Fire at "The Bridge"

Sadly, there was a fire last week at the Bridge Youth Centre where we practise. The cause isn't clear yet, but a lot of damage was done to the roof of the football pavillion, which was only added on to the front of the building last year.

It seems the hall where we practice (further into the building) is not damaged, other than smoke. So we'll press on this week with our Saturday session, and hope the repairs to the building don't bring too much disruption in the weeks to come.

Aikido Demonstration

In a couple of months we get a chance to do a public demonstration of Aikido, so preparations have started so that we have a programme to follow. Sensei Chris is leading the open-hand techniques, and Sensei John is giving us some extra teaching for the jo (staff) so that we can demonstrate something with weapons, perhaps the 31 step kata. Perhaps we will also do "jo-taking", i.e. the attacker has a jo, and tori must do a technique while disarming the opponent at the same time. Some of these types of techniques are in this Youtube video:

Club visit

Club visit 23rd March 2009
We managed to squeeze in time to visit an Aikido club in the New Forest area - it's a long drive but well worth it. Our Sensei, Chris Elliott, has a connection with their Sensei, John Harding, and so we get together from time to time. Our visit was well timed as Vince Sumpter was a visiting Sensei that day. The session was really interesting, informative and we all looked pretty tired at the end of it. We were exposed to some new (to some of us) techniques.
We hope to be able to reciprocate and host the New Forest club at some time in the near future.

*NEWS*
During the visit one of our students, Noel, was graded to yellow belt. Congratulations Noel.