No sacred cows

As regular readers will know, Caroline has developed a fanatical interest in tennis and is currently captain of the ladies second team at the local sports club. I have written before about how her new-found passion has turned me into a tennis widower — she is out two or three nights a week during the high season — but I thought that was the extent of its impact on our marriage. Turns out I was wrong. The nights she spends at home with me watching television are even more emasculating than the nights she spends out. Why do I say this? Because the only thing she wants to watch is tennis. There was a time when I used to have to defend our monthly subscription to Sky Sports, with Caroline dismissing it as a needless extravagance. Not any more.

Readers may recall that the Young family welcomed a new addition to the household about two years ago: a Hungarian Vizsla named Leo. He turned out to be incredibly high-maintenance. He demanded to be walked twice a day and invariably did something unspeakable, such as rolling around in fox excrement — or, worse, start eating it. Even after running the length and breadth of Richmond Park he would still have enough energy to tear around the house like a Tasmanian Devil, leaving havoc in his wake. I was delighted, obviously. I hoped he’d be an inexhaustible source of material for this column. Then Leo did something really bad and the first thing Caroline said before she told me about it was: ‘You can’t write about this in The Spectator.

Over Christmas, Caroline and I finally snapped about the amount of time our children were spending on their screens. If they weren’t watching Logan Paul vlogs on YouTube, they were on Snapchat or playing video games. I couldn’t get them to read anything — not even one of the wonderful How to Train Your Dragon books — and attempts to persuade them to go on walks were met with fierce resistance. Towards the end of the holidays they began to look and act like drug addicts — pallid complexions, easily distracted, short-tempered. Perhaps they really were addicts. Any parent who has tried to limit their child’s screen time will be familiar with the standard objection: ‘But Dad, you’re always on your screen.