War on games

On a visit to my old school not long ago, I found myself confronted by my former PE teacher, now the deputy head. She fixed me with an icy glare. ‘Oh no,’ I said, ‘I’ve forgotten my note.’

The icy glare froze completely so I explained: ‘You remember? I’m the one who came to every single PE and games lesson with a note from my parents saying I had neck ache.’

Icy glare. To her, it still wasn’t funny. More than 20 years later, and on the night I was invited back to present the prizes, my lack of enthusiasm for school sport still made her look me up and down with a stare that said, ‘You are a dangerous subversive.’

At my alma mater there was nothing you could do to compensate for being useless at sport. You could get straight As in every academic subject, win Young Musician of the Year, spend your holidays volunteering at feeding centres in Africa or photographing hitherto undiscovered Amazonian tribes, but they wouldn’t sign you off a report that said anything other than ‘could try harder’ unless you looked lively when handed a purple vest bearing the legend ‘Wing Attack’.

I resisted to the bitter end. When ordered to run around a track I sat down and feigned sprained ankles. Before hockey I stuffed heated pads in my gloves and two sets of shin pads on each leg.

During water polo I all but drowned. At ‘survival’ classes I swallowed life-threatening amounts of water by spending the entire time making jokes, between gulps of chlorine, about the scenarios which would require us to stage an emergency swim wearing pyjamas.

I couldn’t see why girls shouldn’t learn the rules of cricket, sitting somewhere nice and warm as someone explained them using a blackboard.