A friend of mine (this one is real), having just been at a Hibs match, went to visit the parents of a pal, taking with her a further friend. The pal’s mum asked how the game was. Without pause, my friend’s friend replied: “fucking pish.”

When the two were alone again, my chum enquired: “What the hell were you doing there? She’s about 90. You’ve never met her and the first word you say is a swearword.” “Well,” replied her companion, “I thought she was a Swearer.”

To swear, or not to swear, that is the question...

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In his head, it seems there are two types of people in this world: Swearers and non-Swearers. Joining him and scar-heided fictional footballer Gordon Ramsay in the first group, you have those who believe that all sentences are improved by a garnishing of expletives. To them, everything is game for blaspheming, so that Martin Luther King Junior’s most famous speech would’ve been far better if he’d stood up and gone: ‘I have a dream that one day this frigging nation will rise the shit up and live out the true meaning of its creed’.

Of course, there is truth in this: anything the great Doctor said would’ve been improved by the use of northern English words like ‘frigging’. If only he’d thought of this, King Junior wouldn’t have become the forgotten and marginalised fringe character he is today; truly, he was the Bobby Davro of the equal rights movement.

Another Swearer was my granddad, a Yorkshire-Irishman brimming with the confusing sense of morose bonhomie such genetics breed. When marrying into the family, my dad was immediately impressed by his new father-in-law’s cussing, later defining it as ‘creative swearing of the best kind’. Dad’s favourite remains the occasion on which an exasperated granddad bore down on a quarrelsome housefly and seethed: “come ‘ere, yer blue-arsed flamer.”

That second group (remember, from a few words back), the non-Swearers, would certainly not have welcomed granddad into their pious cabal, but it’s amusing to imagine the tame language with which they’d have told him to go away, and equally his untamed response.

Advantages of being a non-Swearer include performing better at job interviews than Swearers and not offending the elderly, always good unless the elder in question is Margaret Thatcher or the novelist Katie Price. In addition, non-Swearers don’t suffer the sense of alienation an ‘Email not sent due to explicit content’ brings.

Whose side are you on? It’s a bloody minefield.

Twatting apples with a pogo stick

For the past month, more often than not I’ve fallen asleep listening to the Ashes and reading the diaries of former Labour MP Chris Mullin (to use some words up, un-dear reader, you can have two jokes here: ‘Chris doesn’t seem to mind’ and ‘which is a particular worry as I’m an overnight long distance lorry driver’. Neither work, but that’s 42 words used – now who’s the idiot?).

Other than inviting Delia Smith around to make you a cocoa laced with free-range port, this is about the most middle-class way to reach slumber. It also leads to lucid dreams of former Minister for Agriculture, Fisheries and Food Nick Brown bowling at Michael Hussey or Diane Abbott dropping an easy catch at slip, but that’s a different matter, as my psychoanalyst keeps reminding me.

Laying there, understanding between four and seven per cent of the words babbled and jargoned by the commentators, a nagging feeling gripped me in its arms: having never played cricket on any discernible level apart from twatting an apple core with a pogo stick, how do I know that this isn’t the game for me? How do I know I’m not in possession of an incredible, raw, world-beating talent?

Before long, this feeling extended to everything in the universe, ever (it was a long night): politics; metaphysics; javelin; making cup cakes; medicine (medicine, for Pete’s sake – I might have within my hidden talents a cure for cancer or the common cold or that thing when you knock your elbow on the table and it goes all fuzzy). You name it, I fretted that it could be my leashed talent, my untapped gift to mankind.

Now though, the cricket’s over and I’ve finished the diaries. I can get back to listening to Tony Livesey’s 5Live phone-ins about bin collections. I can start reading Mrs Pen Portrait’s Heat magazines again. Happy New Year.

Info: Daniel Gray’s Stramash: Tackling Scotland’s Towns and Teams is out now priced £9.99. For more, including what he’ll soon be describing as ‘critical acclaim’, see stramashthebook.com