COYS

Tottenham Hotspur are playing South China in Hong Kong on Sunday. My wife and I will be joining an assortment of the many HK Spurs fans in the north stand, along with my capoeira teacher and her 5 year old daughter. I think it's good to have kids along - it helps cut the swearing down and the sprogs' energeticicity can be infectious.

As I will mention at the drop of a hat, I've been Spurs since the day I was born. I wasn't born in Tottenham - I pranced onto this mortal coil at University College Hospital a little way down the road - but my family lived there at the time, on Philip Lane. And on that day, Tottenham won the FA Cup. So I didn't really have much of a choice in the matter.

Despite that, this will be the first time I've ever seen Tottenham play in real life. When I was a little over the age of one, we moved to Bedfordshire. We were never terribly well off, and we could likely have afforded either tickets to White Hart Lane or the train tickets to London, but not both. As a student in London, I honestly never even thought of going to a match. Now that I think of it, I probably would have had the cash, but it honestly never crossed my mind - I'd got used to football, or at least Spurs, being something I saw on TV. At uni in Beijing, I did go to a match between Beijing Guo'an and Qingdao at the Workers' Stadium. I think that was the only sporting event I went to in those four years.

After university, I moved to China, which pretty well nixed any chances of Spurs-watching. We nearly had the chance on our honeymoon earlier this year to go, but the home matches were on the day we arrived and the day we left (and in the middle was an away game at Villa that seemed unappealing). Despite this we did spend some time trying to work out if we could get from White Hart Lane to Heathrow in time for our flight back to Hong Kong. As it was, we barely made it from my cousin's house near Loftus Road to the airport in time, so it was probably for the best we didn't start from N17.

So what I'm saying is, it's been a bit of a wait for this Sunday afternoon, and I fully intend to enjoy it.

Capoeira on Lamma

The inestimable Lamma-Gung came by on Saturday to take some photos of our classes at the Island Life Studio. I don't usually go to class there, but the sessions in Central have been on hiatus while we relocated from Kontact gym (the facilities were good but it's hard to train capoeira with other classes and workouts going on around you).

Anyway, the photos got put up on Lamma-zine today, and here they are.
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It doesn't pay to read too much into Facebook.
However, I just got a friend request from a capoeira mestre other than my own.

Sweet.
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Sou discipulo que aprende, sou mestre que da lição

So on Tuesday I had to lead the capoeira class. Our contra mestre called me about half an hour before to check I was going, and to let me know she's missed the ferry. The original plan was that she would catch the next ferry and I would just egt everyone to warm up and do some basic exercises. In the end, she didn't make it at all, but things didn't go too badly.

I ran out of ideas after about an hour - it turns out it's not so easy to think up sequences of more complexity that "you do this kick and you esquiva". But we did all right, and I think some of the beginners did need more practice on negativa and meia lua de compasso, which it was nice to do without too much pressure. Consensus afterwards was that without The Teacher there, one could get away with experimenting a bit.

At any rate, after I'd run out of ideas, we just made a roda and played for about 20 minutes. I put on some of the slower songs so we'd not get worn out, there being only half a dozen of us. I think this was good practice, since we don't usually get to play for so long at the end of the class. Unfortunately a combination of me not controlling my kicks well enough and two of the girls not doing a low enough esquiva meant I manage to kick two (count them) people in the head. One quite hard with a meia lua de compasso she didn't see coming and the other with a queixada I just didn't lift well enough.

Strangely neither seemed to mind that much.
So in the end, we got through it and everyone was very nice to me afterwards, suggesting I should get the evening's pay from our contramestre. And I won't complain about being at the front of the class for a while, since it's still easier than being the teacher.

Seen yesterday: "American Gladiators" dubbed into Cantonese. There was just one bloke doing all the voices, which made the female presenter sound a bit like Pingu the penguin's mum.
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Seen yesterday: "American Gladiators" dubbed into Cantonese. There was just one bloke doing all the voices, which made the female presenter sound a bit like Pingu the penguin's mum.
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I had another minor breakthrough with capoeira recently. Nothing to do with technique, however. Last Wednesday evening I finally plucked up the courage to go and practise in public -- I ran to and a couple of time around the park near the old asylum, and then found an empty corner, cued up the appropriate soundtrack on my MP3 player and did about 10 minutes of capoeira practice. Nothing too fancy, as it was too warm and humid to expend much energy.

No one batted an eyelid. My audience was three cats, and the other people in the park just jogged or walked on by. I mentioned this the next evening to a friend of mine who is also a capoeirista, though as an angoleiro he doesn't train with our class. He'd had a similar experience, and said "in fact, after a while you kind of get annoyed that people aren't stopping and staring".