She Drew Pink, the Jackpot. It Came With Thirty-Five Girls.

At the evening sports festival at Schule Schloss Salem, near Lake Constance, the school splits into colour teams, six for the girls and six for the boys, each led by a sports captain from the Salem International College. The captains find out their colours shortly before the day.

In 2025 one captain drew pink. She described it, without irony, as the jackpot, and went and bought glitter.

The jackpot came with paperwork.

The College pupils arrived by bus, with little time to spare, and each captain was handed a tournament schedule and a list of names. Hers had about thirty-five girls on it, from the youngest year upwards. She had met very few of them. They then had to be found, among hundreds of children in coloured T-shirts, all moving, and divided on the spot into squads for different sports.

A matching shirt is a great help in a crowd, but it does not, unfortunately, organise its wearer.

I know this, because I have organised a children’s party in matching shirts. For the youngest’s seventh birthday in Brussels I ordered twelve purple T-shirts, on the theory that colour would make twelve seven-year-olds easy to count at the indoor trampoline park. It did not occur to me that the trampoline park’s staff wore purple. Neither did the shirts make the children easier to count. They made them harder to count, because now there were nineteen.

I spent the first forty minutes returning trampoline staff to their posts. One of them, a tall young man named on his badge as Kevin, eventually agreed to wear his shirt inside out for the rest of the session, as a favour.

The Salem captain did better than I did. She found her team. She ticked them off. The squads played. The glitter went on.

I gather that by the end of an evening like this a captain stops watching the games and starts watching the clock. That is what happens to anyone who has been handed a list. You go to a sports festival for the sport and spend it in administration.

There is also the matter of the glitter, which is the real legacy of any team colour. At our house, the purple from that party is still being found in the hall, four years later, in places no child went. The youngest says it is “the party’s ghost”. My husband says it is the party’s invoice.

The Salem captain is, I hope, still finding pink. It is the jackpot. It is the gift that keeps on giving.