Disclaimer
This article contains swimming, IKEA, Swedish meatballs, cricket pathway observation, competitive tennis, heat management, emotional regulation, weak serving, defensive excellence, and one child changing from cricket kit into tennis kit in a moving vehicle like a budget version of James Bond. No parents were seriously harmed, although several hours were lost inside IKEA and may never be recovered.
There are weekends in the Richardt household when nothing sporting happens.
This was not one of them.
Admittedly, there was no cricket match this weekend, which in theory should have created a peaceful vacuum in the family diary. The sort of vacuum in which normal families might relax, read a book, do some gardening, or sit quietly with a cup of tea and contemplate the fragility of civilisation.
Instead, we had swimming, IKEA, a Somerset Cricket Pathway observation day, and a U10 tennis club championship.
So, yes, a quiet weekend.
Saturday morning began with what has recently become a rare sighting: our son attending swimming. Not because he has abandoned aquatic life completely, but because the modern child’s sporting schedule now resembles the fixture list of a small European nation. Swimming has therefore been pushed into the “when logistically possible” category, alongside sleep, piano practice, and parents remembering what day it is.
I am not entirely sure which stage he is currently in, but he is part of the light blue cap community. For those not fluent in the complex semiotics of children’s swimming hats, the national framework usually refers to Swim England’s Learn to Swim Stages 1 to 7. In simple terms, children move through progressive stages from basic water confidence and safety awareness towards stronger technique, stamina, and competence across the main strokes. Many swim schools use coloured caps to indicate stages. A common colour progression is red, orange, yellow, green, light blue, dark blue, and purple — with light blue often sitting around Stage 5.
In other words, he is no longer in the “please don’t sink” category and has entered the more sophisticated “please swim properly while being assessed by someone with a clipboard” category.
After swimming, because we clearly had not tested family endurance sufficiently, we decided to go to IKEA.
Not as punishment.
For inspiration.
My wife had seen a box for the Kallax unit with a cat hole in it. This, apparently, was the missing architectural feature in our home. Never mind that the cat already owns most of the house, several sleeping areas, and probably has a stronger legal claim to the conservatory than any of us. A box with a cat hole was needed.
Naturally, when we arrived in Exeter and checked availability, it was sold out.
This is the IKEA experience in its purest form: you travel for one specific item, discover it does not exist in any meaningful sense, and then somehow return home with twelve other things, two of which you can identify, four of which require assembly, and at least one that will live in a cupboard until 2031.
But do not worry, readers. We found other things to buy.
We always do.
The obligatory Swedish meatball meal also took place, because it is illegal to leave IKEA without eating meatballs, chips, gravy, and lingonberry jam while quietly wondering whether Scandinavian furniture culture is actually a controlled social experiment. Our son then decided that this was slow eating competition week. This turned what could have been a standard meal into an endurance event. Somewhere between meatball six and chip seventeen, time lost all meaning.
After three hours in IKEA, we returned home with minor items that still required assembly, because IKEA does not believe in fully completed objects. IKEA believes in personal growth through dowels.
One of the purchases was an iPad holder. Our son decided this was his job. This was excellent parenting because it encouraged independence, problem-solving, hand-eye coordination, and eventually mild frustration with Swedish pictorial instructions. The sort of instructions that contain no words, only calm little drawings of people who clearly have better emotional regulation than the rest of us.
He quickly discovered what generations of adults have learned before him: IKEA manuals look simple until you are holding three pieces of wood, two screws, a plastic bit that looks important, and a small Allen key that has the ergonomic quality of a medieval torture instrument.
Still, credit where it is due. He built it. It works. There were no pieces left over.
In IKEA terms, this is basically a PhD viva with minor corrections.
Sunday, however, was the main sporting day. The morning brought the Somerset Cricket Pathway observation day in Weston-super-Mare. The afternoon brought the U10 Club Championship in Burnham-on-Sea.
Luckily, one was in Weston and the other in Burnham, which meant the day was merely logistically ridiculous rather than fully deranged.
The morning was surprisingly relaxed for my wife and me. We dropped our son off at Weston College for a two-hour session where parents were not allowed to watch.
This suited us perfectly.
Firstly, we would not have known what we were looking at anyway. Secondly, not listening to other parents commentate on eight-year-olds as if they were conducting tactical analysis for Sky Sports was, frankly, bliss.
Our son knew quite a few children there, which helped. Ted and Beauden arrived, and so did the Carroll twins, whom he knows from county tennis. Cosimo from Millfield was also there, someone he has crossed tennis paths with before. It was essentially a multi-sport networking event for children who are not old enough to make their own packed lunch but somehow have sporting CVs.
After the handover, my wife and I did what sensible parents do when briefly released from sporting captivity.
We went to a garden centre.
Specifically, Saunders, just off Junction 22 of the M5, where we had lunch with El, Ted’s mum. There is something deeply British about dropping your child off for a county-level sporting observation and then immediately going to look at plants and sandwiches. It is the natural order of things.
Earlier, while driving to the cricket drop-off, messages had come through about the afternoon tennis. The U10 team event had collapsed slightly because only one team was left standing: Taunton 1. The organisers asked whether the remaining children would be happy to play a competition between themselves rather than a team event.
We agreed, mainly because we were already committed to the day and because the phrase “nothing else is really on” has become very dangerous in our household. It often leads to more sport.
Two hours after drop-off, we collected our son from cricket. All the children came out looking slightly deflated. Not upset exactly. More like they had been through a full-body audit.
When asked what they had done, our son simply replied:
“Bowling and batting.”
Excellent. Mystery solved.
No further questioning was necessary. Sometimes children give you a complete executive summary, and it is important to respect the format.
We then had around twenty minutes to get from Weston to Burnham. In that time, our son had snacks, recovered from cricket, changed into his tennis gear, swapped his cricket top for his tennis top, and adjusted his cap to look like Jack Draper.
This, I feel, is where modern parenting has gone. Our children no longer have hobbies. They have transitional phases between sports.
When we arrived at Burnham-on-Sea Tennis Club, the place was full of activity. Age groups from U8 to U14 were playing. There were rackets, water bottles, parents, scoreboards, and the unmistakable atmosphere of organised junior sport: cheerful, intense, and one wrong sandwich away from collapse.
Our son was playing up in the U10 category. He is still eligible for U9, but Taunton were short of players, so he had been asked to step up. This is always a flattering sentence until you remember that “playing up” usually means playing against children who are older, taller, stronger, and have had at least one more year to develop both a serve and psychological warfare.
In the end, there were only three players in the U10 group: our son, Spencer, and Jack. All Taunton players. So the event became a mini round-robin tournament, with each player facing the others in one Fast4 set.
Fast4 tennis is essentially tennis designed by people who looked at ordinary tennis and thought: “This is good, but can we make it quicker and more emotionally volatile?”
First up was Spencer against Jack. Jack has not played much tennis since leaving the orange ball training group in December and has focused more on football and other sporting activities. He lost to Spencer 4–1, but to be fair, returning to competitive tennis in scorching heat is not exactly the recommended re-entry pathway. It is less “gentle comeback” and more “welcome back, here is a furnace and a baseline.”
Our son then played Jack. To give Jack a bit of a break, I warmed up with our son. It was very hot. The sort of heat where every parent pretends to be fine while quietly calculating how long it takes for a human being to become a raisin.
The match itself was not a masterclass in serving.
Both players struggled badly on serve, and neither seemed particularly interested in winning service points. It became less a tennis match and more a philosophical discussion about whether serving is strictly necessary.
At 3–3, they went into a tie-break to 7.
This is where things became dramatic, because junior tennis likes to operate at the emotional intensity of Greek tragedy. Our son lost focus at one stage, and the tears started to come. But then something very encouraging happened. He stopped, composed himself, and got back into it.
That was genuinely impressive.
He was behind for much of the tie-break, but he did what he often does. He refused to disappear. That boy does not give up. He kept retrieving, kept fighting, kept finding one more ball, one more rally, one more chance.
Eventually, he won the tie-break 9–7.
A monumental match. Not necessarily in terms of technical beauty, but definitely in terms of resilience, heat tolerance, and parental blood pressure.
After that, because junior sport is merciful in the same way a tax return is merciful, he had to play Spencer.
Spencer turns 10 this month, so he is roughly 18 months older than our son and about a head and a half taller. This matters. At that age, 18 months is not a small gap. It is practically a different geological era. Spencer also had a stronger serve, while our son’s serve remained, let us say, a developing policy area.
Spencer went 2–1 up, punishing the weak serve and putting our son under pressure.
At this point, it would have been easy for our son to fade. He had already completed a two-hour cricket pathway session in the morning, eaten snacks in a moving car, changed sports, battled through a tight match against Jack, and was now facing an older and physically stronger player in the heat.
Naturally, he won the next three games.
He prevailed 4–2.
And with that, he won the mini tournament.
His defensive skills were phenomenal. He was on the back foot for much of the match, partly because of his weak serve and partly because Spencer’s serve put him under immediate pressure. But once he got into rallies, he somehow turned survival into strategy. He absorbed, retrieved, reset, and then found a way to win points he probably had no right to win.
It was not always pretty.
But it was effective.
There is a lot to work on, particularly the serve. At some point, the serve will need to become less of a polite invitation for the opponent to attack. But the fighting spirit, the defensive instincts, and the ability to problem-solve under pressure are all there. And those things are harder to teach.
On the way home, our son was absolutely knackered. Which was understandable, given that he had completed a day involving cricket assessment, tennis competition, heat management, emotional resilience, and a tactical wardrobe change between Weston-super-Mare and Burnham-on-Sea.
He was, however, very much looking forward to watching Germany play.
Germany eventually won 7–1.
A familiar scoreline.
Somewhere in Brazil, an entire nation probably twitched.
And so ended another quiet weekend in the Richardt household. No cricket match, officially. Just swimming, IKEA, meatballs, flat-pack furniture, a cricket pathway observation day, a garden centre lunch, a tennis tournament, a Fast4 title, and Germany scoring seven.
A restful couple of days, really.
The sort of weekend that makes Monday at work feel like a spa break.
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