SAY what you like - or, if you prefer, what you don't like - about The Sun, but they certainly know how to put a front page together.
From the surreal (Freddie Starr Ate My Hamster) to the triumphal (It's The Sun What Won It) to the notorious (Gotcha!) the old currant bun has offered up an awful lot of memorable and eye-catching splashes down the years.
Yet my personal favourite seems to have fallen by the wayside of collective memory. It was produced in September 2001, following Iain Duncan Smith's improbable election as leader of the Conservative party. While most papers recorded the arrival of the new leader of Her Majesty's Most Loyal Opposition in vaguely respectful tones, The Sun decided to give voice to what most people were actually thinking. With reference to the fact IDS had replaced the equally charisma-lite William Hague, they printed a full-page picture of the new man, emblazoned with the words: "Anonymous Baldy Number Two".
The tag stuck in my mind - and, I suppose, in the minds of quite a few others. Long before Duncan Smith made his much-derided "do not underestimate the determination of a quiet man" speech at the 2002 party conference, it was clear that underestimation was pretty much his due. He did not last as leader much longer. And, frankly, when you are replaced in a job by Michael Howard, you probably realise you should never have been doing it in the first place.
Now you might be wondering what this has to do with the Wednesday brief of a rugby column. And until halfway through the last paragraph I was struggling to remember too. But then it struck me, for Duncan Smith has the most intriguing rugby connection. Turns out he went to the same school - HMS Conway, a naval training school on Anglesey - at the same time as Clive Woodward.
Better still, they even played in the same team, with Duncan Smith at fly-half and Woodward at centre. The school closed in the mid 1970s, but had it stayed open, I'm sure it would now be promoting itself on the reputations and career trajectories of its alumni. "Come to Conway," they might say. "Learn how to tie knots. Develop an inflated sense of your own importance. Watch your hair fall out."
But another IDS link to the egg-chasing game came to mind recently. Now you probably think I spend my days poring over possession statistics and reading the biographies of minor Welsh forwards of the early Edwardian period, but I'll have you know I'm a far more erudite and worldly fellow than that. And my finger was firmly on the throbbing pulse of the zeitgeist the other day when I sat down to read the Office for Budget Responsibility's report into the Duncan Smith-led Department for Work and Pensions' implementation of Universal Credit.
With a form of words that might have been crafted by Sir Humphrey Appleby himself, the OBR took issue with the department's "recent history of optimism bias in Universal Credit and other projects of this sort". In less euphemistic terms, they reckoned the numbers they were being fed were pure hooey, and that projections of the future success of the policy came down to nothing more substantial than wishful thinking.
Which brings us to Scotland's Six Nations campaign. Or, rather, Scotland's Six Nations disaster. Three games, three defeats, plum last in the tournament table and the two strongest teams still to play. To err again on the side of euphemism, it's not looking too good right now.
But let the mind drift back a few weeks. Then, in the wake of Scotland's autumn Test programme, we were looking forward to the bright days of a Six Nations spring in which the national side would reassert itself as a force in the game. We were ready to roll again. Our glass wasn't just half full; we had three pints lined up behind the bar and happy hour was about to begin.
The only thing wrong with all this quaffing was that it had obliterated a few memories. Most importantly, it had led us to forget the recurring pattern of the past few years, whereby a decent November showing is followed by a succession of Six Nations calamities and a battle (which now appears to have been lost) to avoid the wooden spoon. For want of a better term, let's just call it the recent history of optimism bias.
Now psychologists, biologists and other such boffins have suggested that there are solid evolutionary reasons for human beings being hard-wired with this outlook. Some years ago, a survey of 97,000 people found that optimists are 14 per cent less likely to die between the ages of 50 and 65, and 30 per cent less likely to die from cardiac arrest. One recent academic paper concluded with the suggestion that "the mind has evolved learning mechanisms to mis-predict future occurrences, as in some cases they lead to better outcomes than do unbiased beliefs".
And maybe it has. But I envy those future generations, perhaps a few million years hence, who have evolved minds that protect them from that cringing sensation you feel when you realise your team isn't really all that good and that you were a bit of a plonker for ever thinking otherwise. Because, frankly, that's how a lot of Scottish fans felt as they filed out of Murrayfield on Saturday evening.
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