1. You are a reviewer and have received a promotional code for an app you want to review, but you do not live in the USA.
2. Someone has sent you an app as a gift but you do not live in the same country as the donor.

Here is how to set up an App Store account for a foreign country:

What you need

1. An email address other than the one you are using as the ID for your existing iTunes account.
2. An address in the country concerned. It doesn’t have to be a real address – just something that looks plausible. Search the Web for a suitable address and change the house number and perhaps the street name. Apple will not send anything to this address.
3. A phone number in the country concerned. It doesn’t have to be a real number – just something that looks plausible. Search the Web for a suitable number and alter it. Preferably, remove a digit from the number. Apple will not call this number in any case.

What you do

Follow Apple’s instructions: Create an iTunes App Store account without a credit card.

What you can do once you’ve done it

• You can still buy apps, music and other content from your own App Store.
• You can still install free apps from your own App Store.
• You can install free apps from the foreign App Store.
• You can use promotional codes that are valid in the foreign App Store.
• You cannot buy apps, music or other content from the foreign App Store.

Almost two years ago, on Tuesday 30 January 2007, I walked to the Budokwai for the first time. As I passed by the millionaires’ houses in the road that leads to it, the only thing that kept me moving forward was the thought that if something terrified me this much, I had to conquer that fear or never respect myself again. I did not turn back and go home. I took the next step – and the next, and the next. I went in. I signed up, I bought a gi, and I started my first martial arts class ever.

To list the highlights and the low points of the 23-month journey to my blue belt would take a very long time. To list the people I came across, and what they have taught me and done for me, would take a lifetime. But I have to mention Luciano Cristovam, who has run the Wednesday night beginners’ class since it started in February 2007.

Not every great fighter is also an excellent teacher, but Luciano is. He knows how to explain, he knows how to encourage, and he communicates an energy that blows away beginners’ self-doubts and their frustration at being unable to learn the simplest moves. He was away for a couple of months at the beginning of this year, and we were well taught in his absence (except once); but the day Luciano came back and taught us, everyone in the class realised what we had been missing.

I’ve been going to advanced classes for a while (the rule is that you need at least two stripes on your white belt before you can) and although it’ll be sad not to see the friends I’ve made in the beginners’ class, an advanced class is more constructive and less distracting. You’re not faced any more with a manic youth in a white belt determined to prove that he’s stronger than you are. With a higher belt comes a new goal: every time you spar, you learn something or teach something – often both. There are many people in the advanced class who can wipe the mat with me any time they want, but usually they refrain from destroying me utterly, and often, at the end of it, they take some time to give me a few tips on my game. And so, of course, when I’m sparring with someone less good than me (they are rare but they exist), I try to remember to do the same for them. “In sparring there are only two outcomes. Either you win, which is good, or your friend wins, and that’s good too.”

The Roger Gracie Academy is slow to award blue belts, and I think that’s a good thing. I thought this even during those months when I felt I was already “blue-minus” but my belt wasn’t changing. To receive a blue belt is to receive acknowledgement that your probationary period is over and you’re a full member of the family. It means that you’ve made the transition from “fight to win” to “fight to learn”. As I’ve said in a previous post, getting your blue belt is like getting into university. You’re about to start learning the same things all over again, but you’ll learn them more deeply: you’ll learn why they are the way they are.

Or, to use another picture: getting your blue belt is like getting to the top of a steep hill, and looking up and seeing that there are mountains beyond it.

The worst thing is, I’m told that the same thing happens to you with every new belt, even the black!

I never expected one of my reviews to get a review, least of all a review from the author of the book I was reviewing. It was a good review, too: he said that mine was the best review he’d read, and he sent me a copy of his second novel as a way of saying ‘thank you’. At the time I thought that ‘best review’ meant ‘review penetrating deepest into the mind of the author and his intentions in creating the work’. I’m not so sure, now – he might just have meant ‘review that says the nicest things about me’ – but either way, I am in his debt to at least the extent of another review.

It took me a long time to get round to opening the book. Not just the sense of obligation, but a simple fear: would Stephen Foster, like Donna Tartt and Salley Vickers, be one of those authors who ought to have got run over before publishing their second novel?

I needn’t have worried. In AYWM, Stephen Foster attempts something far harder than he has tried before, and he pulls it off. Reading it, you have the sense of trust that you get when you are in the hands of a master. And yet… there is something about the book that makes it feel as if someone had taken a Rembrandt and put it in a plastic clip-on frame. But I’ll come to that later.

Tom Radford is 15. His father has died in a road accident and his mother has moved from South London to a cottage in Norfolk and of course taken Tom with her. The bulk of the story covers their first few months there, adjusting to the darkness at night, the lack of shops, the smell coming off the fields, the ten towering wind turbines (never more than nine of the sails working at once); and of course the people. Tom finds his feet at school and in the village, works out whom to respect, whom to hang out with, whom to avoid… and above all, Tom starts to become Tom.

This is not a plot-driven book, in the same sense in which Babette’s Feast (say) is not a plot-driven film: the plot is not the point.

Adolescence is impossible to write about. Like a quantum entity hesitating between being a wave and a particle, an adolescent isn’t in a state intermediate between two states (childhood and adulthood) but in both states at once. It’s a delicate mixture that risks being destroyed by the very act of measuring it, of writing about it. It’s like trying to capture a smoke ring in a bottle and expecting it to be a smoke ring still.

Stephen Foster approaches the task with strict rules and extraordinary discipline. Although, formally speaking, it is a nearly-19-year-old Tom that is the narrator, there is no hindsight or self-judgement. The reader becomes 15-year-old Tom so completely that at a couple of points in the novel it’s necessary to insert an adult’s point of view (Tom’s mother’s, and the school photographer’s) as a kind of reverse-angle shot, just to show us how things look from outside Tom’s head. The rule-following is strict: when Tom talks about a friendship that is doomed to fade through distance, there is no hint that in the end that friendship will not only not fade but will turn out to be the only thing that endures. When Tom (keeping his head down, hanging out with the people who will let him hang out with them) finds himself in the back of a stolen car, on the way to a beach where it will be set on fire and filmed, there is not the slightest hint that this might be morally wrong. Tom will discover in due course – and we with him – just how wrong it was, and how this one incident will become a key to the whole story, tying together past and future.

There is a lot of tying together in this book, and it gives it an almost musical quality. A catchphrase marks a  friendship; its modulations reflect the shifting nature of the friendship; at the end, its reversal marks the reversal of the power relations with that particular friend. The stolen car turns out to be the only link of its owner with his dead father; the death (in an unconnected incident) of one of the thieves is the catalyst for Tom’s discovery that friends can die as well as fathers, and so for his liberation from a paralysed stage of mourning.

But describing these things in a review is also like trying to bottle a smoke ring, so I’ll stop. I’ll only add that one of the attractions of the austere rules that Stephen Foster has set himself is that even the smallest detail speaks volumes in the silence. With one of the tangential characters (but no-one is ever truly tangential) Tom’s entire conversation consists of six one-word sentences and a stick of chewing gum, but over the length of the book their relationship is heartbreaking: it has enough emotional impact for a an entire play. Tom’s text messages with his distant friend Milo – typically, two-word micro-poems with pictures attached – not only depict their friendship with accuracy and economy but also show how texting has created a completely new way of maintaining intimacy at a distance. Security, in the end, is having someone you can say tb to.

So – with all this mastery even down to the tiniest brush-stroke, why isn’t AYWM a masterpiece? Or rather, why is it a masterpiece in a white plastic frame?

The refreshing thing, as I’ve said, about Tom’s narrative of his own adolescence is that it doesn’t reflect or assess, it just narrates: so the experiences grow in the reader’s mind, and if the reader chooses to reflect or assess, it’ll be his own experience that he’s reflecting on. The exception is the second chapter (Chapter 1, because there’s a Prologue). I can see why Stephen Foster thought it necessary to connect Tom-the-narrator with Tom-the-narrated, both who he is and why he’s telling the story now – what the significance of it all is – but to me the whole looking-over-relics-of-the-past thing just clunks. I’m not interested in 19-year-old Tom the narrator. I’m not interested in his remembered Citizenship lessons or his elaborate excuse for knowing the story of Tom Sawyer and the fence. The whole thing sounds portentous and clever and self-conscious and all the things the rest of the novel so wonderfully isn’t. I hold on to the hope that Stephen Foster didn’t think of this himself but that someone told him it had to be put in. Put it in or we won’t publish, perhaps. I hope that’s what it was. There is really no need to spell things out for us: we’re about to be so hypnotized by the writing that there’s no way we’re going to put down the book after 30 pages because there wasn’t a clear explanation of Why You Are Reading This.

The other awkwardness comes at the end of the book. It’s at the point where the narrative has to change gear, to leap over a couple of summers, to take Tom through two years of being a reclusive teenage chrysalis, then out of Norfolk and into North London, where, in a period of non-time spent doing a non-job, all the themes of the novel reappear, modulate, interact, and drive Tom back to a final visit to Norfolk and from there to a truly magical conclusion.

This was, obviously, going to be difficult, and it turns out that there’s something about that North London segment that (for me) kills everything. Perhaps this is intentional. Filling in forms, signing up for a course, thinking about “contact hours” instead of helping to shoot foxes – you might argue that this is an unreal existence and so it should seem unreal when you read it. I can’t quite be persuaded of that. To me, something about the whole segment feels too much like fleshed-out bullet points. It’s still well written and well observed (and there are some classic Foster expository inner monologues, such as the swimming pool segment) but – well, either I’ve missed something or there’s something missing.

The worst of it is, you can’t simply cut out the offending pages, because the themes are reappearing and interacting and being seen from a different perspective, and it’s still a joy to see it happen and it’s still necessary to the plot, but…

Well, enough complaining. If this were a mediocre novel I wouldn’t be bothering to whinge.

Perhaps if North London hadn’t been so grey then the final image that signals Tom’s escape back into reality wouldn’t have been so moving:

I note a strange vision in the rear-view mirror: ten sails of a wind farm all rotating at the same time.

Can one say of a book, “I’ll come back to it again and again and each time wish I didn’t have to”? If one can, is that a good review or a bad one?

I think again of the musical structure of the whole novel. I think of the visual images: the beach at California, Norfolk; the Edward Hopper-style buildings; the ruined people in the ruined house; the reappearing red Corvettes; the wind sails. And I think what a beautiful film this would make. So little will need explaining; so much can be shown. It would be a masterpiece.

And what better way to warm up for the next novel?

Here’s a good comparison between belts and academic achievements:

White belt – none yet.

Blue belt – university entrance (matriculation).

Purple belt – first (bachelor’s) degree.

Brown belt – master’s degree.

Black belt – doctorate.

For the honour of the academy, we decided to hold a class anyway.

There were eight of us and four three-stripe white belts, so we paired off with one three-striper in each pair. I took one of the novices and gave him a guided tour of BJJ. I took him through a range of positions – close guard, side control, and mount – and some of the standard moves: armbar, choke (two flavours), triangle, scissor sweep, sit-up sweep, guard pass, bridge out of side control, bridge out of mount. I showed him how each one was done and got him to try it out on me. I was careful to emphasize that all these moves were “as far as I can remember”: my aim was not to instruct but to give him a feel for the sport so that when he had his first class everything wouldn’t feel completely unfamiliar.

One of my friends did the same for the other novice. The pair that included the third-timer from Tottenham spent some time trying to reconstruct what he’d learned last time about capturing your opponent’s back, getting the hooks in, rolling him over and choking him; and the final pair seemed to be working mostly on chokes and defences to them.

It was a very interesting time. We learned that each of us has something to teach the others. Later on in the session I taught a friend my way of passing the guard while defending against a triangle and he taught me his way of defending against a rear naked choke (of course it was Luciano who’d originally taught us each of those techniques!).

Because we didn’t have an instructor on hand to answer questions, we spent a lot more time working the answers out for ourselves: exactly how a move was meant to work, and why. By being forced to think in this way, we came closer to the first principles of BJJ, something I’ve argued for before. It hadn’t occurred to me before that having an instructor present makes you intellectually lazy; but it must do, because now we all found ourselves really thinking in a way we’d rarely done in the past.

At the end of the session we’d all been on the mat continuously for over an hour. We hadn’t sparred against each other at all – no one had tried to vanquish anyone – but we had learned a great deal because we’d had to teach ourselves.

Actually, it was excellent.

Nevertheless, when the endorphins have worn off, I’m going to find out who was responsible for this cock-up and I’m going to pull his head off.

When I was studying mathematics at university, I went to lectures. Four lectures in all, all in the first week of my first term there. Never again. The reason I gave out to my friends was that the lectures coincided with the moment at breakfast when I’d finished my second egg and my eighth crossword clue. The real reason (that I only realised much later) was that the lecturers were trying to teach us and I was not much good at being taught. I learned mathematics by going through the problem sheets we were given and working out for myself how to solve the problems. Once I’d effectively “invented” mathematics in this way, I was much more teachable. If you like, my tutors could put jam on the bread but I was the only one who could bake the bread in the first place.

I think the same dynamic is beginning to occur in BJJ. There is no one in the class who is better than me at forgetting the moves we have just been shown. The memorisation of moves as facts is something I’m no good at.

When I do feel I’m beginning to make progress is in what you might call “first principles”. I know – my body knows – that to do a sweep you have to deprive your opponent of support on the side the sweep is going (or just choose a moment when he’s deprived himself of it). I’m beginning to know – my body is beginning to know – that in any rotatory motion it’s best to have your opponent as close to the axis of rotation as possible: for example, in sweeps from half guard (which I’m just starting to learn) stretching out your and your opponent’s leg so that they form a “hinge” is the natural thing to do.

These “first principles” (and others to do with weight and balance) aren’t moves in themselves: they are the motives for moves, the reasons why a move is done in a particular way, and the reasons why it succeeds or fails. I think they’re also unteachable in themselves. You can teach this armbar or that armbar, but you can’t teach “armbarness”. That is something the student’s body has to learn for itself.

For me, then, it looks as if the pattern of learning may be:

1. Apprehend the first principles and make them part of you.
2. Act according to those first principles. You will end up moving in particular ways as a result.
3. Discover that the relationship between the moves you’ve made up for yourself and the moves that everyone was trying to teach you is that they are the same thing.
4. Start understanding and learning moves when other people teach them to you, because they fit into your already existing body of instinct and knowledge.

This sounds like a massively ambitious programme stretching over many colours of belts, and I guess in some ways it is. The question I’m trying to explore is whether everyone thinks like this. I don’t think they all do. I think a lot of people are able to function by memorising moves and having them immediately available when they’re sparring. Those people are teachable.

What do we do with the unteachables? We have to find other ways of causing them to learn.

What I have found most useful so far has been what you might call “calibrated sparring”. I’ve done it against my instructors in 1-1 sessions but I can’t see any reason why any higher belt shouldn’t be able to do it. When it works well, I think it works rather like this:

• He isn’t trying to win. We already know he’s better than me!
• He turns down the “volume control” on his speed and skills so that he’s stretching me further than I thought I could be stretched but not unbeatably so.
• He guides the fight so that situations naturally arise in which I can practise the skills I’ve learned earlier in the session. This is the crucial point. It means that my body learns how to recognise what to do and when to do it.
• He has a Pause button. If I get completely stuck, knowing I ought to be doing something but either not remembering exactly what or exactly how, we can have a pause and a momentary consultation before continuing.
• He has a Rewind button. If I handle a particular situation in the wrong way, or if I surprise myself by handling it in a successful way and want to check that it wasn’t a fluke, we can go back and replay the scene again.

It would be interesting to see whether sparring against higher belts would be as much of an educative experience. I am writing this post, of course, on the very evening when I could have found out by going to a mixed class and “playing with the big boys”!

But to return to my original point: I think different people learn in different ways. Some can accumulate facts and get round to generalising from them later: those people are easy to teach. But others can’t really absorb facts until they have the general principles already under their belts: those are the people who have to be helped to learn.

This simulation is designed to demonstrate fundamental principles and isn’t intended to be beautiful!

Agaves are sharp. They remain sharp even when you’re trying to balance a Sorapot on them in an artistic way. They remain sharp when you stab your thumb directly on the point of one of the leaves. Fortunately blood wipes off the Sorapot very easily. Was this a design criterion when choosing the materials?

I haven’t yet tried making tea with it. I’ve read why it should make good tea and I’ve read why the design is the way it is and I’ve wished that I’d designed something like that. But actually making tea… that brilliant shiny glass will be dulled by the deposits from the peppermint tea, it’ll get misty from the water, it’ll never be the same again. And how to find tea worthy of it?

Perhaps it’ll be better to keep it as a piece of garden sculpture. Here’s a safer picture.

The packaging of the Sorapot is designed to be easily recycled. It fails miserably at this because it is too beautiful to throw away.