I took my first real beating when I was 16 years old.
Before that fateful Saturday night I had come off worse in a few spats in playground and park but this was something else. This was my first close encounter with violence. This was a good hiding. This was one of those undeniable, unmanning defeats where I was flat on my back and being pummelled in the face, and it did not end until someone dragged off the youth kneeling on my chest. The violence was short, ugly and vicious - just like my opponent - and it seemed to explode out of nowhere. There was a woman involved - no, she was a girl, loving all the attention - and some hearsay, and wounded pride, and alcohol. And what more did young men ever need to start throwing punches?
It wasn't much of a fight. They rarely are. When it all kicks off, what usually happens is that someone wins emphatically and immediately. But it is hard to beat someone up. Adrenaline exhausts you much faster than mere physical exertion ever could. Your fragile hands connect with hard bone and sharp teeth. Your spiked blood pressure means your punches are thrown wildly and sometimes completely miss their target. And even if you are winning - even if you are the one kneeling on someone's chest, even if you are dishing violence out rather than sucking it up - there's always the fear of what might happen to you if things go too far. But if it is hard to win a fight, then try losing. You never understand how sickening violence is until you have been on its receiving end. I got up off the ground with what were superficial injuries. A black eye and some scuffed skin. My Ben Sherman shirt had lost a few buttons. I had kept my front teeth.
But my pride was annihilated.
Read more: Bear Grylls on how to avoid a fight
Beyond any physical injury, losing that first fight was humiliating. It was crushing. It was worse than being left by any woman. It was worse than being sacked from any job. It took away my sense of self-worth and left it out for the bin men.
When I got home, my mum wept at the state of me. But my father - a man with a PhD in violence, a scarred old soldier, a heavily decorated killer - just stared at me. And before my father turned his attention back to Match Of The Day, he uttered the truth that every man and boy must learn about violence.
"There's always someone tougher than you are," my dad told me.
You would think that men would grow out of this stuff. You might reasonably hope that there would come a time in our lives when we put all violence behind us. Scrapping over some mousey girl at some dismal party - it sounds as appealing as acne. You might think that the eternal proposition - how is a man to live in this world? - would evolve to a point where violence is the last thing we have to worry about. But violence, you will learn, is always out there.
You kid yourself that violence is behind you now - disappearing in your rear-view mirror forever, just like drugs and promiscuity and poverty, one of those youthful phases we eventually shed like dead skin. But violence is always with us. The fight-or-flight response doesn't go away just because your hair has a smattering of grey.
As growing boys and young men, the threat of violence is as all pervading as the weather. The threat is there at the school gates and over the park, and later it is there in parties and clubs and pubs. But you grow up.
You stop chasing every passing girl and start loving one woman. You are suddenly deadly serious about your career. You start staying home most nights. And then - the greatest change of all - you become a father. And once you become a father, you have someone in your life that you are ready to die for. You discover that fighting to protect your child comes more naturally than breathing.
Read more: Tony Parsons on when to start a family
I was recently driving with my daughter, who is 14, when one of the global rich who are buying up our neighbourhood nearly ran us off the road in his shiny new black Mercedes. I exploded. And if the driver who nearly hurt my daughter and I had said one word to me then I would have knocked his head into the back seat. And when it was over, my daughter was looking at me as if she was seeing me for the very first time. It was not a good moment for either of us.
But it reminded me that violence is still out there. It can appear at any time. You do not have to go looking for it. Sometimes violence finds you. And a man needs to do more than merely fear it.
It is a cliché often repeated that a real fight is nothing like the movies. A real fight is also nothing like the gym. It is nothing like the dojo. Any form of fighting in a controlled environment is nothing remotely like a real fight because there is the assumption of fairness. Any kind of sparring has a code of honour. Violence is not like that.
In sparring, you do not gouge your opponent's eyes or boot him in the testicles. He does not whack you when you are down. In a real fight all of these things happen. You don't get multiple assailants in a nice karate class. But you do down at the Rat & Trumpet at closing time. Violence isn't fair. Someone wins almost immediately and the rest of it is nothing but damage.
There is great value in doing any kind of combat sport - they keep you fit and remove your terror of getting hit - but they can never replicate real violence. They can't even prepare you for it. If you spar, then you are almost certainly sparring with people you know and like. But if someone tries to crack your skull in a bar, then he is inevitably some random stranger who hates your guts.
Read more: Real men get facials
You can do martial arts for years without ever becoming a martial artist. I did kung fu but I was never a martial artist. But my teacher was a martial artist in his blood and bones. I once watched him walking down the street towards some little gang. He was neither afraid nor aggressive. He was completely self-contained. And I watched as that little gang parted to let him pass, without, I suspect, even knowing that they were doing it. But he was a martial artist. And no matter how hard we train, most of us will never carry ourselves with the calm self-possession of my kung fu teacher.
There are two types of men who find themselves drawn to combat sports. There are the wild boys who want to learn to fight because it harnesses some inner demons and there are those who have been bullied, often all the way to the hospital. My kung fu teacher was the latter - he had taken up martial arts in the first place because he had been brutally picked on as a teenager. He was a gentle-natured, quiet man who could kick me from one side of a room to the other. And once, after getting into a fight with a passing creep who had insulted my girlfriend, I sought his advice about what I should have done differently.
"You should have walked away," he told me.
But what if you are not man enough to walk away?
Hard men - true hard men - always say that violence is never worth the price you have to pay. Because the consequences of violence are unknowable. This is the best reason to avoid violence. If it kicks off, you could lose your front teeth or your job or your life. You could end up in hospital or prison. This is all serious, life-warping stuff. The chances are you will have no idea about your opponent's strengths. And, whatever happens, there will be nothing remotely reasonable about it. Every fight risks you killing someone or putting them in a coma - or having the same done to you. Even if you win - even if you emerge without a scratch - nothing good is going to come out of it. And if violence happens in the work environment - as it did with me in my first job - then your career risks coming to a stop before it has begun.
In my first job as a journalist, I had a fight in the office, some six years after I took that beating. This time I was at the other end of the violence. In some ways, it was worse. My editor would have been within his rights to kick me out. My opponent could have called the police. And for what? Hurt pride over some woman when there were a million better women waiting just around the corner. That is the mindlessness of violence. You play Russian roulette with your health, your career, your freedom. You risk everything for so little.
Read more: Why some men stray
Violence lasts for almost no time at all but the messy aftermath - to body, to mind, to career - can echo through the years. Violence is always ugly, brutal and senseless. And yet we can't deny that it holds a fascination for us. All boys want - long, crave, yearn - to be harder than they really are, and all men know in their heart that they will never be quite hard enough for what the world has waiting.
And we are never so evolved that the concept of being hard is alien to us. We understand the power of violence. How its threat protects everything we love. How violence could take it all away. Yes, violence sickens the heart whatever end of the beating you are on. But you can't grow out of violence because it is central to any man's life. Anyone who thinks that having a mortgage and a moisturising regime puts him beyond violence is deluding himself. Learning to deal with violence is key to being a man.
The experts on violence I have known - the two men who taught me to fight, the father who taught me to be a man - always advise an instinctive pacifism. Make like Jesus and turn the other cheek. Ignore the insult. Walk away. Then keep walking. Wonderful advice but sadly it does not cover every scenario.
Read more: How to nail that killer running technique
At some point you will not be able to walk away. And the banality of the moment that violence becomes inevitable will stun you. You might bump into someone in a bar who will simply not accept your apology. You might wake in the night with a burglar standing at the foot of the bed. You might hear some random goon insult someone you love. What are you going to do about it? You are not going to walk away. You are going to take the initiative while always remembering that you should never hit anyone who you are not prepared to keep hitting.
But when you must - when all peaceful, placatory, pacifist options are exhausted - then hit them first and hit them hard.
And when you hit them first, for God's sake aim at something - the jaw, ribs or bridge of the nose. All are good - very few men can have their nose broken and not be given pause.
And when you hit them hard, hit them with everything you have, with a punch that comes from your feet and not your arm. And when it is over - when those sickening seconds have passed - you don't walk away. You run.
You run for your life.
