En garde
At the Discworld convention last August, YoungBloke attended a kids' fencing session.
He enjoyed it so much that he went to the adults' session. And then when they put on an extra session he went to that too. At which point one of the coaches told us about the fencing club he coaches in, in Oldham. So since October the Blokes have driven from home to Oldham and I've got the tram from work to Oldham and we sit and read Facebook I mean watch YB learn to fence. We go to the youth session, with kids ranging from 6-7 to about 14. Officially it's for under-13s but they looked at YB compared with some of the younger kids, and said "but we can go by height". YB is by far the least experienced so when they go from warm-up to bouts, one of the coaches tends to take him off for what is, to all intents and purposes, a private lesson (thereby saving us an additional