Hi, and thank you for visiting this site which is primarily about my enduring love of karate, but also will tell you a little about who I am and what I do for a living.

As you navigate you will find some great links and useful information about personal safety and conflict management. 

I live in Dedham on the borders of Essex and Suffolk, England, where the famous artist, John Constable, went to school. His father owned a mill in Dedham and John painted all around the Stour Valley in which the village sits. Some of the Pilgrim Fathers came from the area and many set off to America from the nearby port of Ipswich, stopping off at Plymouth on the way.    

I am not a professional, full-time karate teacher as I have business commitments that prevent me from doing so.  However, karate is the greatest passion of my life outside of my family, and without it and the love and support of my wife I know I wouldn't be here today.

Karate, or rather the underlying philosophy of it, has taught me how to survive and endure.  By that, I don't mean on the streets, although I am quite able to deal with that sort of problem, I mean the effect it has had in my personal and business life.

Notwithstanding the vicissitudes of business, over the past 25 years I have been on the receiving end of a brain tumour and a completely unexpected quadruple heart bypass. In both cases I was expected to be away from work for a significantly long period of time.  I was back within 12 weeks after each major operation. I returned to karate training in both instances and I hope I am the better man for it, physically and mentally.

I greatly value the knowledge I acquired of specific breathing techniques and mokuso (meditation).  Karate has also given me another dimension to my confidence and brought me to a level of harmony that I had not known before.

There is so much to learn from karate, or the martial arts in general,  that I would urge you, if you haven't done so already, to look for the deeper meanings.  I know it will bring great benefit to you.

My passion has brought me into contact with some wonderful martial arts masters of all disciplines and cultures.  It has been my privilege to know them and I take the opportunity to pay tribute to them on this site.

This is one of several mantras I try to live by:

('If I had to select one quality, one personal characteristic that I regard as being most highly correlated with success, whatever the field, I would pick the trait of persistence. Determination. The will to endure to the end, to get knocked down seventy times and get up off the floor saying "Here goes number seventy-one" '- Richard M. DeVos)