It’s been a big week for hips. The other day, the diarist popped into the local howff for the morning eye-opener and, as the landlord gently coaxed a double measure from the bulbous teat of the optic, he turned and said, “ah see that synovial joint formed by the articulation of the rounded head of the femur is giving Andy Murray some jip eh?”
The ruddy-faced regulars nodded in sighing agreement before returning to nurse their goblets of Pale Ale while burying their heads back in the pages of The Lancet.
But forget the muttering concerns over oor Andy’s acetabulofemoral thingymebob. The European Elvis Championships took place earlier this week in the shimmering, Vegas-style majesty of the Hilton Metropole in Birmingham. Shoogling hips here, gyrating lunges there, sequined-tinged pelvic thrusts everywhere? All of this quiffed, lacquered endeavour was done in the name of becoming a prize-winning Elvis Tribute Artist, or as they are officially known, an ETA.
The diarist actually thought those ETAs were what Rangers employed to get round the taxman?
No? Oh well, some will say the current club is just a tribute act anyway . . .
Away from Andy Murray’s sair bits, the good folk at the orthopaedics department of the Government Medical College and Hospital in Chandigarh have reported that Kabaddi players had the most knee operations of all sporty folk in the Indian subcontinent between 2012 and 2017.
It’s just over 25 years now since Channel 4 first showcased this noble discipline which saw bare-footed combatants in a confined space jouking, wrestling, pawing and grabbing at one another in an attempt to score.
Funnily enough, similar procedures are still utilised in some of Glasgow’s more effervescent night clubs.
In the bleak midwinter and all that. Sunday night is still Ski Sunday night.
This snow-shrouded production, which basically documents men and women plummeting from one end of a slope to the other, first aired 40 years ago. For a nation with a fairly modest track record in downhill skiing, its longevity is admirable.
Whether it was the presence of the great David Vine, whose sun specs were so vast they just about eclipsed the entire Chamonix-Mont Blanc resort, or the sound of cowbells echoing as Britain’s Konrad Bartelski skited over the line a full season behind Franz Klammer in the time trial, Ski Sunday caught the imagination.
All hail the sprightly veterans. The ageing process is certainly not hindering Kazuyoshi Miura, the Stanley Matthews of Japanese football, who has signed a new contract with Yokohama FC just a month shy of his 51st birthday.
Presumably his agent has ensured Miura can now trigger the Methuselah Clause, that contractual spin-off which offers a series of lucrative biblical references and a percentage of the club’s embalming fluid sales.
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