Gavin Ames

How old are you when you start ‘losing it’? I found out last week that the answer to this question is 43.

There I was, waiting outside the five-a-side football court at Altwood School’s sports hall, having a bit of banter with the lads, when one commented on my shorts looking ‘a bit ‘80s retro’. Before offering a hilarious retort about the state of his hair, I thought I would just check out the bit of kit he was referring to.

What I looked down at wasn’t quite what I was expecting to see. In short (or not as it turned out) I hadn’t finished getting dressed before leaving the house and was standing there in my Spurs shirt and my boxer shorts. To summarise, I was standing there, ready to play football, in my pants.

This was not a positive development. I can still remember being forced to do PE at Furze Platt Junior School in my racing car pants when I forgot my shorts. I also recall that was the first day of spring and I hadn’t worn a vest, which only served to exacerbate my Mowgli look and my self-consciousness. But 36 years later I am sooo over that now.

Perhaps this wasn’t actually happening. This sounds like the sort of recurring dream that anxious people have.

Maybe I was actually asleep. Perhaps I would awake at any second and spontaneously chuckle with relief, before filing this hallucination with the dream I still have about my younger self having to sit an exam I haven’t followed the course for.

‘Oh Gav, don’t put a ‘tackle’ in tonight will you’ one wag said. This was happening alright. Once the laughter started to die down, there was a moment’s quiet, when I thought I had ridden out the worst of it, before someone quietly muttered ‘is this really the best way to promote your column, mate?’

I was perplexed as to how this had happened. Then three days later, at Sunday lunch at my mum’s, she confessed she had meant to coat the roast chicken with her sunflower oil spray. Instead she had used Mr Sheen.

There is a Danish phrase that ‘the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree’. Suddenly it made perfect sense. The cooked chicken did have a good shine to it, mind.