Long life | 16 July 2015

I have always been what I suppose one could call a weed, and a cowardly one at that. I never liked sports and was never any good at them. When fielding at cricket at my prep school, I used to while away time making daisy-chains. Of my part in football one prep-school report merely said, to my mother’s great amusement, ‘Chancellor prefers to avoid the ball.’ At my public school, where you had to choose between rowing and cricket, I chose rowing, but only because I was just small enough to get away with being a cox, which only involved sitting in the stern of a boat and bellowing orders at the oarsmen who were doing all the work.

But there was one sport at which from an early age I found that I was rather good, and that was the game of croquet — a game now reportedly threatened with extinction, in which 74 per cent of people have ‘no interest’, and of which one in 20 now haven’t even heard.