Russell Jones's Week Moment: Britain is Centuries Past Being the Biggest Lad in the Schoolyard

In an increasingly brutal and lawless world, Britain must start picking its fights better, or risk getting left in the dust, argues Russell Jones

As a teenager I was guilty of two major strategic mistakes.

The first was to have my growth spurt at a bizarrely early age, fully three years before any of my classmates got around to theirs. By the time I was 13, I stood at almost 6 feet and tipped the bar at a brawny 15 stone.

On the face of it this doesn't sound like a bad thing, but you reckon without the two worst things about my school: all of the teachers and all of the pupils. It was a pretentious all-boys grammar school that seemed to have two principal goals: teaching Latin to the smartest 1% and teaching mindless brutality to all the rest of us. To be fair, it achieved both with staggering efficiency.

As somebody hovering just below the Latin set, the teachers saw in me nothing more than a large, slow-moving specimen who might be useful on one of the ritually violent school sports teams. Without showing the slightest interest or inclination, I was consequently drafted onto the boxing and rugby teams, where my official role was to find every possible opponent and beat the bright out of his eyes.

My time under the teachers was grim enough, but lunch hour — supposedly a break from institutional violence — offered only its chaotic cousin. With no girls to compete over, the only game in town was to become “cock of the school” — a title awarded, unofficially, to anyone who hadn’t lost a fight in the last 12 to 24 hours. I had no interest in this meaningless bauble, but others did — and purely for entertainment, they’d egg on challengers while they watched.

Here I must apologise to Costigan — not that I ever knew his first name, in that idiotically formal school. George? Andy? Phil? Who knows. He was just another big, daft lad who’d made the mistake of growing early, and so, like me, was regularly pitted into lunchtime fistfights neither of us particularly wanted, and neither of us decisively won.

So being too big too soon was my first strategic error. My second was to stop growing, so that by the time I was 15 half the boys in the school had overtaken me. Somehow, I was still forced to box and play rugby, which merely meant that during a really rather challenging final year, all the kids I'd previously thwacked on behalf of teachers now returned the favour on behalf of different teachers.

Those two mistakes came to mind this weekend, as I considered Britain’s place in an increasingly brutal and lawless world.