The worst thing about being punched in the face by a stranger on Christmas Day wasn’t that it happened twice: it was that, the second time, my friends accidentally helped him out. It was after Christmas Eve drinks at 2am when the punch landed, and I’m still not clear what I did to provoke it – the best my assailant could offer, as I stood there confused with an aching jaw, was that I had been “in there, giving it all that”. Possibly I’d been dancing over-enthusiastically to the Divine Comedy’s Gin Soaked Boy, which my local nightclub, The Gallery, loved using as a closer around Christmas 1999. Maybe it was something else. For me, there was no warning: one second I was waiting for my friends to get their post-club chips, the next, I was asking a man why he’d just hit me in the face. It didn’t calm him down at all.
Then, of course, my friends intervened. My dear, sweet, idiot friends, whose only experience of fight-intervention tactics came from Jackie Chan films and Harry Enfield sketches, decided that the best tactic at this point would be to physically hold me back, while telling me to “calm down” because the guy “wasn’t worth it”. The guy, of course, happily availed himself of the opportunity to hit me again, right in the same spot.
After that, I ran off. What else was I going to do? My friends came with me, and the guy and his friends sort of lazily gave chase – but nobody’s heart was really in it, and soon enough we all stumbled home to get a few hours of sleep before dressing gowns and presents. The next time I thought about the punch was when one of my friends rang after Christmas lunch to check that I was all right, a genuinely thoughtful gesture that almost led to the worst possible outcome: my mum worrying about me.
I told my mum my friend was ringing to check on my hangover, which helped reassure her that I had lovely friends, then I watched the traditional array of Christmas films, pleased that at least I hadn’t fallen over and banged my head on the concrete.
More than anything, I was embarrassed. I know that being assaulted is bad, often traumatic, and can come with consequences far more dire than an aching (but unbruised) jaw. But for 20-year-old me, the worst part was not having a clue what to do. I had been dabbling in Japanese jiujitsu for a year or so at university – the sort of martial art where you’re encouraged to telegraph your punches like a John Wayne villain, then artistically somersault to the ground at the slightest pressure on your wrist.
In a way, the two punches I had been hit with taught me more than anything I’d done to get my green belt – they helped me understand, in a single moment of clarity, that none of it really worked. I spent the rest of the Christmas holiday keeping my friends away from my mum, and then joined a muay thai class.
That experience shaped quite a significant chunk of my life from then on. Muay thai was great fun and much more immediately practical than complicated wristlocks. Eventually I started dabbling in other styles – Brazilian dance-fight art capoeira first, then Chinese wushu when the novelty of doing cartwheel kicks wore off.
My mum, who always tried to be encouraging but was (rightly) worried about my face, dutifully put up with me practising in the garden over subsequent Christmas holidays and bought me a book that included advice on how to chop bottles in half with your bare hands one year. My dad, who probably seeded the ground a bit by buying me a lot of Batman comics, seemed mystified. I did actually get my nose broken at one point, but I managed to hide that from my parents for more than a decade.
And then things escalated. I went to the Shaolin monastery in China’s Henan province for a month, then to Phuket in Thailand to sharpen my kicking skills and Rio de Janeiro to get better at grappling. I had a handful of amateur mixed martial arts fights – yes, in an actual cage – and then, quite a long time later, got my black belt in Brazilian jiujitsu, the ultra-practical style now being practised by Mark Zuckerberg and Demi Lovato. These days, I’m teaching a mixture of students, engineers and rewilding experts how to scrap and it’s one of the most rewarding things I have ever done.
I’ve never been in another non-organised fight, but that’s also part of the point. That one, early, not-very-harmful experience with violence taught me how unpredictable and difficult it can be to deal with the real sort – and helped me to avoid it wherever I can. That, I suppose, is the real gift my spontaneous face-puncher gave me – he got the brief dopamine rush of bruising his knuckles on a stranger’s jaw, and I got a lifetime of adventures, friends and realistic expectations around the effectiveness of self-defence classes.
I would almost like to thank him, but I still don’t know why he hit me – so if you’re out there, mystery man, please do get in touch. I promise, I just want to talk.
