Fatigued from his long journey, Philodontis anxiously approached the first person he spied coming up the road and greeted him with a hearty, “Chin-chin, my good fellow, would you be able to direct me to the pankration stadium, for I would be most interested in placing a wager on a fighter who has gained great renown in my homeland, but I’ve only been told that it lies beyond the great weald in the vicinage of the village of Phigalia?”

I once had a brief chin-chin with a sports historian in Athens who claimed that the pankration champion Dimitri Kickboxopoulos usually trained in a weald in the vicinage of the ancient temples at Delphi, jumping, screaming, boxing and wrestling trees, all the while invoking the Oracle and the god Apollo to bestow on him the power to win.

The ladies of Layer-de-la-Haye Women's Institute were interrupted in the midst of a fascinating chin-chin regarding the benefits of saltpetre added to a husband's morning cuppa when divers yet enthusiastic ululations rent the crepuscular calm; upon discovery in the vicinage Augustine Bellwether and Simeon Callipygeon explained that the seclusion of the weald was the perfect place to practice pankration...