Is It Really Too Much to Ask? (18 page)

As we know, it is much better to lose than to win. First of all, losing requires much less physical exertion. If you want to win a game of tennis or squash, you have to try very hard, which involves a great deal of running and sweat. Whereas if you really couldn't care less, you can spend an enjoyable hour sauntering about, hitting the ball only if it happens to be passing close by.

It's the same story with chess. If you set out to win, you really have to concentrate hard on what you are doing, anticipating all of the moves your opponent could make and deciding how you might respond.

Whereas if you don't mind losing, you can spend the time when it's not your turn drinking martinis and flicking through powerboat magazines. This is much more enjoyable than doing mental maths.

There's another big advantage to being the plucky Brit who comes home second. It's this: if you win, it is almost impossible to get your face right. You have to look pleased but not smug. And you have to walk that tightrope while making magnanimous noises to your opponent. This is tricky.

Whereas if you lose, you can shrug your shoulders and make all sorts of jokes about how useless you are at everything. There is comedy to be had from being a loser, and none at all from being a winner.

That's why I have spent all of my life ensuring that I am no good at anything.

However, there is an exception to all of this. A time when you must risk a heart attack and a seizure to ensure that you wipe your opponent off the board, or the court or the pitch or wherever you might be. This is when your opponent is one of your own children.

I spent some time yesterday with a fifty-three-year-old man who was absolutely charming, until the conversation turned to his fondness for running half marathons, and how he is driven every year on the Great North Run not to just beat, but to humiliate his twenty-seven-year-old son. I understand this very well.

One of the sports at which I don't excel is table tennis. That said, I'm not a complete numpty. Obviously, I won't spend the game standing fifteen yards from the net making stupid spin shots and sweating like an Egyptian burglar. And you can be assured that if you've moved me to the left side of the table and then suddenly sent a shot to the right, I'm not going to risk a coronary running for it. That would be undignified.

However, while playing my son the other day, all of this changed. It was 8-1 to him. A score that was not possible. It's my job as a dad to be better than him and better than all the other dads, too. It's my job to win.

And then it was 10-1. And then 11-1. At this point, I'm ashamed to say, I changed into a pair of training shoes. Then I went outside, took some deep breaths and came back a new man. I may have even been growling a bit.

I sent my serve deep into the bottom corner. It skimmed the very edge of the table, and whooshed under his armpit. ‘Yes!!!' I cried, punching the air, my face contorted with determination and rage.

And so it went on until the score was 21-20. To him. He was serving. He took his time. Wondering, perhaps, what the
snarling, sweat-soaked monster at the other end of the table had done with his dad. He pulled his hand back, and this was it.

My life hung in the balance. If I messed up, I would have lost to my own son. I focused. The ball came, I sent it back, with some side. He whipped a fast one hard into the left court but I was ready with a chip. Which he reached, sending a short ball back. I smashed a backhand at it. And knew the instant I made the move, it wouldn't work. I was right. The ball sailed into the pile of boxes at the far end of the room and was lost. So was I.

The boy was very kind and said all the right things. He had been lucky. I hadn't been concentrating properly at the beginning. It had been a good game. And so on.

But I knew that what had just passed between us was not a fluffed backhand in a game of table tennis. It was the moment when the line of his ascent to adulthood passed my line of descent into an old people's home.

For fifteen years, I have encouraged my son and taught him things. I have watched him grow and learn, safe in the knowledge that, of course, I will always be faster and cleverer and stronger. And then comes the moment when you are forced to face up to the fact that this just isn't so.

The fluffed backhand was that moment, that pinprick of time when I realized he is now faster and stronger than me, and that one day soon, he will be cleaning up my faeces and holding my hand when I cross the road.

The only good thing, of course, is that despite his new-found strength and agility, he would never have the same level of wisdom. The young bull knows that he can charge into a field of cows and have a couple. The old bull knows that it's better to stroll into the field and have the lot.

So, even when my son is having to wipe my bottom, I will
still be able to offer him advice on the ways of the world – because I will always be thirty-six years older. He will always have thirty-six fewer years to have experienced things. As a result, I will always have the ability to think more strategically than him.

That's why, after I'd smashed my table tennis bat into a million pieces and fed the remains into a wood-chipping machine, I agreed to sit down and play him at chess.

I poured myself a glass of Ribena so that I would go into the match sober. I turned off my telephone. We began.

And he won that, too. I'm now thinking of killing myself.

7 August 2011

As you are no doubt aware, every single young person in Britain discovered last week that they had passed fifteen GSCE exams with A* grades. This means they are now able to sit their A levels, which they will also pass with flying colours, and pretty soon they will be at university studying, oh, I don't know, ‘dance and waste management' or ‘Third World development with pop music'. Both of which are real courses, incidentally.

When they have achieved first-class degrees, they will emerge into the workplace fully formed and educated to a higher standard than any other young people in history. Or will they?

Because if you look carefully at the results you will note that many of the successful children passed in subjects such as ceramics, or needlework, or PE. So while the child may be capable of making a flowerpot and doing a forward somersault, he or she may not be able to go to Paris without ending up in Rio de Janeiro.

Some lay the blame for this fairly and squarely at the door of league tables. They argue that to get a tick in the box from the government, each school must ensure that as many kids as possible get as many passes as possible. This means pupils are discouraged from taking an exam in physics, which is hard, and encouraged instead to sit papers on dusting, or using a urinal.

This is undoubtedly true. I know of one girl who insisted on taking various science subjects for her A levels. Her head
teacher argued strongly that she should not but she was adamant and scored a C and two Ds. As a result of this – just one pupil – the school fell fifty places in the league tables.

However, league tables are not the only reason for the shift. There's another which comes to light when you note that this year the number of pupils sitting a geography GCSE fell by a whopping 13,800.

When I was at school, geography was a doddle. We learnt about capital cities and American states and then occasionally we were taken on a field trip to the Peak District so we could stand behind millstone grit outcrops, smoking Player's No. 6s. I loved geography and still do.

However, today the geography syllabus has changed beyond all recognition. Instead of learning which countries are next door to Libya, which is interesting and useful, the subject has been hijacked by eco-mentalists.

Yes, there's a bit of interesting stuff on tectonic plates, but mostly it's a non-stop orgy of weird-beard nonsense about man's impact on the ecosystem and why snails are more important than bypasses. Kids are taught to ‘appreciate the ways in which people and environments interact and the need to make developments sustainable'. It sounds like a local council pamphlet.

They're also taught about climate change and hazard management, which is another way of saying health and safety. And then, if they are still awake, they are made to sit through hour after interminable hour of the teacher droning on about the green revolution, globalization and how best to manage the world's resources. This isn't education, it's propaganda. And, worse still, it's boring.

We have the same problem with English literature. Instead of getting children to study books such as
Matterhorn
or
Birdsong
, which are exciting and well written, they are still made to
read Shakespeare. If I were running the education system, Shakespeare would be banned. His plots are simplistic. His characters are unfathomable. He is only of use to postgraduate dweebs interested in what was going on with the language in the sixteenth century. He should be removed from the curriculum and take Chaucer and bloody Milton with him.

Then there's maths. What in God's name is the point of learning algebra and cosines and long division? Maths is not necessary once you are past the age of four because anything more complicated than adding two and two can be done on a telephone.

To make matters worse, maths is compulsory. Which is almost certainly why so many children choose to spend their days sitting around in an Arndale centre frightening old ladies.

As a country we need a rethink on not only what we teach our children but also how we teach it. Take French. Like geography, it, too, is less popular now than PE and ironing but I know how to reverse that trend. I know how you could make every single child in the land fluent by the time they are fourteen. It's simple. Instead of teaching them that a table is female and how to conjugate verbs, simply play them French – ahem – ‘art' films with the subtitles turned off. They'd get the gist pretty quickly.

What's more, when they are in France they will find it much more beneficial if they can say ‘My dear, your thighs are exquisite' than if they can only say ‘The pen of my aunt'. Just one word of warning. It's probably best not to let children see German ‘art' films. Not unless they want to take a GSCE in moustaches.

Let me give you an example of how a change in teaching methods has revolutionized life in my house. Ever since they were old enough to walk, my children have had music lessons.
They've done their scales and learnt to play stupid bits of Bartok and as a result none of them can play an instrument.

But yesterday I was sitting watching television when I heard my youngest daughter sit down at the piano and play ‘Clocks' by Coldplay absolutely perfectly. I was so staggered that I went next door to find out how this had been possible.

It turns out she had downloaded the score, which was displayed on an iPad like a Space Invaders game. I had no clue what was going on but, her being twelve, it all made perfect sense. This morning she bashed out the second movement of the ‘Moonlight Sonata' so beautifully I thought Beethoven had dropped in for breakfast.

If schools can use technology like this and French pornography and get rid of Shakespeare, the nation will once again be full to the brim with educated people. Rather than people who have a lot of GSCEs.

28 August 2011

Back in the 1960s there were many things to occupy the mind of a small boy, many rivalries to be discussed in the playground. There was music, for starters; lots of it and all so very different. There were tunes for mods and rockers and hippies, and there was bubblegum pop for people with pigtails.

Later we would discover Led Zep and the Who and the Stones and I would argue until well into the night about who were best. And this was just the tip of the iceberg. Was
Crime of the Century
better than
Rumours
? Was Mitch Mitchell a better drummer than Nick Mason? Who was better-looking, Christine McVie or Stevie Nicks?

And when we tired of music, there was still a rich seam of debate to be explored. Ferrari versus Lotus. Chelsea versus Leeds. England versus Australia. Communism versus capitalism. America versus Vietnam. The nearest I ever came to an actual schoolboy fistfight was with an idiot who really and truly believed Wrangler made better jeans than Levi's.

Now, though, all this is gone, swept away by the rise and rise of Premier League football. Today, if you listen to children talking, it's not about whether McDonald's does a better fry than Burger King or whether the Taliban have more of a point than Obama. No. There's an occasional discussion – usually among girls – about which
X Factor
contestant is most likely to end up back behind the counter at Asda that week, but mostly it's football.

In our house it's constant. My fifteen-year-old boy is a
fanatical Chelsea supporter and I like to play a game with him: starting the conversation as far away as possible from football and then seeing how long it takes him to get it back to Stamford Bridge. His record is pre-Byzantine architecture to John Terry in three moves.

His fanaticism has even had an effect on me. Until quite recently I saw football as twenty-two overpaid young men with silly hair kicking an inflated sheep's pancreas around a field. Yes, I was able to recite the Chelsea and Leeds teams that played in the 1970 FA Cup final but I only chose to do so, in my head, when I felt I needed to last a little longer in the bedroom department. I would even pray for England to get knocked out of tournaments so that television programming could return to normal and I could get back to discussing the Rubettes and the joy of a pleated Ben Sherman shirt.

Not any more. Last year I flew all the way to South Africa – at my own expense – to watch Holland and Spain play in the World Cup final. Then, last weekend, I voluntarily sat down and watched Tottenham play Manchester City, two teams in which I have absolutely no interest. Because unless I know what's going on these days, I'm useless to my son when I'm at home and in a conversational cul-de-sac when I'm out.

I met a chap last week who drives a Toyota Prius and thinks it's unkind to shoot a pheasant in the face. I was very much looking forward to talking to him about these and other things. But no. We started with football over the prawn cocktail and were still at it as we finished the Black Forest gateau.

It's not just a religion here, either. Premier League football is now screened in more than 200 countries around the world. And we're not talking ‘screened' in the same way that Piers Morgan's chat show is ‘screened'. I mean watched. And not just casually, but fanatically.

Because the big teams field players from all over the world,
pretty well every country has a local hero for whom they can cheer.

Nigerians can support Chelsea because they have John Obi Mikel. Bulgarians can support Manchester United because they have Dimitar Berbatov. Scandinavians have a fondness for Liverpool because the Reds once employed a Nor called John Arne Riise.

This means that wherever we go in the world my son is always first to make friends with the locals. I caught him in earnest conversation with a known Caribbean drug dealer the other day and was very angry, until I realized that they were actually discussing Arsenal's chances this season.

And while it's undoubtedly sad that football now sits in humankind's conversation pit like a gigantic elephant, it's good news that Britain gets to sit in the spotlight every weekend.

There is, however, a problem. According to all the experts, the league will be dominated this year by just two teams: Manchester City and Manchester United. That's not good, because what makes the Premier League so much better than any other in the world is the sheer number of teams that start every season with half a chance. If it's a two-horse race, between the teams from just one city, new boys like me are going to struggle to stay interested.

Which brings me on to an idea suggested by John Timpson, the shoe-repairs magnate, whom I met on holiday last month. He reckons that the Football Association should work out a formula based on a club's finances to determine how big the goalmouths should be.

This is inspired. It would mean that when a rich side such as Manchester City plays a less well-off side such as Norwich, the East Anglians would be aiming at a goal that's about the same size as their home county, while the Mancs would be trying to get the ball through what was basically a letter box.

Obviously it needn't be that pronounced. A few inches either way should be enough to level the playing field. Rich owners could then continue to field great teams playing great football. But the result? Deliciously, it could go either way.

Then – and this is my little twist – if it's 0-0 at half-time, the second half should be played with two balls on the pitch at the same time.

Oh, and finally, this is from my son: anyone appearing for a team with Manchester in the title must play while wearing a bag on his head.

4 September 2011