Holiday fencing: gees, that got big!

Serious Joe's famous (almost last) words: "Hey, I've got nothing to do over the holidays. Can we get a school holiday program going?"

The final result? 36 individual fencers across the two groups. We'd have been happy with a dozen in total! Twenty people completely new to fencing. We hoped for 6! And ten new members for the club. Maybe two or three we guessed! It's astonishing. And a little exhausting (there's a reason Joe is sitting with a weary look on his face in that shot above).

Be careful what you wish for!

So yeah, I guess you could say our little school holiday program got a bit bigger than we anticipated. Three times bigger to be precise. And we couldn't be happier.

And my personal highlight? It's not numbers, amazing as they are. It's the coaches and senior fencers who made this happen. Consider Ollie. That tall young sabreur, on his school holidays no less, coached every single session with humour and verve and was still standing (just) at the end. He even took home club gear to wash!

I said it was astonishing. And it is. But then, there's so much goodwill and so many amazing people (not just Ollie and Joe) joyfully volunteering at this fencing club that astonishing new things just seem to happen every other day.

Fantastically astonishing indeed.