Memento mori

‘Daddy, when do you want to die?’

Momentarily winded, I surreptitiously checked that the eight-year-old’s head was not revolving through 360 degrees, her eyes were not spitting red fire. ‘Er, well, I don’t really want to think about it’ I answered, lamely.

She insisted. ‘All right, then: when I’m 86.’

‘No, I mean what day? I want to die on a Tuesday.’

I shouldn’t be surprised. We used to live in a house next to a cemetery – a beautiful Victorian one, with cedar trees and stone angels and a chapel. The Daughter loved to say goodnight to the angels she could see from her bedroom window. She learnt to walk tottering through the gravestones. Her first taste of freedom was speeding her tricycle through the yews and along the path to the cremation plots.

Now she likes filching a glass chipping or two off the odd grave; blue ones are her favourite, being rarer than green. ‘I hope blue ones are still in fashion when I get to be buried,’ she says.

It’s no use being shocked: most children seem to be fascinated by the macabre and are entirely open in their curiosity about death. So as long as it doesn’t tip over into morbidity, I’ll go with the flow. But I still don’t know why she’s chosen Tuesday.

The Olympic spirit

I don’t do sport. Not only do I not play it, I don’t watch it, talk it or rate it in any way.

This is a big disadvantage when you’re a man, and I’m one all the time. Men are expected to love sport. They’re expected to live it. I loathe it.

This leads to awkward silences when the nice chap on the phone from Mumbai, faithfully following his crib sheet, says ‘It was a great match last night, wasn’t it?’, while I wait for him to fix my internet connection. It limits the banter on those rare occasions I’m allowed out with the boys. And it earns the contempt of my football-mad daughter.

Imagine my delight, then, when I found that the Olympics is going to be on my doorstep next month, almost literally. The time trial and road race cycle events are set to pass one end of my road and, four hours later, return past the other end of it. We will be prisoners for three days, unable to leave our street between 4am and goodness knows when.

I moaned at my friend Dazzle, who hates sport too. But Dazzle is gay, and said that being held prisoner by 100 sweaty men in lycra is his idea of a jolly weekend.

I moaned at my Hungarian neighbour, who can usually be relied upon to express sympathetic outrage at life’s inconveniences. But she has five boys and is glad of something that will get them out of the house without having to hire a bus.

I moaned at my wife, who said that I’d better watch what I say in case the Stasi cart me off for contravening the diktat that we are to embrace the Olympics whole-heartedly.

So I did the only thing I could do, and booked our family holiday for the whole Olympic fortnight. We leave the day before the lycra lock-in begins. And today I realised that I’m missing the most exciting thing to happen in my corner of suburbia since I got chatting to the lady in charge of flowers in Tesco and found that she’s the ex-wife of Gregg Wallace from Masterchef.

At last, the Olympic flame has been kindled in my heart, and it’s too late to rearrange the holiday.