The great ball-kicking gene mystery

I’m thinking, in particular, of the White House health experts, because I am missing the ball-kicking gene. This is urgent.

With Mr Trump’s miraculous discovery of the cause of autism, I feel certain he and his team could easily find an explanation for why I have never been interested in kicking balls, unless they are attached to people who barge into queues.

To further deepen this behavioural mystery, I am not even remotely interested in watching other people kick balls either.

Or even throw balls.

Look, I don’t like to make a big thing of it. I try not to complain.

I quietly battle through life with this embarrassing condition all year until I come to days like these, when the whole world seems to go ball-throwing-kicking bonkers.

I have racked my brain for a reason why I am missing this gene.

Perhaps my mother didn’t eat enough oranges at the half-time mark.

Perhaps the doctor dragged me out by the arms instead of the feet.

Perhaps my dad didn’t sing the team song or give me my membership card and scarf quickly enough.

It could be any of these things.

They all seem entirely plausible to me.

In any case, my missing gene has meant a lifetime of exclusion, and whispered derision for me.

In social situations, people treat me with awkward looks and silent gaps in barbecue conversations after the weather and kids have been talked about.

I remember I did dabble in ball-kicking when I was about 10 years old and invited on to the school soccer team.

I played in the left back position, and it was my job to guard the goalmouth.

But on my first outing, I scored an own goal after being distracted by an amazing dive from a passing pied flycatcher.

My new position then became left back in the changing rooms for the rest of the soccer season.

It was the same in rugby, which was a substitute religion in my secondary school.

I was the smallest on the team, so inevitably I was appointed scrum-half.

It was my job to get the ball out of the ruck, which meant diving underneath the studded, stamping feet of six bellowing minotaurs and trying to escape intact.

Because I have an innate sense of survival, I quickly learned that if I held on to the ball for more than two seconds, I would be flattened by at least five six-foot blokes with no necks.

So, I threw the ball in any direction and ran away very quickly to the end of the pitch, where I tried to become invisible by hiding behind the goal posts.

This was always accompanied by a staccato attack of Celtic words from our Welsh coach – which sounded a lot like swearing in anyone’s language.

By the time I bought my first guitar, ball-kicking and team sport were already dead to me.

The rugged individualism of being a rock god was far more appealing.

It seems I have passed on this genetic deficiency to my son, who is also a milky-veined guitar addict with no interest in ball-kicking.

However, his youngest is showing distinct signs of being a red-blooded scarf-wearing ball-kicker.

So, it seems the gene is able to skip a generation and then reappear.

I need to run this by Mr Trump’s team of genetic scientists.

My case is proof the human genome can survive even the most catastrophic losses and addiction to joke science.

John Lewis is a former journalist at The News