Santa zooms across the Devon sky

Have a Merry Christmas. One sort of has to say that in the end. I’m not a bah-humbug, never have been: I do like Christmas, but once the kids fly the coop, one makes far less effort. This year I won’t see either of them over the Season, which is a first I think. How odd that, at the lifestage when we have far more time, patience and wisdom to impart to children, they’re off somewhere else making all the same mistakes with their own kids that we did with them.

Lots of things in life are the wrong way round. When I was twelve, I only wanted to be a professional footballer. Nothing else mattered at the time: there was a vague stirring in the trousers at the sight of Brigitte Bardot, but not much else. Our coach kept saying we needed to learn to read the game, and to be honest I hadn’t a clue what he was on about. Before I could learn, Bury asked me to go for a trial. This is it, I thought: I’m going to be the next Stanley Matthews.

I’ve no idea why I was out on what we called ‘the left wing’ in those days of bollocks-free footie. I was very right-footed, and not that fast. But anyway, I pitched up at Gigg Lane expecting to sign a contract, only to be faced with about 300 other kids. There was a brief kickabout, at which my genius went unnoticed. Then the trial began. I got on the pitch for roughly five minutes, having touched the ball twice. The entire game was being played at a speed and skill level somewhere on an astral plane outside my wildest imaginings.

When I started playing amateur stuff at a seniorish level – this was around the age of fifteen – it gradually dawned on me that most of the other players didn’t really know what they were at either; but watching what the ‘game-readers’ did, it became clear that a lot of it involved looking up. Soon afterwards, our club captain transferred me to this entirely new place called right midfield. A star was born.

By the time I was twenty-two, I had mastered the art of the through ball, the disguised defence-splitting pass, and the blind-side backheel to perfection. But there was a problem: three years at University spent drinking cider at the bottom of a tobacco chimney had removed the puff required to put these majestic game-changing maneouvres into practice. Now at the age of sixty-three, I can go to Old Trafford, Exeter or Chelsea and tell all twenty-two players where the ball should be played, how to control their temperament, and why it’s really all about looking up. And indeed, if the game was played with a strict speed limit of one mile per hour, I would be up there with Pele, Messe and Moore. This is a criminal injustice, and a terrible loss to the British football fan. I coulda been a contender, were it not for the vision thing kicking in when I was too knackered to take advantage of it.

It’s an endlessly rich seam, this Backwards Life obsession of mine. Sex is a particularly galling case in point. The hormones start racing around the body at the very age when the last thing anyone should be allowed to do is choose a partner. Only a huge amount of luck and incompetent sperm saved me from disaster before the age of twenty-one, but I didn’t find the right person for me until I was forty-five. This is also, as it happens, roughly the time when most men finally gain control of the orgasm. As the start of losing interest in nookie is a mere twenty years after that, you can see just how badly the whole human life-cycle is organised. In fact, it’s pretty clear to me that the intelligence in charge of it needs to be rather more customer-facing.

And this brings us back to where I started. If chaps and girlies didn’t want to jump on each other until roughly the age of 40, the partner choices would be wiser, the sex better, and the parenting infinitely improved. And above all, everyone could have a misspent youth lasting four decades. We’d pop off around the time when our kids were just coming to the end of that same blissful freedom, and they would then pocket the inheritance just in time to start a family…without having to bear the cost of sticking us in old folk’s home where we will rot pointlessly, giving them endless attacks of guilt, and horrendous financial problems.

Life could thus be a great deal more fulfilling were it better organised. But a fatalist part of me still thinks that the crap dished out in that life provides some kind of reason for the Western Christmas in the post-religious age.  It provides a break and a contrast, during which one can forget the crap, celebrate (or avoid) such family as one has, eschew diets, stop writing about the EU, and neck some Champagne at 11 am without wondering if you’re turning into a bag lady.

This year, far more people than usual will not be necking even Tesco’s Champagne (Carpentier at £12, pretty good), won’t have a family with them, will be homeless, will be broke, will have no job, and will understandably feel as if they have no future. In some cases this is their fault, but in most it isn’t. I have only two crumbs of comfort to offer such unfortunates. First, the rich do not, in my experience, know how to enjoy themselves – least of all at Christmas; and second, your future will almost certainly be better…whereas for the rich, it will almost certainly be worse.*

I don’t doubt that in excess of 70% of Sloggers will disagree with this conclusion. But either way, I offer only only this observation: if you do something about injustice, I’m right. If you don’t, I’m wrong.

* I could also point out that for 85% of humans not living in the West, Christmas will be incalculably worse than anything we could imagine. But again, it has been my experience that saying this doesn’t help.