We'll do him the favour of anonymity, but skipping lightly over the insults and the odd grammatical pothole, his contentions were as follows:

* We should have been grateful to watch "the two best men's players of all time" (i.e. Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal) in the recent Australian Open final.

* Margaret Court's Australian Open titles were, and I quote, "meaningless".

(He didn't specify whether her many other grand slam titles were also meaningless, but you may detect a general tone presently.)

He continued: "Have u ever actually seen a video of womans [sic] tennis from back then? They couldnt [sic] play."

Riiiight. Folks like Margaret Court and Billie Jean King couldn't play tennis. There you go. You stick around long enough and you're bound to learn something new.

One thing that's rewarding as a columnist is that feeling when a reader has really picked up on the arguments you have carefully tried to construct. Obviously this is not one of those times, but it's a heck of a feeling when it does happen.

Briefly, I didn't specifically review the Federer-Nadal final at all in last week's column, in terms of either gratitude, ingratitude or even experiencing a beer-induced epiphany, because it was not, in itself, germane to the issue. But to remove any nominal ambiguity, it was a tremendous match.

One imagines you would find a dissenting view on that only from people who don't like tennis, sport, life or television.

Roger Federer was specifically cited in that column as a player obviously in contention for any "all-time greatest" considerations.

Nonetheless, any suggestion that he and Nadal are unequivocally the two best-ever men's tennis players seems no less premature or contentious than it did last week. And, as Mrs Slocombe from Are You Being Served? often sagely observed, "I am unanimous in this".

However, to reiterate a point that may be worth underscoring, some among pundits and public apparently feel a strange, fierce compulsion to live in an era of all-time bests. Their time is the greatest of all times, apparently.

They fail to heed the sting in the tail of the old Chinese curse, "May you live in interesting times". In fact, stampeding over that particular cliff, they seemingly yearn to live only in the MOST interesting of times.

This seems less a compelling argument than it does some kind of minor psychological disorder.

A colleague put it best during a discussion of a general lack of knowledge concerning vintage movie classics. She observed that some individuals seem inclined to believe that nothing of significance could possibly have happened "B.M." – i.e. "Before Me".

These are those times all right.

Send feedback to: leapso@hotmail.com