Wrestlers tickled pink

Thomas and I are great wrestlers. This is a slightly ambiguous sentence admittedly, but just to clarify, I should perhaps say instead that we are regular wrestlers. We wrestle three or four times a week, usually on the bed, at night.

Thomas, 11, is spidery, prone to using pillows and blankets (he has no idea, as yet, of the subtleties of this great sport) and has banned tickling as an offensive strategy. He is a very good jumper and body slammer and squasher; sometimes he sees how far back he can twist my fingers before I yelp for mercy; sometimes he indulges in a jolly passage of jump-on-the-ear, or squash-the-head, until of course I buck him off like a steer flinging a cowboy at a Midwestern rodeo.

It's a little like rugby without a ball. And the pleasant thing is that you can land on a duvet, a considerable improvement on being tackled on the hard fields of, say, Kimberley in midwinter.

The ban on tickling is particularly difficult for me. I find myself tempted by the tickle strategy fairly regularly. Suddenly I find myself close to an armpit or the soles of his feet and I simply can't control myself. Thomas feels (rightly, I think) that tickling is not anything any self-respecting wrestler should stoop to, so has put a blanket ban on it.

I think that there's an element of self-interest in the tickle ban, because he's more ticklish than I am and I'm a better tickler than he.

Still, he might have a point. Can you imagine one of those steroid-frenzied, sunbed-bleached animals from WWF indulging in a bout of comradely tickling? I think not. Thomas has standards of etiquette to uphold and tickling is beyond the pale.

I was thrilled with him the other day. We were about to get grappling when he raised a finger and we paused. "It's time to lay down some ground rules," he told me seriously, not seeming to realise that he'd made a pretty decent pun.

"So what are they?" I asked, knowing at least one of them would involve the great tickle edict (Alfred, T, 2011). He went on to detail that if he asked for a time-out, we should respect that (fine) and that there was to be no extremely rough stuff (I wanted to snigger, I am not the rough one), but I held my tongue.

I was wonderfully proud of him for this because so often our wrestling matches end in tears, with me bawling my eyes out and stomping off down the corridor to seek comfort and solace from my significant other.

Now things would be more fair, on more of an even keel. Perhaps, I reasoned silently, I could even slip in the odd tickle if I deemed the occasion appropriate, although I'd have to pick my moment.

Maybe the real issue with our wrestling is the fact that wrestling is really a long prelude to having a hug or a moment of strong physicality, which we both love. Being 11, Thomas has developed a kind of sixth sense about the encroachments of puberty. He is forever on pimple alert and generally worries at the least hint of a sign that he could be passing out of boyhood.

Once we hit the testosterone-laden wastes of adolescence, I rather fear that our wrestling days will be over. Then again, maybe not. I can't remember ever wrestling to this degree with either of his older brothers, so maybe this is a ritual for just for the two of us. It might continue for a while, until he deems it passé.

But long may it continue. Wrestling between fathers and sons is one of the great pleasures of being a dad, up there with swimming together, playing cricket on the lawn and making a series of dubious puns that aren't very funny.