school, sports day, races, parents
image courtesy of Wikimedia

We have rather a topical prompt word for Linda’s Stream of Consciousness this week with ‘egg’.

Now, of course, my first thought was Easter as that is hurtling towards us at tremendous speed. I am sure I could go on and on about Easter eggs, but that will only make me hungry and I haven’t got any chocolate in the house at the moment!!

I am going to go totally down another path and talk about the good old British sports days of yesteryear. When I was at school, I remember them being lots of fun (we are talking about primary school here). A lot of effort went into organising the games, and of course, parents were invited too.

This meant that all the children wanted to try their best to impress their parents. We had all the usual running races, but there were the fun ones too like the egg and spoon race (being a klutz I was rubbish at this), the sack race (pretty exhausting this one, jumping about in a small sack trying to get to the finish line), and the three-legged race, being tied at the ankles to another child, and having to run in unison to the finish line.

As you can imagine with these races, there was a lot of tripping and falling over, but we just got up and kept going.

It was all very competitive in those days too, it was encouraged to want to win. At the end of it,  there was usually a mum’s and a dad’s race. I don’t remember my mum ever taking part in this and I can’t say I blame her, as that was also pretty competitive!

Last time I went to Miss Hap’s sports day at primary school, there were none of the races I remembered so well. There was a skipping race, that she managed to win despite losing a shoe! It is not about the winning now, though, everyone get points and prizes which are totted up at the end.

There were  no mums and dads, shoes off, sleeves rolled up, ready to run for glory down the length of the school field elbowing away their rivals (Thank God)! No, it is all very civilised now. For a start, most of the schools use a local sporting facility or recreation ground as they don’t have a field.The area they cordon off for the races are much shorter than I remember. The kids all have their bottles of water, sunhats and suncream on. We didn’t, if we burnt to a crisp then so be it!

Sometimes change can be a good thing!

 

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