I wish that every single one of the Arsenal fans who were in the stadium to see their team’s pathetic surrender to Man Utd, could be nominated for an Oscar, as I was yesterday. I have to say, Oscar nominations really help to assuage football-related disappointment. My wife, who doesn’t get to the games very often now that one of the children has commandeered her season ticket, was sitting next to me on Sunday; she got a nomination too. And so did Colin Firth, who was right behind the goal where Rooney scored. That may be it, as far as recently Oscar-nominated Arsenal fans go (unless Meryl Streep is a Gooner). In terms of the collective London N5 feelgood factor, it’s nowhere near enough.

It was hard to feel particularly sad about the passing of JD Salinger: most of us had become accustomed to the idea that we wouldn’t be hearing from him again. I am glad that January 2010 is over, though, because in the last four weeks, a lot of people who meant a great deal to me at one time or another passed away. Apart from Salinger, we lost Willie Mitchell, the man responsible for the sound of Al Green and Ann Peebles and OV Wright; Bobby Charles, the Cajun white soul singer, whose ‘I Must Be In A Good Place Now’ is one of my wife’s desert island discs; Kate McGarrigle, mother of Rufus Wainwright and one half of the McGarrigle Sisters, whose first album is one of my favourite-ever; Mick Green of the Pirates, whose guitar style influenced both Wilko Johnson and Pete Townshend; and Teddy Prendergrass. If the year continues in this way, then we will be left with Miley Cyrus and Taylor Swift by its end.

‘It’s over before you know it
It all goes by so fast.
The bad nights take forever
And the good ones don’t ever seem to last.’

- ‘The Best Of Everything’, Tom Petty. And that, I’m afraid, is the only rhyming couplet you’ll ever need; all the rest are superfluous.

‘An Education’ has been nominated for eight BAFTA awards – it received more nominations than any other film, apart from ‘Avatar’ (which I haven’t seen) and the brilliant ‘The Hurt Locker’ (which everyone should see.) And though that’s amazing and fantastic and wonderful and so on, I can’t help feeling a little disappointed that Rosamund Pike has been overlooked in the Best Supporting Actress category. She is, in my opinion, effortlessly funny in her role – but that, of course, is the problem. In life, it is much harder to deal with an incurable illness than to make a joke; in films, the opposite is the case. And yet nobody seems to be able to make that distinction when awards season comes around. I hope Rosamund can see that we would never have made it into the Best Picture category without her.

I haven’t posted much up here in the last few weeks – school holidays, snow, the African Cup Of Nations and so on – and I intend to post more regularly from now on. And to be honest, it’s not just time that has stopped me from blogging; the truth is that I don’t really know what to say about how I’ve been spending some of my time. Because ‘An Education’ is involved in this interminable awards season, there has been a lot of travelling, and talking, and party-attendance, and general sucking-up. So far we have been nominated for thirty-eight different prizes, according to imdb.com, and I’m not sure that’s all of them. I provide that figure not to convince you of our greatness, but to prove that there’s a lot of it about, and that it tends to dominate life to an extent one wouldn’t have thought possible. If I had to describe my occupation, I wouldn’t in all conscience be able to call myself a writer. I am currently an unpaid suit-wearer. And whatever you might think of my books and screenplays, I can assure you that I’m better at writing than suit-wearing.

The last sentence of the novel I have just finished (SPOILER ALERT):

“Everything had gone wrong, and he had succeeded at nothing, and he was never going to have any kind of life at all.”

Hey, thanks, literary fiction! Again! I wish the author had found a way to move that line somewhere up towards the beginning, thus saving me a lot of trouble.

Now that ‘An Education’ is out on general release, we have a never-ending queue of people happy to tell us where we have made mistakes with early-60s period detail. My mother-in-law is very anxious about a Pyrex dish in an early scene. (The word ‘Pyrex’ was invented by the glassware company in 1915.) Somebody else was troubled by the appearance of a tea-bag. (If you care, the tea-bag celebrated its one hundredth birthday this year.) A film critic who gave us a five-star review told the producers that the construction “I was so hoping…” was a verbal anachronism, and that ‘so’ plus gerund was imported from Australia in the 1970s . . .

It’s not just the period you have to get right, clearly. If you have set a film or a book at a time within the last seventy-odd years, then it’s people’s memories of the period you have to respect, too. If they don’t remember tea-bags, then you’ve had it.

TALES FROM THE ROAD 1:

I am on a train from the south coast back to London. Across the aisle, three elderly passengers, two women and a man, buy coffee from the trolley.
“What you do,” says the elderly man to his friends, “Is, you sip through the hole in the top of the lid.”
The two elderly women give it a go, tentatively at first, and pronounce themselves amazed and delighted at this technological breakthrough.
“I only found that out myself when I went to Hastings,” said the man.
What happened in Hastings? I wish I knew.

TALES FROM THE ROAD 2:

I am in a hotel in New York. Outraged by the mini-bar prices, I go out to buy a bottle of whiskey, and contrive to smash it to smithereens in the lobby, right by the reception desk. I end up raiding the mini-bar anyway.
Just as I’m pouring my drink, the phone rings.
“Mr Hornby? This is the concierge. You can take that bottle back to the shop and get a refund. The seal isn’t broken. You have the receipt?”
I tell him that, seeing as the bottle is in a thousand pieces, I wouldn’t feel good waving the neck and asking for my money back. I point out that the breakage was pretty much my own stupid fault.
“Up to you.”
Two minutes later, the phone rings again.
“It’s the concierge again. I’m sorry to trouble you. But do you have that receipt?”
“Why? I’m not going back to the shop.”
“If you’re not going to use it, could I have it?”
Only in New York, et cetera.

The first episode of ‘The Richest Man In Britain’ is on Radio 4 this Friday at 11.30. I am not entirely clear whether that’s in the morning or in the evening, but I don’t suppose it matters much, what with iPlayers and iTunes and so on. You could go to the cinema to see ‘An Education’, come home, and turn on the radio. Or the computer.

It has been a busy couple of months, what with one thing and another, hence the lack of blogging. ‘An Education’ opens in UK cinemas today, which means that my promotional work is finally done. Thanks to our security-conscious government, I am able to trace readers of this blog who haven’t paid to see the film in a cinema; I’ll give you a couple of weeks, but after that you’ll be named and shamed. If you need any further encouragement, we have received universally positive reviews in the UK, and we have just been nominated for six awards by the British Independent Film Association.

Nick Hornby will be joining us LIVE this Thursday lunchtime to answer all YOUR burning questions on AuthorsLive.

Everything you ever wanted to ask one of the best writers in the UK, Nick Hornby can be answered LIVE at the click of a mouse. Get chatting about his new novel, Juliet, Naked, his film, An Education, out later this month, and there may be a bit of football in there too. Or maybe you want to know where Nick gets his ideas from? Does he use a pen or a computer? Or where does he write? All these and hopefully more interesting questions too!

Store your questions up, and make a date with Nick Hornby on AuthorsLive, 12 noon BST on Thursday 15th October and see Nick answer your questions, LIVE.

I’m off for a couple of weeks to the US, to read from ‘Juliet, Naked’.
Please, PLEASE come and say hello:

September 29th in New York
Barnes & Noble ­ Union Square, 7:00 PM

September 30th in Boston
Brookline Booksmith, 6:00 PM
Location: Coolidge Theater

October 1st in Washington, DC
Politics & Prose, 7:00 PM

October 6th in Los Angeles
Book Soup, 7:30 PM
Location: Skirball Cultural Center

October 7th in El Cerrito, CA
Barnes & Noble ­ El Cerrito, 7:00 PM

October 8th in San Francisco
City Arts & Lectures, 8:00 PM
Location: Herbst Theater

October 9th in Seattle
Elliott Bay Book Company, 7:00 PM
Location: Seattle Public Library

That gap between the 1st and the 5th . . . I’m not skiving. ‘An Education’ premieres then – and opens in New York and LA on October 9th.