Freddie Flintoff

I bought the 2005 Ashes box set the day it came out, actually. It's been gathering dust for some time since its initial frenetic burst of activity in my DVD player, which is as it should be. Past glories mature better in the memory than they do on screen. And the memories are abundant, and most seem to feature Andrew Flintoff, who announced yesterday, after what must have been a close to soul destroying two-year programme of surgical procedures, bouts of ungodly rehabilitation, and ultimate failures to put back together his crocked knee, that he is finally retiring from all forms of cricket.

The timing could have been a lot better. Coming as it did on the final day of the most exciting County Championship finale in recent years, the announcement became the day's big story, overshadowing what proved to be an enthralling dénouement to the title race. A calculated move, I'm sorry to say, and one I hope had more to do with his advisers than himself. Even if that is the case, he has in the last few years proved himself very media savvy in his attempts to build the Flintoff brand, something the old school have sneered at but with which I've never had a problem - if a charisma-bypass like David Beckham can do it, why shouldn't he? But that was a step too far.

Now I'm going to talk about how he will be remembered.

He always said he was a batsman who bowls; his own insistence aside, it turned out to be more the other way around, but either way he was that rarest, most valuable of cricketing breeds: a genuine all-rounder. His statistics don't quite much up to past all-round greats like Botham and Khan, and they are dwarfed in comparison to his peer Jaques Kallis. But you ask any neutral cricket lover from Bombay to Brisbane which of those two they would hand over their hard-earned to watch, and they'll plump for Freddie Flintoff every time. At any rate, statistics are, as a wiser man than I once noted, the obsession of the unimaginative - and it's the imagination that Flintoff inspired whenever he came out to bat or got ready to bowl. He had the ability to make grown men weep - and not just supporters of the opposition, either. Lumps in throats were a by-product of Fred on a cricket field.

It's something of a cliché, so I'll allow Michael Vaughan to say it: "He cleared bars," the former England captain wrote yesterday, "and he would then go and join them in it afterwards." As a batsman, he was a stroke-making thug of a player. At his best, his brutal power meant that, if his game was in synch, his six-hitting could take the game away from the opposing team in less than a session, less than ten overs. The magic that seemed to twinkle around the ground when he was in the mood was like no other; I recall him swatting, seemingly at will, these mighty sixes on (I think) the way to a Test hundred against the West Indies in 2004 - with one of these he managed to pick out his own father in the crowd. Flintoff Snr. brought a bit of reality to the proceedings by contriving to drop the catch, but the look on Fred's face more than made up for the aberration. As a fielder, standing there at second slip with the batsmen's nicks disappearing into his huge mitts like they were just happy to get home, he was simply peerless.

His bowling was always quick and hostile, his strength and height enabling him to bang it in and shit up the opposing batsman, but in the second half of his career he picked up a bit more pace, in spite of his catalogue of injuries. Now a genuine fast bowler, he also added to his game the ability to get prodigious swing, both conventional and reverse. And late swing, to boot. The combination comprehensively overpowered Ricky Ponting in one of The Great overs in 2005, a defining point in a series that came to be known as Freddie's Ashes long before any news broke yesterday.

For all his mighty deeds on the field, the strange thing about him was his almost contradictory sense of familiarity. Despite his being a top-class sportsman, you knew someone just like him. You got the feeling that if you ever struck up a conversation with him down the pub, the evening might end with you round his gaff, closing the curtains against the break of dawn while he scoured the kitchen cupboards for a bottle of coffee liqueur he swears he saw in there last week or whenever. One of my favourite images was him being interviewed by the BBC or ITV before one of the England football team's 2006 World Cup games, at the ground it was being played at. Pissed as a fart (it was a lunch-time kick-off, I seem to remember), he rambled on almost incoherently while his good friend and England team-mate Steve Harmison stood by, sniggering like a loon. Anybody who's ever been to a proper house party that somehow just didn't manage to end would have recognised the tableau immediately. Not just a great, inspiring player, but a hoot to boot. Nice one, Freddie, we'll be lucky to see your kind again - and I'm dusting off that box set tonight.

Winston and the Black Dog

I was dreaming of a long flight of stairs, and in the dream I knew there was a park at the top of them. I had just decided to ascend when I felt something tugging at my leg. I woke up and saw Winston sitting at the end of my bed. He was staring into the laptop.

"You were snoring," he said.

"I was sleeping."

"Well I wish you wouldn't."

"Sleep?"

"Snore."

I knew he'd been drinking even before I saw the Highball next to the computer. He pointed at the screen and I saw he was on Gumtree again. He was fascinated by it for some reason.

"What's a WAG?" he asked.

"It stands for 'Wives And Girlfriends'."

He half turned to me and I could see in the weak light of the screen how his eyes glistened beneath his furrowed brow. "They are advertising on here a website which young ladies can join in order to become one of these WAGs. Can they not go about it in the normal fashion?"

"Well, a WAG is the girlfriend of a rich, professional footballer. It's kind of a thing now."

"So this website is for women who want to marry a rich football player."

It wasn't a question but I answered anyway. "I guess."

"So they themselves can become rich and, presumably, famous. By association."

"Well there are varying degrees, Winston... But yeah, sounds like it."

"Jesus Christ," I barely heard him say.

He turned away from me and raised the glass of Scotch to his lips. He took three long, deep swallows, but when he put the glass down it contained no less liquor than before.

I pulled the covers off and sat next to him.

"How bad is it?" I asked, rubbing the sleep from my eyes.

He made a snorting noise through his nose and then was silent.

We sat like that. The steady flow of traffic outside was mesmerising, and I began to doze. I was jolted back by Winston's elbow digging into my ribs.

"I am dead, you know," he said mildly.

"That's right. You're a ghost."

He laughed, and just then he sounded young, and his eyes began to sparkle with something more than booze and sadness as he recited to me: "'A ghost! One trusts such things? In will, and sight?'"

I had no idea what he was talking about. "Is that... Shakespeare, or something?"

"Ha! Close - Master Winston Churchill, I believe it was." He smiled, and whatever had been dancing in his eyes vanished as suddenly as it had appeared.

He took another drink from his bottomless glass, and I waited. He drank and drank and when he was finished he slammed the glass down. "This," he bellowed at it, "no longer fucking works!"

I nodded my head. "I know man, it doesn't help anyth-"

"I didn't say it doesn't fucking help, I said it doesn't fucking work! When you are dead, alcohol no longer has any effect on you. Whatsoever. Point of fact."

"But I've seen you drunk loads of times. Like... now?"

His shoulders hunched and he held his hands up before me as if they held something. "What you see is a pantomime," he said, his voice wavering almost imperceptibly on the last syllable. "A placebo. Psychosomatic bullshit. I go through it because I know how to, do you see? But it doesn't work, and because it doesn't work it doesn't help. And so it rolls in, as it always did whensoever it would desire... and I'm powerless." He stared into me, his eyes wild, and what I saw within them wasn't fear or anger but a perplexed despair far more dreadful to witness than either. He turned away and bowed his head. I tried to put my hand on his shoulder but it went straight through him.

After a while he looked up, but not at me. "What time is it?"

I did not want to get into this.

"What time is it?" he repeated.

"It's six to midnight," I said eventually. "They haven't moved it since you last asked, Winston. They haven't moved it since January - and that was to put it back."

He wasn't listening. "Six minutes," he muttered under his breath.

"It's not..." But I didn't know what it wasn't. "It's not... so bad," I finished weakly.

He took another drink, then wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. A faint smile appeared as he patted me firmly on the back. "Stephen, you're an idiot," he said - not unkindly - and then he faded away, taking his Scotch glass with him.

A Somewhat Feeble Defence

procrastinate verb prəʊ ˈkræs.tɪ.neɪt

to keep delaying something that must be done, often because it is unpleasant or boring

(Cambridge Dictionary)

Sometimes, not often, but sometimes a piece of work that should take me, say, two hours, takes me two hours. These are joyous, momentous occasions. They restore my faith in... all sorts of things. Actually that isn't really true. They only restore my faith in myself. But I suppose under the header "self" lies all sorts of things I could be referring to, like, er, ability for one, I suppose? Competency, definitely competency. So, those two. They - the occasions when I complete a piece of work on time (not before, though, never before) - restore my faith in my ability and competency. Which is rather lovely, when it happens, which, as I mentioned in the opening line, it doesn't very often.

So I'm happy and pleased and maybe a little bit smug until I realise that the only reason I finished it in exactly two hours is because I had exactly two hours in which to finish it. Do you see? I had no choice. I was panicked into forced creativity. It doesn't count and must be stricken from the record. I lose, somehow.

Of course, it's now harder than ever for writers to keep focused when trying to bash something out on their laptops.

Not like that.

Facebook, for instance. Cursed, wretched thing. Why don't I just ignore it completely, or even deactivate my account, and get some work done? The answer is... well I'm not entirely sure what the answer is. The suggestion makes perfect sense to me. But would it really do any good? What about e-mails? Gotta have e-mails. Got to have 'em. So if I had no Facebook, I'd just be checking my non-existent new e-mail messages every ten minutes, which I do anyway. And then there's, you know, the internet. Who's that guy that played that guy in that thing? I might idly wonder while attempting to navigate some tricky opening paragraph. Buggered if I know... but I bet IMDb does! As for Wikipedia, I just don't want to talk about Wikipedia.

So, cunningly, I disconnect the internet. But my laptop has Solitaire. Now I hate Solitaire, and after my ninth or tenth game I remember this, so I close that down too. Now it's just me and the blank page... and maybe just one more quick game of Solitaire. Or Minesweep, do computers still come with Minesweep? No, this one doesn't, I'll just reconnect the internet and download a version... And so on. So it's the fault of computers, then? So when writers were using word processors and typewriters they didn't have any of these problems, right? Wrong. Ever heard of pens? Ever heard of paper? Ever heard of doodling?

So let's say for argument's sake that you could successfully ignore all these distractions like a professional, whatever one of those is. What happens then? Why, then the questions start, of course: Have you brushed your teeth? Are you seriously happy with the layout of your room? A snack, do you fancy a snack? I bet there's some Wotsits left. Somewhere. In the world. Go find them.

You might be reading this and thinking to yourself, "Gee, this guy is lame." And the truth is, I couldn't agree more. My only comfort is the knowledge that this is not an uncommon affliction. Down the ages, writers of all levels of experience and stature have done virtually anything to get out of writing. Not all of them, but enough to keep me from losing my happy thoughts completely. It can be incredibly satisfying, writing, but it can also be like volunteering daily to have your head put in a particularly belligerent vice. So if my constant meandering stops me from putting my own noggin through the computer screen, so bloody be it.