Badminton

The Minx has bought a badminton set for us to take on holiday next week. And as it was a surprisingly nice day to day - although I don't know why I should be surprised; it's August! - we decided to head down to Astley Park for a picnic and dust down our shuttlecock skills.

It's easy to be drawn into this belief that our young (and not so young) people spend all their time on their 'phones watching Youtubers these days but, in fact, the badminton set was in use all afternoon. The Minx even caught me playing here.

When my brother and I were young, we weren't really outdoorsy types. We spent most of our time with our noses in books, as I recall it, although Wol did later take up the guitar. Occasionally, we'd go through the rigmarole of setting up a video game on the television. Our favourite, Tennis, simply consisted of two vertical bars, one each, and a square 'ball' that was batted between them.

During the long, lazy days of the summer holidays, we did venture outside sometimes, though. We had two games that I clearly remember. One involved using tennis racquets and a soft ball, which we'd hit up against a sloping roof on the side of the house. The other - the excitingly monickered 'Killer Frisbee' - involved standing at opposite ends of the lawn and attempting to hit the other's shins with, you guessed it, a frisbee. 

Prior to that, when I was at primary school in Hong Kong, I'd been a dab hand with a badminton racquet, and I still remember playing on the court painted onto the wooden floor of the school hall. I was pretty good, actually, and whilst I'm not sure I was calling on any of those long atrophied skills, today, I enjoyed playing with everyone enormously.