Hawks - A Piano In The Pyrenees: the Ups and Downs of an Englishman in the French Mountains

'What do you mean you're not going to play any more?' said Kevin.

The dressing room smelt, we'd just been beaten 82, and I was close to exhaustion.

'I mean exactly what I say,' I replied. 'No more five-a-side football for me. I'm forty-four years old and this is clearly a game for a younger man. Like you, for instance you're forty-three.'

'Don't be too hasty about this,' said Brad, a mere forty-one.

'Yes, are you sure you don't want to think this through?' said Tim, forty-three.

'There's nothing to think through,' I said firmly. 'My body's hurting too much. I can still meet you guys in the pub after the game and do the boysy catch-up. I just won't bother with the football bit.'

'It won't be the same,' said Kevin.

Of course it wouldn't be the same. Life changes. It's supposed to change. I wasn't going to make the mistake of trying to hang on to something that ought be allowed to become a pleasant memory. (Or, in this case, simply a memory.) Nothing stays the same. Our bodies get older, our children get bigger (or, in my case, godchildren), our pets die on us, our friends get jobs abroad and move overseas, our passions ebb and flow like the tides, governments rise and fall, and natural disasters destroy life with a callous contempt and an alarming regularity.

So why was giving up five-a-side football such a big deal?

'What are you drinking, Tone?' asked Tim from close to the bar.

Dave, the team's fifth player, had gone home to his wife and kids, so that left me sharing this smoky atmosphere with three of my oldest and closest friends.

'The usual please, Tim,' I replied before sitting down with the other two weary members of our heavily defeated team.

The pub opposite the sports centre was heaving, mostly with drinkers I recognised as being younger, if not healthier, than all of us. We watched the back of Tim as he fought for the barman's attention. He stood there: tall, good-looking particularly from the angle we were now surveying him. His gentle, roguish sense of humour was something that had made him enormous fun in our younger days when, more likely than not, we would have been in a pub like this one with the sole purpose of trying to chat up women. Unlike me, Tim had settled down. He'd met Lucy when they were both jobbing actors specialising in poor quality adverts for German toothpaste, Belgian coffee or Norwegian shower gel. Shakespeare it hadn't been, but it had provided them enough money to get a nice house and the means to support their two boys, Archie and George.

'Tony, what's "the usual" again?' asked Tim, who had quickly popped back from the bar.

'A pint of lager,' I replied. 'Not one of the strong ones. Cooking lager please.'

'Righto.'

Tim's question revealed just how infrequently these vaguely sporting liaisons actually occurred. Many years ago, we'd played weekly in a five-a-side league, but now our busy lives prevented such frivolous indulgences. We were lucky if we managed three games a year. All the more reason, I would have thought, for my retirement from the game to have been accepted more readily.

'Well, I suppose you should listen to what your body's telling you,' said Brad, who was always the first to be conciliatory.

Brad looked younger than his forty-one years, boyish almost. I looked at him and remembered how much irritation his looks had caused me over the years. Too many girls thought he was 'cute', and it wasn't fair. I'd always taken some comfort in the fact that he wasn't a very good footballer (that's why we put him in goal), although regrettably my retirement from the sport now made that consolation redundant.

Brad's emotional life had always been much more complicated than mine. We'd met in 1985 as performers in a West End musical called Lennon, and at that stage Brad was already a father figure to Sarah, the daughter of Kate, the woman he lived with. He and Kate no longer lived together but they were great friends. In fact, Brad was now married to someone else Claire but then he didn't live with her either. Instead, they too were great friends, who happened to be waiting on a divorce. A pattern was beginning to emerge in Brad's love life, but this wasn't the time or the place to discuss it.

'Tony, if it feels right to stop the football, then you should do what you want,' continued Brad.

'Yes, but what do you want?' enquired Kevin.

'What do you mean?' I replied.

'Well,' said Kevin, somehow adopting the swagger of a courtroom barrister, 'if you had to pick two things you wanted if you had to what would you pick?'

I hesitated. This was a bigger question than was usually asked at these post-match debriefs. I resisted the temptation to opt for the easy way out the humorous reply, so often the Englishman's refuge from confrontation with his true feelings.

'I suppose the honest answer would be,' I said, still accessing the last pieces of required data from a jumbled mind, 'the two things would be: meeting my soulmate, and finding an idyllic house abroad somewhere.'