Well, they won.
I mean Number One Daughter and her team of athletic cross-fitters, obviously.
I have been determinedly tuning in to their competition at half past two and then again at five in the morning. I had to set an alarm for the five o’clock one for the first two nights, but last night I had been at work so late that all I needed to do was dawdle a bit in the shower, and it was just getting going when I propped myself up in bed with my glasses and my computer.
It is very easy to watch something when Our Team is doing really well.
It was a competition, as I might have told you, for elite cross-fitters from all over the world, the winning team to go through to the Cross Fit Games. This is like the Olympics for cross-fitters, and will be held in San Jose in California in the summer.
Competitors were put in heats according to their abilities. The first couple of heats were filled with teams who were the very best that their countries could muster, there being an awful lot of preliminary heats, but nevertheless they looked slow and clumsy and rubbish compared to the magnificently wonderful teams who competed in the third heat.
Number One Daughter’s team were not only in the third heat, they were put in the centre lane in pride of place, so that they were the most visible for the cameras.
The teams on either side of them were also very good indeed, and it became a nail-biting battle.
Their closest contenders were a Korean team, who had the advantage of a very partisan audience, being all of their friends and families, and by the end of the final heat, which involved handstand press-ups and carrying a massive heavy weighted sausage between the four of them, kneeling down and getting up with every step, they were absolutely neck and neck.
It was so close that nobody could tell who had won, not even the commentator, and he said we would have to wait for half an hour to find out, so they would just move on to the individual events now, don’t go away.
Of course I wanted to go away, not because I did not care about Number One Daughter’s team but because it was long after five o’clock in the morning, and I really would have liked to be asleep.
I dozed in front of the computer for what seemed like ages until eventually Number One Daughter sent me a message to tell me that it was all right, they really had won, and that all of the winning teams had been imprisoned in a back room to be drug tested before the results were announced.
The moment of standing on the podium collecting the award was not for a couple more hours, however, and so I decided that probably Number One Daughter could manage that without my long-distance encouragement, so I switched them off and closed my eyes, with a sigh of relief.
It was already daylight.
I woke up at about eleven, because the dogs were fidgeting about wondering if I had died in the night, and watched the ceremony on YouTube. Number One Daughter’s team were standing cheerily on the winners’ rostrum, clutching a cheque and a ticket to the CrossFit Games, whilst the Korean audience applauded politely and looked regretfully at their own team, who had come second.
It was a happy start to the day.
Other than that the weekend has been without exciting event, apart from an old friend of mine unexpectedly discovering, and sending, some photographs, taken in our distant youth.
This was a splendid surprise, taking me on the sort of stroll down Memory Lane that I don’t usually bother about.
We were rascally youth. Most of the other people in the photographs did not make it to being sixty, and I looked at their eternally youthful faces with regret.
We were all so young. My face looked a bit the way it would if somebody had shaken it out and given it a thorough ironing, and my hair looked as though somebody had washed away a large bucket of plaster dust
There was a picture of me by myself, which I thought with some satisfaction portrayed me as rather better-looking than I had been even at the time. I have attached it here, so that you can imagine my youth as being trailed by broken hearts and wistful young men to which of course I was supremely indifferent. I like that idea rather better than the reality, which was of a gormless muppet without any more dress sense then than I have got now, and possibly rather less.
I was eighteen years younger than Number One Daughter is now.
Imagine that.
