helenic

I've recently taken up parkour/freerunning. denny got into it a year ago, and I've spent most of the intervening period tolerating him incessantly showing me freerunning videos with varying degrees of patience. (Most of the videos are of people with very advanced skills, and I find them more off-putting than anything else: I'll never be that much of a ninja, so what's the point?)

A few weeks ago, sick of never getting to see him on Sundays, I went along with him to a training session. I had a good time, despite being relatively unfit, started learning about how to jump, and enjoyed throwing myself with determination at various walls until I managed to scale them.

After that I started insisting that Denny show me parkour videos made by women, such as Tam with a Cam. These felt a bit more accessible. But the video I found most motivating was by TraceurSteel, one of the Supa XXL Sunday Trainings crew (this is the group that Denny mostly trains with, and which I had gone along to), which showed him warming up, stretching, drilling and conditioning, including trying and failing the same thing over and over again. This was much more immediately inspiring for me than a showreel of successes.

I went back a couple more times. Today was my fourth session training with the Supa XXL crew, but this was the first time I really got it.

The previous two times I'd been out, I found myself getting very easily demoralised. Surrounded by ninjas doing things I couldn't hope to do, I'd struggle to find anything I could have a stab at. You have to design your own exercises in parkour, and as a newbie, without either confidence or competence, I sucked at it. I relied totally on Denny to find things that might be within my range, and coax me through trying them. Failure (which is inevitable) would leave me feeling discouraged and hopeless, and Denny had to spend a lot of time persuading me that it was worth persisting. By the time I achieved what I'd been working at, I'd be so cross with myself for having made such a meal of it that I wouldn't be fully able to enjoy the victory.

Intellectually I knew that failure was inevitable, persistence crucial, but I couldn't flip the switch in my head that found the journey fun and successes rewarding. Everything was just difficult. Finding things I could have a go at was really hard; it all involved throwing myself at new techniques that required skills I didn't have yet, and just failing over and over again until my body started to learn what was required of it.

My second time out, I tweaked my ankle ("ankle thingy" seems to be the technical parkour terminology, or "top bit" - it's when you land a little short of a wall jump and jerk your toe up too sharply, causing a mild sprain in the top bit of your ankle) and it was five days until I could put weight on it properly again.

I've been doing fitness stuff for a couple of years ago now - starting out with pilates and swimming, and moving on to yoga and weightlifting, both of which I now do regularly. Still, in parkour training I struggle with my strength/bodyweight ratio.

Added to that, outdoor urban parkour is fucking terrifying. Everything is made of brick and concrete that will take your skin off if you slip or miss or land funny. The third time I went out, Denny taught me to lazy vault over a rounded railing in the park, which was nice and friendly. When I tried to apply this skill to a brick wall, I skinned the outside of one of my thighs and got a bruise that lasted over a week. Jumps that are perfectly doable on the ground become psychologically impossible when you're doing them from one wall to another, with small, precise take-off and landing areas, two or three or four or more feet up. Every repetition of an exercise comes with a fear of skinning your shins or landing on your face. If you want to practice a jump you just have to conquer your fear, again and again and again.

You don't know what you can do until you try, so you have to try a little bit of everything. And, like the first time I attempted a cat leap, when you square off against something, look at it, psych yourself up to it, try it - and then come nowhere near to it and realise how many months of work lie ahead of you before your body is ready for this particular movement, it's hard not to feel discouraged.

This aspect of parkour - the mental conditioning, the psychological component - is well documented, and Denny wrote about it after his training session the week after my first time out. Anyway, I didn't do a scary double rail precision like he did, so I'm sure there are plenty more revelations in my future, but I felt like I started to get my head around this today.

At the first spot we went to, a kids' playground, everyone launched themselves at different jumps and balances and climbs, and I just looked at all of it and knew it was beyond my level. I had a go swinging from monkey bars, but I'm not strong enough for that, so I had to cheat by kicking one leg up on the far side and hoiking myself across that way - but after a few goes of that I had blisters forming on my fingers, and had to give them a rest.

I talked to another woman who was there for the first time. She was a dancer and had been going to indoor classes, where you could practice things at different heights made of less skin-destroying materials. That seemed like a much better idea. I started to think that I was approaching this the wrong way.

Denny walked with me in search of things for me to do, and once we were out of sight of the others I couldn't stop tears coming. I felt totally despondent, not good enough and not even able to do anything to help myself improve. Why was I even bothering? I just wasn't fit enough.

I dried the tears pretty quickly, and after some hugging Denny found a rounded border on the floor which I could practice balancing on. I sucked at it, but it was something to work on. Then I had a go at railing traverses, at which point the blisters on my hands started popping, and we did some precisions on the square tiled floor.

Thankfully, the next spot was much more friendly, with a lot more options for n00bs. I found a railing to practice my lazy vaults with another lady who was also a beginner. One of the guys, Jonnie, drifted over and started offering encouragement and advice. He taught me the basics of a step vault, which gave me something else to practice. I met TraceurSteel in person, who gave me some useful pointers with the step vault and kindly held my fingertips while I walked along the rounded rail so I could get used to the height and the movement, since I can't yet do it without a support. Basically, everyone was as friendly, welcoming and encouraging as you could wish. I practiced lots of vaulting and precisions, did some conditioning exercises like quadrupedal movement and monkey walks, tried a cat balance on the round railing and fell off. The sun was out, we were clambering and jumping all over things, people were being nice to me, I had things to work on and I was having a good time.

We moved on again. The next stop had a couple of very high walls over some garages at different heights, a long way apart - twelve feet, perhaps more. Steve, the not-a-leader, ran up to the lower wall and did a cat leap from that to the higher one; then did another cat leap between the two highest walls of the same height. The three second best ninjas lined up at the edge, looking at it. People got cameras out; the rest of us gathered to watch.

Watching these incredibly strong, athletic men sniff at that high, long jump was a revelation. They would walk up to it, look at it, focus, make like they were going to do it, then walk away. They'd go and look at a harder jump, pretend they were going to do it, then walk back to the first one and see if it seemed easier. They'd jog up to it, slow down, bail, jog back. One of them kept clapping his hands, psyching himself up, saying "yes, yes, I'm going to do it, come on" out loud... then still not actually doing it. The other was quieter, more focused. Eventually it was the quiet one who went for it. He made it. The other had no choice after that. Both of them were fine. It was well within their physical limits. It was the mental challenge of launching yourself, off a brick wall six feet in the air, at another brick wall twice as high and just as far away, that was the tricky bit.



Until then, I'd been thinking that the reason I was so afraid, the reason I was finding it so difficult, was that I was unfit, I was a n00b, I was shit. Watching the psychological process writ large with two of the most skilled practitioners in the group, I learned that it doesn't get easier as you improve. It gets harder. The more physically capable you are, the harder the mental challenges you have to face in order to push yourself.

One of the ninjas laughed when I tried to express this to him. "Yep, it never goes away, it just gets more and more horrible." You'd think this would be demoralising, but for some reason it was exactly what I needed to know. This fear I'd been facing, it wasn't an impediment to learning parkour. It was parkour.

I followed a small group down the road in search of more manageable challenges. My fellow beginner climbed up the corner of a wall, three or more metres high, where the bricks overlapped and made regular footholds, and I followed her up. Denny and I found a flat-topped rail, narrow but manageable, where I practiced rail walking until I got more steady. I learned to turn around on the rail, to traverse it sideways, and realised when squatting down to say goodbye to someone that I could squat pretty comfortably with my toes on the rail and my bum on my heels, so that led to me doing rail squats while Denny filmed me. (I tried a one-legged pistol squat too, but those are much harder.)

Back on the road, different conversations helped the pieces fall into place. It's not about comparing yourself with anyone. You just have to learn to see the places where you can practice, and do those things. Persistence is always, always rewarded. It's about not giving up, about having the imagination to see the opportunities presented by the landscape. There's always something you can do and if there isn't a perfectly placed opportunity to push yourself, you can practice things you can already do and work on moving more quietly, more smoothly, with more control and flow.

I got talking to a young woman who had just joined the group and who had also mostly done indoor training. I heard a lot of people saying that indoor training was fun but not really applicable to outdoor, as it gave you an inflated sense of your own abilities and once you were out, the brick seemed even scarier. I started to understand that there aren't any shortcuts: getting out and facing the brick is the only way you're ever going to conquer it.

I was feeling more confident now, and at the next spot my new friend was the one standing around not knowing what to do with herself. It was fun calling her over with a suggestion for somewhere she could practice vaults, and encouraging her to find things to try. I was getting better at spotting things within my range - and at the same time, my range was increasing by the hour.

By the end of the day, I'd improved my lazy vaults and step vaults, done some related conditioning, learned how to do plyos (precision jumps in a sequence, where you use the energy of the middle jump to power the next ones and can go even further than from a standing start) and spent a good half hour hopping from wall to wall like a bunny, had a go at a run-up-and-stride jump and stuck a perfect landing, and worked on getting my landings more precise and more quiet. I'd climbed and clambered and crossed obstacles. I'd been encouraged and encouraged others, and by the end of the day I was happily making precision jumps longer and higher than at the start.


Best precision distance (with a good landing) 12 May 2013: seven of my feets.

Today was five hours of training (six hours out and about in all, but I don't include all the walking between spots). By hour three, I was euphoric. I danced rings around Denny as we walked along, and couldn't stop bouncing. I felt strong and lean and energetic, and I saw training opportunities everywhere I looked. I was full of exercise endorphins, but not only that, I was filled with that confidence and adventurousness that comes from conquering your fear.

Parkour is about traversing obstacles as efficiently as possible. The thing is, most of those obstacles are mental.

Another interesting thing. When I came to do cool-down stretches, to my utter surprise I discovered that I was the most flexible I've ever been. I've been doing yoga for two years and my hamstring and hip flexibility has always been very poor; I've never been able to touch my toes, and even sitting upright with my legs stretched out in front of me is very painful along my tight hamstrings.

Five hours of parkour training achieved what two years of yoga failed. I could touch my toes from standing, and in a forward bend. I spent half an hour with a group of the others doing various stretches, and I felt looser, more flexible and stronger than I can ever remember.

Today is definitely a day when I leveled up in real life. I want to feel like this as often as I can. I am officially hooked.



Photos © Deepak Dembla 2013

Zoe Margolis has just posted a crowd-sourced list of female UK comedians, by way of highlighting the gender imbalance within comedy, especially on panel chatshows. I've heard of nine of the women on the list. I don't do to the Edinburgh fringe and I'm not a comedy buff, so unless I've seen them on TV or YouTube, I'm missing out.

I'm drawn to openly feminist comedians like Charlie Brooker and David Mitchell - but honestly, it'd be nice if actual women weren't just an occasional treat. If there was a campaign demanding that comedy shows gender-balance their guests, I would support it. I don't find many of the male comedians particularly funny, so even if the new guests turn out to be a bit pants I don't think it'd be a great loss overall - and at least if I didn't find something funny it'd be more likely to be because it was rubbish, rather than because the joke was sexist.

I'm Sorry I Haven't A Clue is guaranteed to make me giggle - always has been - and is usually fairly genteel and "safe" compared to, say, Mock the Week. For a while I was catching up on back episodes on BBC iPlayer while doing my physiotherapy exercises of an evening. Which was fine (although the whole Samantha thing made me grit my teeth a bit) until the "finish the line from a 1920s marriage etiquette book" game. I hoped that the players, decent chaps all, would take the opportunity to play with listeners' expectations and provide some interestingly gender-bending humour. Maybe even some good old fashioned surrealism? But no. Suddenly it was old white men making jokes at the expense of women, and I had to turn it off.

Miranda Hart's Joke Shop

A few weeks ago I sprained my ankle going down some stairs on the tube. By the time I'd limped home I was pretty much completely immobile. Denny was out for the evening so I installed myself on the sofa with my netbook to wait for a few hours, and to distract myself I looked on iPlayer for something to watch. I was feeling a bit sorry for myself, so comedy seemed like a good idea - but I was so not in the mood to have to breezily ignore any jokes made at my own expense. I scoured the BBC website for a show in the Comedy section which included women. Any women would do. Just one would be fine; I mean I find that a bit obnoxious, the token One Woman in a comedy team, but that'd do me for now. I couldn't find anything. Nada.

I ended up on the BBC Radio 4 website, listening to the first episode of Miranda Hart's Joke Shop. I hadn't heard of Miranda Hart before, but she's a big, tall, jolly, posh woman who has a brash, self-deprecating humour - she styles herself as a kind of failed- or anti-Bridget Jones - and the joke shop is sort of a framework for a sketch show, and sort of a bit like Black Books, only with more chocolate willies.

Reactions:

- I liked her; she made me laugh (especially once I warmed up to her style) and her manner is charming and memorable. It was great to have a sketch show about a woman who isn't conventionally pretty, is socially awkward, and owns her own business. All the humour was at her own expense, which was much nicer than listening to a man making jokes at the expense of women like her.

- The primary theme is how bad Miranda is at being a Girl. Her awful overbearing mother continually tells her to pretty up and get married. Her girly public school friends are all getting engaged and having big meringue weddings. So, clumsily and awkwardly, Miranda finds herself whisked along in their schemes, but hilariously and completely failing to fit in and eventually giving up. It's interesting. On the one hand, it gleefully pokes fun at the Cosmo readers of this world who think that makeup and men are the most important things in a woman's life. It's nice to have a protagonist who is a bit oblivious to all of that, and an overall message that people obsessed with those things are more laughable than people who suck at them. But OMG, could we have comedy by a woman that isn't about weddings and boys and dresses? Even if they're about how stupid all that is? Could we have comedy by a woman that's about, I dunno, science or the internet or politics or books? If only Kate Beaton did standup.

- Another running joke is Miranda getting mistaken for a man, resulting in her desperately trying to femme up so she can 'pass'. Again, some bits of this were pleasingly counter-cultural, but I found other aspects of it outright transphobic. I honestly didn't know what to make of the scene where she ends up in a shop aimed at trans people. On the one hand there's the "OMG Miranda you look like a transvestite! I didn't realise it was fancy dress!" punchline which, just, ugh. But on the other hand the whole conversation between her and the shop owner (who believes that she is trans) has a weird sort of sensivity to it. There was a bit that went:

Miranda: And my mum goes on about it all the time, she says, "Miranda you're a woman, you should dress like one!"
Shop owner: Oh, lucky - not many people have parents who that supportive.
Miranda: Um, I guess...

It was really odd. I mean the whole "Miranda looks like a man! She must be trans!" aspect of it is obviously horrendous and transphobic. But there was also clearly an awareness of her cis privilege. Odd.

Vous Les Femmes

This evening denny and I were looking for something to watch on iPlayer while we ate our tea, having monstered our way through the three Frozen Planet episodes already published in about as many days (neither women nor comedy, but OMG, so highly recommended). Anyway, he suggested comedy and by unspoken mutual agreement we flicked past all the stuff solely featuring blokes, and ended up with 'WOMEN!' (Vous Les Femmes). It's a French language micro-sketch show in which each sketch is only 1-2 minutes long, with an entirely female cast.

Reactions!

- This is baffling, surreal, hit and miss, with so strong a miss at first that we nearly turned it off, but definitely worth persisting with.

- It has a LOT of physical humour, and on average I enjoyed the sketches which involved over the top, slapstick physical fooling much more than the wordier ones - although perhaps that's because some of the humour is lost in the tones of voice if you're following the subtitles more than the French. I seem to remember reading something a while ago about the way physical comedy in particular is male-dominated, in which case this makes a refreshing change.

- The jokes are a mixture of social and situational comedy with low-brow toilet humour, absurdism and slapstick. A lot of it is gendered - like the "sex bomb" showing off her figure at the beach and the way other women react to her; ranting about queues for the ladies; the absurdity of a woman trying to modestly get changed in public - but none of it is sexist. Some of it is 'girly' (cocktail nights, dating, relationships, parenting) but some of it is just gloriously silly - and sometimes both at once. The 'dogwalkers' sketch starts out with a dodgy girlfriends=dogs reference and ended up making me laugh more than any other moment in the entire show, as the two women hare around in the woods like mad things, looking persistently stupid and having a lovely time.

- So the silliness/absurd physical comedy sort of forgives the genderedness, and while there's some poking fun at gender stereotypes it does mostly seem to be good-humoured, hitting sideways rather than hitting down. And there's some lovely fucking with gender expectations, too - as with the repeated lowbrow toilet jokes, and the 'bad parenting' sketches with their deadpan delivery.

I've also recently discovered Helen Arney, also via @denny, who took me to my first Festival of the Spoken Nerd show the other week. She seems awesome, and yay, female musician geek! ... But somehow I don't find her quite as funny as I'd like to; her songs all seem to be morbid romances, and they aren't quite morbid enough. It's also musical comedy where neither the music nor the comedy stands out - if her musicianship was really outstanding, it would make up for the bits that are only averagely funny. But she's young, and certainly doing better than I would, and I'm sure she'll get better. And I did enjoy her improv and banter on stage when she wasn't singing. But I think I'd like it if fewer of her songs were about failed love affairs and more of them were about science. Since she's part of a science troupe and all.

Oh! I almost forgot: the other female comedian I've encountered recently is performance poet Alison Brumfitt. She's wonderfully, challengingly, outrageously queer and a lot of her poems are about rejecting received cultural expectations and gender stereotypes. Listen to When I am old, her take on Jenny Joseph's famous poem. She's a feminist sex positive dyke and she doesn't give a fuck.

The Queen's Head is proud to present our first ever arts and crafts fair! We've got also sorts of creative plans for this year, and to kick it all off with a bang we've teamed up with local gallery organiser Nikki to host a big, inaugural Mad March Fair on Saturday 26 and Sunday 27 March.

Artists, makers, crafters, knitters and cooks are invited to book a stall to show their own beautiful creations. We welcome any homemade or hand-crafted item. Soap, cosmetics, jewellery, notebooks, collage, paintings, prints, cakes, chutneys, wood-carving, metalwork, leatherwork, knitting, embroidery, clothing, bags, cushions, masks, greetings cards, painted furniture, painted mugs, pottery - you make it, we'll show it!

Please contact helen@queensheadrye.com to enquire about booking a free pitch. (Instead of charging you up-front we'll ask for a commission on any sales - we want this to be as accessible as possible.)



Admission will be free to the public. The Fair will be hosted in our timber-beamed Function Room and open from 11am-8pm both days. There's a free gig on the Saturday night in the Lounge Bar once the Fair closes, so feel free to hang around and enjoy the mystical medieval folk of local minstrel Kim Thompsett and her band.

Come along, browse beautiful hand-crafted items, buy gifts, sample some delicious handmade cakes and preserves, sit down for a cup of tea, a pint of real ale or cider and a plate of our homemade pub food. Stay around for the evening and chill out with some live music. Invite your friends!

Mad March Fair: facebook event

Apropos of this link on how to make your 404 page work for you, denny made a tongue in cheek request for a cute mascot for the Shiny Ideas 404 page, sort of like the twitter failwhale. Perhaps a gay shark?

Et voilà:

I've just posted a report of the Take Back Parliament demo in London today, including live BBC video of Nick Clegg's spontaneous address to the crowd after we demanded he come out and receive our petition in person. Right now I'm feeling an enormous sense of hope and achievement. We made our shout heard. This is what democracy looks like!

Of course everything hangs on the negotiations, but on PR at least I hope we can trust the Lib Dems to stand firm. This is just the beginning - we'll be keeping up the pressure and pushing for electoral reform for as long as it takes.

( Photos from the demonstration: )

Oh, and yesterday I posted a slightly more coherent response to the election results on Police State UK, if anyone's interested. It's called We didn't vote for this.

John Cleese talks about proportional representation, coalition governments, and why they offer us an improvement on our current system. This dates from the late 80s or early 90s, but is still true today - and even more important.

"Historians used to talk about the British genius for compromise. Well, perhaps we can rediscover that genius. Perhaps we've got to."

There has been pub progress. Significant progress, but it's all been under wraps until contracts were signed. We've now agreed to exchange contracts on the day we move in, so we may as well start talking about it now, since we've already been working on it for ages and things are about to get a lot busier.

Short version: after waiting months and months for the Yorkshire pub to get back to us, in March we started looking for backup options. We found one in Sussex, went to visit, and fell in love with it. We've had an offer accepted and are moving out of London on the 10th of May, aiming to open on the 27th of May for a Grand Opening beer festival and gig.

( Long version with photos of Sussex pub )

And the hilarious thing? Last weekend the Yorkshire pub got back to us and accepted our offer. After leaving us with no word for five months. Three weeks before we move into a pub we only first looked at three weeks ago. Can you believe it? This is of course a good thing, as well as being an excellent joke, because it means if it all goes bizarrely, horribly wrong and we can't sign the contract at the Queen's Head after all, we still have a backup pub in Yorkshire. Although it would be a pain, because bard has his last day at the Pembury tomorrow and isn't earning until we open the next pub, and I've handed in my notice on my flat and would have to move in with my mum and dad temporarily while we sorted things out. And going back to the Fridaythorpe pub would be a bit of a headfuck at this stage. But at least we wouldn't have to start the whole process of looking for the next pub from scratch.

We have all fallen head over heels in love with the Queen's Head. It would be impossible not to. I am so excited I don't know how to process it. It's like being invited to Hogwarts. I never in my life imagined I would get to live anywhere this beautiful, especially not before I was thirty. It still doesn't seem real, and I still don't dare believe it's actually going to happen, but I have to start acting as if it is because we need branding and a holding page ready before we move.

( emotional stuff )

I have six working days left before the election, then it's a swift pack, move house, and plunge straight into a lightning, high-intensity refurb project. Then the opening beer festival, then June 1 I'm back at my desk and I've already got Shiny Ideas clients booked up until the start of August. It's going to be a crazy summer. But, I think, a happy one.