Word association football

I was doing a bit of writing this evening and ended up at one point including the phrase ‘ee-ay-addio’ which had me wondering about its origins. Via Private Eye’s football reporter E I Addio, I ended up looking at football chants and then back to the nursery rhyme ‘The farmer in the dell’, where it comes from. The rhyme itself is alluded to in The Secret History by Donna Tartt (a book I love), and I’m pretty sure it’s referenced by Dennis Potter in The Singing Detective. It is also the source for the title of the book I am the Cheese by Robert Cormier. For some reason I’ve been thinking about Robert Cormier recently, even though I’ve not read any of his books since I was a teenager. I went looking for any surviving Cormier books and found a long-forgotten copy of the screenplay to Jules et Jim. That and After the First Death are stacked up as the next books to read. And back at my writing – it’s a story about a computer – I finished a second draft, did a word count and discovered I had written 6502 words. The very first computer I used was my brother’s KIM-1, basically a development kit for the 6502 processor, and my introduction to computer programming was 6502 assembly language.