I used to dread PE lessons at school. If it was football, the teacher always divided us into shirts and skins, and the skins had to take their shirts off for the duration, even though we had reversible tops. We’d be stood there, shivering in the cold and indignity of the situation, whilst the kids who were good at sports picked their teams and, of course, I was always one of the last picked.

The way I remember it is straight out of the classic film Kes. I would do everything I could do avoid contact with the ball and when put in goal I would wander off for a chat if I saw a friend passing by or hang off the goalposts whilst the ball dribbled in underneath my legs. “If you’re all that bothered about the ball not going in the back of the net,” I said one day, “why don’t you just board it up?’  That did not go down well.  I had no competitive spirit whatsoever, and the effect of a weekly double lesson of PE was exactly the reverse of what it ought to have been.

I wasn’t the only rebel in the school. For a while, we were allowed to choose unaccompanied cross-country running until the teacher worked out that we were running out of sight and then going to one of the lads’ houses for a cup of tea and a chat instead of a run. We would splash water on our faces and try to look out of breath, but I suspect we overacted and ultimately we were rumbled.

After leaving school I never had any interest in playing a sport or joining a gym and now here I am decades later working in a department at Oxford Brookes University where most of the team are ridiculously fit. In a sea of slim, trim and muscular people I am the Michelin man by comparison, and each winter I make the same joke about how underneath all of these layers of clothing I am wearing because of the cold weather is a 28 inch waist.

One of the things I am grateful for, this year, however, as the person who is aware that he is probably the least effective at physical self-care in my department, is that I work in a culture of gentle encouragement. We have a scheme that is called Green Impact, and at one level it is about taking better care of our planet by thinking about how we use resources, but there is also a lot in it that is about physical and mental self-care. People come up with little ideas that have a profound difference – we had a ‘leave your phone downstairs’ week, which was about promoting better sleep and good mental health by making us less stuck to our digital devices, we have had sustainability shared lunches, where people have shared food and recipes, and there have been challenges to gentle physical exercise – getting away from the desk for 10 minutes, doing hourly stretches, taking a walk outside.

I was on one of these Green Impact walks in late October, listening to a learning development podcast because that felt like the only way to justify not being at my desk. The guest on the podcast was asked about the need to pay attention – he said assume multi-tasking is not possible – stop what you are doing and pay attention to where you are, what is going on around you and how you feel.

So I did. I switched him off and noticed that I was breathless because of the pace I had been walking at. I noticed that it was a pretty nice day that I had been in a hurry to get back to work from and I hadn’t really taken the time to take in the details of it (I took the pictures below on the way back).

I was aware that it was the gentle persuasion of other people that was getting me outside in the open air.

And finally I noticed that refreshed feeling you get when you have been moderately exercising for a while.

Happily, there wasn’t a goalpost in sight.