MANY years ago, a work experience student from a local school, asked me where I got the ideas from to write a newspaper column.
"Give me a subject," I said, "and I'll write about it."
Unimpressed by my hubris, she said: "Chairs."
Clever girl. That punctured my ego. Still, I turned out 400 words about how I had always struggled with chairs because of my short legs and the dangers of sitting on a bench seat in a bar and finding that my feet don't reach the floor.
I don't think she was impressed.
Usually, I have two or three ideas at the back of my mind around which which I can write a piece and don't need a suggestion. Until this column.
My clippings folder is empty, my brain sagging in the hot weather and my home office is beginning to crowd in on me. A novelist might describe this as writer's block. Except I don't believe in writer's block.
An online search found bizarre advice from bloggers on how to overcome mental inertia. You need to have some fun, said one. Right, who's coming to the pub? Another suggested taking a trip, by bus, train or plane.
These are obviously people who have never written to a deadline. As a journalist, I have written to a deadline all my life. A system I also used when writing novels: sit down at a set time and write so many words a day. Forget about tempting the muse and waiting for inspiration; the muse is probably already down the pub. Writing is hard work so get on with it.
But wait, here's another nugget of a suggestion on how to get your creative juices flowing when your mind is as empty as the Sahara: invent an imaginary friend. I kid you not.
Give him a name, talk to him, listen to his problems and hopes, be a good friend, write him a letter ... hang on. I'm supposed to have writer's block.
Other suggestions include getting angry, swearing, ranting, taking a shower, washing the dishes or dancing.
Laurence Stern, the 18th century writer, had a very specific way of overcoming a blockage: he would shave off his beard, change his shirt and put on his best coat: "In a word, dress myself from one end to the other of me, after my best fashion.”
Such a ritual would suggest he didn't suffer from a lack of inspiration very often, if he had to grow back the beard before he could do it again.
That great author Graham Greene tapped into his creativity by writing about his dreams and, when you think about it, building images in words is basically day dreaming. I use a similar technique by taking a plot to bed with me and working through it before I drop off. At the moment, I'm halfway through a 19th century romp that follows the rise to fame and fortune of Irish rogue John Devlin. The book will probably never be written but me and John are having a fine old time along the way.
Now. What was I saying about writer's block? Would another 400 words about chairs be acceptable?

A FRIEND of mine has started online dating.
"You're doing what?" I said, as we talked in the bar. "Whatever happened to meeting a girl when you were out socialising?"
"I'm out socialising now," he said. "Look around this place. Do you see anyone suitable?"
There were three fat blokes further down the bar and a crowd of lads in the sports room watching football. Point taken.
It was all so different in the past when people met potential partners at dances or work or through a friend of a friend. Back then, young people went around in a collective (polite name for a gang) and paired off. Boys and girls would switch partners until they discovered compatibility and then got engaged. Job done.
This arrangement was best summed up when I asked a friend how he and his wife had got together.
"I was the last one left of our group," he said. "So she took me."
Both my happily married daughters said my attitude to online romance was prehistoric and that any self-respecting single of any age these days turns to the relevant app on their mobile to look for a suitable date. Apparently, one in four relationships now starts online.
The first dating site, Match.com, was launched in 1995 and now operates in 25 countries. There are 1,400 dating sites catering to UK singles. Users can be matched by age, location, hobbies, politics and religion. Some sites use "personality defining algorithms", which means filling in a questionnaire. This in itself is fraught with danger and obfuscation (otherwise known as stretching the truth or lying).
Top lies told by men are about their job, height, weight, physique and money. They also claim to know celebrities, have assistants or work in the film industry. There must be plenty of those living in Huddersfield. Top fibs from women are about weight, age, physique, height and money, bust size, glamorous profession, knowing celebs, having assistants and working in entertainment. A lot of those, too.
Which basically invokes caveat emptor: let the buyer beware.
But if you want a website, there are many to choose from: Happn, Match, Once, Hinge, Huggle, Zoosk, Elite and thousands more. They cater for every interest, age and belief; gay, Christian, senior citizens and beard lovers (it's called Bristlr). Every niche area is covered. Ourtime (for like minded singles over 50), DateYorkshireSingles, Gluten Free Singles. Tindog for dog lovers, Salad Match for salad lovers, Sizl for bacon lovers, Trekdating for sci fi fans, Tastebuds that matches musical tastes, Spex for people who wear glasses or like people who wear glasses and Farmers Only.
Purely in the name of research, I filled in a survey at comparison website Queek'd . The dating sites recommended for me ranged from eHarmony (the brains behind the butterflies) through Uniform Dating (everyone needs a hero) to Millionaire Match (the original and largest millionaire dating site since 2001).
By heck, had someone recognised my worth at last, by offering me premium membership for celebs and VIPs? Except that it added: salaries will be verified. So if I was to use any app to find a date, it would be back to being honest and say that I was six foot tall, athletic build and friend of the stars. Well, I once met Norman Wisdom.

WHATEVER happened to those happy endless days of summer we all enjoyed in childhood?
School ended mid-July and didn't start again until September which was as far away as Australia.
The weeks stretched ahead without stress, the need to duck board rulers and homework, or having to get up at the crack of dawn to put on formal clothes, heft a bag, satchel or briefcase full of books, and trudge off to a day of toil and confusion.
"Wake up son. It's time for school."
"I don't want to go to school, mum. The kids hate me and the teachers hate me."
"You have to go to school, son."
"Why?"
"Because you're 52 and you're the headmaster."
I still remember one particular end of term day with great fondness, standing on Oxford Road station in Manchester waiting for the train to take me home to Timperley in the folds of the Cheshire countryside. My last day in the fourth form and the future consisted of weeks of pleasure, idleness and the hope of chatting up a girl called Violet. And, of course, the sun was shining.
Nostalgia isn't sepia toned when it comes to summers past: it's invariably sun-streaked. Sometimes it was; on other occasions the rain persisted down. But even that didn't dampen spirits during days of freedom and exploration.
Cynicism only sets in with age.
"Summer? It was that three days in May followed by a long weekend in June. Don't hope for anything better. August will be a wash out."
St Swithin's Day didn't help. It poured down first thing, became dull and sulky and the sun only peeked out at the tail end, as if checking that the rain had stopped. The legend says: St Swithin’s Day, if it does rain; Full forty days, it will remain. St Swithin’s Day, if it be fair; For forty days, t’will rain no more.
So if what we had on that day sets in until school goes back? We can expect a typical English summer, which usually requires anyone planning a day out to pack the car with windscreen de-icer, shorts, T shirts, sweaters, track suits, Wellington boots, weather proofs, sleeping bags, flasks of tea and coffee, survival blanket and a long pole with a flag on the end to stick up through a snowdrift so the emergency services can find your vehicle in the Yorkshire Dales.
If you intend to attempt a day out by train, bus or bicycle, you need a backpack the size of a baby elephant and a certificate to prove you have completed a Bear Grylls survival course.
Brits, however, are eternal optimists when it comes to summer. They don their shorts and sleeveless tops at the first hint of May warmth and are undeterred throughout the following months, no matter what the heavens throw at us.
These days, trips out are taken by car suitably equipped for all seasons and those long carefree days of summer remain as memories of bicycle rides to the woods with Violet.

THE Summer of Love in 1967 was helped by the Scott McKenzie song San Francisco which became its anthem. Hippies had made the Haight-Ashbury area of the city an enclave of free thinking youth who wanted to wear flowers in their hair and believed all you needed was love as an alternative to what was seen as the strictures and corruption of government.
Teenagers reacted across Britain in response and we had better music: Whiter Shade of Pale, Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, Penny Lane and Purple Haze. Young people from Llandudno to London wanted to be part of the Magical Mystery Tour.
The 50th anniversary of that period will be commemorated and remembered over the next months and has already had its detractors. It may not have achieved anything tangible but it was a concept of optimism that has never left those who embraced the ethos and music of the time. It's legacy has been felt by succeeding generations of teenagers.
I got married in Blackpool at the end of that summer. I was living alone in my wife Maria's family home before the wedding. It was a mansion and was about to be put up for sale and I became caretaker. Minstrels' gallery, servants quarters, study and a drawing room with a bar. And rent free.
Just the location for the occasional hippy party, with the french windows open onto the grounds at the back and a game of midnight rounders in the nude.
And yes, I wore flowers in my hair, not that the manager of the off-license down the road was too impressed when I appeared in jeans. Afghan coat, beads around my neck, Zapata moustache and a daisy chain in my hair to ask for a Watney's Party Seven. And wasn't that a terrible beer?

Weather is always better in retrospect but I seem to remember high temperatures and sunny days. And the memories, and the message of love and peace, have stayed with me ever since.

IT STARTED with John L Sullivan, the world heavyweight boxing champion between 1882 and 1892. He was so famous people would say: “Shake the hand that shook the hand that shook the hand of John L Sullivan.” It was a way of touching history before radio, TV and instant communication.
A chap recently said something similar to me: a relative three generations before had met Buffalo Bill during one of his Wild West tours. “So I spoke to a man who met Buffalo Bill,” he said.
The modern equivalent is the theory of six degrees of separation. This has been around since 1929, and spawned a play, film, TV programmes and a Hollywood parlour game involving actor Kevin Bacon
It postulates that anyone in the world is only six steps away from anybody else. To put it plainly, Donald Trump is only six people away from everyone, through a friend of a friend or acquaintance. Which is scary.
Let me explain.
The best man at my wedding was comedian Lennie Bennett who played Las Vegas with Frank Sinatra. So I am connected in two to Sinatra, in three to the complete Rat Pack, the Kennedy clan, Marilyn Monroe, Elvis and most of Hollywood. Keep following their friends, relatives and work colleagues and you see how swiftly it all expands.
The theory has been tested by Facebook. Among its 1.6 billion users (which is 22% of the world population), the difference of separation was only 3.57. Which takes the breath away to think that you could be connected so easily to a Chinese rice grower on the other side of the world.
Then again, I can connect to both Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin in three: through MP Barry Sheerman to Theresa May who has met both the world leaders.
Come to think of it, I can connect to Adolf Hitler in three, through friend, author and biographer Stephen Dorril who interviewed Diana Mitford, who married British fascist leader Sir Oswald Mosley in Berlin in 1936, when Hitler was one of the wedding guests.

The Hollywood game was to connect that very fine actor Kevin Bacon to other actors through films they were in together. I can even make that connection personal in only five degrees of separation.
Kevin Bacon was in the film Frost/Nixon with Michael Sheen who was in The Damned United with Sir Michael Parkinson who was a friend of George Best who chatted up my wife Maria in a Manchester boutique in 1968. She turned him down.

Try it yourself and discover that it really is a small world.

MAYBE I'm going a little deaf in my old age but I often have to ask my wife Maria to repeat what she says. “You're going deaf,” she says. “Pardon?” I say.
I think she sometimes does it on purpose and mutters rather than enunciates, like method actors in television dramas. Have you noticed how half the dialogue goes missing when moody thespians opt for what they call a natural way of mumbling rather than speaking clearly.
Sam Riley in SS-GB sounded like he'd been smoking 40 Woodbines a day to get into the character of a whispering detective in a post-war England ruled by Nazis. And Tom Hardy rollocked his way through the streets of Georgian London in Taboo with authentic muck under his fingernails whilst delivering verbals as if chewing a dead rat.
There have been so many complaints about muffled speech that experts staged an experiment at the National Science and Media Museum in Bradford for groups of pensioners and young people and discovered TV sound problems were not confined to the elderly: the younger generation couldn't hear either.
Last year I blamed my flat TV set and bought a modestly priced sound system but couldn't make it work. Instead I've left it propped by the screen like a threat but the TV continues to ignore both me and the threat and still projects dramatic moments as if delivered by Norman Collier on a faulty microphone.
People have suggested the sound from a flat screen TV is not as good as the sound produced on the old chunky box set. TV makers say that's not true. The test audiences at the Science and Media Museum listened to the sound from those old box sets that had a back as long as a station wagon and said yes, it was far superior. Trouble is, if you wanted one with a 50 inch screen it would be so big you would have to house it in a shed in the back garden and watch it through the window.
My wife and I enjoy a lot of subtitled drama from Europe and the strange thing is I even turn the sound up on that so I can get a sense of the dialogue, so maybe I am going deaf. I said maybe I am going deaf. Admittedly I haven't a clue in Swedish or Icelandic but I'm chuffed when I understand some of the French and tell my wife the subtitle is wrong.
Perhaps I should try using subtitles on English programmes as well, although that would be so bizarre my wife might think I've gone barmy if she spots them on Happy Valley.
“Subtitles? For Sarah Lancashire?”
“Half past nine.”