I tried this one out on Valentina earlier, apologetically acknowledging that it was in all likelihood a pathetically male thing to do which has been nickhornbied in any number of papers recently, and she just shook her head rather sadly as if asking ‘why bother?’

After that adverb-laden paragraph, you must be agreeing with her.

Maybe it’s my father’s death, maybe it’s middle-age, maybe it’s the two associating malevolently, but I find some sort of satisfaction in listing things in my life. I don’t want to get too detailed so I’ll keep it at the level of football.
I’ll plough on despite Valentina’s head-shaking, and those who don’t measure out their lives in four-year stretches can just skip this bit. Maybe I will eventually manage to write the piece on the use of the different senses in early June, how the salt on your children's skin has a smell. But I’m grabbed by worldcupfever. Here are the World Cups I remember and where I remember being, summarised in two lines (if I can).

I’ll start with the ones I can’t remember.
1970. I remember the sticker album. I remember we never got the number 10 for Bulgaria, and another player for Mexico, despite our mum sending off to Shell or Esso - they just sent us the same ones we already had. We put our extra Bulgarian into the Mexican team and vice versa. Our mum should have been Alf Ramsey. We saw England draw against Czechoslovakia in crappy pastel blue shirts, and we saw them lose against Germany. And I remember Gordon Banks saving from Pele. My dad was there. Where were we?
1978. I was in Newcastle, for sure; it was the year before my ‘O’ levels; I was in the ‘Removes’, the fourth year. I don’t remember seeing any of the games. I don’t remember being with anyone at any time. I was listening to John Peel.

Now it gets easier because the next ones I can remember.
1966. Seahouses. Peering through a letterbox at an enormous lady in a bathing costume on a lounger in her even more enormous garden. We’re on holiday and she’s our landlady. Our mum has taken us out for a walk while the match’s on. We decide not to disturb her. My mum turns my brother’s pushchair and we carry on to the beach. I don’t remember getting back to where we were staying, and I don’t remember any celebrations. Were there any?
1998. London. Ealing. Marta was crawling around. Penny and Mike were with us and she didn’t seem to have ever seen a match before, let alone understand goal sweeps. Mike had recently been to his first match ever. The whole to-do about Ronaldo was beyond everyone.
1990. Brunei. I watched most of the games in the huge room we had with air-conditioning at impossible times of night. Most games were interrupted by the first call to prayer of the day, even if they’d gone to penalties. One game I seem to recall going to see at the house of some friends in order to snog someone’s wife. Things weren’t going well, relationship-wise.
1974. Tynemouth. ‘Just remember these boys haven’t come all this way, from Wylam and from...somewhere else, just to watch a World Cup match, eh?’ They probably would have preferred watching Holland-Brazil to being sent out for a walk in the park in the drizzle and North Sea wind. George Scott and Grant Douglas.
2002. Camogli. Brazil-England. I heaved the TV set up the stairs to Stuart’s house. Mel had put up little streamers of England flags. 8 o’clock in the morning and my brother was having vodka and orange. Pity Ronaldinho wasn’t. Everything went downhill after that.
1994. London. Just down the road from Paddington Station in the Notting Hill direction. A nothing-pub but plenty of benches outside. It’s Valentina’s last day of work - she’s going back to Italy. I hadn’t meant to come here - I’m the boss, they don’t want me around, and anyway, I want to see Bolivia play. I leave after a couple of pints and hugging Valentina. I walk all the way back to Shepherd’s Bush. I collect my four tins of Stella and bottle of exquisite Bulgarian red. I miss the game. What’s just happened to me? I blot it out.
1986. Greece. The World Cup started in Macedonia and ended in Crete. Regret is pointless but if I could have just missed that flight from Thessaloniki to Iraklion, would I, things, have turned out different?

-What was it like, living with an alcoholic? Did you understand that he was? I mean, was he standing?
The conservatory of the Constable Melton, Seaton Delaval. We’re on lunch break. Why not come here? I have a pint of bitter in front of me. I had thought about having one of the malts they’ve got on a blackboard but given the conversation we’re having it’s just as well I didn’t.
Murder in the Cathedral. Newcastle Cathedral, December 1980. I’m not sure what my part was - a knight? (Graham Buttery was Beckett.) Whatever it was, there was a lot of speaking. In the makeshift dressing room before the performance I was reading Samuel Beckett (Watt?) dressed in my mail and armour. I can still feel the cold. Ian Renwick lifted up the cover to see the title: ‘Life’s too short for reading Beckett novels, man!’ Afterwards I stood with my brother and mother in what would be the piazza in Italy. In Newcastle it’s a small grey rectangle surrounded by benches normally occupied by drunks, and cut off by traffic at the end of the biggest boozing street in the town centre. ‘Go and get your dad Philip - he’s in the pub over the road, I suppose.’
I was old enough, sort of, to go into pubs. But I had the remains of stage make-up, my school uniform and a duffle coat on. It wasn’t how I would really want to enter a pub, even one as poxy as the Post Office. I approach my dad, seeing for the first time what he does when he nips into a pub. Stand at the bar, one foot on the rail, gaze into the mirror, hand on a half of bitter (‘you can get them down quicker’) and large scotch gulped at fractionally (that one raises my eyebrows).
-Oh, hello. You ready then?
-Mum asked me to get you.
-Must be cold out there. Let’s get going then.
He finishes the drinks off, one two, beer dribbling down his chin, scotch falling into the wrinkles of the corner of his mouth, wiped away on the move with the back of his hand.
-Ooh, yer bugger.
-Maybe you should have worn a coat, Dad.
I could have been offended that he made no comment on my epic performance, that he didn’t acknowledge that his shy as sheep son had just acted in front of 300 people in one of the oldest cathedrals in the country. I was too embarrassed to be offended though.
There’s a vine growing inside this pub conservatory; there are little green grapes above our heads that’ll never make it into wine; I remember a taverna in old Athens - the vines were so entwisted that you didn’t even realise what sort of plant it was. Not if this was your first holiday abroad, anyway.
-2 mince and dumplings? Braised steak and gravy?
Is anyone seriously eating any of this? My scampi comes… yes then.
-What was it like? Well, it was just normal. It was never dramatic. I guess it depends what you mean by dramatic though. There were odd events - like lying on the floor when the electricity board men came to switch off the power because the bill hadn’t been paid. You get used to just about anything, so even the worst things become undramatic after a while.

We bagged up his clothes for whatever charity that it is we’ve decided that it all should go to. We started moving through the house, closing things up, getting ready to throw them away. We worked like thieves in the night; we didn’t want to disturb the neighbours, not wanting them to know that we knew he was about to die.
I started to see how he had tried to recreate his own life during the last few days of his life, and how he’d failed. Everything back in the freezer the way it always was; his M&S fish pies, the things he told us he always had for pudding. None of it made any sense considering what we’d learned from the specialists. Except in the case that he knew he was dying and he’d been trying to keep it from us and now was in yet another routine of deception, another twisting of circumstances that made it impossible to know what was really happening, his age-old act staging its swan-song.
I’m writing these notes around the names and numbers of the cancer ward nurses. ‘If there’s anything you need to know.’

I’m writing this in Sardegna. I look down from the terrace where I’ve just finished some work. A new group of people has stationed itself around an umbrella. I’m listening to music to drown out the building work just behind me. Everything I see seems slightly more remote than it should be. For an instant I see the new group in a false light, perhaps, not the light of four women coming to the beach over their lunchtimes.
Two are sitting on deck-chairs facing into the sun; two are lying on the beach. Of these two, one has rolled away, asleep presumably, and the other seems to be the focus of the others’ rapt attention. Her legs are wrapped in gauze, almost bound in it; it’s so tight and her legs are so unmoving that I assume she can’t use them - there’s something about the position of her backside as well that suggests some disability. She must be suffering from something so awful that I don’t even know what the illness is called, let alone know anyone with it. Her friends are listening to her with such attention because these could be some of the last things she ever says to them. Her suffering is so great that she’s found some greater truth than the rest of us ever know.
After I’ve shaken my head, I look again - she’s managed to shift the position of her legs. I realise that it’s not a medical garment at all but a semi-transparent beach wrap that you can buy in any shop or from any of the beach salesmen.
I’m haunted more by the surgical visual imagery than I like to think.
There’s an old woman in a purple-spotted bathing costume. It’s a strange colour combination but you wouldn’t notice it unless she had decided to lie on one of the smooth rocks that delineates the beach. Even then your gaze wouldn’t go back to her more than once or twice before she’d gone away again. Instead you feel compelled to look because she isn’t moving. Nothing. Not a twitch in her position. What happens if a person dies on a rock? Do they spasm? Do they try and get away? Do they simply stop breathing? Has anyone checked this woman recently? I go away to make a cup of tea and decide what to do. When I come back the first group and the old woman have all gone away.

In the bay opposite my father’s a woman is watching Zulu on her Patientline monitor. It’s Spring Bank Holiday Monday. His condition has ‘severely deteriorated’. Yesterday he could recognise what was going on around him when he was awake. Now, apart from hardly ever being awake and having an oxygen mask, he can’t respond to anyone.
Stuart told me that hearing was the last sense to go; I guess it makes some kind of sense. But I can’t see any evidence that he can hear. I remember talking to the children as tiny babies and seeing their faces change as they heard the human voice. Then I didn’t know what to say, and I can’t remember what I did say, but the words came. Now I talk about the weather and the immensity of the football stadium at the back of the hospital compared to when I used to go past it every day on my way to school, but there’s no twitch on the skin of his face that might suggest that he’s hearing anything. I can’t think what else to say. I sit down next to the bed and listen to the voices in the film, a film we watched together once.
He has what I imagine is the full range of drips. Antibiotics for the pneumonia. GKI (did I hear right?) to keep him hydrated. Something for his kidneys. A catheter.
-He hasn’t peed at all.
I pass on Valentina’s observation to the nurse, John. It was John who put ‘Bill’ in big red marker above the bed to stop people calling him Horace. John who shaved him this morning even though the mask covers his face.
- Yes, even if Bill is being hydrated it’s a sign that his kidneys aren’t working. His body’s tired.
-Is he in a coma?
I don’t know what difference that information would make to me. It wouldn’t change the way I sit here or the frequency of the breaks I suggest we take.
-He’s asleep. He’s just very tired.
John is desperate for us to understand, but we can’t really. All of the words he uses mean other things to us, have different contexts. ‘You’re very tired,’ are the words we use to explain to a child why everything’s wrong with the world, why there are tears that can’t be stopped. ‘Very tired,’ but in the morning everything will be different, you’ll be better, you won’t be crying any more.
But here ‘very tired’ means not understanding anything, not waking up, it means the end.

We get back from the coast and prepare to watch again. We don’t know what we’re waiting to see, we don’t know what the signals are, but we sit down. We’re getting used to it; it isn’t that dramatic any more.
And then it all changes. He becomes, in their words, ‘not comfortable’; in our words, ‘awake’. He’s not there, he’s rebelling, he’s full of rage. ‘Rage, rage against the dying of the light’ might have seemed a good thing before your father died; as he’s actually giving up the light, I can tell you, it’s not so good. He doesn’t know who anyone is, he’s railing. He hits out. It seems like forever. We try to calm him but we’re useless, we don’t know what to do. We talk in the voices that we use with the children. But when we take on these voices, we hold on to the children, we talk them through it. There are too many tubes, there’s too much history in this case. One of us, I don’t remember who, goes to get John, to tell him that he’s ‘uncomfortable’, that we want him to have that other tranquilizer.
And at that point we understand that we’re the ones being looked after, that John is talking in his lovely voice to us now, and that he’s choosing words for our benefit.
We go back. We plan another day. We go back to the hospital. The Sister meets us before we get into the ward and tells us that he’s died.
In the evening we find ourselves at The Sage. Paul Buchanan’s first words are ‘Now that I’ve found peace at last, tell me Jesus, will it last?’ Then I hear his voice singing, ‘I would never turn my back on your love’. My hand is wrapped in Valentina’s and she knows everything. Look, we’ve come through this as well.