Something really weird is happening in the PC household. There are pink running shoes on the top stand of the shoe rack and a small pair of muddy boots underneath. There’s a ladies’ running top drying beside my husband’s big old sweaty one and a new iPhone armband holder for girls. This weekend I found myself screaming on the sidelines as our son played in a huge international football tournament with 79 other teams. Proper tents, first aid areas, water stations, loudspeakers, all that. There was our boy, trudging out for game after game with the rest of them, and there was me, watching with proper interest and not once getting out my book or wandering off for coffee. Sport has entered our house.
Mr PC is stunned and delighted that his family might finally be learning a language that has so far only been used by him. Up to now I have borrowed his neon wristbands for 80s parties and used his running headphones on long-haul flights when mine have gone missing. But to take part?
My mum dined out on how I avoided Sports at school, was secretly proud when she discovered I’d been using her typewriter and forging her signature to rattle out sick notes every week. She would have been properly proud, though, to learn that I am at last getting some kind of physical routine worked out, and even more so to see her grandson belting a goal on a pitch in the middle of the famous Padang with Singapore’s iconic skyline as a backdrop. Major result.
I talk about running with other runners. I put soccer dates in my diary. I clog my Facebook page with line-up shots from SmallMonkey’s football games and plaster them with proud captions (friends will soon start filtering my newsfeeds, no doubt). I didn’t once leave the field this weekend to go shopping or find lunch. I even left a weekend drinks party early so that I could get up in the dark for Part II on Sunday. I have no idea what’s going on here, and can only put it down to that classic expat thing of trying out new things in new lands. I’m still not sure whether SM really understands the glorious game or might stick with it. So far it’s just something we’ve told him we think he’ll enjoy and so far it’s working.
The team is adorable and wonky; when they started out just two months back they were assorted and random, flinching when the other team came towards them and sprinting with the ball towards the wrong end of the pitch. This weekend they bravely spent the first day taking annihilation from teams who had been training together for years. They got up at 6am on Saturday to stagger around in the hot mud under a brutal sun then did it all over again on Sunday. By the second day the groups had filtered down to even levels and at last they got a chance to play against kids of the same calibre, working together like little machines, winning or drawing every single game and smashing the opposition for two out of three. Who scored that glorious first goal of the day? SmallMonkey, that’s who – the same boy who only recently used to duck when the ball came his way – and he didn’t just place it in the net, he scored a blinder, belting it in from the side with the ease of a well-drilled player. Meanwhile I’m bellowing on the sidelines like one of those mums who actually knows what she’s shouting about (sometimes I do have to ask what’s going on but the high fives at the end are always worth it).
Tomorrow I’ll set my clock for 6am and tiptoe out of the house in the dark, enjoying the neon pink of my running shoes and the feel of my new fluttery shorts as I pound my way round the block like a proper road-runner. I’m secretly on my knees when I get home but if the eight-year-old can get to like the S word then so can I.
