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I signed schoolboy forms for Watford when I was 12, but then my parents got divorced, and I never kicked a ball for three years. I rebelled, I left home, but getting back into football sorted me out. It was the second chance I needed.

When I was about 12, I spent the summer writing four plays on my dad's old typewriter for a school play competition. And I wrote little comic bits at secondary school and at university.

I used to spend a lot of time at football training, but that time was later spent in amateur acting classes and my local youth theatre, in plays at school and after-school clubs. That filled the void.

I didn't play organized football until I was in the seventh grade. Up until that point, I only played at recess and in the backyard.

I used to write stories. Handwriting stories in school were a big deal for me. That's kind of what I did.

Writing-wise, I started when I was 17. Whatever was bothering me, I could just write about it in a song. I was in the west suburbs of Chicago, then I moved an hour south, and then I went to school up on the South Side - Saint Xavier, though I was at Purdue for a second before I dropped out.

I only started concentrating on football as a career when I left school at 18. I played golf for the Scottish and British boys' teams.

I started writing 'Brick Lane' when my children were two years and five months old. We were on holiday in the north of England when I was overtaken by a compulsion to start writing.

I would have been about seven years old when the formative years of my competitive football education began. I was playing in the local leagues around Manchester, playing against lads from tough areas who had been taught they had to fight for everything.

I didn't do plays at school, because I didn't have the confidence. At 14, I was at boarding school in Devon and I suffered from dyslexia quite badly, but they had a very good department there which specialised in it.