Until I was eighteen, sport played a large, even dominating, part in my life (music was my other passion). I was a scholar of movement. My PE teachers expected me to become a PE teacher myself, because I was clearly mainly interested in sport and also not too shabby with the book thing. They seemed nonplussed when I announced I was going to university to study psychology (where's the excitement there?). But my intellectual life took off around this time and the opportunities for sport were not as routinely available at university as they were at school. The result was that at university sport largely vanished from my life, to be replaced by books, late nights and sitting around all day drinking coffee. I did on a couple of occasions tag along with a friend who was involved in university gymnastics, but three things put me off: the skin peeling off my palms while practising on the high bar; being hit in the mouth and breaking a tooth while supporting someone else; and all the talk among the student gymnasts about broken backs. Studying the mind seemed much safer. I would still trot out my serial headsprings or my horizontal balance – mainly to impress the girls – but systematic sport disappeared from my life for about four years. It was nerd time for me. I suppose I needed to get my career together, as well as my love life, and it was the late 1960s and early 1970s, when sport was not much appreciated culturally; in any case, I let it go.