Mistaken Beliefs

The first time I saw stars that were not there…

no, let’s go back a couple of years earlier,

to when I was eight

and, at my first prep school,

had just been made centre-forward and captain

for my year’s one and only football fixture.

 

Go Team Fergus, right?

 

This appointment was an unfortunate surprise

based solely on my older brother’s

impressive athletic prowess

and faultlessly competitive attitude.

 

My classmates were as open-mouthed as I was

at this blundering mistake,

but not as gawpingly gormless as the hapless teacher,

who, had he done a due diligence test,

would have swiftly discovered

that adoptive younger brothers

of athletically able pupils

don’t actually share the all-important sporting genes.

 

One practice later,

and I was thankfully de-captained

and relegated to the position

which most eventual poets take up on the field of play:

the isolated daydreamer/goalkeeper.

 

Team not-Fergus lost six nil

and the game went down in sporting history

as the only occasion I ever represented my school

on the playing field.

 

‘We’ll make a rugby player of you yet!’

I was told at my second prep school,

a while later,

by yet another deranged games teacher.

 

Quite why this was said –

in a whole school assembly –

I will never be able to say,

for this is the sort of detail

which daydreaming obscures from the historical record.

 

Kudos to Mr Suter, though,

for articulating this ludicrous thought

in iambic pentameter.

 

The first time I saw the stars

that were not there

was after I had deliberately

hurled myself to the floor, aged ten,

in the middle of an English lesson

during my first term at my third prep school.

 

‘Mime scoring a try!’ the teacher had whispered to me,

clearly harbouring the delusion

that this was something I had experience of.

 

I hurled myself to the wooden floor,

et voila: stars!

 

Six more years of playing rugby

at an all-boys boarding school later

and that remained the only try

which I had to show

for my spineless endeavours.

 And now, when I hear friends and acquaintances

reminisce about the ball-centred pursuits of their youth,

I am reminded of that old cliché:

‘The older we are,

the better we were.’

 

You should have heard me sing, though.