I'm writing a book. Yes, I can confirm that I'm going to take all my unfinished ideas, baseless bragging from my early twenties and finally get it together. It will be a mammoth epic of 34521 pages, its plot complex and clever, based around the blueprint for traffic management in and/or around Junction 13 of the M50 in the run up to Christmas Eve. I'm also hoping to have it finished by next Tuesday. Despite its length, complexity and thoroughly unrealistic completion date, not to mention my chronic inability to finish colouring a book let alone write one, I still stand a better chance of winning the Man Booker prize than Colm Toibin.
Although Toibin happens to be the greatest creator of fiction we've produced since Bertie Ahern's legal team at the Mahon Tribunal, the great man is in danger of becoming the Ivan Lendl of international literature. Unless judging committees for book prizes stop infusing their decisions with the cruel pleasure of deliberately overlooking a man whose persistence, let alone talent, deserves to be rewarded, Toibin's only comfort will be when he wins the Nobel Prize. This of course will be soured by the BBC calling him British, and you just can't unring a bell.
Given his perceptibly shabby treatment by Booker, Toibin's next novel will be called "The Testament of Colm" and will consist of: one slightly scrappy looking jotter page, drenched in a tin mug of Pernod, with four words scrawled in regularly interchanged order over and over again: when, prize, give and sodding.
