Risking A Bit Of Heart-Felt

Day 140,Wednesday, May 20, 7am: I am feeling so, so, so, so good. Despite feeling pretty lousy. In fact, I'm feeling so good that I sometimes forget about the cold, the sore throat and the head full of cotton wool.

This, by the way, is not an advert, it's just a bit of Heart-Felt. Which, admittedly, is not to be encouraged, not too often anyway, and preferably not in public. But here goes. I'll risk it...

To date, I have had five reactions to my book and they've all been overwhelmingly generous. And, do you know, that is enough. That is all, and probably more, than I ever hoped for. I wanted somebody - just one somebody, not five of them - to get something out of it. I put a fair bit of feeling into the book, in between the flippancy, and I wanted somebody to notice.

I have never much rated what I do. I was a jobbing journalist for years. I wrote as well as I could but it didn't seem to add up to much. As a wire journalist, you wrote against the clock - or rather, against the unmerciless tick-tock of the second hand - and you never saw your audience. Your texts disappeared into the ether, never to be re-visited again. And, try as I could, I never considered that writing about sport could be termed as anything much more than froth.

But here I am with a book, and with five people who liked it. Bloody hell. That's a serious, serious highlight. So to Matthew, Martin, Juliet, Godfather John and Chris - thank you so much. You have made an old, decrepit, fat, burnt-out excuse of a house dad very happy indeed.

It won't last, of course.

In fact, I feel the Heart-Felt getting a bit over-bearing already. Back to the tried-and tested general grumpiness... it's so much comfortable to deal with.