Saturday morning. My butt was sat on an old wooden bench in Camberwell Green, where I was watching a group of people playing cricket. In fact I wasn't really watching, it was just there. I'd always hated cricket. As far as I could work out they were all completely insane.
For one thing, they were playing with a tennis ball, so it wasn't even real cricket. Then, there was the weather. It was five degrees outside. Far too cold to be standing around. Me? I'd only be there for ten minutes. Enough time to finish my chicken shwarma wrap, which was the only reason I'd stopped in Camberwell in the first place.
If they'd been playing a real sport, their bodies would be moving around enough to stay warm but their feet were practically rooted to where each of them stood. They wore normal clothes. I decided to look up the Wikipedia entry for cricket. The definition's opening line described it as a game, rather than as a sport, which was how it described football, basketball and hockey. Interesting.
I decided to look up the definition of a sport. "An activity involving physical exertion". Ahha! Cricket involved almost no physical exertion. It definitely wasn't a real sport. I wondered if they knew that. I could go tell them. Then I wouldn't have to watch their insanity while I ate lunch. I was about done with the wrap by then though.
The ball had bounced off the bin next to the bench once and had flown past me a couple of times since I'd been sat there. Had the batsman been any good, he would've probably hit me as I'd gone and sat pretty much exactly where he was aiming. I kinda wanted that to happen so they might feel bad and their stupid game would be disrupted but it never did.
I finished my wrap, stepped over the tennis ball that had just rolled past my feet without even looking at it and made my way out of the park. It was time to finish my walk into the city and to watch something more interesting for a while. Like the pavement.
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