I wouldn't remember many things about my childhood if it weren't for exceptions.

Of a break time - playtime, lunchtime whatever, it appears that I used to take on 'all comers' in some sort of informal wrestling. I don't remember this I only remember how deeply chuffed one lad was one day when he beat me. I was not aware that beating me carried such joy and cache until that day. I also remember how utterly delirious another lad was when he got me out at cricket caught and bowled.

What I also remember about that incident was that it wa supervised by a teacher who instructed me to bowl underarm. And yet dear reader I never got into any school teams because I never turned up for out of school practice and I won my house colours for field hockey.

Anyway, enough of this self aggrandisement... Competition. Submission.

What I'm trying to get at here is that probably unbeknownst to be the other boys competed with each other to see how long they could last in a wrestling contest with me. they probably worked out some sort of pecking order on this basis.

So far as I know there was no adult supervision of this activity. This was a middle class environment and I was completely baffled at the age of ooo 17 when somebody started to talk about having been out Paki bashing over the weekend. So all these boys at a boys grammar school wrestling all over the playing fields of a break time nobody said What a bunch of queers. If they had nobody would have known what it meant. I mean essentially this was a rugby playing school and wrestling and rucking were - are - virtually indistinguishable. A ruck is an informal scrum in rugby.

So what's the point? The point is : once you develop a society dominated by working class men and those working class men are either actually autistic or feel that they must mimic their autistic mates then hierarchy is - tends to be - more likely to be established by remote forms of conflict.

It's possible to gain a sort of submission in a knife or gun fight simply if one participant bottles it but often there is nowhere to go, nowhere to withdraw to to signify submission and so the fight has to end in severe injury or death. If we allow full contact forms of contest we live with the idea that this has sexual overtones and is intimate we gain by the virtual assurance - collapsed scrums can break necks - that little or no harm will occur and a proper hierarchy or pecking order can be established. Established on the basis of relative strength and skill and not of extent of psychopathy.