Modern spooky tales don't have ghost of a chance

SNOOKER and ghosts, disparate subjects though they may be, both occupy my thoughts this week.

- Peter Mortimer

Like many, I have spent an excess of hours watching the snooker fortunes at the Crucible Theatre in Sheffield, a city for which I have special memories. Sheffield University indulged me for three years, allowing me to gain a BA (Hons) degree in economics. A second class degree of course - only swots got a first class honours. This at least was the dubious 'fact' all of us not clever enough to achieve such a height found comfort in.

Having spent most of my working years since those varsity days in the somewhat impecunious calling of a writer, people often wrongly assume my degree subject was English literature. Not true. The degree was in economics. Why so? I confess that all these years on, I'm no longer quite sure, but it did mean that instead of studying the likes of Shakespeare or Milton, I was swotting up on the works of John Maynard Keynes’ and his General Theory of Employment.

Keynes was not your normal dry economist. He was gay for one thing, and enjoyed a regular tipple of Champagne. Whether he believed in ghosts is not recorded.