This picture was taken last year, but it may as well have been taken yesterday: I’ve re-joined the gym at Wells Leisure Centre. Their pricing policy went sharply skyward back in January 2025, making practice effectively unaffordable. However, a few days ago I took it up with the manager and we struck a deal, so I’m back after eleven months in the idle wilderness.
Muscle-memory did its job. The Cheng Man-ching 24-step Tai Chi form and the first four Heian kata of Shotokan have survived more or less intact. The Tai Chi sword form, however, has dissolved into glittering fragments. That will take a few days of deliberate reconstruction.
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| Cordoba C1M classical guitar |
I rarely consult my bucket list (drafted ironically, naturally), but I’ve decided to master blues fingerpicking. In my guitar-playing teens and early university years I mostly strummed chords or played electric lead on my beloved Fender Stratocaster. Fingerpicking was something I admired from a safe distance; it wasn’t the music that set my blood moving. I may have toyed with the Rolling Stones classic, Angie, but I never realised I had to systematically train the fingers - and the thumb.
ChatGPT explained that fingerpicking is essentially piano by other means: different parts of the hand doing fundamentally different things at the same time, all of it needing to be drilled to automaticity. Fair enough. Repetition.
Then came the advisory note that you also need a decent guitar. My current instrument has a ludicrously high action and nylon strings that feel like barbed wire; my tortured fingertips forced abandonment. But now I remembered the effortless pleasure of my old Strat compared with the cheap box I’d dragged to Warwick: argument over.
And finally, here's the book GPT5.1 recommended.
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| Amazon |
