Idris and Cai have been on a squad with a boy called rafe_f_07 since the September of 2024. Thirty-odd Thursday evenings. My sons have been coaching a thirteen-year-old through algebra on a headset since the autumn, and calling him mate, and taking the mick out of his spelling.
And in the April the Merrow Prize published the finals rosters — real names, schools, the lot — and three boys sat in three different rooms and worked out what they were looking at.
And they did what teenagers do, which is that they said nothing to a single adult for two weeks and dealt with it in a group chat.
What the boys had decided.
They had a plan. They had a plan and it involved not telling me, which I have had to be reasonable about.
The plan was: Rafe would not say anything to his parents before the finals, because his mother had told him in the February that his father had “two older sons who don’t want anything to do with him”.
That is what Seren Farrow believed. I am fairly sure she still believed it in that foyer.
And Rafe — thirteen, in a blazer, in a car park — said to my sons: “Is that true? Did you not want to?”
And Cai said no.
And Rafe said: “Right.” And then he said: “I thought so, because you’re not like that.”
Thirty Thursdays on a headset were enough for a thirteen-year-old to know that the version of my sons he had been given at home was not real.
