Gold for bravery

I WAS the chubby, bespectacled swot who hated PE lessons at school.

Standing on a freezing playing field I was last to be picked for every team.

But I’d try to bury the aching sense of inadequacy and plod around until the whistle went.

So I could never understand why they made me compete in inter-school athletics events, when I had zero talent.

“It’s not the winning, it’s the taking part,” the teachers said.

Yet finishing last in every race made me a champion LOSER, and I never forgot how humiliating that felt.

So, when I was having a nervous breakdown 25 years later, I struggled to tell anyone. Because now I was losing at life as well.