Summer's here and the time is right for playing ball games in the street.
Am I the only one who feels suddenly intimidated?
I have two major concerns when it comes to ball games in the street, and they have little to do with broken windows. They go a little something like this...
1) I have limited sporting ability. While I could occasionally, in my youth, catch a cricket ball if pressed to do so, this was largely a survival mechanism. Better it hit me in the palm of my hand than smack in the face, chest or unmentionables. I cannot, however, and never have been able to, kick a football. You know when you're walking down the street and two urchins are moving (passing?) a ball back and forth and one of them sends it swerving towards you and the "decent bloke" thing to do is stop (trap?) it with your foot and send (shoot?) it back to them? I cannot do this. If I try, I am more than likely to fall on my arse... or break somebody's window.
2) Balls are weapons. No, this isn't a Freudian thing. In my youth, I was, on various occasions the direct victim of GBHBB (general bodily harm by ball - come on, keep up). Tennis balls used as forearm-to-face missiles. Footballs booted with such savage velocity that they'd have taken off the heads of lesser men. Basketballs bounced repeatedly on my supine fizzog till it became porridgey mush. Well, you get the picture.
Through all that time, the one thought that kept me going (through what could, quite reasonably, have been dubbed My Childhood / Adolescence of Terror) was the idea that "Things won't always be this way". That I would reach a point in my life when I was older, when I commanded the respect of an adult, when I actually intimidated kids with balls more than they intimidated me.
I'm 39 now. I'm still waiting.
