Double Touch

About

I am from Wellington and came to Dresden in 2020 to work at a research institute, measuring very small things in very cold rooms. In the summer of 2024 I watched every session of the Olympic fencing on a laptop, and at some point my partner said that I either had to stop explaining the rules to him or go and find out whether I really understood them. In September, at forty-one, I signed up for a beginners’ course at a fencing club that trains in a school sports hall twenty minutes from our flat.

This is the notebook I have kept since: footwork, lessons, bouts, tournaments and the many ways of being hit. I fence épée, the heaviest of the three weapons, in which the whole body is a target and there is no right of way. Whoever hits first scores, and if both hit within about a twenty-fifth of a second, both do. That is the double touch of the title, and in my first winter it was the only kind of touch I scored with any regularity. The training is in German and the commands are in French, which turns out to be the language in which I lose.