Sue's Sports Starter by Sue_Thearle

So I am now the proud owner of two adorable (naturally) children who are at school. I’m not ashamed to say that I cried when my little boy went in on his first day. He waved happily and pottered off while I bit my lip and sobbed properly once safely outside the school gates. I was so unable to speak my husband didn’t actually notice....he was probably enjoying a rare moment of peace and quiet. But so far so good in terms of my son’s school career. In fact in the space of four action-packed days he has, as he put it, broken up with one girlfriend and acquired another........he is only 4. Heaven help us all.

His progress has been a ray of sunshine in a relentlessly gloomy sporty outlook. My achilles is still playing up. I have been having tons of treatment and it still hurts. Damn. Damn. Damn. My physio says it’s a chronic injury - well yes I think we can all agree it is. And I am a rubbish patient. But the lovely lady who is making it better has relented and allowed me to go spinning again, on account of the fact it really doesn’t hurt then. Well put it this way, my achilles doesn’t hurt when I’m spinning, although everything else does. I did also manage to play golf again last week in the Telegraph Media Golf Day, where I had the pleasure of playing in a team that included Sir Steve Redgrave. Now it’s fair to say that my husband didn’t help the night before, when he suggested that a 5-time Olympic champion might be a decent golfer and slightly competitive. Of course he was entirely right.

(Picture courtesy of Gary Prior). Steve is a terrific golfer, but also charming company and generous to a fault, when he realised that he had in fact been paired with three members of The Muppets. Any hopes of a decent team score were long gone by the 3rd and he merely smiled encouragingly when I couldn’t actually hit the ball. And every time I had a putt that mattered, which I must confess was rarely, I cocked it up. Oh the shame. The shame. At one point I even had to reassure Steve and the rest of my teammates, that I had actually played the sport before, because I must be honest, it wasn't immediately apparent. Ho hum indeed.

My gloomy grumpiness has not been helped by the approach of (a) my birthday (sigh) and (b) Christmas. Now I love the festive season more than most, but I was open-mouthed to see Christmas chocolates on the supermarket shelves, where the previous week there had been school uniform. Indeed the very items of uniform that I had forgotten to buy and had naively expected to remain in the stores longer than 24 hours after the start of term. But no, apparently not. If you don’t buy it at least 6 months before you actually need it, you can forget it. Grrrrr. But flipping tubes of chocolate with a snowy street scene, now I could get loads of that, which I'm sure will come in mighty handy during PE. Right, rant over. I am off to audition for a role at the school Xmas play. I think I might be a shoe-in for Scrooge.