"Look at this," said my wife as she was reading the Indy. "Never seen this before."
I grunted. Some boring book review, a piece on a new art exhibition, a cheap feature bought from America, another potty survey dressed up as a news story. She will read out things when she knows I'm going to read every word of every page anyway, always have done, whereas she is just a skimmer. Yet for some reason she always manages to pick out the good bits and take the edge off them before I get there.
Then I noticed she was reading the back pages. She also flicks through them, in her skimmy way: cricket, golf, athletics, horse racing, swimming, which I usually totally ignore.
"OK then, amaze me," I said, sighing. "What is it?"
"This photograph of Steven Gerrard," she said. "I've never seen him smiling before."
"Liverpool's just got into the Euro quarter-finals; that's why he's smiling."
"I know that. But he doesn't usually smile. It takes years off him. He looks so young . . ."
He is young. All footballers are young. It's because we've been watching them since they were in nappies, living through all their agonies, that we think they are older than they are.
But I got up, had a look, and yes, it was a real cheesy grin. Now he's back to normal, that awful frown, the weight of the world on his young shoulders, gone. I don't know him, no more than my wife knows him, but we have him down as a worrier, a tortured soul, taking everything so seriously.
Can you get it right, making these sweeping assumptions, just by watching someone perform, observing their expressions and body language? Wayne Rooney, wouldn't like to meet him on a dark night, what a thug, so you might think. In real life he is completely different - shy, self-effacing, sensitive.
Gazza, we all had a laugh with him, his merry tricks on and off the pitch, without knowing, at least for a long time, that he was a depressive, suffering the most appalling mental problems.
Paul Scholes, don't know him, but on the pitch he's another worrier - fretting, eyes narrowed, uptight. Must be a right misery guts. Or is he a load of laughs?
I've got it into my head that Dimitar Berbatov, at home, must be rather cool, laid-back, intellectual, though perhaps not as clever as Yossi Benayoun. Now surely he's got a high IQ, just look at him. I find myself thinking this partly because they are both foreign. In my head, which is a strange place, all foreign players are cleverer, more cultured, more sensible than our own home-grown lumps.
I've always marked down Nedum Onuoha, Man City's thuggish-looking fullback, as a lump, but blow me, I read an interview with him and he's got three As at A-level, one in maths, which he could have read at university.
They're awful, these prejudices and assumptions we acquire, basing our views on looks or performance, which tell us nothing about the person behind.
Class, I do that as well. Gareth Southgate is clearly middle-class, must be, look at that hair, clothes, way he holds himself erect, speaks so well and sensibly. Surely he went to some middling public school - Oundle, say, or Radley. Probably in the same boarding house as Graeme Le Saux.
David James the goalie, clearly an artist, did postgrad at the Royal College of Art. Same class as Hockney. Probably dyed their hair blond the same week in their first year. Obvious, innit?
