Kungfu

This pursuit takes up almost every evening I have and quite often my weekends. I train at Southern Crane Kungfu in Sutton and Tolworth, Surrey, Monday to Thursday evenings, Friday morning in a park at 6am, and take part in Masterclasses at the weekends. I could be described as a kungfu nerd, perhaps, or even an addict. I don’t mind. I love it.

The style I study is Tiger Crane combination, which uses the fighting aspects of both creatures. Keeping it simple, the Tiger style covers short to medium range fighting with its ripping, clawing and downright ferocious personality, while Crane is about intelligent long range manipulation, deflection and precision attacks. The style comes from those developed in Southern China and the younger and more sophisticated of the two, Crane, is about 300 years old.

When I am asked what the toughest part of my training is, I always come up with the same answer; as a children’s instructor, I am committed to helping in the kids’ class each week. Now that’s tough…

Elvis

No, not the crooner; the Bull Terrier puppy. Mistakenly called the English Bull Terrier by most people, and feared and misunderstood by many poodle owners, is our Elvis. He is wonderful and simultaneously, trouble incarnate. His seek and destroy missions keep me on my toes every day, on edge to find out what item of mine will be next on his list for execution. Because of this tendency, on a good day he is known as Fang the Wonderdog, and Fang the Destroyer on those other, all too frequent, days.

Travelling

Over the years I have managed to get to quite a few places, but like anything, the more you see and do, the more you realise you have seen and done nothing. So I intend to do a lot more travelling to make up for this.

Alone on a post university four year jaunt I saw a few places, during which my mum frequently implored me to come home, eventually resorting to throwing my dad on the phone to turn me around through his concern over my non-existent (and still non-existent, sorry dad!) pension as a reason to return to sunny Blighty. I went to South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand and India, hopping back and forth between these destinations when the whim caught me. Those were the days.

Since then my holidays have been mostly limited to press trips. On these fantastic jaunts, I have been to the likes of China, Egypt and Israel, plus all over the US and Europe. More please! The more far flung, the better.