The Last Straw: 'Remember, people will be very disappointed when they turn to the back page and find Frank's not there." With these discouraging words still ringing in my ears, the Features Editor walks away, having landed me at short notice with the mug's task of filling Frank McNally's sturdy Monaghan boots. Not so much the last straw as the short one. I have learned my lesson: you'll never catch me gazing, slack-jawed, out of the office window in a semi-stupor again. Or not for a few days at least.
So first, an apology. Frank McNally is unavailable, or indisposed, or something. I know he's not dead, because he sent a message warning me not to be too funny. I told him not to worry, since there seems to be a consensus emerging on that particular subject.
Over dinner, I casually mention to my wife that I'm doing Frank's column this week. She stares at me. "But Frank's column is funny," she says. I am affronted. Surely I can be funny too? A deathly hush falls over the room. I enlist the support of the baby, deploying my best "funny" faces, "funny" gestures and finally, in desperation, "funny" dances. The baby coughs. Blushes. Stares at her feet. Examines her nails.
Who cares what the women in my life think? What do they know? I can be funny. And I've done this filling-in lark before. I'm a professional. How hard can it be?
The next day, I settle down at my desk to write this column. The trick, I usually find, is to read your subject's last four or five offerings, then set a course firmly in the opposite direction. Don't refer directly to what they have written, but make it clear, in the nicest possible way, that you're offering a welcome respite from the self-satisfied drivel that usually occupies the space. So, let's see . . . The Last Straw, in recent weeks, has been devoted to the following: Shakespeare-based management training; child prodigies; the Latin sporting temperament; the Irish language at the Oscars . . . I'm starting to feel a little queasy. A passing colleague asks what I'm working on. I tell him.
"Frank's column?" he says quizzically. "Doesn't that mean you have to be funny? Are you sure about this?" Absolutely, I declare.
Because I have just had a brainwave and have arrived at a topic. I will write about the experience of being asked to fill in on Frank's column.
So, here I am, a man trapped inside another man's column, writing about being a man trapped inside another man's column. It's brilliant. Being Frank McNally. People have received Oscars for this sort of thing.
"Very, er, postmodern," says the colleague, drifting away. I stare at the computer screen. Postmodern? What exactly did he mean? Three possibilities spring to mind. Pretentious. Juvenile. Dated. Then a fourth. Unfunny. That bastard. Whoops. Sorry.
Before I've even written this blasted column, I appear to be losing the run of myself. It is one of life's great inevitables that all opinion columnists will eventually go mad. But usually it takes a few years, not hours. And aren't all those Being Eternal Adaptations of the Spotless Mind things about madness anyway? This is an unhealthy train of thought and needs to be diverted immediately.
Perhaps the real problem is one of location. With all its distractions, a newspaper office is an awful place to write a column. In fact, you're more likely to see an orang-utan than a columnist in a modern newsroom. Columns are written far from the madding crowd, in comfy home offices with your favourite music on the stereo and a warm mug of cocoa by your side. Or, alternatively, in sealed rooms with floors covered in used Kleenex, toenail clippings and milk bottles filled with urine. The point is, the choice is yours.
So that's it. I shall go home, slip into something comfortable, and the words will flow like honey. I'll just need a bit more time . . . I wangle a few hours' grace and head for home, where the women in my life are strangely unsurprised by my failure to be Frank.
But then, miraculously, it happens. Just as I wearily sit down to try again, a blinding flash of inspiration strikes. I have it! I have it at last. This will show them all. This will put Frank in his place. I can hardly wait for the screen to spring to life, and my fingers start to tap . . .
