Suppose you have two young people wanderin' down the street. One's a strapping lad in torn jeans and a ratty work shirt -- pure working class ruffian if ever there was one. T'other's a medium-small, cute little bit, pretty as you please in her uniform from a certain hoity-toity girls' school. They happen to be siblings, and plainly so -- very similar in the face, in the way they carry themselves.

Now having this pair, which would one expect to be the ne'er-do well? The one who is greeted more often with the promises of violence than open arms? Right, of course. But you'd be wrong.

See, my sister's always been a bit mad. Ask anyone. But once she was packed off to boarding school, on account of her brilliance and all, she went completely bleedin' starkers.

If you think things get a mite rowdy at footie games, you've never seen the public school girls going at it on the lacrosse field. They're sodding terrors, vicious blighters, and no one says boo about it. The real trouble though, comes when you get one who keeps that battle madness when she's off the field, too. Like my sister, exactly like.

It's not that boarding school made her violent, just that it gave her an outlet, and it taught her how to cause maximum damage with minimum risk of getting called on it.

From the moment she picked up the sport until the moment she graduated, my sister had that lacrosse stick with her, day and night, sleeping and waking. Toughs with the tyre irons and lengths of chain learned the hard way that they were nothin' to the ferocity of an angry young woman who knows her way around a lacrosse field. The damage she can do with that stupid wooden stick is absolutely beyond belief.

And she took great joy in baiting just such thugs, playing with them, getting them riled up, and then going at it with them like nobody's business.

Of the two of us, she's the one born to be punk, and not a day of life's passed without her being angry that her lack of a Y chromosome makes it damned near impossible for her to be acknowledged as one.

She's mellowed some, mind, now that she's grown and her hormones aren't shredding her dubious hold on sanity, but she's still all too fond of a brawl, and one of these days she's gonna haul out that old lacrosse stick and have at Jamie's head with it.