Obv when v.small the key to survival – during sermons, lectures, recorder concerts, nativity plays and the like – is to find a way to teleport yr wee brain elsewhere: my game, which I recommend to one and all, was to gaze up into the vast roofspace of the room I was trapped in (assuming it was vast) and calculate ways to clamber round the top of the walls without need of ladders, ropes etc. Old interior architecture is tremendous for this: there are always odd little ledges, beams, walkways, friezes and the like – sometimes also inexplicable doorways into mid-air, hatches, port-holes and so on. And if the room was small but had a window (of it it’s a bus) I’ll gaze outside and do the same, if I could see how, with ornamentation or balcony or fire-escapework or shop marquees, leaping in my daydreams from roof to flagpole to catwalk to…
Well some edgy banlieu kids went and turned it an actual real proper grown-up sport without asking my permission. Now it’s called “Le Parkour“‘ and it’s suddenly all kind of psychogeographical and situationist the way they do it, all fit and young and wearing complicated trainers. Turn yr lame nabe into the Self-Taught Acrobats’ Quarter!! *sigh*
Luckily the C4 TV documentary about it – Jump London, (re)transmitted during the Holiday Season – kind of blew it, veering wildly off into stupid arty camerawork bcz they didn’t end up with the great footage they evidently hoped for (plus the Bigwig London Buildings the team were commissioned to jump – like the Albert Hall and the Wobbly Bridge – were more constraining than liberating). They were at their most exciting in the first third of the show, when they were jumping up and down and over fire escapes or small walls and sheds, or balancing on bollards in some godforsaken concrete Paris suburb.