Iain Hollingshead

Twelve summers ago, just before our first child was born, my wife and I almost quit our sensible London jobs to run a smokehouse in Suffolk. We’d never run a smokehouse before. We’d never even run a business before. But we were awfully fond of smoked cod’s roe. And Suffolk.  I stumbled upon the email the other day, while searching for something else. It was almost comic in its naivety. A fledgling family offering to take on an established, struggling family business. No thought of notice periods or maternity pay or balance sheets or smoking techniques (you just whack the fish on the head, take a deep breath and shove it up the chimney, right?).

Cricket has laws, rather than rules, which might explain why someone suspected of breaking them can become the subject of an extra-judicial lynch mob. Last month’s North Yorkshire and South Durham Cricket League’s Division Two game between the second elevens of Saltburn and Norton would normally struggle to make headlines in the Northern Echo. But thanks to video footage of Brian Devine, Saltburn’s 38-year-old slip fielder, apparently clicking his fingers as the ball sailed harmlessly past the outside edge – thereby fooling the umpire into giving the batsman out caught behind – the match has become famous across the world.  Newspaper readers from Melbourne to Mumbai have piled in below the line (and, sometimes, below the belt) to demand the fielder’s head.

The best stocking-filler present I received last year was the bumper Christmas edition of The Spectator. But it wasn’t the only erudite reading matter crammed into a moth-eaten ski sock. Nestled under a mouldy tangerine and some chocolate money destined to be stolen by my children were: How it Works: The Dad (Ladybird for Grown-Ups); You Do Have the Authority Here!: #What Would Jackie Weaver Do?; and The Best of Matt, 2021. They now jostle for space in a downstairs loo sprinkled with other half-read stocking fillers chronicling the past two decades: Schott’s Original Miscellany; The Curious Incident of the WMD in Iraq; Does Anything Eat Wasps?; Crap Towns; Fifty Sheds of Grey; Five on Brexit Island; and half a dozen more Ladybird spoofs, a series that has sold 5.