Phone calls like ours only happen when you've spent several years hurting and being hurt, until every work you utter or hear becomes coded and loaded, as complicated and full of subtext as a bleak and brilliant play.

Between the ages of fourteen and twenty-four, foreplay changes from being something that boys want to do and girls don't, to something that women want and men can't be bothered with. ... The perfect match, if you ask me, is between the Cosmo woman and the fourteen-year old boy.

Radio football is football reduced to its lowest common denominator. Shorn of the game's aesthetic pleasures, or the comfort of a crowd that feels the same way as you, or the sense of security that you get when you see that your defenders and goalkeeper are more or less where they should be, all that is left is naked fear.

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

You're not allowed to say anything about books because they're books, and books are, you know, God.

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.