Chapter 5: Day Three (Tuesday, 13th September)
They shoot horses don't they?

I said. ‘Why, sir, you seemed to me to despond yesterday. You are a delicate Londoner; you are a maccaroni; you can’t ride.’ Johnson. ‘Sir. I shall ride better than you. I was only afraid I should not find a horse able to carry me.’

The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides, by James Boswell

The next time I saw Redman Durcet was the following day. I was to start my polo training so that by the end of the week I could take part in a polo match... with a bunch of toffs.

'You are having a laugh,' I said, 'that's not going to happen. What I will do, however, is learn how to do it. I will also learn how to ride a horse.'

I had never been on a horse before, except as a child and then being led. Here I was with my own personal tutor who probably already considered me to be one of the most repulsive people he had ever met. I was in his world. I thought he was going to bully me, he was going to make my life, physically, very painful, and I had to grin and be the "Cheeky, Chirpy, Cockney Character."

Of course, I walked into the big arena that they have polo matches in, because, obviously, a man of the wealth as the fellow I swapped with, like Gerard Braughn, has his own polo arena that is a bona fide venue for polo tournaments. I was led to believe Prince Charles had played there, both out of doors and in that very arena.

For my first polo training session I wanted to wear my Gaucho hat but I was told that through health and safety I would have to wear a maroon helmet. Very American police cop. I did insist on wearing my leather jacket. Strangely the maroon hat had a strange significance and there is a lot of synchronicity in this story that all you metaphysics buffs out there will lap up and love. There was a whole intricate pattern of coincidences that just fell into our lives, that neither Redman nor I could deny. However acrimoniously it ended, and had to, these were life-changing experiences for us both that week. It had to end in a figurative gunfight at the OK Corral. It just could not have been otherwise although he brought it on, finally. I am glad he did, because I would not have wanted to leave shaking hands with him and having to admit that he was one of my new friends. Call me a dogmatist, I don't mind.

I walked into the arena. It was a massive, sanded area, under a huge, high roof. There he was with his full kit on: his jodhpurs his big boots and his hat. The weedy little punk rocker was going to be dragged around the place. I knew it was like a bad day in Tom Brown's Schooldays. Here I was, his personal fag, for that afternoon. Flashman's fag!

'You disapprove of fur and all that?' he said.

'Yeah well,' I said, 'I am wearing leather, so I'm not so much of a hypocrite to deny that this is still animal skin but, you know, there are endangered species that are diminishing, but there's still this intent on bloody using them, and I'm not really sure I should be using leather, and I'd certainly never buy it new.'

Then we came to the first really big coincidence. Here we were at Beverley Polo club, in Yorkshire, and here I am being given a maroon helmet. Now, maroon was the colour of the Third Malden Boy Scout troop that I was a member of as a youth, an organisation through which I had met people like Redman before. I had come from not too dissimilar a background to Redman, which is strange. He was like the local public school boys who went to schools like Rokeby and Dulwich and places like that. I had met people like Redman before and he had met punk rockers from Secondary Moderns before and he was almost the exact same age as me, bar a couple of months. Here we had two men, exactly the same age, brought up in exactly the same set of educational systems, who had experienced a lot of the same scenes on various streets, but who had arrived at completely opposite ends of the political spectrum.

'Strangely,' I said, 'we are at Beverley Polo Club and this is your big banner, The Beverley Polo Club, but I went to Beverley Boys Secondary Modern.'

He looked at me. This was before I even got up on the horse, or anything, so this was what the camera crew were filming. All the stable hands were watching. Most of them were young girls, and they were all grinning. They couldn't believe this was all going on. None of them had been warned. Their governor had just done it, he had left them all in it, including his own son. The ground staff had not known who I was until I told them. 'I'm living in there,' I said and they went 'you what?' 'I'm your boss for a week,' I said. I was actually amused by the epic tide of reasoning that my opposite number had seemed to have employed in his decision to agree to the swap, other than the fact that he just appeared to be a completely disorganised, make-it-up-as-you-go-along, I'll-do-this-on-this-day-and-this-on-that sort of man, which the rich are at liberty to be, but I think he had pushed his boat a little too far out this time. As soon as he found out it was someone like me and someone like Kiran he shat himself at the other end, and he engaged in all kinds of covert phone calls to try and protect his empire from us while we were so-called running it. I did, sort of, joke on the phone to a few people that I was thinking of selling it on eBay to see how many days it would take for someone to come up with forty billion quid for it {or whatever it was worth}. Although Gerard & I were not allowed to phone anybody involved at the opposite end of the swap we were allowed to ring people not connected to it. The director had initially asked us to hand in our mobiles but in the end agreed that this was asking too much. As long as we told the crew who we were ringing & why we were allowed to do it. I didn't mind that but Gerard wasn't playing by the rules. Whereas I will question a rule & be transparent if I am not prepared to follow it Gerard was the sort of guy who'll pretend he's doing one thing while all the time he's doing something else. It's a bit like the excuses we were given for the invasion of Iraq. “We've gone to shut down a dictator but what we're really doing is nicking the oil.”

Anyway, Redman was a bit shocked by my revelations surrounding the name of the club & the name of the school I went to. So was I.

'Of course,' I said, 'you know where the word 'Beverley' comes from, don't you? The connotations with the beaver, and Beverley boy's school was near Beverley Brook, which also strangely ran across Wimbledon Common just outside the back of the flat I was brought up in, so I'm a Surrey boy. I know all about people like you mate. I tell you, it was a weird mixture of millionaires sons and dustman's sons in the same classroom at the school I went to, but the irony of the word 'Beverley' is that it means 'beaver' and 'lea', a lea being a stream and beavers that are living in the stream, but ironically the beaver was wiped out around the area of Wimbledon Common, as it was all over Britain around about the seventeenth century through over-hunting, you know, and that's it, nowadays most people think beavers are only indigenous to bloody Canada. Most people I meet have no idea there were beavers in Britain and that's where there's loads of references to them especially in the word 'Beverley','

'Oh yes,' he said. 'Oh yes. "Beaver lac", it comes from, actually.'

'Oh, "beaver lac"?'

'I know all about that.'

'Well,' I said, 'isn't it ironic, that here I am at Beverley Polo Club and you're all pro-hunt?

He turned around.

'You'd love the hat that I go on the big hunts with,' he said. 'You know the top hats? I've seen that you're a lover of hats.'

'I am,' I said.

'Yes,' he said, 'it's made out of beaver and bear skin.'

You don't even care that the beaver's been bloody made extinct, I thought, and here you are using a word that incorporates the name 'beaver' in an area that obviously had a lot of beavers, because it was near the town of Beverley. You sick monkey, I thought, but you aren't going to unsettle me. I don't care how painful this ride is.

'You've been on a horse before?'

'No'.

His face lit up!

'Never, ever,' I said. 'I might have, on a beach, as a child, but that's hardly riding a horse.'

'No, it isn't Craig,' he said, rubbing his hands together. 'We'll start with some polo moves so you understand that, and you will be taking part in the match at the end of the week, and you will also be hosting the polo club ball, from horseback.'

'Do what?' I said.

'You will have to take part in a parade of different jockeys and dignitaries,' he said, 'and you will be at the head of the parade and you will have to ride in from one of the back doors and come round and do a kind of S-shape and then sit at the head of the procession and address the guests. There will be somewhere between six and eight hundred guests, all sitting at table in the side next to the arena.'

I would be riding my horse indoors. Apart from just having played in a polo match indoors. His face was a picture.

'If you are to do what Gerard does at the annual polo club ball,' ' he said, 'then I suppose you've got to do it then haven't you?'

'The annual polo club ball?'

'Yes,' he said, 'there is only one of this size per year here.'

He did look as unsettled as me. I was thinking the arrogance of my life-swappee. When I host parties, I wouldn't want to be known as the head of the whole event. He wanted to ride his horse to his guests tables! I also thought, this is interesting. I've got to organise a party. Well, that's what I do. Not like this, though.

'Well,' he said, 'do you think you'll be able to do that?'

'I've got to, haven't I?' I said. 'I'll give it a go.'

He actually did look a little bit impressed. He's going to give it a go, even if he gets dragged along, upside down, by a wild horse that just flies out of the arena at the most inappropriate moment while he's addressing the crowd, it's got to, none of us have any choice, it's got to go ahead. So, you know, that was it, I would just have to jump in & swim.

Then came the first polo training, and this was pure Tom Brown's Schooldays. I did see the humour in it, and bullies do make me laugh, I admit. Not always, because sometimes I just want to knife them... in the neck... but sometimes, especially at school, when a bully had some really inventive, imaginative way of humiliating someone I could not help but chuckle.

'You stand over there,' he said, 'and here I have the polo stick.'

He showed me how to hold a polo stick. Strangely, it is exactly the same way you hold a sword.

'I was in the under-twenty British fencing team for a short while,' I said.

This also unsettled him.

'How come?'

'Well,' I said, 'at our Secondary School we had the ex-coach of the British fencing team. He was a bit of a rebel and he tried to get scummy kids from working class families into the sport to inject new blood into it because they were all getting slapped every time around the world playing the Germans, the Italians & the Spanish.'

When I touched on the subject of international sport he said that there would be a few Argentinians at this polo club ball. He admitted that would have still been the case in the sport during the Falklands war. I thought, bloody typical, the soldiers are made to fight while the generals play polo. It seems Argentinians are the best at polo. Anyway, I was standing against one wall. I knew how to hold the sticks. It was the same as holding an épée, foil, or sabre in fencing, the line of the thumb going down the handle.

'You've got to learn how to trap, swing and deliver the ball.'

He was miles away over the other side of the arena.

'Like this!' he yelled. A ball came whistling straight towards me. It missed my head and went 'spank!' onto the advertising hoarding behind me. Hmmm! I thought. I have now got to try and launch a ball at your head and you have been doing this how many years? It was like something out of Harry Potter, like putting an eleven year old in the boxing ring with Frank Bruno. This is a fair fight?. You bastards don't believe in a fair fight. In fact you revel in unfair fights, it's what you think is funny.

He was quite a good polo teacher, I'll give him that, but since this is his one discipline at present, he ought to be a good polo teacher. I mean, he's top of the form, but that's all he does, he doesn't know the first thing about anything else, except fox-hunting, which is another 'sport', you know.

I did not want to play polo anyway, because I was not swinging a mallet around a horse's head in the state of inexperience that I was going to be in by the time I was expected to do this. I am not even sure it is not cruel to animals even when you know what you are doing. I will say one thing as a pre-emptive statement concerning my later attempts to hit a ball whilst on horseback, that even when he was doing it, the horses were flinching every time the ball was hit and these were horses that were used to it, therefore polo is cruel: you are dominating the animal, you are forcing it to go where you want it to go at breakneck speeds, and you are waving a stick around its ears. He is supposed to have been a horsey person, and I thought, you're about as horsey as Attila the Hun!

'The horse is a flight creature,' Redman pointed out to me, 'like most herbivores. It enjoys being chased. In fact, it is only in the chase that the horse truly finds itself, when it is in flight from a predator. And we are that predator sitting on its back, constantly providing it with adrenaline.'

Now that is a very compelling argument, although I am loath to admit it, because I do pride myself in being a super-intellect compared to my enemies, but I had to think about this. Then I thought... fuck off! What do you think I am? Should I go and bash my granny so that might add some meaning to her life? You animal, I thought. I should get on your back then, with some big spurs, with nice, juicy spikes on them to see how you like it. I bet this is what happens behind closed doors anyway, eh Redman?

So, anyway, I just bit my lip. I had to see a whole week of this, so I did not contradict him. I just looked at him. He knew what was written all over my face.

I did learn to trap and hit the ball all the same. Basically, a ball comes whistling towards you. It bounces, and on one of the smaller bounces, as it gets closer to you, you just put the mallet on the ground where the ball is coming in, and then stop it, momentarily, before hitting it. You try not to hit it before trapping it. Then you go out and learn how to whack a ball in mid-air and probably round the back of your own head by the end of it. I had to do it on the line and the line has to stay like that, because if you cross over your knee area or whatever with the mallet you're going to whack the horse. I had to stand like I was sitting on a horse, which was very humiliating, very comedic. The camera crew loved it, there was a lot of mirth and a lot of laughs.

Obviously, like any ball sport, because I spent a lot of my childhood playing ball sports, it wasn't too difficult to pick up. They do like rules.

'The origin of polo,' he told me, 'is in fact from a Persian sport where the severed head of the leader of the opposing tribe was used as the ball between players from both tribes. When it moved to India, rules were not applied and anyone could do anything they wanted.'

When the British got hold of it, after they had set up their empire in India, they applied rules. This empire connection was another impasse between Redman and my wife. They grew to absolutely despise one another by the end of the week in a way that I could not despise him because I am not black. He was on all levels ruder to her, than me, dismissive of her and basically critical, whereas I think he thought he could convert me to quasi-fascist, British imperialist posturing, or at least make it endearing to me because he knew I had read the battle comics and I had seen the same movies. Also, he did have a Triumph Spitfire.

'I used to drive around in my mate's one of those,' I said to him. 'We had one amongst our gang of Punk Rockers.'

This, also, immediately, got under his skin. The proles should not have had a car like that in 1982! This Triumph Spitfire was the first car he ever had and it was given to him by his mother. It meant a lot to him which is important, because later, when we completely fell out, one of my comments was that he didn't deserve it, which really upset him because, without knowing it, I was insulting his mother! At no point was he even close to hitting me because he knew I was a far more vicious, horrible, battered human being than he was.

Now, to say that Redman and I had both reached an important point in our lives is an understatement. Both being the age of forty-one when this happened, is quite amazing because we were both near enough in the middle, a little bit past the middle if we are honest, but we were starting the second half of the great game of life, in which there are two halves and an interval in the middle, where you have to think about what you've done for forty years, or thirty five years, depending on where you feel the middle is. Here we were, both men who, to all intents and purposes, in that particular year were both very vulnerable and capable of having a very strong mid-life crisis and nervous breakdown. No matter how different our paths have been the same paradigm exists when it comes to age, your own sudden realisation of mortality and how long you've got left. Regardless of how he had disguised that fear, with all kinds of sporting and international events, and all kinds of hunts and parties and piss-ups, I have also done the same in being involved in demonstrations, helping to put on squat raves, going to, for want of a better term, 'illegal' unlicensed events that treat the punters with more respect than the paying ones. I have also distracted myself to some extent with drugs but what I have found is that a lot of what I have done has been a preparation for this time of my life, where both he and I are at the peak, we're at the top of our game, we're both physically and mentally never going to be so in synch again. Everything from now on will be mental acquisition and physical sacrifice, whereas for the first half of anyone's life it is the acquisition of physical prowess and less consideration about what has been going on. What causes most mid-life crises so suddenly, particularly among men, because by nurture they are more territorial and more competitive than women, is that they do start thinking about what they have done with their lives. In a lot of cases they are not happy. To feel that you have wasted thirty-five years or at least twenty of them in your adult life, is a terrible, unhinging, thing. I have made sure that there is not one year that I regret. I can remember the path that I have plotted through life. All of my writing and music has been leaving a bit of string to the entrance to the cave. A lot of people lose the string. They become lost in the cave and, bingo, here I was with a bloke who was certainly far more vulnerable to that feeling than I was. What have you become? Well, you certainly haven't become the ruler of the planet, mate, I thought, and surely that was the game people like him played. You are not anywhere close to right up at the top. You have to touch your cap to someone, just like I am expected to. Only you do it, and I do not. So how inferior does that make a fellow feel, no matter how many millions he may have got in the bank? You want to be Napoleon? Well there are a lot of Napoleons wanting to be Napoleon. You are going to go to your grave way down the Z-list of upper-class celebrities. You just taught their kids polo, I thought. They are probably as rude to you when they pick up little Natasha as they are to their own servants, regardless of the fact that you were the rugby trainer at Rugby School, which is arrogantly posited in history as being not only the birthplace of rugby, but, and I am sure I do not believe this for an instant, the birthplace of everything foot- and ball-related, from soccer to American football, in fact that Public School fashioned the whole international sporting direction of any ball game ever. Well, I am certain that is rubbish. It was all stolen off the local peasants in the first place and goes back way before Christianity and this baronial feudal madness we are still living in. On this topic, he said something to me that was probably the quintessential moment between us and transcended even our terrible argument at the end. He did not realise the gravity and the huge importance of what he said, and nor did I until he said it. It almost came out of his mouth involuntarily.

'I've met people from your walk of life,' I said

'Well,' he said, 'I've met people from yours.'

'I dare say. I'm sure we both strike very familiar chords from childhood.'

'Well,' he said, ' When I was at Rugby School...'

I could not work out whether he was talking about the time he was a pupil and in the rugby team there, or whether this was later on, when he was a teacher. I am still not sure. A lot of the conversation was very sporadic, very fast and in a very physical environment, so it was enough that I managed to catch any of these things, but I understood them as being very important moments but some of them were not caught on camera. Even though we had clip-on mics, you never knew when they were stopping and starting it. They were not that strident. They would have ended up with terrible fatigue if they had filmed everything all the time. So, the quintessential moment between me and Redman was probably not on film.

'It's strange,' he said, 'because under the laws of Rugby Union, the school that came top of the state school rugby league every year had the privilege of coming and playing rugby on the Rugby School home ground.'

So, comprehensive schools, probably grammar schools, certainly secondary modern boys' schools every year played for the privilege of going to rugby's home ground to play rugby with the team of the same age group as them. And for a moment I thought, that's really disgusting as an ethic. That's like saying, "you get to play the Übermenschen now and see how well you can do," as though being the best prole team in the school rugby league system was basically just a preparation for a class match. However, I was not expecting the next bit.

'What happened then?' I asked.

'Every year,' he said, 'one or other of the schools, your own school might have done it, I'm sure you took little interest in the imperial posturing of your headmaster.'

'Of course,' I said, 'I was a terrible truant during the assemblies when he read out the scores. He was a diminutive Welsh member of the Tory Party who was a friend of Margaret Thatcher and hated me with a venom I don't even think even you can match.'

He laughed at that.

'Well,' he said, 'I'll tell you something I don't talk about often. Every year one of the working class teams would come up and destroy us. Absolutely murder us on the pitch. You know, not only win, but we had kids being taken off on stretchers. It was a horrible, scary moment, every year that none of our teams wanted to have to go through.'

It was never recorded and, he said, most of the time the results were not even added to the scores the rest of the team had for that year.

'They were friendlies,' he said. 'That's what you call it, when you have a match that isn't recorded. A friendly.'

'It don't sound very friendly to me!' I said.

'No,' he said. 'We trained and practised and trained and practised and I knew damned well that some of these other players, by their technique, hadn't really paid attention to the rules at all. There was all kinds of fouling and kicking. It was just as if they didn't care whether or not they won. They just wanted to damage my boys. Why do you think that was Craig?'

He was confused, to be honest. He did want me to tell him. It was not as though he was being facetious, or sarcastic. He seemed painfully naïve as to why this should have been. I was the right person to ask. I was one of those kids.

'Perhaps,' I said, 'they had a bigger axe to grind.'

And then there was that moment. We made eye-to-eye contact. Then he knew what was happening here. I had come up. It was my once-in-a-lifetime, top-of-the-league match with him, as an individual! Suddenly, I realised that there was no way either of us was going to go through the week without me kicking his arse badly and in that moment he looked really worried. He knew it was going to happen again, but in a totally different way. This was the big rugby match. It was bigger for both of us because it transcended all of those skirmishes we had as children.

'This is two middle-aged men who know what they know now,' I told the camera crew and Kiran later on. 'We are going to be brushing our brains together and seeing who comes off the better, you know?'

If you come from a moneyed family, you are going to be aloof towards other kids and you are being trained to be aloof because you are expected to pick up a post as a manager, or an employer, or a leader later in your life. Kids, though, are going to take exception to being treated like employees. Teachers have a hard enough time but when another kid of the same age does it, they just get walloped.

Our school got thrown out of the league we were in for rowing after a fixture with a public school. Friends of mine threw bricks into the rival team's boat and sunk it. The next morning's assembly was one of the few I did not skive off. Our right-wing headmaster was in tears.

'What have you done to me?' he whimpered. 'What have you done to the name of this school? You're evil, you're evil, you're all evil!'

Well, this was fantastic. All of us? All inclusive? We have all let you down? How wonderful! That was mass action, wasn't it? Class action! Yes!

So, here I was. Every school is a microcosm of the class system, really. Redman was very confused and there was the sudden recognition in his face and mine that this was another one of those situations. There I was, in his company, pulling his life apart and analysing him like a bug in a jar. After all of those years of shouting at the telly and pelting people like him, from afar, with eggs and shit, I was suddenly in a position to say, "Here we are! Here we are! What's it going to be then?" This was a story that would have had Dickens grabbing his old feller and knocking one out! "Get me a quill! Give me a goddamn quill! What? A Tale of Two Cities? That's yesterday's news!"

You know, I thought, I've got you on all counts now. I've got you on intellect, I've got you on machismo, I've got you on my ability to destroy, I've got you on style, I've got you on British history. He was served up to me on a plate with a very fine set of cutting implements at my disposal that had been prepared for me by a good number of people over years and years of class war. He was the sort of bloke who, by now, would not even ever, ever, ever, ever be in any of the same environments as me at all, ever, so we were drawn together by something far bigger than pure social dynamics. There was something far bigger going on. I'm convinced of it.

I was put up on a horse. Well, I was not put on it. I had to do it myself, and I was not even given a box.

'Oh he's a bugger, he is,' one of the stable girls said to me. 'He's definitely having a laugh with you. Well, the game is on, isn't it?'

'In what way?'

'Well,' she said, 'anybody who's never been on a horse before is at least given a box to stand on to get up on the damned thing, but you were just left to do it'.

So I just had to do the flamboyant Gaucho thing: leg up, do it in one go or it is not going to happen at all. All on film, I nearly went over the other side in the process, causing quite severe pain to my testicles, but then I think that was part of his plan to make sure I didn't have any more kids. I am not sure I was not supposed to be wearing a box as well, but none of that was offered to me. In fact, I am surprised they even gave me a hat, but that was probably for the cameras. Not having a box to protect your bollocks won't show up on film so we can damage him this way! I did have a period of discomfort in the lower regions for some months after this strangely, so maybe it was my karma because I am not sure I agree with getting up on a horse in the first place and this is a very contentious viewpoint but I think riding horses is cruel that one species should ride on the back of another seems to me to be a backward exploitative relationship that very much symbolises the relationship between the classes in a modern post-industrial state. As soon as we feel we have the right to break an animal we therefore feel we have the right to break another person.

That said, I got on very well with the horse. He was very elderly and he was in retirement. He knew he was on an easy ticket for the week because I was stoned and, I can assure you, animals know. He was thinking, hmmm, yeah, this person isn't about to dominate anything. In fact, if I'm really lucky I won't even have to walk. He was an Argentinian called Toby but his real name was Tobermory Auchtermuchty Something Something so I stuck at Toby. He was absolutely gorgeous. You would not have thought he was that old but he should not have been made to do anything. He should not have had another human being sitting on him ever again. He had been pulled out of retirement to play polo with a load of younger horses with a bloke on his back who didn't know the first thing about horse-riding.

'I'm not taking that horse onto a polo pitch when it's in its retirement years,' I said, 'and I don't know what I'm doing and as far as I can tell, the whole purpose of this polo game is going to be to see who can knock the Cockney off the horse.'

There were a lot of periods when I was just sitting on the horse patting it and talking to it.

'Well, do something,' the camera crew were saying.

'It don't wanna,' I said.

'Well, make it.'

'No, I ain't gonna.'

There was a lot of that and it goes on and on and on and it would make a whole separate half hour programme just with Craig sitting on a horse, usually with both me and the horse with our backs to the cameras, facing a wall because both the horse and I weren't particularly into being filmed either.

The horse paid me back for this relationship because in the final scene, where I did deliver the speech, those particular few moments of my life were a big deal, and the horse knew it. He saw me through it and I am convinced that was because I was kind to him.

I pick up worms on the bloody pavement that haven't dried out or been trodden on and put them somewhere safer. It takes ages getting to the local Meithryn Toddlers group with our kid because we're both on the case: 'There's another one...' 'Quick pick it up. Let's take it over here.' That is how I treat living things generally, so, in this, I think Redman was very impressed with the way I got on with the horse. I think he had been the victim of some of his own class's propaganda that we kick our dogs: "Bullseye! Bullseye! Nancy, Nancy, get here! Get here! You're not having any of my food this evening, you can starve you horrible little bastard." All those working class stereotypes. Well, no, sorry. My Mum is a great fan of the Animal Liberation Front, even though they did fire-bomb loads of one of Redman's friends' meat-trucks. When he pointed out to me that the Animal Liberation Front have done something that extreme to a friend of his he also told me that the bloke was responsible for the slaughtering of over five thousand cows a day! A day! Mark that: a day! When he visits the stables, apparently, the horses go mental.

'Isn't that odd,' Redman said to me. 'Do you think they can smell death on him?'

'As their olfactory senses are like our vision,' I said, 'I would imagine they can see the whole history of what he has been doing before he pops in for a champers with you, mate.'

I did not tell him that one of my ex-girlfriends was almost certainly one of the people that fire-bombed those vehicles. Now you tell me that a synchronicity curve like that is not something a little bit special. I could be wrong but I know she did stuff like that around the time that happened in the eighties and I know she did eighteen months for it, although that was after we had split up. So you can imagine, my brain was like a firecracker. Fire and brimstone... and here I was in an environment where I was called Satanic on more than one occasion.

You do have to be absolutely sure that someone is your enemy before you can even come close to considering direct action against them, be it violent or non-violent. You cannot just wipe someone out and know very little about them, although that seems to be the imperial way. I study the people I regard as the problem in society in extraordinary depth and Redman was an Open University degree course all on his own.