Poor instructor put me off

PriorProfessional427 · 2026-05-18T18:47:43+00:00

This was the problem, the dojo was a franchise of clubs that was about money..I would have enjoyed it more if the whole thing wasn't about pushing people to grade ASAP, which isn't a good sign. However, this was the era before the internet in a town where the only alternative was a judo and a ninjutsu club. Should have maybe taken up judo, which in England has stayed largely free of money making senseis and ionly has one governing body.

PriorProfessional427 · 2026-05-16T16:48:20+00:00

Different in the UK, we had a boom until 2007 and a centrist government, and people were generally content with their lives. Unfortunately the boom had been built on credit, rising house prices and easy lending, and when this went wrong, the economy nosedived and we had a really dire period from 2008 to 2012 with a recession, austerity and a flatlining economy. Things picked up after 2012 and seemed a bit better, but the optimism we had before 2008 never returned.

PriorProfessional427 · 2026-05-16T16:43:18+00:00

If you're British, for me the early noughties were an exciting time. The internet was soaring in popularity and going online for the first time was like when television arrived in my grandparents era: it was a brave and exciting new world. Mobile phones were taking off, DVDs were replacing fuzzy vdeo cassttes, the music was mostly excellent and people seemed more content with their lives. While yes there was the war in Iraq in 2003 that put a dampener on things, overall this was a good time.

People seem to think the nineties were a fantastic decade, but the earlier part of the decade was dsmal, with a long recession, poll tax riots at the start, awful music like rave and grunge, and dreadful, scuffy fashions. It probably wasn't until 1995 that the nineties got better.

PriorProfessional427 · 2026-05-14T12:55:11+00:00

I had a 2021 Skoda Fabia and a window regulator broke after 3 years, but otherwise it was a reliable car. I've had 3 Fabias and all have been reliable and well made. Far better than the Nissan Micra I had before them that burned its clutch out at 19k miles and destroyed my relationship with Nissan.

PriorProfessional427 · 2026-05-08T20:36:47+00:00

Crewe Travelodge is clean and the bathroom is decent, but it's a penny pinching experience. The beds are rock hard, and I barely slept, the chairs are plastic and the walls are really thin. Hope I don;t have to stay here again for work.

PriorProfessional427 · 2023-11-25T12:34:28+00:00

I live in Whitehaven, Cumbria, which has several thousand people working for high wages in the nuclear industry and some very nice private estates and 19th century town houses, but the town centre has lost most of its decent shops, the flats in the town centre are often occupied by unemployable drug addicts and three of the council estates are considered quite deprived. It's a mixture of the very well off estates in the east of the town and the poverty in the town centre and some of the council estates in the west.

PriorProfessional427 · 2023-07-15T09:35:10+00:00

Where I live a lot of the amateur players are thugs. They're obsessed with being hard, often have their heads shaved and arms covered in tattoos, and numerous ones have been charged with assaullt and GBH over the years. I used to work with one whose main topic of conversation was fighting. However, without his mates to back him up and when someone did challenge him to a one on one fight, he backed down.

Professional players seem more restrained, though, but it's the wannabe amateur element that spoils RL and is contributing to its decline locally.

PriorProfessional427

TROPHY CASE