Ten Years in the Tub (64 page)

Authors: Nick Hornby

BOOK: Ten Years in the Tub

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The saddest moment for me in this World Cup was watching Thierry Henry, my role model and hero and the man that both my wife and I wish had fathered our children, clutching his face after receiving a blow on the chest. Et tu, Thierry? Anyway, flopping and bawling now occupies the same position in our sporting culture as steroids do in yours. Crying like a baby is obviously less harmful than performance-enhancing drugs, but a lot more annoying to the spectators.

I have always previously referred in these pages to the mother of my children as my “partner”; you may have noticed that she has now been downgraded to “wife,” due to our marriage, two days before the World Cup final. This too has resulted in less reading than normal, what with all the suit fitting, seating plans, parties, and the actually rather distressing legal requirements for consummation. I have read a little, of course. I abandoned a sweet-natured but hopelessly overhyped novel halfway through, and I've nearly finished
Imperium
, my brother-in-law's forthcoming novel about Cicero, which I'll puff next month.

I've been buying books, too. At my eldest son's school fair I bought
The Case of Mr. Crump
, yet another Penguin classic I'd never heard of, because on the cover it had a blurb from Sigmund Freud. I bought Elizabeth Kolbert's
Field Notes from a Catastrophe
, about climate change, after reading the brilliant but terrifying series of articles in the
New Yorker
that form the basis for the book. I thought I was buying it because I wanted to be reminded that things like the World Cup and weddings don't really matter. But then I began to remember some of the details of the
New Yorker
pieces, and I changed my mind: if things are as bad as Kolbert suggests, then weddings and the World Cup are the only things that do matter.