I’ve written two books, A Song For Europe (http://www.amazon.com/A-Song-For-Europe-ebook/product-reviews/B00492CQ2K) and Standing Up.  Both feature a male protagonist and the comedy, especially in Standing Up, is  edgy and acerbic.  But here’s the thing – they’re both unashamedy romantic comedies. And I’m a man.  Let’s be clear about that.

A Song For Europe is about a middle aged, middle class family man whose life disintegrates when he is made redundant.  His wife’s career soars as his prospects diminish.  It is in music that he finds redemption, eventually (and circuitously) becoming Britain’s entrant in the Eurovision Song Contest.  I’ll say no more (read it, for Chrissakes!  Please?) except to say that at its heart beats his love for his children and, ultimately, an old flame.

Standing Up is about another loser, a single solicitor who stumbles into stand-up comedy in order to win the love of the woman he has obsessed about for eighteen years.  It is his beloved teenage daughter who keeps him grounded as he flounders, before eventually finding true love.  It’s a bit more complicated than that, to be honest.  And funnier.

I’m a man.  I mentioned that, right?  And I like romantic comedies.  There, I’ve said it.  I got a bit of a lump in my throat at the end of Love Actually.   I suspect a lot of men did but are too macho to admit it.  What’s wrong with having a bit of love flying about the place?  We all strive for it; even tough geezers with shaven heads and signet rings, I imagine.

On the page, I like my characters and situations to be believable – no horse-riding Lords of the Manor, no dazzling doctors with magical fingers equally adept in the operating theatre and the bedroom – and my comedy to be razor-sharp.  Schmalz, if it absolutely can’t be avoided, is acceptable in small doses.  Call it romcom, call it chicklit.   It’s irrelevant.  Is it romantic, entertaining, funny, well plotted, well written, believable?  Ok, then it’s probably a decent book and that’s the end of it.  Why shouldn’t an author succeed in the genre without being called Tilly or Lucy or something?

I know there are a handful successful male romcom authors out there, but they are dwarfed in number by the avalanche of female authors, many of whom, I should add,  are quite brilliant – this tirade is not misogynistic.  But if romcommers are being discouraged – like my good friend – simply on the grounds of gender, something is wrong.  If anyone tells me One Day isn’t a romcom, I’ll…well I’ll get very put out indeed.  Oh yes I will.  Somehow, David Nicholls’s three excellent novels have avoided the romcom label, but that’s what they are deep down.  If some bright spark had pigeonholed him as a ‘mere’ romcom author and suggested he change sex or give up, we might never have had the pleasure of his writing.

So here’s my clarion call to agents, editors, publishers and the like – just read the book and decide if it’s any good.  Don’t judge it by its cover (wow, just thought that one up all by myself).  A romcom doesn’t have to be narrowly defined;  it can have a male protagonist; it can be properly romantic and properly funny.  Several people who have read A Song For Europe have told me they laughed out loud and shed the odd tear (at different points in the book, I hope).  Job done. But it’s still a romcom.  And I’m still a bloke.

So, duly short-listed, I attended the second audition which entailed standing in a London street and accosting innocent shoppers. My aims: to make them pose for a photo with me, hug me at length and accept a wrapped present. What could be funnier? Well, my impending knee replacement for a start; nausea, 16 hour traffic jams, death, Joe Pasqali…anything, actually. It was vile, albeit almost every victim fell for my charms. I don’t hug my wife unless I absolutely have to, but here I was hugging complete, and often odorous, strangers. A couple of late middle-aged women actually seemed to enjoy it (I think I pulled a pensioner – I got her number anyway) and even the younger men, muscles tensing, generally let me get on with it. Halfway through I was ready to eliminate myself from the process, but professionalism got the better of me. In the end, even a shitload of dosh wouldn’t have persuaded me to prostitute myself for such a grim spectacle. On the upside, they didn’t offer me the job, my evident distaste for the task probably being patent.

What else? I wandered into a Reading multiplex last week to kill time before my gig in a hamlet so remote, I can neither remember its name nor how I got there. It went rather well, in fact, but I’m here to discuss Bridesmaids. It started fantastically well, Kirsten Wiig and her co-stars striking the perfect balance between wit and believability. If it strayed too often into farce and and gross-out territory (one scene was a scatalogical nightmare) I still laughed out loud several times in that Reading concrete box, something I rarely do in cinemas (in Reading or anywhere else). I like my romcoms to focus on the ‘com’ and Bridesmaids didn’t disappoint. The characters and realtionships were real, the tone true. I like to think I’ve struck the same note in my two romcom novels, A Song For Europe (available at Amazon Kindle – http://www.amazon.com/A-Song-For-Europe-ebook/product-reviews/B00492CQ2K if you fancy) and Standing Up, which is now being developed as a TV comedy/drama, but which I am intending to make available in novel form on Amazon.

First blog for ages. That wasn’t too bad, was it?

Now, ok, I’m a nice, educated, middle class boy, but I’ve been going, come rain or sleet, week in, week out (home games only, of course) to watch football for 45 years.   That’s ‘cos I love the game.  I’ve witnessed yobbery, of course, like when I was on the Tube on the way to White Hart Lane in the 70s and 25 Man U lunatics got on and proceeded to torment my companion, a rather overweight young man.  This involved sitting on him, slapping him and, delightfully, emptying the contents of their noses all over him.  They’re probably all 55 now – I wonder if they look back on that episode with fondness (actually, hopefully they’re all dead).  I also recall walking outside the Spurs ground one afternoon behind an Arsenal fan naive enough to wear a scarf.  A Spurs fan walked past him, casually smashed his face and told him not to wear his scarf next time.  Sage advice indeed.  I’ve seen huge mobs of nutters running and bellowing like cavemen up and down Tottenham High Road looking for opposing nutters.  And I’ve seen punch-ups in the stands.  It’s part and parcel, isn’t it?  But I do everything I can to avoid all this shit; I cycle to the ground just in time for kick-off, take my seat, tolerate the fucking morons who sit behind me  for 90 minutes, and scoot off home, no harm done.

I used to go to England matches at Wembley before I got caught up in the middle a bunch of yobs throwing horse manure at each other – no, they weren’t wearing gloves.  Nice.  So I resolved  to go only if absolutely necessary. I’m not sure an FA Cup semi against pathetic opponents who were bound to beat us qualified as such, but I decided to brave it.  I cycled there, leaving it as late as possible.  As I walked up the crowded ramp towards the ground, the chanting started.  It wasn’t cheery, supportive stuff.  Instead, the Spurs fans were singing abusive songs and swearing ferociously at the Portsmouth fans walking alongside us.  The violence in the language was nasty, but the macho posturing, the jostling with no regard for anyone around them, the stink of BO and smoke and alcohol and chips was appalling – it was how I imagine getting stuck in the middle of a raging herd of incontinent, shit-covered buffalo might feel, only way more repellent.

At the top of the ramp, I was forced to stop.  There was no way through because about a thousand Spurs yobs had congregated with the express intention of hurling vile abuse at a similar knot of Pompey fans and, if possible, killing them.  Three policemen tried to keep the mobs apart, but they were pressing inexorably closer.  Had that happened, I’d have been caught up with no escape.  You read about some middle-aged bloke getting stabbed or bottled and forget about it – but that could have been me.  Luckily, a copper on a horse separated the mobs and I got through, only to get caught up in another heaving, foetid crowd of morons, most of them shaven-headed and wearing cheap gold-plated earrings, queuing to get in.

Inside, the steward sent me up twelve thousand stairs to the wrong seat – I’ve got bad knees, you know – and, finally seated, I found myself but ten seats from the Pompey fans, separated only by a bit of netting and some woefully puny stewards.  A young man sat down beside me with, I assume, his nice old granddad.  The young man directed a few asinine but harmless remarks at the baying Pompey hordes, before granddad stood up, gave them all the wanker sign, called them cunts and sat down.  That’s how to do it, son.

Watching from that height, it looked like Subbuteo, and for all their bestial posturing outside, the Spurs fans around me barely raised a whimper.  I left on 85 minutes knowing full well it was going to extra time.  Didn’t want to watch it (the outcome was obvious) and I couldn’t wait to get out of there.

So, what do we conclude?  Middle age has little to do with it, albeit I’m increasing intolerant of anti-social behaviour. But I’ve always been repulsed by the extremes one finds amongst football mobs; they lose touch with their humanity, yet I bet most of them are good to their mums and wouldn’t say boo to a goose under normal circumstances. It makes me question how long I’ll keep going.  I’d already decided that I wouldn’t go to the Cup Final in the unlikely event that we beat those anonymous, bankrupt amateurs, and I suspect Wembley has seen the last of me.

Hornby’s screenplay for An Education was a thing of beauty and I assumed it signalled a return to Fever Pitch/High Fidelity form.  The pigswill period of About a Boy, How To Be Good and the execrable A Long Way Down was surely over. (I shan’t mention Slam.  Oops, sorry, just did.  Hope I haven’t spoiled your dinner.  Still, I know it wasn’t aimed at an old fart like me so maybe we’ll forgive him that suppurating pile of shit).

So, M & S booklight firmly attached, I launched right in on Juliet, Naked during my first sleepless night in the Big Apple. It was 4 am, but even to a man whose biological clock had him alert and perky, the opening pages were soporific. Maybe it needed a bit of time, a bit of patience.  Maybe it was a grower.  So I persevered.  But there’s something about Hornby’s obsession with obscure music and singers – and the characters through whom he pursues it – that’s becoming infuriating.  Here we have to contend with a dull character’s childlike devotion to a has-been and somehow find it amusing or endearing.  But it’s not.  It’s just dull, like watching a stamp-collector paste his precious little bits of paper into an album with those translucent, not-really-sticky sticky things.  I know the character is meant to be a pernickety dullard living a dull life somewhere dull, but that smacks of self-indulgence on Hornby’s part, given that he does nothing to alleviate the one-note gloom, unlike his older stuff in which obsessives and n’er-do-wells are redeemed by rapier wit.  And if there’s something intrinsically amusing about a bunch of nebbishes sharing the same pedantic obsession as the protagonist, Hornby hasn’t begun to nail it.

I haven’t even mentioned the dullard’s girlfriend.  She’s less dull, relatively attractive, switched on, self-knowing…which begs the question – why the fuck has she spent 15 years with an obsessional dullard?  She gets no sympathy from me.  Why should we care about either of these people?  And as for the object of the dullard’s obsession – a drug-addled  American singer with a string of exes and myriad out-of-wedlock children…I mean, he’s such a shallow cliche, I reckon Hornby listed his character traits on the back of a match box.

Ok, now, a small confession.  I haven’t finished it.  I’m not sure I can.  When you keep expecting a book to get better and it keeps striking the same laborious note, there comes a point when you have to give it best.  I will try, maybe when I’ve finished the excellent and classy Intuition by Allegra Goodman.   If I can bear to plough through the rest of Hornby’s turgid, anal, bland-a-thon, I’ll report back.  Till then…

Anyroad, if you were following my old blog, please come and follow the new one.  And to the zillions of you out there who have never read my blog, you don’t know what you’re missing.   It’s really good.  I critique shit books, drone on about cycling in the piss, moan about people who can’t write for toffee getting published while I can’t break into the clique-ridden world of publishing…and so much more.

Hey, you might even learn something, like, there is no such thing as a following wind when you’re cycling and; Tony Parsons is the most pathetically inadequate author ever to sell a million books.  Stuff like that.  Why would you want to miss out?