GEORGE Best has lived in the goldfish bowl for much of his life, either because of his dazzling talent as a footballer, notably with Manchester United in the 1960s, where he turned professional in 1963 - or because of his dizzying decline.

He spent six years at the top, then began a long squandering of his talents, before collapsing into a self-destructive heap of alcoholism, bankruptcy and women.

Last weekend, as he lay dying, for surely there cannot now be much hope, Best asked for pictures showing his fragile state to be published in the News Of The World. He apparently hoped his plight would warn others about the dangers of drink.

The falling of the famous, and their eventual passing, interests us because we live in their long shadows. Sometimes the personal connection is stronger, perhaps because of a fanatical enthusiasm for a particular football team.

That's how it has been with me and George Best, except that it has nothing to do with a passion for football. I may even have told this story before, but, if so, now seems an appropriate time for a reprise.

When I was growing up in south Manchester, going to gawp at George Best's mod marvel of a house was a local pastime. We lived on a suburban estate where the roads had a "mere" in their name. Our neighbours included David Meek, a journalist who used to write about Manchester United (the Meek family, so I understand, has strong York links, so there you go).

We would cycle the three or four miles to Blossoms Lane, near Bramhall, where Best, then 23, had a house built by the architect Frazer Crane. It cost £30,000 and was a modernist split-level bachelor pad, surrounded by a moat. It was white, encased in glass and had a flat roof.

Now if you were the most famous footballer ever, and young and a bit of a playboy too, a handsome charmer and a party boy, would you build a house featuring so many windows?

Well, George did and the crowds flocked, suggesting that idiotic fascination with the famous predates our own celebrity-dazzled age.

This house apparently featured hot-air under-floor heating, a TV that disappeared into the chimney and an underground garage for the E-Type Jag. Not that we could tell from the road, or glimpse much of George, especially after he had a 10ft high fence built.

After three years, George sold the house when he broke club rules and was banished back to his landlady in Chorlton-cum-Hardy.

Being something of a football sceptic, I shouldn't care about George Best, but I somehow do. The slight association of the past has kept me watching as Best has slid from the peaks of brilliance to trough after trough, occasionally rousing himself, before reverting to his dangerous and self-destructive ways.

Best has always been an icon, at first because of his talent, and later, sadly, because of boredom and his addiction to destruction.

Here is another memory from those days. I recall watching a TV drama, probably a Play For Today, about a Best-like footballer. Not much remains in my mind, except for a scene in which the star footballer was sitting in his car when he was harangued by a passer-by.

After a heated exchange, the footballer slammed his car door into the man's shins and said something along the lines of: "That's how I earn my living - how do you like it?" Can anyone else remember this play or have I imagined it?

LABOUR MPs opposed to Tony Blair's education plans are now complaining that his proposals for self-governing schools are unnecessary because they are determined by what happens in London, rather than the rest of the country. They say that Blair is being too "London-centric", a point made in passing in this column all the way back on October 6.

I'd like to claim great prescience, but really it's just good old common sense.

Updated: 10:39 Thursday, November 24, 2005