Yes. I often suspected that he was one of these guys who's probably had the pïss taken out of him or been wound up so much over a lifetime that he often suspected people were having a go at him even when they weren't. I think this made him unpleasantly prickly and almost totally unable to take a joke.
I thought it was because he didn't speak-a the English so good. Anyway, so good as he needed to to make his points in writing, and that heightened his sensitivity and paranoia to acute status.
"Plenty of strikers can score goals," he said, gesturing to the famous old stands casting shadows around us.
"But a lot have found it difficult wearing the number 9 shirt for The Arsenal."