Episode 09 - The Same Grade (For Now)

I am writing this one standing up.

It is not for effect. The knee has taken against the moulded plastic chair, so I am propped against a pillar at the far end of the lounge like a man waiting for a bus that has already been cancelled, while the board makes up its mind about my destination, this time Tirana.

I have confessed in these pages to the flying, the heights, the bridges, and eventually to the sound of other people eating. I should bring the schedule up to date. It now extends to video calls on loudspeaker and, if I am candid, to anyone making too much noise doing pretty much anything. My wife says the irritation gets worse with age. She says it in the tone of someone reading out a result rather than offering an opinion.

This episode is about the knee. The knee is about Kung Fu, and I will come to that. But the knee’s real grievance is with the job.

Nine episodes in, I have made a long (sometimes comic) performance out of the lounges, the delays, the hotels that are the same hotel. What I have not mentioned is what two decades of it does to a body, and that it does not happen at any identifiable moment. Nobody decides to be in this state. You make four hundred small decisions at four hundred gates, every one of them entirely reasonable at the time. One of them is a bacon roll at Heathrow at 5.40am. Another is the hotel bar in Dubai, because the alternative is the room. None of them is the one that did it.

Airports understand this perfectly, which is why the gate is always the last one. Every airport I have passed through has a gate at the end of a corridor so long it appears to be in a different time zone, and that is the gate I am given. I have never, in a hundred flights a year, been sent to Gate 2. I have previously described the departure board as a literary form. In this respect it is closer to a sentencing exercise.

There is always a buggy. A man in a high-visibility tabard will drive you to the far gate, beeping. I have so far declined, on the principle that a man who has recently graded black does not arrive at his flight beeping in comfort. He arrives late, damp and limping, which is the more dignified option only from the inside.

So, the Kung Fu.

I have wanted to do it since I was a boy, ever since Enter the Dragon, which remains the best martial arts film ever made and which I am not prepared to debate. What I did instead was everything adjacent to it. Judo first, which is where a certain kind of boy is put. Then Kuk Sool Won. Then Jujitsu when I moved to France, because that is what there was. Half a century circling the thing I actually wanted. You do not get round to the thing you want most. You get round to the things you want moderately.

My daughters got round to it for me. They started a year before I did, were good at it immediately, and then conducted a sustained campaign to get me into the hall, having anticipated every objection and dismantled it before I could raise it. I resented this for approximately the duration of the first class, which is roughly how long it took to establish that they had been right and I had been hiding.

What happened next will surprise nobody who knows what I do for a living. I treated it as a brief. Here was a thing with a syllabus: stances, forms, sparring and gradings, set out in order, with a standard that is either met or not met, assessed by someone whose job it is to say so out loud. After twenty-five years in a profession where you routinely never learn whether you were any good, this was not an obstacle. It was a holiday. I caught them up inside the year. I want that on the record, because very little else in this piece is going to go my way.

The difficulty is the diary. I train twice a week when I am in the country (and injury free,) and that qualification is doing an enormous amount of work. It is the same clause a man attaches to going to church. The Hague or Dubai does not schedule around my class. Neither does Prishtinë. Neither, it turns out, does a flight delayed for so long that I could have walked to the hall, trained, and walked back before it left. My daughters do not have hearings. They are, inconveniently, always there.

They are shown a sequence once and have it. I am shown it four times, have most of it, and then get on an aeroplane. By the time I am back, it has quietly left me somewhere over the Adriatic. I have tried revising in the lounge. It is not possible to hold a sequence of movements in your head while a man two seats along works through a bag of crisps as though they had personally wronged him. The form goes. The rage stays. I am not certain this is the self-cultivation the tradition had in mind.

Hotel rooms, meanwhile, are designed for a great many activities, and a horse stance is not among them.

They graded black a year before I did, because a month before my grading I tore a calf muscle. A year later I graded, tore a different muscle halfway through, and carried on, largely because stopping would have meant starting all over and whilst my wife thought this was the only sensible option, my daughters and my Sifu thought otherwise.  What followed was very much a Karate Kid final scene moment with our Sifu rubbing some strange red oil on my hamstring and then strapping it up with tape.  I survived. I am now recovering from the knee. We are, formally, the same grade.

I am having injections in the knee at intervals, with the stated aim of reversing some of the damage. It is a phrase I have heard rather too often in other contexts this year. The injections are fitted around the flights, like everything else, which means the knee and I now share a calendar, and the knee is by some distance the more demanding client.

In the Japanese tradition, the first black grade, shodan, means something nearer to “first step” than to “finished”. The Chinese tradition never went in for coloured belts at all. Gongfu means, roughly, skill acquired through time and effort, and a finished gongfuis a contradiction in terms. I recognised that at once, because I have the other version framed somewhere. I was called to the Bar in 2001, which sounds like an arrival and is in fact formal notice that you may now begin discovering how much you do not know.

I have spent my working life in a system where being outmatched has a remedy. You prepare more. You read the file, and then the file underneath the file, and it is astonishing how often that is enough. The hall does not accept that submission. There is a loose hierarchy of seniority in that room, but once we train, there is a sense of equality in the pain and suffering, and no amount of preparation that makes a man of my age and my air miles as flexible as my daughters. They are not being brave about anything. They are simply not in pain.

So here I am, against a pillar, a black belt of moderate ability with a knee full of something expensive, watching the board.

I got the thing I wanted at last. I got it thirty years late, in a body the airlines had first go at, and only because my own children refused to let me go on not having it. We are the same grade. I intend to keep citing that for as long as it holds, which on current form is until the next grading or the next flight, whichever gets me first.

They have just called the gate. It is, naturally, the last one.

They’re boarding. Albania and Kosovo this week. More from the next one.