On 30 June last year Jordan Gill drank a litre of vodka in a field in Cambridgeshire as he contemplated ending his life. It was the night before he turned 29 and earlier that Friday morning it had been, in his own words, “just a normal, sunny day. I woke up and didn’t know what to do with myself”.
We sit a foot apart on a very different Friday morning in a boxing gym in Harlow. Apart from a few weights and pieces of apparatus, the room is empty. Gill and Zelfa Barrett step into the ring for a compelling super-featherweight contest in Manchester on Saturday night. But, now, he pauses before going back into the darkness and despair.
