Having your own website – it seems a very 21st century thing to do. Apart from the undeniable fact that this is the 21st century, why do this?

Already I’ve got three blogs, a Facebook account and now I’ve got hundreds – really, hundreds – following me on Twitter. I haven’t even mentioned Instagram. Or Snapchat. And they’re all waiting for me to do something interesting. In the time it’s taken me to write that, I’ve got another three followers. It’s hard not to feel a bit Life of Brian. What do they want, these people?

Well, it would be nice to get everything together under one roof. My vast body of work, all those words, all that wisdom. How nice would it be if it were all in one place, somewhere I could point at and say “That’s me”. You can already feel the celestial wheels turning a little more smoothly.

The problem is that most of the writing I’ve done is sitting in boxes in a barn, yellowing cuttings from newspapers – some of which don’t even exist anymore and quite few which maybe shouldn’t have existed in the first place. I could, I guess, scan the best in and then display it here. I could. Chances are… I probably won’t. It’s taken me this long to do this, to ask for anything more might be just too ambitious.

The other problem is that most of the writing I’ve done is under the name Jeremy Novick (and yes, that was because it made my mother happy and who doesn’t want to make their mother happy? ), so where do we fit that in? What are you supposed to Google?

I was going to write a full CV, but…. This is what my university biography says:

Jed Novick has been a journalist for more years than he cares to remember, and has worked on most of the nationals, including The Independent (TV editor, TV critic, feature writer), The Times (sports feature writer/reporter), The Daily Express (TV editor and critic, music editor and critic), The Guardian (feature writer), The Observer (arts critic) and The Daily Star (because it’s good to know how these things work).

He has set up (from conception to design to launch) four national magazines, and has also done his time at the sharp end – subbing, production and layout. He’s written 10 books, including two football books (one on The Mighty Spurs, voted “the second best Spurs book ever” by his mother), two music-based books, four biographies, including the first authorised biography of Michael Palin, and two books on sex.

He also runs writers’ retreats – http://sussexhouseparty.wordpress.com – with his fine wife Gilly Smith.

There. Somewhere round here you’ll find the start of the greatest British novel ever not yet written. It started out as a normal book, then morphed into a fantasy escape plan, before settling down as a letter to my kids.