Things to do when you should be writing, #3

Write some software to help you write your novel

Respect to Jack Calverley for this.

An Admission

What do you say when someone asks you about your influences? Thankfully it doesn't happen very often. But I envy people who can confidently and sincerely say 'Steinbeck', 'Woolf', 'Carver', 'Rowling' - it's all good, if you mean it - I just can't match them.

I've had a revelation. I am not as blazingly original as I'd liked to think. The other day I happened to pull from my bookshelf a collection of articles and letters pages from the early days of football fanzines (I know, it should be the collected letters of TS Eliot, or something...) Truthfully, I don't even follow football any more, but it's all come flooding back. The following I recall from memory, maybe incompletely, maybe inaccurately, as others might recall song lyrics or passages from holy books:

'You Are The Ref: The US invades Libya. Do you a) award an indirect free kick... b) ...'

'You Are The Ref: Alex McLeish machetes to death Ally McCoist and buries him in a shallow grave by the touchline. Do you a) book McCoist for leaving the field of play without permission... b) ...'

(of a very traditional Middlesborough line up) 'Every one of them with a name that sounded like the Anglo-Saxon for an act of gross indecency'

'Bladder like a blast furnace'

'Sir - I wonder whether any of your readers have noticed the striking resemblance between Terry Fenwick and a waste of space. Are they by any chance related?'

(of a Newcastle United fan) 'Dad, what's a cup final?'

It's scary how many of these I must have recycled and repainted. Terry Hurlock, I turn into a blackbird. 'One man went past Mo, went past Maurice Malpas', I turn into a doggerel rhyme about cake crumbs.

There's nothing new under the sun. Not from me anyway.