Blades Have Personalities – The Climb #88

Wednesday 19^th April 2017

I woke early this morning, which was a little annoying given that I got to bed late.  However, I suspect that because I had to be in the office early it was my body clock just being cautious.  It was early enough to want to go back to sleep but late enough that I wasn’t able to.
I have this weird ability to be able to think in my sleep at times and I think I must have been doing so about this short story I’ve been asked to submit as I woke with a lot of ideas about it.
Though it’s a story about the end of the world I want it to be a very mundane story.  I guess in some ways I want to contrast the big epic background with something smaller and more personal.  It’s also a bit of a personal challenge.  I can write big, epic, action-packed scenes; this would challenge me to write small.  As I described it at the weekend, I want the real story to be so small that it hides between the words.  It’s certainly a challenge for me and one I’m looking forward to tackling.
But I also had the idea of coupling this with mental illness, specifically anxiety.  It’s something I’ve suffered with (although it seems chasing tornadoes has largely cured me of the worst of it).  I’ve always said that in a crisis, people panic about the bizarrest shit, and so I think the contrast of someone worrying about something mundane against this big epic backdrop could work quite well.
It’s amazing how much work you can do laying in bed.  I just wished the rest of the day had been so productive.
I’d had problems updating my website theme yesterday and had risen a ticket for it with my hosts only to be told the issue was the legacy package I was on.  They said they could upgrade it and so I gave them the go ahead yesterday evening.  Except they decided to do it JUST as I was about to schedule today’s issue of The Climb.  So I found myself waiting around wanting to schedule the post before I went into the day job.  Just as well, as the office had no external internet connectivity today.
*grumble* *grumble* *something* resulted in me having to go into a different office today.  It’s actually a lot closer to home but it really screwed up my logistics.  Ordinarily, I’d write for a couple of hours, go to the normal office and then drive on to training in the evening.  But to get to training on time, it required me to get into the office early, leave early, quickly eat and then drive for 2 hours.
Worst of all, the work I was doing in the office was mind-numbing and the internet wasn’t working meaning that if I needed to look up any external references I had to use my phone.
The only joy came in the form of a cloud.  Yes, a cloud!  Both myself and a work colleague found ourselves looking at this small little fluffy cloud outside the window.
“Is it just me,” my colleague asked, “but is it growing?”
I agreed it was and was the reason I was also watching it.  I told him about the towering supercells that can form and rise up to 60,000ft in a matter of minutes.  And as I did so, the cloud over stretched itself and fell apart into nothing.  It was quite beautiful really.
With a month to go until I leave Canada to start chasing, and it being 3 years to the day of my first day of adventure when I first went out to the US geocaching and stormchasing, it seemed very applicable to today.  It won’t be long until I will be posting The Climb from another continent.  I still have to work out the logistics of that.
Plus I need to do some shopping for my trip (a new portable HDD drive and a load of memory cards)
The drive to training was a long one tonight, and I was busting for the loo the last third of the journey.  Tonight I let everyone spar whilst I worked with people who wanted a bit of personal coaching.  I managed to fix most of the posture issues of a student who recently started sidesword & buckler from smallsword.
We ended up doing some melee games which were a lot of fun.  We even ran a mini tournament which was quite good as well.
The main reason for this (and the Tomahawk and Bowie Knife that the evening descended into at the end) was that we had someone bring in some real swords for us to handle.
I went to a day up at the Wallace Collection in London last year where we got to handle antique pieces.  It was an amazing time but many of the people here have never got to handle a real antique sword.
And as strange as it might sound, blades really do have personalities.  It has a little to do with the weighting, but some swords and daggers feel like they want to do certain moves.  I was telling this to someone who thought I was a bit crazy just as another student came up and said, “this knife feels like it wants to stab”.  Ordinarily if someone said that to you, you’d probably move away from them but we knew exactly what he meant, and all of us who handled this dagger got the same impression.
As I said, I think it has something with how the blade is weighted and where the point of balance is.  But it was great to handle some antique rapiers and daggers  (the first time I’ve handled real ones of the latter).
I said I wasn’t going to the pub but a lot of the Reading crew had turned up and were going so it felt rude not to.  And then it was the 2 hour drive home.  At least I didn’t elongate it by stopping at Tesco, even if I do need some blueberries for tomorrow’s breakfast.
But I still got home after 1am.  I still needed to write The Climb.  I have to be up early and into the office again tomorrow.  It’s killing me already and I suspect I’ll feel dead from lack of sleep in tomorrow’s edition.
Roll on the weekend!