Shibuya stabilisation circa 1992. Great for CB radio, as well… or fighting the Empire.
(via www.bogensport.de)
Popping in, I just looked through my ‘global’ stats for today, and I’ve been by far the most popular in… Trinidad & Tobago. A place I wish I was right now, on island time, rather than the chunked-out running about this noisy bloody city. There’s a few good reasons why this blog has been so quiet for a month. But there’s more to come soon. So welcome, archers of Trinidad & Tobago, and anyone else who cares to stop by and join in. I feel shoots of spring underfoot.
http://londonist.com/2013/03/when-was-finsbury-square-full-of-standing-pricks.php
Great piece from The Londonist about archery practice in London in the good old days. If I want to shoot after work I have to head at least three miles north of the river. 450 years ago I could have strolled down the road with my longbow and got busy – in Tudor Englynde people shot at ‘standing pricks’ in the middle of the City. [Insert your own joke here]. I think they were just tall posts or marks to shoot at; people still do things like that today:
http://www.southwiltsarcheryclub.co.uk/wand.php
As for the ‘standing pricks’ bit, well I know that post-Chaucerian English was far, far bawdier and ruder at all levels of society than it is now (post Puritans / Victorians). Such a ‘hilarious’ comparison wouldn’t have seemed nearly as rude back then – witness the Shakespearean double-entrendres of a generation or so later.
London was of course a walled city in those days. You have to look long and hard for traces of the wall now, although the gate names on that map above such as ‘Moor Gate’ and ‘Byshoppesgate’ are still very much in use. The Londonist get a mild smack on the wrist for the oft-repeated assertion that the famous mandatory archery practice laws are still in force in the UK, when they were actually repealed a looong time ago.
‘Fynnesbury Fields’ only remains as Finsbury Square, near to Liverpool Street station, roughly where those little guys with the longbows on the centre-left are standing. These days, it looks like this:
Well, you could get thirty metres there with a bit of overshoot…
Someone alerted me to a most fantastic, insurrectionary piece up on the Bowyer’s Edge website about instinctive archery. A glorious bit of prose that demands a careful read. Right here:
http://www.bowyersedge.com/elements.html
It’s not the only solid bit of advice on Dean’s website, either. Have a good nose around.
Left to my instincts, I’m an optimistic person. I think this attitude is essential if one hopes to shoot bows by the strength of his muscle, the force of his will and the purity of his desire. It’s an essential premise, this optimistic, self-reliant faith upon which we loose an arrow while expecting it to hit the mark.
There are a peck of dangers in dividing the world into two camps. Liberal and conservative, hunter/gatherer and farmer, male and female, up and down, black and white, etcetera, and so on. Still, it serves a purpose, so I will risk it: Insofar as the world divides into optimists and pessimists, those with the dark view which focuses upon our inadequacies become mechanists. Their suspicions require them to seek out compensations for human shortcomings, inventing contrivances and devices that fill in where Man falls short physically or emotionally. Their solutions to the problems of human experience find technological expressions that smooth us out…
Nowhere in my life is this war of attitudes more apparent than in archery, which diverges like a fork in the road into traditionalists and mechanists. Plucking the string and getting erratic arrow flight when you loose an arrow? Is practice, to achieve a smooth loose, the answer? Or is the invention of a mechanical string release the solution? Upon such simple choices attitudes are firmed up, and from such attitudes a webwork grows and a coherent cosmos gets built. You end up with a stick and a string and a firm resolve, or a titanium/graphite riser for lightness and strength to compensate for a 3 pound stabilizer which absorbs the shock of cam actuated cables which allow for heavier drawing weights with limbs which, in turn, require … because you didn’t believe that you contained satisfactory solutions to shooting problems within yourself.
Fellow blogger Seoul State Of Mind put up some great pictures that he took to accompany the Gwanju News piece which I put up last week. That top one is heading for Bondgirl territory. Like I need an excuse to put up another picture of the lovely Miss Ki. Frankly, I’ll do that on the flimsiest pretext.
There’s more on his Facebook page, and he wrote about the shoot here.
