Football in the Garden

We play football in the garden most evenings after school. This is, at present, the best part of my day.

I want to write about this not because it is profound — it is not profound, it is a child kicking a ball in a garden — but because the not-profound things are the ones I suspect I will most want to have recorded later, and because the specific quality of this particular not-profound thing is worth trying to describe.

The setup

Ellie is five. She is not coordinated in the way that certain children are coordinated — the children who seem to have received proprioception as a default setting and who move with the easy precision of someone who has been told where their body is at all times. Ellie moves with enthusiasm and force and an approximate relationship with the intended direction.

She is, at football, excellent. Not technically excellent. But excellent in a way I find more interesting than technical excellence: she is completely committed. The ball may not go where she intends it. The ball does not care whether it goes where she intends it. She chases it with the same force regardless, and her celebration when she scores — whether I have deliberately let it in or it has gone in despite my efforts, which also happens — is identical. Full-bodied, arms up, completely in it.

What I am doing during the football

Trying to be fully there, in the way I have been trying to be more consistently. Watching her specifically — not the game as a concept but her within it. Noticing the things that are particular to this version of her, at five, that will not be the version of her at seven or twelve.

The specific sound she makes when she shoots, which is a sort of compressed "hup" that I believe she has invented independently. The way she negotiates the rules mid-game, with the authority of a person who considers the rules to be advisory. The moment she decided that the flower pot constituted a legitimate goalpost, which it now does, permanently.

Also, honestly: being outside in the late afternoon, moving, in a way that is not the deliberate fitness intervention of the morning but is just movement in the context of something that doesn't feel like exercise. The garden is about twenty metres long. By the end of a forty-minute session I am warm and slightly out of breath and have had no thoughts about work.

Sam's contribution

Sam participates at a different level. His participation consists of running across the pitch at unpredictable intervals, occasionally touching the ball and declaring himself the winner, and sometimes just sitting in the middle of the garden on the grass and watching with the satisfied expression of someone who has found a good spot.

He is not yet in the football. He is in the garden with the football. These are related but distinct activities.

The evening light

In spring and summer, the evening football happens in the particular light that comes at about five-thirty, low and warm and slightly golden, the kind of light that makes ordinary things look as though they have been slightly enhanced. I have noticed this in the way that I notice things more now than I used to, for reasons I have written about elsewhere.

I notice it, and I notice Ellie in it, and I think: this is what I was doing at this exact time on this specific day. This is the record.

The score

I keep a loose running score but it is not a real score. The flower pot is a real goalpost but the score is not a real score.

Ellie is currently winning by a margin she considers final. I consider the margin provisional, pending a rematch that will happen tomorrow, and the day after, and the day after that, until the evenings get too dark and we have to move inside, at which point we will play a different thing and this specific version of the game will become a memory.

I intend to lose reliably until the evenings go.