The Fall Guy!

Some people say that ‘What doesn’t kill you only makes you stronger!’ But these people have obviously never taken a fall at a martial arts school where a lack of concentration on the part of the idiot faller (guess who?) means he ends up slamming into the mat on his shoulder. Remarkably I was relatively unscathed by this but I would change the old adage to something along the lines of ‘What doesn’t kill you can still hurt loads and make you want to swear quite a lot!’

My bruised shoulder aside my martial arts training has been pretty fabulous of late as the London school I attend has had an instructor from the main school in Chicago visiting for a week. This was great because it meant there were two instructors instead of one so everyone was under a bit more scrutiny than normal.

Our usual instructor is a woman and she’s a truly superb teacher but the guest was also a woman who was equally impressive. She even told me I was quite good at one point – then proceeded to correct faults in my stance and kicking and several other areas for the duration of the lesson. Bugger...

But one of the things I genuinely like about the martial art I do, namely hapkido, is that it relies on technique rather than brute force so correct technique is very important and that is one of several areas that both instructors are razor sharp on. I also adore the school because we rarely attract the type of macho lunatics I have encountered at other martial arts schools – and this is a major boon as a lot of the stuff we learn can be quite dangerous if applied correctly.

The final thing that was very refreshing on a personal note about our guest from the US was that she was articulate, thoughtful and considerate – and in these anti-American times it’s sometimes good to be reminded of the basic fact that George Bush and his gun-toting, world-domination-obsessed, greed-is-good, right-wing chums don’t represent everyone in the US. Thank God...

And that’s quite a timely reminder for me because, as an obsessed fan of The Apprentice US, I was in danger of losing sight of this obvious fact.

The latest outing for the remaining bunch of wannabe squillionaires on this highly watchable bit of car-crash telly saw the two teams, mainly comprised of utterly hateful American business types, have to renovate a house with a $20,000 budget to see who could add the most value to the property.

One side did a really good job and made a bundle of dosh while the side lead by Raj (a remarkably accurate name considering he acts and dresses like an anachronism from the days of English rule in India) were so hopeless that it was a major feat the house was still left standing after his hilarious attempts at ‘home improvement’. Official programme sacker Donald Trump (think Don King colliding with a truck of Brylcreem to get the full horror of the hair) eventually decided that the foppish Raj was next for the chop and booted him out. This was sad as professional gentleman and full-time buffoon Raj was always good value.

But there are still plenty more despicable people left in to enjoy loathing in the show... Misanthropy rules!