Since I seem to be in the habit of writing nigh on 1000 word Blog posts every few weeks, I thought I’d chop this one up into friendly chunks for you to enjoy at your leisure. This is part 1 of 2. Read part 2 here.

DAY OF ANGER, DAY OF TERROR! Are words that I currently know the (rough) Latin translation of rather well*. And that’s not because I’ve been getting spooked at Catholic Mass. (I can already hear the “obvious joke” groans).

Choir

It’s nearly concert time again with Imperial College Choir and Verdi’s Requiem is filling my mind with its thunderous crescendos and poignant quiet moments. A musical friend of mine once affectionately described playing in the orchestra for Verdi’s Requiem as ”Quiet, quiet, quiet, then… LOUD NOISES.” It’s rather more beautiful and captivating than that might suggest, but I must admit that the chap in who’s memory it was composed must have lead one heck of a dramatic life if Verdi was trying to give an accurate reflection!

I keep forgetting to take pictures of the things I do, so please forgive this one not showing you a lot. Shiny though!

I really love singing all this classical music in the choir. Perhaps the novelty will wear off at some point, but I do find it extraordinary that ordinary me gets to be a part of such extraordinary music. It’s quite a privilage. Anyway, enough gushing.

This time of year all the clubs and societies have AGMs. These involve finding out how the club is doing, the Very Serious Business of electing committee members (to the delight of vote counters everywhere, the union insists on a second preference voting system for all elections) and plenty of mild banter. I managed to persuade the other members of the choir I liked it so much that they elected me Vice-Chairperson for next year. Apparently “I don’t know about you, but I love choir!” is a winning line.

My new job started today, as I went to help sort out the choirs enormous (and fascinating) collection of music, some of which was quite old when the choir began in the 1950s… One person noted that the whole thing would have taken a lot less time if we hadn’t stopped all the time to practice singing the pieces.

Cheeky plug, since we need people to come and see us perform to keep the Choir afloat:

Imperial College Choir’s performance (with orchestra) of Verdi’s Requiem is at 19:30 on Saturday the 17th of March at Holy Trinity Church, Sloan Square. Tickets can be bought from Choir members, here, by calling 0207 594 9354, on the door (less cheap) or in the Sherfield Lobby on Wednesday and Thursday Lunchtime. Selling points: Great music, great choir (who have put in lots of effort), great venue, it has me in it, and Verdi’s Requiem is awesome.

Now back to the serious business of discussing my life…

Judo

Judo is as painful and invigorating as ever. The whole club is focussed on the looming inter-university BUCS competition, success at which decides much of the funding for the club. I’ll spare you a Reuben Rant on how unfair the funding system for clubs appears to be (it’s based on the number of points gained at certain qualifying competitions. Except not everyone can get points, and different sports are elligible for different numbers of competitions and points. Grrr…).

To the detriment of my big toe, which took a nasty strain when being swept from under me a few weeks ago, everyone is training extremely hard. I thinks it says something that even though every session causes me to limp off in pain at the moment, I still absolutely love it. (Whether it “says something” about my mental well-being or the sport of Judo, I have yet to decide.)

Oh, and former Olympic and World Champion Maki Tsukada has been popping in to train with us. Pictures soon.

Read part 2 here.

*I’m not sure quite how good the translation in our copy of the music is, but it’s definitely along the lines of “WRATH!” and “TERROR!”.

Me being thrown...

“There are a number of strangles you can do from this position” are somewhat ominous words. It’s apparently all good fun though, since this is strangling in the name of sport!

So, Judo. Roughly translated from Japanese it means “gentle way”. It’s a competitive fighting sport where the aim is to either throw your opponent from their feet (see the video at the end of this post for an example) so that they land on their back, hold them down with their back to the ground, or force their submission with an arm lock, choke or strangle. Gentle indeed. This year, the sport has for me has been a source of satisfaction, exhaustion, pain, and even my tentative steps into poetry.

Following my decision in September not to venture down to the river each morning to row (much as I enjoyed it, rowing was simply going to be too much of a time commitment), I was looking for a new sport to do at the beginning of last term. There are a venerable plethora of sports clubs at Imperial; after the freshers fair I found myself trying everything from Cross Country running to Muay Thai Kickboxing. It was, however, Judo which kept my attention.

Me getting stuck in during a ground fight. I discovered the massive tear on my back, which spelt the end of my first (very cheap) judo suit, after the fight.

Prior to trying Judo, all I knew of the sport came from my memories of other children doing it at my local leisure centre when I was young. They wore pyjama like suits and seemed to do a lot of rolling around on mats. At my first session “Rolling around” quickly revealed itself to be either viscous ground fighting, or a falling technique to avoid getting injured every time you find yourself approaching the floor at speed (which is often). The pyjama like suits… well I don’t know about you, but I’ve never worn a set of pyjamas that I could describe as being suitable for repeated forceful lifting, pushing and dragging the wearer. (If you have, then your pyjama based activities are clearly not meant for sharing.)

After a warm up, and often a silly game to work on balance (trying to “surf” a partners back as they crawl on their hands and knees seems to be a favourite of the coach), we get to training. This typically involves going over techniques or learning something new from the enormous library of moves, the mind boggles to imagine how the numerous inventive ways of strangling were thought up for example, or doing some fitness drills. This builds up to the latter part of the session where there is free practice: we take turns to fight with one another in standing or ground fights (competition fights tend to transition from one to another).

This is an exhausting, adrenalin filled test of the mind: getting past an (in my case usually far more experienced) opponent’s defences means thinking fast and knowing just what move to try in the situation at hand or, more usually for me, some good luck. I get thrown quite a bit. Thankfully, its amazing how polite someone can be immediately after they have just unceremoniously lifted you from your feet and driven you into the floor. To stop players being killed or injured all the time, fighting and training is done on shock absorbent mats. Still, a good throw always knocks some of the wind from you. One doesn’t dwell on this though, at Imperial Judo Club you get up (your partner perhaps offering a hand) and you get back to fighting. I have to admit, the feeling of satisfaction when you finally successfully throw or hold your partner is always fantastic.

We meet for training twice a week: On a Monday evening at Imperial’s sports centre Ethos and on a Wednesday afternoon at an impressive historic purpose built Dojo in Chelsea (which is frequented by at least one Olympian). In the first term there was an extra session on a Thursday night or beginners, to teach us some basics.

Our club captain (blonde, centre) completing a throw on his opponent (my mate Thore, right).

All of this builds up to competitions, where we compete against players from other clubs and universities. I’ve so far competed in one, a terrific team effort at which Imperial won the overall trophy for the most medals. This was one of the most exhausting things I’ve ever done, easily comparable to racing a boat down a river, but also a complete adrenaline rush. I only realised how knackered I was when the fight was over. It was my first win that partly inspired the aforementioned poem.

So, if I may use this blog to plug something, it’s to say that you should try judo. Or, if you come to imperial, try a sport! There are some fantastic clubs here that perform to a very high standard (more plugging: several of the clubs, judo and the boat club included, are some of the best in the country). The (free) gym here is great too.

I hope this (rather long) post goes some way to make up for my lack of them of late. One thing to know about Imperial is that it knows how to fill student’s time! Must do better. Still, now the world knows that I know a number of ways of throwing, strangling and generally inflicting pain on people. Come to think of it, is divulging such information that wise..?

- Reuben

Lots more pictures, including a team photo (at the very end) and a video follow:

Read the rest of this entry »

I love mince pies. If they were more widely available outside the festive months I would eat them all year. Imagine my delight therefore to discover boxes upon boxes being distributed amongst the choir and audience members after last night’s concert.

The mince pies were joined by chocolate and chatter about the concert. Politeness aside, the opinion of a friend and others seemed to be that it was of a very high quality and quite a success. Hooray!

There are some surprising intricacies to organising a concert. As well as enforcing what to sing and when, the final rehearsal included practicing standing up together, filing neatly onto stage, and a discussion of when to clap and when not to clap. Pre-concert activities included warming up our voices and pointing out just how many of the boys had visited Primark to get an inexpensive black shirt.

During the performance there was much theatre: The conductor regularly mopped his brow between pieces and disappeared off stage before the final piece for several minutes (it turned out the soloists were being fetched).

The hour and a half of concentrating on singing passed rather quickly. How time flies when you are having fun! Today I have an essay to write and a cold to get rid of, but I’m a happy chap after having sung in my first concert.

- Reuben

“Laaaaaa! Cough. Owch… Sneeze. OWCH!”

I have a dreaded combination of conditions: bruised/cracked ribs, a  cold, and the impending threat of singing in front of hundreds of people.

The ribs can be attributed to a successful Judo competition last weekend (more on that soon), the cold on being close to lots of people all the time (prospective students beware – at university colds spread quickly) and the singing on choosing to join the Imperial College Choir at the beginning of this term. My first concert looms tonight and I rather resent my body’s decision to try and block all my airways and make clearing them more painful than it should be.

So, the choir. I was presented with quite a predicament at the beginning of this year. Due to needing to have more of a life outside of rowing (and thus reluctantly not doing rowing), I found myself open to many new possibilities via the union’s 300+ societies. The current result is Judo practice 3 times a week and Choir rehearsals on a Thursday evening (and cheese society of course: occasional unlimited cheese is too good an opportunity to miss).

The choir is rather wonderful. It’s filled with lots of lovely people and it’s non auditioned:

There's a mad rush mid-rehearsal each week for tea and biscuits.

you just turn up, are given some music, stand next to someone who knows the piece, and start watching and listening to the conductor. It’s all very non-threatening to someone inexperienced like myself. I have been in a choir before, a small, fairly casual affair at 6th form. I am not however very used to understanding sheet music or singing four part pieces in Latin with a chorus of nearly 100.

I somewhat dove into the deep end. Tonight we’re performing Haydn’s Nelson Mass and Te Deum and another Te Deum by Karl Jenkins, all with an orchestra (click the link for an example). And you know what? It’s all come together. I feel like I have a much better ability to sing from music and sing notes higher than a middle c (it turns out basses don’t just belt out Barry-White-style low notes).

If I may let my Catholicism shine through for a moment, it’s also wonderful to get to singsuch beautiful religious music. After my first rehearsal I was somewhat giddy with excitement at the sound I had been a part of (“It’s like what you hear at an ACTUAL classical concert!”) and the connection to my faith is quite lovely.

So, I’m heavily dosed with paracetamol and crossing my fingers that the cold will not spread to my larynx before this evening.

I shall report back tomorrow on how it all went.

- Reuben