Depending on how old you are, being physically massive can either feel like a blessing or a curse.

Personally I’ve been back and forth with being 6ft 4in and 19-odd stone. Sometimes you feel like you own the room, other times you want to melt into the background.

Purchasing clothes and shoes is a painstaking and expensive task, shops never have anything that fits and life turns into a blur of online deliveries and returned items.

Public transport and especially plane travel becomes an exercise in contortion and discomfort and you regularly get asked to lift stuff off shelves for old ladies – fine, that’s fair enough, a civic duty almost.

You find people walking a little too close behind you on blustery days and occasionally you get some idiot with a Napoleon complex taking a swing at you for literally no reason other than to try and prove his (questionable) worth as a human being.

To make him feel big.

Like a dentist on a safari.

I bet you Jonah Lomu had to deal with all of this stuff, too. But I bet you he dealt with it a lot better than I did.

There are a handful of athletes who changed their sport. Michael Jordan, I guess Tiger Woods, Usain Bolt... I’m struggling now, except for Jonah Lomu.

No longer did the figure 19 stone and an ‘obese’ BMI of 32 conjure images of housebound Americans with remote controls enveloped in their rolls of fat. It triggered visions of power and strength and brute force and will to win.

When I went back to school after the summer holidays in 1995 instead of ‘mind out, here comes One Mode Hoad’ bumbling and charging my way upfield in a game of anything from lunchtime tennis-ball football to our infrequent rugby matches, all of a sudden people were shouting ‘blimey, it’s Lomu’.

When the other 13 and 14-year-olds were a head shorter and a couple of stone lighter than me, as so many were, they were nothing to me, just as Mike Catt and Tony Underwood were nothing to Jonah. It was OK to be big. It was OK to channel it. It was something to be proud of.

I have my own regrets now that I never made anything of my physical stature but how desperately sad that Lomu’s career was so hampered by the serious kidney problem with which he was diagnosed just a few weeks after my autumn term had begun in 1995.

He made a respectable 63 appearances for the All Blacks but his international career lasted just eight years... EIGHT years... and he played in just one more World Cup, after lighting up South Africa in 1995 a month after turning 20.

Perhaps the most naturally gifted player the game has ever seen and by all accounts a charming man away from the field.

He should be sitting at home in Auckland today with 200-plus caps, several World Cup winners medals and a long and healthy retirement in front of him. Instead he is gone at 40.

As if we needed a reminded this week, life is cruel.

Thirteen-year-old me – and all the versions that followed – will always be in his debt and so will everyone who loves rugby.