Part i can be found elsewhere on this blog
In this one I’m in Oxford and at home and I talk about what I did while in these places. Parkour gets mentioned, but so do a few other things like national security and democracy and similar important topics. As with all my travel blogs, I try and tell stories with interwoven points of interest and reflection etc, because nobody really wants to read a list of what I did.
Oxford
The following two weeks were spent in Oxford (or based in Oxford, as I spent a few days going on excursions to visit my grandparents, go to an interview, or go home for a night). I arrived and surprised my brother with a phonecall to ask if I could sleep on his floor, which he wasn’t entirely expecting. I did this for the first three nights before moving into a spare room in a friend’s house for the remainder.
It was great to see my brother again and see how he was getting on at Oxford, and he did a great job of putting up with me, though I tried not to get in his way too much.
The following week included lots of parkour, as the Oxford Parkour group (or Nikolay and I) ran a variety of training sessions. The aim was to have one every day, though I ended up having to cancel one or two later in the week as I ran out of time.
There were a variety of sessions, both aimed at giving beginners a chance to try out the discipline and to give those who already practised some different experiences with a new coach. It was also great to see how the group had got on in my absence – last year it was a one-man-show (me being the one man), but later in the year we were joined by Nikolay (who had practised for a number of years previously, then stopped practising, but restarted when he found our group) who took over running it in my absence (so it’s now his one-man-show, though not quite so as there are a couple of other people who help out running sessions too) and it was great to see how he had grown to fill the role in developing his coaching abilities.
The sessions I ran included a ‘hell night’ session with lots of physical training designed to tire us out but make us stronger (which was surprisingly popular and enjoyed), a general session aimed at beginners, a session focussing on particular techniques at a new location (which included a game in which people had to navigate a course with a raw egg in their hand to give them the challenge of moving with a handicap or working as a team to move the egg), and my personal favourite, parkour nuit.
Parkour nuit means ‘night parkour’ in French and was named after and inspired by a video of a similar training session ran by David Belle. It started at 2230 (would’ve been later, but some people needed to get the last train out of Oxford) so that everything would be dark and quiet and the style of the session was follow-the-leader, where we would run to a certain place and then navigate a certain route for a bit before moving on. There was a strict no-talking-rule, put in place to get everybody into a quiet and focussed mindset, learned themselves instead of being taught by a coach who talks too much (me), and also meant that I had to communicate with gestures. This wasn’t too bad as I had explained how the session would work beforehand and could easily signal “bags on, lets go” or “stop here” before showing people what we would do, but also meant that I didn’t get a few things across. Another point of the silence was so that people didn’t ask what to do, and instead had to figure out how to move around obstacles themselves (ie they can’t ask how to do a certain vault, they just have to try and do it), the focus not being any particular technique. It was still open to beginners (it was the first session ever for a couple of people) as the routes were possible for anyone to do, there are just easier or more challenging methods for completing different things. Anyway, it was really good.
Training in the dark… the training is hard to see!
While I had envisaged having lots of free time in Oxford to go to different events, read books and catch up with friends, it didn’t quite work out like that. I had filled my time with seeing lots of different friends, the parkour, the excursions, preparing for an interview I had, and also a moot which I signed up for.
I hadn’t planned on doing the moot (a debate/mock-trial thing where you argue a particular case against another team before a judge, but only argue about the interpretation of the law instead of the evidence or facts) but signed up for it on my first day in Oxford. They’re good fun, good experience and good to demonstrate the advocacy skills, but normally there isn’t much time to do them during term-time as they can take about 25 hours of preparation. I read some cases, prepared my arguments (we had to argue both sides of the case in two different matches) and made a ‘bundle’ (where you have to print out all of the cases you want to refer to in the speeches for the judge to follow, including putting tabs in all of them so that they can be quickly turned to). The moot was good – in the group stage we won one match and lost another match, though the organiser lost the score sheet so I don’t know which team we beat and which team beat us! I was very happy with my first speech, but in my second one (which was directly after the first match) having swapped sides and not having much time I hadn’t looked back through my argument and got a bit muddled in giving the speech (not using the structure or points that I had prepared). A good lesson to learn, though, and there was a nice four-course meal in the evening with the other participants and judges.
The topic was also very interesting – potentially my ideal topic of interest, which was great. It also made it enjoyable to do, encouraged me that I want to be a barrister, and reminded me how great the overlap of fun and work is. The man in the case had been arrested and searched by the police on suspicion of terrorism offences (bomb making), but it seemed like the police had been heavy-handed in arresting him and there wasn’t really evidence to justify it. Because he didn’t like being arrested and not told why, he sued the police for false imprisonment (to defend his right to freedom), but the police were saying that the argument about whether his imprisonment was fair had to be done in secret because the evidence they had shouldn’t be public for “national security” reasons – further though, they wouldn’t even tell him what the ‘gist’ of the evidence was. So it’s a pretty interesting trade-off between security and human dignity and where the line should be drawn (as well as being a nice reminder that the state will use “national security” as its excuse to try and keep things secret even when national security has nothing to do with it – I’m not just being a conspiracy theorist, there are many examples of this).
Another thing I went to in Oxford, which was really good but came about in an unplanned way, was a talk about protest at the Oxford Radical Forum. I hadn’t noticed it in any newsletters or on facebook, but on my final afternoon in Oxford noticed a poster as I was getting cash out. I checked out the website and found that there was a talk starting in five minutes on the topic of protest, which was something I was pretty interested in, so I packed my bag and ran to it. It was a panel of four speakers who each talked about their experience, then fielded and answered questions from the audience (which was unfortunately small at only fifteen people). The panel comprised of a student from Sussex who had been arrested and suspended from studying for his part in organising protests against privatisation of the university, a student from Birmingham who had done the same, a guy who had been covering the Mark Duggan inquest (Mark Duggan was a gangster who was shot dead by the metropolitan police and didn’t have a weapon at the time he was killed, though he was in possession of one at an earlier time), and Trenton Oldfield, the guy who had swum into the Oxford-Cambridge boat race a couple of years previously. They talked about their experiences with protest and the police and media reactions to it. For the students, a key part of what they were saying was that the reaction from the University administrations and the police was very heavy-handed, with arrests following peaceful protest, violence from security guards, and the suspensions they were facing in discipline. Being suspended for a peaceful protest is ridiculous, and we should all be worried about this sort of reduction in our ability to protest as it reduces our democratic rights and power to make a difference, which will almost certainly cause problems in the future. They also talked generally about media (and police) responses; one particular of this which I remember was how the police (and government) are very quick to get their side of the story out to the media, which gives an entirely one-sided story out to the public as the media (understandably) print the story quickly and don’t (and usually are unable to) check some of the facts and the other side (the protestor or victim) cannot be as organised and get their side out. For example, following Mark Duggan being shot, it was reported by the police that he was an armed gangster killed following a shootout in which he injured a policeman, when it was (or should have been) clear to the police that the injured policemen was hit by a bullet from another policeman, given that Duggan did not have a gun on him (which they knew because they searched his body; there were also issues raised that the gun found at the scene didn’t actually have any fingerprint/DNA link to Mark Duggan himself), but despite this truth this was the story they initially put out to mislead the public in their favour. Examples from student protests from 2011 (against fees and against cuts) were also given where the largely peaceful protest was still represented in the media as being violent by a sensationalist media which stuck close to the government line and preferred to show the minority doing damage instead of give balanced coverage.
Anyway, so that was really interesting and made me more aware and more understanding of certain issues. It was a shame that I missed the rest of the Forum (which covered a range of topics such as pro-womens-rights and environmental), but I’ll look out for it next year.
It was really great to see all my friends again in Oxford, though also a bit strange. It’s an odd conversation to have when you haven’t seen someone who you would previously see most days for six months and it’s quite hard to know where to start with catching up! It was also great to be back among friends I could speak to in my own language: in Bonn I (obviously) had had to make new friends, which has been quite tricky, so I really appreciated having people I was already friends with that I could easily talk to (on top of the fact that I like spending time with my friends and hadn’t seen them for ages!). In contrast with the loneliness of the first few months of the year abroad this was great, and I had also found myself being more confident (both in talking to friends or new people), which makes sense after the struggle of talking to lots of new people in a different language.
Solihull (home)
It was great to be living in a space that was my own instead of someone else’s; not to be living out of a rucksack and having to unpack/repack often; to have a mother who cooks for me and the freedom to sort food out myself too (instead of having to buy lots of food, which is harder to be healthy with and more expensive, or depend upon other people providing me food as comes later); to have a duvet instead of a sleeping bag; and to have a wider variety of clean clothes. It was nice to see my parents again too.
On my way home I went to Sheffield to watch my brother pole-vaulting in a competiton and it was great to see him back jumping after a half-year break and doing quite well, especially as that’s my only real chance to see him jump this year. On the journey there (which ended up being quite long, as due to Sunday infrequent trains which I hadn’t quite expected and a delay I missed the car going from home to Sheffield and had to get the train the whole way) I had a nice chat with a girl I ended up sat next to, which was a nice reminder of the friendliness of people and that it’s a shame that we (as a society) tend not to talk to strangers often!
While home I did a few days of work experience (or a ‘mini-pupillage’) at a barristers’ chambers in Birmingham. I got to tag along with some barristers as they went about their work, going to a couple of trials and hearings, preparing some work (as an exercise, but it was a real situation), and getting to see a different angle on the legal system (by being able to talk to the barristers about what was going on). There was one particular case that was a bit bizarre in a plot-twist sort of way, but I’ll leave the details off here because it would include multiple accusations of dodgy dealing…