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* A warm welcome back to Lai Ying Khee, our table tennis champ, who is back for a short holiday before returning to NZ.

* An appeal has gone out to the '72/74 group to donate to a VIOBA Foundation Scholarship Fund for the needy, to be named after the group. For details, please contact Sze Loon. You can also go to the Interactive Community to post your response in the topic started on this there.

* Missing members of the '72/74 tribe are being hunted down. If you know of any of their whereabouts, please let us know. Please go to the Interactive Community for details, or join the egroup if you are from '72/74 year - contact Kek Hoe for details.

I guess those poor souls must have gotten used to being run over by kiddy kids once a year.

One aspect of it though for which I can truly use the phrase "unforgettable" is the start of the Cross Country Run.

If you recall, one thousand hapless and malnourished kids with hardly any breakfast were lined up on one side of the field, four or five deep.

You cannot know when the run started because the starter was at the other end. All you could do was to run when you see the others starting to run, or more accurately, when the stampede started.

That was the unforgettable part.

When the run started, I heard this loud pounding which I had never heard before, and which I thought would cease after a while. It did not. Quite soon though, I realised it was the sound of one thousand over pairs of feet pounding on the school field. Did you notice this trampling sound?

It was unforgettable for me.

It changed to a clutter as we leapt over the iron piping fence and onto the road. We were like blood hounds at the start of a hunt.

Soon, of course, the Cross Country Run melted into the Qualifying Rounds, and onto the Sports Day, all now but a faint memory with each of us with our own treasured anecdotes to tell.

Well, I don't think I will ever get to participate in the Olympics, but for each of us, I am sure, we all had our own Olympian triumphs in our time at VI.

...The creed of the Olympics is "swifter, higher, further", or something like that in Latin.

VI had its own Olympics, and our very own Olympian creed too. The creed consists of only one word, much more efficacious than that of the official Olympics as well, that word being "compulsory".

Yes, everything was compulsory. If your English vocabulary was nothing to speak of when you arrived at VI, it certainly was instantly enriched by this word, "compulsory".

For example, it was due to "compulsory" that one finds oneself enclosed in a dark study room, on a hot tropical afternoon, with the air-cond having failed, with another perhaps 100 luckless VI boys watching "Pork Chop Hill", and the projector making this whiiiir whiiiiiir whiiiiirling sound at the back. All in the name of "compulsory" and some now forgotten paid donation to some organisation or cause.

I had digressed again. On the Victorian Olympics, another important difference is that the Victorian Olympics was all year round, not once every four years. So you need not wait all of four years to find out who is going to be the next 100 metres champion.

The one similiarity is that every event that you find in the Olympics is in our all year round PE (Physical Education) period, Qualifying Rounds, Sports Day and Cross Country run.

The Cross Country run was really something, one's own Marathon, stretching over all of 3 1/2 miles, over hills and over dales. Well, not exactly over hills and dales, there were green valleys and slopes too.

I well remember the first Cross Country House practice. Where were we going? It seemed such a big adventure for a kid. As it turned out, not only through the busy traffic, but very soon not only over slopes and into valleys, but through cemeteries and over tombstones too!