The write stuff

Some of the Australian cricketers, it seems, are cagey about sport’s time-honoured hobby of autograph collecting. At Highbury stadium new signs order you never to approach Arsenal players for autographs. There was a minor fuss at the Open golf when Tiger Woods’s men announced the champ would sign his name for fans only ‘in pre-announced and strictly regulated circumstances’. Sports celebs reckon the too liberal scrawl of their name in a schoolboy’s autograph book endangers their precious ‘image rights’ and they fear recipients will at once flog it to the highest bidder on an internet auction site. So what am I bid for the first in my tattered old book? How thrilled I was — page one, trim and precise in his own fountain pen, is logged the late Charlie Barnett, Glos and England dasher who lived not far from us up Chalford Hill: ‘To Francis, Best of luck, C.J.