ONLY A GENEROUS observer would have said I was dancing around the ring. A less generous one, the one I’d become after watching my filmed efforts on my boxing trainer’s iPhone, said I was ‘frankensteining’ the ring. My lumbering, T-shirt-tanned frame was swatting at the focus pads that Chris – my lean, smiling and properly tanned trainer – held up. The footage was unequivocal. I was hitting the pads at a much slower rate than I’d thought. As we watched my clumsy moves, Chris, a former Victorian welterweight champion, offered me his take on the sweet science.

‘Sooner or later, Paul, you’ve got to get into the hitting zone,’ he said with a grin accentuated by a huge white mouth guard. ‘That’s not a bad straight right, but you’ve got to keep your left up,’ he added, explaining other technical problems. It was a long list and I nodded and panted. Then we started up again.