My son has recently starting punching me.  Mainly in the face.  He is three years old.

For someone who has spent their whole life avoiding the dubious pleasures of being hit in the face, to suddenly discover oneself literally being-hit-in-the-face is odd. 

The first time it happened, as the little but real fist was about to enter my face’s traditional zone of exclusion excepting lips and with a specific embargo on fists and feet, I was gifted with one of those insights you must thank violence for and indeed go in search of like some chump from a Palahniuk porno-novel to attain.  I had in fact, I realised, only just pre-punch, lived my whole life based on the ethics of avoiding being punched in the face.  In retrospect this was less than easy. 

Believe you me I don’t want to bore you with poverty.  We know all about that now and have pretty much banned it, by which I mean mention of it, except under the dual headings of Chav and Vicky Pollard.  Or round my way, pikeys.  There are no more the heroic poor. 

Yet reader it was once true, I didn’t have much muck to spread, I couldn’t grease the wheels, my pockets ran dry and so on.  Not just me you see but all of us as Stanfield High, a school so appalling it rebranded itself after I left, Hayward High, named pertinently after the hospital next door with which we always did such brisk trade.  A school that one might mistake for a hospital, you can guess the rest. 

We were moulah light, in that school, and accordingly fist-heavy.  Now that I think of it, I was considered a bit odd or bent for not liking a good kicking and a decent enough punching.  As I actively avoided fights and beatings in general, word got round that there was ‘summat wrong’ with me because I didn’t like being punched.  Heads were scratched momentarily, rather than bluntly battered, as the rest of the lads tried to work their way through it.

There was a clear division in the school between the bullies and the ‘poufs’ (who weren’t gay), the ‘gays’ (who weren’t gay), or ‘girls’ (who were boys), or posh (those that read books), or ‘packies’ (any person of different colour plus anyone else), or spacs (anyone at any time of unpopularity), or ‘poufs’ (who weren’t gay).  Obviously the bullies pummelled the spacs, also the speccies (who for once did were glasses) and the packies, so in that sense they were on the opposite side of the house so to speak.  Yet both came together under the distrust of someone who took against being punched. 

I would not for a moment suggest that the poufs liked being punched but you see being punched was, well it was a normal part of life.  It wasn’t as if the bullies or twats as they were often called (they were twats) didn’t get their fair share of face-time.  The bullies after all also punched each other and in fact to take a punch was part of the deal, along with a certain way with the trouser and the choice of boot.  So all was fair in war and war.  You got punched.

Nietzesche was right.  Underneath it all the horror of pure violence. The will to punch and the eternal return of the punch.

So the twats didn’t like me renouncing the law of punch, and the joey-crows didn’t either.  United they were in the who do you think you are, too good to be punched? attitude.  This, however, did not, as one could predict, result in all and sundry trying to apunch me more, knowing I liked it little than less. 

Instead it sort of cast a pall over the whole face-punch culture and for quite the time dead arms, dead legs, elbows to the back, kicking in the back of the knees and non-fatal stabbings with the small blade of a pen-knife, or sharp fork, or the in the seventies omnipresent compass, took over the good old fashioned fist to the face. 

But it was never quite the same and I sort of felt sorry for what I had inadvertently caused by deciding it was better not to be punched at all, not ever, not even once.  The kids sort of lost their identity and clear differentiation for each other.  Tribalism threatened to dissolve and what’s a school without its tribes? 

I was certain that some packies dead-legged some poufs that they never would have punched say, upsetting the natural order of dialectic hatred, while the bullies struggled to get their message across using multiplatform violence that some lacked training in and the feral savour for.

So one day I said I didn’t mind being punched in future, if the circumstances warranted it, not that I would seek it out, but it was no longer off the table.  It was my early version of don’t ask don’t tell: don’t punch don’t know that I don’t want to be punched.  Things got back on an even keel and while I got a lot of pouf and gay-girl-bummer-chummer-boy comments, the occasional packie, it just so happened, or did it, that the occasion never called for my apunchment.

That is until now.

Like all these things we build them up to make our lives more meaningful like trying to hate our colleagues so we can say we have an enemy only to find they are reasonable and normal and not really hateful at all.

‘How can you not get on with her?’ they asked me.  ‘She is so nice.’
Precisement.

Yes being punched in the face hurts, but perhaps you need an aptitude for it because in the end it left me cold.  Neither horrendous nor negligible, it added its name to the ever amassing weight of similar experiences which, as you pass forty, seems to be the majority.  Neither horrendous nor negligible, and their opposite number, neither amazing nor horrible. 

In some ways I was glad.  A man such as I am was ever made to punch, and a bumchum such as myself is best punched by a three year old, at least in the first instance, before I get a taste for it.  Or not.  This sudden development of violence on the part of my little angel has got it out of the way once and for all in one single bathetic bam!  So go ahead, punch me silly you twats and buggers, if you must.  I am past it.  School’s out, forever.

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Last edited by fnord (2011-05-10 14:33:57)