Our writer enjoys soothing missives from the Norwegian wilderness, and remembers lab rats and childhood reading struggles. 

News from the Fjord
An elk fell from the sky and landed on the roof of a car speeding down a winding highway in the Norwegian west country last week. The driver survived. The elk– which it turns out had fallen off a cliff overhead– did not. 
I know this because my mother read about it in her local newspaper and shared the story with me in our now weekly phone call, a new ritual that has come out of these long and, at times eerily isolated months.
Notes
 The routine of weekly phone calls between us began when Norway went into lockdown earlier this year. She was worried she’d get lonely. I was surprised to find that I enjoyed talking to her that often. 
The phone calls continued while she was in our family home in London, too. Why she went, when she could have stayed in Norway– a far safer place for a pandemic, was beyond me. But as I said, she doesn’t like being alone. And I was glad she wasn’t alone. I sent her workouts for the park. “I’m in my sixties, Sarah. I’m not going to crawl around like a bear in public.” 
Now she’s back Norway again, enjoying an enviable freedom, keeping me abreast of all the latest wildlife news interspersed by observations of her own of how ‘mean’ seagulls ‘bullied’ an eagle out of his dinner near the boathouse of the family cabin out in the Trondelag fjord. And how a ‘rude’ woodpecker has made a home on the front porch, loudly digging holes into the wall to impress his lady friends.    
My father and I used to make fun of how inane the Norwegian news cycle was. This year I’m grateful for it –I’m almost tempted to get in a subscription to one of these papers, sift through pages and pages of astonishingly-sized fishing conquests, and Norwegians in their silly folklore costumes marking some event no one outside the country has heard about. My grandmother was especially fond of a magazine called ‘See and Hear’ (Se og Hør), which as far as I could see, was just a catalogue of B-list Norwegian celebrities and their fishing boats.
“This poor elk, just landed with a ‘thump’ on the car. Of course he died on the spot,” my mother said, in the Norwegian lilt that has grown more noticeable since she moved back to her homeland six years ago, a sort of limbo situation forcing her to straddle London and Norwegian family life while finishing off her final years as an immunologist at her hometown’s university in Trondheim.
“What did you do this week at work?” I ask her regularly. “Oh, you know. Science,” she always says, looking to change the subject. It’s funny, journalists go on and on about their work, you can’t really shut them up. Scientists are usually quite different. They tend to have more humility, the work itself being much more mundane on a day-to-day basis. 
Over dinner, journalists talk about news events as if they were in the middle of all of them. Scientists return home with very little more to recount than that they might need to invest in a more upscale pipet. 

Vindictive lab rats
My mother trained initially as a nurse, working in this capacity for long enough to realise that there lived inside her a hunger for solving the sorts of long and complex puzzles to which scientists dedicate themselves. I think I always respected the level of engrossment and dedication she had with her work, although there might have been frictions around the long hours. During my early years, before school started, I spent a lot of time with my father. He worked night shifts at a London newspaper at the time.
My mother moved to London in the eighties on earning a little inheritance from an uncle, and with the aim of completing a PHD. This is how she met my father. Their marriage came faster than it might have done otherwise, owing to changes in immigration laws implemented by Margaret Thatcher.
“I’ve always just gone with the flow,” she says. By flow, I think she means that her capacity for devotion, for moving through the patterns of her life without questioning too much, is rather strong.
 She’s a person of faith, too. Never saw a conflict in what she had learnt as a scientist with what she felt about her God. I respect her for that, though growing up I found this Nordic fatalism trying. If you don’t ask yourself the right questions at the right moments, how do you know you’re on the right track? How do you know you’re not an elk about to wander off a cliff?
 When I was little, she’d sometimes take us to the lab, introducing us to the rats you were allowed to hold, alongside the white ones that could never leave their glass cabinets. Once, she placed a grey one between my fingers. It bit me and I cried.

Words that swim
My brother was the budding scientist. I was the kid who couldn’t read. I hated it. Words would sort of – for want of a better way of describing it – swim on a page, and I couldn’t make sense of the ways the letters came together, couldn’t really see the logic that came naturally to everyone else. Learning to write felt like trying to paint on paper with a spear. It just didn’t really work.
 “L-A-P” – what word is that, Sarah?” I didn’t know. Trying to know always put me in a panic. Reading terrified me, but I didn’t really have much choice but to plough through it, trying to conceal this slowness as best I could, trying desperately to find my own solutions. I’ve ironed out the worst of it, now. Sometimes, when I’m in flow, I don’t notice it all– this panic and doubt that makes me second guess every word such that they start swimming again.
If I need to, I can stem the way they swim by isolating a sentence, and tackling it word by word, remembering breathing exercises that have helped create calm in sparring scenarios, too. 
I am not really sure where or how this arrested development came about. With each new language I have learned, I have struggled with the initial building blocks of it, and fluency for me has always come in the form of having a handle on the unique rhythms and flows of a language, not really in mastering the grammar or spelling on any innate level. I still compulsively spell check. And I still harbour fears around being ‘found out.’ Which is funny, because I do this professionally now. And I’m good at it.
But maybe it’s not that surprising, maybe it’s what I do to claw back some sense of control, however uncomfortable the process can still make me. It’s always a relief to finish with an edited piece. Tidy something up so there’s nothing wrong with it anymore. 
Don’t get me wrong. I genuinely love what I do. And I love words in a particular way that has nothing to do with the pain they initially brought to my life. Most of all I like how they sound, and that feeling you get when you finally think of the exact one you need. 
    Some self-help gurus say that we either do one of two things: We either operate out of fear. Or out of love. And that it is ultimately up to us to choose love over fear. I understand this premise and I see its value. But I don’t think matters of the human heart are ever that simple, or that we always have that much power over what drives us. I think a lot of the time, we can’t really help the fact that our motivations and passions are driven by an interplay of both. 

Back to Berlin
This weekend I had a friend come round. My funniest German friend.
“Oh my God. This place! You’re Hannibal Lecter!” she said, before diving onto the piano and cracking out some of “Freddy ‘Small Hands’ Chopin”’s greatest hits. Though she’s a self-proclaimed ‘loner introvert’ who enjoys her own company, I think she’s going mad like the rest of us muddling through this strange year of repeating disconnection. This reflects itself in how she played, which felt more frenetic and passionate that usual, more magnificent. Makes sense. Art that endures usually comes from a place of discomfort and yearning.      
For my part, It was nice to get company in this hall of dark and ungodly things, to punctuate time spent between watching the frost settle outside my window in the mornings and trying to fix the pink flamingo figurine in a Christmas hat that I accidentally decapitated last week. 
Honestly, I thought I would make better use of all this time skulking about at home in a robe, to read and write. I got halfway through a decent Danish thriller that I enjoyed up until the point where I felt like it was making me lethargic. I have yet to complete the third draft of the beginning of a short story that has decided that it never wants to be written. One of these days I might end up printing out the entrails of these aborted efforts just to shove a spear through them.
In the backroom of this lair –Hannibal Lecter’s lair– is a punch bag. Probably the crown jewels of the place. I could easily spend about two hours a day in there if it weren’t for other commitments and a fear of annoying neighbours. 
Bag work isn’t optimal – nothing replaces having a human partner, however many scenarios you dream up in your head as you shadow box. (Shadow box: how lovely is that phrase?!) But it’s a great way to focus on the foundations of the movements and the sequences, which is probably what I need anyway. I am out of practice in my striking, having mostly focused on trying to learn the interlocking logic of grappling this year as and when training has been possible. And last year, everything was so mad and gungho –I didn’t get enough time to just, sort of. You know: 
Jab, cross, right roundhouse, switch kick. Jab, cross, switch kick, right roundhouse. Right tee. Step back. Right tee. Step back. Right tee. Jab Jab. Right elbow. Block. Block. Jab. Cross. Jab. Jab. Jab. Cross. Jab. Cross. Knee. Step back. Knee. Block. Knee. Elbow. Block. Jab. Cross. Uppercut. Cross. Decoy jab. Gnarly right hook. Pause. Step forward. Clinch. Knee. And he’s down.
On a side note, I’ve replaced the wilted, cut flowers with pot plants which I intend to water regularly and watch grow as a lockdown mood-lifting strategy. I have been told that I am unlikely to do well with plants, owing to my struggles in maintaining focus on simple tasks.
 “You can barely take care of yourself, Sarah,” a flatmate said this year. I don’t know. There are a lot of things people have told me I can’t do that I’ve done. So I don’t see how gardening is any different. 

Oh, to explain another point: I have entered into the habit of beginning each entry by describing the view outside my window: A warm up for my fingertips that reminds me of an early premise made here: That a change in perspective might resolve certain feelings of restlessness in looking at something that seemingly remains the same. I observed seasonal shifts from my window, tried to interrogate my view in a way that would prevent me from growing bored of it.
But I also cheated in this exercise. I have moved twice now since I began this blog, and I still can’t escape my geographical restlessness, much as I know that staying put, creating routines and a sense of familiarity and attachment, are what I need to do to find the roots that elude me.
This new view is so far my favourite. Especially at golden hour, which it is right now. I’m not sure I’d appreciate autumn so much if I hadn’t lived without it for so long.

Read more on Sarah's Mixed Martials Arts journey via the links below:
1. Fight Club
2. Lessons from the mat
3. Good and bad algorithms 
4. Taming the lizard brain

Read her summary of why she fights, and what cultural value MMA brings in her BIO.​

​In which the writer makes an inventory of the bruising inflicted during a particularly passionate week of fighting and learning.

Early morning. Birds moving mostly in one direction, brown has overtaken green and leaves jitter. Visually, winter’s approach is palpable. Physically, also. I wear woolen socks my mother knitted. My feet still feel a chill, but it’s fine. The sensation wakes me up, keeps me alert. These are in fact the perfect conditions for writing. Mild, austere discomfort, and quiet. As I take this inventory of subtle hallmarks of a seasonal shift, I notice changes that have occurred in my own body this week, too.
              A greater determination and focus has seen me commit more time to the mat, and the ensuing improvements in performance have lead to me taking greater risks, and showing more tenacity and confidence in a fight: Has led to me showing up, in a fight. Working actively, not just reactively. Though my hesitance in committing to a takedown pervades. I continue to opt for the process that has worked time and again: Keeping low, letting my opponent execute the takedown, and allowing my body to do what it often seems to do of its own accord in this particular context, that is, somehow land and flip things around such that I end up having the upper hand.
“You always fall on your feet,” my mother likes to say.
              This shift in tenacity and confidence writes itself into my body. My shins, first, are peppered with subtle green and purple bruises, and there’s a cut on my ankle proving that a sparring partner has not abided by the rules and forgotten to clip his nails. These mementos don’t feel all that strange to me; anyone athletic or outdoorsy would have them.

And they remind me of a session we had with my first coach and his motley crew of fighters who were, by the way, some of the loveliest people I’ve ever met, and besides journalists, the best community I’ve found in terms of being able fling this way and that some great zingers. (‘Go read Moby Dick, nerd’ one guy used to shout at me, before demanding I make him a sandwich. Of course, I lined up my own retorts, and fired them in his direction in between rounds. He, a serious gamer turned Muay Thai nut, was a super fun guy, and I really miss him.)
But yeah, this session I was reminded of, in which our coach told us to stand in a circle and commit to a chain of low kicks, going round and round, learning to instinctively twist our thighs around and tense up the muscles as we received the kick. “You just have to build up resistance to getting kicked so you can focus on other things during a fight,” he said. You learn to laugh off the pain and see bruises as essential to the learning process.
The further up my body these bruises go, the stranger I feel about them, the more I feel like they ought to be hidden somehow. What would people think if they saw them: The purple patch around my wrist the size of my palm which speaks to someone’s attempt to get me into an Americana which I resisted by tensing my bicep, sliding my other hand under him, creating leverage, and clinging to that endangered hand as I slivered out from underneath him.
“In this session, would you like to talk about why you like to fight men?” a therapist asked me last year. The answer to that question is, if given a choice (class ratios tend to be 10 per cent women, if that); my optimal opponent is a woman who is just a bit stronger (doesn’t happened all that often, I have to say) and more experienced and knowledgeable than me (happens all the time). This is optimal for learning.
The women I fight with, on the whole, tend to be more communicative and gracious, and the experience of being dominated by one tends to stir fewer complex emotions in me. Although I am getting better and distinguishing between the male opponents who want an interesting and challenging fight, and are helpful and cool, from those that, it seems, really struggle with the idea of being overpowered by a woman, and who can get carried away when that prospect presents itself.
I can feel it, when those emotions come up in them, and something in my body prepares accordingly. I sharpen, and focus, and something within my chest jitters like those winter leaves, almost impalpably. I operate entirely in a defensive mode and play a long game. I try not to tap out in fear, and I try to get the upper hand as and when they start to gas out from all that huffing and puffing. I protect my wrists. Because these are the guys who especially enjoy a nasty wrist lock which disables you quickly with a sharp, searing pain. A cheap shot.
Most importantly, I stay put. I don’t run. And at the end of the round, I shake hands/ bump elbows, and look my opponent steady in the eye.  
I’ve been told, by women, that the guys you need to watch out for are the ones who show up having watched a bunch of YouTube videos, eager to fling their weight around. Dedicated guys are not really about that, they say.
“You know, if it was easy, I wouldn’t keep coming back,” said one guy this week, who taught me two new submissions and to whom I admitted struggling with these complex maneuvers. It’s true. If it was easy I wouldn’t keep coming back, either. And I feel exactly the same way about facing a blank page, too. If writing was easy, I don’t I’d do it so much.
There are other bruises, few of them I remember the specific event in which they were inflicted, and which I certainly did not feel as they were inflicted: An ugly and heavy brownish purple one on my arm that has faded surprisingly quickly, and a big annoying purple one on my right elbow that makes itself known every time I attempt to rest on it, and which made me jolt slightly with pain during a meeting in one of those strange moments where the professional persona you have is rudely interrupted by the person you are in your other worlds.

​Creep higher up my body still and we have something that has never occurred as a result of my recreational activities before: a little bruise on the side of my chin which I would cover up with concealer if I could be at all bothered with applying make up on a day-to-day basis, and a nearly imperceptible scratch on my left eyelid.
This reminds me of a great line from my first coach when he returned victorious from a fight in preparation for which he had had to cut 10kg of weight in under a month while studying his opponent – a kickboxing brawler-type known for his unpredictability in combat.
“Still pretty,” he said, on his first day back, pointing at a face that was almost blemish-free. In an interview with The New Yorker, Ronda Rousey, MMA’s (now retired) golden girl (whose face is also blemish-free) said that it was the girls who didn’t look like they fought that you had to watch for. They were the ones who were good. The woman who played a part in coaxing me onto the mat with the line; “I can’t wait to see your first KO” - Hong Kong’s first female professional MMA fighter, who quit her high-powered job in management consulting after smashing up too many computers, also didn’t “look” like she had fought.
Some might read the anecdote above as an indication that the person probably most responsible for this strange hobby of mine had anger issues. This simplifies who she is, and what learning to fight does for people like her, people like us. I think some people in this world are racehorses trained to work in pony pens. Intense emotions, like anger, are symptoms of something underlying, something that is wrong, and that needs to change. It’s the lizard brain screaming “enough!” – the part of yourself you learn to talk to, negotiate with, and tame, on the mat in way you don’t get to anywhere else. Not even in a therapist’s chair.
 I am not sure I can call myself a racehorse. I believe I am little bit too awkward a person for that label. Racehorses are so suave. But what I am doing is operating within a lane which is quite different from what it’s “supposed” to be, and I think what martial arts is helping me do, is find the courage and the tools to commit to this path. And the result is I have a life I love, bruises and all.

Read more on Sarah's Mixed Martials Arts journey via the links below:
1. Fight Club
2. Lessons from the mat
3. Good and bad algorithms 
4. Taming the lizard brain

Read her summary of why she fights, and what cultural value MMA brings in her BIO.

In which the writer resolves to foster calmness so as to make wiser decisions on and off the mat.

​It’s late evening again, and I am pulling shards of glass from a mirror I accidentally broke earlier this week off the rug, listening to weekday traffic gliding home, squinting to see a blueish grey sky through a pair of glasses so clouded I really ought to replace them soon. 
I wonder when I write these things about the extent to which characters besides myself should get their airing. I struggle with this, the personal and the journalistic slipping and sliding between one another. It is an uncomfortable place that I do not like very much and where I try to tread lightly. 

That I returned to the mat might be evident. A couple of points to note, that I think might be relevant to some of the themes explored here. First off, that film of fear and/or adrenaline I had been carrying onto that, and mats before this one, has evaporated. 
I bring a calmness to the study of conflicting bodies that has eluded up until now. I think I might owe that to having spent the last months doing very little except staring out of my window and going for long, lost urban walks, in what has been one of the only times in my life in which I haven’t been overwhelmingly productive and buzzing with responsibility. In the absence of excessive cortisol coursing through my veins non-stop, I think with a newfound clarity, and with much greater recall, even in the remit in which I most greatly suck. That is, the physical.
For example, I withstand a chokehold quite close to the point at which I know my breathe will no longer hold out (breathe? Nope, it's not about losing breathe, it's about losing blood flow to the brain –Ed:...future Sarah) ). I tap out tactically, not in panic. Fists that used ball up in a panic under the weight of an opponent are slightly less reactive, though the bad habit of clinging to a fabric remains to be rooted out, at least in scenarios in which a Gi is absent. Sometimes, in the heat of it, I remember carefully what I need to do. I no longer just scramble- a strategy that sometimes proffers explosive results, but which is unreliable and ineffective against the strategic, clever fighters who seem to have every eventuality and future outcome mapped out to a tee. 
I experiment with what I am taught, even if it means moving away from the tried and tested sequence, I use time and again, and never quite complete. By completing, I mean taking mount position, and raining punches down on my opponent. Something I don’t really like to do, if I’m honest. Punching someone in the face a lot while you’re sitting on them just seems so rude. 
“You’re too nice,” my first coach said a fair few times.
 I have committed myself to the effort of really trying to retain the physiological data that is passed on to me, about maneuvers and behaviours that are unwise, algorithmic dead ends. I don’t rely so much on brute force to protect myself, and I try finally, truly, to understand the mechanics of submissions, the strategies around how to achieve and escape them.

Other important points to note. It feels like I know nothing at all about this sport. I’m not sure what it was I learnt up until now, how much I might have unlearnt, how confusing it all still is, like I’m surrounded by people speaking in tongues, and I’m still not picking anything up. I am hoping, now that the backdrop of my life is considerably calmer, with almost a total absence of menace, I can focus on this learning, on learning to define and negotiate with myself the points at which I carry on, or step off from a particular challenge.
I remember one thing my first coach saying about stress. There's a point at which it sharpens. After that, it takes you under. Learning to fight is about negotiating such terms bit by bit to a point where you are making accurate assessments of your own capabilities, your own staying power. It's about learning to make assured assessments that aren't so much based on the spectres you carry around with you that are inspired on whole host of fears and biases - about when you can and can't prevail -  but on a reality that is as humbling as it can be empowering.

One coach I had for a couple of months, who instructed in wrestling and Brazilian Jiujitsu, said, recognising that what I struggled with most was applying these intricate physical movements to stressful scenarios, that I’d just have to show up for long enough until something clicked.

It still hasn’t, but I guess I’ll just carry on being thrown around and choked out until it does.

"I am not a nice man, I have been fighting since I was six." I remember him saying to me of his occasional testiness, which didn't really bother me, especially as what lay beneath that felt like a strong sense of justice and honour- and which anyway kind of befitted his branding, that is, a host of photos from the Octagon, blood dripping from his lips and his fist his held high in the air.

"I am not very nice. But here, you learn to work under pressure."

Another thing he said, about takedowns (the movements statically most responsible for injuries) specifically, was that they actually become more dangerous if you approach them with ambivalence.  "You have to commit to your takedown," he'd say. "Or it goes wrong." My first coach told me off countless times for overthinking. I asked him for research materials and he basically just said: "Nope".

​I always feel better after a class. Lighter somehow. Things feel a little bit more vibrant beyond the mat; I walk down the streets of Berlin with a freshness that feels like you’re 12-years-old, just out of a swimming pool, rubbing chlorine from your eyes, blinking at the midday sun. Things feel pretty, and sharp, and easy, and bright. Everything feels OK. Like worrying about anything is dumb and pointless.
It still surprises me, how much my body can withstand.
The intensity of pressure it can endure, the strength and cleverness that lurks somewhere hidden until called upon to act. I think, after years wrestling with, and ultimately finding myself humbled by the limits of my mind, its nice to see, or at least, hope to see, potential expressed elsewhere. 

Read more on Sarah's Mixed Martials Arts journey via the links below:
1. Fight Club
2. Lessons from the mat
3. Good and bad algorithms 
4. Taming the lizard brain

Read her summary of why she fights, and what cultural value MMA brings in her BIO.​