More Than Mind Games

In my imagination he is always shouting. On the touchline, at the training ground, in his office under the ghost of a sign that once said “I’m Frae Govan.” My mental Alex Ferguson lives a life of ceaseless outrage and sprays violent criticism like spit from a Hattersley puppet. The real man is fierce enough…

I was just months old when my parents split up, and for the next five years we lived in my gran’s rented two-up-two-down terrace. Mum worked nights and I was looked after by gran and her sister, “Bab”. Both were elderly widows, long past the storms of life. We were surrounded all day by their…

Everyone who watches football, I suspect, watches it in the hope of catching a note in it that’s peculiar to themselves. I watch it wanting it to tell me that this is still a world in which the extraordinary can happen, to remind me, when I need reminding, that I’m here and alive and it’s…

Every so often, one of the dwindling number of bloggers I read daily will offer up a kind of beginner’s guide to jazz: a bucket-and-spade type basics list of so-called “essential” albums. It’s always the same stuff, and always from the 1941-65 period Larkin described as “After Pound! After Picasso!” Miles, Bird, Coltrane, Shepp: all…

Sooner or later, the national anthem is going to have to make way at internationals for songs more closely related to the individual countries of the UK. If we stop making her listen to that awful Georgian dirge, perhaps the Queen will come along once more. She used to be at the Cup Final, every…

P.G. Wodehouse spent the dying days of World War II shuttling from one address in France to another. His had been a travelling life, so this wasn’t in itself any sort of obstacle to getting the writing done. Nevertheless he used a letter to an old friend in England to complain that, where once a…

Clive’s mentioning of Patricia Barber’s rendering of “You’re The Top!” reminded me to post this passage from Robert McCrum’s Wodehouse biography. “Anything Goes” is the greatest musical of the twentieth or any century, but its creation was anything but smooth: Towards the end of his life, Wodehouse published an account of the day when (Cole)…

It was just a silly idea that I had for a novel. It would have to get past the Wodehouse trustees to have any chance of publication. Perhaps if I made old Plum a leading character it would soothe their feelings. So I’ve been reading Robert McCrum’s brilliant Wodehouse: A Life – the paperback edition…