Writing fictional accounts of the lives of real people is a haunting experience. I don’t mean this in the sense that I believe I’m reliving their lives, but rather, I feel at every moment I’m not doing them justice. I feel my spiritual debts amassing with every line of dialogue I put into their mouths. I guess the difficulty I’m having with this script is that the characters feel very present to me, yet at the same time, I know that they are figments of my imagination as much as any character I might choose to create from nothing. The simple fact is that I cannot hope to capture an authentic moment. Everything written as ‘non-fiction’ is still in some senses ‘fiction’ because every moment is remembered less perfectly than it was lived.

Yet this gets me no further with my drama. I tried to get ahandle on this by watching Alan Bennett’s version of Anthony Blunt’s life, A Question of Attributation. He must have faced the same problems. If you aren’t consulting the real people, then you are interpreting their lives. The only way to remain loyal to the reality is to transform it in a way that does them some justice.

For Bennett, whatever actual history he recreates eventually slips into the grand design of the double-layered narrative, between the uncovering of the fifth man in the spy ring and the fifth man in the Titian painting. It matters little if his Blunt is anything like the real Blunt. In a way, his becomes more authentic because it is the one that people will remember. I don’t know who, in the end, should be the more grateful. The writer’s debt to his source material is perhaps outweighed by the honour the subject might feel to see his life reinterpreted.

I have to feel good. The football season’s back tomorrow.

Not many years ago, I wouldn’t have have anything to do with ‘the beautiful game’. Football was the domain of the tough kids at school who already had swastikas tattooed on their necks and membership forms to join the local ‘firm’ initialed by their parents. The crowd trouble of the seventies and eighties, the gang violence masquerading as club loyalty… none of this attracted me to a sport, which always seemed to be caked in mud, blood, and stale beer. It also put me off from looking at the game strategically; a factor I always look for in sport. I didn’t understand the meaning of 4-3-3 or 4-4-2 because, to be honest, it wasn’t something that seemed significant to what was going on between the two sets of goalposts. I don’t recollect is every being adequately explained. Football was Jimmy Hill, bad haircuts, muddy pitches, and crowd trouble. There seemed to be very little sport. It was hardly surprising that I became addicted to cricket from an early age. I put all my sporting prowess into learning the skills of inswining yorkers and off drives. Television explained the concepts behind the sport in a way that football would never get until Sky came along.

These days, I’m never happier than the first day of the Premiership season. I love the strategy, the rivalry between sets of talented players. I love to see new players establish themselves and the old players undergo a choice of scenarios taken from all the great classic dramas: heroes that rise, fall, or return. It’s all great stuff, but especially when Liverpool win.

Maintaining a blog can be so utterly unrewarding if you set yourself too high a goal. Which is why I’ve decided to keep a new blog that’s free of pictures, memes, and all the other things that make blogging such a chore. Not that writing isn’t itself difficult, but I want to see what it’s like running a blog using this new Windows Live Writer. It means I can update this blog each day, and take only the time it takes me to write a few words on whatever catches my eye.

And I don’t intend to advertise it. This is as it is…