Even though I don’t watch much football I love the World Cup because it’s my passport to total freedom. I can nip off to the pub, slob indoors on a sunny Sunday afternoon, leave supper before we’ve finished eating, let alone before the dishes are done. And where normally that kind of behaviour would at the very least get me a dirty look, during World Cup season it actually gets me brownie points.
Why? Because it’s a sign that I’m being a Good Dad. It worked in the old days with the Rat. And now it works with Boy. Mothers are absolutely potty for their sons and will look fondly on any activity that makes them content. So whenever I slink off to the TV, wearing an expression that says, ‘You know I’d really much rather be strimming the nettles/scouring the roasting tray/clearing up cat poo but the boy wants me to watch with him’, I don’t merely get away with it. I’m viewed almost as a saint.
The games I like best are the ones when England aren’t playing. Apart from being less stressful, it means you can multitask — tweet, check your emails, wade through that blockbuster Ulysses Grant biography that you still haven’t finished — and usually the audible excitement of the crowd, or your son, will alert you if anything important is happening on screen.
Sometimes, though, your son isn’t watching either. As anyone with teenagers will know, the younger generation is quite incapable of staring fixedly at a single screen. They need distraction from all that concentration. Boy is always on Facebook when he watches; Girl is always on Snapchat. Still, the good thing about football is that even if you miss the goal, they’ll replay it from different angles 30 seconds later, so long as you can bear the wait.
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