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It was once asked after an incident on the bus on my way home from school, “Why don’t you stand up for yourself?”

But I never did, because I felt completely powerless. In truth, I didn’t know how to.

So though that was the last time I told anyone what was going on, it carried on for the next several years.

I hated that daily journey home from school, listening to the same taunts over and over.

Why not stand up for myself? Because my standing up for myself would itself become the new source of ridicule.

My voice was always soft and quiet, my speech slow, my vocabulary stilted, a suitable putdown never in reach.

So instead I’d constantly just gaze out of the window for the entire journey home, wishing myself away, as those around me jabbed with their barbs without pause.

That powerlessness extended to the corridors of the school. For months on end, a group of boys took to following me everywhere I went, mimicking every action of mine.

Humiliatingly, they were from the year below, which made that sense of powerlessness seem all the more acute. Wherever I went, they followed. Whatever I did, they copied.

I used to dream of developing the martial arts skills to deliver a ninja backflip right between their eyes. But of course I never did.

Never, because I was a clumsy, lethargic kid with no coordination, and no muscles. I was a target precisely because I was so weak. So I’d just live with it until they finally got bored.

No, I never did fight back or stand up for myself. I just ran away, resolving to leave that school for good, hoping never to look back.

In a new environment where nobody knew me, everything would be different, wouldn’t it? But of course not.

One evening while waiting for a bus to carry me home, complete strangers pelted me with eggs, confirming to me once more that I was powerless to change a thing.

All I resolved to do at that point was to walk the full five miles home each evening rather than waiting for a bus.

Indeed that has been my default stance ever since: avoidance rather than confrontation. For most of my life I have felt completely powerless.

So if I say, “There is no power or might except with God” it is a sentiment I really mean with all my heart and soul.

A notion that came alive in 2002, when I was steamrollered into a wall then kicked to the ground by a gang of youths in Tottenham. As they laid into me that evening, I grasped for the only handhold available to me.

“There is no power or might except with God.”

That was my rescue then, and always. La hawla wa la quwwata illa Billah.