Perhaps because I am as much Scottish as English, I am finding it impossible to work up enthusiasm for, or even feign interest in, the activities of the national team in the World Cup. Perhaps if they start to win, I might take a different attitude.

The appalling reaction of almost everybody to poor Robert Green’s goalkeeping error in Saturday’s opening match says everything that is necessary about the lack of sportsmanship among those who follow ‘the beautiful game’.

I wasn’t, of course, watching the ITV broadcast, preferring to recapture the delights of ENO’s recent production of Leos Janacek’s Katya Kabanová, which I saw at the London Coliseum in March, on Radio 3. Curious about the progress of the game, though, I switched on the telly just in time to see the faux pas and the immediate blistering reaction to it.

But at least the episode produced a number of amusing headlines the next day, including Hand of Clod, Stars ’n Tripe and Tainted Glove, the last understandable only to pop fans who remember Soft Cell’s 1981 No 1, Tainted Love.

I challenge anyone to make any sense at all of the worst effort which was supplied in the Sunday Times: Green Fingers. OK, the bloke is called Green and his fingers were involved in his failure to stop the ball. But neither has any link with the images of gardening that come to mind when the two words are placed together. Now if the player had been called Butter . . .

I have not always been anti-football. I still recall the excitement of watching games in my early teens at Peterborough United’s London Road ground. ‘The Posh’ were then on a giant-killing rampage, to employ a word that Derrick Bird’s murderous activities have rather put off limits to sports writers.

The special atmosphere of football in the sixties was eloquently recalled by Frank Skinner (right) on Desert Island Discs on Sunday. His interview conveyed a warmth and generosity of spirit I had never suspected in the comedian. The discovery that this highly intelligent man had not read a book until he was 21 amazed me. It was Alan Sillitoe’s Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, in case you’re interested.

His choice of records was also a very good one and included George Formby’s Why Don’t Women Like Me?, The Queen of the Night’s second aria from The Magic Flute and the England World Cup Squad’s 1970 chart topper, Back Home.

I suspect — though am not certain — that he mentioned something about England’s 1966 World Cup victory. He certainly told us he was drinking in pubs at 15. I started a year earlier and actually watched the final, aged 14, on a flickering black-and-white television in a pub in the Norfolk village of Wolferton. It was next door to the station which was used by The Queen (the railway line is now shut) on her journeys to Sandringham.

It was courtesy of Her Maj — or more accurately as a consequence of her Official Birthday — that guests at the private view of the biennial on form exhibition of garden sculptures at Asthall Manor on Saturday enjoyed a thrilling fly-past by the Red Arrows. Many joked that our host, Rosie Pearson — so assiduous in other matters of our entertainment, including copious quantities of strawberries and cream — had laid it on specially. In fact, the low-flying jets, with their plumes of coloured smoke, were on their way to Trooping the Colour.

Even their racket could not distract the naughty dog we were watching steadily polishing off a big bowl of clotted cream in a leafy corner of the garden. I promised Rosemarie that I wouldn’t ‘split’ on the animal. But I feel sure that her identity — and the nature of her sin — would have been graphically revealed all too soon . . .