It would be worth being a fly-on-the-wall when Harry Pearson pitches his latest idea for a book.

In the last decade or so he has managed to persuade his agent that a nostalgic look at the joys of playing with toy soldiers, a travelogue around Belgium, and the delights of summer fairs in the north of England are all fitting subjects for a potential bestseller. His latest is a celebration of dogs.

"My publishers are pretty lenient," admits Pearson, who has a day job as a Guardian sports writer.

"I do realise that if you wrote a one-line synopsis of any of my books it would sound pretty odd, but I just get an idea and run with it."

Like his other books Hound Dog Days is born out of peculiarly English eccentricity. It is a literary ramble through the pleasures and occasional frustrations of living with a canine companion against the backdrop of rural life where there are otters in the river, glue-sniffers in the woods and near international incidents over fishing rights.

"I like the small things in life," says Person, who is one of the guests of the inaugural Carnegie Sporting Words Festival, which takes place in Harrogate next month. "I like people watching, I can't help but listen in to people's conversations, minutiae is what I'm interested in.

"I grew up with a variety of spaniels, terriers, collies and mongrels and I've spent a lot of time walking dogs. It's where I do a lot of my thinking, so Hound Dog Days is a kind of thank you for that."

His efforts have seen Pearson regularly likened to everyone's favourite travel writer Bill Bryson. It's a comparison he admits is flattering and it's not undeserved. He writes with an effortless wit, which he may well have developed growing up watching Middlesbrough FC on Saturday afternoons in the now defunct Ayresome Park.

Football has been a constant in his life ever since, but following the well-documented influx of foreign billionaires into the Premiership, Pearson has been trying to recapture more innocent times on the lower league terraces of Hartlepool FC.

"I don't live as close to Middlesbrough as I used to, so only manage six or seven games a season," he says.

"It's not the experience I remember as a kid. That's partly why I started going to Hartlepool. It's in the lower leagues where the real heroes are. It's easy to get kicked about every Saturday when you're paid £120,000 a week. It's not so easy when you're just doing it for the love of the game." In his Guardian columns, Pearson has chronicled the changing face of football with a wry wit, but he admits that he has watched the developments with a sense of sadness.

"One of my friends is a Manchester City fan," he says. "I was talking to him about the takeover and he feels like something which belonged to him has been taken away. It's like when you were a teenager and the obscure band you liked suddenly became popular. It feels like they've sold out, forgotten their roots and left you behind. Clubs like Middlesbrough and Sunderland have always been run by people who really love the area and who feel a responsibility to serve the community."

Pearson is fanatical about sport and his enthusiasm is contagious."I covered the British Superbikes Championship and the atmosphere really makes the hairs on the back of your neck stand up," he says. "It attracts crowds of 200,000 people, but at the same time it's also incredibly intimate. When I looked at my press pass I noticed it said, 'access to pit lane'. After so long reporting on football where everything has become so staged managed I thought that can't be right, but it was. And it wasn't just journalists.

"Twenty minutes before the race fans can go have their photo taken with the riders. It's just fantastic. That's what sport should be about."

At the Carnegie Sporting Words Festival, Pearson will join Hunter Davis for a talk on ghostwriting. Davis was the brains behind the official autobiographies of Wayne Rooney, Paul Gascoigne and Dwight York, while Pearson penned Andy Gray's life story Gray Matters. The title still makes him laugh. "I didn't choose it, honestly it was nothing to do with me," he says. "Ghostwriting is a funny old job and not as easy as some people might think. Hunter Davis is the king of ghostwriting, but even he struggled with Dwight Yorke. What you want is someone desperate to get something off their chest, like Gazza obviously did.

"With Andy Gray I was lucky. He's a pundit, he knows how the media works and he knows what sells, but there are others who will give you three hours of their time and then declare the only interesting bits of their life off limits. The after dinner circuit can be a killer for a ghostwriter. It pays well and there are people who want to keep the best material for themselves. When that happens you might as well hold your hands up and admit defeat."

Carnegie Sporting Words 08, which will also include a tribute to Brian Clough and a live broadcast on Colin Murray's Radio 5 show Fighting Talk, will take place in venues in Harrogate and Headingley from Oct 2 to 5. For a full programme of events call 01423 562303
or log on to www.sportingwords.com.