It has been a very busy Christmas and I have hardly sat down at the computer.  We’ve had family visiting, friends round for meals, a wedding, the occasional walk – and of course, there’s the bathroom.  Functional but not finished.  But when I did finally get  older son off the computer and me onto it, I found I’d been caught in the blogtag game  by Mrs O’Neill.  I thought I’d given up playing it years ago. As very few of you know me, I can write anything I want, so where to start?

I think I might use this as an excuse to pick out a few salient points in my career and ramble on at length about them.  Everyone else has gone for brevity, but why go with the flow? This may well take some time so I might develop it over a series of posts.  We’ll have to see.

The first thing you don’t know…

I was always the slowest runner in any class I was in, anywhere in the world.  I loathed with a passion PE  (or PT as it was then) if it involved any form of running or athletics.  As a six year old at school in Kuala Lumpur, we had PT one day a week and had to come to school on that day dressed in white PT kit.  No kit, no PT.  I tried so hard every Wednesday morning to forget that I had PT and, just occasionally, got away with it.  Oh joy! I would arrive at school in my normal uniform and think I had escaped.  But as a six year old, I should have known my mother better as she would invariably remember and turn up at school with the missing items.  I went on to hate hockey and netball but, thanks largely to my mother’s out of school efforts, loved tennis, badminton & swimming. 

Running, however, remained a mystery and I would never so much as run for a bus.  However life does take some strange turns and, at the grand age of 47, I completed the Haddington triathlon.  Not only did I have to run over 7km as part of the race, I found I enjoyed the running training.  This was a complete shock to me.  What’s more, whilst I may still be one of the slowest in the class, I am not the absolute slowest and I have yet to come last in a race!  And I am currently the proud holder, for the second year, of a grand silver trophy as – wait for it – Scottish Female Supervet Aquathlon Champion.  My children will gleefully tell you how many people I had to beat to win said trophy (whispers one other) but who cares?  I did have to hurl myself into the sea off Portobello in a melee of arms & legs belonging to taller, younger, fitter males & females before I got anywhere near the run.

But I still retain a vivid memory of the six year old who hated PT.