SEPTEMBER

The news that the BBC was losing The

Great British Bake-Off to Channel 4 confirmed all fears that here was a nation possessed by a frenzy of selfharming. Which creates a seamless link with Mayo, who yet again managed not to win an All-Ireland, losing it this time to the reviled Dubs.

Which gives us no link at all to Sir Bradley Wiggins who, in a scene which will be cherished by students of media management for decades to come, chose to do that one big interview in relation to the doping issue with the BBC’s Andrew Marr.

Traditionally the sports section of a newspaper has been known as the toy department, though some of us have always known that these things are all upside down. And now in a defining moment, here was Sir Bradley choosing a political correspondent as his ideal interviewer, a guy who will ask him, figuratively speaking, to name his favourite colour, a guy from the real toy department.

But in general the public was at last starting to learn something about doping, such as — if I may quote myself here — to a large extent there is officially no such thing as doping.

You just discover that you have something wrong with you (the hay fever seems to be a good one) and you get this thing called a TUE (Therapeutic Use Exemption) which enables you to crank yourself up with enough drugs to cure all the hay fever that everyone in Europe has been suffering since the end of the Second World War.