…British film in competition at this year’s Cannes Film Festival is “Love You More”, a short film directed by the artist Sam Taylor-Wood, and adapted by Patrick Marber from the very sexually explicit story he wrote for “Speaking With The Angel”. We at TreeHouse (the school received all profits from the book) are very proud.
 
  I received two complaints about “Speaking With The Angel”, and the writers of both letters were unhappiest about “Love You More” and Irvine Welsh’s story. One of these outraged people wanted his money back. “Am I really that out of touch?” he asked plaintively. I told him that he was, and refused to give him his money back on the not unreasonable grounds that he’d clearly already read the book.  He then wrote back again, saying that he would send TreeHouse their portion of the cover price if I would send him back the rest. At this point, I’m afraid, I decided that the correspondence was over.
 
  Anyway, I am now going to ask Penguin to produce a movie tie-in edition of Patrick’s nine-page story, with a suitably shocking cover. It’s all in a good cause.

“I’ll tell you where it all went wrong for Arsene Wenger,” said a friend after the first leg of the Champions’ League quarter-final against Liverpool, a game that Arsenal were unlucky not to win.  “That two-all draw against Bolton, when we threw away a two-goal lead.” Like many Arsenal fans, I remember the game well – it was a decisive moment in the race for the Premier League, and those two dropped points meant that Arsenal would not win the title…in 2003. According to my friend, we have been on a sad, slow but steady decline ever since.
 “What about 2004? When we won the League without losing a match? You don’t think he temporarily stopped the rot that year?”
 “That was a disappointing season,” he said. (My italics.) “We should have won the Champions’ League, and he chucked the FA Cup away.”
 This is the mindset of a certain kind of football fan. Becoming champions of your country in an unbeaten season is no use if there aren’t a couple of cups to go with it; and the championship is not an end in itself, but only a stepping-stone that allows you to climb towards more championships and cups. This is the mindset, in other words, of a fan who will be disappointed every year. If he were a Manchester United fan, he might have allowed himself a brief smile at the end of the treble-winning ’99 season; but other than that, it’s hard to imagine where the joy of following a team might come from.
 All Arsenal fans are disappointed this week. A season that had begun to promise so much has ended in calamity and despair. If I were Arsene Wenger, though, I would console myself with the thought that, had Arsenal held on for five minutes at Anfield on Tuesday night, seen off Chelsea in the semi-finals, and trounced Manchester United or Barcelona in the final in Moscow, some fan somewhere would still be complaining about his failure to shore up the defence in the 2003 run-in. In other words – what’s the point of winning anything, ever? Unless, of course, you’re going to win every game, for all eternity.

…to Christian O’Connell’s morning show on Virgin this week, you have a chance of winning five grand – yes, five thousand English pounds – in a competition to create a soundtrack for Slam. You just have to submit five songs that you think would be appropriate for the story. There are clues in the book, of course, and as I’m judging the competition, anyone who shows any evidence of having flicked through it in a bookshop will be ahead of the game. I will be announcing the result on air at 6.45 am on Friday. 6.45 am is a quarter to seven in the morning, in old money. The lengths I’ll go to, to promote my own work! I usually sound pretty good then, though. Ask any of my kids.