While you were away

This corner has already broken its fundamental annual rule not to get worked up about football till the clocks are altered at the end of this month — there is ample time ahead to concentrate on soccer’s unending imbroglio of speculation, satisfaction and scandal — and any number of faraway correspondents write to say they relish the seasons being topped and tailed with some shafts of basic information. In providing a few for you distant Spectator subscribers, I’m warmed by the memory of the late Peter Cook telling me how, as a schoolboy on summer hols from Radley at his father’s distant colonial service outpost in West Africa, the Times would be delivered, chuggingly by sea, in back-number batches, which Cook père would ration himself, in date order, to a single copy a day. No matter the news was weeks out of date, the family could still be roused at the breakfast table by the father delightedly exclaiming: ‘Terrific! Worcestershire look like beating Surrey at the Oval!’ Although the following day’s paper was top of the large pile next to him, he’d still wait till next morning’s breakfast to see if Worcestershire actually did win.