sport - Debbie Young's Writing Life

Rain Starts Play

Posted on June 28, 2011July 18, 2016 by Debbie Young

Last weekend torrential rain provided me with a welcome excuse to ignore the laundry (no chance of drying it in this weather) and to disregard the garden (unless I was to take up growing rice). I decided to do some work.

Talk about lack of resolve! Only the day before, I’d vowed to stop working at weekends. When you work from home, it’s too easy to switch on the laptop to check a few emails and end up lured into other, more time-consuming tasks. One thing leads to another – and before you know it, the day is gone.

But this time, it wasn’t to be. I started tapping away at the keyboard, but the screen would barely respond. That irritating on-screen egg-timer kept popping up, slowing down my progress down to a snail’s pace (albeit a snail with touch-typing skills).

It wasn’t my computer that was at fault, unlike my husband’s laptop. He’d immobilised it the night before in an unscheduled scientific experiment. He proved conclusively that a keyboard and a glass of wine don’t mix. It’s still drying out in the conservatory.

To rest my eyes from staring at the locked screen, I gazed out of the window at the hammering rain. And then it struck me: the weather was slowing down the internet. The local weather report revealed 97% humidity. With that much rain in the air, no wonder the signals couldn’t get through.

I logged into Facebook (slowly) to ask whether any of my friends were having the same problem. Eventually, some answers crawled back to me: y…e….s, w…e a…r…e.

Well, no more work for me then. I declared I’d take the rest of the day off. What a welcome change from the usual English summertime cry of “rain stops play”. In my case, rain was stopping work.

And then I realised why the weather was quite so bad: it’s only a week till the start of Wimbledon.

(This post was originally published in Hawkesbury Parish News, July 2011).

Family, Type 1 diabetes

The Best Reason to Run

Posted on May 15, 2011July 18, 2016 by Debbie Young

While running the Bristol 10K this morning (she says casually), I couldn’t help but be moved by the very many runners in charity t-shirts. They raised money and awareness for a tremendous range of fabulous causes, from the local St Peter’s Hospice (one of the Bristol 10K’s two main charities) to obscurities that I’d never heard of till then – though if I see them again, I’ll be more receptive to their appeals for having seen them in this context.

I love to run, but, like many runners, I need a major race in my diary to make me do it. To train for and complete the Bristol 10K, I needed a formal commitment to a charity that deeply affects my family – the JDRF, dedicated to finding a cure for type 1 diabetes, which my daughter contracted at the age of 3 and my husband in adulthood. When I wavered in my training, my sense of obligation to early sponsors kept me at it. (Aaren Purcell and Bill Chapman, you were the leaders in that race and I thought of you both on every training run.)

Of course, for those who are more naturally athletic, the running is the thing. What keeps them going is the constant striving for a new personal best, the new medal to add to their collection, the smart new race finisher t-shirt to boost their wardrobe of running clothes. Running to them is as blogging is to me: it’s my favourite hobby and I wouldn’t dream of asking anyone to pay me for it. (Though there may be a few who’d gladly pay me to stop…)

But to me, no matter how fulfilling the run, it’s a hugely wasted opportunity if you choose to trek round the route in a top that advertises only your favourite sportswear manufacturer or your last year’s holiday destination. Without a charity emblazoned on it, the runner’s chest is a wasted opportunity – an empty billboard, a bare bus-shelter. There are plenty of charities who will be grateful to you just to fly the flag and raise awareness, even if you’re not able to muster a bit of sponsorship. This simple, effortless act could persuade wavering donors to stump up some cash next time they are asked by that charity. The crowd will cheer you on all the more because of it. And if people then offer you money for the cause, so much the better.

Well, I’ve flown my JDRF flag, and now it’s in the washing machine. If you haven’t sponsored me yet but would like to, please feel free! Here’s the link:

Debbie Young – Helping to Cure Diabetes

Personal life, Writing

Writing On The Run

Posted on April 27, 2011July 18, 2016 by Debbie Young

somerset monument, hawkesbury upton, glouceste... — Image by Synwell via Flickr

Sending a text on my mobile as I jogged past Hawkesbury Monument the other day, it occurred to me that I was only a stone’s throw from writing my blog on the run. So many of my friends update their Facebook status from iPhones and Blackberries that I’d been thinking about investing in a smart phone myself, so that I could post to my online blog while away on holiday.

It’s not the first time I’ve hankered after equipment to help me write while travelling. Years ago, long before the rise of the internet or the miniatiurisation of the mobile phone, there was a clever little gadget on the market. A bit like a miniature version of the shorthand machines used by courtroom stenographers, it was like a tiny typewriter but with just four keys, one for each finger of one hand. You tapped the keys in a different combination for each letter of the alphabet. Even in a shaky commuter train, you’d be able to write legibly, because when you got home, the machine would spool out what you’d typed in normal letters. One of these devices would have made my daily commute across London suburbia more productive, but my salary as a lowly editorial assistant wouldn’t stretch to one.

Another reason I wanted it is that I’d never learned shorthand. Several times in my teens I had bought teach-yourself books, but even with daily practice, I knew that it would take a long time to master. With the short-termism of the typical teenager, I couldn’t make the commitment. Every year or two after, I would think to myself “If only I’d stuck at it, my shorthand would be fluent by now”.

So if I do write my column on the run, I’ll have to use an even more old-fashioned device to record it – my brain. I just wish my head had a USB port so that I could back it up with a memory stick.

(This article originally appeared in the Hawkesbury Parish Magazine, May 2011.)

Family, Personal life

Keeping Up with My Sporty Daughter

Posted on April 4, 2011July 18, 2016 by Debbie Young

“What’s your favourite sport, Mummy?” asks my small daughter on the way to Brownies.

I rack my brains, trying to think of which sports I can actually claim I do.

“Running,” I reply, from my list of one.

“What about badminton? Or football? Or tag rugby? Or tennis?”

She reels off some of the many activities she’s tried at school since moving up to the Juniors in September. At the small village primary school that she attends, her class has a PE rota, enabling the children to sample a different sport for three weeks at a time.

Her after-school schedule is equally varied. In the last couple of years, she’s tried ballet, tap, modern, country dancing, street dance, karate and gym. With a trampoline de rigueur in every modern child’s garden, she does quite a lot of random bouncing, too. Then there’s roller-skating at the leisure centre on Saturday nights with friends, swimming with Daddy at whichever local pool currently has the warmest water, and ice-skating whenever we encounter a rink. (She’s skated outdoors in Paris and Amsterdam so far.)

On this evidence, I don’t believe the newspaper hype that our children are growing up fat and unfit – not round here, at least, where we have so many open, safe places for them to play.

My childhood experience of sport was very different. For baby-boomers like me, PE in the Infants meant pretending to be a tree to the sounds of “Music and Movement” on the radio and learning to do bunny hops over benches. In the Juniors, my only real sporting memory is of the obstacle race on Sports Day, even though in the first year we were lucky enough to have a former national athlete as our class teacher. Mrs Stocking, formerly Patricia Kippax, had sprinted in the 1964 Tokyo Olympics and a few years later, there she was, letting us chase her round the school field, much to the amusement of other staff.

At secondary school, the PE teachers were only interested in the naturally talented few who might make county standard. My best friend and I jogged round chatting at the back on our cross-country runs past the graveyard, trying to conceal American Tan tights kept on for warmth beneath our hockey socks. In the hockey season, I’d always volunteer to be goalie as I reckoned it might require the least physical movement.

Whenever the Olympics came around, the events were so alien to me that they might just as well have been on Mars. I did recognise I was witnessing history being made as the American swimmer Mark Spitz secured his seventh gold medal at the 1972 Munich Olympics, but only because my teenage sister had a crush on him and she made me watch.

But next year, when the Olympics come to London, for my daughter, as for so many other local children, the sports will seem real and tangible, because they will already have tried out so many of them for themselves. She’s won a few medals herself already for sporting activities, for reaching a certain stage in her gym club and for completing some sponsored walks and runs. She will watch the games as a fellow sportswoman. She will see herself as a contender.

And I bet when hockey comes up on her rota next autumn, she won’t be keeping her tights on.

(This article was originally published in the Tetbury Advertiser, April 2011)

Family, Travel

Laura’s Fishing Tips

Posted on July 31, 2010July 18, 2016 by Debbie Young

A walk along the banks of the River Ness suggests my seven-year-old daughter Laura might be destined for a scientific career.

“Why does the ground stay there and not get washed away by the water in the river?” she asks me.

Cue for some improvised theorising, concocted by the very unscientific me, drawing on vague memories of a documentary about soil erosion and news stories about flooding.

Strolling further along the river bank, we pause opposite the lay-by where fisherman park their cars. They cluster together, comparing notes, planning strategy. It’s clearly a very serious sport around here.

We see several cyclists arrive, perilously dangling their fully extended fishing rods behind them. We hope they won’t hook any passing pedestrians.

We watch them don thigh-high waders before they trudge through the fast-moving shallows to cast their rods into deeper waters.

“Don’t the fish notice them?” queries Laura.

I fail to dredge up any memories from school biology lessons about the fish’s field of vision.

“Maybe fishing rods are always brown or green or grey so that fish will think they’re just tree branches hanging over the river,” I suggest. “After all, you never see fishermen with brightly coloured fishing rods. And they tie things called flies on to their hooks – bits of feather and suchlike that are meant to look like naturally occurring river insects that fish usually eat.”

Laura considers this proposition.

“Then I think they should stick leaves on their rods, too, to make them look more like branches. Otherwise I’m surprised that the fish fall for it.”

I was wondering why we’d never seen the fisherman catch anything.

POSTSCRIPT ON 18TH AUGUST 2010

Venturing into a branch of Aldi for the first time yesterday, I was rather pleased to spot something I’d never seen before – a “fishing t-shirt” and “fishing sweatshirt” for sale entirely patterned in camouflage suitable for a riverbank. Where Laura leads, others follow…