I'd like to point out now that my telling of this first part of the story is entirely conjecture on my part. I was not involved in the birth of this story which I will tell below but have happily become involved in it.
With so many children of GSJ so close together it was deemed madness that they should not conspire to meet and train together. Of course this trend of GSJ students towards the South-East is not news and has been an occurrence for at least as long as I have been at GSJ.
What was different as of last year was that Tom Tam was moving to the South-East too. This was news.
And so at the Ei Mei Kan Christmas seminar 2013 I was invited to join the other ex-members of GSJ in some aikido training in the town where Tom lived. At this stage there were no details set in stone. Only the knowledge that at some point we would converge on the town of Woking and train.
A few weeks later I received a text message asking which of two possible dates I was free and to have a think about any techniques I would like to see at training.
And so it was that on the 25th February 2014 I attended the first ever home-counties aikido seminar. Joined by a humble student base of just 2 others (Christopher Ng and Adrian Harasemiuc) and under the tutelage of the very capable Tom Tam.
What I learnt at some point between my invite and the event itself was that Tom and Szevone had in fact converted their garage into a dojo. Just 6 mats long and 2.5 mats wide (mats not sqaures), this is without a doubt the smallest dojo I have ever seen, you couldn't possibly fit any more than 4 students and a teacher in the space.
Yet it is also a truely wonderful dojo. The care that Tom and Szevone have put into converting a garage into a space to practise aikido is inspiring.
Of course with such a small number of students the seminar was naturally quite intense. There was of course only one person taking tori at any one time which meant that you were under constant scrutiny. But along with this scrutiny comes a lot of personal tuition and the teacher being able to bend the session to the individual needs of the students.
The day was fantastic. I am humbled by the work that has gone into the creation of the dojo and honoured to have been invited at all to train with the home counties aikidoka as well as partake in the very seminar of the Woking dojo.
(Should it be called Woking Mei Kan?)
