I REMEMBER, REMARKABLY well, the night I punched a police officer, probably because I’ve recounted the story so many times. How I’ve told the tale, however, has shifted with increased distance, almost twenty years, and a maturing of perspective. The earliest accounts were crammed with flippant, self-deprecating hyperbole, low-hanging puns and oh-so-wry observations about bouncers and police. To my modest blog following, I blithely called it my ‘Betty Blue moment’, while gleefully pointing out – the irony is not lost on me that I’m doing it again here – the police officer’s spelling mistakes: ‘She dragged the sharp heal [sic] of her high heal [sic] across his stomach.’ 

Years later, at a reading for a ‘women behaving badly’ literary salon, I played up the transgressive aspect of aberrant female behaviour on public display. Many women, women older than me, told me afterwards how they related to that feeling of blistering rage that has to go somewhere. Later still, I leant into the late-dawning awareness of my middle-class, white-woman privilege in my brief tourist trip through the criminal justice system, earnestly pointing out that the leniency granted to me in the courtroom was awarded on the basis of class, race and, in this case, gender, which made it statistically unlikely that I’d reoffend.