LockerRoom:   I ALWAYS mean to behave more like a squirrel. Every year I make amendments, post little memos to self. Behave more like squirrel. Be like squirrel. People with sports columns really should learn from the bushy-tailed little rats. We should be prudent. We should have foresight.

We should stockpile. Yet October comes around every year and the sports season ends suddenly and, well, we have no acorns stashed away up in the tree. We have nothing to write about. Nada. Niente. Diddley squat. Every year.

In my case this means getting up on Sunday mornings and ransacking the Sunday papers. Depressingly, the Sundays are full of vehement opinions about things which happened last week. Nobody needs another opinion on Monday morning.

I live in hope though. Maybe something topical will have come up since Saturday night, when it first dawned on me that I hadn't a thing to write about. Of course it hasn't: when the world runs dry of sports controversies it runs completely dry.

Arid. The Sunday papers bring no water to the parched desert which exists where the column is supposed to materialise.

Never mind, I chuckle to myself. I know. I'll do a funny column on the business of not having anything to write about. A quick mental inventory reveals that I have filed about 27 such columns in the last few years. Best for a columnist not to make too much of a production about having nothing to say.

The late American sportswriter Jimmy Cannon was a great squirreler. On fallow days he'd regurgitate entire columns full of one-liners and isolated thoughts which he'd been gathering. These columns he headed "Nobody Asked Me, But" and he'd use them to string together necklaces of individual little gems:

I don't like Boston because all the men look like me.

England produces the best fat actors.

Neat cab drivers are the hostile ones.

And so on and so on. I've often thought that if you carried a notebook and begged, stole or borrowed all the good one-liners you hear in the course of a sporting summer you could fill two or three columns of that stuff through the winter. Next summer, definitely.

I could do with having some friends who utter good one-liners occasionally, but mine aren't exactly a Wildean bunch. There's not a single one of them pulling their weight when it comes to filling this column.

Meanwhile, the winters are getting tougher. This summer has left the audience with controversy fatigue and it is too dangerous just now to try a reheat of the Keano affair. You could wade blithely into the latest FAI fiasco, but health professionals are advising now that if readers are exposed to more than six "FAI Fiasco" columns a year their brains could atrophy and one of two things could happen: class action suits might follow or recruitment into sports journalism might become very competitive.

It's been a fine summer for live action, too, a World Cup, good championships in hurling and football and even an exciting finish to the overhyped Ryder Cup which was won by an Irishman even though, being so European, we hadn't noticed that. Suddenly, though, there are no more live events to turn into columns.

Cannon's squirreling technique was appropriated and developed by the doyen of the Texas sportswriting school, Blackie Sherrod, in his Scattershot columns. Sherrod it was who gave the great Dan Jenkins his start in journalism (thus providing us with the best piece of golf writing ever committed to type in the "Glory Game at Goat Hills"), and it was in Sherrod that I came across a quote which sums up that unique hell of a columnist's life: always being an hour from deadline and two hours from an idea, always vowing that you'll put away some words and have a spare column or two on file .

"I live my life in mortal dread someday I'll die a column ahead." Imagine. All the misery of columnising and then dying with an unused one on file.

Almost every other aspect of the sports hackery trade can be done quickly. The interview piece. The colour piece. The match report piece. The quotes piece. We hacks pride ourselves on being quick when we are "under the cosh", and as technology improves for some reason deadlines just get earlier so we spend good chunks of working time "under the cosh".

Okay, it's not a Siberian salt mine, and anyway, as the old Seattle sportswriter Phil Taylor once put it, "you'd be surprised how quick you can go when you have no pride."

Everything now is quick, quick, quick, but the column with no ideas to back it up moves as slowly as a dead pig in a snake's belly. And ends up as the same sort of little mess in the dust.

People often ask how to get into sports journalism, and sometimes I wonder if a column detailing the many character defects required wouldn't be useful. Soundings amongst other hacks, however, suggest that all the kudos will go to whichever one of us can come up with a column detailing exactly how to get out of sports journalism. Alternatively, a column on how to keep younger, more talented people out of the game (for their own good) would find an appreciative audience.

Mike Royko, the great and cranky Chicago columnist, kept a small retinue of fictional characters on hand to press into service on days when no thoughts stopped by or when the laws of libel were frisking every thought at the door. His main cypher was a Polish-Chicagoan called Slats Grobnik who worked just perfectly under the circumstances, muttering balefully from the bar counter on the occasions when he could raise his head.

I HAVE often meant to take the time to create an equivalent figure through whose eyes I could look balefully at the Irish sports scene. Paddy Downey, the poet laureate of these parts, told me once, however, that he had just such a device going for a while. I think she was called The Old Woman of Bansha, but I'm open to correction. It's fine for me to rip ideas off from crusty old Chicagoans, but you can't start going through the pockets of colleagues looking for stuff to use.

Talking of Chicago (you weren't, but I was), a bathe in the waters of Finley Peter Dunne might be useful when looking for a voice for the fictional character whose birth has been delayed. Dunne's Mr Dooley columns written late in the 19th century suggest the source for good dialect writing from his time right through to d'Unbelievables.

"John, I'll tell ye thrue. I'm a Connickman. I'll not deny it. But I was born near enough to th' county Clare f'r to have to take along an ax whin I'd knocked the hurlin' ball over th' bounds. I'll say that much but I'll say beyant that, that though Connickmin is put down f'r stealin' hor-ses an' cuttin' th' ligs off cattle they're no wor'rse thin th'rist iv th' counthry is. Divvle th' bit . . . Th' forman'd been a jackeeen. I said wan day that th' Shannon was beautifuller thin th'Liffey an' they made me ate coal.

"Thim's no rel-ations to me. Thims farmer Dooley's No wan iv our fam'ly iver lived in th counthry. We live in th' city, where they burn gas an' have a polis foorce to get on to. We're no farmers, divvle th' bit. We belong to th' industreel classes. Thim must be the Fermanagh Dooley's, a poor lot. An always on good terms with the landlord. Bad ciss to them says I. We're from Roscommon."

The difficulty is that if the response to last week's Ryder Cup diatribe is anything to go by then this column has too many readers who'd think the whole thing was straight up.

By next week we'll have thought of something. Honest guvnors.