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Our Legend@Lunch for May was Business Studies and PE teacher Mr Ben Phillips. Ben drew an amazing crowd and had them enthralled. Along with his own recollections of learning about boxing and learning the life lessons of boxing, Ben quoted from some of his favourite books on the subject. Several are recalled in the video above. One of these is from On Boxing by Joyce Carol Oates. Widely known as a fiction writer, her book surprised many but is considered a modern classic on the subject. The session was rounded off with video highlights of a few famous boxers of the last half century.

Ben inherited a love of boxing from his father who encouraged him to read about boxing history, then agreed to take him to lessons where he really got hooked. Some final words from Ben:

The thing that boxing taught me was the importance of being a man from an early age and using the skills I learnt wisely… Boxing taught me self discipline. What this discipline instilled in me was to finish things I have started. To go the extra mile. To run another kilometre when I had finished a set training distance.  To train when others weren’t. To finish the things I start.

Fan fiction is a term that describes authors’ creative writing that uses pre-existing characters from television, movies or other fiction. Usually composed of short stories, fan fiction used to be published in ‘zines and mailed to a small number of subscribers. Today, the Internet allows authors to publish their work to a much wider audience. From Chilling Effects Clearinghouse

The biggest fan fiction site around is FanFiction - unleash your imagination and here is what Daniel thinks of this site:

Everyone who can read has the choice to like or dislike reading. Whatever your feelings are towards reading, I know a website for you. Fanfiction.net has a multitude of stories including stories based on games, movies, cartoons, books and much much more… All the stories are written by different authors and are fantastically edited into masterpieces. Hope you like it! Daniel

We would love to hear what you think of FanFiction.net - some specific examples would be good. Click on COMMENTS below.

Some authors and publishers object to fan fiction being published on the web for copyright reasons. This is a tricky issue. For more information read this page at Chilling Effects Clearinghouse. J. K. Rowling has given her blessing to fan fiction writers, with a couple of provisos, and Mary Hoffman encourages it by publishing fan fiction on her Stravaganza web site.

Illustration: Fancy Hippogriff - Arizona Turquois Rump by Babbletrish.