LOCKER ROOM:It's January and there is a spitting, mass-murderer lurking just outside the bedroom door . . ., writes TOM HUMPHRIES

WHAT’S THAT? January? You’re asking me what I think of it as an idea? As a concept? As a month, examined alone and in isolation from other months? Good question and thank you for coming out this morning and asking it.

Let’s just say it is 7:07am on a Sunday morning in January and outside it is cold and foggy. Inside there is a fat man of very limited talents cursing himself for the thousandth time for not beginning and ending this column on say Friday or Saturday or any of the other days available for starting and finishing a Monday morning column. Nope. It is now 7:09am and no idea has flown into his brain like a roast duckling flying into the open mouth of a peasant who has been standing for a long time on the top of a hill. It’s January. There are no ideas in January.

As a month it should be shut down and terminated. Paid off. Given voluntary redundancy. We should be invited to spend the month of January in repose or in bed. Just hibernating. We will work 11 months and get paid for 12 and that will be good for morale.

It’s 7:11am. Maybe we will write about convenience stores? Nah. Let me tell you about last night.

The head hit the pillow at a time when it was admittedly impossible for the head to get enough sleep to be in proper working order this morning to write this column. So apologies there. And then the head tossed and turned like a cork on a turbulent sea casting about for an idea which would service this column in the morning and allow the head to enjoy some morsel of contented sleep.

Nothing. It’s January. Could write the annual pulling rugby’s tail piece but it’s too early. Unseasonal. No point messing with the ying and the yang goys.

Bah. Trying to remember what the great and prodigious American columnist Red Smith said. Every column you write is worse than your last one? Nah, that was the sports editor. If you get one column in three right , Red said, you are doing well. I reckon in 2012 I’m due a whole year of perfect columns. For the meantime Red, it’s January. It’s O’Byrne Cup. McGrath Cup. FA Cup.

Now it’s 7:25 and the battery acid of pure regret is all over my botoxed face. Only “watched” Leeds epic two-all dismantlement of Spurs on the radio didn’t I? In the car-park of the Omni in Santry. Leaving me in no position to do anything but gloat. Anyway have written so many “sad demise of the FA Cup” columns that it is well nigh impossible to change tack now and pronounce the FA Cup to be the greatest knockout competition in the world. Let’s see how the replay goes anyway.

Anyway, where was I? Yes, tossing and turning I was? When I heard the noise just outside the bedroom door. It’s Saturday night getting on for Sunday morning and there has been some of the commotion one associates with that time of the week, but this was different. This was a man standing outside the bedroom door who had clearly just spat. It was that distinct. A clear and disdainful expectoration. Like having Javier Bardem from No Country For Old Men, standing outside the door waiting to kill me. In January.

The bitter irony of being murdered in the month where nothing ever happens. And not getting to write about it. (Note to self. Last sentence diminishes the suspense for reader wondering if you do actually get murdered?)

It’s January and there is a spitting, mass-murderer just outside the bedroom door and courageously I hold my breath and lie perfectly still and think of Dublin playing Meath in Parnell Park in a few hours’ time.

If I am to be cruelly dismembered would they have a minute’s silence? I wouldn’t expect it. Not for holding the record for purchasing Oxtail Cuppa Soups at half-time but it might create a little stir of excitement around the seat I usually sit on. That’s your man with the soup? Jaysus? Chopped into exactly a thousand pieces?

What’s the country coming to? And it’s only January. Will they use him for soup d’ya think. Was it anything to do with the soup?

More kerfuffle and commotion from abroad meanwhile. Raised voices beyond the window. Taking advantage of the noise, I get up to have a look out. Maybe it will be a small crowd with placards, each of which has an idea for a column written on it. It’s a small crowd alright but they’ve drunk enough for a big crowd. And they are drifting away. Leaving me to my fate. Now silence. Hate the silence.

Then he spits again. Louder this time. Jesus. He’s standing there just waiting. I reach down slowly and gather the only weapon acceptable to hardened sports journalists, my winter anorak. And I throw open the door and rush out into the light brandishing the anorak above my head in a manner likely to confuse and somehow entrap the spitting intruder. I’ll get the anorak over his head, try to avoid being stabbed or shot (no desire to be remembered as one of those have-a-go-heroes from the Brit tabloids) and then tell him he can go free if he comes up with four good column ideas.

But he’s not there. My anorak gets hauled in through the air and the catch is nothing. It strikes me that perhaps he, my adversary, is very thin and astonishingly quick and that he is now hiding in the airing cupboard. Shit.

Usain Bolt is planning to kill me. What a column it would have been?

Then the spit actually hits my face. A spray of lavender and camomile issued from the Air Wick thingy blinds me and send me careering against the airing cupboard door. Ah. Apologies Mr Bolt. I am being menaced by the Air Wick freshener that I spent a tenner on in the Omni in Santry before settling into Leeds versus Spurs on the radio out in the car-park.

It gobs out lavender and camomile every few minutes, removing the need for cleaning. Stand in front of it for five minutes yourself and it removes the necessity for showering or aftershave. Just remember that it is not in fact an intruder.

It is 8:05 now. The word count on this failed column is 1,090 words. For the record, I had one idea, maybe one and a half, during the abbreviated night.

In the middle of the sleeplessness just past I dusted down Charles Pierce’s famous interview with Tiger Woods

(the one where a young Tiger tells the dirty jokes). I’d forgotten what a brilliant piece of post-modernist journalism it was with Pierce acutely aware of the impact the piece would have but eager not to have its meaning distorted. It was the last glimpse of Tiger Woods before he was ushered away from the real world by IMG. And it will make a good column the week before the Masters.

And it’s bright out now. And then, having taken out the Lavender and Camomile bandit, I read another piece of Charles Pierce’s fine work.

An essay called A Big Game where Pierce describes himself “as a sucker for a Big Game. Which is not necessarily the same as a Championship Game. It is not necessarily the same as an important game, as defined by television hucksters, A Big Game is more than that, it is a piece of living history . . . I would rather be at a Big Game than almost anywhere else in the world.”

A nice thought. The second last Sunday of January. The first Big Game of the New Year is going down somewhere.

Nourishment for the lavendered soul.

And too late for a column.