There was every possibility that the interview would have to be abandoned. At the time of writing, Arsenal fans around the world are finding it rather hard to concentrate on anything apart from Arsenal, and the distinct possibility of a spectacular Double. The interviewer is an Arsenal fan, the subject is the Arsenal fan and the first 10 minutes are inevitably spent in feverish praise of Anelka, Parlour, Bergkamp, Vieira and Petit. The glory days are back. Nick Hornby is perhaps the most famous Arsenal supporter there is, and he has valiantly supported his team at times when it was neither popular nor profitable to do so. His first book, Fever Pitch, probably the best book ever written about football, was a huge success and established Hornby as a kind of thirty-something Everyman. The book's appeal and that of his subsequent novel, High Fidelity, lies in Hornby's uncanny ability to reveal with painful precision the reader's own flaws, traits and embarrassments. And so, most young men will find his writing spot-on, hilarious and deeply uncomfortable. What makes us even more uncomfortable is that women tend to read Nick Hornby to find out what men are really like.
The latest novel About A Boy again features a thirty-something man living in north London. Will Freeman likes to keep life at arm's length. He doesn't need to work (there is a particularly embarrassing reason) and he passes the time watching Countdown and pretending he has a son in order to make him more attractive to single mothers. He certainly succeeds, but he also gets to meet Marcus, a 12-year-old misfit brought up by his hippy mother to listen to Joni Mitchell and never to concern himself with trainers and haircuts. Once again, the power of popular culture, the demands of fashion and the importance or otherwise of particular heroes seem the vital elements both of growing up and of forming successful relationships. Marcus is tortured at school because he doesn't know very much about what is supposedly important to people of his own age. He thinks Kurt Cobain plays for Manchester United. "I think finding your own heroes is as important a stage as learning how to use a knife and fork. And I wouldn't really trust someone who hasn't gone through that stage. But I think when you're at school you don't really stop to think whether you really like something or not because there is so much peer pressure. When I was a kid there was a pressure not to listen to soul music - you had to listen to Deep Purple instead. I was 16 or 17 before I started listening to the Tamla Motown records that I should have been listening to at 13. But I guess my childhood heroes have pretty much stayed the same in that I haven't started to think of any of them in a different way. I think of people like Joe Strummer or Liam Brady. I haven't reassessed these people at all and nobody has ever come along to replace them. The weird thing for me is that I see Liam regularly now. I was crossing the road the other day and someone honked the horn and shouted `get out of the road you hooligan!' and asked me did I need a lift anywhere. It was Liam Brady. It's a weird life." There is a typically funny but uncomfortable scene in High Fidelity where Rob and Laura are arguing about the difference between Got To Get You Off My Mind by the soul singer Solomon Burke and Bright Eyes by Art Garfunkel. He likes Solomon Burke, she likes Bright Eyes and he can't believe it. He certainly can't believe that anyone could like both. And the Burke song, he believed, was "their song". Laura responds that one song is about rabbits and the other has a brass band. He is horrified. It's not a brass band, it's a horn section! And so relationships founder on attitudes to singers and their songs - to one partner insignificant, to the other the most important thing imaginable.
"Elvis, Lennon and McCartney and Bob Marley are the only ones you can really make a case for. I think the Beatles actually changed things for all of us. But you do despair when you hear people trying to make a case for New Model Army or whatever. You can only argue the importance of people within a certain context and if people won't listen to you on those terms there's nothing you can do. Then you're left with brass band versus rabbits."
Many teenage boys abandon football at a certain stage and begin to explore music in an equally obsessive way. Music seems sexier. Football has lost its glamour and your heroes have all gone. There's no more George Best, no more Pele and no more Stan Bowles. For Arsenal fans of my age it probably began the day Charlie George joined Derby County. How could he do it? It was time to buy the Thin Lizzy button badges.
"Absolutely. Arsenal had Charlie George and then they didn't have Charlie George. In my late teens I started to go very much towards music because it was more social, it was in the evenings and it involved women more. But then the moment Arsenal got good again I was straight back there. People always ask if Arsenal still means as much to me and, because people keep asking me, I've fretted over it and wondered whether they do or not. But at this moment - absolutely. I have no doubt whatsoever. This is a golden period."
Again, the possibility of the interview being abandoned at half-time becomes a reality. All it will take is a casual reference to Bob Wilson and we'll be off. We both know it. He is now the official sounding-board for all Arsenal opinions. He is also the oracle for all Arsenal seekers of the truth and he has, ironically, become something of a hero himself. But celebrity always brings with it certain difficulties and expectations from others, particularly as Hornby's first book was so confessional. Now, no matter what fiction he writes, people will inevitably assume that the books are about him - personally.
"Yeah but there's always stuff that people don't know. There are things you choose to confess to and things you don't. Another thing is that I think you tend to disappoint people. It takes a long time to think up the stuff that's in the books. So that's unnerving, yes. I'm glad that people write to me and I enjoy getting the letters but it's not something I do myself. I don't think I've ever written a letter to an author, however much a book has meant to me. And so I keep thinking that even though some of the books seem to work because of identification, I can't see myself in the people who say they've read High Fidelity nine times, because I've never read a book nine times."
In so many ways, Nick Hornby seems to be on the pig's back. His books have been successful and sales and film rights have famously made him a wealthy man. Even so, the difficulties and fears of working as a writer for a living are still there. These days he works in an office and even amid all the distractions of Highbury and the Gunner's title challenge, he tries to work within a strict regime. Himself, a computer and two CDs. "It's a trick I learnt from Roddy (Doyle). He listens to contemporary classical while he writes. And I have a couple of things - Philip Glass and Steve Reich and I find that quite soothing. And it's great having somewhere to work and this is the first book I've written there. It's a big thing to be able to go somewhere different and have a different phone number. I really enjoy it. Once something has happened in my head then I work every day. There's something that goes off in your head that tells you it's going to work and that you really want to do it. But the writing itself is hard and I get fed up with myself and I pace around the room and do anything I can to distract myself from it. The first couple of things that I tried to write I wrote longhand but when you see reams of your own handwriting on sheets of lined paper it's impossible not to think of school and I find it so depressing. You even look at it as if you were a school-kid and you think it's just rubbish. But when you get something up on a screen and printed off there's some kind of separation between the work and you."
Writers often have different approaches to their finished work. Some like to see it go off on its own and basically prefer to have nothing more to do with it. Some don't sleep for wondering what other people will make of it, others say they don't care. But because Nick Hornby operates in a world of heavy promotion and international reading tours, the finished book stays close to him for longer than might be wise. "Initially I feel very protective of a book but then I want to put it out in the world and I want to read from it to people. But I've been reading from High Fidelity for a year now and it's going to be fantastic to have something new to read from. It's only after all that when you think a book is on own. Now when I see people writing about Fever Pitch, for instance, I don't feel that the book is anything to do with me. I think a lot of people who write this stuff like to think that Fever Pitch was responsible for so much because it somehow empowers them. It helps the media to feel empowered if they think that this book is responsible for all sorts of things - like Dennis Bergkamp coming to Arsenal or whatever!"
And so the interview is finally abandoned because of the inevitable mention of an Arsenal footballer. If Nick Hornby is in any way responsible for bringing Dennis Bergkamp to Arsenal then all I can say is thank you thank you, thank you. An enthusiastic Arsenal fan conversation follows. Yes, we're going to win the Double. And as you read this, Nick Hornby is heading for Highbury to watch the Barnsley match on the big screen. He always sees the big picture. About A Boy by Nick Hornby is published by Victor Gollancz.