Sport isn’t something I’ve ever been very good at. Most of my exercise related memories from primary school consist of being very efficiently outrun by three quarters of the class. The other quarter had more courage than I did, and simply faked an overpowering headache to avoid the breathless, humiliating dash across the dewy field. In the city I could have been seen as above average in my PE classes, as our diets mainly consisted on chips slippy with grease from the shop across the road. So everyone was equally appalling runners. But in the country where everyone goes to regular swimming lessons, and there’s a nut and raisin breakfast bar in every lunch box, I didn’t stand a chance. Recently however, in an attempt to rid myself of those memories of me as a slightly doughy ten year old, I’ve been playing fairly regular squash with my Dad at weekends. It’s also fairly regularly bad, on my part anyway. I seem to be using the same motion as a swat chasing a particularly acrobatic fly; my racket is able to hit anything except the small black ball that’s flying towards me at an alarming speed. Still, after months of wheezing around the court and careering into it’s every surface, I can now play a reasonable game of squash.

Yet this isn’t the first time I’ve enthusiastically (and optimistically) taken up a sport. At a more innocent time in my life and attracted by the glamorous outfits and pretty shoes I’d begged for ballet lessons. As a five year old standing on one leg for forty minutes a week was a perfectly fine way to spend my time. But as I aged I discovered I was expected to improve, and it turned out that it was the girls who did tap who got the sequined leotards and shiny shoes. So the novelty began to ware off. I stayed though; maybe it was simply to relish my dad and brother’s terror of my teacher who was a cross between Cruella Deville and Atilla the hun, but without his notorious sense of fun. My Dad would refuse to even the school in the fear of being caught and berated about my attendance. Whenever she had him cornered she’d have one gloved hand clamped on his shoulder as if correcting his posture. This lack of regard for personal space always made my very middle class Dad extremely uncomfortable, and he swears she did it on purpose.

Still, the move to the country changed things again. The next ballet teacher seemed to think that all our lives solely revolved around toe pointing and knee bending. By the time I’d moved my short lived pink and glitter phase was long behind me, and I definitely didn’t appreciate being told that my hair had to be scrapped into a deeply uncomfortable bun every lesson ( now two times a week). My hair was slightly too short so it took a horde of clips and slides, which I never had, to hold it in place. Even then it still seemed to be a personal insult to my teacher. She would flinch at the very sight of what I had the audacity to say was fit for her class. The final straw was when we were told we were going onto point. I was never going to shove lumps of wood into my already uncomfortable shoes and wash my feet in white spirit each night to harden the skin. So the ballet stopped, although I think I can still do a pretty mean pirouette. Which is still much more impressive than my squash playing ability.