To Bradly, Podson was a minor pub gabbler out of a hundred such. He had boozed away an evening with Podson because he was an attendant parasite on Doctor Ramsey.

If coming second is coming nowhere, as all sports-people tend to to be taught (remember the words of Mr Lombardi), then this is most true in those individual sports where careers tend to be brief, and opportunities to win fewest.

And yet we are so far from the Elizabethans in that our post-Saussurian understanding of language, with its foregrounding, not to say fetishizing, of inbuilt structural difference and deferral—both that between signs themselves and that between the sign and any fully determinate meaning, let alone external reference—is so radically and unrecuperably counter-enactive.

Couldn't somebody have dreamt up a goddamn beach?