At the end of 2022, in this piece, I wrote about playing football again with people my own age. I had just completed a years’ worth of games, usually playing 5-a-side (or similar) once or twice a week. I continue to play regularly, though not as frequently as before. Last week’s Wednesday night game meant that I had played at least once every month for 33 months in a row.

I keep a record of these games in my Snippets documents, described elsewhere on this site as “the password-protected documents where I type at least a thousand words a day, most of which will never be made available for anyone else to read”.

Looking back through them I can see that I have only played once a month since the start of the year. The games have become symbolic rather than frequent. They’re not really keeping me fit. I have swapped football for music: I sing and play most Wednesday nights, and often on Fridays, the two evenings when I was usually playing football back in 2022. The timings make it difficult to do both. After July’s game (on a Friday) I was hoping to sing at a twice-monthly music night afterwards, but it got too late. Last week, after a Wednesday game, I got home for the second half of Leeds losing abjectly to Middlesbrough in the EFL Cup, but ran out of time to get to a weekly music event that started back in March in a pub in Brentford.

The only significant injury that I have picked up was at the end of 2022, from a couple of hefty kicks on my left shin. The bruise took weeks to clear and prompted me to buy a pair of shin-pads. After a fortnight I went to the Urgent Care unit at a local hospital. The doctor took a look at it and said, “Why are you still playing football at your age?” I took his tone to be light-hearted rather than critical, so I responded accordingly. “We’re always being told to do more exercise. What do you want me to do? Sit on the sofa eating doughnuts?” The injury healed eventually.

At that point I was pleased to get to a year’s worth of regular games. If I manage to play at least once in each of the next three months, I will have made it to three years’ worth. Yes, I know. At my age.