I will rip his arm off and beat him to death with the bloodied stump

My mum has been visiting me in Malta and I have loved our long walks and chats. It is such a blessing having her here and at almost 85 she has indomitable energy. I have enjoyed her company immensely, except for her wiping the floor with me in the game, Rumicube. If you haven't played this game, do yourself a favour and your family,  buy one now. She particularly enjoys beating my husband, at this game, as he hates to lose and is always ridiculously upset when she has a victory. His rage brings a smile of sheer contentment to her face.

On one of our long walks, we were late getting back to the flat. It was getting dark and the road home was blocked with a crane and trucks so we took a narrow dark back alley instead. It was only when we were halfway up I became aware of the darkness, lack of lights and total isolation of the lane. Suddenly, out of the darkness, an African man appeared. He approached us in an oddly agitated manner.

I have to explain here that I did many years of karate at university in my youth and this created an illusion for my mother that I was invincible in hand-to-hand combat. When my cousin and I were teenagers we headed off with backpacks across Europe. She told me she never worried about us because of my karate! This was a total misconception. Years later on the Isle of Wight, in England, I joined a self-defence class which was full contact. This is taught me many things. 

That all those years of karate, where you just touch your sparring partner softly, are light years away from the reality of a hard punch or kick. It showed me that even a tiny man is usually much stronger than the largest woman. I bruise easily and so my weekly defence classes resulted in me looking like a particularly bad domestic abuse victim. Colleagues at work would not believe otherwise and one hissed venomously to me in the toilet to “leave the bastard!” Before washing her hands and exiting the room.

Ron, the instructor, was outrageously vicious. Demonstrating how most women, when strangled face-to-face with the perpetrator, would instinctively try and remove the hands clenched around their throats. Ron screamed in irritation. 

“He is cutting off your oxygen and you're scratching his hands uselessly! Begging him to let you go with your last breath.”

 He glared at the class and particularly at the woman members. 

“You still think you can win by appeasement! Well, you can't! By thinking like that you get too badly injured to do anything. Most men's instinct is to fight for their lives, women hope they can talk their way out!”

He then demonstrated that instead of flailing at the hands clenched around your neck, you should instantly jab two fingers as hard as possible into the assailant’s eyes. His two finger strike straight to the face of his opponent (stopping just centimetres from the eyeballs) had all of us women screwing up our faces in distress. At this, Ron launched into an excited rant, 

“You see, you’re all thinking, you couldn't do that to anyone. It's too vicious! But if your life depends on it, get vicious!  Get angry fast, it could save your life!”

“If you're in a dark lane and you hear footsteps from behind keep walking, keep close to the right wall. That way the attacker has to come to you from the left side. Now, you need to get angry fast. Imagine the bastard has murdered the person you love most in the world. Feel the adrenaline surges as your anger grows. Then, when he actually touches, you strike hard as if you want to kill them. Strike and run. Imagine you've only got one shot, so make it hard. They'll be expecting shock and fear from you, not rage and anger.

I practised imagining the assailant had just hurt my mum and when my sparring partner grabbed my left shoulder from behind I turned on him like a banshee (~wild Irish woman) cursing and punched him on the face with a roundhouse swing that felt like it came from all the hatred I could muster. Ron had been impressed, I had been shocked at myself and my sparring partner sported a huge mark on the left side of his face. I was also riddled with guilt. Obviously, my powers of imagination had been a little too excessive.

So here, 20 years later, I was in a dark lane with a potential assailant and my tiny sweet 84-year-old mother was at my side. Ron’s training flashed quickly into my mind. If he touches my mother I thought, I will rip his arm off and beat him to death with the bloodied stump. Adrenaline surged, I clenched my fist, prepared to bite his nose off. I was even prepared to do a bit of Ron’s eyeball poking!

Meanwhile, the African guy kept asking us to take a piece of pizza that he held in a box in front of him. My mother was calm but insisted that she already eaten didn't want anything but smiled her gratitude. I'm thinking my poor innocent mum has no idea of the danger she’s in. She's never been hit, never raised her hand to another human being. What sense can she make of all this? It's up to me to defend her, this is the moment Ron warned me about. To be ready, to be angry, the minute he touches her, he's a dead man!

Then tears started streaming down the guy’s face.  He says he's from the Sudan. His father died five years ago today.  He doesn't want to eat alone he wants to share his meal with us in memory of his father. We are standing in the dark lane and he's blocking our way offering a piece of pizza. I'm still thinking perhaps this is a ploy. Are there others waiting in the darkness to attack us. Friends of his? Blocking our way, he's probably keeping us here until they attack!

My mother moves in and hugs him in a wide embrace. I'm so expecting violence, I am completely thrown. She holds him close and suddenly I can see the genuine sadness and loss on his face. He wipes his tears with the back of his hand and my mother says he must come to our house and eat with us. She instructs me to give him my card so he knows where to go. I give him my card he shakes my hand politely and disappears into a nearby rusty metal doorway.

We walked the short journey home. My mother comments gently,

“What a nice lad that was! It is sad he's lost his father. It's difficult to be alone in this world far from loved ones.”

 I can say nothing I am exhausted by all the rage and adrenaline. Having too much imagination is a draining traumatic affliction.

Making Failure An Art Form - or falling with style

I have come to momentous moment in my life. At this stage, when there are no longer children around to focus on it is time to examine oneself with clarity.  To see where I have come from, where exactly I am now and hopefully to look forward to the path ahead. It is a eureka moment indeed to reflect on life. What one has achieved, or hasn’t.  What choices lead to which results. It looks a bit like an underground tube station map. There are main lines along which one has spent a disproportionate amount of energy and time. Then, there are the numerous dead ends. Lines that seem to beckon appealingly but end nowhere. Here are a few.

My unproductive knitting hobby. I never managed to finish single item. I even had a knitting machine with which I wrestled but produced nothing of value.  Looking back at primary school we had to knit a cushion cover. It took an entire year. Those were the days when the whole class would sit obediently knitting in complete silence for an hour a day. Educationalists would hold their heads in outrage at the waste of time it entailed.  The lack of academic content. Question the learning objectives and value of skills acquired. Point out the demanded silence was a form of abuse against talkative young eager minds. But if I'm honest I enjoyed knitting more than almost all my other classes.  There was a meditative silent stillness in the room. Just a click click of needles. You knew the task. The method was straightforward and when you returned to your work you could see visible progress each day. It achieved something. Your brain could find a stillness in the moment.  In the year, I almost finished my cushion cover. My tendency to knit tighter and tighter until the needles could barely get through the stitches meant I had a lot of ripping out and re-doing to do. My cushion cover which started almost a foot wide gradually narrowed down to 2/3 of its original width. This was disappointing but accepted as part of the journey. The knitting class became a metaphor for the rest of life. Sometimes you make a pigs ear out of things and have to go back to fix it. It's okay you get better each time you repeat something. Spotting a slip earlier rather than later helps. Missing a single stitch is not an option. You have to keep each and every one to have success. Don't waste time comparing your cushion cover with others. You'll be devastated by how far ahead they’ve got and what nicer colours they’ve chosen.  

My failed martial arts ability. Fuelled by movies I was convinced that I could get my black belt and go through life confident in every situation. It did make me fitter but I got no further than the yellow belt. That is not something one can boast or swagger about.  The kata were wonderful. I would go to an empty gym near my home and put on a cassette player (yes, that far back) and do the karate moves hypnotically until it felt as meditative as the knitting. I did not like spar fighting. It involves being punched and kicked and I was fearful of both. For some reason I was usually paired with a curly haired tough looking girl who would fight arms flailing like a paddle steamer round and round. It was impossible to block those blows as we been taught in karate and so I'd spend an inordinate amount of the fight running backwards around the mat. Fortunately, she wasn’t fit and usually ran out of steam before she could do me much harm. I learnt a lot. I do not like to be hurt and did not enjoy hurting others. So it was worth all the years of classes and is a somewhat valuable dead-end.

My inability to lose weight. I have kept diaries almost all my life and at the top from the very earliest I have recorded my weight in stones and pounds with despair. I look back at those weights with longing and wonder why on earth I obsessed about it.  If I knew then what I know now, I would have chilled out about being 10 stone. Now I dream of being under 11 stone. Elderly aunts used to say I had big bones, it drove me mad as an adolescent. I reckoned there were big dinosaur girls like me and other tiny fragile girls. I with my big bones obviously belong to the former group. These tiny birdlike aunts belonged to the latter category. I often broke things, handles off doors, cups, even windows and was terrified I might injure these elderly visitors with their matchstick arms, legs and necks. But they were tougher then they seemed and made me feel guilty and awkward. When today, I look at magazine covers of slim women staring out with razor cheekbones at slender bodies, I realise that such shapes are more appreciated than my broader lines. As a tall,sturdy, Yorkshire police woman friend of mine once moaned “if I'm reincarnated, I'm coming back as one of those butterfly women whose cases others have to carry!”  While there is genuine despair at the yearly expansion of quantity, regarding fat, perversely I'm infinitely grateful for being able to haul heavy gas cylinders up flights of stairs. After all quality (strength) trumps quantity (of fat content) every time.

My last dead end is an inner critical voice.   This strident voice has been heard echoing  through the decades. “You'll never pass, achieve or amount to anything!” How many initiatives died a death under the whithering machine gun of its cutting comments. Instead of pressing on to finish that knitting, get that black-belt or lose that weight I succumbed to that sneering tone of derision from within and gave up. If someone else voiced such hurtful jibes I'd respond with righteous contempt. But when that voice comes from deep inside your own brain your heart goes out of any enterprise. So having reflected on the past with clarity, my eureka moment was finding out that every path and turn has been plagued by an unnecessarily negative companion. As a dear friend Eleni announced when she returned from a weeks holiday in Paris with her husband. “He spent the whole time complaining about the price of coffee, bread, train tickets, taxis and the hotel room. As we walked down the Champs-Elysees, he whined about missing his own bed!”  She decided that this was the last holiday she would ever go with him. When I tried to remonstrate with her she became more emphatic.  “I mean it, if he's going to heaven I'm choosing hell. If he is going to Hell then I better be in heaven. In fact, heaven is going anywhere where he is not.” Her exasperation was excessive but she made a point that resonates.  So on careful reflection I’ve decided to be equally callous with my inner critic.  It is not a voice of humility nor does it provide an analytical perspective. It has to go! How to shut it up, is the tricky thing? At least, the direction ahead is clear. I'm excited about the future that could be mine, if like a stubborn nose polyp, this useless vocal appendage can be excised at last. 

Sexual Assault in France

I was always a nervous traveller.  I expected that on a given train there would be a few murderers and rapists, as well as at least a dozen thieves.  So travelling on a train with this mindset posed its own difficulties.  Each carriage was inspected with care.  Four guys in a carriage was just asking for trouble.  Two women of stocky build could overcome me, so their carriage was risky and  should be left as well.  I usually ended up in a compartment with a tiny elderly weak lady as I would tell myself even if she were a killer, given my size and their age, I could probably take her down.  Deciding on which carriage to travel in was a major part of the first half hour of travel and I did not rush into it. 

All of this is plain weird, I know, and will seem even stranger when I tell you that I studied martial arts for years and even attended self defence classes too.  For a whole year I attended a full contact dojo on the Isle of Wight and ended up each week covered in bruises and bumps from being kicked and punched.  I can tell you there was a world of difference between someone punching at you but stopping at the skin and another kicking you from the front as if he wanted to dislocate your spine.  I learned many things, that bigger people kick you harder, thin lean men can be incredibly strong, being kicked is much worse than being punched and why women are so often badly hurt in attacks.  Our trainer told us that women are usually in placating mode when they are attacked.  They hope that by doing so their attacker will stop hurting them.  This, they continue to do even when the attacker continues to hurt them badly.  He was full of instructions about poking out eyeballs and other   gruesome techniques. 

I didn’t like any of it and decided on my own approach – that was pre attack preparation.  My carriage checking was a way of avoiding any conflict, and I felt that it made sense to put the odds in your favour.  Another pre attack policy was never to look as if you don’t know where you are going.  Vulnerability is sensed by the predator.  For years I was amazed that the world changed when I went on walks with my sister in law.  She is terrified by dogs and on spotting one almost half a mile away would begin to dance nervously behind me arms shaking, crying her distress.  It was like an irresistible invitation for any dog in the vicinity and I was constantly amazed how dogs would come from everywhere zoning in on her distress signals.  So too, in strange cities wandering around with maps and looking lost brings upon you all sorts of weirdoes.  Instead, I developed the practice of walking purposefully, as if you know where you are going even when you are lost.  Indeed, there are several major cities where I have found myself wandering lost in areas that I can remember vaguely being lost before in! 

I remember years ago going across France and my cousin decided hitch hiking was the way to speed things up, against my heated arguments.  A tiny French car stopped with a huge fat French man squeezed in behind the front steering wheel and his seat.  His stomach made a huge indent to allow for the steering wheel to fit.  His hair was positioned carefully over a bald head and kept in place by a liberal supply of sweat glistening everywhere.  We had gone only a mile or so before he pulled into a lay-by and started kissing my cousin on the mouth despite her protests.  I thought about hitting him on the back of the head with a swift chop, from the back seat, and then worried that he might stop kissing her and pull a knife or a gun.  So I opened the back door and threw both our rucksacks out onto the road instead.  My cousin extracted herself out the front door and the French fat guy took off at full speed.  We stood there, on an empty dusty road, my cousin spitting furiously on the road to clear all taste of his assault, both of us traumatised by what had happened.  Mind you to put things in perspective, I might not have unleashed a well trained karate chop on his neck (despite years of training) but my pre attack preparation served me well.  Why do you think my cousin ended up in the front seat and not me?

 Having past the half century age I no longer worry so much about train carriages and weirdoes.  Now, I concentrate on not putting my clothes on inside out and find I have become the possibly weirdest person I am ever likely to meet.  I certainly would not choose to share a train carriage or car with someone like me and that is strangely comforting in a sad odd way.