I can get all the chat and analysis on footie that I need - in my head, son

They all think, in this house, that I spend all my time either reading about football in the papers or watching it on television. If only. I must waste hours sleeping and eating, not to mention working. I really must try harder to put my life on this planet to better use.

As it is, there is just so much football I do not read about or watch, just as there is so much on the radio I always avoid. Not just Thought for the Day, as the whole nation goes to the lav when that starts, but anyone with a caring voice, such as Fergal Keane, that woman O'Leary, even Michael Buerk and John Humphrys when they put on their phoney, concerned voice to interview someone you've never heard of who has had to make some boring choice, yawn, yawn, or faced a supposed moral dilemma, God give us strength.

With football, I never watch the pre-match or half-time studio analysis. In the country, I have it timed to perfection. There are two fields I know I can walk around, leaving the house when the whistle blows and getting back exactly in time for the restart.

I never watch Saturday evening's Match of the Day live - what, stay up till 10.30pm? It's not natural. I video it and then watch it on Sunday morning, whizzing on when it's a game I've already seen on Sky or there's any chat. I can get all the chat and analysis I need - in my head, son. These days, during the game itself, unlike being there in the flesh, you get immediate action replays of goals, saves or anything of interest or dispute. You don't need the "experts" to trudge through it all again later.

I reckon, when I have three live games in a day to watch, oh rapture, roll on the World Cup, that out of eight hours slumped in front of the telly, I can just nod off for two hours.

In the papers, I have loads of football topics that I never read. Last weekend, for example, before the big Liverpool-Man United game, when I saw acres in all the papers about Gary Neville slagging off Liverpool, I thought goody, I need never read a word.

Anything on diving, over which all the papers have been getting themselves into a self-righteous lather, I can skip at once. Ditto "will Wembley be ready in time". Supposed fights in the tunnel, disputed penalties, was it over the line or not, oh no, spare us. I miss everything that the TV time-servers call "talking points". They're all cobblers, rubbish stories, of interest only to desperate sub-editors.

Hooliganism: what are the Germans going to do about it, fantasy mobile brothels, eyes at once go glazed. World Cup ticket fiddles, as if I care. Managers getting bungs, dodgy agents, do us a favour, tell us something we don't know.

In FourFourTwo, a magazine I love, which every fan should read, the minute I see David Platt coming up, talking tactics with all his stupid diagrams, I run for cover. In the Sunday Times, whose sports section is excellent, I breathe a sigh of relief when I eventually get to Hugh McIlvanney, knowing he'll be pompously saying the obvious. With the Times's The Game, which is the best daily coverage of footie, I never bother to plough through anything about money in football, or if they've got some dopey cause into their head.

When I'm jumping up in the middle of our family Sunday lunch to catch the live match, kicking off at the really stupid time of 1.30pm, I always tell them that if I were a true slave to football, I wouldn't even be sitting down at all. I'd have no time for eating, sleeping, breathing. In fact, you're lucky to see so much of me. Make the most of me when I return in 45 minutes, and don't scoff all the pudding.

I suppose, friends, it happens in all areas - art, literature, music. No matter how much we may love them, blind prejudice or total boredom in the face of certain artists, writers and composers, or when they get on to certain topics, means we should always manage some time for other things. Living, it's called.

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