We’re playing Donkey Tag and Capture The Flag, it’s fitness by way of playground games These are not my people, I thought. But here I was, in the park at 11am on a Saturday. Whose people are anybody’s, in that kind of scenario? Young professionals, I guess you’d call them, very hale and serious. We were here to rabble, which I’ve decided is a verb because language needs it: it’s fitness by way of playground games. I imagined us all running around chasing each other. Surely in playtime terms, “it” was it? Maybe we’d play a bit of British Bulldog, though I can’t see the fitness benefit in hurling yourself into people. So time has moved on, and now there are a million games, all highly labour-intensive. We stood in a circle to warm up, playing a variant of catch, where the person holding the ball yelled their own name; then after a bit, you yelled the name of whoever you were throwing to. Insanely biased against poor catchers: we couldn’t remember anyone’s name because we’d been too focused on the ball. Yet something flickered inside each one of us, as we passed the final 30 seconds hurling the projectile towards the one guy everyone could remember, because his name was Ben: that maniacal competitiveness of childhood, where you seize the advantage by haring off before the rules have ended. I didn’t know what those other non-Ben guys were called, but by the time we started Donkey Tag, by God I wanted to beat them.