What better way to spend a sunny Saturday afternoon than reflecting the state of the nation through sport? Forget football, a restrictive team game with rules, over which we have no say, limiting the independence and personal sovereignty of our players. What we need is something with flexibility, balance and very few rules. Try slack-line walking and limbo dancing. 

When I come across the game the multi-coloured slack line (imported from Germany) is fixed between two trees and is doubling as the limbo bar. The horizontal line over sloping ground provides for a gradual series of limbo heights. The two girls are making it look difficult. They are wobbling and falling off the slack line after only five or six steps, and call that limbo? I'd struggle to clear that as high jump!

I'm told that both require balance, flexibility, concentration and skill to be done properly. If attempted by the unpractised or inexperienced both risk the player crashing to the floor. 

Why? Isn't that just scare mongering to stop people trying and to keep them watching football instead. "It's the easiest thing in the world," I say, "All you need is confidence. Anyone who believes they can do it will make it all the way, across or under." Easy peasy as we used to say when I was in infant school.

After several failed attempts to get started on the slack line walk and being rebuked for bending forwards in the limbo dance I tried to renegotiate the terms. 

Fix the line at a height of 1.65m for the limbo dance and then move it to 10cm above the ground for the slack line walk I demanded. My demands were met with laughter. What's the point in that? You can already walk around upright on the ground without our slackline. Hahaha.

So I tried again and again but made little progress and achieved nothing other than a serious of disappointing falls and a sore back. Then while sitting rubbing my bruises and watching the girls it occurred to me I'd just played out the British Brexit story.

On the one hand the government trying to balance its way across a slack-line, swinging from side to side with each step, never more than one step away from crashing off into disaster, just because it's there and they said they'd do it. Then on the other the millions of people in limbo, not knowing where they stand and forced to bend over backwards to maintain no more than they had before. 

Can there ever have been two activities better suited to the Brexit zeitgeist? At least they provide a plan B in which the UK becomes a national circus with more than just clowns in the act.