Tag Archives: tang soo do

Day Three (and Six Years)

Leave a reply

So a few days down, and the first gym session and first TSD session of the year are behind me. The gym was a killer. What I did before to warm up left me gasping and by the end of the hour I was feeling quite sore and very tired. There was thought behind it though, as I knew I had TSD the next evening, so the idea was to blow out the cobwebs before I got back in the dojang.

Um yeah, that one didn’t work out quite as I’d hoped… The warmup was still a shock to the system, so much so someone else got a nosebleed from the exertion :) But once we were back into the swing of things it was like I’d never been away, and I have to say I’m so pleased to be back in a dobok and working hard. The conditioning exercises at the end of the session left me with purple forearms today, but that’s all part of the fun :) .

The other part of this update’s title refers to the fact that last night was exactly six years to the day that I first started training in Tang Soo Do. In some ways it feels like a lifetime ago, in others, like yesterday, but going along for that first session in a cold school hall was one of the best decisions I ever made. Here’s to the next six!

Day One

Leave a reply

I’ve not exactly been prolific with updating this recently have I? Poor show, I know, but I’m looking to rectify that. No, not in a ‘I’ve got a new years resolution to update my blog more’ sense, but certainly over the next 4 or 5 months there should be a lot more updates here. This is due mostly to the fact that I’m on a bit of a mission, and want to use this place as a reminder, motivation and diary for it.

Like millions of others over the last few days, I’m back on the ‘lose weight, get fit’ thing. In fact I’m all over it. Instead of just doing it with a vague sense of commitment, like those joining gyms this week with one eye on next months direct debit date to make sure they can cancel it in time, I have a real, actual goal to aim for.

Actually that’s a bit of a misnomer, I don’t have a specific goal at all. No dream weight or size or anything like that, but a definite time and place I want to be reaping the rewards of my impending monastic lifestyle. That time and place is the European Tang Soo Do Championships in Germany this May, over my birthday weekend.

I’m not sure why I’m so eager to get it done for that in particular, but it’s firmly lodged in my brain now, so that’s just how it is. I’ve been to a lot of competitions now, and not done well at all since mixing it up with the Dan grades. Now while it’s true that my technique isn’t the greatest, and that it all depends on the judges on the day, there’s also another major contributing factor; fat guys don’t win forms.

I know, I know, ‘it’s nothing to do with that’ – but it is. So I figure if I can at least get in shape properly by then and I still lose miserably, it’s because I suck at forms, not because I’m wobbling all over the mats. That I can live with. The essence of a forms competition is aesthetic, it’s about how it looks, and like it or not we’re affected by factors below our level of conscious thought. So from now until then I’m going to use this to keep track of what I’m doing, how it’s going, and to motivate myself. It might come across as part blog/part Facebook status at times, but that’s just tough I’m afraid. If you’re after something to read with a bit more intrigue, do yourself a favour and read The Pelican Brief.

So here we go, day one, it starts today with my first session back at the gym which will in all likelihood kill me. Such fun!

Oh and as an aside, I’ve also decided to start again with the Fish Oil and Glucosamine Sulphate supplements in an attempt to mend my ailing hips. I got on with them quite well last year, so I’ll give them ago for a couple of months to see how I get on.

EMTF British Championships 2011 Review

Leave a reply

(I’ve cross-posted this from my training log at our club’s website here)

——————————————————

Another weekend down, and another tournament under our belts. Our club once again sent a sizable squad to Bedford and Northampton for the EMTF British Championships, hosted under the watchful eyes of Master Kumar Sr and Grandmaster Salm. It’s always nice to see Grandmaster at these events, and even moreso when I didn’t even realise he’d be there this year. After an arduous trip up, thanks to traffic, accidents and a wayward satnav, we checked-in to our home from home at the Premier Inn in Bedford and managed to get a meal before the next day’s early start.

To be fair we probably should have been up earlier, we’d underestimated how long it takes to get across to Northampton, but we were still there in plenty of time to get changed, feel some butterflies and line up with scores of our Tang Soo Do family. Once I’d been told what was expected from me for the day (Dan grade and above don’t get much of a chance to sit around doing nothing) the competition began quickly and it wasn’t long before our girls were the first to take the mat. They did a great job as the forms categories starting rattling through, and at times it was difficult to know where to look, you couldn’t turn round without seeing one of our guys on the mats!

As the day wore on it was fantastic to see our gup grades walking away with trophy after trophy, the high standards we strive to keep and the effort put in by everyone really shone through. It wasn’t too long before the Dan grades – me included – got called to the mats to stand in front of three or four masters at a time and try to show them why we deserve to win anything. I couldn’t believe how big our first category was, the names over the tannoy just kept coming. In the end I think we had fourteen people in our traditional forms section, and eleven for chil sung, I’ve never been in a group that size before. Despite not coming away with anything myself our guys did great and placed in both categories, and for once I really enjoyed performing, rather than just feeling incredibly nervous the entire time. It doesn’t mean my performance was any better, but at least this time I can still remember some of it!

I didn’t spar again this year, which meant I spent the afternoon on a ring helping to score and judge those who were fighting, but I quite enjoy it to be honest and it makes the day go a lot quicker. Again, our guys did a good job of taking trophies at all levels from 8th gup upward, and the standard of sparring was very high across all schools. Watching the Masters compete in forms and sparring is always one of the highlights of the day, and this year was no exception. The standard of sparring and forms was very high, right across the board, but still the best bit is watching your own instructor training. It sounds silly but it’s so unusual to actually see your own instructor performing a form, especially one of the ones needed at their level. Normally you only ever see them breaking down a form applicable to your own grade, so it’s a treat to see them performing.

When the day finally ended at just after 7 in the evening we lined up, bowed off and until the next time (which seems to be sooner and sooner every time,) said goodbye to our extended family. I guess everyone took away their own particular highlights for the weekend, but for me they were watching our students looking stronger and more confident in sparring than any time I’ve seen them, running a ring with the very nice Master Christensen from Denmark again, and watching a particular bout in the sparring. The more I go to these events, and the more time I spend with the practitioners – both at home and away – the more grateful I am for having been lucky enough to have found this art and club.

Levitation Perfected

1 Reply

The weekend played host to a couple of tough training sessions with the EMTF. SBN Kumar Jr traveled down with a few students from his school in tow and stayed down to take the first squad session for the World Championships next year in Florida. Between you and me this meant I knew what I was going to be taking away from the weekend – pain.

The couple of hours we had on Friday evening were pretty hard work (oddly I can’t remember anything from the lesson), but Saturday afternoon was the killer. From a CV point of view it was very tough, and we had a good test of both our aerobic and anaerobic fitness, not to mention a lot of strength and stamina work. I can’t remember doing as many sit-ups in one go before, and I hope it’s a long time before I have to do it again. The added palm strikes to the solar plexus during the exercises were the icing on the cake!

If that cake were made of glass, elephant tramplings and caustic soda that is, the entire front of my body is killing me!

I wasn’t too bad on Sunday to be honest, a bit sore but nothing to write home about, but after last night’s lesson which included more core work drills from the previous days, I went to bed in a lot of pain. I’ve had DOMS before, but nothing like this, it feels like I must’ve had a bloody hernia or something!

Of course, we training martial artists are the epitome of grace and always in control of our bodies and balance (no, really), which makes this morning’s performance of ‘How To Get Out Of Bed Like Bruce Lee’ even more atrocious… I slept reasonably well considering, only waking up a few times when I rolled over and when the dog decided he wanted a night-time jaunt around the garden to relieve himself. When the alarm went off though, I found I couldn’t actually sit up.

No matter how hard I tried I could not lift myself off the bed, and lay there for a few minutes wondering if this is what it’s going to be like when I’m eighty. Then, using my wonderfully logical brain and my love of applied physics, I came up with a plan:

  1. Lift knees
  2. Drop knees to side to rotate body
  3. Drop legs off side of bed to rotate into seated position
  4. Stand up and face the day knowing I AM MAN

What happened though was something     quite different. The bed had been shifted about 6-8 inches to my side of the room to accommodate the dog’s bed on the other side (so he doesn’t go off to make friends with the cats in the middle of the night and end up with a face full of claws), and as I hitched my knees up and rolled onto my side two things happened. 1) I fell off the bed. 2) I got wedged between the wall and the bed. I was barely conscious at this point, and the confusion of finding myself suspended above the floor in total darkness left me a bit bemused, but I figured it out eventually. I just couldn’t figure out how to get down. I couldn’t struggle or twist to get myself unstuck because it hurt so much, and I remember a tremendous sense of shame at having got myself stuck. Kinda like a ship in a bottle – how did it get there??

Eventually I wriggled myself free and slumped to the floor, unobserved and pride intact! I’m still not sure how it happened really, it was one of those only-just-awake things where you’re not sure if it really happened or not. Suffice to say, I’m installing some kind of airplane-style escape chute at the nearest opportunity.

Fail?

Downtime

Leave a reply

The observant (or perennially bored) among you will have noticed that I haven’t updated much lately around here. There are a few reasons why, but the short version is that I’ve had a lot of stuff go on lately away from Internet Land, and not much of it has been nice. It’s been a very trying and upsetting time for my family and me, but there are breaks in the cloud now and things seem to be getting better.

On a training front, I haven’t got a lot to report really. I’ve unfortunately had to miss some seminars that I’d have loved to have been at, but that can’t be helped and I look forward to the next chances I get to go away and train. My own class is still going well too, albeit with a minimal number of students for now. It would be really easy to look at that as a negative, but that’d just drag me down, so I’m focusing on the positives from it. With a small number of students I’ve been lucky enough to spend a lot of time working on specifics, and giving a lot of attention to the things I can see which need addressing, and I’m hoping that what we lack in numbers at the next grading, we make up for in quality.

When I first knew the class was going to be opening on a Friday, I was a bit sad to be losing one of my own training sessions each week to run it. I thought I’d really miss putting on my dobok, standing with the others and working up a sweat. So far though when it’s come to it, I haven’t really had a chance to feel like that. From start to finish I’m completely engaged, constantly thinking, analysing and trying to adapt what I had planned to what’s happening in the dojang. I’m sure as time goes on it’ll become more instinctive and organic, with less detailed planning and more adaptation, but for now the challenge is great.

It’s really quite interesting now that I take some time out to sit and think about it as I write this, because it’s yet another aspect of Tang Soo Do I’d never really thought about before. We do a lot of work on the Internal and External as we progress through the gup grades and beyond, and teaching is yet another area where it applies. When I train on a Wednesday or Sunday now, my focus is very much internal. I’m thinking about me. How is my form? Am I applying this correctly? Are my stances good? When I’m stood in front of a class though it’s all about the people in front of me, and I’m asking the same questions of them in my head. I’m getting a lot better at pacing a class, knowing what time it is roughly and how long I have left, but I still have a few moments of thinking ‘oops, I haven’t checked the clock for ages, what time is it??’. I’m hoping the attention I pay to the moment is seen as a good thing by the people stood in front of me, I can think of nothing worse for them after paying money to be taught, to think my attention is elsewhere. Respect is a two-way street, it needs to be earned.

School Days

1 Reply

My own Tang Soo Do class started last week, and today’s the second time I open the doors to the unsuspecting public. It was a really odd feeling turning up last week and being responsible for opening the doors, making sure everything was ready, coming up with a decent lesson plan (some of which was ad-libbed) and realising that none of the familiar senior faces weren’t going to be there. The only thing I can really compare it to is that first time you get in a car by yourself after passing your driving test. Daunting but with a certain sense of freedom and responsibility. It’s strange to be driving in the opposite direction of my normal Friday class though, knowing that everyone else is still there training together.

Despite it being a small class (and I was never expecting anything else) it was good fun and a good first test of my ability to control a class and to keep it running without any big breaks. Keeping the energy levels up in the room is difficult and necessary, that’s going to be the hardest part to learn and continue. Things like Ho Sin Sool are difficult at the 10th gup level, because it’s very basic stuff (relatively speaking of course), and much slower paced than sparring or pad drills. I suppose with my TSD head on I should be talking more in terms of Um and Yang, and how the slow pace is good to give students a chance to catch their breath after the hard work :) .

One of the things I’m very aware of now is just how important these first few months are going to be in any student’s development. This is where the first stages of muscle memory are going to develop, and it’s important to iron out any bad habits before they take hold, or at least to try. I find it interesting now when I look around a class to see the small idiosyncrasies and differences between similar grades. Sometimes it’s almost imperceptible what those differences are, but you could show a class full of people in silhouette and out of focus and be able to identify people by the way they perform a move. So for me it’s going to be important to make sure legs are locked out (god knows I’m guilty of this enough myself), hands aren’t opening and closing, techniques finish where they should, shi sun is level and consistent etc. Obviously these aren’t things I’m going to be hammering-down on as such in the early days, but where possible and where I spot things happening I want to try to nip it in the bud.

I dare say in just a years time I’ll be able to look back at this post and think ‘boy did I have that wrong!’, but only time will tell. They say there’s no substitute for experience after all!

EMTF British Championships 2010

Leave a reply

Another week, another Tang Soo Do event of some kind to attend. This time it was back up to Rushden and the scene of the recent Masters’ seminar for the annual EMTF British Championships.

The convoy got on the road and the not-entirely-unreasonable time of 10:30 on Friday morning and we got to our hotel in Bedford shortly after the sun went down, thanks in no small part to a crazy amount of roadworks on the M1 and M25. After checking in we congregated in the bar – which felt as if we’d only been there a week ago, never mind seven months! – and had a quick drink to unwind and some food, then it was back to our rooms to chill out with some TV before trying to get some well-earned shut-eye.

Bright-eyed and bushy-tailed (no, really) we got on the road again first thing on Saturday morning and had a lovely drive over to Rushden, only to find the caretaker at the school which was to be our venue was obviously enjoying a lie-in and hadn’t opened the gates, leaving buses and cars all over the road. Once we got in and claimed ‘New Cornwall’ in the corner of the warm-up hall, the competition began quite quickly. We had some nice surprise presentations after the bow, including Master Jan De Vry’s 6th Dan and Master Kirie’s (apologies for the spelling) birthday present of a beautiful hand-made sword from Germany, and then the Masters began their competition. Our own instructor took part and gave the sort of performance that helped inspire the rest of us for the rest of the day.

I’m finding it’s par for the course now to to be expected to help if you go away to a big competition as a Dan grade, and I think it’s right. If we want to wear the belt and progress, we should expect to carry extra responsibilities at these events. Personally I find it makes me feel very proud that my opinion during judging counts for something. So with this protocol in place, the Dan grades were next up so we could compete and then help run the other mats to work through the Gup grades and sparring. Unfortunately for me, despite training hard and giving what felt like a decent performance in Chil Sung, I failed to place, and the same for the Dan Gum section (although I did miss a transition move which couldn’t have helped my cause). The Chang Bong was another disappointment for me, made all the more difficult as I felt the sting of being fourth in a group of four! Oh well, I guess I’ll just have to train harder the next time around.

Fortunately, everyone else’s training and skill was more than evident and as a club we took a haul of thirty-seven(!) trophies at all levels, from lower gup grades to master level. I couldn’t have been more proud of the people I train with, and as I was looking around the dojang during the day, I couldn’t turn around without seeing one of our students accepting a trophy somewhere. I was especially proud of the gup grades I think, especially when I think of the limited amount of competition experience some of them had, you’d never guess it to watch them. When the day was done, we headed back to our hotel for a quick meeting and a few words from our instructor, a few celebratory drinks, and then off into town for a slap-up Chinese meal and a bit of dancing at New York New York. The evening was cut short thanks to some trouble-makers who felt it necessary to look for a fight (talk about choosing the worst group to start on), but we instinctively schooled like fish and left early.

It was a great weekend, despite a lot of driving. The bond between us all grew stronger again, and there’s no doubting that we really are a family of sorts. Everyone’s there for one another, all offering support and friendship, and getting away with the EMTF feels more like visiting extended family every time we go. Despite it meaning my comfort break was essentially me running around with a banana in my mouth (no, not like a monkey), it was nice to feel included enough for Masters Kumar Jr and De Vry Jr to grab me to help set up the scoring system for the afternoon. I’m already looking forward to the next competition, and hopefully doing a lot better. Thanks to the EMTF once again for making us feel so welcome.

Distance

Leave a reply

Saturday was one of the longest on record as far as I’m concerned. After a late (well, later than I’d have had ideally) Friday at the dojang where we hosted a birthday party for one of our junior – now senior – students, I managed to get about 3 hours sleep before the alarm went off at 4:30 in the morning, the start of an epic day’s traveling and Tang Soo Do.

The reason I was up so early was to join my instructor and another Dan grade on a trip to what was billed as a Master/Dan seminar. In Rushden. Rushden being five-hundred kilometers from Cornwall. Yeah…. Anyway, bleary-eyed and really not with it, we hit the road under the cover of darkness and rolled Eastward. After a couple of necessary rest stops we found the college we’d be spending the day at with about twenty minutes to spare before the seminar began, and I don’t think it really hit any of us until then that we hadn’t eaten! I scoffed down a banana and some water and did my best to wake myself up and get loose, I knew we had Master Kumar Jr leading the start of the lesson, so I knew it was going to be hard. I wasn’t disappointed, I hadn’t sweated like that for a long time, and looking back on it now it was good. Isn’t the power of hindsight wonderful? ;) .

We were lucky enough to have Master Jan De Vry taking the majority of the seminar, with a firm focus on Kyok Pa – Destruction, or breaking. Anyone who’s been through a few gradings will have had a go at some breaking, usually with a strong kick or punch, and most people will have at some point felt the pain of a failed break. It’s not just the physical pain (and it can really hurt), it’s the short-term (and sometimes long-term) psychological damage it does, and the resultant damage to confidence and technique. When someone fails a break, you can pretty much guarantee the next time they’ll do one of two things; either hold back because they know it hurts, and as a result probably hurt themselves more, or try too hard on the next attempt which adds tension, takes away speed, and often removes the accuracy too. It’s all mental of course, there’s really nothing physical stopping 99.9% of people completing a break, and so we spent the best part of 3 hours working on the mental aspect of breaking, in combination with the physical.

The concepts we worked on are things I’ve thought about a lot in the past, things like relaxation, using the weight in the limbs to do the work and so on, but mentally connecting all of these things is a lot harder that it sounds like it should be. I won’t go through exactly what we worked on, for fear of a) trying to illustrate something I still don’t fully understand, and b) boring you all into a coma, but suffice to say by the end of the day I was happily breaking boards with very little physical effort from an inch away, and even managing some nice two-finger breaks. Ok, they weren’t two inches of pine or anything as dramatic, but it’s very easy to see how it can be applied and increased to cope with just about anything put in front of you.

The biggest thing I took away from the day was learning how to use breath to separate the conscious and subconscious, and then being able to trust fully in the subconscious doing what it needs to. I like the way Master Jan is able to happily work with both sides of the martial arts compass; the body mechanics and science of the West, and the esoteric, meridian and chi based thinking from the East. There’s no ‘this one is right, that one is wrong’, just a healthy respect for both. I also had the dubious honour of being his example dummy for most of the day, apparently he likes having someone substantial to demonstrate on to prove the techniques work. I still have the sore ribs and bruising on my chest as a souvenir from the day.

The other thing I like about these days away is the less-obvious things I take away. Seeing and working with other high grades from around the country offers a sense of perspective, and really helps me feel the kind of inclusion that being part of the EMTF promises. We’re all there for the same reason, all unified by one common interest, and it feels good.

After some sparring led by my instructor as part of his fifth Dan pre-assessment, and a chance to try to cram in the third dagger form (easier said than done with a brain addled by traveling, tiredness, five hours training and a distinct lack of food!), we hit the road again and chased the setting sun back West. Well, we would have done if it wasn’t for rain and cloud for most of the trip. By the time we got back home around midnight I was running on autopilot, until I crash-landed in bed. I’m feeling the pain more today after training last night, and my hamstrings, instead of being formed from some kind of good steak (yes, I’m made of meat) seem to have been replaced with tough old jerky. Still, I can’t wait for Wednesday and getting back to it all over again :) .

Fresher? I Wish!

1 Reply

For some reason I’ve not been able to get any proper rest for days and days now. I sleep, but i wake up with my head already spinning with stuff and it feels like I need to go back to bed immediately. I’m convinced that a combination of this, the changing light and the fact I can grow hair just about anywhere (the first one to mention the top of my head gets a beating) is an indication that I may in fact be part bear. I’m not sure what the other part must be, but sadly it doesn’t seem to be shark, and I don’t feel 7000% deadly.

I attended the Freshers’ Fair yesterday at the college closest to my hopeful catchment area for my branch of the club, and it went as well as I’d hoped for. We were a bit out of the way, stuck up on the first floor in a small room with the NHS, a bank, the Samaritans and people like that (including a stand for a local nightclub with a girl in hotpants who really looked like she had no idea where she was, let alone what she was meant to be doing there), but the students seemed to come through in small herds. I’m pretty sure the collective noun for a group of students is a herd. What was nice was that most of the people who put their names on our sign-up sheet seemed genuinely interested. I’ve contacted them all now, just to let them know that a) I’m not some weirdo collecting peoples’ details (I’m not!), and b) that I’ll be in regular contact until the club opens. I’m indebted to those who came along to support me, I think if I was there on my own all day it would have been a bit more nerve-making, not to mention a lot less fun :) .

I’m hoping to have the club up and running in around four weeks, and with a venue that already seems likely I’m starting to get excited. I’m not starting until then as it gives me a chance to sort out all the things I’ll need to get going, and also gets the British Championships out of the way. I wouldn’t want to get everyone in for a lesson and then immediately lose the momentum by buggering off for a week. The British should be good fun though, I’m really keen to compete again, even if my nerves at the time will be jangling and my stomach doing somersaults. The good thing about being a Dan grade at these events is that I tend to have to help out with running the mats now it seems, which gives me less time to worry. There’s probably an argument to say it gives you less time to prepare too, but as far as I’m concerned all of the preparation will be between now and the day. Trying to go over forms too much on the day of a competition normally results in me forgetting the simplest of things, I work a lot better when I’m in automatic mode.

I feel like I should give Murphy a little shout out as he doesn’t get many column inches here these days, but he’s been an absolute little star at agility lately. He seems to have come on in leaps and bounds (oh the punnery!) over the last couple of months, and with the exception of some particularly smelly places on the field, nothing seems to distract him any more. When we started training there were a couple of small Cocker Spaniels who he was head-over-heels in love with, so much so that I had to change classes as he wasn’t getting anything done other than ignored by the focal points of his adoration. But now I think he’s just about ready to get officially measured (to see if he goes into small or medium classification) and entered in a competition. The only thing I’m not too convinced about is his entry into weaves. Dog agility has a lot of different obstacles: Jumps (including jump-through tyres), tunnels, A-Frame/dog-walks, see-saws and weave poles. Weave poles are quite easy once they’re in and going, but finding the entrance is the hard part. Your dog has to enter the very first pair from the right, anything else counts as a fault, and Murph has trouble finding that first pair at full speed or from an angle. Once we crack that though, look out world.

I say ‘world’, I mean the relatively small world of local dog agility.

Novice division.

My golden boy taking a well-earned break on Monday evening

:)

Crammed Calendar

Leave a reply

We’re on the third row down on my desk calendar now, which can mean only one thing: it’s the best bit of the year! :D

September is when I start to get really excited about the stuff coming up, but before all of the various festivities get going I’ve got lots going on. The EMTF British Championships are coming up, and in preparation the clubs down here are getting in some serious training to make sure we’re all on top form and repeat the success we had away at the Europeans earlier in the year. It means we’re having squad sessions every other week at the moment (on a Sunday before heading back over to the academy for evening training…) to make sure ours forms and sparring is as good as we can hope for.

At the British Champs my instructor is grading for his Oh Dan (5th Dan) and there’s extra preparation for that too. We’re away for a trip up to see SBN Nessworthy which may end up being in Newcastle, and there’s an extra trip to Bedford in the offing as well. Somewhere in the middle of this there’s a Gup grading happening too, so those guys grading are under even more pressure to train hard at the moment. To be honest I’m feeling the pressure a little too, as I’ve stepped in to teach one of the clubs once a week, which means their preparation is in part my responsibility. There have been lots of changes in the syllabus recently, and although none of them are massive ones, they’re small differences to things which can highlight a lack of continuity between clubs at an event like a grading. I’m doing my best to help make sure this continuity is present next weekend.

My own training last night was the worst in ages. I’d been feeling a bit off all day at work, that sort of car sick feeling, and thought I was fine until I got my dobok on. I had nothing in me, no energy at all, and my brain refused to work. I forgot at least one move in each of my forms and wasn’t with it at all. My forgetfulness didn’t stop there; I got home and realised I’d cycled back and left my helmet at the academy. It hadn’t even occurred to me while I was riding. Here’s hoping for being a bit more lucid tonight, those poor people deserve more than me stood in front of them for an hour and a half going ‘durrrrr I do karate I do!’.

In other news, I finally moved the shed in the front garden! Ok, so it took me and three friends (friends bribed into doing it with homemade pasties) to do it, and there was a bit of shouting a bit of blood, but it’s done. It means I have a front garden again, and light in the living room. The shed was sat right at the front of the garden, and the garden’s raised up about 3 feet on a wall, so it practically eclipsed any natural light that might attempt to come in the house, and in an old miner’s cottage with walls 2 feet thick and small windows, every last bit of light is precious. Unfortunately I now have a garden that looks like it’s been lifted out of the Battle of the Somme. The next thing to do out there is decide what to do with the unruly hedge, sort out, level and replant the lawn and then create some steps in the wall to get up there more easily than with the death-trap steps already there. A landscape gardener I am not.