When I was around twenty-one, I paid rent to live in a self-contained room in a house. The bathroom was separate, but all the kitchen equipment was in the room. The room was on the second floor and had a beautiful view across a green hill and a couple of fields. I had a wooden, carved snake. A cobra I think. I bought it from an ethnic African store on the High Street of some town in London – it could have been Richmond. It was a couple of feet tall. I’ve always loved snakes – they’re one of my totem animals (a guardian one in fact, but that’s a post for another day). I placed this snake beside my door, inside my room. It was, to my mind, the guardian of the door – I often told myself this jokingly, and I would usually give it a pat on the head when I left the room before locking the door behind me. I’m sure we all have small, slightly daft things like this we do, that don’t really mean a lot at face value, but we do them anyway for whatever reason that might be. Sports people are well ...