The ladies who punch

When I tell people that I’ve started kickboxing, they tend to think they’ve misheard. It’s true I’m not who one might think of as a typical fighter. I’ve spent my life working with books and now along with the books I juggle three kids and a dog. The closest I usually get to fighting is when I drag my whippet away from a scuffle in the park, or get elbowed out of the way in the school bake-sale scrum. Although I always seem to have multiple schoolbags looped over an arm, I have minimal upper body strength and have never managed to do a press-up, or even use the monkey bars (I broke my arm mistakenly thinking that I could, aged five). My usual exercise takes the form of cycling at breakneck speed to get to school pick-up on time, throwing a ball for the dog and my walking book club. I have long held hopes of becoming someone who swims year-round in the Hampstead ponds, or who runs fund-raising half-marathons, but frankly I’ve had neither the time nor energy. When I attempted a new mums’ fitness class soon after one of the children was born, the soles of my ancient running shoes fell off.

It was, inevitably, a book that made me see that there could be a fighter hiding in the mess of modern-day mothering. My children range in age from four to nine and every Friday for the past year I’ve been taking them to martial-arts classes after school. While the younger two were busy with punch bags and burpees, my elder daughter and I sat on the side reading together while she waited for her class.