The joys of maturity

It so happens yesterday that I was engaged upon a schedule that saw me setting off from the south coast to London at sparrow’s first fart in the morning, spending much of the day in town and then returning to the coast in the early evening.

As part of my general scheme, I first ‘dumped’ my car in Richmond and from there took the train into the metropolis – and then out again – before picking it up and driving like the proverbial bat out of hell down the A3 in order to try and miss the worst excesses of the Tuesday evening rush hour. Which, as it happens, didn’t really materialise as far as I was concerned – thank God.

However. I must now take the reader back about thirty years, to when I worked in a large company that – for the sheer hell of it as well as a means of developing ‘team spirit’ – used to organise annual cricket competitions between its two biggest departments. These were a combination of an excuse to get together and socialise, hopefully in reasonably good weather, and (for those with sporting pretensions) the chance to either show off, and/or enjoy some fraternal bantering at each other’s expense, upon the field of play.

One year that I cannot now identify, but which is relevant to my post today, for some reason an additional fixture was arranged – this time of a football match. I don’t recall the exact circumstances, but the facts that our new managing director was keen to make an impression whilst engendering more cohesion and team spirit on his watch – and indeed fancied himself as a soccer player – certainly came into it.

The football match was played on a ‘proper’ local town team pitch and attended by about 150 spectators. Your author had (naturally) been selected to play in left midfield for his department, even though in fact I did not regard myself as a soccer player and, after leaving school, had only ever played in semi-serious matches either for a law firm with which I was once connected and/or a park soccer side with my mates.

Nevertheless, of course, this was an opportunity for me to impress … er … somebody/anybody(?) … with my general sporting prowess but also have some fun with colleagues that normally I only knew in office or perhaps canteen situations, both in my own department and the opposition’s.

We duly changed in the ground dressing rooms and came out onto the pitch and – in little bunches or perhaps twos – began kicking a ball or two around in the guise of ‘warming up’ and/or practising – and perhaps even discussing the odd tactic also.

I remember vividly what happened next. I was jogging down the near touchline with a close business colleague, simply knocking the ball back and forth between us, when he hit the ball four or five yards further in front of me than before. I therefore naturally lengthened my stride – and speeded up – in order to capture it (Messi-like, though Messi probably hadn’t been born at the time) seamlessly on the end of my foot …

And immediately realised that something was wrong.

I’d pulled a hamstring – well, if not a hamstring (I’d never had a hamstring injury before) then something in the back of my left leg that felt like one – or that it ought to be one.

I tried running it off, and stretching, in the hope that it would ‘go away’ … but to no avail. Ten minutes later I had to inform our new managing director that there was nothing else for it – me, the greatest athlete in our squad (by my own admission), was unable to take to the field of play because of an injury sustained in the warm-up.

A few weeks later it dawned upon me, really for the first time ever (I was in my mid-thirties then) that I was no longer the eternally-youthful twenty-something that I was. And probably needed at least half an hour of gentle warming up, if not skilled physio massage, the application of suitable liniments and possibly even two months of preparatory training, before I ever took part in anything so strenuous as a game of anything.

I just wanted to mention all that because – yesterday at about 2.43pm, at the age of 65 – in an effort to ensure that I caught the 2.50pm train from Waterloo to Richmond which was leaving from the far-flung Platform 24 (situated over the former Eurostar Terminal area because of the current refurbishments being carried out at the station), I had to break into a jog for about 300 yards.

And, as I subsequently discovered when arriving at Richmond and leaving the train, pulled my left hamstring again.