On the one hand I suspected a trap, but on the other the man was patently honest. I sat in the pie shop kicking my heels and pondering the problem.
And while Clough misses out again, it is understood that Blanc has a contract that will take him to French drama club Marseille in the summer. Clough has been left kicking his heels in his search to replace England defender Des Walker, who left on a £1.5 million cut-price deal to Italian giants Sampdoria in the summer.
While he had been kicking his heels yesterday he had spent an hour in a tiny bookshop in Curzon Street and had come away with a paperback edition of the Parsons Rosenberg and the Seamus Heaney and Ted Hughes’s anthology.