The Beautiful Game

Ever wonder why soccer is known as The Beautiful Game?

A few years ago FIFA were looking for a cool moniker for the sport, so they called in fifteen guys from KPMG at $300,000/day. Each. Got them to sit around a table and come up with a name. It started slowly. The first few days resulted in suggestions along the lines of: The OK Game. The Game With A Round Ball Where You Kick It A Lot. The Not Bad Game. The Game. The Funky If You’re Brazilian But Kinda Dour If You’re Scottish Game. A Game On Grass. If Star Wars Was A Game It’d Be Soccer. After several weeks, and several million dollars in consultancy fees, it looked like they were going to have to settle for I Can’t Believe It’s Not Rugby, when during the wrap-up, a small fella from Rhode Island said jokingly, “We could call it the Beautiful Game.” There was a certain amount of sniggering around the table, but these were marketing consultants, men for whom truth means nothing, where style is king and substance is immaterial. “I like it!” one of them suddenly. Then Sepp Blatter said, “We must be ballsy. Ballsy! We are in football, and if there’s anything we have a lot of, it is balls.” And then men in suits started saying The Beautiful Game in low voices until it sounded ok, because if you repeat anything often enough it begins to sound plausible. Try it, it works. For example, I bet now when you read about John Reid being a potential Prime Minister, you don’t choke on your cornflakes the way you did the first time you heard it mentioned. The Beautiful Game was born.

As you can see from the above photo, Two of Two is an expert exponent of the Beautiful Game. Every picture tells a story, and here is a boy, limbs moving fluidly, tongue out, poised to pounce on the ball and stroke a sweet shot into the corner of the net.

Saturday 7th Ocotober was a momentous footballing day. I know that already, you’re thinking. Scotland beat France 1-0, and since France had recently beaten Italy, is made us de facto World Champions. At least for four days. Now, certainly that day was momentous for that, but the principal reason it turned out to be a day of moment, was that it saw the first goal of Saturday morning football, after thirteen months of trying, by the aforementioned Two of Two.

One of Two scored two goals the previous week - she was, as her American coach pointed out, on fire - and another that Saturday. We got that warm fuzzy feeling that one gets when watching one’s kid achieve something, or in our case, as we’re not at all demanding, anything at all. ‘Yay! You ate you’re breakfast without spilling any milk! High Five!’ However, each goal was a stab from a couple of yards, in games on a small pitch, four-a-side. And One of Two does not want to be a footballer when she grows up. She wants to be a doctor or a diplomat, she wants to help people and get everyone on the planet to be nice to each other. By God, she has a lot of disillusion in front of her, but you can say that for all kids, and at least she’s going into it with a decent attitude.

Two of Two, on the other hand, wants to play the Beautiful Game. All the time. He wants to play for someone in the World Cup, although he hasn’t yet decided if it’s Scotland or England or France. (The Lindsays came from Normandy, presumably in 1066, so he’s in with a shout.) He keeps taunting me with the England thing, and if he’s not doing that, he says he wants to play for Celtic. He’s young.

So, there he is, going to football every Saturday morning. They practice skills for forty minutes, and then they play a twenty minute game. Quite a large pitch, decent sized goals, and at least twenty-five six year-old boys roving around the park in a tight bunch, like a herd of wildebeest. When the ball goes to one end, it generally takes about ten minutes to get back up to the other. This is end-to-end football in slow motion.

Goals, under these circumstances, are at a premium. When it can take quarter of the game for the ball to work its way out of a midfield scrum of twenty pint-sized Vinnie Joneses, there’s never much goalmouth action. That Saturday’s game was no different. A dour struggle, characterized by the behaviour of the herd, it was heading towards the final seconds with Two of Two’s side on the wrong end of a 1-0 mauling. The ball had finally worked its way up to the other end of the park, and all the opposition needed to do was keep the thing in the midst of the herd for another ten seconds or so.

Suddenly the ball broke loose, and rolled along the ground to Two of Two. He was about twelve yards out, on the outer rim of the scrum - it was a bit like the sun suddenly breaking loose from the centre of the solar system and finding itself next to Pluto. Twelve yards doesn’t sound too much, but these kids are six, and most of them have trouble kicking the ball twelve feet. Two of Two swivelled, smacked the ball right-footed, first time, and sent a magnificent looping shot, through the crowd and over the dwarf-like keeper’s head. The net bulged. The wee lad then took off up the park, hands aeroplane-like out at the side - he’s been watching all the right tv - and was still charging full steam in that classic goalscorer’s pose when the final whistle blew.

He’d saved the day. He’d scored his first competitive goal. It’s now two weeks later, but he’s still running up and down the park celebrating. Saturday 7th October 2006. It might be remembered as the day Scotland beat the nearly world champions 1-0. But not in this house.

Two of Two, goalscorer. It was sweet, perfectly placed and opportunistic. And you know what? It was beautiful.

A Brief Word On The Search For An Antidote To Pre-School Trauma

I’m on a mission to find new breakfast music. We are several weeks into the new school year, which means we have so far endured several weeks of pre-school stress, following two months off. (Two months of 24/7 kids on the one hand, but two months of not having to get them out the door by 8 in the morning on the other.)

I discovered at some point in the previous year, the antidote of music. Something relaxing to smooth the first traumatic hour of the day. However, the old favourite, the music which served us so well through the bleak winter months and the chill promise of spring, Jack Johnson, whose calming influence soothed many an early morning bunfight, is now sounding tired and old. Banana pancakes? ‘We don’t need no stinkin’ banana pancakes!’ cry the spawn.

It takes a particular kind of music, gentle yet not banal, to do the job. You don’t want to be making breakfast thinking you’re in an elevator, but at the same time you don’t want some raucous guitar romp which has the kids standing on the table strumming a tennis racket.

On Monday I tried out our CD with 24 versions of The Girl From Ipanema. On the upside, it felt like we were having breakfast in the Sheraton or some other top notch international chain hotel. On the downside, it felt like I was the waiter, the chef, the houseboy and the dishwasher in some top notch international chain hotel.

Wednesday I went for Bailero from Chants D’Auvergne, by Frederica von Stade. This is a lovely piece of music, although at six minutes, it does test you to try to get the kids breakfasted, dressed and teeth cleaned, lunchboxes made up, coats and shoes on, homework finished, spelling tests checked and backpacks on before the song ends. It’s the kind of music that would be used in a Brian de Palma movie while someone gets bloodily disemboweled in slow motion. I can imagine myself shouting at the kids for spilling milk all over the table - they’re currently running at 13 of 22 mornings since school started on spilled milk - and hurling a sandwich at them, the bacon and bread separating in slow motion in mid-air, as the kids dive under the table screaming silently, the operatic-style music filling the kitchen with juxtaposition.

Yesterday we went for Hoagy Carmichael. Sadly, Hoagy didn’t work. Ought to have done, he ought to have filled all the right criteria. However, the minute they started fighting over who got to read the back of the Rice Krispie packet, we were all doomed, and the airy songs of lazy rivers and buttermilk skies were damned. Screaming and shouting ensued, mayhem was no refuge, the kitchen was filled with anger, distrust and cries of betrayal, homework went undone, bowls of breakfast cereal were left unfinished, and not until the school playground at drop-off were words of conciliation finally spoken. Hoagy did not do the trick. In the first James Bond novel, Casino Royale, Bond is described as having a bit of the Hoagy Carmichael about him. Hoagy Carmichael is that cool. However, even the writer of Stardust, who looks like James Bond, cannot do the job of bringing calm to a family of four before school.

Next time, we invite Jack Johnson into our house in person, to sit in the corner and play guitar while the kids eat...

An End To Authority

A couple of weeks ago we were driving home from school. I’d taken the car because I had to pick up someone else’s kid, and so had put on hold the dicing with fate/death/stress that is the daily bike ride. It’s barely more than five minutes in the car, but barely more than five minutes is more than enough time for the conversation to get round to bad words. Which is one of their favourite conversations after all.

When they talk about this stuff, it’s always pretty mild. They never use the swear word in any sort of proper sentence structure. For example, phrases such as ‘Fuck me, my day was a complete bastard,’ are still alien to them. It’s just the words themselves, and the suggestion of them.

School days for six year-old boys are split between playing football and skulking around the playground in wee groups, the amusement coming when every now and again one of them will say ‘shit’ and the rest will dissolve into fits of giggles. The end-of-the-day report usually goes along the lines of, ‘Today we won 19-2 and Billy said fuck.’

The girls are different of course, and not just because, in our case, they’re all two years older. Girls don’t skulk around playgrounds. They stand in little collectives in corners, (they get it from their mums standing in little collectives at the school gate), wondering which one of their friends they’re going to bitchily exclude from the group for the next fifteen minutes.

So there we were sitting in the car and the conversation started up about some kid who had said the ‘sh’ word of the ‘f’ word or something, and the situation in which he’d used it, which of course is never, ‘David said Miss Peabody is a sack of shite’, but far more likely to be, ‘David was just standing there doing nothing and he said shite and we all laughed.’

It’s one of those minor but ever-tricky parental moments. The first time someone says ‘Billy said a bad word...’ you can’t jump on the conversation and tell them to stop talking about it or there will be no Boomerang for six months. So you let it go. However, you don’t want them to be still talking about it in say six hours time, which you know they will be if they get the chance. So you have to give them some leeway, and then stop them at a moment of your choosing. Or, to look at it from the kids’ perspective... you have to ignore the discussion, which makes it look like you’re condoning it, and then suddenly you tell them off at a completely random moment. Which is probably the moment that you’re getting annoyed about it, and from nowhere you sound harsh and angry. Happens all the time.

On this occasion, seeing as we had a non-family member in the car, when I made my completely random assertion that the conversation had gone too far, I didn’t pick up the hand-held flame thrower that I keep in the glove compartment. Instead I spoke sternly to them. They laughed and edged the conversation a little closer to actually saying the rude words in question, whatever they were. I said some more stern stuff, this time, so I thought, with a bit of an edge, just to imply that, although I had never done it before, this might just be the time when I press the rear seat ejector button which we’d had installed by the Peugeot garage the last time the car was in for its service. My serious, enough-is-enough tone, the one that suggests firm but reasonable authority, the tone that you hope carries weight and gravitas.

They smiled and looked cheekily at each other, but the conversation died and I thought I had triumphed. A few more smirks and then the other girl in the car, the non-family member with, more or less, freedom to say what she wanted, said...

‘You sound like Shrek.’

Giggling all round, and that, in such a small and seemingly insignificant moment, was the end of all parental authority.

Worse, my Scottish accent sounds like Mike Myers. Must be time to go home...

Scooby. Dooby. Doo.

Last weekend. A quiet Sunday afternoon in Eastern Europe. TPCKAM was in the kitchen making dinner, the kids and I settled down in front of the tv. Two of Two and I wanted to watched the football, One of Two wanted to watch cartoons. We negotiated a compromise. Football until half-time, then switch to Boomerang.

When we changed over, Scooby Doo was just starting. An episode about a guy dressed up as a scary monster, who never actually does anyone any harm. Can’t quite place it from that description? I know...

At one point, Fred and the gang are in a motor boat being chased across San Francisco Bay by a gang of thirty foot great white sharks, which are snapping ferociously at the boat. Something which I expect happens all the time in San Francisco Bay. After a scary chase, which has Scooby leaping into Shaggy’s arms in a comedy manner, they finally think they’ve evaded the sharks. Velma stands at the back of the boat and says, ‘Well, it looks like we’ve evaded those sharks.’ Two seconds later a gigantic shark appears and bites off the whole rear end of the boat, including the motor. Velma looks phlegmatically at the camera and quips, ‘Irony, my old friend, we meet again...’

A lovely line, well delivered. But you can spot the problem. IT’S NOT IRONY!!!!

What is the matter with these people? What she said was counting your chickens before they’ve hatched. It’s taking things for granted. It’s spending the money before the cheque’s cashed. It’s a myriad of things, but it’s just not irony.

Had they been going to swim, and someone had said, ‘no don’t swim, there are people-eating sharks, you’ll die’ and then they’d decided to take the boat instead, but rather than people-eating sharks, the sharks had turned out to be boat-eating sharks and therefore they’d been eaten, when if they’d swum they’d have been all right......that would have been irony.

Irony is a complex idea which generally defies one line description. That’s why some people in a certain country which we won’t mention just don’t get it. And yet they’re the one’s who mention irony more than anyone else. Irony, as William Shatner says in Airplane 2, can be pretty ironic sometimes.

Eastern Approaches II

They say there are all sorts of animals roaming wild in the primaeval forest at the border of Poland and Belarus. Bison, lynx, deer, wild boar, donkeys, Shrek. They say that if you’re quiet, and if you wander far enough into the forest, you might be lucky and get to see one of these rare creatures in the oldest untouched forest in Europe.

If you’re quiet...some chance of that, with two marauding children. There wasn’t an animal this side of the Urals which wasn’t alerted to our presence, and had legged it to the nearest cave to get away from the screaming menace of a six year-old wee nipper on the charge...

We spent a Saturday morning in Bialstok in eastern Poland, waiting for the kids to fall into a fountain. It was large, with an impressive array of displays, and it seemed inevitable that at least one of our kids would take an immediate header into the water. Amazingly, as if the benign water gods were smiling upon us, neither of them did, despite playing beside it for almost an hour.

Eventually we managed to drag them away and headed off in the direction of Bialowieza national park. We were to spend the night in a small wooden shack with dead animals on the wall and no heating, in the small town of Hajnowka.

We arrived in the peaceful country idyll, were served fantastic steaming bowls of soup made from forest mushrooms, and settled back to relax as the kids roamed free and safe in the unspoiled countryside. So we thought. Instead, they stayed about twenty yards away from us playing in a hammock strung between cherry trees, which would have been fine, except they were producing a level of noise equivalent to the whole of Italy when Fabio Grosso scored the winning penalty in the World Cup Final against France. The peaceful county idyll was shattered. We headed off into the forest in an attempt to wear them out, or distract them long enough that they forgot to keep shouting.

We wore them out, sure enough, which helped by 9pm that evening. For the time being, however, they kept up the noise levels. Had there been any kind of dramatic animal life anywhere near the spot where we entered the forest, it would have had time to pack its bags, put its house up for sale, eat some lunch, watch the first three series of The West Wing, have a bath and then catch a late train to the Black Forest, so much warning did we give them of our presence.

We walked for forty minutes, crossing numerous paths and wondering if we’d find our way back. We’d been leaving a bread crumb trail, but discovered deep into the undergrowth that Two of Two had been scoffing it, along with a light chianti he’d brought along for the trip. Soon they were agitating to turn back. You can fight that kind of thing off for a certain amount of time, and then it becomes unbearable. We caved in and marched back to the shack.

By the time we’d found our way home, Two of Two had three hundred litres of mud in his boots. The rest of the day was wet and cold, no heating, Two of Two going through clean clothing like sweets, so that by the time night fell every inch of the shack was covered in soiled/damp/washed clothing.

Sunday morning we took a horse and cart ride into the forest to an orthodox church, painted vivid blue. The perimeter was fenced off with barbed wire, the gates were locked, and we were shown to the huge hole in the fence as means of entry. Behind the church was a sacred well. We’d been told to take a bottle to fill with holy water, for those awkward child demonic-possession occasions. The area was covered with the signs of pilgrimage and prayer, accompanied by a signpost on the neighbouring fence saying that it was a military area and everyone should keep out. In four languages. That whole military-religious mix. There’s nowt more sacred than that.

We took a trip to the tourist centre at the edge of the forest in Bialowieza, mainly to get lunch and take a hike up to the top of the park tower. In the near distance we saw Belarus. There were a lot of trees. Hard to believe they beat Scotland 1-0 at Hampden last year.

When we headed home that afternoon, we stopped off at the orthodox shrine in Grabarka. The story goes...in 1770, when the town was being ravaged by the plague, the townspeople were directed by a heavenly sign to erect a cross on the nearby hill. They called in the marketing consultants, who advised them at $40,000 a day, to put the contract out to tender. Following a five month process, plagued by corruption and claims of cronyism, the contract was placed, and three years later, and miles over budget, the cross was built. The plague vanished overnight. Of course, everyone was already dead. The hill became a holy place, and is now covered in thousands of crosses. There is a burial area, a church, and large areas where visitors on pilgrimage have planted crosses to commemorate their trip. A remarkable sight. We left the kids playing in a ditch by the side of the road, as they’d had enough religion for one weekend.

And that, apart from the dreary drive back into Warsaw along with everyone else who had been in the country for the weekend, was that. We had seen and enjoyed a lot of memorable things, and yet as always, the weekend was dominated by having two spawn at every turn. One day they may thank us for having taken them to an orthodox wedding, a former Nazi death camp, a primaeval forest, a sacred well next to a military installation, and a holy orthodox shrine, all in one weekend...but they probably won’t.

Eastern Approaches I

Last month we headed east to the town of Bialstok, near the Polish border with Belarus. We’d been invited to the wedding of our child minder, who strangely hasn’t been put off the thought of marriage and the near-inevitable consequence of children by looking after our spawn for the last twelve months. The wedding was to take place in an Orthodox church, beginning at 5pm on Friday evening.

The Parent Currently Known as Mum (TPCKAM) had a day off work, the kids had a day off school - they needed it after all, after having endured the first three days of the new term following two months off - and we set off from Warsaw at ten in the morning, only an hour or so later than planned, which isn’t at all bad, given that we had two kids and hadn’t packed the night before.

It’s no more than a three hour drive, so we decided to stop off along the way at one of Poland’s Holocaust memorial sites, at the former death camp of Treblinka. Even in this day of kids being seemingly desensitised against the worst horrors of humanity, a former death camp is no place for the under-10’s, but the camp at Treblinka was destroyed by the Germans long before the end of the war, and there are no empty buildings left standing, no relics of the gruesome past. The site, in a beautiful, peaceful, secluded forest, is made of standing stones. The perimeter of the camp is marked out with large Stonehenge-like blocks, and inside there are thousands of small stones, marking the victims and the towns from which they were taken. We gave the children a brief explanation of events, they weren’t at all interested, they charged off into the forest and played.

800,000 people were killed at Treblinka, which is just too big a number for anyone to really comprehend, never mind small children. It is a beautiful memorial.

We arrived in Bialstok two hours before kick off. Checked into the hotel and discovered a children’s play area across the road. We bundled the spawn in that direction, and they charged off, shoes to the wind, and let loose the dogs of war. We settled back with a cup of joe and watched the mayhem. At the heart of the play area was a giant, pink and yellow inflatable breast. Perhaps it was intended to make small children feel comfortable, and ease any separation issues they might have when their mother tries to get fifteen seconds to herself.

High up on the wall was an advert for another children’s recreational joint in the city called Fartlandia. Extra beans optional.

At T minus 60 I returned to the hotel. At some stage, and even before I looked in the suitcase, it suddenly dawned on me that I’d forgotten my white shirt. This is the kind of thing that would have you shouting at your kids for their carelessness. Fortunately my own mother wasn’t there to shout at me, and I was at least able to contribute to the stress of the groom and his mother by asking if there was anywhere nearby that I could buy a white shirt. (Good thing I hadn’t forgotten my sporran, which might have been a bit more difficult to source at short notice in eastern Poland.) A spare white shirt was dredged up form somewhere, and I was saved. The kids told me off, but they’re not as good at it as I am.

The wedding service lasted about an hour. A choir chanted melodically almost throughout, responding to one of the many chanting priests on hand. It was a beautiful service, and One of Two and Two of Two managed to hold themselves in check for the entire time. They looked angelic, and maybe they fooled some of the people some of the time, but they weren’t fooling the parents. We were like Gregory Peck in the Omen. (I mean, we could see through the mask, not that we tried to sacrifice them on the alter with two thousand year old knives.)

The service over, they went on the charge. However, later, when the chips were down at the wedding reception, they once more behaved themselves.

This was a wedding reception like you’ve always dreamed of. No speeches. Frankly, that’s what you want out of a wedding reception, as a groom, father of the bride, or as a guest. When One of Two gets married, I now have an alternative to insisting she runs away to the Dominican Republic.

The food was brought out at a tremendous rate, one course zipping quickly into the next, so that if you didn’t get your cutlery in your hands quickly enough, the plate had gone and you were looking at something else which required a completely different set of implements. The object of fast food and no speeches was clearly to get everyone onto the dance floor with as much haste as possible. And so, within about twenty minutes of everyone sitting at the table, and after several ad hoc localised vodka-fuelled toasts, the music was on and ninety percent of those in attendance were boogieing on down to Boney M. Seriously, Boney M. There’s no escape. Resistance is futile. Despite Brown Girl In The Ring, we danced and danced into the small hours.

Ok, I danced for about ten minutes, and then only because TPCKAM pulled a machine gun on me. Soon enough, however, the long tiring day of mostly behaving himself got too much for Two of Two, and the wee fella started complaining of tiredness. We retired hurt to the bedroom, and fell into a deep sleep, only to awake to the cries of Ra-Ra-Rasputin ringing through the hotel at two in the morning...

To be continued...