100 YEARS OLD AND WAKING UP BEFORE IT IS TOO LATE...

LORD Coe was yesterday reported to have described the booing received by Justin Gatlin at the world athletics championship as a “wake-up call” for British sport. According to our database of British newspapers, this is the 1,237th wakeup call so far this year which works out at 5.6 wake-up calls a day.

This, I suggest, must be playing havoc with the nation’s sleeping habits. We have to fall asleep before we can be woken up, and to do this 5.6 times a day is disruptive to say the least.

I raised the matter with Sir Justyn Thyme, permanent secretary at the Department for Cliche Synchronisation. I asked him: Are we not disrupting the nation’s slumbering with all these wake-up calls?

“Wake-up calls are a ticking time bomb,” he replied. “We must do something about it before it is too late and make a fresh start, but I assure you we have it all under control.”

He pushed a spreadsheet towards me which showed the number of times certain cliches had appeared in the national press over the past ten years:

The columns, he explained, reveal the number of times each expression occurred in the relevant year: Wake-Up Call, Ticking Time Bomb, Make a Fresh Start, Before It Is Too Late. “We only have interim figures for 2017, but even if we assume they will continue at the same rate, that only gives 2,052 wakeup calls for the entire year, which is an improvement on last year’s 2,129.”

The real worry, he said, is the number of ticking time bombs. “As you can see, these underwent a dramatic increase in 2012 and this year’s projected figure of 254 would be the highest on record.”

So what, I asked Sir Justyn is the Department for Cliche Synchronisation doing about it?

“Glad you asked,” he said. “We at the DCS view this with the utmost urgency. As is clear from our name, our primary objective is to synchronise cliches to give the best possible results. In this case, our plan is to ensure that every ticking time bomb is supplied with a wake-up call scheduled to go off in good time to wake us up and defuse the bomb before it goes off. It is imperative that we do this before it is too late, leaving the nation ready to make a fresh start, free from the threat of ticking time bombs.”

“But as your figures show, the Fresh Starts are running behind the Ticking Time Bombs this year, for the first time since 2013,” I said. “Even if we defuse the bombs, there won’t be enough Fresh Starts to go round.”

“Good point,” he said. “I hope it serves as a wake-up call before it is too late.” And we left it at that.