Even though I have been lucky enough to have spent most of the last weeks abroad on holiday, first in Sicily and just recently the USA, I have been on a determined bid to get back into my martial arts patterns (taught to me by my instructor Neil Johnson of White Crane Fighting Arts – see links) as a primary way of getting, and trying to stay, fit.  Luckily, the friends that I was staying with in rural New Jersey had an excellent and large garden that was perfect for my early morning routine.

For over a month now, I have tried to do a daily session consisting of the moving meditation system named after one of kungfu’s founding fathers, the revered Da Mo. Even though it looks gentle enough, it is actually pretty demanding especially on the legs. It stretches the body gently and subtly, trains the lungs and puts you, if you can control those wandering thoughts, into an inspired state of oneness with your surroundings. It was wonderful doing this here in a woodland New Jersey garden with the sun rising above the trees and a chorus of unfamiliar and exotic-sounding birds and insects.

It was pretty challenging doing my Taichi and Kungfu patterns too as the strong summer sunshine racketed up the temperature.

It was a great deal cooler when I started this regime at home in my small town garden in Lewes, UK.

The great thing about having these patterns to perform every day is that you can really do them anywhere giving you no excuse for not keeping your body strong and flexible even if like me, you are not particularly skilled at them.

Unlike team sports or visits to the gym, you can take your exercise regime with you wherever you go and over the last year, I have done just that. As I now approach the third anniversary of a major illness, dare I say it,  the gradual recuperation and exercise is beginning to pay off. The after-effects of my brain haemorrhage now seem to be near to disappearing all together and the seizure-caused broken back too has benefited all through this period from my regular use of my White Crane Kungfu 66-move Taichi form which I began to practise again, against doctor’s orders, on the hospital ward and that has meant that I needed no physiotherapy as my spine repaired itself. So even though I can no longer take part in those highly enjoyable sparring sessions, I have been able to keep my patterns going – even my weapon patterns – in some unlikely places. All you need is the determination and a certain lack of feeling embarrassed doing the stuff in public places.

Straight sword with a purloined garden cane,  Paros, Greece.

Straight sword with a strip of plastic on a hotel roof, Santorini, Greece.

Seven and a half foot staff pattern with a plastic ventilation pipe, Santorini, Greece.

Sword pattern with a mountain walking stick on the summit of Mount Rigi, Switzerland.

Taichi by the Grand Canal, Venice, Italy

Kungfu in Florence.

Da Mo Meditation on Mount Etna, Sicily.

Kungfu on the beach at Cefalu, Sicily….

and finishing with some Chigong exercises just a few days ago in Princeton, New Jersey. It may seem strange to say this but doing these intense but also at times profoundly contemplative exercises in different lands gives me a deeper sense of the places and, don’t laugh, a feeling that I have connected with them in a special way. It all began in 2008 when I practised early morning Taichi in a park by a lake in Fujian Province, Southern China with a roaring lion breaking the morning silence in a nearby zoo.

The important thing now is for me to keep it up now I am back in old England.

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This was the view from my bedroom window when I awoke at around 5.00 one morning whilst staying in the luxurious appartment of my obsessively hospitable relations Franz and Mathilde in a small town near Zurich in Switzerland. The Zurichsee, the big lake that laps up against the well-heeled boots of some of the World’s richest businessmen reflects every shift of light as the day progresses and, if you have no pressing needs, it would be possible just to spend all day watching the scene from Franz’s balcony. I did my regular hour of taichi and kungfu practice as the day continued its dawning and then headed off with Franz and Mathilde, their nephew James and my good friend Heidi on a trip to the summit of their nearby Alpine mountain, Rigi.

We travelled by car through scenes of typical Swiss life seeing many of the local traditions::

Meeting another Heidi who had taken a bit of a tumble up a mountain, it seemed, but was being helped down by her very own friendly goatherd Peter.

These Zurich gnomes could have tried to look a little more cheerful, I thought, and they were trying too hard with the makeup but pushing wheelbarrows all day can be wearing.

We stopped off at a little country shop, or house, I wasn’t sure which – maybe we had become burglars.

There was no one there to serve us but going through the front door into the little house, the room was filled with good  food and sunflowers and there was a box where you could put whatever money you thought these things were worth. It might have been a scene out of Goldilocks except I always go for the biggest of everything – no dilemmas for me.

Outside the “shop” I got my first sighting of the mountain that we were going to climb and I truly felt that I was in Switzerland.

It is a country of mountains and lakes where, if you like that kind of thing,  you can spend your time climbing, swimming or doing silly things in boats – whatever takes your fancy.

If my swimming gear hadn’t been in my lost baggage which had joined the other one thousand cases stranded at Gatwick Airport when the loading carousel broke, I might well have joined this happy couple, springing out of the icy Alpine waters like a frolicking dolphin.

We only had time to watch whilst having lunch before we were off to catch a train. Like all good Swiss mountain train journeys we were joined by a band of guys with very long horns but it was all in the spirit of fun. This little train was pulled along on wires up the precipitous climb to the top of Mount Rigi and my relations generously arranged for me to sit in the driver’s cabin at the back where I could see the full journey in its splendour, beauty and vertigo horror.

The journey was genuinely thrilling as we went higher and higher into the Alpine landscape and there was nothing for it but the Wolf just had to practice his kungfu Chinese straight sword pattern at the very summit.

It must have been the thin Alpine air, the sheer exhilaration of being on top of a mountain or maybe the gently evocative peeling of hundred of cowbells in the surrounding valleys but this felt definitely like the real thing so I reverted to type and the cows seemed to appreciate my efforts.

I could also see that Alpine plants really do grow in the Alps:

and people really do live in cute little wooden chalets with all their winter fuel stacked up for months of snow.

The excitement of returning to her spiritual roots was too much for Heidi who took to the hills with a vigour not often seen in these parts.

Then it was time for the dreaded final descent in a machine that I had vowed never to enter – the nightmare world of the cable car:

 I would have been fine just telling the others that I would be coming down the mountain when I come and doing it on foot but….

 …as James, Mathilde’s nephew, a natural Austrian mountain boy looked so cool about the whole thing, I decided to try and at least look the same even if I wanted to bite my knuckles.

Oddly, being stuck in a small glass box suspended on wires over a Swiss forest actually felt not only good but exciting. I only got that horrible urge to jump feeling once:

Even the ferry that took us from the apartment to the city centre branded itself as a Lunch Ship.

So for the duration of my visit to Zurich, I should admit that I was mostly “out to lunch” and, when my case finally arrived, three days later, a number of not-to-be defined articles of clothing no longer fitted me.

Walking along the banks of the Zurichsee on a hot, well Swiss hot, summer’s day, I began to think about moving on.

There looking out over the water was a Twentieth Century statue and I walked around it to see who it was meant to represent.

It was David and the slain Goliath but I have not been able to find out the name of the artist  – let me know please you sculpture experts out there – it is a fine moody piece of work but it reminded me that soon I would be seeing two other Davids, the greatest sculptures of the subject and probably the greatest sculptures of all time, the Davids of Donatello and Michelangelo. Yes, in the morning, I was off, by train through the Alps, heading south to Italy.

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Switzerland, apparently, has been in turmoil over this question and it has been a narrow victory for this intrepid adventurer who thinks his country should loosen up somewhat.

Naked pastimes seem to be in the news at the moment as there is a similar controversy raging in China where a Chinese tourist agency has declared its support for the so-called “naked boatmen” of Hubei province who had been told to cover up so that they didn’t embarrass women and children. They claim that it is much easier in their exhausting-looking work of pulling boats upstream if they are not weighed down by sodden and unnecessary clothing.

The Swiss man likes that freedom too but he also enjoys feeling natural in Nature after a week stuck in an office in his suit. In England we have had similar battles in our courts with our very own naked ramblers who enjoy letting it all hang out as long as the stinging nettles don’t grow too tall.

I am an unapologetic liberal and support all these examples of people’s right to wear what they want so I smiled when I read that the other case raging in Switzerland at the moment is the rights of women to wear the burka. Apparently whilst not wanting to see naked hikers, the Swiss are also very against people covering themselves up completely. Soon they will be told that they can’t be naked under the burka either.

I suggest that the returning and humiliated England football team might well try wearing the burka for a bit though because I for one have already seen much too much of those gentlemen. I am only joking, of course, I would much rather we all stopped getting hung up over what other people look like.

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