I only realised quite recently how frequently I make reference in the pantheons of my literature to my kids.  Love and pride, of course, are the prompts but there is another dimension which, I suspect, differentiates my pride from other fathers.  And that is that neither of my kids are quite right in the head.  It is a Mallen characteristic they have inherited from Yours Truly.

Daughter No 2, however, takes this beyond these ancestral bounds.

A few years ago – she’d have been in her late teens – she was on a night out at a gig with her pals.  She differed in appearance from the others. All of them would have caused concern in their dads from what they wore but in open view on Sam’s thigh was a huge purple/black bruise that looked like a map of Australia she had earned in a football match earlier that day.

Anyway, in the course of the evening some gobby youth got into an argument with her best mate which he ratcheted up into pushing and prodding her.  Sam told him to “Back off” (I think that’s what she said she’d said).  And when he turned on her, well, this happened.

Now, you probably gather from the footie bruise she had always been a bit of a tomboy (the son I never had) and I had taught from being little when we wrestled how to punch.  I’m not talking a flicked cautionary jab; I’m meaning the Money Punch, putting everything into it – hips, shoulder and arm.  And believe me, I knew from painful experience it was a stunner.

I can see you’ve got ahead of me and can see what’s coming.  But the lad didn’t.  And you too perhaps haven’t anticipated fully the spectacle.   I should have mentioned that this little fracas had taken place on a kind of elevated stage.  You’ll have guessed that she caught him a pearler no doubt but won’t have visualised the arc of his backward aerial flight into the mosh pit.

He never knew what hit him but by the time he told his mates afterwards you can bet he had been set on by six blokes.