Oh, oh, and also!

Lovely as the 'Bourne is, what with its pots instead of middies, and its trams, and its castles that rhyme with tassels, and its superabundance of cunning facial hair, nonetheless, the AFL obsession is calculated to wear a sportophobe from oop north down. I am aware that AFL is a subgenre of football, that it probably derives from an ancient Celtic fertility rite entailing the kicking of a severed sacrificial head back and forth between two plague-infested hamlets, but that, quite frankly, is all I care to know. Thus, when a young scholar tells me – in ecstasies – that his sister, a fourth year podiatry student, has just got a job as apprentice masseuse to the toes of the gentlemen from an AFL team – which team I will not name for fear of finding myself on the pointy end of an AFLoony's google search (though "Essen" and "don" may give discerning readers the pertinent clews) – I cannot share his rapture. Indeed, I can think of few places I would rather my sister not approach than a footballer's bunyon.