It started in the back garden of our house in south London when our son Gus was a mop-haired six-year- old. A decade on, he is a hulking lump of a teenager with a buzz cut, but we are still at it. More than ever, in fact. Keepy-uppy is the art of keeping a football in the air using any body part other than your arms and hands.
“Art?” I hear the uninitiated scoff. OK, maybe not art, but something close. If you are an atrocious golfer, as I am, you will know that every so often, somewhere among the depressing panoply of topped drives, slices and hooks, you inexplicably play a shot that is right up there with the very best in the world. Even Tiger Woods would raise a hand to the adoring crowds and permit himself one of his cheeky grins. The point being this: that for the briefest of moments you rub shoulders with the gods.
Keepy-uppy can feel like that. When you are barefoot on a beach somewhere with a ball, and for whatever reason you are both in the zone that day, reality seems to fall away. You drop out of time. That’s when the crazy stuff happens. Don’t get me wrong; I’m the first to acknowledge there is more to life than sending a lofted 20-yard pass precisely back to where it came from with a blind overhead donkey kick, but when one of you pulls off such a move, keeping the ball “live” in the process, there is a sudden sublime connection between you that touches on the transcendental.
I guess you either get it or you don’t, but you won’t unless you give it a try. As activities go, keepy-uppy is cheap, fun and one hell of a workout (it will put a sweat on you before you know it). The basics are relatively easy to pick up and once learned, never forgotten. Endlessly challenging – there is always another devilishly difficult trick to master – keepy-uppy is also one of the best calling cards in the world, a way of meeting strangers and sharing a moment with them.
I think Gus would agree with me that our most memorable keepy-uppy experience occurred on a beach in Essaouira, Morocco, when he was about 10. We were messing around with the football as usual – anything to relieve the boredom of basting on sun loungers – when a man sheepishly approached and asked if he could join in. Half an hour later, there were eight of us in a large circle doing whatever it took to prevent the ball from touching the ground.
The numbers continued to climb and the keepy-uppy was eventually abandoned for a game of football on a pitch marked out with heels in the sand, then marked out again and again, ever larger, as more and more people showed up. It was a few hours of pure pleasure that neither of us will ever forget, if only because one of the new tricks we learned that day is still referred to as an Essaouira.
To see keepy-uppy as a force for international harmony and universal peace might be stretching it a bit, but I am pretty sure it would take something major to put a dent in Gus’s fond recollections of the warmth, humour and affection with which he was treated that day by our fellow fanatics.
Laughter goes hand-in-hand with keepy-uppy. So does piss-taking, more and more of which seems to be directed my way as time trickles by and the pupil becomes the master. I like to think we are still shy of the tipping-point, but suspect we may well have passed it. I fell behind Gus in the stamina department a while ago, but I have been clinging to hopeful notions about my speed, strength and agility. Not for much longer. Keepy-uppy is a cruel adjudicator in such matters, a touchstone against which my failing physical prowess can be tested. Yes, I’m getting old and it is beginning to tell, whereas Gus is going from strength to strength, heading for his prime. This is to be celebrated, of course, and I do celebrate it, but wistfully, with a touch of sorrow and self-pity, if I am honest.
All is not lost, not quite yet. I am still better at catching a ball between my ankles. Oh, and we broke our record the other day. It was unexpected. Gus was deep in GCSE hell, strung out after endless hours of revision, and yet we somehow hit a rhythm on the village green in front of our house, posting a very gratifying 672. (Yes, all right, I was the one who messed up in the end.)
Whether we ever get to bag the big 1,000 before my knees and/or hips finally give out remains to be seen, but I do know that when we head down to Cornwall later this week, the tatty blue football we have always favoured will travel with us.
It is a flying visit, a post-exam surfing jaunt with our friends Ivan and Lucas, also father and son. The waves are looking great, big – way too big for me and Ivan. We will watch our fearless boy/men paddle off through the break into the distance, where they will sit bobbing on their boards with the other people who know what they are doing.
Every so often we will glimpse one or other of them flying across the face of a wave and when they gesture sweetly to us to come and join them we will wave back and pretend we are quite happy where we are, being pummelled by the walls of white water, reflecting on the fact that we taught them everything they know. Well, OK, not quite everything.
As with keepy-uppy, so with surfing, so with life.
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