Is it just ME?

Or does social sport send shivers down your spine?

‘ANYONE for tennis?’ Oh no. Anything but that. Don’t make me play rounders after lunch in summer, or ping- pong before tea in spring. Don’t ask me to sign up for a Fun Run, a sponsored swim, a wall- scaling, tunnel crawling obstacle course.

It was bad enough at school: being picked last, wallopings with a lacrosse stick, belly-flopping off the diving board. ‘I used to stand quite still and stare at the trees and not think of anything,’ says Flora Poste of school sport in Stella Gibbons’s Cold Comfort Farm. That was my strategy, too.

I never thought anyone would subject me to ‘Games’ in adulthood. But a dogged few will insist on making you sweat for your supper. A table football tournament, a bounce on the children’s trampoline, a sprint along the canal on borrowed bicycles. Don’t fall in!

If I just sit here quietly, I think at picnics, under this tree, and press my nose up

Need we all be Olympians? Nothing is less jolly than jolly-hockey-sticks

against my book, maybe they’ll leave me alone? No luck. A kick-about is in the offing. And all must join in.

Photographs of foreign secretaries Boris Johnson (Team UK) and Julie Bishop ( Team AUS) jogging in London last week made me goggle. How do you have a trade talk in track pants? ‘Beneficial HUFF exports PUFF tariffs HEAVE.’

Need we all be Olympians? Floras don’t berate colleagues for not wanting to read a book or have a nap, but the hearties see not taking part as a lack of moral fibre. A friend was dragged go-karting on her first day in a new job to ‘bond’ with her team. It had quite the reverse effect. She took an instant dislike to the whole company.

Never was there anything less jolly than jolly hockey sticks.