Last Pick

I was a very fit child and teenager who was no good at sport. Pencil thin, I even had a primary school teacher who would berate me in front of the class, by no means only in PE lessons, for being overweight. It was beyond me then, and it is beyond me now, why the obvious need for physical exercise had to be met in the form of competitive sport.

As for the lesson usually said to be learned from such activity, has it ever occurred to those who come out with that argument that academic work might have been a more appropriate way of teaching that lesson? After all, it is not at all as if they themselves were the types that they glorify. Politics and the media are not exactly replete with people who look as if they were always picked first for sports teams. Is that how you picture the adolescent Michael Gove?

Yet somehow, even when made a Secretary of State, they remain convinced that they have failed at life because they were not like that, and desperately pretend to cultivate the impression that they must have been, since no one else would possibly wish to inflict the whole process on anyone else. Would they?

Like the slavering public school commentariat's insistence that school uniforms, of which I am a staunch defender, were given up in state schools some time a generation or so ago (when the Tories were in government and exercising far tighter control over schools than hitherto, but never mind), the slavering public school commentariat's insistence that competitive sport was given up in state schools some time a generation or so ago (when the Tories were in government and exercising far tighter control over schools than hitherto, but never mind) is totally false in my experience and in that of everyone whom I have ever met.

What we do all remember, however, is the flogging off of school fields. When the Tories were in government and exercising far tighter control over schools than hitherto. The academies so beloved of Michael Gove, his "free" schools being a proposed form of them, are already being built with no outdoor space whatever, on the grounds that people are there, at those places of business, strictly in order to work. Remember, eventually, every school is supposed to become one...