Little Wingers

I didn’t have the armchair to myself, I seldom do. My kids have warped the timespace of inheritance protocol and have set up occupation in the sitting room of my house for many many months now. Clearance to watch a football match on my own television in my own sitting room requires me to call bilateral talks at lunchtime with the key delegates of the Cartoonocracy. They are a hardline sort. They didn’t like the idea one bit. They’ve seen this stuff before; the games are soooo long, and sometimes Daddy gets cranky.

Timing can be a great ally in negotiation. The leverage of my having the Easter Bunny’s ear proved decisive in thrashing out a Good Friday Agreement. Pats v Rovers would be a standing room only affair in the Armchair Saint’s sitting room. I would send the Bunny's ear back to him after the game.

You should know more about the kids. The boy is three. I expect he will eventually be barred from most of the football stadia on this island unless legislation softens about jumping on seats, or headbutting. He spends much of the game engaged in a construction / destruction cycle involving Lego towers and karate chops.

The girl is five. She is precociously logical and has no tolerance for throwaway answers. You’d best respond to her queries with the kind of sure-footed precision that someone staring down the business end of pistol held by a Samuel L. Jackson character ought to deliver. Much of the narrative of the past week has been set against the backdrop of her evolving affections towards the violin which a few months ago was oh so central to her well being.

The violin looks beautiful and its sound has the potential to match. But the journey from screeching cacophony to elegant melodic flourish is long. Each persistent correction from her teacher nudges her further towards a satisfying sonorous articulation, but it too dents her enthusiasm. It’s an education in effort and reward, and right now she wants to throw the towel in.

It’s a new situation for me too. I’d like her to keep playing, but I don’t want her to play to please me. It was her idea to play the violin, it can be her idea to stop. But I know she will regret it, and that will be no satisfaction to either of us on the day some years down the road when that feeling bites hard on her. Rorsy and Tiger may well stroll down the 18th fairway at Augusta this weekend in epic sporting battle - both products of ‘enthusiastic’ paternal coaching from a tender age in their (fathers’?) chosen discipline. I can’t help but think of all the projects taken on by super motivated coaching Dads whose efforts are now eternally resented by their offspring. Must be scores of wounded kittens for every Tiger.

So each occasion she has expressed her admiration or appreciation of anything this week, I have planted a not very subtle seed of self-motivation by highlighting how much hard work the person who made it has put in to achieve that level of ability. She rumbled it pretty quick of course: “I know you’re talking about my violin Daddy, but I don’t want to play it anymore.”

An hour till kick-off. I have been admitted to the sitting room, I bribed the border guards with a small plate of ginger nuts. Channel hopping before the game I strike pure gold as Jimi Hendrix Live at The Isle of Wight is being broadcast. Now this is a proper pre-match build up. 

Jimi’s guitar grinds, squeals, howls and roars in lysergic euphoria. This isn’t music; it defies notation. This apparently free-form fury is all under Jimi’s control, like a god juggling lightning bolts. He mouths each wail in perfect synchronisation. The illusion catches the attention of a ginger nut eating ex-musician.

Question 1: “Daddy, is that music happening now, somewhere else?” 
No, this was over 40 years ago.   

Question 2: “Daddy, is that man making those noises with his mouth?” 

Daddy laughs. No, he’s making them with his guitar and kind of singing them too, but you can only hear his guitar.

Question 3 & 4: “Why is he doing that? Is he wearing the same kind of clothes as us?” 
Well....his clothes are pretty different, aren’t they....very colourful. He’s doing it as part of his performance.....he was the best guitarist ever.

Question 5: “Did he put his fingers in all the right places on his guitar?” 
Daddy laughs. Yeah, but he was way beyond that kind of thing.

“Daddy, I know you’re thinking about my violin and you’re going to talk about practicing”. Daddy laughs. This time, I actually wasn’t going to mention it.

The channel switched, the teams on the pitch. The boy sparks to attention. “Which one you-are Daddy, which one you-are?”. It becomes apparent that the boy thinks he’s watching a video game and that I am controlling one of the teams. My God, what have we done?

I explain to the crew that while I have no influence over the outcome of the game, we are rooting for the red and white guys. The boy gets excited at the numbers on the jerseys. “Number 9 kicking it, number 6 kicking the ball now, then number 8.” His commentary is preferable to and frequently more accurate than the efforts of the state broadcaster. However this is not the time to slate RTE, my gratitude to them for televising this game is eternal.

Vindicating my decision to not yet expose them to chilly evenings of football without the barrier of a television screen, the children express their boredom as early as the second minute. “Daddy are the red team going to score soon?”. Well, probably not. There may not be any goals, and that would be a good thing. 

It is while processing this counter intuitive proposition that the girl’s thoughts are unceremoniously derailed by the blizzard of ginger nut crumbs which fill the air as Chris Forrester opens the scoring.

The boy was building his Lego tower, its base was precarious. As he stretched to put each additional story on to the wavering structure he grimaced in the fear that all which had been built might collapse. I didn’t need a mirror to know that Gary Twigg’s header off the bar was the catalyst for a similar expression closer to home.

We had a little chat about balance and how he needed to build the tower in the middle of the base. If you put the pieces in the wrong places you’ll have all manner of problems. At this point Killian Brennan illustrated my point with greater clarity than my words could ever muster, 2-0 Saints.

Much will be said about Pats third goal. I’ll not burden it further than to say it was so outrageous an effort that I must plead guilty to calling Forrester a ‘cabbage’ in the moments between the ball leaving his foot, tagging a cloud and landing in the goal.

In the aftermath of Ken ‘not-my-fault’ Oman pulling one back, my wife noted that Damian Richardson sounded very like my father; whence I praised the zeitgeist of her expeditious interjection and noted it as a great advert for the domestic game.

Pats scored a fourth, and a fifth, Brendan Clarke improvising a quarterback role with his booming deliveries tucked behind the haplessly turned fullbacks. You’d almost feel sorry for his contemporary at the other end of the field if he weren’t a Shamrock Rovers goalkeeper.

The match ends, it’s all very pleasing. It’s bedtime for the little people. The girl offers this pearl of wisdom as she leaves the room: “Daddy, don’t those boys in the green and white need to practice really hard if they want to be as good as the red team?”.