1. Being Treated with Unmitigated Unfairness (I got punished
once for looking at the very thing the teacher was talking about. He said I
wasn’t paying attention.)
2. Being Unappreciated.
Here’s an example of the latter:
During one sports period, the sports master was clearly at a
loss to know what to do with us. ‘Let’s have a game of football,’ he said. And
so we did. We all tripped off to the football pitch (that’s ‘field’ to the DYs)
and divided into two teams. I played in my customary position of centre half.
(They’re called central defenders now, just so the foreign players know where
to stand at kick off.)
My team won a corner kick on the right, and I suddenly got this kind of premonition. I somehow knew that if I pushed up to the opponents’
penalty area and stood in precisely the right spot, the ball would land at my
feet and I could take a shot at goal. And do you know what?
The lad who took the corner made a bit of a hash of it and
one of their defenders got in the way. The ball was deflected outfield and
landed just in front of me and slightly to the right. I’d seen it all happen
beforehand and was ready for it. I took one step forward, drew my right leg back
and hit the ball sweetly on the half volley. It flew clean as a whistle inside
the right hand post. Goal.
Now, if Beckham had done that, he would have been lauded to
the heavens and paid an extra 20m or so to have his face stuck on yet another
bottle of some smelly chemical. What I got was a wry look from the sports
master.
‘Bet you couldn’t do that again,’ he said. And that was
that.
No comments:
Post a Comment