6889/19809
It's weird the things that stick in your mind and that you find yourselves regularly thinking about, for no apparent reason, for the rest of your fucking life.
At least 30 years ago, me and some of my friends from University would meet up in Richmond to have picnics or play a game of some kind. I don't think we did it very often and it wasn't long before life and new relationships got in the way and the gatherings became gradually smaller and further apart. But I think this summer day we were going to play rounders. It seems in hindsight that we were a bit old to play rounders and yet I kind of wish we could all get together right now and play rounders. Was the park we were going to very big or sparsely attended or were we just full of youthful confidence and thought it was OK to take up a rounders shaped space in a public park. I don't know. This memory isn't really about us or rounders. I think it was though probably the last time I ever played rounders and I've just got a bit of a nostalgic yearning for rounders. I wonder if anyone plays rounders any more. It feels like something from the last millennium. And not just because it is.
Anyway as we arrived at the park there was an even more assured and confident group of young people there who were there to play frisbee with each other. They weren't on our patch or anything so I guess the space must have been big. They seemed brasher and posher and more confident than us (though as I say, I think we must have had a degree of cock-suredness ourselves to take over a chunk of public land to play a children's game (that I loved- who wants to play rounders right now?). The guy I remember and who I have thought about regularly for the last three decades, even though (as far as I know) this is the only time our paths have crossed) was limbering up ahead of the game of frisbee - properly stretching like he was an athlete. I feel he had long hair and an alice band and sports clothing on, but I feel there is a chance I have created this image from his attitude. He was addressing his group of friends in a casual, friendly way, but with a tinge of self-importance and arrogance. "Come on guys," he pronounced, "Stretch those hammies. I don't want any pulled hammies today."
It struck me as utterly ridiculous that a group of people in their early twenties would stretch before playing frisbee (it was definitely a casual weekend throw around and not a professional frisbee event. But I think stretching before a professional frisbee event would be overkill and looking slightly ashamed that you were involved would be a better pre-game ritual). I also wondered how many people had ever pulled a hamstring playing frisbee in the park with their friends. It won't be none, but it won't be many. Not enough to insist on everyone warming up and making yourself centre of attention. People's hamstrings are their own concern and if they want to warm them up then that's their business. They don't need a so-called friend instructing that they have to do it. It just seemed attention-seeking and prickish to me at the time. I did not warm up my hammies before playing rounders or at any point in my exercising life until recently, including when I ran a marathon.
I suspect he's back in my mind because I am exercising a bit more again. That sentence was all I heard from him as we were walking past him as he said it. And the interesting thing isn't the rightness or wrongness of him instructing his friends to stretch in faux-concern for their hamstrings, whilst just trying to make himself appear like the alpha male (of some frisbee-ers, so it's all relative) but that I have never been able to forget him and that he keeps popping into my mind. And has now been immortalised in a blog that is archived in the British Museum and so his arseholery might be read about in hundreds of years time and will be the only mark left by his life.
Hope you're OK if you're reading, hammies guy (and calling them hammies is obviously part of what made him comedic too - trying to dampen his stretch-fascism with a silly nick name). What you been up to recently? Want to play rounders. We should probably stretch first though as we're now in our fifties. Feel free to instruct me about my hammies.
