Headings. It would need headings.
On Schooldays
On Sport
On Music
On Reading
On Bullshit
…etc, etc…
OK, here’s a little extract from the Memoirs that Never
Were.
On Schooldays (or
Sport, whichever needs more padding.)
It was a cold Saturday
morning in January and I was playing in a rugby match against a team from
another school. I was sixteen – only a year to go before attaining the
perennial age of thirty two.
I picked up a loose
ball and took it into a maul which soon collapsed to form a ruck. (Such a state
of play was known as a loose scrum back then, but these days it’s known as a
ruck – which, by an odd coincidence, happens to rhyme with ‘luck’ and many
other words in common usage, a fact which might or might not be deemed
appropriate in the circumstances.)
Body after body piled
on top of me until I spied a knee descending inch by unremitting inch towards that
part of my anatomy which I expected to put to meaningful use in the not-too-distant
future. What might a fit young man be expected to do in such circumstances?
Scream to get the game stopped? One doesn’t like to scream during a rugby
match, but one likes even less the possibility of having one’s future prospects
prematurely compromised. I screamed, manfully I hope.
The referee blew the
whistle immediately and my future prospects were saved – for posterity, as they
say, although posteriors were not then, nor ever have been, my forte.
All true, but hardly saleable.
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