I like most kinds of sport. Unlike almost every other aspect of life, sport has structure, rules, meaning. When you play or watch a game, you can briefly shed the knowledge that everything else you do is pointless and accidental and, until it ends, enjoy performing or observing actions which make sense, which are deliberate and aim to achieve a specific, designed and agreed result. Golfers who thank their Lord Jesus for helping them to guide that little white ball into a hole don’t get it. If, when they lost matches, they heaped scorn and derision on him for his failings or claimed that he’d missed the team bus, that would be more consistent and make more sporting sense, but invoking his name introduces an element which is not covered by the rules and is thus extraneous. Games have a beginning, a middle and an end. They are self-contained pockets of significance in an otherwise absurd continuum.

But modern life is moving so quickly from the values which used to inform it that some games are breaking out of the straitjacket of their codes and seeking to become as unstructured and chaotic as mainstream living. The experience, for example, of watching football has become philosophically far more challenging. By the way, the Americans call their version of the game soccer, because they already have a game called football, one in which the ball is passed and controlled with the hands, which, in an absurd universe, makes complete sense.

So what’s happened to football to bring about the change? In a word, money. It’s a clear fact that paying men grotesquely inflated sums can potentially ruin their health. There’s a distinct statistical correlation between the size of the weekly pay cheque and their pain thresholds. When fouled, female players, who earn relatively little compared with their male counterparts, get back up and get on with the game. But the lightest of touches (and sometimes even when there’s no contact at all), has men writhing in agony, often compounding the injury by doing several rolls along the turf. The neural pathways are also affected because, from whatever anatomical location the contact or near-contact occurs, the pain shoots immediately to their faces, which they bury in their hands, emitting through their fingers agonised cries which are pitiful to hear.

The same distortion occurs in their moral equilibrium too because, while women accept the referee’s decisions with rarely any signs of protest, men see injustices being perpetrated at every whistle blast and crowd round officials to help them understand how the rules of the game are being distorted by their interpretations of them.

So football seems to have changed irrevocably. It’s moving closer and closer to the situations penned by Ionesco, Beckett and that famous goalkeeper, Albert Camus. To complete the progression, all it now needs is for the ubiquitous gender gap to be closed. My contribution to the debate about the future of our national sport is simply stated: if we want to see women playing the game as it should be played – with histrionics, simulation, immaturity and an awareness that the ego is more important than the team – we need to pay them much more.

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I know people are scared of spiders. They’re a sort of template for creepy, unnatural monsters. That brilliant old movie The Incredible Shrinking Man has many very scary sequences, but the best is the one with the spider. They seem to represent all the dark, nasty things that lurk in our subconscious. They’re also much better than we are in many ways – not just connected with making webs or knowing the best recipes which have flies as the main ingredient. I don’t know if they have muscles but, whether they do or not, whatever it is that makes them able to scuttle so effectively works much better than our tendons and things.

I’m writing about them because I’ve just had to get rid of one from the bath. I’ve been cleaning the bit of the house I use as a study because it’s also where guests stay when they come (the only occasions when it sees a vacuum cleaner or duster). This spider had been in the bath for about a week (it’s a spare bathroom). I’d seen it every day and marvelled at the fact that it was often in exactly the same place it had been when I’d looked several hours or even a whole day before. We’re incapable of standing still that long and, even if we did, when we eventually decided to move, we’d creak, be racked with pain, stagger and generally feel terrible. But, if they’re disturbed, they can take off at top speed immediately and you don’t hear any spidery cries of ‘Oh shit, that hurts’.

Another thing. When I eventually had to get rid of my creepy visitor, I got a glass, put it over him, slipped a sheet of paper under the glass to keep him in and took him to the front door to let him go. I upended the glass, he fell about four feet (the equivalent of us jumping from the 15^th storey I’d guess), landed perfectly without bouncing and took off at Usain Bolt speed right away. Which is all very impressive.

Coincidentally, the following day I heard a spider expert on the radio talking about them. (BTW, don’t quote any of this in your PhD thesis on arachnids because I haven’t checked the facts and may be remembering them wrongly.) I’m sure he said they had 8 eyes, some on top of their head, some in front. In  addition to that, the tactics they have to use when they mate could very usefully be employed by most if not all men.

Very wisely, they’re scared stiff of females. Certainly some, if not all, make sure they tap out some great rhythms on her web before they actually sidle up to her. I don’t know if they’re special, agreed signals or the latest in arachnid Zumba routines, but they let her know they’re not a Big Spidery Mac. Makes sense when you think of what the female might do to you otherwise.

And the pièce de résistance is delivered by the one (or maybe more) which has (have) the courtesy and common sense to bring her a gift of a juicy meal. This level of romanticism is rewarded when she’s so busy enjoying it that she doesn’t notice him having his evil way with her as she eats.

We can learn a lot from these enterprising creatures if only we stop squishing them..

Fortunately for me, the word hiatus just means ‘gap’ – it can be big or little. When I used it in the heading of my last entry, I thought it would be short because my operation was due this week. Today, however, I got the news that I wouldn’t be going in until the 26th so we’re now talking of a stretched hiatus (which sounds like a gynaecological term but, as far as I know, isn’t). In fact, it’s now been stretched so far that it’s not a hiatus at all because I’ll probably post a couple more things in the interim. Instead then, it’s now a delayed hiatus, which is probably a cosmic anomaly.

Anyway, to celebrate or deplore this fact, I decided that it’s about time the poor old Sparrow got some attention. For no discernible reason (apart from the obvious fact that they’re literary masterpieces), readers seem to be showing some interest in the Jack Carston books, especially Material Evidence, but The Figurehead and The Sparrow Conundrum are languishing, seemingly unloved. The former did, of course, have its blaze of glory last month when I made it free for a couple of days and it leapt to number one in Amazon’s historical fiction list. It even earned a couple of 5 star reviews, too.

The Sparrow, despite 13 reviews (11×5 star, 2×4 star), is friendless, forlorn but, this weekend, will also be free. You can download it on Saturday 29th or Sunday 30th from the USA here and the UK here. 

The delayed hiatus also gives me more time to finish an interesting wee project. As part of the year of Creative Scotland, Haddo House, a National Trust for Scotland property near Aberdeen, is holding a crime festival on October 19-21. I’ll be repeating the workshop I gave in France but I’m also devising the scenario for families which visit the property to solve a mystery. It has to be suitable for ages 6-16, which is actually a difficult spread, but I still think it’ll be fun. The presence of young kids meant I had to scrap the first idea (the Laird has a habit of seducing chambermaids, they get pregnant, are sacked and want revenge, so murder him most foully). But 

it’ll still be interesting because I’ll set it in the mid 19th century, they’ll walk through 3 rooms, spotting (or not) clues, and then have to decide who knocked out the Laird and stole some money. They’ll then get a second chance because we’ll give them access to modern techniques – DNA, chemical analysis of soil and glass samples, fingerprints, etc., to show them how much easier it is to solve crimes nowadays.

It’s interesting for me because thinking up a story by starting with clues doesn’t feel natural. I prefer to get the characters interacting and let them decide who does the deed and how and why they do it. The clues are then by-products of their actions. But being forced out of your comfort zone is always a productive experience.

But forget all that, look into my eyes and repeat after me ‘Must download Sparrow. Must download Sparrow’..