"Only two things dominated the lives of any schoolboy growing up in Johannesburg in the late 1970s – sport and girls. Girls were a proposition too various and complicated to contemplate, so we sublimated frantically and played more sport than we were already playing. Scratch soccer games at break-time. Cricket, rugby, touch-rugby. We swam, considered water polo. We even tried athletics.

"If we discovered that we were ill-suited to rugby and self-loathing to any great degree, we heard the distant call of hockey. Although close by, the hockey fields were, strictly speaking, outside of the school grounds, which should have told us something. Over the merry clash of sticks we slowly realised that it was a sport reserved for the intellectual and the gloriously eccentric. I played it happily for five years."

In episode One Hundred and Three we look at "Blue Period" by Luke Alfred from the recently released Issue Twenty Eight (published in March 2018).

Read the full article here: https://www.theblizzard.co.uk/article/blue-period

Issue Twenty Eight, like all issues of the Blizzard, is available for £12 plus postage on www.theblizzard.co.uk. Since we’ve relaunched the website, all our articles, including this one, are available to read for free. Non-subscribers get 3 free articles a month, while subscribers have unlimited advert-free browsing, as well as access to digital downloads of all our issues in eBook formats.

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