MILE END PARK LEISURE
CENTRE
190 Burdett Road, Mile End
London E3 4HL
020 8709 4420
Housekeeping note: Please stick with this. I do get to the swimming, eventually ...
The colour of sport in
Mile End is yellow. You may be expecting a
smart ‘who knew?’ at this point. But I knew. Because I'm a yellow. I shall explain.
Let’s start with some
semantics. There is a seemingly innocuous question that can be particularly
revealing about the askers background. It’s this: ‘where were you at school?’
If you get asked that, or the even shorter ‘where were you?’ rather than ‘where
did you go to school’ the assumption is that you were ‘somewhere’. By
‘somewhere, they mean ‘somewhere we consider important’ (where ‘important’
means practically in the Cabinet already, and ‘they/we’ means ‘people who need
to perpetuate myths about what is best, and then do their utmost to keep them
out of people’s reach’.) If your
answer is ‘up the road’ rather than one of the acceptable private names, it
shows that you were, in fact,
‘nowhere’. I went to school ‘nowhere’ though at the time it looked
pretty somewhere to me, with all its buildings, teachers, pupils, books etc.
And now, on to
statistics. ‘What house were you in?’ is equally revealing. If you went
‘somewhere’, your house was probably named after an Old Boy or (for the more
radical establishment) Old Girl whose families had owned whole areas of Surrey or estates in Northumberland. The rest of us, educated nowhere, split
into four easy Houses: Reds, Yellows, Blues and Greens. Around 7% of the UK is
privately educated; of the remaining percentage, I suggest we knock off 3% for
home educators, because if they were asked which house they were in they would
just say ‘my own’. Divide 90 by 4, and we can conclude that 22.5% of us were
Yellows. That’s a lot of
Yellows! I was a Yellow, I probably still am as I never officially signed out; I passed that Yellow birthright down to my own Yellow children (it was
that, or the shooting rights on my little place in Scotland). And in their paint and décor choices, Mile End
Park Leisure Centre has identified
itself with the Yellows, has come down not just on the side of the Best of
Fellows, but on the whole house colour system. They’re saying proudly: we’re
anti-elitist. We, Mile End Park Leisure Centre, are sport for the people.
Looking round the area, I’d say they made the right choice.
