Whenever my kids and I are stationary in the same room, within five minutes they will have started talking about football. Every now and then, a name will float out that I recognise – Jude Bellingham, say – but most of the time it lacks the dramatic texture to hold my attention. Everyone is either a genius or an irretrievable loser.

There’s a lot of counting. “Would you watch a play in which everyone was either entirely wise or entirely stupid and the rest of it was mainly a body count?” I ask, trying to wedge myself back into the conversation. They reply: “Hello? Romeo and Juliet?!” then go back to the shortcomings of La Liga, so I go back to looking at my phone.

Sometimes I wonder if they’ve constructed an elaborate code, the way parents switch to French in front of small kids when they want to talk about getting the cat put down, although their dad and I never did that, because he’s very honest and I don’t speak French.

Imagine their surprise and delight, then, to discover that, on the eve of the World Cup – the first such epochal event for which the oldest child has authentic ID – I........

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