I was returning home from the supermarket when the snowball hit me firmly on the back of the head.
Startled and angry, I swung around to identify the perpetrator, as a group of teenagers in the vicinity began to laugh at me.
It wasn't any of the teenagers, though. Instead, it was a boy of no more than seven or eight years old, who was in fact lining up another shot as I made eye contact with him.
I exclaimed: "You fucking little cunt! I'm going to rip your fucking arms off!" and it wasn't until a little while later that I realised the exact sequence of events that had led up to this. (It's also interesting to me that it happened in a blur, but for once I am able to winkle out the most salient facts and arrange them into some sort of order.)
When I used the expletives in front of the child, I am now aware that it was a conscious attempt to corrupt him, by using the worst possible word I could think of in the heat of the moment.
In the space of a couple of seconds, I'd weighed up and equated my being struck with a snowball and the idea of furnishing a boy with a new, offensive term, the use of which might get him into trouble further down the line.
It's very rare that I lose my temper, and when I do, the proverbial 'red mist' is the most apt way of describing it. For a short while I become frozen and unable to articulate anything sensible until the feeling has subsided. On this occasion, though, a seam of awareness attenuated the flash of anger, and I was able to be as malicious as possible under the circumstances.
I write this feeling neither proud nor ashamed of what happened. I now realise, though, that not even in anger are emotions unilaterally expressed - like painters, we temper one hue with another, and this process is conscious.
I remember reading about Diego Maradona, the most gifted footballer to have played the game during my lifetime. In a high-pressure World Cup quarter-final with England in 1986, he scored what some have called the greatest goal ever, collecting the ball in his own half, slaloming past helpless men in white shirts, and finishing past Peter Shilton.
Such an astonishing goal was made even more sublime when Maradona revealed how his mind was working as he took possession: he remembered a game seven years earlier when he was in a similar position, but after he'd dismantled the opponent's defence, his shot went the wrong side of the goalkeeper, and he missed.
Recalling this, Maradona made his mind up to go for the far corner against England. That is, as he's busy running past defenders like they're not there in a match of enormous consequence, he remembered what had happened before, processed this information, decided upon one of any number of options he could take, and then carried it out, all at dizzying speed, with desperate Englishmen trying to cut him in two. From receiving the ball to dispatching it beyond Shilton took all of ten seconds, and this genius of a man was able to delve into a game from years ago to assist him in the present.
It is this ability to calculate for the purposes of destruction whilst moving at speed that separates Maradona from the rest of us. The one time I've ever been able to do it, I used my opportunity to swear at a small boy who’d launched a snowball at me.
