When you play elite soccer, you have to be fast. At the youth state trials, the coach said, ‘You boys gotta believe in your potential. Anyone can be coached—anyone who isn’t slow, I mean.’ Did everyone look over at me? I probably imagined it. But my body remembers the shame, which came like goosebumps. I did not make the team.

Now, a decade on, I would give anything for what speed I had back then. It is not just that I’m older. For almost four years I’ve been seriously ill with an unspecified condition whose main symptoms include weakness and fatigue. I have had to give up sport, and going out, and full-time work. On bad days I inch down the street to the shops. On worse days I can’t leave the house—so I sleep, hang about like a ghost, watch the soccer on TV and daydream.