Scary

Thursday night kung fu. Spent the whole lesson with the kids and beginners again going through siu lim tao and the first stick set. I'm trying hard not to get frustrated by it, not sure I'm succeeding yet. After the class we went through Char Chuan briefly just to check I'd remembered it OK, then the first 2 bokken sets, which, as ever, I couldn't remember in isolation but managed fine as soon as I was actually paired up with someone, when instinct takes over.

On my way down to tai chi one of the teenagers, L, was in the foyer just being picked up by her dad, who had their dog with him - a young husky I think. Anyway, the dog was terrified of me! This was a first for me, usually it's the other way round - when I was a kid I was very scared of dogs, it's only after a few years of martial arts that I've started to feel a bit more comfortable round them (one of the happy side effects of studying kung fu does seem to be that it has generally made me calmer and more able to cope with things I used to be afraid of). The dog was cowering behind L, even though I wasn't conscious of being at all threatening - in fact when I saw how afraid it was I tried crouching down to make myself smaller and less frightening - but it didn't seem to work - it didn't want anything to do with me. Obviously I'm getting pretty scary!

Tai Chi was a little frustrating, we went through the sword form and the pole, but there were quite a few of us so space was extremely limited and in the sword form in particular we became so crowded into one corner of the room at one point that it was getting quite dangerous. We also paired up to practise the shoulder push, I was working with A who is a good foot taller than me so it was fairly difficult for both of us