Mind your language | 20 March 2010

It has always seemed to me that in the lyrics by David Baddiel and Frank Skinner for their song marking the European football championships of 1996 the word hurt enters awkwardly, for the sake of the rhyme: ‘Three lions on a shirt, Jules Rimet still gleaming,/ Thirty years of hurt never stopped me dreaming.’ Perhaps I would say the same if they had reached for the word dirt instead.

• From magazine issue: 20 March 2010