Still, writer’s block is frustrating, and upgrades itself to unpleasant if it strikes at a time you really need it not to. (The anxiety about being blocked, not just ‘being blocked’, dishes out the real carnage.) So, here are some of the writing strategies I adopt to stop it starting… or if it’s already started, to chase it away.

How to Overcome Writer’s Block

1.When I feel the fluidity start to fail, the first thing I do is grab a pen and paper and walk. Down the high street, in the park… wherever. I just keep walking until it flows back. (Cycling can be even better, though I’ve yet to find the best spot to stash a biro.) Apparently there is some scientific basis to this method; all I know is that it works for me. I’ve left the house with a blank sheet of paper and a blank mind where my dazzling copy ought to be. Two miles later and I’ve done the first draft and am three-quarters of the way to my invoice.

2. If every day were made up of chunks of 8 until 10 am, I’d have written as many books as Stephen King by now. It’s my brain’s most productive time. So: Work out your best times, and write through them without a break—and with your router switched off. When time’s up, snap the laptop lid and do something else. I try and clear the decks (and/or the kids) for a free run at my prime-time.

3. I read about professional writers who ‘never write fewer than x,000 words each day’. If that works for them, great. But it doesn’t work for me, so I don’t tighten the pressure-spiral by trying to learn it. At the end of a writing day, I know whether or not I’ve spent my time usefully without such a simplistic metric. It’s not always about the bottom line, even if I’ve been down a ridiculous lateral sidetrack and written almost nothing.

4. Watch out for cabin fever: sometimes I just need a change of environment. A co-working space works for me, and costs very little—I take the minimum tariff at The Hub. Because I often write in a small room, and in silence, when I’m co-working I go to the other extreme. I work in the café bit, not the office-like upstairs. The noise and space shock my brain into cooperation.

5. But if you really can’t write today, don’t beat yourself up about it. Read some Tolstoy or (for torrents of wordiness) some Ellroy, watch a DVD, or take yourself out to the Soane and make like a tourist for the afternoon. There’s nothing worse than reaching the end of the day to find you’ve achieved nothing bar staring at the 17-inch and aborting 32 different paragraphs. That just feeds the anxiety—and you don’t have to play along.

(I’m grateful to a tangentially-related conversation with @Twiverpool for setting these ideas on their way to concrete. The nostalgic photo is c/o StarbuckGuy… though writing with a pen makes my hand hurt these days.)

Rarely has the mix been quite as fruity as this weekend’s end to the Italian football season, with all eyes on the race for the Serie A title. Most of those eyes, admittedly, will be on whether Internazionale blow a seemingly unassailable lead and hand the prize to Roma. Mine, though, will be watching politics and sport get it on in the battle for 4th spot, and an all-important qualifying place for next season’s Champions League.

In the red-and-black corner are AC Milan, the European aristocrats who were founded by expatriate Brits, the team of Kaka and Pato, and last year the spawniest European champions since, erm, we last won it. In the purple corner, representing Italy’s bucolic heart, are ACF Fiorentina, La Viola, from the city of Dante and Botticelli, supported by some of world football’s craziest fans. They’re a team, more importantly, that hail from (still) Red Tuscany, a nickname the region didn’t get from it’s wines. The city’s mayor is a former Communist.

It’s Milan, the squad of (ahem) Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi and his Mediaset empire, who must win at home to Udinese and keep their fingers crossed. Against Florence, with a 2-point advantage, who need to take something from a trip to Torino.

There are reasons aplenty for anyone, left or right, to want to push pies of gloat into Berlusconi’s pudgy face (excepting those too ignorant to know any better). Among them, however, isn’t the rumour that was flying round Florence last week: Mediaset bought the Napoli president’s latest screenplay in return for his team rolling over against Milan. Napoli won 3-1.

Failure to qualify could cost AC Milan, and Berlusconi personally, a delicious €25 million or more. With the added bonus that his smug face won’t be on ITV quite so often next season. And that, even for the football unbelievers among you, has to be something worth cheering.

A kidney patient who travelled to the Philippines to search for a live donor has defended his decision to become a so-called “transplant tourist”.

Stories like this hit the bullseye of the inherent tension between ‘liberal’ and ‘left’ ways of looking at the world.

A liberal (even ‘libertarian’) solution would be simple: we should be allowed to sell a kidney. It’s our body, and we should be free to do what we want with it. The borders of the state must stop at the dermis. Liberty is that simple. Or simplistic.

A left analysis would first point out that the burdens of this ‘freedom’ would fall disproportionately on the poor. Should they need a kidney, they won’t be able to afford one. A rich person is unlikely to need to sell his; a poor person, the opposite. Kidney sellers will be poor; purchasers usually rich. A freedom isn’t a freedom unless its universal; it’s more like a privilege. Just like my freedom (or ‘right’) to buy a Porsche. In a system that relies on exploitation, what we call capitalism, words like ‘freedom’ are sometimes meaningless. (There’s an analogy here with smoking in pubs, but that’s another story.)

There’s really no ‘left-liberal’ solution to this, not in the philosophical sense anyhow. There’s also no place for supporting or condemning one man’s attempt to prolong his life. Perhaps the place to start is with common sense. Support for the BMA’s position on presumed consent is little more than acknowledging the existence of a market failure that can be corrected. Easily and liberally.

First published at Liberal Conspiracy.

1. I’m standing in Throgmorton Street with my face pressed against the glass of a private banking building. The TV in the corner opposite the reception desk shows the collapse of a tall grey structure. It’s the WTC, North Tower. The channel is Sky News. At the bottom of the screen the LSE stock ticker is scrolling. The prices are changing.

2. I’m in the mail room of Tower 42, the basement of the building formerly known as the NatWest Tower. It’s forty minutes later. Rumours are going around that several airliners are missing over the Atlantic, perhaps heading for London. The workers in the 183m of building above have been told to evacuate. To go home. “Why are you all still here,” I ask the postroom workers. “We’ve been told we have to stay.”

First published at The Sharpener.

Each show will see six new contestants face five rounds of questions. Throughout the game they will know exactly how many they have right and how much money they are accumulating… However they have no idea how well their fellow contestants are actually faring… At the end of each round one person must leave the game.

The only way to get out with a fatter wallet is to fold and take whatever you’ve won so far. Or gamble, stay in the game, and hope you aren’t in last place (and sent home with nothing). Last man standing after five rounds takes home £50,000.

It’s televisual genius, of course. But the best frauds always are. Millionaire‘s reliance on hardcore general knowledge at least diluted the influence of class and gender: one can just know Eleanor of Aquitaine’s place in the Plantagenet jigsaw, though it sure helps if you’ve sojourned in Fontevraud L’Abbaye. Deal Or No Deal, meanwhile, can be turned on its head by an outrageous run of good or bad luck, and a working knowledge of Expected Value.

There’s no such fortune for proles having a punt at Poker Face. While the blurb-writers gush about “nerve” and “strategy” and “bluff”, the fact that you’re playing blind (and against each other) gives the fatal advantage to anyone who can afford to lose the cash dangled under his nose. Even the thick coating of Geordie cheeky-chappiedom can’t mask the stench of class dominance and gender intimidation. The simple suggestion to “remember the six kids” was enough to make one woman needlessly fold on tuesday. The law of diminishing returns is never on the side of the poor.

Four days in is a little early for statistical analysis, but once the data-set is large enough, you’ll find those at the right end of accent, gender and occupational power relations prospering, while the poor take what they can and get out. In this sense, it’s the perfect evening mirror to a day spent in the service of capital: Poker Face might be the best primetime opportunity for everyone to grab a chunk of pin money, but the big prize will always be reserved for those who deserve and need it least.

First published at The Sharpener.

I think Materazzi probably deserved it…With any luck, Materazzi will be disciplined for racist abuse by FIFA.

Dave Hill:

If – and it’s a very big if – I had been him and Materazzi had said to me anything like any of the remarks attributed to him, I think I would have done the same and maybe more.

Matt Foot:

Materazzi called Zidane a “terrorist”, presumably in some disgusting reference to his Algerian descent…Materazzi would be guilty of an offence in this country: racially aggravated disorderly conduct, on the basis of abuse of someone because of their nationality

Piara Powar, national co-ordinator for the anti-racism group Kick It Out:

If there was a racial slur then Fifa needs to act.

I’m sure there are plenty more. You might put this down to footie partisanship. We love Zizou. He’s the peerless footballer of his generation, the greatest since Maradona. Materazzi was a` pantomime clown (and occasionally violent) during his time at Everton. But something more interesting is going on here. Materazzi is being convicted of racism on the basis of the following:

1. Conflicting lip-reader accounts of what he said. He may have called Zizou a “dirty terrorist” or the “son of a terrorist whore”. Or perhaps he just “wished an ugly death on [Zidane] and [his] family”. Or maybe called Zidane’s sister a prostitute. We’re not sure.

2. No knowledge at all about the other half of the conversation. Zidane’s back was turned to the camera.

3. When Zidane releases a statement tonight, the word of someone who assaulted Materazzi in front of one bilion witnesses. Someone who already has form for violent retaliation, justified by an uncorroborated charge of a racist slur (vs. Saudi Arabia, 1998). This is purely cirucumstantial, but if all we have is circumstantial evidence on both sides, then it has to be weighed all the same.

None of this is enough, surely. The trite response would be the favourite of the Right: the Left aren’t to be trusted on civil liberties, in this instance the right to the presumption of innocence, without prejudice (all those “if-and-it’s-a-big-if’s” won’t do). Further, (some among) the Left’s curious obsession with race (to the exclusion of all else) makes them ill-placed to dish out neutral justice, without which there is no justice at all.

In fact I think it’s a little worse. The presumption that Zizou was justified in “retaliation” can only be explained by assuming Materazzi fits the northern European stereotype of the Italian as a racist wop. To those that charge Materazzi with racially abusing Zidane, on the basis of so little evidence, I call right back at you.

UPDATE: And on it goes. So far, this episode has told us little about Zidane (he’s human, he lost it, he’s handy, behind the shyness he’s moderately arrogant), nothing about Materazzi, and far too much about the pundits who have chosen to view this incident distorted by their own petty prisms.