It’s Like Taking Candy From A Dog ~ That’s what my uncle Mac used to say whenever he slotted another goal past me (two grown men against a couple of kids).
So I used it for the title of my book, which is an account of childhood told, for the most part, by the boy in the 1970s present rather than the adult looking back.
Stories and episodes from the life of a boy are threaded together by the musings of a threadbare sock monkey called Luke. The monkey haunts (or taunts?) the man the boy has become.
Tales of football, picnics, cats, holidays, rabies, ghosts, skeletons, George Best, Father Christmas, punk rock, moth rescue, starling execution, ant holocaust, emu puppets and being winked at by strangers.
I have also latterly come to realise that the book is also my apology to the boy I once was for the way I’ve turned out.