Feteful attraction
Sue Mott
WE are looking for a minor sports celebrity to open our village primary school's fête and, boy, what a window into the soul of sport this enterprise is proving to be. It has been vividly revealed to me that a cup of tea, a sticky bun and a go in the stocks are no longer sufficient reward for a mild afternoon's work.
So much for grass roots and role models. If a job doesn't involve a nationwide television ad for a new flavour of crisp, the celebrities just don't want to know. We've got a sand-art kit and a raffle, which is — they give me to understand — not the same thing at all.
Maybe we're aiming too high. Mrs Dunn wants Roger Black. She makes the same request every year and is annually disappointed. Unfortunately, our fête always clashes with athletics on television and he chooses to honour his contract to the BBC. It is very laudable in one way, but depressing for a deputy headmistress who puts so much into her short-distance running.
I've conducted a long campaign to get the committee interested in Sean Bean, on the whippet-slender grounds that he is now a director of Sheffield United. There has been a curiously muted response. Half the mothers are too young to remember him in Lady Chatterley's Lover, and all the children think that he's dead. (He had three swords thrust into his manly torso at the end of Lord of the Rings.) One might have been driven to despair were it not for the great history of the event. We've had some wonder years. Last year we enticed the former British world karate champion, Molly Samuel, to the fête with a troop of her karate kids from Forest Gate. They caused a small sensation, not least by being the largest group of black people ever seen en masse in the village.
While their discipline was spectacular and rigorous, our own children ran amok, so that we all wanted to send our despicable offspring to a karate class for months afterwards but couldn't find one. Perhaps it is an urban thing. And perhaps our desperation was not quite desperate enough. One of Molly's pupils was sent for lessons by her mother because she had just been stabbed in the eye at school. Then, last year, Lloyd Upsdell came with his mum and dad. You will have heard of him. He was the mile-wide-smiling sprinter with dyed blond hair and cerebral palsy who won two gold medals at the Sydney Paralympics. He was front-page news for a day, but the nature of Paralympic sport is that he will now go entirely ignored, except by us, until the next Olympics.
But now there are fewer than three months to go, and I feel a judder of panic setting in. Mrs Bishop, chairwoman, mouthed the words 'David Beckham' at me in the playground this morning. She cannot be serious. How could we get our children into their uniforms every morning if our guest of honour turns up in a vest and rimless sunglasses?
I sense that it is time to get ruthless. Football's out (too oafish), as is cricket (depressive), tennis (where are the stars?), snooker (they all look too ill), and table tennis (oh, please!). So, if you are a minor sporting celebrity, with a particular fondness for children aged 5 to 11 who will say that they have never heard of you and leave sticky imprints on your Armani jacket, I would be very pleased to hear from you. Buns will be served.
Previous page
