Hello all, Today’s (wednesday 27th) session went more than swimmingly. You all showed good spirit. I said in the email that I was only expecting a focus on groundwork but we were pleasantly surprised by the mats’ adhesion to the Activity Space floor and so we were able to get in some good standing randori as well. The number was also perfect for the space we had so we’ll be continuing that number for future signup sheets. A quick reminder that if today wasn’t your first session, please make sure you paid using the shop item on our page on the Union website. We do have names so we will know. We’re also not being greedy, we just need to keep the club affloat. For future sessions, we’ve been given the approval to store new roll-out mats. What this means is a much quicker set up time (it would entail moving 5 slightly heavy rolls plus a few rectangular mats to fill borders, instead of the 36 individual mats we had to move today) and no separation whatsoever (the rolls have velcro). So that’s promising for standing work in the future. That said, anything can happen from one day to the next. Fingers crossed, things continue as well as they’re looking at the moment. Anyone who came to our first Monday session will remember that we were double booked with boxing, leading to a venue fiasco. That fiasco has continued, we lost the room, but the Union have very helpfully managed to get us a replacement venue for Mondays to come: Meeting Rooms 1&2. If I remember correctly these are located just beyond Activity Space 2. Once we have roll out mats it will be no issue setting out mats in this venue, but if we train on Monday we will still have to use the conventional mats, and it will be a bit of a hassle to get them to the venue. We’ll keep you updated on that. Finally, the beginners for the most part still had to deal with no-gi techniques and wrestling. From a self-defense and all-round fighter point of view this isn’t too bad. However, the unique selling point and source of interesting tactics in judo is the ability to grab each other’s jackets. We’re still in the process of acquiring gis to lend for each session. They’ll hopefully be here soon. Till next time, Nicolas