Time to see sensei: can karate help us kick our frustrations?

I wanted to watch some boxing. That’s how it started. In my head, I was going to find some louche club, maybe in east London, and I would sit there, whisky in hand, barely wincing as flecks of sweat and blood flew across my face. Would I, in this scenario, be wearing a tight velvet dress with a vertiginously high thigh split, diamonds of uncertain provenance glittering around my slender neck? Maybe. Yes. It’s possible I got a little bit carried away.

In any case: none of it ended up mattering. There were no boxing matches, compellingly dodgy or otherwise, happening at times that worked for me. Instead, I ended up spending an afternoon in a sports centre in Kilburn, west London, dodging dozens of little kids running around like maniacs, and watching the city’s inaugural Open Karate Championship.

That was close enough, I thought – at least I’d get some violence, and some entertainment. I definitely got my share of the former. Karate is extremely quick and frequently stops and starts. The brief bursts of action are, as a result, often very intense.

I’ve no doubt that the technique involved is really precise, and requires hundreds of hours of practice to make perfect. Still, I do have to be honest: a lot of it made me smile, precisely because I felt like I was watching two people dramatically recreating scenes of my brother and I, as children, beating the crap out of each other over ownership of the TV remote. There are hands and fists and feet and knees, and little time for anyone to catch your breath. Surely only children must be at a disadvantage, through lack of real-life practice.

A particular highlight of the day was that the championship welcomed all, and so it was possible to watch kids, adults and everyone in between battle it out. Perhaps unsurprisingly, I found that teenage girls seemed to be the most vicious of all. If I’d had to step on that tatami, I probably would have opted to fight a grown man over any of those little beasts.

God, they looked like they were having fun, though. That’s my main takeaway from my brief foray into martial arts. Every single person who did karate that day seemed happy, focused and fulfilled, and free of the tightly wound rage you see in so many people as you go about your life. It’s understandable: on more than one occasion, I found myself wishing I could join them, or maybe just kick one of my fellow audience members just to see what’d happen.

Truly, I believe most of our society’s problems would be solved if everyone took up at least a version of karate. Male loneliness epidemic? Beat someone up about it! Living as a woman in a patriarchal society? Physical violence won’t solve most of it, but it’ll get some of the frustrations out of your system! The seemingly unstoppable rise of populism? We’d all get along so much better as a country if we all just fought each other in a safe and regulated environment, once to twice a week.

I just don’t think there’s any real point to it as a live spectator sport, though. I’m not going to pretend I enjoyed sitting in a loud, busy gymnasium with the heat and humidity levels of a tropical forest for two hours. I got pretty bored pretty quickly. Clearly, there’s a reason why there’s no such thing as a martial arts Wimbledon.

Do I think a Universal Basic Karate scheme would solve a lot of Britain’s problems, though? Well, it’s not like Keir Starmer’s bursting with ideas right now. I say we give it a shot.

Photograph by Gokhan Taner/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images