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I played real tennis three times this week and I'm definitely getting better, but would my skills translate to Switch tennis versus my daughter?
Possibly, we got to two games all and deuce in the deciding game and my controller had lost power part way through the match gifting her the third game.
She won though.
Then we joined forces to take on random players all around the world. It may be obvious to say it but video games have come a long way since I played Pong on my TV in the early eighties with a rip-off Atari console that plugged into the aerial. Whenever I smell that electrical smell that the connection created (was that dangerous? I doubt that knock-off console had passed many safety checks, if we even had them back then in the glorious days before woke Health and Safety came in) I think of those legendary games of tennis I played against a white line on a black background on a TV the size and width of a bulging suitcase.
Have graphics moved on since then? Arguably. Have imaginations atrophied consequently? Yes. I had to imagine the everything to make that game enjoyable. Was I able to? I presume I had aphantasia then too or surely I would have noticed becoming mind-blind when it happened. I can still imagine though. Just not like you norms. Making it doubly difficult for me to turn a white line on a black background into Wimbledon Centre Court.
Phoebe and me were a good team. We lost the first match, but partly because I got confused about which of the players I was operating. Then we beat all comers. Now it's possible that all the people we were playing were 6 years old, but even so we smashed their fucking faces in.
We take it for granted, but what an incredible world where we can connect with anyone with access to the technology and play a seamless video game with them. I don't know how the internet has so successfully divided us when it had so much hope about bringing us all together. Though admittedly I say that after being delighted at beating a 6 year old at imaginary tennis.
I looked after the kids most of the day and Ernie was spectacularly paying me back for all the years of being an annoying child myself, by insisting on touching everything we passed in the shops or running around getting in people's way and trying to make jokes.
His mum, already busy and distracted with work towards her Edinburgh show, had to put up with him for much less time, but at dinner as we tried to watch Malcolm in the Middle (a signal lesson in not annoying your mum, but an absolutely excellent sitcom) Ernie asked questions, talked, sang and kept up the excellent work of being a 7 year old boy (one day, I hope a 7 year old boy will get revenge on him for this and so on until the end of humanity). He dropped the salt cellar in some ketchup and Catie had to get up to clean it. She was not pleased. Ernie survived somehow.
He temporarily behaved himself, but a few minutes later was misbehaving again and Catie tried to hold it together as she chastised him for the thirtieth time. Most children would probably back down, but not my child. Ernie looked at her and asked in the tone of a therapist "Is this about the salt?"
Comedy is such an unpredictable force. Every scintilla of logic and sense would have said to duck out of this one and that any comment would end in disaster. But sometimes (and definitely not always), bravado is rewarded. This was such a brilliant line and such a risky one and I laughed for a minute straight and even Catie was now smiling. The joke totally diffused the situation.
He'd probably done 200 jokes during the day that made things worse and didn't make sense and just aggravated everyone, but no one remembers the failures. And as he gets older that success rate will increase from 1:200 to maybe 3:100 and then he has a comedy career.
Phoebe is much less scattergun but just as funny. Her best moment today was as we passed a pub called The Cock and she read out the name in an amused voice. I said "What's funny about that? It's just a bird."
"The Cock" she repeated incredulously!
A man in front of us turned round, laughing. Getting a laugh from a stranger is the best. Both my kids are doomed.
I am a terrible parent aren't I?
