In 2016, I was invited to teach in Australia. I spent my first weekend giving a longsword seminar in Perth, and during one of the lunch breaks I had the opportunity to do some messer sparring with Jim Campbell.

Jim is an incredibly skilful fencer, and he is also very athletic. It was a pleasure to fence with him in this fashion, even though I was struggling the whole time – it was a good learning point for me that I needed to improve my physicality and athleticism, and that being able to do technical things correctly but slowly wasn’t quite good enough.