It is a strange paradox that while the grief of football fans(and it is real grief) is private - we each have an individual relationship with our clubs, and I think that we are secretly convinced that none of the other fans understands quite why we have been harder hit than anyone else - we are forced to mourn in public, surrounded by people whose hurt is expressed in forms different from our own.

In other words, it's one of those books you thrust on your partner with an incredulous cry of "This is me!

I hate time. It never does what you want it to.

So now what? What happens when words fail us?

Sequels are very rarely a good idea, and in any case, the success of the book changed my relationship with the club in some ways.

Did you know that Jacques Benveniste, one of the world's leading homeopathic 'scientists', now claims that you can email homeopathic remedies? Yeah, see, what you do is you can take the 'memory' of the diluted substance out of the water electromagnetically, put it on your computer, email it, and play it back on a sound card into new water. I mean, that could work, right?

I love the detail about the workings of the human heart and mind that only fiction can provide - film can't get in close enough.