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three foilists ranked in the top hundred, one junior international foilist, and five epeeists who can hold their own with the best of them. I have no illusions about the part he played in my development, either. Without him I would still just be a journeyman, hauling myself around the country to opens so that I could get soundly beaten by vastly superior fencers before heading home.
    The club, which has grown to around twenty active competitors since his arrival from Glasgow back in the late noughties, has a lot to thank him for, and so do I.
    He says that he gets a lot out of it, and I guess it must be pretty satisfying to see one ’s protégés develop and blossom on the tournament circuit, as is the kudos which comes his way as yet another of his stable claim a scalp from one of the big London clubs. I’m glad he finds it rewarding, as it was probably that which enabled him to maintain his patience with me during my lesson on the Tuesday evening after Cheltenham. I don’t know what it was. Most days everything just clicks and I can do the exercises effortlessly, without even thinking about them, but in that particular lesson I was all over the place. My timing was out, my footwork was clumsy, and my point never seemed to be where it should be. Phil could obviously see that something was wrong.
    ‘ Do you want to leave it for tonight?’ he asked, pulling off his mask as I fluffed yet another counter disengage. ‘You don’t really seem to be enjoying yourself with this.’
    ‘ No, I’m fine. Really.’ I don’t think he was convinced. ‘I just need to settle into it a little.’
    ‘ Hmmm. Okay. Well, we’ll finish off with some straightforward stuff then. Direct attacks to forearm, first stepping then step lunge as I step backwards.’
    He pulled his mask back down, and I came on guard. He was deliberately making it easy, and I soon found my point anchoring firmly in the thick black suede of his coaching sleeve. These were simple moves, moves I could do in my sleep, and it was just what I needed to salvage something, anything, from the lesson.
    He picked up the change in me immediately, and began extending the exercise, bringing his blade across to close off my line of attack and forcing me to introduce disengages, dipping my blade to avoid his. All of a sudden it clicked. I relaxed. My footwork tidied itself up, and the fluency was back. It was a good way to finish.
    He saluted and pulled off his mask, and I did the same. We shook hands and he looked at me earnestly.
    ‘You sure you’re okay, Richard?’ he asked. He knew, as well as I did, that after the disaster at Cheltenham this was not a good time for me to be off form. I needed to bag as many points as possible at Oxford, a mere five days away, to make up for it.
    ‘ Yeah, yeah, I’m fine.’ I didn’t meet his eye. ‘Just a little slow to get started, that’s all.’
    ‘ Ah, don’t worry about him, Phil,’ came a voice from behind me. ‘It’s probably just his hormones or something.’
    I looked round to see Shirley standing by the wall, patiently waiting for her turn with Phil.
    ‘Yeah, right,’ I gave her a thin smile and she winked back.
    She ’s quite a character, Shirley. A tall, wise-cracking, gum-chewing epeeist with spiky red hair, she is one of the club’s great success stories. Fed up with her husband’s unending obsession with football, she decided to take up a sport of her own as an alternative to sitting around in an empty house all the time. Having signed up for an evening class in fencing at the local college she discovered she was a natural, and has never looked back. Within five years she went from being just another bored housewife to representing her country as a senior international. She’s also got a colourful sense of humour, and is popular with just about everyone, including her rivals on the circuit.
    I left them to their lesson, and decided it was time for a fight.
    Out on the electric pistes several fights were