First things first, please …

Never mind the war upon ISIS or the fact of 195 countries signing an accord in Paris regarding action to be taken in respect of climate change in order to avoid the extinction of the human race by the year 2100 AD, there are far more important priorities to be dealt with and I cannot understand why the United Nations doesn’t just get on with them.

Let me take you forward a decade from now to a Brave New World in which we all live in modern high-tech houses boasting sixty-foot wide high-definition television screens adorning our basement cinemas, whilst parked outside in the driveway is our mini (vertical take-off) family-sized personal aircraft in which we fly to work, nip the supermarket to do the weekly shop and indeed set off on Friday afternoons at about 2.30pm to our weekend villas in Greece.

By then, naturally, our sixty-foot wide high-definition television screens will be the means whereby not only will we control every utility and appliance in our homes, but go online, pay for everything, review our family holiday snaps, and of course watch all our television and movies.

There will be no such thing as a television licence, nor indeed crazy satellite or cable deals in which several hundred channels in which we have absolutely no interest are bundled together via a payment package containing the two or three channels we do want, so that we’re effectively being bent over the nearest armchair with our trousers round our ankles and being ripped off left, right and centre.

Instead everything – literally everything – will be ‘on demand’. In other words, we shall be able to watch anything we want at any time of day, ‘live’ or recorded … and we shall only ever pay for what it is that we have chosen to watch – no more, no less.

Yesterday was a perfect example of a still-imperfect world in which between them this weekend Sky Sports and BT Sport are combining to show umpteen European rugby union matches ‘live’ on British television at the rate – if you were so minded to deploy two televisions and use your red button – of no fewer than four per afternoon/evening on both Saturday and Sunday and yet neither of them are transmitting coverage of the sole match of any real important, viz. Calvisano v Harlequins (away in Italy) in the Rugby Challenge Cup.

Accordingly, I busied myself all day doing various bits and bobs, none of them having anything to do with rugby football, because to be frank I wasn’t interested in rugby as an art form or sport. No fully-committed fan can be.

For the record and indeed my eleven Rust readers, therefore, let me simply state here than the boys in the quartered multi-coloured shirts duly prevailed by the margin of 10-50, getting over the whitewash on no fewer than eight times, courtesy of Messrs Clifford, Lambert, Chisholm, Hopper, Sinckler, Walker and Wallace (2), on top of which Botica also landed five conversions.

I also understand (from the Quins fans’ unofficial website) that Wallace ended the game with one foot in a plastic boot, so that may be an injury to be concerned about.

Anyway the next game of major interest is Quins’ Big Game 8 – against Gloucester, on 27^th December at the Big Stoop, aka Twickenham Stadium, a venue to which, on the basis that the match-day experience is insufferably mediocre and poor value for money, I will not go on principle. As a result I shall also be watching that one on television.

In the meantime I shall have to resort to getting my December Quins ‘fix’ by going next Saturday to the Stoop in order to watch the return (home) fixture against Calvisano, which we should win at a canter, especially since rumour has it that it will be the occasion of the long-awaited debut for the club – provided that he’s recovered from his dead leg sustained in the Varsity Match – of the last of our stella summer signings, talismanic Welsh centre Jamie Roberts.