Sunday - oh gosh - why did we say yes to this? We were to be honoured guests at a sports day held by a school on the same site as the Showa part of BST. Dave had already met Ichihara Sensei (the head) and we were included in the guest list this year.
The sun shone and the temperatures were quite high - the wind was blowing too. We arrived to hear the noise of music and children cheering so we knew we were in the right place. As we collected our 'Guest' badges we were escourted to our seats by a young woman in a track suit wearing a mask so I will never recognise her again! The seats we had been allocated were in the sun so our first act of disruption was to make everyone else move up so that we could have a seat in the shade! This was organised by our gracious hosts, not us, I hasten to add. Although we had slopped on the sunscreen we had come without hats - but that was soon sorted by the amazing attention to detail of our hosts - a straw hat was proffered and accepted by me. At this stage, I realised that the wind was blowing quite hard and when you have a wide brimmed hat on the best one can hope for is that you don't look silly. To look silly and be seen chasing around after your hat is probably not good etiquette! So I sat with one hadn on the hat and the other working the camera.
This was not a sports day in the English sense of the word. It was a fun day with a few sports and a lot of synchronised activity - flag waving, dancing, gym movement, all done brilliantly by beautiful, beaming children who were obviously having a great time. Why do we make ours have mini olympics? Why do we have so few winners? Do we set our children up to fail? The parts of the day that were running were very much team events - the relay for instance was across the year groups and was a real spectacle but the sense of competition was very real.
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