I had the misfortune of going to Bishop Vesey's Grammar School, a secondary school in Sutton Coldfield, England.

Physical exercise was a big deal at Vesey. Not only did we have P.E. twice a week, but also Games twice a week too, which was like P.E. but held outdoors in a field. (A freezing cold field if my memory serves me well).

I hated sports. The problem was I was never very good at them. I was one of the unlucky boys who had no aptitude for sports whatsoever. I was crap at 100% of the sports at Vesey, without exception. Honestly, there was not a single sport I was good at. I was even bad at table tennis, which isn't even a proper sport.

Here are some of the sports we did at Vesey.

Rugby

Rugby was the main sport at Vesey. The school somehow owned not one, not two, but three private rugby pitches. (At least, I think it was three. According to the school website, it's actually seven rugby pitches?)

Why did the school need so many rugby pitches?

The answer is to torture hapless young boys like me.

We played rugby all year round: autumn, winter, spring and summer. No matter the weather, no matter the temperature, we'd go out and play rugby. It could be snowing. It could be boiling hot. There could be a category 5 hurricane passing by. But we still had to play rugby.

Winter was the worst. Conditions were near-freezing and we had to go out dressed in shorts and a rugby top. It was so cold that my bum cheeks would freeze together and my balls would disappear into my scrotum, probably.

Now, when you think of shorts weather, you think of the sun and heat. Maybe you think of a tropical beach. When you think of shorts, you think of summer.

But when you think of shorts weather, you don't think of winter. That's because no one is insane enough to wear shorts in winter.

But shorts we wore.

And as soon as we stepped out of the warmth of the pavilion, the cold would hit us and we'd start shivering. Some of the more enterprising boys would start jumping around to in a vain attempt to generate body heat.

Obviously, in such cold conditions, you want to wear as much clothing as possible, to keep yourself warm. So it's a mystery then why the school made us wear shorts. We quickly learned to wear two rugby tops, one on top of the other. That was better than just wearing one rugby top. But we were still freezing.

My fingers would go numb and painful. I learned to tuck my hands under my armpits for warmth. You can't play rugby with cold fingers because you can't catch the ball, so this proves we weren't there to actually play rugby. We were there to suffer.

I didn't realise it at the time but the very name of the town itself served as a warning: Sutton Coldfield. The town's name came from the extraordinarily cold rugby fields of Bishop Vesey's. Probably.

Why did we have play rugby in such inhumane conditions? I think the cold was supposed to make our testicles as hard as steel and drive out any homosexual tendencies. The cold was supposed to turn us into 'real men'. But it didn't work because I'm still a pussy to this day. I complain whenever the weather gets the slightest bit cold.

Sports pavillion

When the sports teachers weren't shouting at us to run around in the cold, they were sitting in their teacher's lounge, which was a heated room inside the sports pavilion. In my memories, the teacher's lounge had a cheery roasty fire and cups of steaming hot chocolate. Meanwhile, we had unheated changing rooms and cold showers.

Swimming

In my first year at Bishop Vesey, we had swimming lessons at Wyndley Leisure Centre. In the first session, the teacher told us to divide into three groups:

• High ability group: Boys who were already professional swimmers and would probably go on to win gold medals at the Olympics
• Medium ability group: Boys who could swim okay but would not be winning gold medals at the Olympics, only silver
• Low ability group: Boys who would drown if left unattended in a child's paddling pool

You would think, given my lack of aptitude for any kind of sport, that I would’ve gone into the last group, the group for spastics. This would have been the smartest thing to do. However, for reasons beyond comprehension, I was confident enough in my meagre swimming abilities to join the second group, the group for boys with intermediate swimming skills.

Now, I kind of knew how to swim. We'd had lessons at primary school. But these lessons involved mostly holding onto the side of the pool and kicking your legs for a bit. Then holding onto a float while an instructor holds onto your body. That kind of thing.

So I wasn't ready for what happened next.

"Line up at the edge of the pool!" shouted the teacher. So we all lined up at the edge.

None of the other boys seemed to share my fear and trepidation. They were actually looking forward to jumping in the water.

"On the count of three, jump in and start swimming!" he said. "One... two... THREE!"

Now, at the age of eleven, I had never jumped into a swimming pool before. Not without armbands on. So when I jumped into the water, I was unprepared for what happened next.

First, there was a big splash. Then all the chlorinated water went up my nose. Next, I couldn't tell up from down. It was as if I'd just jumped out a plane and landed in the ocean.

Some survival instinct must have kicked in because miraculously, I started swimming and I surfaced. The other boys were already pounding through the water like Terminators after Sarah Connor. Heroically, I started swimming after them. And I actually kept up with them! At least, for a couple of widths. Then I started to lag behind. And after about five widths, I started half swimming and half drowning. After ten widths, I was mostly drowning.

The other boys meanwhile were swimming past me again and again, like stronger players lapping a weaker player in Mario Kart.

I managed to haul myself to the side. The teacher looked down at me with contempt.

Between heavy breaths, I weakly asked "Could I go to the beginner's group?" while coughing up water.

The teacher glared at me with disgust and disappointment, as if he had expected more from me. But begrudgingly, he let me go to the beginner's group.

The beginner's group was a lot better. All we had to do was paddle around in the shallow part of the pool, where there was little to no chance of drowning. And even so, we all wore armbands, so we couldn’t drown even if we wanted to. What made it even better was that all my friends were there as well. They were all physically-inept geeks like me.

Football

I was crap at football. The other boys picked me last for their football teams because they knew how bad at football was.

My preferred position during football games was defender. This wasn't because I liked defending the goal. It was because it gave me the least to do. I could just idle around in the back, claiming to be defending the goal but in reality discussing Pokemon with the one or two other losers like myself.

On rare occasions, completely by chance, the ball would land at my feet. I would be so surprised that I wouldn't know what to do with it. "Kick it!" someone would shout. "Over here!" could came another cry. So I'd try to kick the ball to a teammate but instead, my kick would send the ball careening off to one side, either out of bounds or straight into my own goal.

I have one particularly vivid memory of football. The event happened during a match where for once I was out in the middle of the field, actually trying to play the game and get the ball. One of the boys kicked the football right at me, hard. It was a mean kid. Practically a man, he was. Kevin Carter, his name. I don't know if he did it on purpose but I reckon he probably did. The ball hit me right in the chest, right in my lungs. The ball bounced off me and everyone kept playing.

With the game still going on around me, I realised I could no longer breathe. There is not much that is scarier than being unable to breathe. The ball had collapsed my lungs or something. I just stood there, not knowing what to do.

One of the kids asked me, "Yo, are you okay, Petey?" I think his name was Umar Hussein.

I tried to reply but I couldn't talk either. I couldn't breathe and I couldn't talk. I just looked at him, hoping my eyes communicated my terror.

The kid must have thought I looked okay though because he grinned, put his thumb up and ran away.

Out of instinct, I bent over. And as soon as I did that, I could breathe again. That was good, otherwise today I could be dead.

Cricket

Here's a typical cricket match at Vesey:

Joe Sroczynski is up for the bat. Philip Stretton bowls the ball. Sroczynski smacks the ball with his bat. The ball sails, sails, sails through the air and somehow lands straight into my hands. The ball bounces out of my hands and rolls away. I chase the ball. I pick up the ball. My teammates shout, "THROW IT!" and "OVER HERE!" I throw the ball to one of my teammates but the ball lands six feet away with a plop. My teammates groan. The other team cheers. I pick up the ball again and throw it another six feet. The two batsmen are running as many runs at they can. In fact, the batsmen are setting a new school record for most number of runs on one ball. I pick up the ball one last time and throw it, as hard as I can. It goes high up in the air, high up in the air, high up in the air, comes back down and clonks me on the head.

Other sports

Other sports we played at Vesey were

• Basketball
• Table tennis
• Actual tennis

I was crap at all of these. Somehow there was not a single sport I was good at. That probably explains why Mr Carney didn't like me and why I didn't like sport. It was my least favourite lesson even.

One sport I wouldn't have minded playing was dodgeball. I only ever saw it on American TV shows and we never got to play it at Vesey. I'll always regret that because it looked fun. Throwing balls at each other's faces? Dodging other people's balls, like Neo dodging bullets in The Matrix? It actually sounds fun. But sadly, the purpose of sport at Vesey was not to have fun but rather to 'build character' by freezing your bollocks off.

School badges

If you were good enough to join one of the school sports teams, then you received a badge to wear on your blazer. I say badge, but they're just patches of fabric. I think each one had a letter on for each sport. R for rugby, C for cricket. I wasn't sure because I never won any badges for rugby or cricket. Or for any sports for that matter.

You'd take the badge home and your mom would sew it onto your blazer, probably while crying tears of happiness. Some boys had dozens of badges on their blazers, glories upon glories, the same way war veterans have a jacket full of shiny medals. There was one kid, Samuel Weatherly, who had so many badges by the end of his time at Vesey that the badges had reached the bottom of his blazer.

You know how many badges I had?

One.

And it wasn't for sport. It was for merits. When a teacher was impressed with your schoolwork, they could reward you with a merit. Get 50 merits in one school year and you get a silver merit badge. Get 100 merits and you get a gold merit badge. Get 200 merits and you get a platinum merit badge.

In my first year at Vesey, I attained 50 merits for school work and got a silver merit badge. It was a time when I still believed in the merit system with as much enthusiasm as a young Chinese Communist believes in their government.

In some ways, having one badge on your blazer, as I did for seven years at Vesey, is worse than having none. Because if I had no badges, then at least I could have pretended I had loads of badges at home but I couldn’t be bothered to put them on my blazer. But I only had one badge, and it was on my blazer for everyone to see, and it was the most measly, easily attainable badge that you could get.