There was Ish, the highly entertaining Sikh who was often so high in spirits that he seemed crazy to all of us. He was constantly uttering a stream of adjectives meant to sound sophisticated but ending up as meaningless strings of words so hilarious in their incredulity. When we met, the first thing he said to me was “Your body is an approximation of gargantuan scale that it is in juxtaposition to your puny miniature concoction of a brain.”

And his most comical moments were when he would bug out his eyes, go around forcefully bear-hugging people and growling, “I am the best, I own you!” in his trademark confident voice. Or he might say, “Look at my thunderous thigh muscles, they bulge out till my tights are bursting!”

And we would all roll our eyes and go sarcastically, “Yeah yeah, Ish, your fats are shapely…”

So Ish was in a class of his own. It was highly amusing to prick his flamboyant show of ego and overrated self-flattery with reality checks, but while he might have made comments that could, on the surface, appear as intolerably condescending, he said them in such an exaggerated and cheerful tone that we found his verbose self-aggrandisation so ridiculously amusing.

It is always great to have such lively, buoyant personalities brightening up your life, and Ish soon became especially inspiring to me as I soon found out that not only was my tall lean body unsuited to back strain inherent in hockey, but my coach seemed, to be picking on me too.