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Watch my Back - Chapter 1 - Early Days

Before I recount my experiences, I think it is best that I tell you a little of my early days. It might help you, the reader, to understand how a man such as myself ended up working as a nightclub doorman.
I was born in Coventry, Tile Hill actually, in 1960 to Josephine and Kenneth Thompson. I was one of four children, three boys - myself, Ray and Garry - and a girl, Marie-Jo. We were all lucky enough to have enjoyed a sound upbringing with a lovely Irish mum and a great English dad. I went to St Peter's and Paul's Junior School and later on to Cardinal Wiseman Comprehensive.
All my early life, certainly from the age of eleven, I was plagued by the fear of fighting and confrontations. I don't really know why this should be. My mum reckons I'd inherited her nerves and that it was just my way. She always reminds me that whilst I was a very sensitive kid, I was also a bit of a boy too. Whatever the reason, my mind felt weak and constantly under attack from fears too powerful to fight. Doubtless I was not on my own in this respect, but at the time I felt I was, so I could take no solace from this. What I found to my distaste, what really hurt, was not being scared, it was the thought of having to live under the dominion of fear for the rest of my life.

Many times during these cruel years I found myself sneaking out of the back door at school to avoid my would-be antagonists waiting for me at the front, then running off to the sanctuary of short-sightedness and ignorance, only to wake up the next morning with fear and worry ever-growing at the thought of having to go back to school and face the 'enemy' again, often having to go under the protective wing of my dad.

I vividly remember one Christmas morning sitting in my bedroom alone and crying, worrying about going back to school in two weeks' time, and the misery that would then ensue. My elder brother Garry came in and asked me what was wrong. I shrugged my shoulders, too ashamed to admit my weakness. My whole childhood was marred by such incidents: these sad, scared, worried feelings came and went at will - I was, I felt, at the mercy of my own mind.
Hope came on the horizon in the guise of the martial arts. Bruce Lee took on all celluloid comers and held no fear. He became my mentor and I enthusiastically, though not convincingly, mimicked him along with thousands of other protégés of the late great.

High on the inspiration, I started a martial arts class, aikido, in my bid to build confidence. Life was my bully and I needed an arsenal to defend myself. Unfortunately my efforts had the opposite effect. If I thought the bullying was a problem I was in for a shock when I started aikido; my real problems were about to begin.

At first it was great. I was eleven years old and the teacher - a very big man in his late twenties - took an instant shine to me. I became the class pet so when he asked me and a few other students to stay over at the centre one night, to help fix some of the damaged training mats, I was dead keen. I asked permission from my mum and dad. They were a little cautious. I didn't really know why at the time, but they were, so my dad came down to the centre to check it out. After meeting my instructor he said 'no problem'. He was impressed, 'you'll be fine' he assured me. I didn't need assuring as much as he did. When I got to the club that night there were no mats to fix and the other lads who had been invited didn't turn up. I should have seen the danger signs, but at eleven you don't, you just trust. And anyway, there must have been another thirty people sleeping over that night, no need for alarm. It seemed a bit strange, but for a kid my age it was still an adventure so I wasn't that bothered. I'd have a good laugh and a late night. I would really enjoy myself.

My joy was to be short lived.

It was in the middle of the night that it started. The abuse, the invasion of my body by the cold hands of paedophilia. I was drenched in fear. By the morning I was still crying and still shaking. The colour drained out of my young life. A dark depression swallowed me and turned my world a stormy grey. Like a blackmailer the memory shadowed me for many years. My hero, the man I adored and trusted, the man I aspired to be, my role model, let me down. Actually, he smashed my world apart. In the morning my eyes were swollen from a night of sobbing. I was so frightened, so desperately scared. I didn't know where to turn. When he jokingly asked me why I was so quiet, I said: 'Someone touched me in the night'. The smile fell off his face. He suggested that my experience was a bad dream and that I shouldn't tell anyone or he'd get into trouble. He didn't need to tell me not to blab. I had no intention of telling a soul. I was so ashamed, so very ashamed - though I didn't quite know why. Just the thought of others knowing about my misfortune filled me with absolute dread. It became an obsession to keep it hidden and one day to seek my revenge. It was my secret.

My confidence plummeted to an all-time low. Mum and dad, blissfully unaware of what had happened, kept asking why I had given up aikido when I was doing so well. I made up some excuse about being fed up with it and just hoped that they didn't ask again. I wish now, of course, that I'd told them. They are such lovely parents and I know they would have handled it very gently. As it was, my bottle went and I decided to keep it to myself.

That was the end of my career in aikido. It would be many years before I found the courage to try another martial art. And even then I was very nervous around adults. One day, I vowed, I'd meet this man again and I'd be in a position to hurt him like he had hurt me. Later, many years on, providence placed him back into my world and I had the chance to face him down, only this time under different circumstances.

So, my first shot at the martial arts blew up in my face like a faulty firework. It knocked the wind right out of my sails and for years after I never went near a martial arts class. It was only when Ian, one of my very good friends, said he knew the instructor at the local Shotokan club and that he was going along to train, that I plucked up the courage to try again.
Believing the crap of celluloid martial arts was my first and biggest misconception in the martial arts. It took ten long years of experimenting and soul searching before I could finally admit to myself that 'real fighting' wasn't like that. Anyway, I plodded on with the karate, conscientiously learning technique if nothing else. Confidence was born to better technique and by my fourth year in comprehensive school I had begun to feel less scared, the bullies of yesteryear were confronted, beaten and tossed by the wayside. My fears were temporarily checked, only to be replaced by a weakness as great in its own right: overconfidence. I had reached an embryonic peak and mistook overconfidence for fearlessness.

I had worked and trained hard and believed my lack of fear to be the fruit of my labour. I realised much later that the goal was not to rid myself of fear (that can never happen), but more to control and harness it. Anyway, there I was, sixteen and by now a purple belt in Shotokan karate, standing on a 'sugar pedestal', not realising that when the rain came down it would crumble below.

Inevitably, the rain did come, in the shape of a six foot, thirteen stone (or at least he seemed that big) Jamaican called Ronnie. He had a face like a robber's dog and a growl to match. His hands were the biggest things I'd ever seen without lungs and he wanted me. I'd given his mate 'tarmac burns' the week before, and done it with little or no fear, and Ron was not H.P. When he approached me at a local disco to tell me so I felt an explosion inside, my legs shook and seemed to cry out 'overload, overload'. That little man popped up on my shoulder and said, 'Not so brave now are ya?'

In retrospect, Ronnie was probably as wary of me as I was of him, but he hid it well and I didn't. The arse dropped out of my trousers and the sugar pedestal crumbled below me, leaving me back on the unfriendly floor of reality. Fear and worry were back on the curriculum. Insecurity crept back in, and every time I felt even a little confident I subconsciously reminded myself of 'Ronnie the robber's dog' and how I had bottled it. I still kept up the Shotokan karate, but found it hard in a tough club under the auspices of sensei's Rick and Mick Jackson. I was 'catching a few' and didn't like it, thank you very much. The fear that had dissipated returned with a vengeance. Just getting to the dojo (training hall) became a battle, and an hour and a half's training seemed more like a week and a half. I was being shagged by Salvador Dali's 'linear time', where the melting clock seemed to freeze in my most agonising moments. I'd look up at the clock and it would say 7.30pm, I'd look again in an hour's time and it'd still be 7.30pm.

Time distortion seemed to have it in for me. Being hit in the head by other practitioners? What's that all about then? I didn't like it at all. Now that I understand training I realise that if you're not getting hit, or if there isn't at least the danger of it, it becomes unrealistic and impractical as a form of self-defence. 'If you want to dance to the music, you have to pay the band.' Every time I went training I'd pop my head through the high wooden dojo door to see who was there. If I saw anyone who was likely to 'give it to me', my heart would sink to my stomach, and fear, worry and time distortion ganged up on me like a pack of wolves. This kind of pressure, coupled with the discovery of my 'mating tackle' and girls, forced me to into early retirement from karate, and for the time being I was content to live with the fears and misconceptions.

I married young to a lovely girl called Nina. She was seventeen, I was a little more mature at eighteen and two months. Chronologically I was old enough to marry, but mentally I was still doing wheelies on mountain bikes and playing marbles with my mates. I was a baby. Sex was still a novelty, and the idea of being married and having it all the time seemed a pretty good deal. I would soon learn different.

I loved Nina very much, in fact I was besotted by her. She was gorgeous, so when she got pregnant I did the mature thing and said, 'I know what we'll do, we'll get married'. How she got pregnant I will never know, we did it standing up at the back of the local shops and my mates had assured me that you can't get pregnant when you do it standing up. Maybe it was the fact that her pill lay unopened in the bottom of her handbag. Who knows. Still, it had happened and I took charge. I was dead mature. An indictment to my maturity was when, at my wedding, I sneaked a cake from the buffet before the speeches. My mum slapped my wrist knocking it out of my hand and onto the floor. 'Geoffrey,' she said sharply, 'the buffet isn't open yet.'
Kerry, our first child (still my baby) was born shortly after. So things looked different now; I had a wife and a child to protect. I felt that if I wasn't capable of this what good was I? With this thought acting as my catalyst I began training again, this time with sifu Alan Hines in Shaolin Motga Gung Fu, a form of Chinese boxing. I restarted my search. I eventually attained my black belt in Gung Fu, but after some disagreements with my seniors (not Alan), I decided to leave and go back to Shotokan, but it was tough. I trained very hard, but there were many times when I felt like throwing it all in. Many times I lay on the bed after an arduous session with John Johnston and thought, 'what the fuck am I doing here?' I thought that getting my black belt would take away all my fears, and that I'd emerge as a fearless warrior. As it turned out, the black belt status, whilst very nice, was a disappointment to me, it was completely overrated. After the initial high of gaining the coveted grade, I felt worse than before. I wasn't just scared - now I was a black belt and scared. I looked around me at my peers: they certainly didn't look how I felt. I even asked them privately, 'Are you scared?' 'No way!' they lied. Must be just me then, I wrongly concluded. I was the only coward in the class, perhaps even the world (I had a tendency to exaggerate things in my mind).
I'd reached the physical goals I had set myself, and hoped along the way my mental physique would develop and I would erase my fear of real fighting. At times I kidded myself that I had, but I hadn't. I still worried because I couldn't control the massive explosion I felt inside every time I even smelt trouble.

There was one occasion, however, when I did temporarily rise above my fears.

My dad was brushing close to fifty-five, and you couldn't meet a more amicable, placid chap. I loved him. The two wankers who followed him out of the working men's club late one Saturday evening never, unfortunately, shared my love. My sister, sixteen at the time, her girlfriend and their two very young boyfriends walked from the club slightly ahead of my mum and dad. The chat was light and cheerful as they walked down the pavement towards home. The two that followed were out for a fight. My family was 'just there'; no other reason was necessary. One of the young men was a tall, weaselly tattoo-head, the other was short and stocky with short hair, a pig nose and slitty, shitty eyes; both were in their late teens. My family had no knowledge of their presence until they struck, in a completely unprovoked, mindless assault.

They set about the two young boys arm in arm with my sister and her friend, beating them mercilessly to the ground. The young girls screamed in horror and begged them to stop, but their pleas were met with verbal abuse and threats to 'stay back or be beaten back'. My dad, being of the old school, ran in to help the lads. He expected a little consideration due to his age, but got a hefty blow to the eye instead that sent him crashing to the floor. The initial punch was followed by several heavy kicks to his face and body. He was out of the game before he even realised he was in it. Dad watched semiconscious from the floor, as the two kicked the horizontal youths so hard that their unconscious bodies shifted along the floor. His face twisted in a writhing mask of pain.

This wasn't the first time they'd done this; mine wasn't the first father to meet with their wrath. They were, by all accounts, making a bit of a career out of violence, and were meeting little or no resistance. Their names were big in the area, and because of this they suffered no comebacks for their unsolicited attacks.

This time, though, they'd made a mistake. This time it was my dad they'd done.

The factory my family worked in was a big, thriving chemical plant in the north of the city that could be smelt for miles around. Its musty, vinegary, property-devaluing fragrance dug deep into its workers' paws and infested itself into their clothes, cars and furniture. Everything, in fact, with which it came into contact. I hated working there.
No one had told me of dad's attack. The first I knew of it was when I saw its aftermath in the form of the lumps and black bruises that covered his face as we met by the works' canteen. My greeting smile dissipated instantly and I stammered for words. My eyes welled with a blurry, salty film and my anger grew. I prayed that his injuries were just the result of an unfortunate, silly accident, but I knew my prayers lay on thin ice.

My dad unfolded the encounter. As the details scratched into my heart and etched themselves onto the plateau of my mind, I silently swore my revenge. Dad wanted an end to it, mum warned me to 'leave it', but the hurt inside me wouldn't let it lie. I had to let them, dad's attackers, and everyone else for that matter, know that you don't fuck with my family and get away with it.
A month of detective work, asking anyone and everyone about the incident, resulted in the names Smith and Davis. By the time my search had ended I knew more about them than their own mothers. I also knew that their time was running out. I decided not to phone them or visit their homes because they both had families and I didn't want to involve innocent parties. I would just bide my time and wait for the right moment.

The doorknocker of my third floor maisonette echoed at the 10.45pm knock. I opened the door to reveal Ken, my wife's brother.

'They're at the club now, Geoff.'

His simple message filled me with a concoction of fear and excitement. This was what I had been waiting for: my time and their time had come. I bowed the laces of my polished, black, steel toe-capped equalisers and made my way to the club.
The huge, high-ceilinged concert room in the newly built working men's club was filled to capacity. My eyes searched through old and young, tall and short, for the pair. Ken pointed Smith out to me as he headed for the toilet in the corner of the room. My blood boiled and I smiled to myself as I thought of doing the dirty deed in the loo, forcing his head into the urinal, sticking him down there with the other shit. But, attractive as the idea seemed, it wasn't practical - too many witnesses and too many people to stop me. I didn't want to be stopped.

'I know what you're doing here,' said Steve, a tall, ginger haired friend, interrupting my thoughts. 'He's bad news, Geoff. He always carries a knife. I know you do karate but, well, be careful.' He shook his head as though to underline his warning.
I knew he was concerned, but I also knew he was trying to worry-monger me and I felt a little insulted that he thought I would be put off so easily. Didn't he know that this was blood?

The last fifteen minutes of the night had me waiting in slow motion. I watched as Smith and Davis left their seats on the low balcony that rose slightly above and back from the sunken dance floor, two young girls following them as they passed Ken and I on their exit, not catching my look of hate. We followed them out onto the pavement, appropriately only yards from where they'd done my dad. Their laughing and joking ceased as I approached them from the rear.

'Hey, mate!' I called, with a slight quiver in my voice. Smith turned his head towards me. I hated him, despised him, loathed him, I wanted and needed to hurt him. Everything I despised in a person was epitomised in this piece of shit that stood before me, that dared to share the same pavement as myself, that had the audacity to breathe the same air. I saw my dad's face stretching in pain, felt his anguish as boot after boot landed heavily on his face, and sensed his feeling of absolute helplessness at the hands of this scum.

Bang! I put my right steel toe-capped foot into his eye, busting it into a gaping, bleeding wound, the contact of steel on bone sounding like a hammer hitting a girder. He landed heavily on the grass verge behind him, the two lady companions jumped back in fright and gave out the perfunctory squeal. Davis took a stance in front of me, his hands circling in a celluloid Kung-Fu style, puffing and sucking air in and out, trying, badly, to control his fear.

I took his measure then ploughed a left leg roundhouse into his lower abdomen. He crumpled over like a jack-knife and, before I could finish the job, Ken, who was only light-framed and young, lashed into him with fists and feet, leaving him in a bloody heap. Smith, who had obviously never played major league before, recovered some of his senses and ran for it. I gave chase, hurling much abuse at his yellow back. Two hundred yards up the road, when I thought I'd almost lost the chase, he tripped and fell: all my Christmases and birthdays came at once as I vented the anger that had been bubbling inside me. He covered up his head and crouched up his body as I kicked him savagely from head to foot. He begged me to stop but I couldn't. I kept seeing my dad's battered face in my mind.
My body, which had been aching for revenge, went into overdrive and only his whimpering, begging pleas for mercy eventually stopped me. Was this weak specimen at my feet really the tough guy I'd been warned to be careful of? Was he really the man I ought not to have crossed? He was nothing and will always be nothing. Sometimes now, years on, I still see Smith and he cowers under my shadow.

As I walked away he tried to get back to his feet, but his legs wouldn't hold him. He lay there like a dead thing reaping what he had sown. I celebrated the death of his reign, as did his many other victims.

What I learnt from this experience and from my constant searching and experimenting, was that the explosion inside my stomach that I had struggled so much to control was the adrenalin build-up, the 'fight or flight' syndrome, a hormonal release from the adrenals that hits and goes through the bloodstream like a bullet train, preparing the body for violent action. It makes you temporarily stronger and faster, and partially anaesthetises you from pain. The more dangerous the situation, the bigger the build-up and adrenalin release; the bigger the release the better you perform. But by the same count, the bigger the build-up and release the harder it is to control, i.e. the easier it is for you to bottle out.

Cus Damatio - the late adoptive father and trainer to Mike Tyson - once said that the feeling of fear is as natural as the feeling of hunger or thirst or of wanting to use the toilet. When you're hungry you eat, when you're thirsty you drink, and so it should be with the feeling of fear: you shouldn't panic under it, you should harness and then utilise it. So my goal became to control and master fear, rather than to erase it.

I had suffered so much apprehension in my young life that for many years I suffered from severe depression, often to the point where life was the very last place I wanted to live. Where these feelings of low self-worth came from I am not altogether sure, I only know that when they did come it was in abundance. On one particularly low occasion I went to the doctor for help. Now, when you go to the doctor, the very last port of call, and he gives you his answer in a little brown glass bottle, you feel as though your world has ended.

I was twenty years old and my future looked bleak. Depressed to the point of not wanting to leave the house, I tried one of the tablets as a very last resort. It tasted like shit and made my head loop-the-loop. I felt worse than before. I lay on the bed and sobbed. I got up and paced the floor to try and get the pain out of my head, I threw furniture and generally smashed the room up. Midway through my emotional outburst my young children came into the room screaming. Their daddy was a monster. I tried to console them but they recoiled in fright. I was devastated. I had frightened them and this saddened me beyond measure. I felt worthless, to myself and to them. I thought that smashing things might help, but I quickly realised, when my wife and kids looked at me like a stranger, when I saw that they were frightened of me, that it didn't.

I even took to having more showers. Maybe I could scrub these feelings of depression out of me? Apparently not, though I was the cleanest depressive in the western hemisphere. As I tossed another cup at the wall in an emotional outburst I caught a glimpse in the mirror of this very sad and lonely man, this desperate young person whom no one could help. He was even a stranger to me. This weepy youngster married with children, who had taken to following his wife around the house rather like a puppy, and who was scared of his own reflection, was not a person I recognised. As I looked in the mirror I could see only despair. I realised at this point that I had to do something and quickly. My life had hit a Titanic-iceberg and I was going down fast. First things first; I left the house and emptied the doctor's solution into the river. The fish were probably chilled out for days afterwards. I can imagine the fishermen having their best catch in years, the fish jumping onto the hooks saying, 'Hey man, no problemo, I'll take the bait, I'll chew on your hook.'

Tablets disposed of, I was on my way. Now for the hard part, picking my esteem back up from the floor where it was being kicked around like a football. I needed to do something that would enable me to face these feelings of depression and fear, and erase the negative thoughts that dragged the guts out of me. I needed to lay my fears out on the table and take a hammer to them. Smash the fuckers into tiny pieces before they smashed me. There was a part of me that wouldn't lie down, that was strong enough to carry me through sexual abuse as an eleven-year-old. I had to recognise and nurture this strength, make it a bigger part of me, in fact, make it all of me.

Then there was the melancholy side, the part of me that was now dominant, staring at and taunting me from the mirror like an inhabiting spirit. This shadow had to go - and if I had a cerebral .45 I'd have blasted the fuck out of it. I didn't have a weapon that'd do the job so, instead, I did the next best thing: I starved it, starved it until it was frail, then mercilessly cut the shadow out like a cancerous growth. I did this by paying it no attention. None. These weaknesses feed on negative thoughts, they banquet on attention. What we focus on all day long is what we become. I realised that this was my world, and that if I didn't want these bad thoughts to rape my mind then I ought to stop entertaining them. So thoughts became my sparring partners, and internally I worked every day to develop a gatekeeper that would keep the shit from my door. When the negative thoughts came into my head I ignored them, or talked over them with positive thoughts. I surrounded myself with beauty, art, great and inspiring books, positive people, I only watched empowering TV and only listened to radio shows that enlightened me and helped me to grow. But mostly it was books.

They say that the only way out of the rat race is through football or music, I found my way out through the library. I educated myself out of depression and despair by dispelling my fears with knowledge. Fear is just a shadow; information is the light.
I shone that light and I killed off the part of me that was trying to kill the whole. Sometimes you have to lose a finger to save a hand, so I did a little 'self surgery'.

In order to face down and eradicate what was left of my fears once I had starved them to emaciation, I needed a strong will. To build my will, I needed to start doing the things I was most frightened to do and stop doing the things I knew were not good for me. Real power is the ability to control yourself, not the ability to control others. I decided to confront my fears so that I could become desensitised to them. 'Confrontation desensitisation', if you like. How to go about it though? I couldn't just go out and look for fights - that would be going against my own moral and ethical codes and also the law of Karma: 'A good for a good, and a bad for a bad'.

This is where I developed my 'fear pyramid' (see my book, Fear - The Friend Of Exceptional People) as a means of overcoming my fears and building a strong will.

This can be a very private thing; it was with me. I know that a lot of people would not wish to share their more private fears with others, and this reticence is understandable, but you don't need to divulge publicly your more private apprehensions. You don't need to take out an ad in the local rag announcing 'I'm as scared as pants'. You don't need to share your deeper thoughts with the populace. I certainly didn't, though I have to say it does lessen the burden if you have someone trustworthy to share the load. A problem shared and all that. My 'someone' was my mum, and between this lovely lady and me we set about 'changing my mind'.

What I did have to do, though, was admit my fears, even if only to myself. I always used to fob myself off with stupid excuses like, 'I'm not scared of it (whatever 'it' may be), I just don't want to do it', and other such nonsense. I realised that this was the first and most important step, I couldn't go any further until this was complete. Even an alcoholic can't begin treatment until he first admits that he is an alcoholic.

So I admitted all the things that scared the crap out of me, and wrote them into a list. I drew a pyramid on a scrap of paper with as many steps to the top as I had fears - there were a lot of steps, I have to say. Then I wrote each fear on a step, starting at the bottom of the pyramid with my least fear and finishing at the top step with my greatest fear.
Once they were all down on paper I systematically confronted them, one at a time, from the bottom step to the top, confronting each one until I mastered it. It was a difficult time, I have to tell you, but on the way up the pyramid I found myself - as my confidence grew - confronting things that would normally have had me running to the loo like a tester at the laxative factory. I even stood up to the people I loved, who had become dominant and bullying. My wife for one. She didn't like the new me at all, but I figured that she had no respect for the old me because I was such a pushover, so I had nothing to lose. She went on the pyramid like the rest of the scary creatures. I went through my fears like a man on a mission, I had found a new lease of life, and the depressions I suffered from in my youth were smashed like brittle toffee and tossed to the side. My problems started when I got to the top of the pyramid.

My greatest fear was violent confrontation.

After much deliberation, the only way I could find around my dilemma was 'bouncing' in the Coventry pubs and nightspots. But it was a very big step with no means of meeting the challenge other than jumping in feet first and hoping for the best. But I had to ask myself, 'What if it all went wrong, what if it failed, what if I couldn't hack it?' Coventry seemed more famous these days for the monopoly it held on violence than for its three spires and Cathedral. I was riddled with self-doubt. I might get hammered, seven shades of shit might get kicked out of me and all the confidence I had thus far gained could be lost in the gamble. What if my bottle went? Getting the job wouldn't be too much of a problem with a black belt in karate, but if I was a success and held the position any length of time, I knew the bow tie on white shirt would effectively mean I had to take on all-comers. I was having a severe attack of the 'Jonah complex', or, in layman's terms, a fear of success. Abraham Maslow, the famous humanist psychologist, stated:
'We are generally afraid to become that which we can glimpse in our most perfect moments, under the most perfect conditions, under conditions of greatest courage. We enjoy and even thrill to the God-like possibilities we see in ourselves at such peak moments, and yet, simultaneously, we shiver with weakness, awe and fear before the same possibilities.'
So if I did raise the moral fibre to propel me into the kitchen of violence, could I stand the heat once there?
I thought of Rudyard Kipling's immortal words:
'If you can meet triumph and disaster and treat these two impostors the same, or watch the things you gave your life to broken and stoop and build them up with worn out tools, if you can make one heap of all your winnings and risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss and lose, and start again at your beginnings and never breathe a word of your loss, yours is the earth and everything that is in it, and - which is more - you will be a man my son.'

'Fuck it!' I said to myself, 'I'm gonna do it.' Thanks Rudyard.

The thought of living with my fears felt worse than the fear of getting beaten up, in that the former was long term, i.e. forever, and the latter was short term.

So began my term of office 'on the door'.