Indeed, Chuck, I have sent a Freedom Of Information request to Herbert Ackgrass and King Cricket to try to ascertain why that phrase failed to find its way into the piece.

Response there has been none.

I couldn’t agree more, Bert. It would be impossible to apologise enough for Herbert Ackgrass and his incessant scribblings, perennially raising more questions than he answers. Quite right.

I thought I’d bumped the old curmudgeon off in the mid 1980s…

… https://ianlouisharris.com/1985/02/07/hackgrass-signs-out-february-1985/ …

…but the old git seems to have made a comeback under King Cricket’s eccentric tutelage.

However, Denise Sullivan couldn’t possibly have been a Lindsay Hall F-Block resident, as that block, together with the several surrounding it, were for boys – I chose my description wisely.

For reasons never properly explained, the female blocks were out of earshot from the boys ones, although not out of what my mother would have called krikhn (or crawling) distance, thank goodness.

I don’t remember a vision in red and think I probably would remember same. Perhaps Denise wasn’t a vision in red back then. I was a skinny ha’peth who might well avoid detection by dint of a more recent description. Do send Denise my very best wishes and sincere apologies for the noise (not that she could possibly have heard it unless she was herself up to no good) next time you speak with her.

The first and most obvious new question is, “How come the bowling side has twelve players?”

The second question is, “Why isn’t the drawing done to scale?” I mean, it doesn’t strike me as an impossibility to at least approximate the scale. As drawn, the “corridor” appears to be more of a hallway, but the absence of any scale means that the relative proportions of width and length must remain unknown. And I have to say, in what I think of as a corridor, the chance of the bowler being able to find a gap between any two of the on-side / off-side fielders is pretty remote.

The third question is, “Given the obvious slapdashery with which the draughtsman has done his work, what on earth prompted him to draw a fancy border round the title block?” And not only that, but to draw a slapdash fancy border round the title block. It’s as if the muse of artistic precision visited him for a few brief seconds, but then gave up and buggered off before completing her work.

That’s it, no more questions. The final score is 3-1 in favour of questions asked and not answered.

(*) Denise Sullivan is a very real person, an English student at Keele at around that time. She went on to work doing PR for Texaco, in which role she occasionally delivered cake to the media at Texaco Trophy matches. She was once described on TMS by Brian Johnston with the phrase “A vision in red has just entered the commentary box”. She is also my cousin.