Up to this point in my life I hadn’t been aware of any particularly masochistic tendencies in myself, so you might imagine that I wasn’t initially that thrilled at the prospect of, as a certain gleeful sports editor termed it, “Getting your ribs broken in the name of journalism”. And yet I somehow found myself wandering down to James College Hall on a Saturday evening for this very purpose; sayings about curiosity, and in particular its unfortunate effect on cats, filled my mind.
As soon as I toddled in I was met by bemused looks, presumably due to the fact that I wasn’t wearing an ankle-length blue robe. It might sound difficult to feel abnormal in a room full of people that look like they’re impersonating Japanese housewives; let me assure you that it isn’t. And then my induction in Kendo, or “The Way of the Sword”, began. This involved learning how to hold the sword in question (it’s called a shinai, in case you were wondering), which, I was slightly surprised to discover, wasn’t the full Uma-Thurman-disembowelling-the-Crazy-88 job, but several bamboo sticks wrapped around a core. Faint hope was provided by the sight of a wooden katana, but this was hurriedly hidden away again, and someone muttered, “No, not that one-that one breaks bones.”
Then I learnt how to walk. This was more difficult than I thought, especially given that I reckoned I was alright at it beforehand. This was a day for the shattering of preconceptions though. I still don’t quite understand what went on, but I do know that it involved the members of the club gliding effortlessly back and forth across the floor, bearing ominous resemblances to the terrifying Wringraiths of Lord of the Rings. Meanwhile your gallant correspondent mentally laid on curse after curse while attempting to shuffle along at the least embarrassing pace.
After stretching (which never helps to improve your mood, really) we formed into two lines, three of us without armour, the rest in the whole sweltering caboodle. Subsequent exercises involved striking your opponent on the men (head), do (side), cote (wrist), and in the throat with a tsuki (thrust). Excused from being hit due to having no armour, the note-from-mum excuse of many a Kendo master, I slashed ineffectively for a while until there began a sequence of blows that can’t even be remembered, let alone carried out; so I sat on the sidelines, sweaty and frustrated.
And then a strange thing happened. The cries (ki-ai) when people struck, which had seemed utterly random (and, in the case of Geoffrey, visiting from Oxford, utterly terrifying), gradually began to correlate with where the blows fell. The strange staccato footwork started to make sense, albeit vaguely. Given that I enjoy hitting people with a stick as much as the next man, I went back in, and by the end of the session I had really savoured these exercises.
Watching the armoured members going at each other like tigers at the end dispelled me of any delusions over my own extremely crude abilities; what was even more impressive was the fact that the club has only been going on for two years, and has only had funding for one. Based on what I saw, they deserve more.