I've just been to watch sports day at my sisters' school, Pipers Corner.

It's very reminiscent of sports days at Taunton School (in as much as I maintain my record of attending sports days without actually competing in anything, if nothing else), although the inter-house competitive edge at Pipers is possibly even healthier than it was at TS.

There are four houses, each with an associated colour: Hampden (blue), Mandeville (green), Milton (yellow) and Penn (red). Each house is named for a local area around Wycombe, where the school is based. Alice and Lucy, my sisters, are in Penn.

From the very start, competition between the houses is encouraged. They're divided into four along the home straight of the athletics track, each decked out with balloons, banners and mascots in their house colour. There's plenty of chanting too. The atmosphere is more reminiscent of 'house singing' at TS, which was a raucous annual event with much chanting of house songs, than sports days at TS, where the sense of competition was lessened and proceedings generally quite relaxed. Or at least, that's how it seemed from inside the scorers' hut.

Both Alice and Lucy did well. Alice came second in two events, behind the same improbably quick young girl on each occasion, and then performed magnificently in the relay to drag Penn up from fourth place, going into the final straight, to second. Lucy won the three spring jump competition (a hop-skip-jump competition, minus the hopping and skipping) and won a relay competition too.

Penn actually won the overall inter-house competition. Clearly I'm a good omen, since this was the first time they've done that in eleven years. After an interminably long wait, the lady announcing the results began to go down the final scores in reverse order. Milton were last, but still greeted their name with a loud cheer, as did third placed Hampden. When the name 'Mandeville' was read out for second place, a similar cheer went up - except it came from the Penn area, which had turned into a sea of red bouncing up and down with joy at the thought of having come first. Very satisfying. This is why we bring the children up with a ridiculously over-egged sense of 'do or die' by playing football with them in the back garden. Even if it does mean my dad has to support a team that wear red.