Locker Room: January is a bleak and arid month for the humble sports columnist, writes Tom Humphries.

Some columnists just shut the joint down for the month. Others will fall back on endless predictions/reminiscence columns. Some will manufacture things to be outraged about.

And as veterans of Januarys past will know, the proprietor of this here space likes to get through a bleak and arid January by just lazily pointing out that January is in fact a bleak and arid month for the humble sports columnist.

Those columns which explore the quintessential nature of nothing and nothingness draw reader responses which are varied only in the extent to which they use four-lettered words. People suggest various other means by which the proprietor of this here space might busy himself until he actually has something to say. They list past atrocities committed within the confines of this here space and wonder (quite hurtfully) how the proprietor of this here space ever got a licence to do business in the first place. Many sentences begin with the words, "Do you even know the first thing about".

Well, it's very easy to bellyache. It's in yer nature to be moaning minis. Very few people actually help out. Nobody writes in with suggested topics, except those who have been sentenced by law to spend many hours playing obscure minority sports. Very few people do something constructive.

Except one man. For 12 years now he has been standing up and beseeching us to look at him, to listen to him, to write about him. Please, please, please.

He understands. He knows the deal. In a slow news period he proposes something absurd and ridiculous. Well, he proposes the same absurd and ridiculous thing over and over again.

I spend a column or two pointing out in detail just how absurd and ridiculous this thing is. He gets the publicity and comes off like JFK proposing to send man to the moon. I get a few cheap columns which point out that we only have some paraffin and a soggy box of matches with which to make the great astral journey.

It's the sweetest little minuet. On Friday, I cocked an ear and in another room - yes, they were playing our tune. I blushed with pleasure. I'd thought for a while that he was sulking. Perhaps it was all over. It had been a while since I'd heard anything. I feared that he had got sense, that the fire had gone out.

Then the phone rang. Today FM. Did I want to go on the radio and debate the issue of Dublin staging the Olympics with the man himself?

What a touch. To many of you Gay Mitchell is just a brass-necked, hard-nosed TD with an eye on the main chance, but there is true romance in the heart of a man who makes it all up to you in such a novel way. The outstretched hand, the offer to discuss the Gay Olympics in the relative privacy of a Today FM show. I was touched, but (teasingly) unavailable. He sang solo. Sweetly. Like Romeo beneath the balcony.

And I sat back and closed my eyes and decided there and then not to fret about the Gay Olympics. What does it profit a man to point out that we have enough dirty syringes lying around this city without playing hosts to the Olympics, that we don't have and will never have the infrastructure to host the thing? Or the weather. Or the competence.

Or even the financial wherewithal to provide the Olympic movement with an indemnity against losses. I'm done with worrying.

No. I decided instead to just marvel at the small but perfectly formed Mr Mitchell. What a great heart beats beneath that shiny quiff. It was at the time of the Barcelona Olympics that Gay first announced his Olympian dream. I remember once going on telly with him, and first he filleted me (he played MLK, repeating over and over that he had a dream. I played the sweaty man saying but, but, but). And then he made me laugh.

Towards the end of that TV show I got a word in. Nine words, in fact. I said, "But Have You Ever Even Been To An Olympics?"

And Gay drew himself up to his full height and said, haughtily, "I Have Stood In Five Olympic Villages."

Which is like being asked if you knew what it was like to have been at the centre of Beatlemania and replying that, yes indeed you did, you had been to several wax museums. I knew immediately that this was a hard neck that would someday be garlanded with laurels.

Twelve years have passed since. Wonderful years for Gay and I. Back then, Pat Hickey pointed out that this country couldn't provide the toilet facilities for an Olympics. I think he meant it quite literally. Gay didn't care though. He had stood in five Olympic villages. All at one time, for all I know.

Twelve years. So much has happened, but Gay has endured. He's as steadfast as the Duracell bunny. English soccer fans have rioted at Lansdowne, causing the abandonment of a full international. They found Lansdowne surprisingly easily to dismantle. Crumbly even. We're still playing internationals there, though. What an advertisement it is.

And our swimming community has covered itself in glory. We provided the sport with its most celebrated drugs cheat. And we had to scrap the IASA altogether.

We've forced our finest athlete to get stripped and changed into different gear as she stood in the tunnel before an Olympic race.

Our World Cup soccer team has prepared for the tournament by travelling 23 hours to a remote island which had no proper soccer pitch. Cunningly, we brought no training equipment, and then we evened things out by leaving the island without our best ever player.

We've played hosts to the opening stages of the Tour de France and seen that particular race degenerate into a farrago of drugs and lies which effectively finished the event off as a credible sporting spectacle.

And we've come fifth in a competition to stage something as relatively modest as a fraction of the 2008 European soccer championships.

We've had a five-year - no, wait, six years now - debate over building something as straightforward as a national stadium. We've seen the lease run out on Morton Stadium in Santry. We've listened to our Taoiseach blather on endlessly about his dream for Abbotstown, his plan for precisely replicating the colossal, loss-making, white- elephantish, money-down-the-drain project of Homebush Bay in Sydney.

We've created the phenomena of the Red Cow roundabout and the M50. Doh! We've had endless planning tribunals. Doh! We've built a port tunnel to take away the big trucks and we've discovered that the port tunnel is too small for the big trucks. Doh! We've had a Celtic Tiger and lost it. Doh!

So through many toils, dangers and fears has Gay Mitchell already come. He is Crowelike in his gladiatorial defiance of all logic and sense. He has a dream. I have another column.

It's a luuurve thing, a luuurve supreme.