I remember my first ‘ban’ as a teenager after travelling to the Smoke, against my will, to watch Anita Dobson in the West End production of ‘Budgie’. It’s fair to say the first half was enough to put me off theatre as a cultural medium for life, and I and some kid known only as ‘Mark’, decided to slip out and go and see what Soho was all about. Suffice to say we weren’t disappointed, but our English teacher and classmates were after waiting around on a coach for 90 minutes in central London after we ‘lost our bearings’ around the Raymond Revuebar.

Mark, being a renegade, and the opposite of a stickler for the rules, then got banned from parking his tractor in the school car park a few years later. In his school uniform and having recently passed the agricultural driving test he would steam through Rye town centre on the family tractor with five or six random school kids hanging off the sides. He would then struggle to find a parking space at the school. After an altercation with a teacher, he decided to block his car in the staff car park for the day. By the time Mark had been identified as the culprit, the teacher had missed an important meeting and a vendetta ensued.

Father once proudly displayed a sign that he planned to attach to our front door. It was his first attempt at banning undesirables from coming onto the property. This was during a fashion, back in the 1980s, of ne’er-do-wells who would come around laden with tea towels and sponges that they hoped to sell to home-owning punters.

Nowadays such sales people are not that frequent, and neither are charity muggers whose trade seems to have reached the decline stage of the sales life cycle. Father had bought a sign that read ‘No Hawkers/Circulars’. The only issue with this ban was that we no longer lived in Victorian Britain and those visiting did not know what a hawker/circular was. Thank goodness for Sherlock Holmes dialogue nowadays with which to educate the masses on old-style diction, thanking you kindly mister sir guv'nor.

To be banned from anything is either a badge of honour or a total humiliation with no middle ground. I guess the question comes down to were you banned from something you love or not? Being banned from school trips to the theatre is only wounding if you love the smell of the greasepaint and the roar of the crowd. For me it is like waterboarding, spending hours in a cramped stuffy environment watching people pretend to be something they are not.

‘Chris Froome loves cycling’ is probably the most obvious sentence I have ever written. The four-time winner of the Tour de France is not universally loved. In the UK, he suffers from the same affliction that has been the case with former sporting superstars such as Zola Budd and Mo Farah. The ‘if you're not born here, you’re never truly going to be seen as one of our own’ syndrome and being born in Kenya has caused Froome to be treated with the same deference.

He recently got banned from the Tour due to irregularities over claims he had double the amount of salbutamol in his body during the 2017 Vuelta A Espana. The asthma drug was twice the permitted level and, despite the ban being rescinded, the doubts still remain. My only question is why so many children who suffer from asthma seem to take up professional cycling, but that’s inclusion in action I guess. At present eight per cent of the general public are asthmatic yet 40 per cent of elite cyclists are. You can draw your own conclusions from that data.

Other sportsmen, inconsolable at the injustice of it all, have been banned for varying offences including biting other players, kung fu kicking fans and attacking referees.

I have not been banned from anything since a friend in Cornwall banned me from riding her horse some years ago as I was ‘carrying a little too much timber’. I stood and watched the others trot off as I felt the burn of humiliation and tasked myself with losing weight. If it ever happens again, I have the perfect redress: I’ve seen a second hand John Deere tractor for sale on eBay. I’m going to teach me to drive the beast and block her horse trailer in as I sneak off for a well-deserved skinny latte.