Dad You Suck: And other things my children tell me. Tim Dowling

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      ‘Mud,’ I say, ‘is a great leveller.’

      For me the most difficult form of spectatorship revolves around the professional game, where I must watch alongside my children. I can follow a football match on television – I’m even interested – but I have no gift for armchair punditry, and none of the passion of a true supporter. With every fresh attempt to join in, I manage to say something that reveals a whole new facet of my ignorance.

      I have had to promise my youngest son that he will have first claim on the next one-on-one father–son opportunity to present itself – he has been sorely short-changed in favour of his older brothers – but after months of waiting, he has given up and taken matters into his own hands. He has won two tickets to a football match.

      They come courtesy of an Arts Council initiative called Kick Into Reading. Far from lavishing funding on one-legged Lithuanian dance troupes, as the Tories fear, the Arts Council is wisely spending money on a project that teaches kids that literacy and football are, if not exactly indivisible, at least not mutually exclusive, through a combination of storytelling and free tickets to see QPR play Hull City.

      My sons are all Chelsea fans, but I have for some time harboured a desire to transfer a portion of our familial allegiance to Queens Park Rangers. Because their stadium is within walking distance of our house and the tickets are cheaper than those at Chelsea, I have argued that we might participate more fully in the life of the less top-flight club. I am American, however, and fully conscious of the fact that I have no idea what I am talking about. I routinely defer to the older two on football matters, and they assure me that QPR tickets are easy to come by because QPR are rubbish. But the youngest has never been to a match and is blissfully unaware of Rangers’ position deep in the bottom half of the table of an altogether different league. He might yet be converted.

      Over the course of Saturday, his mood veers wildly: one minute he wants to leave for the stadium two hours early, the next he is insisting that he doesn’t want to go at all. Like me, he has trouble savouring anticipation of the unknown. It is, however, a sunny stroll to Loftus Road and he has cheered up considerably by the time we get there. In the meantime I have become increasingly apprehensive. The sign above the turnstile reads ‘Supporters Only’. There is no sign saying ‘Dads Who Like A Bargain’. I feel like an impostor.