I’m a reader. Never used to be. Then I read Leon Uris’ ‘Exodus’ when I was bored shitless in my first ever proper job aged about 23 and ‘my life changed forever’. I became bookish. Nerdy. I gave up drink, drugs, fast cars, loose women, football and cannibalism and dedicated myself to the words of others. And I still love books, some 35 years later. I read on the tube every day, I read in bed every night, because there are so many books out there and so little time.

I mainly read novels, because they’re wonderful escapism, but will also, at times, read non-fiction. The odd sporting autobiography, The Wolf of Wall Street, science type books. Chaos Theory. Relativity made very very simple. Fermat’s Last Theorem. Evolutionary biology. History of Science. I like it. But mainly its novels.

But now I’m going to give up reading. Because, apparently, there’s only 6 stories in the world and on the assumption that I’ve read about 10,000 books, I must have covered those 6 many times over so I don’t need to keep repeating myself.

A professor at Stanford, no less, has analysed 40,000 books using a computer (saved a bit of time, I reckon, cheating like that) and the results show just 6 storylines. Which is pretty much what Kurt Vonnegut, the author and lecturer had said to inspire the research.

He identified very few story types. In fact mainly two.

The computer plotted emotional content against time. And found two main options.

Graphs that looked like a valley. Emotionally happy at first, then a plummet (sudden poverty, lost love, someone dies, Chelsea win) and then up at the end to leave the reader on a high note filled with messages of positivity and luuuuurve. Niiiiiice. These he termed ‘man in a hole’.

The other main type was where the graph was the opposite. Raised in the middle and low at the edges- ‘man on a hill’. These start miserable, then get bright, breezy, rich, in love and happy in the middle only for everyone to contract ebola at the end or Manchester City win the league. Ahhhhhhhhh. Shame.

I wonder if Arsene Wenger is a man in a hole?

Happy whatever day this finally gets finished.

A xxxx