It was just part of a week in which the news..went further and further into the realm of Mondo Bizarro.

I had the very devil of a squeak for it, he went on. "I did the hurdles over two or three garden-walls, but so did the flyer who was on my tracks, and he drove me back into the straight and down to High Street like any lamplighter. […]

It is, frankly, a scandal that at the various rail industry events I attend, the number of non-white faces can be counted on one or (at best) two hands.

In matters of disbursement he was (to use an eighteenth century idiom) “monstrous gouty-handed."