Current mood:

cynical

Swashing and Buckling but no sign of Errol Flynn
I has a strange - slightly gruesome...slightly ironic...slightly fascinating - experience a few weeks ago, that had so many different resonances with different parts of my life that I wasn't entirely sure whether I'd bring it up for a while.

People may have seen details in the press regarding an incident in a Finglas pub during which a man's hand was severed using a "samurai sword". The pub in question just happens to be one in which my company installed the security cameras, and we were called in to extract the footage (although maybe that ought to be called handage under the circumstances).

As it turns out, the incident happened right in front of a camera (more out of luck than judgement or planning), and although it wasn't the best camera in the world, the incident happened at a time of day when the lighting was good and the recorder was set up to record live (25 frames per second).

It's not an intrinsically bad pub - it's new, it's quite nicely laid out - and during the daytime it serves the industrial estates that surround it (I actually had lunch in there a month or so before Christmas), but in the evening the demographic shifts a bit. I wouldn't have been at all surprised if someone told me there'd been a gangland hit in the place, but I was a little surprised to hear about the sword attack.

Anyway, at first I wasn't at all interested in seeing the footage. I mean, why would you want to see it? What purpose would it serve? But the opportunity to see real life sword play in a modern context was eventually too much to resist, so I had a look at it - purely for the sake of research, you understand.

Ok...Aragorn of Arathorn he was not. In fact, although the guy had obviously "played" with the sword a fair bit at home, the end result was...*frenetic* to say the least.

And this is where it got more interesting for me. The spaces were not very confined (ceiling was perhaps a little low for a long-ish sword) and he had plenty of room to move about in. The movements of the protagonists were very fluid - much more so than you see in staged sword combat.

There was a clear intention on the part of the attacker to remove the other person's head, and as an unarmed (oh I didn't mean that one) combatant, his natural reaction was to raise an arm in defence (which was how the hand became disengaged from the arm).

A couple of the other occupants of the bar played football with the severed article after it hit the floor, but the owner of the aforementioned appendage carried on fighting without the slightest flinch. In fact, he was punching the swordsman with the blood-spurting stump of his unhanded arm for much of the remainder of combat without seeming to realise the fact that he was five fingers short of a handshake.

There were a surprising number of people about at the time of the attack, which resulted in a lot of people running in every direction to get out of the way of the sword (or the hammer that his friend was carrying), or to get out of the way of the pumping jets of blood, or perhaps to get to the carvery before it closed...I dunno.

What makes the entire episode even more bizarre is that the two people involved had been drinking together that day, and the root of the problem would seem to be that one guy called the other guy's mother "a slapper" (alegedly). Of course, I wasn't there and didn't hear everything that may or may not have been said. I'm just an innocent bystander really who happened to see a bit of video footage, but ignoring all of the particulars of this specific episode, I was drawn back to all the various instances of metal weapons demos I've seen, all the rubber-sword types with their swagger and bluster and their silly looking latex broadswords, and I was wondering how any of them might have faired if they'd been in there having a quiet pint.