Grumpy Oldie Man
Some people learnt Italian or the harp. I got addicted to Playstation
Long ago, when the plague was young, which of us didn’t plan to deploy the lockdown as the launchpad for a stratospheric journey of self-improvement?
On reviewing my own odyssey four months later, I find the results to be mixed.
On one side of the ledger, the capacity to speak Italian has developed to the tune of not uno word.
Neither have I have learned to bake, paint or play the harp, and I read precisely two books, both exceedingly short. Far from being transformed into a paragon of suburban neatness, the garden is currently auditioning for one of those post-apocalyptic TV dramas in which the streets are governed by mutant rats.
But hey, swings and roundabouts. On the plus side – and, in this, my pride cannot be overstated – I have, at almost 57, developed an addiction to Playstation football.
Perhaps addiction is too strong. One seldom cares to melodramatise. For a while, admittedly, it did threaten to lurch out of hand. But thanks to iron self-control, I can now restrict time spent on the Playstation 4 to as little as 14 hours a day.
Football and obsessiveness have never been strangers. A manager of the Argentine national team confessed in an interview that he could no longer go to weddings. At the last one, he meekly watched the wedding party gather outside the church, until the photographer was about to begin. Then he heard himself screaming, ‘Wait, wait! There’s a gap. Put another man on the end of the wall.’
But while the pressure of steering Diego Maradona through a World Cup offers some licence for insanity, can the same be said for a middle-aged schlub, frantically pressing buttons on a PS4 controller in Shepherd’s Bush?
Which of the almost literally countless moments wasted playing PES (Pro Evolution Soccer) ranks as the most tragic is a tough one to call.
Obviously, the general squandering of time once earmarked for rereading Dickens is unquantifiably pitiable in itself.
Yet it’s the individual humiliations, each somehow more crushing than the last, that best capture the dismal flavour.
Taking the considerable trouble to change my team’s name from North East London (so called thanks to a rights issue) to Tottenham Hotspur briefly affected to be the zenith of quasi-adolescent idiocy.
Leaping from the sofa and violently punching the air in celebration of a last-second Harry Kane equaliser against Arsenal quickly trumped that.
On my retirement after a disastrous Champions League defeat at Bayern Munich, at what I presumed was approximately midnight, the discovery that it was almost 4am – PS4 time moves at casino pace – once again appeared the apex of moronic fecklessness.
And then, a few nights ago, came a gentle rap on the front door. A very sweet neighbour, deep into his 80s and recovering from a mild stroke, insisted he didn’t want to intrude. But he and his wife were concerned by the shouting, and wanted to be sure everything was OK.
Everything, I told him, was very far from OK. In the dying embers of a crucial fixture at Anfield, with the game tied at 2-2, the referee had given Liverpool a quite ridiculous penalty. Mohamed Salah had duly slotted home from 12 yards.
‘Oh, I understand,’ he bemusedly muttered (the neighbour, not Mo Salah; the Egyptian was too busy being mobbed by teammates). ‘So it wasn’t a fight?’
What followed instantly joined the list of the self-inflicted embarrassments that flash to mind when I wake and induce that ritual howl of anguish.
‘No, not a fight,’ I said. ‘You’d best come and see for yourself.’ ‘Um, it is late, and my doctor says…’ ‘Come in,’ I reiterated, more an injunction than an invitation, ‘and see for yourself. Can I get you a Scotch?’
He made another reference to his GP, and gingerly took a seat.
Some minutes passed in the effort to fathom the replay feature, though at a pace less reminiscent of the blackjack table than of that first night in a Lubyanka interrogation cell.
‘I really should be going,’ he muttered several times. To these requests, understandable in the circs though they were, a deaf un was cocked.
Finally, I cracked it. The slow-motion replay showed Salah trapping a through ball and jinking to the left, before collapsing histrionically on being impeccably tackled by our Belgian centre-back, Jan Vertonghen.
‘Never touched him, did he?’ I said, rewinding and playing the footage from another angle. The neighbour pursed his lips silently. ‘For heaven’s sake,’ I said, ‘you must see that’s an outrageous dive.’
‘Erm, if I’m honest,’ he said, ‘I reckon he caught him.’
‘You’re not serious? Vertonghen took the ball.’
‘He did, but I think he clipped his ankle first.’
‘Well,’ I said, rising, ‘it’s later than I suspect your doctor would think wise.’
‘You’ll be packing in for the night now, won’t you?’ he said at the door.
‘Of course,’ I reassured him. ‘Any minute now.’