Littleton First School Sports Day

I wish I had kept ‘Story and Picture’ books throughout my entire childhood, although most of the teen entries would have involved crudely drawn pictures of me telling my parents how unfair they were, and crayoned images of my increasing angst over inappropriate boys. Still, I would have perhaps found the humour in a failed attempt to lose my virginity much quicker had I the opportunity to sketch it out in felt-tipped pen [*pauses to attempt a quick biro draft, smirks*].  Think Dad’s dressing gown, unnecessarily large condom,  Coal Chamber on the CD player, Nine Inch Nail lyrics grunted seductively in a ear.  ["On Thursday my boyfriend attempted to 'have it off' with me but it didn't really work so he got grumpy and told me that I was uptight..."].

Anyway, to more innocent days when spare time was filled with sweets and Sunday night TV, where the only things a six-year-old girl could write about were her family’s arguments, her Mother’s weight gain and the inconvenient death of a grandparent.  John’s books from a similar time reveal a fantasy world of Dr Who monsters, battling robots and effortless space travel. The only monsters in my books are my sisters and the local paedophiles.

I recently found a stash of my ‘Story and Picture’ books in my Dad’s attic, and settled on the bathroom’s carpetted floor, laughing and crying  my way through the clunkily illustrated and appalling misspelt exercise books.

The first entry I wanted to put up here describes a Littleton First School sports day. I have very few memories of my sporting activities prior to Montfort winning the house rounders competition at Blackminster in 1995. The most sporty thing I ever did at first school was to throw Paul Stansfield’s pumps down the corridor when I thought no-one was looking. The wretchedly omnipresent Mrs Hall caught me red-handed. There is a 200m swimming badge in a shoebox somewhere (but I think I may have pinched that from one of the Kirbys) and I remember being awarded a yellow ribbon for my performance in a sack race, that was stitched onto the hip of my itchy school leotard.

 

Tuesday 91th July

On Thursday it was sports day. I was in the hoop race. After a while it poured with rain. So all the people had to go home. And the children who were in sports day had to go to there class. So we had to have are sports day on a Monday. I was in the harnes race and the skipping race.

There was a sack race, bat and beanbag race, a three-legged race, a fathers race, a mums race. In the mums race Liz Keene, Matthews mum, tripped over a dog. There was a toddlers race too. Reds won in sports day and I was reds. I saw Lee’s mum and Dad. Lee’s sister ran in the toddler’s race. My mum didnt go in the mums race.

 

The Crystal Maze

 

When I was at middle school I was allowed to stay up later on Thursday evenings to watch The Crystal Maze. I loved the theme tune (Zack Lawrence’s “Force Field”), hated the renovation of Industrial Zone to Ocean Zone, and scoffed at the I.T. executives and management consultants as they missed the crystals that were so obvious to their frustrated teammates. I planned the type of game I would pick (Mystery) and which zone I would want our team to start in (Aztec, so that we could kayak through the ‘jungle’ to the games arena).

When not pretending to be part of a Man. United-based fantasy game with my friend, I avidly played The Crystal Maze game on her Acorn computer (even though it would always crash during the last level in the crystal dome), and was overjoyed when my Dad announced that the Jones girls could each pick an item from the Benson & Hedges tokens catalogue and I found a handheld Crystal Maze game therein. The game bore little resemblance to the television show, taking the form of an impossibly difficult side-scroller with background music that sounded like a dying smoke alarm. I took the device into school in the hope of impressing my classmates but it was promptly confiscated by the deputy head.

The Crystal Maze still influences me today (and not because Challenge TV has it on repeat). When I was 11, I devised a series of Crystal Maze-like games to motivate me to complete my daily housework tasks. To this day there is part of my brain that approaches the drying-up as if it was a Crystal Maze game in ‘Chore Zone’, where the challenge is to carefully lift items off the monstrous pile on the draining board so as not to move anything else remaining on there, with 3 lives to lose before being ‘locked in’. Furthermore, like zombie videogames, the programme has embedded itself into my dreamscapes and I frequently have nightmares that Richard O’Brien forces me to play ‘Physical’ games.

As to the O’Brien vs Ed Tudor-Pole debate, I remain undecided. The latter lives in the same part of London as me and I often see him decked out in mock country gent garb as I wait for my bus in the mornings.