Now, through mutual friend Graham Wylie, both are involved in Speedflex, a company that offers high intensity circuit training – Ferris as chief executive, Shearer as a director. It’s hard to describe that feeling when those doors close at the airport and you’re on the other side of it.”

I was in hospital the February after getting my prostate out when I got the offer from [publishing company] Hodder. When I was getting treatment then, I wanted to wait until it was all over before the book came out.” Injury after injury saw Ferris spend more time on the treatment table than on the pitch, and robbed him of the natural gifts of speed and mobility that had set him apart. At 21, he left St James’s Park for the first time.I left school at the start of my fifth year, so when I made my debut in May 1982 my friends in my class were doing their O-levels. If that happened now at Newcastle United or any football club, they’d have had you tied up to some sort of a contract that would’ve secured you for quite some time. I had to radically change my lifestyle, which I have done, I had to radically change my diet, which I have done. I was doing quite well with that and then I got prostate cancer…” he says before bursting into laughter. Why so open? He explains: “I’ve always been open. There’s a freedom in being honest. I didn’t want this to be a book about my life in football, both as a player and as a physiotherapist. Writing about the people I had played and worked with, such as Kevin Keegan or Alan Shearer or Ruud Gullit, would have been the easiest way to get published, but I wanted to give an account of who I am for my kids and their kids.

The stuff about my mother was painful to write. Painful to experience, but painful to write. My family reading that again will be tortured by that, but I had to write it. I’m laughing but those two things, they just shake your confidence in everything. Where you didn’t have fear before, you have it. If I get a chest pain now I think ‘oh, what’s that?’ I have three boys and up to that point they think their dad’s invincible.

The pain of leaving home always lives with you, it never leaves you. Once you move away from your home, and you settle somewhere else, you never quite belong in either place and that’s the strangest thing. Yet this autobiography is more than a tale of the vagaries of sporting fortune. It begins during 'The Troubles' in a working-class Catholic family in the Protestant town of Lisburn, near Belfast. After a childhood scarred by his mother's illness and sectarian hatred, Paul meets the love of his life, his future wife Geraldine. Football memoirs rarely produce great literature but Ferris's The Boy on the Shed is a glistening exception.' Guardian The Boy on the Shed reveals an impressive triumph of human resilience over adversity as well as a truly gifted wordsmith. * Sunday Mirror *

Paul Ferris has written a book that transcends genres...Ferris writes with the sort of fluency that, on the pitch, once impressed peers such as Paul Gascoigne.Ferris has gone beyond standard sports autobiographies. The Boy On The Shed is of a time and place, of Ireland, of Northern Ireland, of growing up a Catholic on a Protestant estate in Lisburn in the 1970s. It is a story of everyday sectarianism and its effects...These books offer a window on another world. Paul Ferris spent much of his childhood in Lisburn looking through one. What he saw, how he understood it and didn't understand it, is gripping. ( Irish Times)

Paul Ferris has written a book that transcends genres...Ferris writes with the sort of fluency that, on the pitch, once impressed peers such as Paul Gascoigne.Ferris has gone beyond standard sports autobiographies. The Boy On The Shed is of a time and place, of Ireland, of Northern Ireland, of growing up a Catholic on a Protestant estate in Lisburn in the 1970s. It is a story of everyday sectarianism and its effects...These books offer a window on another world. Paul Ferris spent much of his childhood in Lisburn looking through one. What he saw, how he understood it and didn't understand it, is gripping. * Irish Times *