The whole cowboy scene is overrated anyway. My cowboy belt only taught me one useful thing: fresh leather is pink. Sure, it tans with sweat, weather and horse manure. Sure, it’s sold pre-tanned in your average wannabe-a-cowboy store. But underneath it all—and remember this when you’re staring down the rodeo star whose hat you accidentally trod on—it’s pink.

As to soccer: most young soccer stars end up with knee injuries. At junior school, only two other players could call themselves my equals. Richard and Adam. They didn’t give up like me, didn’t subside into rugby, field hockey and then a long career in the amateur non-competitive activities world. They stuck with it. They attended training camps, hunted scouts. Now they both have knee injuries. Like I said. What are they going to do when their kids want a piggy-back run down the hill? Not my problem.

Rock music fame, though. Aye, there’s the rub. That star still twinkles i’the night. You can never go wrong with good ol’rock, to quote Hamlet or Homer or whoever it was. If I had to choose between you and a packed Wembley stadium (knee-injury capital of the world but also not a bad concert space), packed with the kind of fans that shut up and listen, well…it would be tight. I can’t tell you which way it would go, but it would be tight.

Some are born ridiculous. Some become ridiculous. Some just start thrusting ridiculously. And all of us have got to dream about that, once in a while.

Tom Howell knows almost nothing about Ice Hockey.