going for gold

Unless you’ve been in a coma or the Big Brother house lately, you’ve probably noticed that we are doing rather well in the Olympic games. It’s all medal medal medal, siliver gold silver.
Which reminds me of a sporting triumph I enjoyed myself once.
Now, when you are fat, bespectacled, camp as Christmas and sport- and ballphobic as I was as a youngster, moments of sporting glory are very few and far between.
So picture the scene. It is the trials for sports day and I have been selected to try for… the egg and spoon race!
So, I line up, spoon in hand and egg on floor before me. The whistle goes. I bend to pick up the egg and it is as if it wants to be on that spoon. I scoop it up and am off, running (ok, walking slightly faster than normal, free arm flapping around, heels kicking up, egg-carrying arm rigid, probably flapping about the possibility of the egg falling off the spoon, or worse, my hair getting messed up) toward the finishing post while the other competitors are all repeatedly dropping their eggs on the floor and having to pick them up again. It is as if my egg is now stuck to my spoon.
When sportsmen talk about just going into slow motion or flow motion during an outstanding race I really get it, because for a few moments back then when I was 11, I did just that. And I came first by a very long way. It was as if me and my egg were carried along by some higher power. The patron saint of fat children was smiling on me that day.
Shame he’d gone on holiday the following week when the race proper happened. Poised at the starting line, ready to repeat my success and get my very first medal (‘fly Steven, fly’ said the voice in my head. ‘see the egg, be the egg’) the whistle goes off and guess what – I can’t even get the egg on the spoon. I am still struggling to pick it up off the floor when every other bugger has finished the race.