Illustration: Benoit Jacques
When I was very small, I spent a lot of Sundays in a field watching my father play touch football, a slightly less violent version of American football. One of my earliest memories is of me at age three or so, standing on the touchline on a crisp, autumn afternoon and having a motorcycle fall on top of me. The incident left me with a profound ambivalence towards spectatorship. I never imagined I would one day have children who would one day be forced to watch me play sport. Which is just as well, because this never came to pass.
Instead, it is Sunday and I am standing on a touchline watching my middle son play football. It is one of about 20 matches taking place on the same open expanse of grass. I have just reached the point, a few minutes shy of half-time, when I remember what a mistake it is to bring the dog along. To relieve her boredom, she has just introduced a game of her own devising, in which she tries to prise the lead from my wrist by any means necessary.
"Stop it," I hiss. "I hate this."
She gets the lead between her teeth and pulls. She growls and thrashes her head from side to side. When I try to ignore this escalation, she starts leaping into the air like a marlin. It attracts a lot of attention.
At half-time, I tell my son he's playing well. He knows I'm not in a position to be more specific than that. I know the rules of football, but I've never developed the knack for commentary. During the break, I take the dog to a remote corner of the field where I can plead with her without anyone hearing. A light rain begins to fall.
"Just another half an hour," I say. "Please behave."
In the middle of the second half, the sky darkens and the rain turns heavy. My son's team look miserable; they're wet and cold and a goal down. I take the view that such hardship is good for the boy – he will learn discipline in the face of discomfort – but it's not doing me . I learned all that stuff a long time ago.
My son's team drive one in off the crossbar and draw level. The cheers are drowned out by a strange whooshing noise. The dog puts her tail between her legs and starts whimpering.
"What's wrong with you?" I say. Because I am standing hunched with my back to the wind, I do not see the solid white wall racing across the field toward us. Suddenly the players are swallowed up in a wave of horizontal hail. At some point I realise I am no longer watching a football match, but bearing witness to an extreme weather event. With three minutes left to play, the linesman shouts to the ref, "You have to call the game off!" That's the last thing anybody hears for a while. I see the outline of my son approaching.
"Do you have your stuff?" I shout.
"No!" he shouts.
We run in the general direction of the changing rooms, into the wind, squinting to keep the hail out of our eyes. When we finally reach the building, I huddle under the lip of the roof with the dog shivering between my feet. Because 20 matches have been abandoned at once, it takes my son half an hour to get dry and changed. By the time he emerges, I am soaked through, stiff with cold and unable to stop my teeth from chattering. "Let's go," I say quietly. "The dog is unhappy."
As we head off home across the fields, the boy chats animatedly about the goal and the extreme weather event, while I try to walk without letting my skin touch my clothes. I think back to when I was three and begin to wish that I was lying cosily trapped under a nice warm motorcycle.
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