Once a year there was a cross-country race for the whole school. Legendary athletes had run the course in absurdly short times – we had one of those Pheidippides in our year, who I think went on to push the mile record to close on four minutes but was not the gangling doctor-to-be who broke the barrier first on a scruffy off the beaten track track on the Iffley Road in Oxford close to where I lived in later times this story is not of those near-Olympian demigods but of me and my friends
a motley bunch of loafers and dawdlers who tried to make the whole sweaty charade a little more bearable. Apocryphal stories of hidden taxis waiting round the corners were discounted or ruled out from lack of cash, and the short cuts were known and patrolled so we settled for a race to be last which was more of a challenge than it sounds because we had to seem to be making forward progress and had eventually to finish however far behind the leading pack so we laid our bets and set a suitably calorific prize of the kind of sugary bun certain to slow the winner down even more but then we encountered a mysterious new law of nature which was that there was a fat boy who couldn't be dislodged from last place however much we tried it was the Bermuda Triangle of wading through cosmic treacle and he always was there waddling behind us grinning amiably the grin of endless buns to come. The school I recall took pride in the universal athleticism of the boys which was contradicted in the most obvious way possible but it was part of the ethos a holy word if ever there was and mens sana in corpore sano ruled in the classical sentimentality of our elders or as we said in our impeccable schoolboy Latin: stay sane in a healthy corpse
