Today Is Saturday, Wield a Sword!

A bit of an odd fencing workshop this month.

Most of the Sheffield crew and our semi regular visitors from Leeds were absent for various reasons, mainly due to the workshop being brought forward a week and hence falling on the easter weekend. In fact, it was only me, Rachel, Rick and Amber, so it was a good job we had seven newbies turn up en masse, eager to get their hands on sharp pointy things ... ;-)

The rapier work saw the prof giving the newbies a crash introduction to basic rapier, whilst me and Rachel got stuck into riposting to single and compound attacks in a variety of ways before going on to some very useful rapier and dagger techniques including different methods for disengaging the opponent's dagger or binding their sword. Lovely.

We didn't get to play cutlass in the afternoon, but it was still useful to revisit Hutton sabre (which I haven't done for a while) and then a bit of basic backsword using single sticks as training weapons. In fact, we probably covered about a 500 year span of fencing techniques which is not bad for one day's work, all told.

Home for an excellent Shakespearean episode of Doctor Who accompanied with a glass of Greene King IPA export. Can Saturdays get any better than this? Oh, wait - next weekend I get to play being a pirate for a tv show, so maybe they can ... huzzah!