There was a spectacular difference between physical exercise in primary schools to that in secondary ones.  

And what a surprise I got during my first PE lesson at my Tooting grammar school.  It wasn’t so much pretending to be a tree (something I’d done successfully the previous seven years), this was trying to jump over objects which looked the size of a fully-grown oak!

Previously, I’d dressed only in vest, pants and ill-fitting plimsolls, prancing gaily around my Balham primary school hall, listening to a BBC employee who sounded like she’d a whole orchard of plums in her mouth.

At secondary school it was not called “Music and Movement”, although there was certainly movement (mainly avoiding the PE master’s eyes), but no music, although any funeral march or anything towards the end of Wagner’s Götterdämmerung wouldn’t have seemed out of place. 

Music and Movement was very innocent; I still have days when I wish I could suddenly become a horse chestnut (usually during endless Zoom calls).

When we didn’t have the radio, we’d have a kind, elderly teacher who’d play the piano (she probably tinkled on her church organ at weekends, like Violet Carson, only without a hair-net) as opposed to secondary school when our master, who, should you have tracked his genealogy back to the late 15th Century, you’d have gone directly to Tomas de Torquemada. 

The only good thing at secondary school was you didn’t have, chasing you throughout the lesson, was a girl who wanted to become a golden retriever when she grew up.  Especially if you being a tree was slightly too realistic.