T.H. White, “The Once and Future King”
The best thing for being sad,” replied Merlin, beginning to puff and blow, “is to learn something. That’s the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honour trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then — to learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting. Learning is the only thing for you. Look what a lot of things there are to learn.”
Got a phone call on the way to training on Wednesday evening, to say my grandmother had had a second stroke and it didn’t look good. Mom said to go ahead and train and to go see her the next morning, and I was ten minutes from the range and two hours from the hospital at the time, so I said okay and trained. It’s become a sort of security blanket for me in some ways I suppose – training settles everything out, and virtually anything can be fixed. There’s not much in life you can say that about.
The training itself went well. Warmups without the jacket had a string or two above 90 (nothing lower than a 9.0). Shot a 30-shot match, and wasn’t happy with it. After some work, Matt and I came to the conclusion that I’m getting an inconsistent head position as I roll my head forward to the sights. I’ll have to watch that in the match. Must also work on getting the shot rythym perfect; on those shots where my breathing and rythym coincide properly, all went very well – when they didn’t, it was very akward and slow and usually off-target. If we had more time, we’d adjust the cheekpiece, but for now, I just keep training as I have been and do the big changes later, after Bisley.
Obviously no training on Thursday, so it’s just the daily lunchtime training for the next while, then range time on Saturday and Sunday, lunchtime training till Wednesday and then drop out the rifle and overnight bags to WTSC for Wednesday night and meet the team in the airport on Thursday morning. My pelican 1150 case for the rifle sights was ordered on Tuesday afternoon and got here yesterday, which was impressive – the sights now have their own custom-fitted foam case along with some allen keys, the flat plate I check my foresight position with, and soon my earplugs, a box of foresight elements and any other small thing that would be useful to have in there.