“PATRICK VIEIRA TOLD MY SON EVERY ARSENAL PLAYER WAS GIVEN THE BOOK WHEN THEY SIGNED”
“I sometimes wonder if [Jurassic Park author] Michael Crichton got fed up talking about dinosaurs,” muses Nick Hornby as we wait for a menu to appear at Demartino, the busy Italian restaurant in Fitzrovia where FFT has arranged to meet.
“He had a really good idea for a book, then wrote it and ended up talking about it for the next 15 years.”
There’s a pregnant pause while he takes a sip of water. The audible gulp is not his. “The thing I had to talk about and keep talking about is the centre of my life in so many ways, what with the kids and the friendships that get shaped around football, so I’m very happy to keep talking about it. I tend to have friends who read, like movies, like music and also support Arsenal. Over the years, you can collect enough people like that to sustain your whole social life. I quite like talking about the football of the past too.” Well, that’s certainly a relief.
We’re here because , his autobiographical memoir, is 30 years old this summer and was a landmark book in so many ways. It was published three weeks after the Premier League came into being in 1992; turned into a film from his own adaptation starring Colin Firth five years later (and once again, more loosely, as an American rom-com by the Farrelly brothers in 2005); sold over a million copies worldwide; and is widely recognised as one of the most important books written about football (or indeed sport) and its place in the life of a fan. “It’s something
