I went to a couple of very good lectures the other day — by Etienne Wenger and Yrjo Engestrom. Before the show started, however, this mysterious message was flashed onto the screen. What could it mean? That it was disgraceful to be seen in such company? It’s a truly idiotic notice.

Richard Williams is not impressed by the decision to appoint a new England manager with such indecent haste.

Capello is one of the great club coaches and his brusque intelligence may just be what this generation of England players need. If England are going to employ another foreigner, he is as good as they come. But did the FA really need to seize the time quite so urgently?

Here was the opportunity to recognise the failure to reach next summer’s Euro 2008 finals as a real blessing, albeit in very heavy disguise. A period without competitive fixtures could have been used for rigorous consideration of the factors that have led the England team to such a pass, in particular the terrible paucity of plausible English candidates for McClaren’s job. This is the major fault-line running through the foundations of the English game, and the FA would have done well to acknowledge it by avoiding the temptation to make an instant high-profile appointment, announcing instead its intention to search for a radical solution…

I am chronically uninterested in sport, but I love intelligent writing. Which is why I read Richard Williams.

Vivid account by Bridget O’Donnell, a mother who happened to be on holiday in Portugal in the same group as the McCann family when their daughter was abducted.

We lay by the members-only pool staring at the sky. Round and round, the helicopters clacked and roared. Their cameras pointed down at us, mocking the walled and gated enclave. Circles rippled out across the pool. It was the morning after Madeleine went.

Six days earlier we had landed at Faro airport. The coach was full of people like us, parents lugging multiple toddler/baby combinations. All of us had risen at dawn, rushed along motorways and hurtled across the sky in search of the modern solution to our exhaustion – the Mark Warner kiddie club. I travelled with my partner Jes, our three-year-old daughter, and our nine-month-old baby son. Praia da Luz was the nearest Mark Warner beach resort and this was the cheapest week of the year – a bargain bucket trip, for a brief lie-down…

It’s a very good piece, which makes no attempt to exploit the experience. And she donated her fee to the Find Madeleine fund.