YOU know the fight or flight response?

Well, I don’t have the first bit. I’m all flight. I didn’t get where I am today by making a stand. Not me. I leg it. I’m a coward and always have been. It’s instinctive, and I’m happy to acknowledge it. I pay monthly dues to the Amalgamated Union of Fearties and Milksops.

I was cogitating about this recently when I considered that most movies and TV dramas are about heroic people acting bravely. There but for the grace of Buddah go I.

Like everything else in my life, it’s not my fault. Faced with a threat, my brain overloads with chemicals which disable any impulse towards bravery. It isn’t just physical threats. I remember standing in the street with an unhappy girlfriend one evening. We were having a perfectly amicable discussion about my shortcomings when, suddenly, I cut her off in mid-harangue by running away. True story: I legged it down the street.

A detail I remember concerns the fact that, as I disappeared into the distance, she shouted after me: “Toad!” The amphibious allusion was discombobulating. I’d never been called a toad before, certainly not in Leith, where other four-letter appellations were chosen by enemies and teachers. Toad? You’d think I’d hopped down the road making parping sounds.

The fascinating point is this: it was the right thing to do. It got me out of an uncomfortable situation instantly. Same with physical threats: immediately, my eye spots the exit and I exeunt sharpish. You recall, too, the time I fled the social distress of a party, departing via a bathroom window and running on fleet feet through the streets of Portobello.

It was exhilarating and bears out my conviction that cowardice and freedom gang thegither.