Fair to middling

AMONG THE PIECES occasioned by Harold Evans’s death was a fond and generous memoir by Donald Trelford, his rival Sunday newspaper editor: “We found we had much in common — both of us short men with northern working-class backgrounds (his family in the railways, mine in coal-mining) who had come up through regional papers … If Harry had a fault it was a kind of northern boastfulness though delivered in the gentle manner of Michael Parkinson rather than Geoffrey Boycott.”

Now, a few years ago Trelford became a gerontological sensation when he fathered a child at the age of was proprietorially proud of the city’s fecund son: “Is Coventry man Donald Trelford Britain’s oldest new dad?” Probably.