To our great happiness, the children’s Krav Maga teacher thought that since the weather forecast was good today, the children could have their lesson on the beach at St Bees instead of in Carlisle at the gym.
This pleased me very much, because obviously the beach is much more fun than the town centre. It is fresh and breezy and beautiful and smells of the sea, without a single Poundland in sight anywhere.
We arrived just in time for the lesson, after having dashed through unexpectedly tiresome Lake District traffic to get there. It was unexpected because obviously we had forgotten that it was half term for everybody else as well, and Mark and I ate far too many jelly babies in our anxiety: but we got there just in time, and of course everything was quite all right.
The teacher met us next to the beach, and stopped to talk to Mark and I whilst the children unloaded the equipment. He is very gentle and quiet, and I don’t think I have ever heard him use so many words all at once. We listened carefully.
He said that Lucy was possibly the best pupil he had ever taught, and that next year he would like to put her on a course to be a Krav Maga instructor.
We were very pleased about this, imagine how marvellous to know that the little flower which you have delicately nurtured in a genteel private girls’ school has an undiscovered talent for ferocious fighting.
Krav Maga, also incorporating something called Rapid Assault Tactics, is so vicious that it is not allowed to be considered a sport in the way that martial arts are. It is fast, scary and savage. It is not stylised in any way, and is used for teaching soldiers to defend themselves against unexpected attack, especially if the attacker is wielding a weapon. It is used mostly by the Israeli army, who know a thing or two about getting into fights, and also by the American Navy SEALs. It is mostly about hurting somebody so very much that they stop attacking you and start considering whether or not they might be about to die. It shows the user how they can achieve this in a terrible emergency.
We thought that this might be a good thing to teach our precious little chicks, because then we would never need to worry about them being bullied at school, or attacked on a dark university campus, and indeed it has relieved our minds wonderfully on that score, we never ever will.
Their teacher is very quietly spoken, and has run several free courses for people teaching them what best to do should they ever find themselves in an unfriendly situation with a terrorist. I hope that if ever I do meet a terrorist I have got the children with me, because they are jolly scary now.
They all trekked off along the beach so that they could practise fighting when they are sliding about on stones or falling over in water, because obviously most fights do not happen on a rubber mat in a gym. Mark and I watched them go, and then spent a contented hour strolling along the water’s edge with the dogs and then back along the top of the cliffs: from where we watched them, surreptitiously.
I took a photograph, which is above. The ones on the edge of the sea are Oliver and Harry. Lucy and her friend Indie are watching, and the instructor is standing even further back, keeping his feet dry.
Obviously they got soaked.
Lucy got soaked again after dinner, when she jumped in the sea, in an up-to-the-neck sort of fashion, and had to dash shivering back to the camper van to get dry and changed.
It turned out to be the loveliest of days. The children learned how to jab their fingers into somebody’s eyes and cut off their breathing with one quick poke. The dogs charged up and down the beach ecstatically, barking at piles of seaweed and at little waves. Mark and I had a private paddle in the sea followed by a little snooze in the camper van. We all ate a huge plateful of sausages and cheese and cakes, and then had a last twilight walk before reluctantly packing everything up and setting off for home.
When we got home Mark and I set out for work but after hardly any time at all the fan belt slithered off my car and I had got to give up and go home until Autoparts send us a new one tomorrow.
Mark said to go and get some sleep but I thought I would write to you first, and now I think I might just like a glass of wine.
The pictures below show firstly Lucy’s brief swim, and then the view from our last walk.
It has been the nicest of happy days.
