The 2032 Olympics

seem to be a long way off. The Premier of a different state has gone on a trip to Tokyo to try and persuade the IOC that Downunder should host them - again. (There is a row about her going. I just think it is plain silly to go given the level of Covid19 infections in Japan.)

But it all rather reminded me of school sports days. I hated, loathed and detested them. There were two sorts of sports days. There were the sports days which were just your own school and then there were the area sports days in which you competed against other schools. 

I suspect most of my fellow students quite liked sports days because it meant a day out of the classroom. Of course I much preferred to be in the classroom - and reading surreptitiously under the desk.

There were times when I simply had to be on a team because there were not enough people otherwise for the school to even have a team. I never could work out why they couldn't just have seven people on the "bob down" team and have one person play twice to make it up to eight. We all knew that our team would not come first because I wasn't going to throw and catch the basketball or run down the line to the end. (There were other, similar, games and I was equally hopeless at them.) It was, to put it mildly, embarrassing for all of us.

I am trying to remember now how they organised things for the schools which had eight, fourteen and sixteen students respectively. The school with only eight students did get extra points at the beginning. I do remember that. I suppose the others did too - but they could never have won the day against the biggest school. That had more than two hundred students.

Our schools were divided into houses of course. I went to four different schools divided up that way. The one thing to be said for that is that family members were in the same house. Middle Cat made up for my lack of athletic prowess and Brother Cat's lack of athletic prowess too. Mind you he was pretty good at the sack race and the egg and spoon.  

But there was one thing I could do and I could do it as well as any parent. Somehow my siblings and I were always in the house that came out on top. This had absolutely nothing to do with physical or intellectual capabilities and everything to do with the fund raising stalls that accompanied the events. There was a cake stall, a produce stall, a garden stall - and a sweets stall. 

We always had the sweets stall. There was hard toffee in little "patty pans" (paper cake containers), there were toffee apples, marshmallow cones, fudge, Russian toffee, butterscotch, peanut brittle and other jaw breaking but toothsome delights. It sold too. There was never anything left.

I would stand behind the counter and take in the pennies, the "thrupney" and "sixpence" pieces - along with the occasional shilling or two shilling pieces. I could add up and take away money and give change without making a mistake. The adult in the background was only there to help the youngest children decide how to spend the penny or two an adult had given them. 

The rule was that I was not allowed to buy any for myself but we got around that by my brother doing it for me. That meant we had a nice stash of very long lasting sticky toffee for some days. No, our mother was not impressed but there was little she could do about it at the time.  And yes, even our mother contributed to the stall. I don't know how she found the time but her contribution of creamy caramel coloured butterscotch always looked good.

I think that was the best part of sports day for most of us. We didn't get many sweets back then. That was something the children in the city knew about. Out in the bush we had to wait for Show day and Sports day. All that was fine of course. We were all active enough to use up the calorie intake in a day - including me.

I feel rather sorry for all those Olympic athletes and their specialist diets. I think we had more fun.