I know I’m guilty of encouraging my son in watching and playing sports. It started with watching and it has extended into playing – he hasn’t yet seen a sport involving a ball that he doesn’t want to play, perhaps apart from golf, but it’s early still. Football is the mainstay, by which I mean soccer. We’ve tried the American variety, though that’s a bit dangerous for Dad to be playing in the apartment. A lot of potential for head, neck and knee injuries, I’ve found in just two or three brief, ahem, experiments.
Anyway, a few weeks ago there was a little party at his school, whereby the parents come into to read the latest stories written by their kids (and read those of the other kids and comment on them too).
Our boy chose as his subject the first professional football game he attended, that of Fulham v Middlesbrough.
I have to wonder how many of the parents thought, “that’s nice, but what is this M’brogh?”. He gets that from the abbreviation M’Boro they use on the telly when showing the score.
Anyway last week we went for his twice yearly assessment with his teacher and without going into details, story-telling came up and she said – and I’m paraphrasing here – ‘he needs to diversify the subject matter for his stories, they tend to be about one thing.’ And we know what that is, don’t we?