I’ve only ever suffered a punch to the face – a proper bare-knuckle blow, powered by malice – on one occasion.
A one-off event like that is always likely to stick in the mind. But it was also memorable for its sheer strangeness.
Thankfully there’s no trauma surrounding the incident. I guess technically what happened to me was common assault, although I’ve never thought of it in that way.
If I reconstruct the incident in detail – like, say, for a wry long-form biographical reminisce on a blog – then I can still kindle some residual bitterness from what happened.
But mostly there’s just a sense of… well, that was weird.
Remembrance of road rage past
I’ll set the scene: I’m stomping home on a winter’s evening, in late 2004 or maybe early 2005. My Walkman is whirring away, deep in an overcoat coat pocket. Maybe I’m listening to drivetime radio. Maybe there’s a mixtape going.
My walk takes me past the entrance to a pub car park, which opens straight onto the pavement. I’m crossing the entrance when I notice the beams of someone’s headlights, wheeling around at high speed to train directly on me. The movement is accompanied by the loud and prolonged sound of a horn being sounded.
I snap my head to the side to see that a van has lurched to a halt in the road. Clearly, the driver is annoyed that he’s being made to wait before he can access the car park. He obviously hasn’t checked for pedestrians before starting on his turn across the opposite lane.
To me, the angry horn-tooting seems to be an unnecessary and entitled reaction. There are no special road markings here. All I’ve done is continue an unbroken walk along the pavement, as is my right.
Impulsively, I reach my right hand across my body and, without looking at the driver or breaking step, I briefly extend my middle finger. A moment later, the van surges past behind me.
I shake my head, roll my eyes and turn my thoughts to the rest of my evening. I turn down a deserted side road to continue the final stage of my walk, which will eventually take me uphill past the welcoming glow of the local pub and on toward my house.
Shortly after making that turn, I become aware of a growing disturbance behind me. I remove an ear bud to check what’s happening and then turn to find the source of the noise.
Sure enough, I’m being accosted.
White Van Man sees red
I turn to see a very angry man, puffed up with righteous indignation, stamping up to confront me. I realise immediately, with a touch of disbelief, that this is the guy who honked at me just a minute or so ago.
I can tell he’s spoiling for a fight. He must have had a very bad day
He’s maybe 10-15 years older than me, of a similar height, hair short or maybe balding. In terms of build he’s a little chunkier but he’s sturdy with it – he doesn’t sit behind a desk all day.
This is classic White Van Man, sent from Central Casting to ruin my evening.
In the moment, it all feels faintly ludicrous. He actually parked and then ran down the road – a distance of perhaps 100 metres – then followed me into a side road, just to continue our petty altercation.
I can tell immediately that he’s spoiling for a fight. He must have had a very bad day up until that point because his rage is way out of proportion with what’s just happened.
I may as well have kicked his dear old mum to the ground or cast aspersions on his manhood, live on national television. He is incredibly angry. The man’s pride is seriously wounded.
“Oi. OI! Mr Brave!?” he shouts at me.
Now this is fascinating. Not ‘dickhead’ or ‘prick’ or ‘c*nt’.
No, Mr Brave.
Even in the heat of the moment I’m struck by this weird, awkward choice of insult. The accusation of cowardice seems to speak volumes about his insecurities.
It’s not that I’m rude or careless. What is significant is my cowardice, my lily-livered refusal to… what, exactly? Stay and see if he had anything further to add to our exchange?
We’re done, mate. That’s how road rage works: you honk, I give you the finger, we all move on with our lives.
Well, not tonight apparently. Enough is enough.
Your way or the Highway Code
He accuses me of making a run for it after flipping him off. My high-tempo march betrays me as a craven.
That this is my normal walking speed on a cold evening – and that my middle finger is all that I wish to contribute on the matter – is a nuance that will be lost in the ensuing altercation.
In an act of breathtaking futility, I try to offer a reasoned response with reference to the Highway Code.
“What are you talking about?” I point out. “It was my right of way.”
You’ll notice that this is a line of reasoning that would only placate a fellow rules nerd.
Even if we had the Highway Code in front of us, and I politely highlighted the salient lines for him, it wouldn’t make a blind bit of difference to his convictions.
The fact is that every driver– certainly any driver who has been on the road for longer than a year or two – has their own personal Highway Code.
People think they know the rules. Where they’ve forgotten them, they rely on moral intuition and their own hazy honour system to get by.
As we reach this dialectical impasse – I’m a coward, he’s ignorant – things escalate quickly.
I have a very clear premonition of what’s coming. In fact, the thought is actually articulated in my head, in words that carry more amazement than anxiety.
Wow. He’s going to punch me. He’s actually going to punch me.
The first rule of Fight Club
Although it happens quickly, you can argue I have time to dodge or even try to block his attack.
Really, I should be able to. I spent up to three hours per week for several years training in Taekwon-Do. And this wasn’t just memorising patterns and working on flexibility. This included a gruelling weekly class consisting of 45 minutes of circuit training followed by 45 minutes of sparring.
It was light contact, with punches and kicks pulled, but inevitably blows would connect with some frequency. There were bruises and the occasional nosebleed.
After one memorable session, my dad (who trained with me) found himself attending high-level business meetings with a prominent black eye that left him looking like a white-collar Fight Club convert.
I hadn’t trained for several years by the time of the road rage altercation but in theory I had all the tools I would need to at least avoid getting hit in the face.
And yet: can an animal change its essential nature?
When offered a menu of ‘fight, flight or freeze,’ I reliably pick option three. Confronted by something strange or scary, my brain usually responds with “let’s wait for more data”.
Standing on the sidelines
A few years earlier I’d been working in a bookstore that was playing host to a book signing by celebrity chef and Countryside Alliance doyenne, Clarissa Dickson Wright. Animal rights groups were protesting her appearance outside the store and a violent disruption inside was seen as a real possibility.
The moist, squishy cushion of my top lip absorbs and spreads the force of the blow
Sure enough, saboteurs gatecrashed the event, barging through the crowds to attack Dickson Wright (and her stack of recipe books) with paint.
As several of my colleagues rushed in to tackle the protestors, I stood watching from the sidelines in quiet fascination, unable to process what was happening fast enough to make any useful contribution.
And so, in a similar fashion, I watch with bystander-like detachment as White Van Man winds up, and sends his fist towards my baffled, handsome face.
The right hook lands but it probably doesn’t have quite the effect my assailant expected. He misses my nose, and his knuckles hit hard, directly below it. The moist, squishy cushion of my top lip absorbs and spreads the force of the blow across the hard palate of my upper jaw.
Nothing breaks, nothing bleeds and no teeth are dislodged.
Everyone has a plan…
It would be dishonest to suggest that I shrug off the attack in the manner of the T-800. But I certainly don’t stagger back in agony, or clutch my mouth in shock.
I just stand there, blink for a second and then repeat, slightly dumbfounded, that it was my right of way.
The puce tradesman frowns at me in confusion. He isn’t sure what to do next.
He’s punched me once – already a mite excessive under the circumstances – and I haven’t crumpled, run away or insulted him further. So, what now?
To flip Mike Tyson’s famous observation on its head, “everyone has a plan until they punch you in the mouth.”
He huffs at me some more, and glowers at me –anger mixed with bewilderment. Then he reluctantly walks away, fuming, while I stand there on the pavement, looking disbelievingly back at him.
I always imagine that, by the time WVM got back to the pub, our little altercation had been burnished into a suitably heroic narrative. He knocked me down on my arse. He saw the fear in my ears. Maybe I cowered and ran off. Maybe there was blood. He settled the score.
Perhaps, as he nursed his first pint of Carling, whatever psychodrama he was nursing – money worries, an unfaithful partner, a toxic boss, a wayward child – felt a little less painful, eased by the knowledge that he’d chased me down and kind-of, sort-of defended his honour.
To fight another day
Inevitably when the incident has come up in conversation during the intervening years, the question has been asked: could you have won a real fight with him?
To which my response is: I don’t know. Maybe, in theory, if my heart had been in it. I was certainly younger and in better shape than him.
But really what would that have involved? What does that actually mean? It only means the fantasy of what a fight is.
It’s not a licensed bout, where someone can win on points. Neither is it the Colosseum, where we do battle until one of us wilts from blood loss and Caesar renders his verdict. It’s not even a car park scuffle, where you can rely on your mates to intercede if things get really out of hand.
It’s two grown men enacting an awkward, ugly fracas in an empty street, exchanging clumsy blows until someone falls to the ground or becomes cowed enough to withdraw.
No, I didn’t consider him a physically intimidating threat, even as his temper reached fever pitch.
Had he been taller, fitter, more menacing, then I might well have backed off instead of standing there like a weirdo. I might even have grudgingly apologised, just for the sake of avoiding an unpleasant end to my evening.
Mutually assured destruction
Similarly, I can imagine that if a member of my family was being threatened at that moment then, yes, I might have returned fire.
I’ve found myself nose to nose with a guy for raising his voice at my pregnant wife. I’ve experienced that unpleasant, uncivilised sensation of the blood rising, of the body reflexively gearing up for self-defence.
By that point in my life, getting punched in the face by an angry stranger seemed par for the course
But that evening in the street, I didn’t feel any of that.
In fact, seconds after I registered that I was going to be punched in the face, another premonition entered my mind with a similar level of clarity: If you retaliate, this is only going to get worse for both of you. You don’t want a fight.
WVM disappeared around the corner. After a few moments of confused contemplation, I turned and walked home.
Along with a spreading numbness in my face, I felt an odd kind of nihilistic acceptance.
I was a deeply unhappy and rudderless postgraduate. I’d recently endured the rapid termination of both a three-year relationship and an eight-year friendship. So, by that point in my life, getting punched in the face by an angry stranger seemed par for the course.
As I approached my house, the second guessing began: should I at least have tried to defend myself? But I batted the idea away, focusing on the pride I felt in taking a punch and forcing my assailant to walk away.
This stoic afterglow lasted about as long as it took for me to walk to the bathroom and check my face in the mirror.
Disfigured and demoralised
In contrast to my father’s rather rakish black eye, I’d been left with perhaps the least valorous war wound imaginable.
Dad looked like he’d been in a good old-fashioned punch-up. I looked like I’d had fillers. My upper lip, while mercifully free of cuts and sores, was swelling up rapidly.
WVM thought he delivered his retribution with that punch. He didn’t realise Mr Brave’s real comeuppance would be the humiliation he faced while walking around with a trout pout.
The next morning, like many of my colleagues, I walked through the lobby of my office building with a scarf wound around the bottom half of my face. I just didn’t remove it when I got to my desk.
I spent the day tapping away at my computer in hopes of being left alone, occasionally having to recite my tale of woe, the more admirable aspects of which were now totally occluded by my comically plump upper lip.
Also, I had to endure other people’s armchair theories of how they’d have reacted in my place.
By that point, all of my high-minded convictions about pragmatism and pacifism had ebbed away. Comic-book revenge fantasies simmered in my mind. I wished ardently that I’d got in a few punches of my own, however inept, to give my tradesman assailant something to remember me by.
I finally had the anger I needed to work with, but it was too late.
Yet looking back, I think the voice in my head made the mature call in telling me not to retaliate, and I’m glad I never had that longed-for opportunity to reencounter Angry White Van Man. Who knows if my heart would have been in it, even a second time around, even with retribution on my mind?
Life doesn’t offer up many rematches but, as unfair as that seems, I suspect we’re better off for it.
