WELL, HELLO HARRY AND THANKS FOR AGREEING TO THIS CHAT.
My pleasure. It seems a long time ago since we were chatting in The Back Page bookshop. I certainly wouldn’t mind a trip to watch Gateshead v Bromley these days – especially since The Heed’s stadium would be ideal for social distancing.
1. First of all, how are you dealing with life in lockdown?
Self-isolation is more or less the natural state of the writer, but I miss going to football every Saturday to eat KitKat and listen to the coaching staff bellow. “Get up early at the corners!” and other incomprehensible advice. There was a point where my hair was going full Motley Crue, but I bought some electric clippers, so now I look like the Foreign Legion’s crappest ever recruit instead.
2. Lockdown has meant a lot of TV watching for me, and one of the most memorable things I’ve seen was Sunderland ’til I Die - a real eye-opener seeing such a famous club self-destruct. As a Middlesbrough fan, what have you made of their decline and did you watch the series?
Yes I did watch it. It was very cleverly done. It made me think of William Golding’s comment about movie making: “In this business nobody knows anything”. Only in the case of some of those in charge of Sunderland you could add “and sometimes not even that much”. As fans we’re constantly assured that ‘football is a business’, but you really can’t imagine many of the people running football would actually find employment anywhere else, certainly not on the massive salaries they pull in – the hapless Martin Bain was reputedly on £1.2 million a year at the SoL, which beggars belief when they losing millions every months. I have a lot of friends who support Sunderland, in fact going to Roker Park with my next door neighbour John Ferguson was partly what inspired me to write The Far Corner, so I don’t take much pleasure in the mess they are in. Like most Boro fans I realise how lucky we are to have a decent, sensible owner in Steve Gibson, who supports the club. Before Gibson came along we had gone into receivership, the squad were training in Albert Park and we were playing home games at Hartlepool. Because of the haphazard governance for the game in England every club is just one bad owner away from total collapse.
3. Middlesbrough (in Ayresome Park days) feature in The Far Corner, one of the great football books (I’ve been checking North Shields results ever since reading it). You’ve now written an eagerly awaited sequel, which was due to come out last week, but the launch has been delayed. Do you have a definite date for its release and can you tell us a bit about the book? Have you been thinking about doing a sequel for a while?
The Farther Corner (as it’s imaginatively titled) should come out on August 6 th now, though all these things are kind of flexible in the current situation (why do those last two words always mean ‘you will get paid less/late’?). With luck it will be out before then, but that depends on the return of football and the re-opening of book shops. I’d thought about a sequel for a while, but this was pretty much the 25 th anniversary of The Far Corner so it made sense. I hadn’t realised when I wrote The Far Corner that football in England was on the verge of a massive upheaval – all-seater stadiums, huge TV deals, foreign owners, players and coaches – that would change it for ever. In 1994 the experience of watching football at Ayrsome Park was much the same as it had been for my Grandad when he first went in the years just before the Great War. He’d certainly have recognised the urinals in the Holgate End. So the book looks at that a bit and also the increase in support for non-League. But mainly it’s just me wandering around on buses and wittering on about Mick Harford and Arthur Horsfield.
4. What’s your favourite of your books and why?
The Far Corner made my career and brought lots of people into my life who became good friends, so I’d have to choose that. I also have a soft spot for Hound Dog Days which is my Mum’s favourite, though sadly nobody bought it, even though it had a cute picture of my dog Manny on the front.
5. This is a two part question. What, in your opinion, is the best football board game ever invented? I hear you have an impressive collection of games from all over the World. I had a few but none took up as much of my time as Waddington’s Test Match (“A fascinating cricket game”). Does your collection include non-football games?
I think the best is the two-player Spanish game, Soccer City in which you move the ball around the field using cards (I’m talking about board games here, not dexterity games like Subbuteo or Striker…). It’s very clever, not too complex and there’s barely any luck. There’s also a good Dutch game called Street Soccer (and a variant, Champions 2020) that, as you’d imagine from the Dutch, rewards passing and movement and has a slight chess-like feel to it. Oddly enough, somebody has just re-issued Wembley, which lots of us played as kids, though that has more in common with Monopoly with lots of dice rolling. Erm, I could go on and on (and on), but if you want to know more you can go on the BoardgameGeek website and look them up. As you may guess from this, my collection is quite large and includes games covering everything from chariot racing to South American drug running. I prefer toys to reality, generally.
6. How much planning goes into your books? Are you someone who carefully plans your chapters or do you favour a more spontaneous approach?
I used to be more spontaneous, but nowadays publishers won’t just accept a one page pitch like they used to. You have to give them chapter plans and the like, which is actually a good thing for me as it makes me focus earlier. Still, I feel books evolve as you are writing them. If you are actually going out and about watching things – as I normally do – you can’t plan too much as you have no idea what will happen, who you will talk to and what they will say. When I started writing The Far Corner it was going to be mainly about the North-East’s professional clubs. Then, early in the season, I went to Hillheads to see Whitley Bay and the bloke in front of me got fed up with the opposition goalie shouting at his defenders and bellowed “Will you shut up, keeper? Some of us are trying to sleep”. And that lead me to focus more on Northern League, which I think made the book much better. Though I do wonder if I’d told the publisher, “It’s going to mainly feature clubs with average home attendances in double figures’ he’d have been quite so keen to commission it.