One of the drawbacks of writing a column is that your place is always cluttered with unused ideas. Half-baked metaphors going mouldy in the cupboard. Or similes, begun in a fit of enthusiasm like last year's DIY project, and now lying abandoned in the garage, waiting for you to knock your shins against them when (alright, alright, get on with it - Ed).
So here are some I'm throwing out. Anything you can use, help yourself.
You know, playing football with your mates teaches you a lot about social justice - consider goalkeeping, for instance. Taking turns in goal is like paying tax: nobody wants to do it, but if everybody shares the burden equally, society as a whole benefits. Unfortunately, certain people are not paying their fair share. In fact certain people - and we all know who they are - seem to think they're above goal-keeping. Meanwhile, the rest of us are paying through the nose, and we're just about sick of it.
What is it with these English five-pence pieces? Everybody knows they're not legal tender here, but there must be at least two million of the pesky things circulating in the economy. If you search your pocket right now, I bet you'll find at least one, and before the day is out you'll pass it on to someone else. They're not the same design or even size as Irish 5ps, so why do we participate in this anti-national conspiracy? Is it some lingering post-colonial thing? Are there monarchist cells out there slipping English 5ps into our pockets? Where does the Central Bank stand on this issue?
There are tax amnesties in football too, of course. Take last Friday night, for instance. As usual I'd been in goal long enough to get frostbite, and as usual I found myself shouting: "Is there anyone who hasn't been in yet?" This is a tired old ritual because, unlike the Revenue Commissioners, I knew exactly who hadn't been in yet, but one always frames the question in a non-judgmental way to allow evaders get their goal-keeping affairs in order voluntarily, without undue publicity. It never seems to work, though.
Have you noticed, when visiting your local convenience store, that the distance between you and the shop assistant is growing every day? In some shops now, when you hand your pint of milk or loaf of bread to the assistant, you're liable to strain yourself in the effort because of the 900 different chocolate bars you have to reach across. There often isn't even a place for you to put your purchases down. And when you think about it, doesn't this sum up man's struggle in today's rampantly consumerist society, where the real business of life must be carried on over a yawning chasm of artificially created, chocolate-coated desires, forced upon us by television and . . . (this idea was never finished)
Americans just love alliteration: stars and stripes, founding fathers, Mickey Mouse, Coca Cola - their culture is full of it. And this must explain the extraordinary success rate of presidential candidates with alliterative names. Ronald Reagan, Herbert Hoover, Calvin Coolidge and Woodrow Wilson, to name but the few I've found in an exhaustive search of the encyclopedia, have between them occupied the Oval Office - there's more of it! - for almost three decades of this century (indeed, the same room has also played host to an extraordinary number of people with alphabetically consecutive initials, like Dwight Eisenhower, Jack Kennedy, Bill Clinton, and Lewinsky, Monica.)
Alliteration doesn't always work, of course, as in the 1968 election when the loser was Hubert Humphrey (whose middle name, even more poignantly, was Horatio). But my advice to the Democrats is this: dump Al Gore now, and put Jesse Jackson and the Californian senator Barbara Boxer on the 2000 campaign ticket. You can't lose.
I had this jumper once. It was a perfect fit, and it had an understated colour scheme that somehow flattered my complexion. I don't even remember what the colours were now, but they were really me. Then one day my wife, as part of her campaign to tidy up the universe, put the jumper "away" somewhere, and I never found it again. I looked everywhere. When we moved house, we emptied every drawer, and every possession was itemised and packed, but the jumper was not among them. To this day it remains a mystery. I've never quite replaced that jumper. It's like a little part of me that died.
I know there's an argument that football's more gifted players, the "wealth creators" if you like, should not be penalised by a heavy goal-keeping regime, because their creativity benefits everybody, including the PAYE-type players like me. I'm sensitive to this argument, because my level of football talent is lower than the IFA estimate of average farm income. But dammit, we were five-nil up last Friday night and still no-one wanted to go in. Self-assessment isn't working.
Writing a column is a bit like flying an aircraft. In both cases, the technically difficult (and potentially dangerous) part is getting it off the ground. Statistics show that most writing disasters happen in the first three paragraphs. But once you have your column up in the air, the automatic pilot takes over and the chances of a mishap are relatively small. Sure, you might get a bit of turbulence, the odd unpleasant sensation when you move from a high pressure thought to a lower-pressure one, but by and large you can relax.
Wouldn't it be nice if Aston Villa's new striker, Dion Dublin, was accused of diving or some other form of gamesmanship in a match against his old club, Coventry City, only to be vindicated by his former manager and team mates. Then newspapers would be able to run the headline: "Dublin's Fair - City". It's just a thought.
Of course, the other difficult bit about writing a column is landing: drawing your thoughts together into a neat, controlled conclusion and getting your undercarriage down in time. In fact, when you think about it, a newspaper deadline is like a runway. And it's amazing how easy it is to miscalculate the distance and find yourself . . . find yourself. . . oh my God, we're all going to die!