Thursday, October 08, 2009

There's a slightly strange sub-plot to all this arm business. Pretty much everybody who's examined me at close quarters over the last fortnight or so, has observed what splendid working order the rest of me is in. This morning, a very nice physiotherapist reassured me that my good arm was so flexible that, when fully healed, even with a reduced range of motion, my right arm should be not that far off most people's range of motion. This specialist in the hospital offered me stronger painkillers, expressing amazement that I was chugging along on the mild ones. I am lead, therefore, to conclude that I am a strong and healthy person.

Why, then, did the Neanderthal cunts who taught PE at school spend my formative years telling me I wasn't, just because I couldn't get excited about kicking a ball around? I wasn't lazy, I wasn't averse to exercise. By the time I was in the 4th form, I was cycling the 8-mile round trip to and from school daily on my 10-speed Falcon Rapier (or Falcon Rapist, as it inevitably became known). I just couldn't see the point in what they were offering. If they told me to put on hiking boots rather than football boots, and let me go walking for the duration of the games period, I'd have been out of their hair and getting good valuable exercise in a manner that did not seem wholly futile.

I can only hope that physical education in schools has changed for the better in the intervening 20-25 years.

2 comments:

Apres la Guerre said...

My school PE teacher married one of his pupils when he got her up the stick. He kept his job.

An experienced mountaineer, he threw himself off a mountain while being investigated in a major fraud involving Euro '96 tickets four years after I left school. I still have the newspaper article round here somewhere, having only marginally decided against putting it in a frame when the news was published.

Apres la Guerre said...

Oh, and it wasn't any mere local rag, either. It was The Independent, and it's still online.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/noheadline-1348670.html