Craig Brown

It is hard being a football loather, a football unfan. I sometimes feel as lonely as the sole survivor in the last reel of a Zombie film, as, one by one, old friends reveal themselves, with their glassy stares and outstretched arms, to have succumbed to the lure.

How I hate the Beautiful Game! I hate its cry-baby players and its gruff, joyless managers, its blokish supporters and its sinister owners, its whistle-peeping referees and its chippy little linesmen, its excitable commentators and - perhaps most of all - its unpluggable 'analysts.'

Some of the most untidy writers have also been the most productive. Iris Murdoch, for instance, wrote a good 30 books in a house strewn with rubbish.

The best critics do not worry about what the author might think. That would be like a detective worrying about what a suspect might think. Instead, they treat the reader as an intelligent friend, and describe the book as honestly, and as entertainingly, as possible.

Like many men, I am highly skilled in the art of losing things but prefer to outsource the recovery process.

The British love of queuing and discomfort and being bossed around seems to have found a new outlet in the pop festival.

One of the many joys of tongue-twisters is that they serve no purpose beyond fun.

As life goes on, we accrue more and more loseable objects. Providence dictates that objects that are too large to lose, such as houses, always come with tiny little keys, specially designed to give you the slip.

Words have a life of their own. There is no telling what they will do. Within a matter of days, they can even turn turtle and mean the opposite.

My life is a monument to procrastination, to the art of putting things off until later, or much later, or possibly never.

Some people see life as a game of chess, while others prefer to see it as a game of cricket; but the longer I live, the more I think of it as a game of Consequences.

In real life, nothing would be more tedious than trailing around after two strangers as they went house-hunting in Hertfordshire. But for some reason, television is more compelling than real life.