Kenny Farquharson: The dodgy knee was a portent of the future

Tall for a Dundonian, I tell myself. And yet I know these are just meaningless empirical measurements. These days the most important fact about my height is this: I am shorter than my sons.

Elder son is about 6ft. Younger son is slightly taller. This is something of a sore point with elder son, as you can imagine, but generally he is dealing with it fairly well. I’m dealing with the height thing passably well too. After all, it’s just the latest example of how the tables have turned.

When the kids were small I enjoyed joining in with the physical rough and tumble. I was the dad the leisure centre assistant would have to warn to keep out of the soft play area. At home, there was arm-wrestling, WWF-style wrestling, Gladiator re-enactments and artless martial arts, all with no holds barred, often ending in dunts and occasionally in tears.

Whenever I could, I joined in with sporty stuff – mountain biking at Glentress, surfing at Coldingham Bay, kayaking in Loch Morlich and an infamously competitive dads v kids football match at primary school that did irreparable damage to my knee and led to the dads’ Romanian goalkeeper being signed off work for a month. I did score a cracker of a goal, though, a half-volley that looped into the top-right-hand corner. Still my finest moment in sport.

The arrival of the dodgy knee was a portent of the future. It began to dawn on me that in the surf or on the hill my boys’ growing prowess and my lack of progress was holding them back. They would linger to let me catch up, but they were just taking pity on me. Increasingly, I just let them get on with it and would enjoy their physical exploits as an observer rather than as a participant.

As they competed with ever-more tortuous ways of doing pull-ups and press-ups, and compared the tautness of their six-packs, my own belly thickened with middle-age spread. Eventually I decided to cancel the costly gym membership and ordered Sky Sports instead. The cross-trainer, bought in the John Lewis sale in a flush of body-beautiful enthusiasm, became Scotland’s most expensive clothes rack.

All this took its toll. At one stage, elder son’s routine greeting to me in the morning was, “Awright, Tubbs?” And younger son commented, “Dad, your belly’s so big it has its own postcode.”

I take this in good part, mostly. This is how it should be. Them stretching further than I can manage. Me in my sons’ shadows rather than them in mine.