How much longer will sledging be tolerated in sport?

It is not true that your correspondent organises his entire life around the assembly of material for his column.

I reject utterly the cruel suggestion that had I been standing on the deck of an ocean liner in 1912 in the North Atlantic, as an iceberg loomed out of the darkness, I would have said: “There’s definitely 600 words in this, you know.”

Similarly, there is nothing to prove the allegation that if I had overheard P. H. Pearse giving his spiff, as they say in Blackpool, a hundred years ago my response would have been: “If I write about this will it stay fresh ‘til Monday?”