I HAD A horrible feeling when I read about the homophobic attacks in the South Bank in London on Friday night. It should have made unpleasant reading for anyone, but I found it particularly so because something very similar happened to me at about the same time — in the small hours of Saturday morning — a little further north in Charing Cross Road.

As I said goodnight to a friend, we were subjected to a barrage of abuse — homophobic abuse. Quite extreme, but unimaginative stuff — we “didn’t deserve to live”, apparently. I don’t remember the exact words — the chap who delivered them wasn’t an urban poet — but I remember the intent. I’ve never experienced hatred like it.

And it was threatening. Very threatening. But my instinct was lofty contempt. I ignored him and didn’t respond. That’s what you’re supposed to do, isn’t it? He passed us by. Spat some more venom and, when he was a little further up the road, threw a bottle at us. Then I did what you’re not supposed to do. After the bottle hit me, I hit him — repeatedly.

I’ve not hit someone since I was a child. In fact, I rarely feel like hitting anybody. You’ll just have to take my word for it, but I’m an exceptionally placid man. On this occasion, though, I got very angry very quickly, walked over to him and behaved out of character.

It was an ugly, untidy kind of fight. A bit of a playground scuffle — as I said, I’m not much of a pro when it comes to violence. But he soon retreated and honour was restored. I went back to being my good, placid self, surprised by my behaviour, and embarrassed in an English sort of way.

The angry young chap found another bottle and, from a safe distance, lobbed it at us. It shattered a few feet from where we were standing. Then I made a calm, sensible decision and said: “I think we’d better leave.” I didn’t respond (though it was a bit late for that, admittedly).

We walked away. My assailant had found another bottle — a nice big glass one. He ran up behind me, smashed it over my head, and ran off.

I hadn’t prepared for this, so I fell to my knees clutching my head. There was a lot of blood. It gushed through my hands and painted the pavement. There’s now a burgundy-coloured bit of Charing Cross Road that belongs to me.

I called for an ambulance and for the police, mobile phone clutched to my bloodied head. They asked me a lot of annoying questions which I passed over to my companion. I started trembling as the adrenalin kicked in. A kind man offered me some paper hankies and I was rude to him. I asked when the ambulance would come; people told me I wasn’t going to die.

The rest of the night was pretty tiresome. I went to A&E at St Thomas’ Hospital and they picked the glass out of my head. I didn’t know it at the time, but David Morley, the barman who had been attacked near the Festival Hall, was being treated not that far away. He died at 7.45 that evening at St Thomas’. I was given a head bandage, with dried blood already accessorised above my eyebrows, and then I had my head gash stapled by a man who made jokes so that I wouldn ’t notice. The stapling hurt rather a lot.

So I was fine. But I might not have been, as my worried friends repeatedly told me. I had been “very stupid” to retaliate. “What if he had been carrying a knife?” And then I had silly, liberal anxieties about it. Should I really have punched this poor, damaged youth? It was hardly surprising that he responded in such an extreme, violent, hateful way. I had deserved that. And what if, fired up after meeting me, he had gone on to attack someone else?

Why had he done it? Was he, as the cliché dictates, sexually confused?

He was also Asian. One friend was “disappointed” that I’d “felt it necessary” to mention this in my retelling. It was also suggested that this muddied the waters, hate-crime wise. My glassing was ideologically complex.