There is a word in Hebrew, 'Halakha', which refers to the collective body of Jewish law, incorporating the 613 mitzvot (commandments) from the Torah, subsequent Talmudic and rabbinical law (amounting to a sort of Jewish corpus legis, or case law) and the prescribed customs and rituals of the Shulchan Aruch (meaning 'prepared table', but in fact pertaining to much more than the alignment of cutlery, crockery and coasters).

This immense and growing body of law is ancient, beginning - in the view of most scholars - as long ago as 700 BCE. When the Christian Fathers assembled, on the whim of Emperor Constantine, for the momentous First Council of Nicaea in 325 AD, the Jews could already celebrate (but did not) a thousand years of written Judaic history and tradition.

And to be clear, 700 BCE is merely the earliest date for which archaeological documentary evidence exists; the Jews were busy pottering about in Canaan - too busy, in fact, to bother preserving their diaries for posterity in reinforced bell jars - from as long ago as 1200 BCE, in that turbulent age when iron implements were de rigueur and bronze breastplates were tragically passé (but not, permit me to stress, sufficiently passé to be retro cool).

Halakha, returning to where I began this rambling lecture, translates to English as (approximately) 'the way to walk', or 'the right path', a metaphor for 'living proper', as codified by a thousand thousand jurists, prophets and kings, and the combined weight of their authority is both oppressive and majestic.

Why am I telling you all this? I am telling you because when I heard it first, I choked with surprise on my extra-strength cider. More than a year later, following a period of intense study and examination, I was accepted by a Rabbinical court as a sincere convert (unlike some other Abrahamic faiths, the Jews have never sought followers en masse. The routes into the Jewish faith are few and far between, and the worldwide population is a mere 15 million (it would have been more, but for one Herr Hitler, filthy menuval). Christianity and Islam, having existed for barely half as long, have nearly 4 billion adherents between them).

For you see, I was not always Herschel Potter, sidecurled pedestrian of the righteous path... 

My story begins in Manchester, England, in the mid-1990s. I was a rambunctious (read: criminal) lad of fourteen years-old, living in the care (read: neglect) of my aunt and "uncle", Tabitha and Darren. They had taken me from a foster home where I had spent my first nine years in, if not precisely Arcadian bliss, then something approaching it. The staff at the home were kind but inattentive; we waifs, strays and orphans had the run of the place, and besides the odd broken bone and shoplifting misadventure, we lived happily and at peace with the world.

My aunt and uncle (the former my dead mother's sister; the latter her on-and-off life partner and soulmate / fuck buddy) were unkind and inattentive. They plucked me from the home shortly after Uncle Darren's disability allowances were stopped - his tennis elbow no longer considered an impediment to his resuming work as a supermarket security guard - in order to access additional child benefits. They had a son already, Gareth, a great juggernaut of a boy and pale as an albino. Demonstrating - albeit poorly - that whiteness is only skin-deep, he was at that time a neophyte "yardie", emulating with great care the local Jamaican gangsters. He spent hours in his bedroom smoking weed and listening to reggae and dance-hall compilation albums, and even plaited his hair to resemble dreadlocks. As a consequence, in fact, he resembled a very camp, obese pirate.

His claim to be known locally as "Eazy Skankin'" was particularly dubious, but there was no doubt he enjoyed a degree of fear and respect on the streets. His huge frame and eccentric appearance was frightening to many, and his gang, the aptly named "Dem Belly Full Boyz", roamed the neighbourhood with impunity, and it did actually contain a Jamaican. (His name was Asafa and, somewhat ironically, given Gareth's Yardie pretensions, he was one of better-behaved and more scholastic gang members.)

I was not scared of Gareth exactly - my own gang had in its time doled out the odd light beating - but I did not know him well, and he treated me with undisguised contempt. I was a scrawny interloper to his (un)happy home; another mouth to feed, and since Tabby and Darren weren't going to stretch the food budget, that meant less to go around.

We shared a bedroom. He, being the incumbent, the elder and the larger, got the bed. I slept on top of a rolled out yoga mat which Tabby had stolen from a local health centre.

Early one morning, after a particularly hellish night's sleep, I was standing in the bathroom, urinating studiously and with both hands massaging my sore lower back. All of a sudden, the door crashed open. I had bolted it, of course, but the bolting mechanism was itself merely blue-tacked to the door and frame. Any resistance against intruders was token and fleeting. Standing in the doorway in his fraying white underpants was Gareth. This was surprising. Since Gareth and I shared a bedroom, it did not require a great leap of the imagination to work out where I must be at 6am if not there, asleep on the yoga mat, and to have reached the bathroom (a rather grandiose term for a small, mouldy, window-less chamber which lacked a bath), he would have had to step over (or more likely, on) the space which I normally occupied when sleeping.

But I digress. Gareth was a cretin, and he may well have been a pervert too. In any case, having burst in on me, rather than react (or, pursuing the roving pervert theory, pretend to react) as a normal human being would under the circumstances (i.e. apologise profusely and leave), he stared at me for a full five seconds. 

I continued to piss bewilderedly. (I have consulted a dictionary to confirm the adverb exists, and it does.)

"You finished?" he said at last, somewhat redundantly. It was clear, as it would have been to anyone standing a yard from my penis, that I had finished. I nodded, pulled up my pyjamas and slunk wordlessly past him, back down the hallway to our bedroom.