A Timely Reminder

Age never fails to remind you that you are never quite as good at anything as you used to be: a situation that is greatly exacerbated when ‘it’s been a while’ and you’re faced with the dawning realisation that in reality you might not have been ‘all that’ in the first place.

I always believed that I was ok at sport – not great, but ok: always in the team, but always just a hair’s breadth away from substitute: generally brought into the squad with the realisation that there was a particularly unglamorous role left to fill when the cry went up “Colin will do it” which, of course, I did.  In cricket I could not bowl to save my life, but I could give the ball a fair old whack.  I didn’t have the finesse required to be opening bat, nor the doggedness to hold up one end whilst the other, more gifted batter did his stuff, but I was well worth a bash in a run chase.  In football I was never a striker and I was much too short to be a goalkeeper or a defender, but I was ‘tenacious’ and if there’s one thing that school sports teachers love, it’s a boy who gets ‘stuck in’, so I got that role: win the ball, make the easy pass and allow the talented players to do something with it.  I thrived in the team doing the job that nobody else wanted to do.  In rugby, being neither big nor particularly fast, I found my role as scrum-half, a role which, to the best of my memory, involved getting jumped on by the bigger members of the opposition with a frightening regularity.  I was never one of the boys that the girls came to watch.

Athletics was not then, nor is now, in any way ‘my bag’.  I can chase a ball, but there is always someone who is much quicker.  I could never sprint, I could never jump either far nor high and I most certainly could not run long distances, but I did discover that I had some kind of talent for chucking stuff so, by and large, that’s what I did.  I was definitely lacking in brawn, but I worked on a technique of sorts and I did ok – still didn’t get the girls mind – and I am fully aware that however limited I was then, I am far more so now.

And of course, it’s not only sport where this retrograde scale of attainment comes into play.  There was a time when faced with a task I knew I could not do, I would think “What could possibly go wrong?” and do it anyway.  These days I know exactly what could go wrong.  I have experience, although not always enough to stop me giving it a go.  Sadly my ability to persevere until things somehow fell into place has definitely waned and I now have a contacts list full of people who exist solely to dig me out of a hole just as soon as I have sense enough to realise that I am badly out of my depth.

My ‘party trick’ when I was younger was to make up a rhyme or limerick instantly from a single word prompt.  I can still do it, but I need twenty four hours notice these days.  Nothing works quite as quickly as once it did; nothing is quite so strong… nor quite so watertight.

I always thought that my writing was ok, and I suppose it is, for me.  The knowledge that I will never write a best seller is ok.  Jeffrey Archer wrote those and look where it got him.  I look back on some of the things I wrote years ago and, despite the fact that nobody would touch them then, part of me thinks that actually they were alright.  Through the years I always seem to have teetered on the line between success and failure, more often than not tripping over kismet and falling head over heels into ‘nearly there’.  These days I realise that it was just the way that things were meant to be: perseverance seldom pays the dividends of good fortune.  So I grew to understand that whilst even in my prime I was never really ‘all that’, I am one step further away from it now and will almost certainly see it as only the faintest of dots on the horizon before my eyesight gives in.  If I’m honest, I’m happy with that.  Accepting the way that things are, is something that I’m getting much better at.  Understanding that they’re not as good as they used to be is just something that comes with age – and being even further from getting the girls…