I’ll be turning 52 on Sunday, and we’re celebrating in the usual way with a 25% discount on all digital products, with the code GUYSBIRTHDAY25. This works for all products (courses, subscriptions etc.) at courses.swordschool.com, and also for all digital products (ebooks, audiobooks, print-at-home decks etc.) at swordschool.shop
Digital products are great because they have negligible fixed costs- it doesn’t cost me money every time someone buys one. Print does, so I have to be careful about giving out too chunky discounts on print books. But: You can also get 10% off any print book (including the brand-new dagger book) with the code birthdayprint10 at swordschool.shop.
Also, Christmas is coming up, which is a lovely time for many, and a miserable time for some. And a total non-event for billions of people around the world. It falls on a Thursday this year, which is very convenient. I’ll be running my usual morning trainalongs on Wednesday 24th and Friday 26th, which you can find in the “support sword people” area of the swordpeople.com. That is behind a very small paywall. If you’d like to join us but don’t want to create a swordpeople account, or are short of cash, just email me and I’ll send you the zoom link (no need to justify your request in the email, just ask for the link).
The sessions are at 8.30am UK time. The session opens at 8.25, and we run for an hour, with a bit of time at the end for chat etc. It’s not a formal class, just an opportunity to do some good-for-you physical training. Some folk follow along with what I’m doing, some just do their own thing but in company, and others mix and match. Join us if you dare!
Here's a sample trainalong session. I've been doing these since lockdown, but am very slack about recording them, so this dates back a loooong time:
Such fun!
Newsletter subscribers have had access to these discounts for a week already, so if you want to stay in the loop and aren't already signed up, join us with the form below.
And stay tuned for a 100 days no booze update, expected end of next week.
I was in London a couple of weeks ago for a family reunion, and took the opportunity to wiggle along for another DEXA scan (at BodyScan UK). My last was a year ago. On the positive side, I’ve put on about 2.4kg of ‘lean mass’ (the scan can identify fat, bone, and ‘lean mass’, which is everything that isn't fat or bone), mostly in the upper torso. And my overall fat percentage has come down from 24.8% in May 2024, to 21.5% now. Great.
But my genetics put the remaining fat mostly in my viscera, the absolutely worst place to have it. I had 148
cm² (which is a weird way to measure a volume, but hey) in May '24, down to 115cm² in August '24, but as the muscle piled on (yay!) it brought some fat with it (as it almost always does), and it all went round my organs, so it's back up to 136cm². Boo.
Subcutaneous fat isn’t such a big health problem, in reasonable amounts. But visceral fat is bad for inflammation, blood lipids, diabetes risk, the works. And it seems that’s where I store it.
I’m not a big believer in calorie restriction as the main driver of fat loss, because while the laws of thermodynamics are absolute, your body is insanely complicated, and has all sorts of ways of adjusting your metabolism to lose or put on weight depending on various triggers. What you eat, and when, is as important as how much. And don't get me started on gut biome. I first really understood this when I accidentally lost 10kg in three weeks. But if there are a bunch of unnecessary calories coming in from somewhere, that's the obvious place to start.
For me the biggest source by far of “empty” calories is alcohol. My natural state is to have a glass of wine or two while cooking, and another glass or three while having dinner, and maybe a dram afterwards, pretty much every day. I normally get through about 7 bottles of wine a week minimum, without hangovers or other obvious ill effects. I think my soul is mostly Italian!
When I went alcohol-free for a month this Spring (thanks to a bad cholesterol test), I lost about 2kg and 4cm around my waist. It messed with other things though- I didn’t get a word written in all that time, other than newsletters. And I didn’t feel any particular energy benefits. Though I ought to have been sleeping better, I wasn’t waking up full of beans and ready to face the day any more so than usual.
But, several credible sources (the folk I listen to most on these subjects are Dr. Peter Attia, and Dr. Rhonda Patrick) suggest that the real benefits to cutting booze come around the three month mark. Kevin at BodyScan said the same thing. So I’ve decided to take 100 days off alcohol. I started on August 19th. Day 100 is November 26th, four days before my birthday.
Why not just cut back?
It's very hard to measure a small amount every now and then. Sure, I bet I could get most of the benefits if I just had one glass of wine on a Friday night. I've previously established with sleep monitors that a glass of wine with dinner has no measurable effect on my sleep (I eat early). But then what happens to the rest of the bottle? How much wine is that really? What if I swapped out the wine for a dram of Lagavulin? It's just much easier to measure “no booze” than figure out “some booze”. And from a self-control issue, it takes very little effort (for me) to have decided to not drink at all, than to stop at one. The hard part is making the decision to stop. Now that's done, thanks to bastard DEXA, it's really no big deal (for me).
I know that other people have much more serious issues with alcoholism or other addictions, so please don't read this as minimising their struggles. And I can think of several life events that could occur that would lead to me immediately abandoning this experiment in favour of getting blootered. So no judgement.
The Pros and Cons of alcohol restriction
You may find the pro/con analysis I do for any intervention a useful rule of thumb, so here goes.
Cons first (always):
1. Is there any known, or likely, health downside? If someone were to suggest going without vegetables for 100 days, or going without protein, or going without exercise, or without in-person social interaction, I’d want to see an awful lot of peer-reviewed studies suggesting that it was a good idea. But there is no known health benefit (that actually stands up to scrutiny) of consuming alcohol. So I won’t be sacrificing any useful nutrients. The polyphenols in wine? I get way more of them from blueberries and dark chocolate.
2. The most common downsides of any intervention are time and money. Exercise costs time. Supplements cost money. Cutting out alcohol saves money and takes no time.
3. Alcohol has been a major component of Western culture since at ancient times. The slaves that built the pyramids were fed a kind of beer. 2600 years later Jesus's first miracle was turning water into wine. 2000 years on, not much has changed. Just about every major event is marked with booze of some kind. We drink with friends, we drink to celebrate success, to commiserate in disaster, to raise a toast or to drown a sorrow. Wine, beer, spirits of every kind have been part of our culture (and many others) since forever, and there is a huge amount of artistry that goes into creating a perfect wine to go with your steak, or the smokiest of single malts. That's the only thing that makes this in any way difficult: the sheer number of times already (it's been less than a fortnight!) when I've had to risk being thought anti-social to decline an offered drink. People who like to drink (like me!) can take this as a critique of their current habits. Nothing could be further from the truth. But cutting out alcohol does carry a social risk.
I worked out that the last time I went 100 days with no booze I was 13. It’s been nearly 40 years since I last tried this, and it’s just an experiment, not a moral position.
So the worst-case scenario is I get no noticeable benefit (but save some money), and lose out on some gustatory delight, and some people will find me stand-offish. I can live with that, for SCIENCE. I don't judge other people by what they choose to drink, so have no interest in the judgements of those that do.
Pros:
1. There is good reason to suppose that I’ll cut the visceral fat down, because it’s happened before (between my first two DEXA scans, in May and August 2024 which established a clear correlation between waist size and visceral fat quantity), and because of the waist reduction this year, in just 33 days of no alcohol.
2. There ought to be improvements in sleep quality. This is very hard to measure, and regular readers will know that I’ve tried several different sleep trackers and found problems with all of them. The only metric that seems at all reliable is heart rate. With alcohol, my heart rate is higher and more erratic when sleeping; without it, it’s lower and steadier. I've confirmed this many times since getting my first sleep tracker in 2017.
3. It’s a clear break from a habit I know is not healthy, and a fairer test of sobriety. I wouldn’t necessarily judge the effects of a diet or exercise program after just a month, so it seems reasonable to give no booze a fair crack of the whip.
The best case scenario is that I get amazing health and vitality benefits from this. But that will raise the issue of do I go back or not? I’ll have to entirely re-think the place that alcohol plays in my way of life. So I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t kind of hoping that it doesn’t help much.
It’s important to keep any test to just one variable. If I replaced booze with doughnuts I could reasonably expect to not lose any visceral fat. So I’m giving myself a couple of weeks to let my usual dietary rules slip a bit (I had four slices of my daughter’s banana bread after dinner last Sunday, with marmalade) but once I’m back from Swords of the Renaissance this weekend I’ll be pretty careful about keeping the rest of my diet as it was.
And finally…
I intend to report back here (maybe even with another DEXA scan) in due course. But I keep my friends on Sword People, and my newsletter subscribers updated on all sorts of things, including my various health experiments. Join us there, or sign up for the newsletter (or both!).
And let me just re-iterate: I'm running a health experiment. I have no moral problem with alcohol, and I don't think of myself as an alcoholic. If alcohol is damaging your health, or getting in the way of your goals, feel free to try 100 days off, or better yet get professional help. But it says nothing about your moral worth whether you drink or not.
Update at 50 Days
50 days into this experiment: so far, so good. The hard part was making the decision. Once it was decided, not drinking is normal. There are open bottles of booze in the house, but no temptation. Every now and then I fancy a drink, but the urge passes quickly. This was as true on day 1 as it is on day 50.
The closest thing to an exception has been a couple of social events in pubs, where I had a low-alcohol (0.5% or lower ABV) beer. I’ve done that twice. I don’t think it matters particularly, but I’ve decided to be careful in the last 50 days to stay off even that.
My weight is down about a kilo and a half (3.5lb), and my waist is down about 2cm. These are averages: weight fluctuates a lot during the day and from day to day: have a glass of water and you gain half a pound or so. Eat more fibre the day before and there’s more water held in your gut. So I measure weight and waist every day, and average them up over the week. Waist is especially problematic to measure, as it’s me with a tape measure, trying to be consistent about exactly where on my body I’m putting it, and exactly how tight, at what point in my breathing cycle. Sucking in my gut gets me down to 84, expanding as much as possible gets me to 96 (which is significantly smaller than my relaxed measurement in May 2024). So I’m not treating these figures as hard or accurate, but they are a reasonable guide to progress.
The oddest thing about this is that all of the weight and waist gains occurred in the first 25 days; they have been basically stable since then. Though I suppose it’s possible I’ve been losing fat and gaining muscle (or the other way round) since then. My weight training is the most reliable guide to muscle mass until the next DEXA scan, and I’m getting gradually stronger (as one would expect), so I doubt I’m losing significant muscle mass. I’m also careful to keep my protein intake quite high (about 1.5g/1kg of body mass, so about 120g/day for me).
I’m not sure if I’m sleeping better or not. I don’t wake up feeling any more rested than I did before, but I have several times slept a lot longer than I used to, for no apparent reason. I’m hoping that my brain is adapting to the lack of booze and getting better at staying asleep, but it’s too early to tell. Sleeping longer means I’m waking up later, so my usual habit of getting an hour or so of writing in before the house wakes up isn’t happening, but that’s ok; I seem to be productive enough.
On balance, this has been underwhelming in terms of health gains so far. I was expecting significantly more benefits already, given that I’ve come down from drinking an average of a whole bottle of wine every day. But who knows, maybe the next 50 days will hold some surprises.
This experiment is an example of my overall guiding principle of training: figure out what works for you, then do that. Both of those aspects are challenging: how do you figure out what works for you? And how do you maintain the practice of applying it? I go over all these things and more in The Principles and Practices of Solo Training.
I really don't like New Year's resolutions. I'm also not a fan of treating this time of year as the beginning of anything. A commenter on this blog once mentioned that he does his ‘New Year' adjustments in April- when life is returning. It struck me as very sensible. This is the middle of winter, everything is at a low ebb, we are deep in the Yin phase, and it's a time for husbanding resources, not dashing out to the gym for the first time since last January. For an absolute miracle, there is something that the UK does well: the financial year runs from April 6th to April 5th each year. I don't know why they do that: the idea of the New Year beginning in January dates back to Julius Caesar deciding it should be so (and look what happened to him!), but it makes all sorts of sense when you think about it.
So I have no New Year's resolutions to share with you. But by the end of this financial year, I should have two more books out for you: The Theory and Practice of Historical Martial Arts, and The Art of Swordfighting in Earnest (my new translation of Philippo Vadi's De Arte Gladiatoria Dimicandi). Theory and Practice is in layout right now- I expect to have the ebook up in a couple of weeks, and release the hardback in February. I might push the Vadi book back a bit to perhaps May, but all in all, getting these two books out will tie up the old year nicely.
As for new starts, in May I'll be walking the Isle of Wight Challenge, which I'll be writing more about later on.
None of this bah-humbug prevents me from wishing you the best of luck with your own resolutions if you have them, and indeed a very happy 2018.
Ten days after I first arrived in Finland, back in 1994, I met a girl. Not very long after that I met her mother Kexy, a civil servant who was a serious horsewoman, and had hunted with her father when she was younger. Rosy, the girl, told me that her mum was nervous about meeting me; most Finns are pretty shy. She also told me what had happened the first time she had brought a boy home. It wasn’t planned; they were passing her home and just popped in to pick up a book. There was Kexy, sat at the kitchen table, cleaning a 9mm semi-automatic pistol.
You can imagine the effect on the boy.
I recently posted a link to this article on my Facebook profile, and it gathered quite a lot of comments, mostly from people who seem to agree with the basic premise, and some who are very much of the “I’ve got a gun and a shovel” school of parenting.
This lead me to think a bit more about the issue.
I totally understand the visceral satisfaction of the idea of being able to murder anyone who hurts your child. I remember walking through the park near my home with my 3-month old firstborn in her pram. A young man on a motorbike (which aren’t allowed in this park) came blasting by. If I’d had a gun, I would probably have shot him. The black rage that came over me at his daring to put my baby at risk was so deep, so fundamental, that only smashing the person’s face through the back of their head would have assuaged it in the moment.
It would, of course, have been entirely inappropriate, and instead of taking my kids to the park, they’d be visiting me in prison. It’s hard being a good parent when you’re at home; it must be way harder parenting from jail.
If a person is threatening your child’s life, and killing them is the best way to stop it, then by all means, taking their life is justified. But the “gun and shovel” meme isn’t about that. It’s about how fathers want to protect their daughters, not from assault, or rape, or anything like that. We want to protect them from sex. Because we (most of us, I assume) remember what it was like to be a teenage boy, and how desperate we were to get into the knickers of the girls we went out with. It was, in the 80s at least, still a truism that girls had it, but didn’t want to give it; boys wanted it, and had to persuade them to give it up. “It” here being sex, of course. There was also a pretty universal assumption that girls didn’t want sex, and so would only do it basically as a favour to the boy, or under some kind of coercion from the relatively benign but still horrible ‘he won’t love me if I don’t’ to worse forms of influence like drink and drugs.
So let’s unpack some of these assumptions.
1) Girls don’t want sex. This is just not true in most cases. Indeed, for centuries it was believed that women wanted sex MORE than men did. So let’s move on.
2) Whether the girl has sex or not is up to her father or her boyfriend. NO! NO! NO! It is, or should be, up to the people doing it: her and her boyfriend, assuming they are both of legal age. Of course, good parenting includes educating kids to understand the possible consequences of sex, both good and bad. But the core problem here is that in the gun and shovel scenario, the father and the boyfriend have agency, but the girl does not. So whether the woman has sex or not is down to an agreement between these two males. This was normal in the Stone Age, but it is an utterly disgusting pattern of thought in this day and age.
3) Sex = assault. Umm, no. So long as there is informed consent all round, sex does not equal assault. So while murdering a rapist has a certain appeal, murdering your daughter’s boyfriend should not. And if the daughter in question consented freely, then while it may be appropriate to counsel her against it if you think it’s not in her best interests, the boyfriend is innocent in this.
4) In the case of a woman being assaulted or coerced by a man, you should focus on the man… You see it in films and tv shows all the time; when a woman is hurt by somebody, her husband/brother/father/whoever doesn’t stay by her to help her get better; he charges off to wreak his revenge. As if it’s him who has been hurt. But the loving thing to do is to attend to the woman, not race off after the assailant; and only go after the son of a bitch if that’s what the person sinned against wants you to do.
So what is my plan, with my two daughters?
1) Sex education. That’s number one. If they know what they are doing, then they can grant or withhold informed consent.
2) Self-esteem. I want my kids to feel that they do not have to do anything to ingratiate themselves with anyone, or do anything they don’t want to. They can say no. If they have been brought up in an environment in which their desires, opinions, and consent matters, they are that much less likely to put up with abuse of any kind.
3) Self defence. Bad stuff does happen, but my kids will know at least the basics of how to spot bad situations before they kick off, and have the wit to walk away in time. I’ll teach them physical skills if they are interested, but by themselves, those skills are useless if you’re not willing to use them.
4) Support. They should know that no matter what happens, I (and my wife of course) will support them. That ranges from picking them up from a party at 3am, no questions asked, so they don’t get in a car with a drunk driver, to helping them get through whatever bad things happen to them. They should also know that Daddy isn’t going to shoot anyone unless they specifically ask him to, and he agrees it’s a good idea.
5) Patience. They will bring home all sorts of potential partners, I imagine. Some I’ll like more than others. But the only fair way to judge any of them is “how do they treat my child?” However much I might want one, I don’t get a veto on who my daughter finds attractive. While they are minors I do get to establish curfews, bounds, that sort of thing; where they go, when, and with whom. But if I’ve done my job even half right, they will tend to make decent choices in the end. And if they do come home having been hurt in some way, I hope I’ll have the discipline to do what they need me to do to make them feel better, not what I would want to do to make myself feel better.
The best “meeting the boyfriend” scenario I’ve ever heard though came from my friend Jherek Swanger. I met him in Seattle in 2004, along with his utterly adorable 3-year old daughter. She loved fencing, and would go and get her little mask and a sword and challenge people to fight her. Because all of her daddy’s friends were swordfighters. My own kids were some years away in the future, but I asked him what he was going to do when she started bringing boys home.
I’ve got it all worked out. I’ll be sitting on the porch sharpening a longsword with a stone. Schrrrripp! I’ll look at him and say: “So, you want to take my daughter out, huh?” Schrrrripp!
“Um… yes sir”
“You’re not planning on doing anything with her, are you?” Schrrrripp!
“Um, no sir. Really. I’ll just take her to the movies and bring her right back”
“Really? You don’t want to do anything else?” Schrrrripp!
I am not a doctor. And even if I was, I’m not your doctor. If you have any kind of medical issue, don’t get your info from the internet, still less from swordsmanship instructors. Do some research, then go talk to your doctor. Clear?
I dropped 10kg from round my waist, almost by accident. Here’s what happened. I’ll go back to the very beginning, so you can see the process.
In the beginning:
In the late nineties, the metabolism I inherited from my father started to kick in, and without my really noticing it, I had to let my belt out, notch by notch. I got this belt from my sister when I was 21, so I’ve had it round my waist for about half my life. It tells a sorry tale…
See the grooves?
Back when I was 21, I wore this belt on its fourth or fifth notch from the end. By the middle of 2000, it was on the third. Then, after coming down from the mountain and deciding to open my school, I started training at dawn every day, on the top of Arthur’s Seat in Edinburgh (I do love my traditional martial arts training tropes). In about three weeks, I lost 7kg (15 lb), from round my waist. 3 weeks later, the weight was back, but round my shoulders. I had to get a new jacket because my old one was suddenly too tight. I was 26, with all the metabolic advantages that gives.
When I got to Finland in 2001, what with the stress of starting the school, and lots and lots of training, I ate what I wanted and stayed skinny. On a normal day, I was training for two or three hours and teaching for two or three. I had to eat every three hours or so, or Hungry Guy would appear and make everyone’s life miserable. The closest I have come to murder was probably when I hadn’t eaten for four hours, went to a Thai restaurant for an emergency feed, and the waiter seemed to dilly dally about getting the food on the table.
I (mis)diagnosed the problem as too-low body weight. I was about 73kg at that point. I ate like crazy to try to put the weight on, but was too stressed and training too much to gain an ounce. Then I met Michaela in 2005, and chilled the fuck out. One of the ways I knew she was the One was that within a few months of meeting her, I’d put on the 4kg (9lb) I was looking for. That did help with Hungry Guy, but only up to a point. I still needed to eat every four hours or so. At this point, my weight was up to 77kg, so I instituted a rule: if my weight got up to 80kg, I’d cut out sugar and alcohol until it was back below 78. Then I could eat what I want. This very often (maybe 5 times a week) included an entire 200g bar of chocolate after dinner, ‘shared’ with Michaela (she’d get maybe one row, so, an eighth of it).
What with one thing and another, by April 2014 I was seriously considering adjusting the rule to anything below 80kg is fine, over 82 cut out sugar and alcohol. (Self-indulgent bullshit is a specialty of mine.) I was at 83kg, and my belt was on the penultimate notch. As you can see, it still has the deepest groove; it had been there for a long time. I had already read Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma, and Gary Taubes’ Good Calories, Bad Calories, so I should have known better. But sugar, oh, sugar; sweet heaven.
The Slow Carb diet
Then, on a flight to Melbourne, I read Tim Ferriss’s The Four Hour Body. It was the final straw. There was just no way I could justify the level of sugar I was eating, especially given my family history of high blood pressure, my father’s serious weight problem, and everything I had ever read on the topic of metabolism, nutrition (not counting the junk science rubbish that occasionally made it onto my reading list; I highly recommend Bad Science by Ben Goldacre to help you distinguish the good from the bad), health and longevity.
When I got to Australia, I decided to try the Slow Carb diet. Let me summarise it for you.
1) No fast carbs; no sugar, no starch. No potatoes, no rice, no bread, no biscuits, no pasta, no white food except cauliflower, in other words.
2) Eat the same few meals; perhaps half a dozen different dishes.
3) Don’t drink calories. Avoid alcohol, sweet drinks (especially sodas, obviously, but less obviously also fruit juice).
4) Cheat one day a week. On that day, eat and drink whatever you like, as much as you like. But just one day a week.
You can see the blog post that started it all here.
If you think about it, rule 3 is really just the same as rule 1, and rule 2 is a bit boring, and rule 4 should be optional. What I ended up doing is basically just rule 1, and I was reasonably strict about it.
On the day I arrived in Australia, jetlagged to hell, and about to teach a 4 day intensive seminar, my metabolism was still demanding to eat every 3-4 hours. So obviously, I never went anywhere without back-up chocolate. I arrived on Friday morning and started Slow-carb right away, and taught Saturday-Tuesday, five or six hours a day. Up until this point there was no way I could get through a 6 hour seminar without a sugar hit in the afternoon. I’d crash about 3pm, sugar-up to get me through to the end, then need dinner, large and fast.
On the Monday, after teaching for three days straight, I was digging through my bag for something, and found my chocolate stash. In three days of teaching, in the most energy-demanding situation (jet-lag, long days), I had forgotten to eat in the afternoons. I was astonished.
This was because I was not spiking my blood sugar at any point, and so was not crashing. Cutting out starch and sugar proved to be a complete game-changer, because it evened out my energy demands. Please note though that I was not cutting out carbs, only fast carbs. I was still eating about eight tons of vegetables every day, and a lot of meat (the food in Australia is superb!).
Slow Carb, Low Carb, and Ketogenic:
Let's take a moment to define a few things:
1) Slow Carb v. Low Carb. They are very different. A classic low-carb diet gives you most of your calories from fat and protein. A slow carb diet gives you a lot of carbohydrates, but all with a low glycaeimic index, so you avoid the blood-sugar spike. I think any diet that tells you to steer clear of vegetables is fundamentally dangerous.
2) Ketogenic versus Low Carb. A ketogenic diet, as the name suggests, is a diet that keeps your body running on fat. It is very high fat, and obviously restricts carbs, but it also restricts protein. This is because protein is easily broken down into glucose, and so your body will switch back to a glucose based energy delivery system, rather than stay in a fat based energy delivery system (a state called ketosis). Ketogenic diets are mostly used medicinally to treat children that have drug-resistant seizures. I personally would not recommend long-term ketosis, because it is very hard to do in the modern world, and there is no evidence that any human population has ever subsisted long-term on a ketogenic diet (the Inuit may be an exception, but probably not). Ketogenic diets should be further subdivided into calorie-restricted (less than 1000 per day) and unrestricted. The best-known proponents of the unrestricted ketosis diet are Dom D’Agostino and Peter Attia (both medical doctors). Their podcasts and websites are well worth a listen/look.
Bye-bye Hungry Guy
What I was doing in Australia was a not-terribly-strict Slow Carb diet; after class, at dinner, I quite often wolfed down a bunch of fast carbs in the form of beer, and chips with my steak, that sort of thing. But breakfast and lunch were fast-carb-free. The difference in my energy levels was enough to sell me on the idea. But when I got home less than three weeks later and trod on the scales, I got a shock. I was down from 83 to 74kg, and had not once, even once, gone hungry. I ate like a pig, just not starch or sugar. I was so pleased with the results I decided to keep it up. I now hover around the 72-73kg mark.
Most incredibly, Hungry Guy has disappeared. To test this, in September 2014 I decided to see what would happen if I missed a meal or two. I had lunch on Monday at about 1pm, taught class on Monday night, ate nothing when I got home, had one cup of coffee instead of breakfast on Tuesday, missed lunch, and ate dinner with the kids at 6pm. So, about 29 hours of not eating anything. And I was completely fine. Not even that hungry. Certainly no dizziness, or feeling of weakness. Nothing associated with low blood sugar problems. It's also why I wrote “avoid sugar” as one of my top 3 stay-sane-and-healthy tips for modern living.
Fasting
This has lead me to do some further research on fasting; it comes in all shapes and sizes. The simplest is just don’t eat for a while. I would not try that without preparation, if I were you. The health benefits of at least occasional ketosis are well-documented; I think of it as a metabolic spring-clean. But you can fast for a couple of days and not get into ketosis because your body breaks down your muscles to produce glucose. So if you don’t want to a) feel too hungry and b) lose muscle mass, it’s a very good idea to get into ketosis before you fast. Here’s how.
1) Be very strict about fast carbs for a week or two. This gets you off any sugar-high rollercoaster. When you fast your blood sugar will probably fall a bit, so make sure that it’s not a dramatic drop.
2) Follow a ketogenic diet for a couple of days. Use pee-sticks to make sure it’s working. Not everyone can handle a ketogenic diet, so if it makes you feel ill, stop. Try step 3 instead.
3) You can dose yourself with exogenous ketones to speed up the process of switching over. Exogenous ketones or ketogenic foods that I have used successfully (as measured by pee-sticks) include medium chain triglyceride (MCT) oil, branch-chain amino acids (BCAAs), and raspberry ketones. When your pee-sticks tell you you are in a moderate state of ketosis, such as about 2-3 mmol/L, then stop eating. See how 24 hours feels. If you get really hungry, or dizzy, or your blood pressure drops, or anything like that, then BREAK YOUR FAST. With breakfast, obviously. But unless there are some odd medical issues, 24 hours should be no big deal. Just remember to drink plenty of water. Tea and coffee are also ok.
Just to test this, last Thursday I skipped breakfast, and ate lunch at about 2pm. At 11am I had a ketone level at or close to 0. Lunch was a small salad, with a tin of smoked mackerel in oil, and two teaspoons of MCT oil, and a splash of olive oil. I also took 2 125mg capsules of rasperry ketones (Hi-tech Pharmaceuticals brand) and a 6.33g dose of BCAA's (USPlabs “ModernBCAA+” brand). At 4pm my peesticks told me that I was in ketosis at a level of 4mmol/L. Easy enough!
I am currently about 73kg, stronger than I was in April 2014, and my belt is wearing a new groove at notch 5. If I fasten it at the deeply-worn second notch, there is enough room under my belt now for two bottles of wine.
Further thoughts on fasting:
1) I got all of my weight-loss done without fasting. It’s not necessary for that purpose, but there is a ton of evidence to suggest that it is good for you to fast occasionally. Here are a couple of articles on it: one very pro: Mercola and one from the UK National Health Service, specifically about 5:2 intermittent fasting, which I don't do, which is more measured: NHS.)Whether the benefits come from being in ketosis (which can be achieved without fasting), or from the short-term calorie restriction, or some other mechanism, is not clear yet. But it is abundantly clear that throughout human history, we have had to be able to function for short periods without food, and indeed many traditional cultures (including Christianity’s Lent and Islam’s Ramadan) incorporate longer fasts into their yearly calendar.
2) There is nothing inherently virtuous in not eating. It’s just a training tool, like push-ups and meditation. Do it because it generates specific benefits.
3) Don’t overdo it. Fasting gets much easier with practice. These days, I routinely fast for 24 hours with no preparation, about once a week. It does wonders for re-setting my metabolism. After Christmas I was so full I didn’t eat for 48 hours. No biggy. I’m planning a 5 day fast for later in the year; it takes planning because eating meals with the children is a big part of family life. If you don’t have kids, then it’s probably much easier.
5) For me, the point of fasting is to reap the metabolic benefits and to test that my diet allows me to be free of the need to eat for 24 hours or so. I never feel deprived when fasting, so I don’t feel any need to ‘make up for it’ with a stupid blow-out. I do stupid blow-outs every now and then just because I like them, and because my habits seem to be good, I can get away with the occasional splurge.
6) I think that as a martial artist I just jolly well ought to be able to work fine without food for a short time. Not eat for a day or two, and still fight. In feels simply unmartial to me to be slavishly dependent on a totally reliable food source for my effectiveness. An army marches on its stomach, yes. But I don't think there has ever been an army in combat that didn't go hungry at least occasionally.
Some further thoughts:
If you are trying to control your weight, try changing one thing a time. The first big thing I would is add vegetables. A decent serving of green vegetables at every meal will do wonders all by itself to make up for any dietary deficiencies, and fill you up a bit, which will reduce the amount of other stuff you eat. Also, the fibre in the vegetables will slow down sugar absorption, at least up to a point.
Then, the next thing to try is to cut out fast carbs. Cheat once a week if you must, but make sure you are always eating lots and lots of vegetables, and some decent high-quality fat. So fry your vegetables in organic butter 🙂 If this is too hard, then do it for just one meal a day, ideally breakfast.
The scales are a very blunt instrument. You might drop a bunch of weight, and actually be getting fatter, if you are losing muscle mass instead of the lard. I would take waist measurement over weight as an indicator of progress (see that belt?). I would also take all measurements at the same time of day, on the same day, once a week and not more often. This is much more reliable and less depressing than watching your weight fluctuate from morning to night (as it invariably does).
Systems are better than goals (as Scott Adams says in his interesting How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big). If you are trying to get your weight down to a certain point, every day that you are not at your target weight, you are a failure. This is not good. Better to try a different system (such as replacing your starch intake with extra vegetables) and just see what happens. Systems are sustainable. Goals are less so, because when you reach them, then what?
So, that’s how I lost 10kg without really trying. Will it work for you? I’ve no idea. But you can try it without risk, because all it requires you to do is eat lots of vegetables and cut out one type of food that you don’t really need: fast carbs.
And let me reiterate: I'm not your doctor. I believe in trying things out sensibly, and building healthy habits. This worked for me; we have a lot of DNA in common, so it's probably at least worth trying for you. I wouldn't put it more strongly than that.
This is a progress report for the “get over boarding school” project. If you’re here looking for some technical sword stuff, I suggest going here or here.
I usually edit my posts quite carefully. Not this one, because if I do, I will end up deleting the whole thing. So please bear with me.
Shortly after posting the last instalment of this boarding school crap (if you haven’t read them, this post will make much more sense after reading The Price of Privilege and Dealing With It), I went to the UK with my wife and kids for my parents’ 50th wedding anniversary. It was a lovely family event, as you may imagine. While I was there, I went looking for stuff from my boarding school years, and, in a box in the attic, I found all my old school reports, and all the letters I had sent home. The first few would make you cry. Basically, “I hate it here, please come and get me”, repeated over and over, in my 8-year-old handwriting. That was ok; my wife was worried about the effect they might have, but I could handle it, mostly because I’m out of there now and don’t ever have to go back.
But part of me is still 8 years old, and waiting for Mummy to come and get me. And I have to rescue that little boy.
(I think I’ll transcribe the whole lot and publish them in some format; it might be useful for the psychiatrists working on the boarding school problem.)
I came home to run the Fiore Extravaganza seminar; you’ve probably read my update about it here. My wife and kids stayed in the UK to see more family and friends; they get back tonight. The seminar was great; really productive, and the students and I collaborated on creating a whole new pollax form. That kept the days occupied. I spent most of the evenings hanging out with friends, sometimes talking about this stuff, sometimes not. The major work was done yesterday; I went to an old friend’s place, someone I love and trust, and talked and talked and cried and talked and listened and talked and stalled and talked and set up distractions and listened and cried and talked. I had been dreading it the whole week. My brain is very good at avoiding pain, and I knew that this was going to be really, really hard. I have rarely been so scared. The closest was when my second daughter was born (that was way worse, because she and my wife nearly died that night). But in terms of distress, this was comparable.
That’s the problem with the things that really work. They often hurt. Surgery. Training. Therapy.
And the shit just boiled out. The things I am having the hardest time coming to terms with are the abandonment, the sheer mercilessness of it, and what we might call the Matron Effect.
Let me gloss over this in bold strokes. Picture a big scary old house in the country, populated by 200 boys aged 7-13. The adults are mostly men granted the power to beat you at will, a few women teachers, and half a dozen women, mostly in their twenties, all wearing nurses’ uniforms, and all wielding absolute authority. The Matrons. It is a well established fact that boys are pretty gross. They tend to wash only when coerced into it. So showers were supervised by said matrons; 4-10 naked boys at a time, all under the watchful eye of an attractive older woman? One who could send you off to the headmaster for a beating at any time? Dear god, it’s like they were trying to raise a generation of perverts.
There is absolutely nothing wrong with adults getting up to all sorts of mischief with fellow adults, so long as it’s all informed and consensual. I really don’t care what floats your boat in that department. And I don’t suppose you care what floats mine.
But I very very strongly object to a system that punches holes in said boat while it is being built.
I think this is why the Mark Vorkosigan story arc Lois McMaster Bujold’s books Brothers in Arms,Mirror Dance, and A Civil Campaign is so powerful for me. A boy was deeply fucked up by the adults in his life, and over the course of the books gets some pretty stellar revenge, and finds not only his true family, but also a girl who can handle the quirks that he’s left with.
Moving on…
One obvious consequence of all this is that I have a profound distrust of authority. I simply cannot trust anyone in authority to have my best interests at heart. One of the questions I am asked most often is why I never joined the Army. There it is. I was a) determined never to set foot in an institution again, b) I just knew that some wanker of a commander would get me killed for his own advancement. The only hierarchies I can abide are the ones I’m at the top of. Anything that even smells the tiniest bit like somebody being in charge of me: just fucking no. Except my wife, obviously 😉
I’m planning a separate post, something along the lines of “Renegotiating my Contract”, to look at how this stuff has impacted the way I have run my school, and what I’m doing about it. Why, for instance, I never wear all black these days. [Update: that post is here]
I have also figured out why I’m blogging about all this. Partly, it’s easier to go through it all if I have a means to make it useful to other people who may have had similar issues. “If Guy can do it, so can I.” But also it’s to keep me on track. It makes me accountable for progress. Because a large part of my mind wants this whole mess back under wraps where it slept for so long. My students have been keeping me honest in the salle for years. My readers here are doing the same. That’s you, recruited into Team Guy. Thanks for stepping up.
I had a bad night last night. I slept very little, and woke up still scared and tired. I cleaned the house a bit, to settle my stomach before breakfast, and while I was making coffee, suddenly doubled over like I’d been punched in the stomach and howled my eyes out.
I did it again in the middle of writing this.
I’ll keep doing it, until it’s done.
I expected this. It’s ok, it’s part of the process. All sorts of stuff will come up, and most of it will be bad enough that my mind had to hide it from me for over 20 years, until I was ready to handle it.
Orwell Park School: doesn't look too bad, does it? Image credit: James Appleton, 2010.
Oh my, what a week it has been.
I was scared of hitting “publish” on my last post, for obvious reasons. I am a big bad scary martial arty swordsman, or at least that’s how a lot of people seem to see me. And now anyone who reads my blog can see me as a great big cry-baby if they so choose.
I had to be ok with that before I published. The risk was entirely about how people regard me. Who wants a swordfighting lesson from a wimp?
But here’s the oddest thing: the single most common response I’ve got has been “you’re brave”. Because, and this is the heart of it, everybody who has lived at all has taken some kind of damage in the process. Some has healed completely, some has left scars, and some is still a big gaping wound. And everybody knows that it can be very frightening to face it, and even more so to expose it to others, because it feels like they could use it to hurt you more.
Because everybody has some experience of trauma, and of being scared of it, so long as the person you’re talking to is actually a decent human being, you get no criticism or contempt at all for opening up about something like this. It’s really not that risky.
Think about that for a second.
Of course, this would be a million times more difficult if I had any shame about it; if I felt that it was my fault, or if I had behaved appallingly. (Which I have at times, but it wasn’t my fault I got sent away.) Likewise, I have no crimes to confess in this process; nothing that might get me sent to jail, anyway. The only thing I risk is my ego. So there’s no real risk, because my ego is not in the hands of the general public; it’s in the hands of my wife and kids, family and close friends.
This is still a very new situation for me, but I thought I’d update you all on what seems to be working for me, and what I see the pitfalls as being. I am moving very fast on this, because that’s how I approach problems: I attack them with a vigorous blow to the head. To give you an idea of how fast: this all came up in such a way that I realised it was a real problem on Tuesday last week. I wrote and posted “The Price of Privilege” on Wednesday. Since then I’ve had three counselling sessions. None with conventional psychotherapists (yet), but the sessions have been incredibly helpful. Perhaps because it means setting aside specific times in which the only thing on my to-do list is deal with this shit. And these lovely people have made me feel safe enough to really go back there and dig. I think that finding the right person to talk to is probably much more important than what therapeutic discipline they practise.
[‘“Therapeutic discipline”, eh?’ I can hear the back row snickering. Fine, laugh it up! Nothing like a good dose of the swishy cane to bring up childhood memories, what? See what I mean about the “naughty club” references in my last post? If you want to know what happens to beaten children, I recommend both Roald Dahl’s Boyand Tall Tales by Ian Kendall. And if you think beating children is funny, it’s not me that needs help.]
Amongst the general outpouring of affection and support that I have received this week, for which I will never cease to be grateful, there were also quite a few contacts from people who also went to boarding school, and some who went to mine. It is very clear that I am not at all alone in this.
Now, things to watch out for. This is an aide-memoire for me; I absolutely am not speaking for or about anybody else. But these things might bite me on the arse, so I’m sharing them here.
1) Trauma explains much, but excuses nothing. Sure, I can point to several occasions in my life where I am 99% sure that my boarding school experience lead me to treat somebody badly. But it’s still my responsibility; I’ll go further: it’s still my fault. I am not responsible for my feelings, but I am 100% responsible for my actions. Unless or until I am certified insane, that remains the case.
2) It’s not a competition. One of the things that held me back from posting about this is knowing so many people who have gone through so much worse experiences. Boarders who made no friends; combat veterans; rape survivors; domestic abuse survivors; the list goes on. What happened to me is utterly trivial next to what has happened to them. It felt like whining, until I realised that even relatively minor wounds can turn septic. In fact, the most dangerous injury I’ve sustained in 15 years of professional swordsmanship was a splinter I got while woodworking. I took it out, but it went septic anyway; without modern antibiotics I would probably have lost my hand. Ignoring it because there are people out there dying of worse infections never occurred to me. Likewise, my experience was empirically worse than some other peoples’s. So what? There is no prize at all for being the most injured. Exactly the reverse.
3) Attention is addictive. It’s really lovely to get such overwhelming messages of support. I can quite see how Munchausen Syndrome https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Munchausen_syndrome develops. This could lead me (especially given the attachment issues that are part of “boarding school syndrome”) to hold on to the damage to keep getting the attention. That would not be good. But I’m aware of it, as are all competent therapists, so it shouldn’t be such a problem. I intend to purge this, heal it, and move on. I have no interest in defining myself as “that kid who was fucked up by boarding school”. I'd rather be a master swordsman, excellent writer, great dad, adored husband, and much-loved friend, thank you very much.
I hope my experiences are useful to you. This is what I’m for, after all. At root, I am by nature a teacher. I can’t quite see the point of mastering a skill if I’m not going to pass it on; and it’s much easier to allocate the necessary time and energy to this problem if I think that my example might help somebody else. If that's the case, please do let me know. It makes such a difference.
You might be wondering what effects this problem has had on me. Well, there are dozens, some of which I don’t intend to share just yet, and some I may never share outside of counselling, but here’s a big and obvious one.
I have no sense of home being a place. Home is people. Originally my parents, of course; now my wife and kids. The only exception to that is a negative: in my head, England ≠ Home. England is the place I was sent to that by definition was not home. Anywhere else on the planet could be home, but not fucking England.
But rationally, England ≠ boarding school. There is a whole ton of great stuff there that I have shut myself off from. This would have been different if my family had lived in England at the time, of course, and perhaps if I had got into Cambridge University (Edinburgh was my second choice, more fool me). We lived in England until I was five years old, then we moved to Argentina (’79-’80), then Botswana (’81-’86), and then Peru (’86-’92). They were home. My family then moved to Scotland, which as anyone who has ever been there knows is very much NOT England. And since then, I’ve only lived in Edinburgh and Helsinki (if we don’t count 3 months in lovely Lucca).
Why does this matter? Because to my wife, only England will ever = Home. And I have twisted and turned in a totally irrational way to avoid giving her the chance to live there. Not fair. I realised this when after we got back from Italy, and saw that the School thrived without me (as it should), we decided to go to England for a significant period, from the middle of next year. This is a perfectly rational move to make. And it was my suggestion. But it made me absolutely miserable, and I didn’t know why, until all this boarding school crap bubbled to the surface. So when I have cleared it, the aversion to living in England for any period, or more precisely, calling England “Home”, should clear with it. This should give my wife a fair crack at living in England, as she has wanted to do for the last decade.
I’d say that was worth a few tears, wouldn’t you?
I intend to keep posting about this; to keep it separate from the usual sword-specific stuff I've created a new category, “boarding school”. I think my next post on this topic will be about the people who made being in boarding school much easier than it might have been. [Update: that next post is here.]
I spent much of yesterday evening crying my eyes out. The kind of wracking sobs that leave you weak and shaky for hours afterwards.
This is not normal.
I was packed off to boarding school at the age of eight. Unlike most other boarders, I did not get to go home every three weeks. Because we lived in Botswana, and school was in England, I got to go home 13 weeks later. This went on for the next ten years: three terms at school, three holidays at home.
It was not okay. It is not okay. I am not okay.
There, I said it.
One of the difficulties I have found in dealing with this over the years is that people in the English-speaking world treat boarding school either as some kind of naughty club (in the decade I was incarcerated (that is not too strong a word) I was never once beaten or buggered. Are we entitled to a refund?) or as a bastion of privilege (which it is), which I should be grateful to have attended. Those from the rest of the world get this look of pity and horror when they hear about it.
Before I go on, a couple of points.
my parents honestly believed that boarding school was the best thing for me (and my siblings). Except in this one thing, they have been excellent parents all round, and I love them very much.
the schools I went to were in general staffed by some excellent, kind, and decent people. It’s not the people that were the problem; it’s the system they were working in. The savage sadists and pederasts of boarding school legend were mercifully absent.
the education I got was first-class, and has been very useful. It’s not the school I have a problem with. It’s the boarding.
The main reason that this is coming up now is that my eldest daughter is about the age I was when I was sent away. I look at her, a small child, charmingly innocent and childish as she should be, and it breaks my heart. I could no more abandon her to the mercy of strangers than I could chop off my own leg.
Other things have triggered this too. I have started to come across studies and stories about “boarding school syndrome”, and recognised myself in the list of symptoms. I was on the phone the other day to the mother of my goddaughter, who will shortly turn 12. Away at camp, after two days she was very homesick. So she called her mum, who came and got her. Of course she did! For fuck’s sake, children need their parents! But when said mother casually mentioned this like it was nothing, as indeed it should be, it took all of my self-discipline not to both break down in tears, and howl at her: nobody came to get me!
Clearly, this has all the hallmarks of unprocessed trauma. My attitude to trauma is neatly summed up in this article. Yes, fuck your trauma. And fuck mine too. Get over it. I will.
So the question is, how?
And that’s where swordsmanship comes into it. I am a swordsman, which means that the primary toolkit I have for solving problems is swordsmanship. So many bullied kids end up doing martial arts. So many victims of assault of all kinds look to martial arts to make them feel safe. So did I. And I have trained for long enough, and deeply enough, that I have a range of strategies for dealing with injury, and dealing with the sort of psychological issues that prevent a person from living up to their best self.
In brief, this is what I am going to do:
own the problem. This blog post is part of that. This is my problem. I will fix it. The problem is in two parts: the trauma itself, which is relatively simple, though not easy, to address. And the coping mechanisms that I developed to get through boarding school. These saved my sanity at the time, but have been causing problems ever since. Looking back I can see dozens of instances in which the persona I created to survive abandonment has hurt good people, and betrayed my core self. Time to dismantle it. But that is way more difficult, as it was built 33 years ago and has rusted in place. This is like breaking down scar tissue to restore range of motion; something I have done hundreds of times to joints and muscles. Less so with minds.
recruit allies. The first step in any campaign. To this end, I have already recruited my wife (obviously, to normal people. But oh my god, that was really hard. Because the first thing you learn in boarding school is show no weakness. But howling your eyes out is much more effective when you are in the arms of someone who loves you) and two of my closest friends. I will be reaching out further afield in due course, and there is a list of organisations and survivor groups at the bottom of this post.
gather intelligence. I am reading up on the effects of boarding school, working out the exact shape of the problem, and studying what other people have done to solve it.
make a plan. I am formulating it now, but it will certainly include talking to professional therapists, crying a lot, and finding ways to dismantle the defences. This is, right now, training priority #1. Way more important than my fencing skills.
ruthlessly execute the plan. This will hurt, like pulling out a splinter. But it’s necessary.
I am also a writer. Those of you that have read Swordfighting for Writers, Game Designers, and Martial Artists will probably recall that I wrote about being bullied at boarding school in the section on handling fear. That was my first real attempt to crack the seal on this great big pot of shit. I felt when I was writing it that it was probably the thin end of a big and horrible wedge. I feel a book coming on; possibly a memoir. But there are so many facets of this that I need to break it up into pieces. And this blog feels like the right place to handle those, one at a time.
I am a writer in the same way that I am a swordsman. The process of writing is a method for solving all sorts of problems. One major problem is the culture of silence around boarding school issues. You are taught at the time that you are lucky to be there. You are taught to not cry. To suppress feelings. To not talk about it. So talking about it is of course simply essential. And it strikes me that talking about it in public through writing might serve some useful purpose. It is much easier for me to do what needs to be done if it serves a higher goal, something more than my own benefit. There are literally thousands and thousands of adults now who went through a similar experience; some came out just fine; many more came out deeply fucked up. My writing about this might encourage even one of them to open up a bit, to somebody. Physical injuries require physical treatment. Psychological injuries require psychological treatment; which is mostly done with words, gestures, and physical closeness. Writing might help someone else.
And if it changes the mind of just one parent about dumping their child in a fucking institution, however gilded the cage, then I truly do not care how much it hurts or what it costs. Because just fucking no, don't do it. It's wrong.
One final note. I do not intend to allow this to interfere with my work, nor to I wish to be perceived as a victim. I don’t need your pity. I certainly don’t want to whine about it. So I would prefer it if, when we meet, you not mention it or bring it up, unless it has helped you in some way to read about it.
For those readers who have no idea what boarding school was like: Monty Python nail the incredibly arcane and arbitrary rules here:
My Mum holding a baby leopard for hand-feeding, Kenya in the '60s.
There are always at least two sides to every story, and usually many more. As historians, we do our best to take all the evidence into account, and tend to rely more on first-person eye-witness accounts than on secondary sources. But I have recently been personally involved in historical eye-witness accounts, and I’m here to tell you that even they are not 100% reliable.
Now, I know you knew that already. But it bears repeating. Eye-witnesses are always biased, and always have some kind of agenda (however innocent or benevolent that agenda may be).
What am I going on about, you may wonder? Simply this: My father has recently had the first volume of his memoirs published. More Sherlock Holmes than James Herriot: the Veterinary Detectivestakes the reader from his childhood in the Blitz, through Veterinary school, and off to Kenya (where photo of my Mum holding the baby leopard was taken), Nigeria, the 1967 Foot and Mouth outbreak in the UK, [me being born in 1973 gets about 2 lines] Argentina, and Botswana. It is a really odd feeling to read the parents-eye view of events that I actually recall, and to find out so much more about the various grown-ups in my childhood; I had no idea that so-and-so was a vet, no idea that this other tall person was a senior government minister, and so on. Grown-ups were either cool (played with us) or boring (didn’t play with us). It makes me wonder what my kids are thinking and absorbing as a steady stream of world-class HEMA instructors come and go from our home.
And it is also interesting to note that there are stated facts that are clearly incorrect, and stories in which the best bits are missing. From my perspective, anyway. Take for instance the trip to Ghanzi, in Botswana, where the President, Sir Quett Masire, has his farm. My father mentions that Richard (my big brother) and I both arrived from boarding school in the UK, and as we set foot in the Gaberone airport, we went straight onto the Botswana equivalent of Air Force One (a noisy military propellor aeroplane), because we were being given a lift up to Ghanzi by the Masire family. So far so good.
I have always been very susceptible to travel sickness. And Lady Masire was very nice about it when I threw up in her lap. Does that get a mention? No. He says:
“Mrs Gladys Masire was kind to them during the flight, giving them fizzy drinks and sandwiches.”
Which is true, but leaves a lot out.
And she was even nicer about it when at lunch a few days later, Richard opened a bottle of Sprite that had clearly been shaken by someone beforehand, and poor Lady Masire got another Windsor dousing. Upon which subject Windsor senior is silent, though he does go into detail about the cattle he was treating. And he mentions the infamous breakfast incident. I’ll give you his version, then mine:
“Guy had distinguished himself that morning: he had woken long before Richard and went into the kitchen to find the president at breakfast and was invited to join him. To his horror Guy found out that it was grilled liver on the menu, which was a dish he could not abide. To his credit he managed to eat it all and even gave the impression of enjoyment. He was definitely born to be a diplomat.”
Hmmm. As I recall it, Richard was already up and out, and I was late getting up. I was hanging around in the garden behind the kitchen, for no real reason, when Lady Masire came out and asked me if I’d had breakfast. I said no, so she sent me into the sitting room, where to my surprise I saw the President sat on the sofa. I sat opposite him, we chatted about this and that, and then breakfast was brought in: grilled kidneys. Kidneys, not liver. Of that there can be no possible doubt. They are burned into my mind in all their ammonia-smelling horror. But I did eat it all.
Regular readers of this blog will also almost certainly dispute the notion that I am in any way diplomatic. Perhaps being in the back of a car with a rabid dog in Argentina has something to do with it? What am I on about? You’ll have to read the book to find out. But yes, my sister and I did play with a rabid dog.
Of the many things I learned from reading this book, not least was an idea of what my father actually did for a living (he is retired now); he was at least as much a microbiologist as he was a vet: for instance, he developed the first vaccine for Contagious Bovine Pleuropneumonia. Want to know what that is, and how the vaccine was invented?
And if you’d like a free copy, I have five copies of the Kindle version to give away in exchange for an honest review. Please email me at guywindsor@gmail.com with a) a link to a review that you have written of any other book and b) your promise to review this one, and I’ll email you the file.
I don’t normally write about political matters on this blog. It would seem mostly off-topic. But the current issue of “gay marriage” is regrettably still current, and it is oddly relevant to how I run my school. The Finnish government recently acted to prevent full marriage equality. This is one of the very few times I have been ashamed of my adopted country.
It has been long accepted in society at large that it is unfair, and now illegal, to discriminate against people on the grounds of their sex, and their sexuality. It is also profoundly irrational to do so. Let’s take a classic example: combat troops. It is true that in tribal societies, sending men off to war does little to affect the birthrate and therefore long-term survival of the tribe; sending women off to war is dramatically more damaging. But we don’t have a lack of women, and the baby-gestators we do have are mostly not working anywhere near capacity. So that argument is invalid. Likewise the strength issue. Guns don’t take much strength to use. So while it is perfectly reasonable to have strength and fitness requirements for military service, there is no reason to automatically disqualify a person because they have ovaries. I have trained with many women who were way fitter and stronger than me, not to mention more skilled. My first fencing coach at school was a woman. I got pasted in sparring in karate by women. As a martial artist, I am well aware that the shape of your pelvis, the tendency of your joints to dislocate, and the presence or absence of dangling delicate targets are all relevant, but not critical, data. Your willingness to strike is far more of a determining factor.
The only context in which it is reasonable to discriminate against a person on the grounds of their sex is if you are thinking of having sex with them. For a straight chap to find out that the rather attractive woman you’ve been chatting up has the wrong plumbing after all can be a deal-breaker. Fair enough. But in law, in class, in training? Hell no.
So, it is an abomination to me that the state could even contemplate preventing two consenting adults from signing a legal contract on the grounds of the sex of one or other of the contracting parties. It is wilfully stupid, irrational, unkind, and unnecessary. Nobody is harmed in any measurable way by allowing these marriages to go ahead. The objections are based only on the disgust that some people feel for homosexuality and homosexual practices (whatever they may be. Try google. Though be warned, there’s some seriously disgusting hetero stuff out there). Sanctity of marriage? Bullshit, while divorce is so rampant, and spousal abuse so common. The historical and religious arguments also fail; gay marriage was relatively common a thousand years ago! [Update: several kind souls have written in to point out that the studies this is based on are not terribly reliable. They are correct. So really I ought to cut this bit, not least as it is irrelevant; priests are ordained, not elected, so while the lawmakers' religious beliefs of course affect their lawmaking, the church itself cannot have a direct voice in a democracy. So the doctrine of any church is basically irrelevant to this discussion. Note, I am not arguing that (for example) the Catholic church should suddenly start marrying same sex couples. Just that in law, the sex of the celebrants ought to be irrelevant. But I'm leaving it in because I find it interesting.] Besides, gender is not as clear-cut as has been previously thought. I know of several of my students who do not identify as their birth sex, and at least one who prefers not to be identified by their sex at all. Fair play to them, I say; and while I sometimes forget to refer to someone with female-shaped hips as “he”, I perfectly respect their right to identify as they choose.
I am a racist, sexist, homophobe. Sad but true. I took the Harvard Implicit Association Test, and sure enough I do have relatively mild latent racist, sexist, and homophobic tendencies. These are irrational, undesirable and unfortunate. I suspect I have picked them up during my childhood; boys' boarding schools are notoriously homophobic places, and there were no girls and very few non-white kids. But I know about these biases, so they are less likely to influence my actual behaviour, as I can take them into account. You are not responsible for your feelings: they are by definition irrational. But you are utterly responsible for your actions, no matter what feelings drive them. You may have similar biases. Take the test and find out!
The law, like martial arts training, should be based on reason, experience, and the greater good. There is no reason to deny gay people marriage if they want it. The experience of places that do allow it shows no negative consequences to it. And it re-enfranchises a pretty large chunk of the population. The only downside I can see is that it will disgust some pretty disgusting people. Which is actually not such a downside, really.
Treat people according to what they do, and what they say. In relations between people, contractual, social, in training, or otherwise, the only relevant issue is how you treat each other. Kindness matters. Trust matters. Love matters. The content of a person’s genome, or jeans, does not.
