I can’t help it, every time I see a photo of Margaret Atwood these days I think of a sheep. She would be a true wolf in sheep’s clothing I think. Certainly not someone I should like to cross swords with. She intimidates me even from the dusty ink of today’s Guardian front page. Not that I like to cross swords anyway. I got my bronze in fencing and then gave up. It was so hot behind the mask, in the padded jacket with the melamine cereal bowls to protect my chest.
I liked the elegance of fencing, the footwork, the terms, the feel of the foil in my hand, but I realised early on I did not have the killer instinct.
Nicola Adams has been single handedly responsible for a take up in women’s boxing of more than 70%. It must get hot in that protective headgear too. Her smiling face is such a contrast with the images of Henry Cooper I carry in my head: his eyes slits in a bruised mass, his nose issuing blood. But of course that was the whole masculine trip of it I suppose, and why he got the work advertising Fabergé’s Brut. Continue reading
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