wiki when it's properly updated, hopefully by Feb 2026], publish the dagger volume of From Medieval Manuscript to Modern Practice [Update: we did! you can find it here], maybe shoot the video for the armoured combat and/or mounted combat volumes, and finish The Armizare Workbook Part Two (which has been more than half written for over a year… but is still stuck in hard-drive purgatory). Part One came out in 2022, and I meant to get Part Two out in mid ’23. Oh well. [Update: we did not get round to shooting the armoured or mounted plays, or publish part 2 of the workbook. Sorry.]
I’m planning to make all of the supporting video for From Medieval Manuscript to Modern Practice (so, clips of every play from Folio 1 to Folio 31v of the Getty ms) free online. They are currently only visible through the links in the books. But making them open to all should help my fellow scholars, and also provide advertising for the books. Another win-win. [Update: Which indeed we won! They are all up on our vimeo account, and will be built into the wiki asap.]
The key thing to remember here is that planning is vital but plans are useless. There is no way to predict the future, and all sorts of things might get in the way of any or all of my intentions for the year. But having a think about what I want to accomplish, and why, makes it much more likely that I’ll be able to look back on 2025 with some degree of satisfaction. Let’s see what actually happens…
I’m just back from the Panóplia Iberica, held in Alconchel, a village in Spain near the border with Portugal. This was an utterly delightful event, all the more impressive for being the first time it has been run. Hats off to the organisers Pedro Velasco, whom I met in Warsaw in June; Jessica Gomes, whom you may recall from episode 38 of the podcast, and who also looked after me in Lisbon before and after the event; and Diniz Cabreira, from episode 157, who runs AGEA Editora, publishing historical martial arts books, primarily on La Verdadera Destreza in Portuguese.
Diniz, Pedro, and Jessica, with some bloke in a hat.
Every event has its own character, and its own strengths and weaknesses. The primary strength of this one was the tone in which everything was conducted. The organisers made it very clear what sort of behaviour they wanted. Collegial; friendly; competitive when fencing, perhaps, but in the spirit of seeking after truth, not climbing the hill of renown over the injured bodies of your opponents. There were a lot of attendees- it felt like something north of a hundred, many of whom taught classes or gave lectures in addition to attending classes and fencing a lot.
There was a lot of fencing. Everywhere you looked, all the time, there were people crossing swords. With so many hundreds of fencing hours, it’s astonishing that there were no injuries, and no falling out. I didn’t see a single disgruntled fencer at any point over the three days. Anyone who has been to a fencing event will know how unlikely that is. Fencers have egos, and fencing instructors have bigger egos. (Ask me how I know.)
Just one example: a smallsword instructor was disarmed three times by another smallsword instructor in friendly but competitive fencing. You might expect a bit of wounded pride there. But all I heard in his voice was a kind of glee to have been shown an area he could improve on, and respect and admiration for his opponent.
This is how it ought to be. And it didn’t happen by accident. Pedro, Jessica, and Diniz deliberately created the environment in which that attitude was natural. It started with a short introduction from Pedro, followed by an entire class, the only one in that first time slot on Friday morning, in which Pedro instilled the attitude in the attendees. I wasn’t paying close attention to the class because I was eyes-deep in the best Fiore nerd-athon discussion I’ve had in years (more about that later), and I wondered at the time why Pedro was running such a general and somewhat odd session. Then it dawned. He wasn’t trying to teach them a particular martial art. He was getting them to behave the way he wanted the event to run.
My own classes went well, I thought. I was invited because Pedro happened to be sitting across from me while I was chatting with Ton Puey (who sadly couldn’t attend this event) about creating scalable assets (like books and courses) and making passive income (so if you’re ill or injured you can still pay the bills). So on Friday night I gave a talk about how to make a living as a historical martial arts instructor. I plan to write that up properly, as it’s probably useful to a lot of people who run clubs, and are thinking about turning pro, or who are already scraping a living teaching the noble art. I focussed on models and strategy, not specifics, because the specifics change greatly depending on your location, goals, and style. In the meantime, my not-terribly detailed presentation slides are in a pdf for you here:
My second session was a rapier and dagger class on how to teach students to get comfortable using the dagger, and avoiding their opponent’s.
Some of my class after rain moved us indoors
You can find the basic content in section four of the Complete Rapier Workbook. The class went pretty well, I thought, with a range of experience levels in the students, from ‘never used a sword and dagger together before’ to ‘have taught rapier and dagger for years’, all of whom were a delight to have in class.
My goal when attending events like this is to make sword-friends, teach good classes, and to help at least one student make a game-changing breakthrough. As always, this mostly happens between classes, in the conversations and spontaneous private lessons that occur.
Such as passing a student who was practising something that looked a little bit like my Farfalla di Ferro drill, and spending some time with him getting it actually correct (Ibrahim, I’m expecting that video next month of you doing it flawlessly!).
Or spotting a mechanical error in a student’s lunge that would lead to injury eventually, and spending time with her correcting it (Anna, keep your knee tracking your foot, okay?).
Or showing the instructor who got disarmed three times a tiny adjustment to the way he was holding his sword that would dramatically improve his control over it (give it the finger, Rui).
Perhaps my most useful interaction, in terms of my fencing, was the aforementioned nerd-athon in which Dario Alberto Magnani blew my tiny mind with a re-reading of a critical passage in the Getty manuscript.I will certainly be writing up what happened in depth and detail, but it will take a little while as I need to run it by him before publishing to make sure that I’m representing his position properly, and I need time to figure out how much of his position I actually agree with. There is nothing better in academia than finding the ground you’ve built on starting to shift under your feet. Watch this space…
It’s impossible to mention everyone who made a positive difference- there were so many! But I’d be remiss to not also thank Rui for long conversations about art and British sabre; Christina for showing me her astonishing paintings and making sure I knew where the wheatless food was; Dario (again) for discussing the business side of running the Thokk gloves empire; the entire Mexican contingent (Anna, Jorge, Sebas, Adrian, Yakimi and Eduardo) for making me even more excited to visit Mexico next year (it’s planned for March); Alex the vintner behind Portos dos Santos port (of which I now have a bottle in my house) for discussions about wine making and history, Ricardo Macedo for continuing a conversation and friendship that began in lockdown; and the list goes on.
All this in addition to spending some quality tourist time in Lisbon. Jessica picked me up from the airport and we went straight to the Gulbenkian museum for a spot of lunch and a massive art injection. It’s a truly fabulous collection, which while light on swords and armour, is really heavy on gorgeous furniture, paintings, sculpture, and tapestries. And a clock from 1745 that’s still running.
And an Assyrian relief sculpture that practically knocked me on my arse.
Abyssinian relief of Nimrod
The next day I went for a wander on my own, and ended up in the Coaches museum. It’s an extraordinary collection of magnificent coaches, with incredible craftsmanship, housed in a state-of-the-art new museum building. And it’s a crap museum. The coaches are just sitting there, like they’re parked in a warehouse. There is no sense of flow, or mystery, or history, or discovery, or story.
The Coaches museum
That evening we drove off to the Panóplia, and got back on Sunday evening. I was on the last flight home on Monday, so Jessica very kindly took me into the centre and we touristed the place up. (Yes, that’s a verb.) The view from the top of the Arco da Rua Augusta was superb, and lunch in a fabulous little restaurant that you’d never find without a guide was a cultural and gastronomic delight. Get this: they set fire to their sausages!
the waiter left me in charge…
There is nothing like wandering around a city to get a feel for the place. And having a glass of Ginja from the same little shop where Manuel dos Reis da Silva Buíça had a dram before heading off to shoot Carlos I (the last reigning King of Portugal; his younger son Manuel was technically king, but in exile, which in my view doesn’t count unless you mount a successful counter-revolution) in 1908. I’m happy to say that I’m feeling no more regicidal after the ginja than I was before.
So to everyone who made the trip such a spectacular success: gracias, grazie, obrigado, and thank you!
It's the beginning of “Mental Health Week”, so I thought I'd share the chapter “Mental Health” from The Principles and Practices of Solo Training. This comes after a chapter on visualising your mental model for training as a tree, with mental health as the roots, physical health as the trunk, and specific attributes as the branches, and is followed by a similar overview of physical health, before we delve into the details of goal setting, how to practice, etc. I am currently working on the audiobook version of The Windsor Method, and have attached the audio for this chapter here, in case it's better for your mental health to listen rather than read. Just click the play button:
Mental Health
Mental health is the foundation of all your training. If you’re too depressed to get out of bed, or too anxious to concentrate on your striking drills, it will be very hard to train effectively. I’m not a psychiatrist, and if you are struggling I hope you will get professional help. I did, and it works, or at least it worked for me.
If we were talking about physical health, you would agree that there are many things you can do to improve your general likelihood of avoiding disease and injury. Don’t smoke. Eat healthily. Exercise regularly. I think it’s the same for mental health. There are things you can do that will reduce the severity of mental health issues if they arise, or even avoid them altogether. But there are no guarantees, and all interventions carry some risk.
Meditation can reprogramme your inner voice, can reduce depression and other conditions. It can teach you how to control where your attention goes. But it can also make things worse, depending on how you do it and what you focus on.
Breathing exercises are particularly effective at reducing stress levels, and inducing a feeling of well-being. They are excellent for bridging the gap between conscious control and autonomic processes. But they can be frustratingly slow to work and don’t work for everything.
Exercise is a great mood enhancer, and is a simple way to boost endorphin levels which help with mood. But it comes with a risk of injury.
Spending time doing things you actively enjoy (like swinging swords?) is good too – and swinging swords can include meditative, breathing, and exercise components that are a feel-good triple-whammy. But everyone who has trained for any length of time knows that you can have bad training days. Understanding the foundations of mental health will help you figure out why. As I see it, they are:
1. Agency. A sense of control over your life and its direction. In many ways practising weapons drills is an externalised form of this. See! I can control this blade – I am in control. Control is always an illusion (you could drop dead at any moment), but it’s a very useful and necessary one.
2. Meaning. If you feel your life means something, you can tolerate a great deal more stress. Sacrifices you make for a greater good are much more bearable than those that are just taken from you.
3. Connection. We are social animals, and a great deal of our sense of meaning comes from the impact we have on those around us and our connections to them. The pandemic has highlighted this to an extreme degree. We need each other, and we need others to see that our existence has meaning. Believing that nobody would care if you disappeared is perhaps the worst feeling a person can have.
4. Sleep. The one natural process that is most key to your health and wellbeing. It only takes one bad night’s sleep to ruin your day. Sleep is a process and a skill, so I’ll discuss it separately from the other three branches, in Part 2: Practices.
Agency is the feeling of being in control.
It’s often reasonable to be upset, depressed, sad, angry, annoyed, or frightened. But none of those feelings 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. The one single most important tool in your mental health toolbox is the ability to focus on your area of control. You don’t control the pandemic, or the weather. You do control whether you did push-ups today, or how you speak to the people in your life. Steven Covey popularised the idea of area of control (which dates back to the Stoics), in his 1989 book The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. He uses the terms “circle of concern” to cover all the things you are interested in or concerned by, and “circle of influence” to cover those things over which you can exert some control. The circle of influence is always much smaller than the circle of concern, but by focussing on your circle of influence, you actually grow it, and become more able to affect the things in your circle of concern.
The key skill then is being able to control what you focus on, to keep your focus within your circle of influence. A great tool for becoming better at choosing what you focus on is mindfulness meditation. As with any skill, it gets better with practice.
One way to focus on your area of control is to make good art. Neil Gaiman was, and always will be, right on this. In his commencement speech on May 17th 2012 at the University of the Arts, he said:
“Life is sometimes hard. Things go wrong, in life and in love and in business and in friendship and in health and in all the other ways that life can go wrong. And when things get tough, this is what you should do.
Make good art.
I'm serious. Husband runs off with a politician? Make good art. Leg crushed and then eaten by mutated boa constrictor? Make good art. IRS on your trail? Make good art. Cat exploded? Make good art. Somebody on the Internet thinks what you do is stupid or evil or it's all been done before? Make good art. Probably things will work out somehow, and eventually time will take the sting away, but that doesn't matter. Do what only you do best. Make good art.” (Published in The View from the Cheap Seats, 2016).
Over and over again, I’ve found this to be good advice. 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, but there are related things you can do, to prepare for when things get back to normal. And ideally, whatever it is, share it. Which brings me on to my next thought: for mental health purposes, you’ll get the most profound sense of agency from helping others. There is nothing more empowering. It can be super-simple, such as Sir Patrick Stewart, Captain Picard himself, deciding at the beginning of the first UK lockdown, to read one Shakespeare sonnet per day aloud . You can find it on the internet. It’s very interesting to compare this shot-at-home Sir Patrick sitting on a sofa in comfortable clothes reading out of a book, with the more polished professionally produced sonnet readings of his which you can find on YouTube. To be honest, I actually prefer the homemade version. You don’t have to be producing content like this. There are a million ways to help people, and there is nothing that is better for your sense of agency, and connection.
Meaning is the story you tell about the things you focus on.
In 2015 my family and I moved to Lucca, in Tuscany, for three months. We spent a lot of that time eating pizza, but also a great deal of time in museums, “looking at old stuff” as my kids would put it. They were aged 6 and 8, and so didn’t have most of the background stories that bring meaning to a statue or a painting. The thing was either pretty, or not. We went everywhere with art supplies, so they would often sit on the floor and draw and paint the marvels around them. My wife and I would take it in turns to hang out with them while the other went exploring.
We learned early on that it made for a much better museum experience if we prepared the kids with some stories, pitched at their level. One very successful example was a YouTube video that dramatised the story of how Michelangelo created his David. When we got to Florence and took them to the Gallery of the Academy, and there David was towering over us, it had meaning for them.
Meaning is primarily mediated through story. The meaning of a piece of art is mostly in the story it tells, and the story of its creation. The meaning of your life is entirely in the stories you believe about it.
Imagine the difference between a scrap of wood on the trash heap, and an identical scrap of wood that a devout Christian believes is a piece of the True Cross. The meaning the Christian brings to the scrap of wood determines the quality of their experience seeing it.
I have a thought experiment for you, to illustrate this. I call it “three broken legs.”
You wake up in hospital in a lot of pain. You have a broken leg. There are three possible stories to explain why.
1. You went skiing/hang-gliding/mountaineering/insert fun but dangerous activity of choice. You had an accident, and your leg is broken. It happens, you knew the risks and took them.
2. You were walking down the street one day, when somebody came up to you with a baseball bat, shouted hate into your face, and broke your leg with the bat.
3. You were walking down the same street one day, and saw a truck about to run over a child. You leap into action, you save the child, but the truck breaks your leg.
One of these injuries is neutral; one is likely to require some serious counselling and may result in long-term psychological problems, and one is a badge of honour that you will draw strength from for the rest of your life. The broken leg is the same in each case.
Your emotional response to the injury is at least as important as the injury itself. The story that comes with the scar determines your experience of the scar.
And mental health is entirely about your experience, your subjective response to external factors.
So how does this apply to training?
From an entirely rational perspective it is absolutely pointless to study most martial arts most of the time. You are never going to use them. I certainly have no intention of ever fighting a duel. My sword training is in that sense a giant waste of time. But it resonates with a depth of meaning for me that every sword person understands intuitively, and no non-sword people will ever fathom. I am wired to see meaning in swordsmanship. I’m guessing that if you are reading this, so are you. Or maybe it’s some other martial art that turns you on. It doesn’t matter which one; it matters that it has meaning to you.
The sword is a sacred object. With its sharp point it pierces the veil of illusion, and with its sharp edge it separates truth from falsehood. It demands balance and justice. It focusses my being on a single point.
But literally every object is sacred, if you see it through the eyes of the right story.
So why are you training? What meaning do you bring to the arts you practise?
It’s perfectly all right if they are just a fun way to spend time and stay reasonably fit. But you need to bring meaning to some area of your life. Endless contemplation of the infinite void in which people are meaningless specks of agitated matter and we might as well not bother might have the satisfaction of being kind of accurate, but it’s not conducive to mental health.
Connection is our relationship to the people around us.
We are social animals. Without our place in society, we are nothing. In every culture banishment is a severe punishment, and in many times and places was equivalent to or considered worse than death. For most of pre-history our place in our tribe was literally how we survived. This is as true for hermits as it is for the most gregarious among us. Having very limited connection is not at all the same as having none.
Loneliness is a plague in our society, at least as damaging as the global pandemic, and of course it has been made worse by the pandemic. It is literally better for our mental health to be hated than to be ignored.
Of course, it’s better to be loved.
But what has this got to do with training?
Simply this: a large component of martial arts training is social, and as with any other human activity, it creates tribes and societies. This is good, in that we need to feel part of a tribe, but comes with the risk of cultish behaviours. Once we are deeply connected to the people in a tribe, staying part of the in-group becomes more important than other factors like rationality, morality and kindness. Martial arts are as vulnerable to becoming irrational cults as any other kind of human organisation. All this means is that we must be mindful of our need for connection, and make sure that we are connecting with the kinds of people who will bring out our best selves. When evaluating a school or club, see how the senior students behave – do you want to become like them? Because if you stay, you probably will.
It goes deeper than our need for social interaction though. Creativity is intimately linked with connection, because we create primarily through connecting previously separate ideas. Great writers aren’t great because they invent a lot of new words – they are great because they connect old words together in new ways. When growing your tree, you need to draw on the ideas of those around you. You can do this through personal interaction, but also through books, videos, and other forms of idea-spreading.
Connection is necessary for your emotional wellbeing, but also for your creativity. I wrote my first book because a friend suggested I should. I wrote my second because a student from my old club happened to complain about there being nothing out there for the rapier. Without these chance connections, I doubt I’d have started writing; I never had “be a writer” as a goal in life. But look how that turned out! Matthew Syed’s book Rebel Ideas explores the relationship between broad social connections and creativity in depth.
During the pandemic I have had a hard rule of at least one social call with a friend every week. Most weeks I have two or three. And if any of my friends contacts me wanting to talk, that takes priority over any work I may need to do. Connection is so fundamentally important to human wellbeing, way more so than any specific project I may be working on.
Our need for connection has many downsides, such as comparisonitis. We compare ourselves to those who are richer, prettier, stronger, luckier, more charismatic, more “successful”, whatever success means to you. My books do ok, but Stephen King probably wouldn’t be impressed by my figures. I find it helpful to be mindful about whom I compare myself with, and the metrics I use for comparison. Most people I know make more money than I do. I don’t care; I have way more free time. And my job description is infinitely cooler. If it comes down to money, I prefer to compare myself to the several billion people on the planet who make less than I do, rather than the much smaller number who make more.
If you are mindful of the categories you compete in, you can optimise for your mental health.
If you are living a life you believe to be meaningful, and have a sense of agency over it, and have strong connections to those around you, then you are in the best position to have solid mental health. If your training feels meaningful, gives you a sense of agency, and fosters connections with other people, it’s likely to help your mental health. This is why it is so very important to train in such a way that you are getting meaning, agency and connection. Because otherwise your training could feel meaningless, reduce your sense of control, and sever your connections with others.
After a session that goes really well, reflect on why. The chances are good that it scored highly in one or more of the three pillars. And if a session goes badly, which pillar did it fail to strengthen? How can you correct that next time?
I should also mention that your mind needs rest too. A bit of boredom is very good for you (see Bored and Brilliant, by Manoush Zamorodi if you don’t agree).
Swords have been a major part of my life since I was a kid and I still have days when my training feels meaningless. It’s normal, and we have ways round it. My own particular fix is having students. They depend on me to have decent sword skills, so on days when I can’t see meaning or value in training, I train for them.
Physical health is important primarily because it impacts on mental health. Would you rather be blissfully happy but disabled, or utterly miserable but physically fine? A great deal of your experience is mediated through your body. To take a straightforward example: adrenaline and cortisol are produced in the adrenal glands, which are connected to your kidneys. The adrenaline rush we get from a roller-coaster or falling in love? You can thank your adrenal glands. The grinding long-term damage from elevated cortisol levels? That’s your adrenal glands too. It is artificial to separate mind and body, they are deeply intertwined. This is why in many cases changing what you do with your body can deeply affect your mental health.
The AI revolution has been growing behind the scenes for a very long time, and now with chat bots like Chat GPT and image bots like Midjourney, the iceberg is breaking the surface. It puts me in mind of the machine-tool revolution in woodwork that occurred in the 60s and 70s, and the quartz revolution in watchmaking around the same time. The short-term result of both of these was that a lot of old-fashioned craftspeople went out of business, and it became much easier for lower-skilled workers to make decent quality furniture and watches, and much cheaper for ordinary people to buy a functional chair or timepiece.
What we see in both cases, and indeed in just about every case I can think of where new technology comes along, was a change in the market, which became much more democratic, and much broader, with a lower low end, and a much higher high end.
Let’s start with the woodwork example, as woodwork is millenia older than horology.
There is nothing in woodwork that you can’t build with just hand tools. Ships? Check. Lace cravat in limewood? Check.
This is Grinling Gibbons’ cravat, hand carved in about 1690, currently held in the Victoria and Albert museum.
You can see how he (probably) did it in this astonishing video of Clunie Fretton’s partial reproduction.
Until recently, every woodworking project, including that cravat, went from tree to finished product with practically no mechanisation. All power was muscle power, human or animal. The tree was felled with axes, split with wedges, sawn by hand, planed by hand, and finished by hand. The circular saw dates back to the 18th century, when it was driven by wind or water power, and used in saw mills to cut trunks into planks, but it took a century or so to become widespread.
Mechanisation first occurred at the largest scales of woodworking: tree felling with chainsaws, ripping with giant circular saws, the planer-thicknesser (known as a jointer-planer in the US), and so on.
At one extreme, we have craftspeople making extraordinary things out of wood entirely with machines; at the other, we have craftspeople making extraordinary things out of wood with no machines at all. One great example of the latter is Tom Fidgen, author of a wonderful book The Unplugged Woodshop, who doesn’t use any machines at all! Yet he does run an online woodworking school… I wonder which makes more money?
At the level of the individual artisan working at the bench, the cataclysm of modernity didn’t really strike until the 1960s, with the development of smaller electric tools such as hand-held routers. This quickly lead to the demise of many companies making professional grade hand tools. It became very difficult to buy a decent saw or plane; all you could get was mass-produced low-grade wobbly crap. Just compare a Record plane from 1950 with one from 1975, and the cost-cutting is obvious. Plastic handles, parts made of bent mild steel rather than cast, etc. This was not the companies’ fault: the market for the high quality stuff just wasn’t big enough any more to be profitable.
But from the ashes of rubbish hand-tools, phoenixes have emerged, beginning with Lie-Nielsen Toolworks, founded in 1981. The top end of the market is now way, way, higher than it ever was before. Such as this saw from Skelton Saws:
The Chippendale, from Skelton Saws, a snip at £750
And planes from Karl Holtey, that begin at around £1k, if you can find them. Most are much more expensive.
Karl Holtey planes: the pinnacle of the art
Which make my beautiful, immaculate, Florip saws look very cheap! I have five: their bench saw, tenon saws both rip and crosscut, and dovetail saws rip and crosscut. Oh my goddess, these are amazing, and all five together cost about the same as one Skelton. But of course, about ten times what I'd pay for the cheapest options. Likewise, you can get a really high end plane from Clifton (an old brand that was going bankrupt, and was rescued by one of the few surviving handsaw makers in the UK, Thomas Flinn), Lee-Nielsen, Veritas, etc for a tenth of the price of the equivalent Holtey, but yes, about ten times what the crap in the big box store will cost you.
You can get an idea of what it takes to make a really cheap plane work properly in this video by Rex Krueger.
Putting these tools to use, most craftspeople fall somewhere in between the high-tech and the hand tool-only. I have always had a romantic and aesthetic preference for hand tools, so avoid machines where practical. But here’s the thing: from the perspective of the end-user, it is impossible to distinguish a board that has been dimensioned by machine and finished by hand, and one from which every shaving was taken away through manual labour.
There is no difference- you only get to see the final surface. Likewise, an article written by ChatGPT will be like a rough-sawn board. Usable for some applications, but by the time a craftsperson has planed it smooth, sanded it, and applied some polish, nobody will know if she wrote it from scratch, or edited it from an AI generated draft. Most end-users, most of the time, couldn’t care less how their book was written or their furniture was made. It either meets spec, or it doesn’t.
It’s also worth noting that mastering woodworking machines is in its own way as demanding and difficult as mastering hand tools. You can’t just dump a load of wood in the machine shop, turn everything on, and hey-presto! Out comes new furniture. It’s just that it expands the lower end, and speeds up production: less-skilled workers can get useful work done, and more skilled workers can work dramatically faster, especially in getting sawn lumber dimensioned and planed all round.
The major downside of machines in woodworking (other than the noise and the dust) is that one can tend to make the furniture that the machine can handle. The machines become a limiting factor. If you can’t fit a board onto your planer, you might rip it down the middle so it will… when cutting dovetails, I usually lay out the tails so close together that it’s impossible to cut them with a router (the cutter shank won’t fit through the gap between the tails).
Anyone who knows about such things will immediately see that these were hand-cut. This has nothing to do with practicality, and everything to do with satisfaction. It’s sticking one finger up to the machine-tool revolution, and quite silly because a) it doesn’t make the joint stronger and b) I’m perfectly happy to use machines for other things. The groove for the drawer bottom in this very drawer was cut with a router, and I used a planer-thicknesser to bring the front and sides to thickness.
If you are unfamiliar with woodworking machines, you can see a state of the art modern set-up here in Matt Estlea’s overview video of the making of his Roubo-style workbench, “Bertha”.
Same craftsman, different jobs, so different tools.
Of course, most furniture isn’t made by any kind of craftsperson. It comes from factory assembly lines, in massive quantities at an extraordinarily low cost. It is literally cheaper to buy a table from IKEA than it is to buy the wood to make the same table yourself. The same people who are (probably rightfully) worried about how AI will steal their jobs are almost certainly wearing clothes made on machine looms, and using furniture mass-produced by industrial processes. And probably wearing quartz watches.
The Craft of Horology
Speaking of watches, here is one of the best watches in the world:
from https://www.casio.com/intl/watches/casio/product.AE-1500WH-1AV/
The Casio AE1500. Yours for about £30. Reliable, waterproof, multi-function, does everything you could possibly ask of a watch… Except make your craftsmanship spidey-sense tingle with glee. Which this handmade IWC perpetual calendar watch (you won’t need to adjust the date, month, or moon calendar until the year 2100) certainly does.
Get this: using only gears, springs, and levers, this watch can handle date changes, including leap years. It’s all 100% mechanical. The mind boggles. Is that worth paying about a thousand times as much for the watch? Some people certainly think so. The Casio does all that the IWC can do with ease, and more, at about a thousandth of the cost. Though, if I’m 100% honest, if money were no object, the high-end watch I’d get would be the Rolex GMT Master II, with the pepsi bezel. What can I say? The heart wants what it wants. Rolex got me with their advertising in the 80s, and I’ve never quite lost the urge. I found this genuine ex-dealer wall clock on Etsy, and I love it to bits:
Getting back on track now (please admire the deftness with which I didn’t go down the wooden timepiece rabbit hole), the quartz revolution almost destroyed the Swiss watch industry. Before those cheap, reliable, tacky watches came along, all watches were purely mechanical. The fancy ones were self-winding, and had interesting complications like GMT functionality and/or showed the date, but that was about it. And when cheaper, more reliable, tackier watches became available, there was a winnowing of watch companies that is heartbreaking to contemplate. In 1970, there were approximately 1600 Swiss watchmaking companies. By 1983, there were about 600 left.
One brand that made a tremendous success out of cheap quartz watches was Swatch. They went on to buy up some of the struggling fancy brands (Breguet, developer of the Tourbillon escapement (patented in 1801). Breitling. Even James Bond’s Omega) and made them profitable. At the same time, Patek Philippe, Audemars Piguet, Vacheron Constantin, and Rolex doubled down on the exclusive luxury end of the market and went from strength to strength, because they are not competing on price or time-keeping accuracy. They are competing on craftsmanship and artistry. It’s worth noting that Rolex and Patek Philippe particularly were actively developing their own quartz movements in the early days, so they were not in any sense Luddite about their approach to watchmaking. But they recognised a fight they'd never win, and so chose new ground to compete on.
Since the quartz apocalypse, there have been some astonishing new entrants into the field, such as Richard Mille and Kari Voutilainen (whose watches start around the 200 thousand dollar mark, about ten times what the IWC watch costs), or Finnish watchmakers S.U.F Helsinki, whose watches start at about a tenth of the IWC. These newcomers are not just filling the gap left by the older brands that failed and were bought up; the market for this kind of art/craft is much, much, larger than it ever was. In terms of price, it goes approximately like so: Casio: x 100 = S.U.F Helsinki: x 100 = Voutilainen. The gap between the bottom end and the top is almost infinite: there are new watches by new makers out there that cost millions.
People will still pay for craftsmanship
What does all this have to do with AI? Well, it’s the power-tool, quartz movement, equivalent for knowledge workers of all kinds, including programmers, graphic designers, and writers. Bill Gates reckons (in his article The Age of AI Has Begun) that this is the biggest thing since the graphical user interface, and he’s pretty well placed to make that assessment.The article is relatively fair-minded, and highlights some pros and cons. Pros include better cheaper healthcare, cons include the risks of AIs being misused by the malicious, and major disruption to the livelihoods of knowledge workers.
Here is what will happen, because it’s what always happens:
The market will split. There will be some people out of work because AI does their job better and faster than they can, and they can’t adapt fast enough. There will be some people who successfully position themselves as the hand-tool/mechanical watch artisan equivalent: poets, literary fiction writers, and so on. And there will be most people in between who learn to use the new tools, and use them to make more stuff, faster, and better.
There is space in the market for the cheap, practical, gets the job done for not much money solution. And there is space for the artisanal, bespoke, gets the job done for a lot more money solution.
On the left of my wall clock, there’s a version of my publishing imprint Spada Press’s logo, done on vellum, by the incomparable Nora Cannaday (whom I interviewed in episode 28 of The Sword Guy podcast).
Spada Press logo by Nora Cannaday (nee Kirkeby, hence the signature), at https://noracannaday.com/
It’s a one-off work of art. I also have this one, that I use in all my books:
Spada press logo, by Robert Simpson, at https://www.squircle.co/
Done precisely to spec, by the excellent Robert Simpson, using digital tools (which graphic designers were up in arms about in the 80s and 90s), and which has now been reproduced thousands of times in printed books and ebooks.
Which one is “better”? That really depends on what you want. They are both exactly what I asked for and are both excellent.
The real question is, who benefits from all this progress?
Back in the 80s, one teacher at school was banging on about how, with the new desktop publishing, you could do in a morning what used to take a week. I asked if you’d expect to get the rest of the week off, then? He said no…
And this is how it will go. If you are working for yourself, or it’s your company, then increasing productivity is usually a good thing, up to the point that it decreases the value of your product, and until your competitors become similarly more productive. If you work for someone else, this will just mean that you are expected to produce x times as much, for the same money or less.
In Gates’ article, he wrote:
“When productivity goes up, society benefits because people are freed up to do other things, at work and at home.” (Emphasis mine)
This is the most egregious rubbish. When productivity goes up, people are expected to do more work in less time. End of story. AI will mean either redundancy or more product for the same pay, for most employees affected by it.
Mark Hurst at Creative Good is a technologist who is usefully sceptical of various aspects of the modern techscape, including AI. He makes the point in his article ChatGPT’s dangers are starting to show that the companies involved in AI development are working to “privatise the gains, and socialise the losses”.
One critical area where the law has simply not been written yet is the use of copyright material to train AIs. To my mind, it’s a blatant violation of the rights of the creator to use their work (usually writing or graphic art of some kind) to train a machine to create other art in that style. Creators should have the right to decline such use, or to get paid to allow it, just as they might licence a film studio to make a movie out of their novel. I think it will be extremely difficult to prove what material the AI has used- for instance, any chatbot AI probably has access to every blog post ever written. But those posts are in most cases copyrighted to the writer. How do you prove that the AI stole your work? This is a solvable problem, I just hope that our society does the work to solve it. Making the owners of the AI liable for any infringements would go a long way towards motivating them to program the bot to behave ethically.
I think that dangerous new technology requires some kind of regulation. Cars, for instance. You need a licence and insurance to drive one. With AI, the primary worry is that ignorant people will mistake an algorithm with access to a finite (though very large) database for the arbiter of truth. And unscrupulous people will use AI to manipulate us into buying more stuff we don’t need, or voting for the wrong people. These are genuine concerns, but I am more concerned with the people who will become redundant, because they either don’t adapt, or re-brand, or their specific area is simply no longer needed by anyone. There can and should be some provision for them.
There is nothing inherently moral or immoral in AI. It’s a tool. It can and will be used to make our lives easier and better; and it can and will be used to make our lives worse. This is true for every tool ever made. Swords bring justice and defend the weak. Swords murder the innocent. It’s not the tool, it’s what we do with it. I could brain you with my #7 plane, stab you with a chisel, or use a chunky steel watch as a knuckleduster, which is how Mr. Bond broke his Rolex in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (the book, not the movie). Though the tools you have access to will tend to guide your choices, whether you're conscious of it or not. When you're holding a hammer, you look for nails. I'm much more likely to joint an edge with my #7 that I am to hit anyone with it.
When I was thinking about getting a new (to me) car back when I lived in Finland, I considered getting a four-wheel drive, because it's that much less likely to get stuck in the snow. I asked a friend who really knows cars, and he said: “with four-wheel drive, you still get stuck, but in worse places”. Tools guide choices.
It's also true that all new technologies have unanticipated, often unanticipatable, consequences, for good or ill. I'm not a prophet, so won't make any predictions about the unanticipatable. But the obvious (to me at least) negative consequence of chatbot AI, like ChatGPT, is that we will outsource our thinking, and so become less good at it. Plato famously decried writing things down as bad for the memory. Folk are continuously ascribing all sorts of things to Plato and others (as Abe Lincoln famously tweeted: don't believe everything you read on the internet), so I'll quote him at length. He puts this story into Socrates' mouth:
The story goes that Thamus [a mythical inventor of writing] said many things to Theuth [a mythical king of Egypt] in praise or blame of the various arts, which it would take too long to repeat; but when they came to the letters, “This invention, O king,” said Theuth, “will make the Egyptians wiser and will improve their memories; for it is an elixir of memory and wisdom that I have discovered.” But Thamus replied, “Most ingenious Theuth, one man has the ability to beget arts, but the ability to judge of their usefulness or harmfulness to their users belongs to another; and now you, who are the father of letters, have been led by your affection to ascribe to them a power the opposite of that which they really possess. For this invention will produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn to use it, because they will not practice their memory. Their trust in writing, produced by external characters which are no part of themselves, will discourage the use of their own memory within them. You have invented an elixir not of memory, but of reminding; and you offer your pupils the appearance of wisdom, not true wisdom, for they will read many things without instruction and will therefore seem to know many things, when they are for the most part ignorant and hard to get along with, since they are not wise, but only appear wise. (Source: http://www.antiquitatem.com/en/origin-of-writing-memory-plato-phaedrus/)
He was right, but I think we'd all agree that the loss of memory skill is worth the upside of writing. I think ChatGPT threatens to create a net dumbing effect on its users. Nicholas Carr warned of a similar effect of the internet itself, and most particularly Google, in his book The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains. He was not wrong. I don't know how many times I've explained to my kids that googling a search term is not the same thing as researching a topic. So we should be watchful for any feeling along the lines of ‘I'm too busy/tired/stressed to do this myself so I'll just get the bot to do it'. The main red flag for this is whether something you used to do yourself becomes “too difficult” if you don't have access to the AI helper.
Banning the new technology, as some people whose livelihoods are affected by it are calling for, is never an effective solution. It has been tried over and over again, just about every time a new, revolutionary, technology comes along. Banning nuclear weapons didn’t stop North Korea from getting their hands on them. It simply doesn’t work. I bet the horse-drawn carriage makers did their damndest to get those nasty mechanised car things taken off the streets. Or restricted to the speed of a horse. And guess what? Some carriage makers went into business making bodies for cars, and some people still drive horse-powered carriages for fun. But yes, an awful lot of them just went out of business. I don’t say ‘adapt or die’. But I do say ‘regulate and adapt, or die’.
Personally, as a self-employed swordsmanship instructor and writer, I can see how using AI could help me produce better books, faster, by (for instance) creating outlines, rough first drafts of specific chapters, back-cover blurb, etc. But there is no way for ChatGPT to run a seminar for me, or to conceive of the idea of a new training manual for the Art of Arms. Also, I’m very much at the bespoke, luxury, end of the market. Absolutely nobody has an existential need for a swordsmanship lesson, so automation is not a concern. You can probably tell from the headline photo, in which I'm wearing a vintage hand-winding Roamer watch from the 50s, and using a Record #4 hand plane from the 30s that belonged to my grandfather, that I'm aesthetically always on the side of the old ways. I teach swordsmanship, not shooting.
A Roamer watch, a Record plane. And the first five saws in the saw till are my Florips.
Swords, spears, and bows used to be state-of-the-art weaponry, but were superseded by guns. Swordsmanship and archery devolved into competitive sports (throwing javelins did too), and even twenty years ago there were precious few swordmakers in the Western world. But there has been a renaissance of historical martial arts, and a consequent renaissance in the craft of swordmaking. That doesn’t help those smiths who went out of business a couple of centuries ago, but it does suggest that there will be a resurgence of appreciation for older ways of doing things in the future. It’s hard to think of a technology where this doesn’t apply.
Music? CDs and tapes killed vinyl… but vinyl came back stronger than ever. We now have streaming at the bottom end, and vinyl at the top, with CDs in the middle.
Ebooks were supposed to kill print stone dead… only for print to survive, thrive, and for high-end leather bound editions to become more popular, and more profitable, than ever. Brandon Sanderson’s latest kickstarter, for a leather bound 10th anniversary edition of his Way of Kings, raised just under seven MILLION dollars! (I could get a thousand Breitling watches for that! not to mention a thousand Holtey planes!) But print is dead, right?
Midjourney image generation does not threaten David Hockney, or Lina Iris Viktor. It does threaten folk making a living producing graphics for websites. Chat GPT does not threaten poets like Simon Armitage or Amanda Gorman. It does threaten writers making generic blog posts for other people's websites (who, incidentally, keep pitching me to write completely off-topic crap for this site!).
It’s not my place to offer advice to people in different circumstances to mine (and unsolicited advice is usually obnoxious). But as I see it, if you work in areas likely to be affected by AI, you have two options. Either master the new tool and use it to make your work even better, or brand yourself at the other end of the market. Both work, and both have value. There will always be people looking for the cheapest option, but there will also always be people looking for the hand made option, and who are willing to pay for it.
Joanna Penn got me thinking about AI as it affects writers, and she has written about it extensively on her blog, here: https://www.thecreativepenn.com/blog/
John Harrison, winner of the Longitude prize, and maker of clocks, including all-wood clocks (you can jump down that rabbit hole yourself!): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Harrison
Life is worth living because of the people you love, and who love you. But everybody dies. In a perfect world, children would still bury their parents, but parents would never bury their children.
My father died recently, peacefully at home at the age of 83. The circumstances really couldn’t have been improved upon, and yet it was still, of course, a complicated, stressful, difficult, painful, grief-ridden time. I imagine you have gone through something similar, or will at some point in the future, so I have some thoughts on what was helpful to me and share them here in the hopes that it may make your own experience more bearable.
Everybody dies
We all know that, from the neck up. But if you know it in your bones, then when someone you love dies, it won’t be a surprise. You won’t have to spend precious energy on orienting yourself to the idea that the person has died. Because everybody dies. It’s what we do.
I take this to such extremes that I religiously say goodbye to my kids when they go off to school (they’re old enough to probably prefer it if I just stayed out of the way!) but there is a non-zero chance that we’ll never see each other again, and I want the last thing they hear from me to be something along the lines of “I love you”.
When I was 18, my best friend’s 17 year-old sister died suddenly of a brain haemorrhage while out with her friends. It came completely out of the blue: one second she was chatting and laughing, then lights out. Hers was the first funeral I ever attended, and it hammered home to me that everybody, but everybody, dies. And we don’t know when. A few months later my much-loved grandma also died, at 86. Hers was the second funeral I went to, and the difference between the two was precisely the difference between sadness and tragedy.
You’ll miss it when it’s gone
I don’t use my phone if I can possibly avoid it. A few friends and close family have my number, and various people who need it, but that’s it. I don’t put it on my business card. Because why on earth would you assume that the person you are calling has nothing better to do right now than answer the phone? I love talking to my friends, but almost invariably arrange a time in advance, I don’t call out of the blue.
Dad did though. Usually in the middle of my peak work flow time. Almost always for something that could very well have been an email or a text. Quite often just to tell me about something that he’d heard on the radio vaguely connected with swords. When the phone went and I saw it was him, I always picked up, and as I was doing so, expelled the “don’t interrupt me” annoyance with the thought “you’ll miss this when he’s gone”. And I do. Fucking interrupt me, dad, I’m just writing a blog post.
I’m so very glad that I had that thought in my head, and didn’t waste my time on work stuff at the expense of hearing whatever it was he wanted to tell me.
You don’t get over it, you just get used to it
When my mother-in-law died,my mum, who had lost her mother some 25 years earlier, said that to my wife, and she was right. When someone you love dies it punches a hole in your world. While you will grow around it, there will always be a mark. Every family gathering from now on will have a gap in it where dad should be. We won’t get over it, but we will get used to it, and at the end of the day, what would a family gathering look like if nobody ever died? You couldn’t find a venue big enough to hold a party for a thousand generations of forebears and their offspring.
Save your spoons
Kind people, lovely people, get in touch to give their condolences. This is nice, and the proper thing to do. But when I do it, I always include something along the lines of ‘no reply expected’. Because otherwise you find yourself constantly thanking people, and it’s weird, tiring, and it turns their kindness into a burden of politeness which they presumably did not intend. So save your spoons, and don’t worry about replying to everyone. Anyone who would be offended by not getting a reply to their condolences isn’t really sympathetic.
Grief, and the extraordinary amount of bullshit admin that comes with a bereavement, are exhausting in ways you may not anticipate. For instance, a couple of weeks ago I went into my shed to cut the panels for the doors for a cabinet I've been making for my study. It's really simple woodwork: measure the exact size, cut a piece of 6mm plywood to the right size (a fraction generous), and trim to fit. Easy for a woodworker of my experience. But I found myself unsure of where to start. Measuring? Hauling the plywood out to have a look at it? finding a saw? What measuring tools to use? It was bizarre, but I figured my brain was occupied with other things, so I did a little tidying up and went back inside. A few days later I tried again, and it took about half an hour, job done.
Be grateful where you can
There is always something to be grateful for. In my dad’s case, things really couldn’t have gone more easily. He knew he was dying for a few weeks before he actually did so, which meant there was time to say goodbye and other things, express some final wishes (more on that below), and the process itself was remarkably peaceful and almost painless. He died at home, in his own bed, so quietly that my mum didn’t even wake up. We should all be so lucky. If his illness had been painful, then we could have been grateful for the pain ending. There is always something, if you look. It's not that bereavement should make you grateful, it's that finding a way to feel grateful makes the bereavement easier on you.
Respect their wishes but don’t be ruled by them
In the hospital, once he knew he was dying and there was nothing that the doctors could do for him, all dad wanted was to come home. It took a bit of persuading for the medical staff to release him. In essence, they weren’t expecting us to be explicit about and unembarrassed by death, and they didn’t want him going into an environment where the people around him weren’t ready to look after him as he would need. Once I explained our situation, and our mental preparedness, they cancelled all further investigations (blood tests that would show that nothing had improved; scans that would show that he was dying) and let him go. He was so keen to get home that he didn’t want to wait until the next morning when an ambulance would be able to take him, so I drove him home myself.
It was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done, because I wanted him “safe” in the hospital, surrounded by professionals. But it wasn’t what he wanted, so I kept my mouth shut and got it done.
But, in his funeral arrangements there were a couple of things he wanted that I felt perfectly entitled to say no to. Here’s how I see it: If there is no afterlife, and death is the end, then the funeral is only for the living, and so the dead person’s wishes are a guideline at best; they won’t be affected by whatever you do. If there is an afterlife, then they are too busy being blissed out (one hopes) that they won’t care that certain details didn’t get done the way they wanted.
That’s all so far… (see “save your spoons”, above).
I’m cracking on with various projects (including editing dad’s last volume of memoirs), and not pushing things too hard. Grief is the price we pay for love, and it’s one hell of a bargain.
