When I was a child I discovered that there was a cheese that shared my name. It was described in our well-thumbed edition of the Encyclopaedia of Cheese as fatty and full-bodied, which felt less like an informed tasting note and more like a hint.
My own childhood full-bodiedness had always been very openly on display. Over the years, successive growth spurts have converted my flabbier latitudes into stretchmarked longitudes, but the hot molten core of my personality keeps on spinning. I am still the same small boy who was astonished to discover that the bleep test contained more than the one bleep, and who on one indelible occasion had to be medevaced down from a ski resort owing to a potent mix of attention-seeking and trapped gas.
I do also play a little tennis, in that slow flabby way familiar to anyone who’s watched a eunuch batting away houseflies in the dying days of the republic, but YouTube’s content processing algorithms would unquestionably label my performance as comedy rather than sport. The greats, they say, see the ball as though it were a grapefruit. On a good day, I’m swinging at sultanas.
My philosophy when it comes to playing sports is the same as the Department of Energy’s with regards nuclear waste: isolate, contain, and act swiftly to minimise human contact. That is why tennis, and, specifically, singles tennis, is where I draw the line. Wasting one person’s time is bad enough. Wasting three should get you put on some sort of list, and then that list should be leaked to websites whose newsletters you’ve asked to unsubscribe from with the message that you were only kidding and would actually love to hear more about their Valentine’s day half-price deal on toasters.
Number 6, on the other hand, has always been a natural team player. Group sports are to her what a family-sized portion of Black Forest gateau is to me: an entirely unthreatening and easily metabolised piece of cake. Individual events might occasionally let her down – on a good day I can claim victory in the mixed singles duvet-stealing championship or secure a bye in the invitational early morning conversation – but give her some teammates, some AstroTurf and a place to stand and she can hit homers for six up and down the court all set long.
Which is why it might have seemed like a terrible, awful, unconscionably bad idea – akin to giving an already portly child unfettered access to an encyclopaedia of cheese – for the two of us to enter a weekly volleyball league on the same team. Thus far, however, in the words of Edith Piaf, the only singer I know whose surname doubles as a volleyball sound effect, je ne regret rien and la vie has been very much en rose. In a few short weeks I have learned more about teamwork, and the nuances of collaborative effort, than from any of the PE lessons I was excused from attending as a child. I have even, to my own astonishment, been kept on as number 6’s preferred duvet-stealing hitting partner.
I hope, as the weeks go by, to share some of what I have learned in my whirlwind reinvention as a proponent of collective sports play. Much of it will doubtless be wrong, and most of what remains self-evident. Of the few surviving sentence fragments, a substantial portion may well turn out to be about cheese. But, as my next post will demonstrate more amply, being no earthly good at something is no reason not to do it.
Next post: Me and my guilt-edged insecurities