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hazzardevil · 2 years

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I'm sleeping in my tent at the last night of Fight Camp and have thoughts about life.

Anything about specific people will have details edited, like if somebody is from the Belgium, I'll say Netherlands to prevent any identifiable information about people being spread around. But if someone likes longsword, they really do like longsword, because that doesn't narrow it down all that much.

https://fightcampevents.com/ for the website of the event itself. All links and URLs in this post may be interesting, but are not essential for the poast.

For those who don't know, it's a big HEMA (Historical European Martial Arts) event in the UK where you spend three days fighting people and learning from classes. This has a timetable of when tournaments and specific classes are, but you can go do whatever you wanted. There is also some classes which aren't HEMA, like a class on Indian Martial Arts which I wanted to attend, but couldn't, run by Asante Lawla. Linking his Instagram because he's a martial arts instructor and he's a professional martial arts instructor and makes his money at events like these, this is unusual for HEMA. I can only think of seven people who make a living doing it and most of them require an asterisk for why it's not that simple.

I think I'm going to start writing essays about HEMA on here to get some thoughts written down. Sorry if you didn't like the long post, but if you didn't, you're probably not reading this sentence.

I have basically forgotten my mobile phone exists for the last few days. I think this is because I have been surrounded by people everywhere there's something interesting to do unless I made an effort to be by myself. Several times each day I have had a desire to be alone and away from people. Sometimes I'm feeling this way from a negative interaction with somebody, sometimes it's just "I am not interested in people at the moment, so I'm going to stop being with them and go read or check my phone for notifications and nothing else.

There's the acknowledgement that somebody may suddenly need me. A family member could inexplicably and in an unforeseen manner become ill or die, causing a "family emergency". In which case I would need to go home. I try not to let it bother me.

This happened to at least two people at the event of around 250 people. And that's just the two cases I know about. I doubt either of them woke up thinking the "family emergency" would cause them to cut their trip to Fight Camp short.

Idea: Bad things can happen at any time without warning. This is not worth worrying about because the thought and time put into it isn't going to better prepare you for it.

I did not wake up on the day I broke my knee, knowing it would happen. I had no good reason to suspect that day that I would receive a life changing injury before I went to sleep that evening. And if I'd been worried about it happening, it would not have made me behave differently. There is a risk every time I drill or spar in HEMA, or go out cycling that I will receive a serious injury because of it.

This happens. It's happened in the last few days with a couple of broken fingers. They were treated on site by the medics and didn't need to go to hospital. This was the worst injury this year at the event, but this was a good year for injuries. Out of 250 people, one person has broken fingers for a while, but they will recover. This could have been me, but through a mix of luck and wearing protective kit I did not receive anything worse than either a hard strike with a blunt steel sword to the head through a mask, or a soft strike with most of the power of the blow stopped by the helmet, but the tip of the blade still struck the back of my head.

I saw a medic who examined my head, said I'm probably fine, but to memorise a random five digit number and come back and check I've remembered it correctly ten minutes later. I reminded myself every few minutes and 15 minutes later I tracked down the Marshal-Medic and repeated the number correctly. At this point I stopped worrying about brain damage. And gave it no further thought until I considered the rate of injuries through doing HEMA and the fact that I know the risks of doing it, but accept those risks as part of the cost of doing the event, along with the money.

Just to be clear, Fight Camp is an event not a place, although it's been hosted by the same venue for the 12ish years. It is hosted at an Airsoft Range called The Grange, in Berkswell, Coventry, England, which has hosted it for the last 12ish years. But the idea of a place called Fight Camp is free fodder to writers in the audience.

Just to be clear, I loved this event. The past four days of the event will be part of the highlights of my year. I want to go to more HEMA events.

I'm autistic, anxious and dealing with depression off and on. Dealing with people is difficult and stressful at times. But coming to Fight Camp means going to an event where everyone else already there has something in common. They do HEMA and like it enough that they've spent money, taken time out of work, accepted the risks of doing it and made the effort of travel.

For me this was a several hour train journey, for some people this was flying from America, or somewhere in Europe. Or in the most extreme case for a German I met, she drove from Cologne to Dunkirk, got a ferry to somewhere on the South Coast of England, then driving to Coventry. According to Google Maps, this will take just under 9 hours. Here's the suggested route from where I'm sleeping in my tent, writing this while a plane files over my head to Birmingham Airport. I've only attached it because Google Maps, in addition to the estimate time also told me about one speed camera and two sites for roadworks. As if there's only one speed camera between Coventry and Cologne, so if I just drive at the speed limit when I'm passing by one of the three speed cameras in Belgium, but then floor it as fast as my car allows, it will take 8 hours and 36 minutes.

All of this varies to some extent. But they love doing HEMA is something constant across the event. You will quickly make friends who you can stay in contact with and be worth holding onto for life. And I don't mean romantic relationships, but this does happen. Just please don't get into HEMA for dating. Do it because you enjoy it and like the people.

Like someone I won't name here who lives in another country told me in a jokingly, but affectionate way that I should go to University in Sweden because his club is there. And then seriously told me that he'd love me to teach at his club if I did.

This was huge to me. And will be a memory of him that I'm going to keep for as long as he's my friend.

One negative experience, which is hindsight was kinda funny, but anxiety inducing at the time, was when somebody who didn't like me decided to sit on a bench where I had been sat 30 seconds before, with a lot of my stuff, including a half-eaten meal right next to him with an empty seat.

I asked him if he could move for a moment so I could return to my seat and finish my meal with the person I'd met five minutes before, been chatting with and had presumably seen me eat half of the food on my plate. I'd got up to get another drink from the bar, obviously not going anywhere.

This fucking guy has now decided to just occupy the empty seat next to him. He tried to bullshit me that his friend was sat there and had also just got up to get something and would be back at any moment to sit their. I wanted to get my meal back before it went cold, so I didn't spend time arguing with a dipshit while my food was being ruined. I suspect now this may have been the point of his actions. It's the only explanation I've come up with so far about why a complete stranger would be such a dick like that. And what did everyone else at the table think of this guy doing it? Because I don't think he was trying to steal my food and and there were plenty of other tables to sit at.

Rather than making a fuss about my seat, I simply sat down the other end of the table after asking for my food and seeing the most disdainful, reluctance of someone handing over food that I can imagine only matched by starving orphans having their food stolen by the occupying army of an enemy nation.

There wasn't really anything I could do. What was I going to do. Force him out of the seat? And while everyone here likes weapons and fighting, I'm not about to have a duel over a seat on a bench. As much as I hear jokes about bringing back duelling in the evenings, we like living in a society where escalation to violence as a means to resolve disputes is not normal. I think this is something people already agree with without knowing they believe it, but the calls to violence in politics on this hellsite scare me like few other posts do because of the idea that "The ability to enact physical violence on others is an appropriate way to treat people in a civilian context" is a medieval idea and this is one of the medieval ideas I'm glad we've abandoned.

This is an event fundamentally about martial arts and without knowing anything about him, I could guess he was at least moderately experienced with at least one weapon, likely more. I recognised him from earlier fighting somebody with a pollaxe. (Note for people who don't know, Pole-Axes or Poleaxes aren't the name of a real weapon. It's actually written and pronounced poll-axe, because poll means head in this context. Like the Poll in Poll Tax. A tax per head.

Also, you meet people from all walks of life. Like a guy who's Dad was a Meth Addict from a council estate. He's made it into the economic middle class. And socially he's now friends with lots of foreign people, through HEMA. This is a thing that happens with HEMA and learning more about countries from the perspective of somebody who currently lives there

He's done really well for himself. He's a plumber who makes a lot of money. He also likes longswords and to grapple people. This could be over 100 people at Fight Camp because Longsword is popular and the most popular methods tend to emphasise grappling. Why this is could be a long post of its own and I've already been writing this for two three hours now and my phone's battery is about to run out. I'd rather have it switched off first.

My biggest regret is putting my tent where I did. On the first day the ground was good and I was away from all the other tents for the sake of not being kept awake by nearby people who want to stay up later than you and have hangovers tomorrow morning.

Between me setting up my tent, going into the local village to collect stuff I needed for my mini camp site, like tooth paste and a toothbrush, a sleeping bag and a source of light that isn't my phone. Because it's pitch-black at night in places in a way most people living in a world of electricity probably never experience anymore.

I'd also forgotten to pack a pillow, but didn't bother buying one because I wasn't going to find anything cheap enough that I wouldn't feel bad throwing away after four days. I decided not to buy one, but did accidentally discover in my mess of a tent that a roll of kitchen towers makes for a pretty good pillow. It's fairly soft, but the many thin layers provide enough rigidity to the shape of my new "pillow" that it didn't keep rolling away from me as my head moved by many pillows with no rigidity at all. It's not as good as a real pillow, but it's good enough that I've used it for the last two days after the accidental discovery of the kitchen roll I'd bought to clean up messes.

Idea: Try to identify other objects that I didn't need to bring to the event, because I could have got something else I own to be a pillow.

Better Idea: It has suddenly dawned upon me that the blanket I brought with me would be a better pillow than kitchen roll, but the capacity for kitchen rolls for pillows should not be underestimated.

Also, my worst out of context quote for the event was:

"The good thing about the Nazis..." And then got distracted by something and didn't finish the sentence for a moment, to eventually finish with "they're an easy example of evil".

I have an uncanny ability to be interrupted at the worst possible moment in a sentence.

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