Kick-off is at eight. Tea in this house is at half past five. That leaves two and a half hours on a World Cup night in which two children ask, at roughly seven-minute intervals, when they can have 'the football food', and one adult explains that tea has already happened. It had, too, and it was fine. But a match wants a second course, and we've spent the week working out what that should be.
Tea, and then the tray
Since the opening match on 11 June we've had five World Cup teas, because Rob has watched every game he can and a few he can't explain. The rule we settled on is that tea stays at half past five, but on a match day it's the small one: a jacket potato with beans and cheese, or a bowl of soup and bread, about £3.80 for the four of us. Then at quarter to eight, when the pundits come on, everyone gets a tray of match food, which is bigger than a snack and smaller than a tea, and is eaten under strict conditions.
The conditions, in the order Isla invented them: trays, not plates; nothing that needs a knife; no sauce unless it's in a pot with a lid; anyone who spills during a goal cleans it up; and Mabel gets nothing, a ruling she contests for the full ninety minutes from the arm of the sofa.
What's been on the trays
- Hot dogs and wedges, eight sausages in rolls and a tray of oven wedges: £5.90
- Nachos with a pan of chilli mince, grated cheese and a lot of sour cream that Alfie declined: £6.40
- Fish finger sandwiches with a bowl of peas: £5.20
- Chicken drumsticks from the oven, corn on the cob and coleslaw: £6.80
Those four average £6.08 for the four of us. Put with the small tea, a match night comes to about £9.90 in food, against £7.20 for an ordinary home-cooked tea at £1.80 a portion. That's roughly £2.70 more a night, which I hadn't noticed until I added it up, and I'm not complaining. It's still a lot cheaper than the pub, which is where Rob would be if we weren't all in the front room.
Alfie eats his peas frozen, straight out of the freezer drawer, and on match nights he gets a bowl of them on his tray with a spoon. He sits through the anthems and the first half in his England shirt with a face of total seriousness. He's in bed at quarter to nine on school nights, and he knows it, so the stretch before the whistle is spent negotiating like a very small union. On Monday, at half-time, he was allowed one question, and it was 'Why are they all so sweaty?', which I thought was fair.
The one night we gave in
There's been one chippy. It was the evening everything went wrong: Alfie's PE kit had been left at school, Isla's bike had a puncture outside the Co-op, and the oven timer went off every four minutes for no reason I could find. At ten past five I rang the chippy. It was £29.60 for four, with a bag of scraps for Rob, and it was perfect. Nobody mentioned trays that night, because it's hard to spill anything from a bag of chips.
Jean next door, who has never followed football in her life, has taken to opening her window during matches. She doesn't say anything. But when we cheer, a second later there's a small cheer from next door, as though she's checking she hasn't missed something. On Saturday Rob went round to tell her the score and came back with a lemon drizzle cake.
It's still light at ten past eight, so the blinds in the bay window have to come down and the front room gets very hot. We have the side window open and the fan on. Isla is keeping a record of the matches in the back of an old school exercise book, with a column for her prediction and a column for what actually happened. I'm not saying whose predictions have been better. Rob has asked me to stay out of it.
On Saturday, which is a late night, Alfie fell asleep on the sofa at twenty to ten in his England shirt, with a bowl of frozen peas still in his lap. I carried him up the stairs, peas and all, and put the bowl in the sink to deal with in the morning. Rob stayed to see the end of the match, and reported the result at breakfast in a voice I won't describe.
