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.