Sometimes words can fail you. So I’m just going to make one up. Bamboozergasted. There you go; an awkward, clumsy, stitched up amalgamation of bamboozled and flabbergasted that looks and sounds as hideous as Frankenstein with a bad bout of the norovirus.

The reason for this patchwork phrase was to describe the way I felt after briefly delving into the world of gastrophysics and watching a short documentary on the science of the spoon.

In a quite mystifying introduction, the host posed the kind of question that left me scratching my head like Stan Laurel being asked to perform a surgical ventricular restoration on an ailing goose. “It’s great for spooning sugar, slurping cereal and general eating,” opined our sciencey woman. “But have you ever stopped to think ‘is this the best my spoon could be?’” At the point I was, well, bamboozergasted. I don’t know about you, but I’ve never, ever studied my modest collection of spoons – or any kitchen utensil for that matter - in great detail let alone challenge said implement to perform grand feats out with the traditional remit of transporting piles of swill towards my face as my mouth hangs agape like a whale homing in on a swirling shoal of plankton.

Indeed, the only time, I questioned this cherished old piece of cutlery was at the sorry conclusion of the egg and spoon race in primary three when my tactical incompetence was brutally exposed as a naïve, laughable farce having attempted this shoogling sprint with a teaspoon instead of a tablespoon. It was, in many ways, a largely pointless palaver. Rather like the Super Bowl.

Tomorrow night in Houston, the New England Patriots and the Atlanta Falcons will do something on a pitch for a very long time and by the end of it, one of these two teams will have been crowned Super Bowl champions. Cue those typically boisterous, whooping, hooting, high-fiving American celebrations on the streets that will probably lead to overturned buses, torched cars and looted shops. Unless the anti-Trump brigade have got there first, of course.

The last time Houston hosted the Super Bowl, in 2004, the season-ending showdown was overshadowed by the half-time entertainment when Janet Jackson’s right breast popped out of her corset during a vigorous period of on-stage thrusting and gyrating with fellow performer, Justin Timberlake. The collective, horrified gasp of the American people mercifully blew it back in again. Or something like that. According to Timberlake, Jackson had suffered a “wardrobe malfunction”, an excuse this correspondent often uses to temper the growing hostility that greets me when I waddle into the office with my Y-fronts on my head.

Rather like the complexities of briefs, I’ve never grasped American football. Even when other folk seemed to have grasped it and I pretended that I’d grasped it in a woeful attempt to fit in with those who had grasped it, I still couldn’t grasp it. All of which led to some eye-wateringly cumbersome conversations about wide receivers. And the less said about muffed punts the better.

Back in the 1980s, when Channel 4 first started to broadcast American football on the TV, the whole NFL thingy was initially rather captivating. There was the strange allure of William ‘The Refrigerator’ Perry of the Chicago Bears, a man so vast he looked like had just arrived from the Ryougoku Sumo Hall, while the futuristic visions that were beamed into the living room of all-seated domes and colosseums, with pristine astro-turf pitches and retractable roofs, resembled something out of Logan’s Run.

To us slack-jawed simpletons on this side of the pond, the stadiums looked so advanced you were generally concerned that your wooden-sided Pye 22-inch television would simply not be able to cope with such cutting edge clips and would crackle and spark before exploding amid chuff chuffs of smoke while spewing out old footage of Fred Dibnah scaling a chimney at a decaying mill in Bolton. Let’s face it, some of our own football that was broadcast at the time was all decidedly peasant-like on the eye, with crumbling grounds and churned up pitches that looked like they had just come under a sustained artillery bombardment.

The NFL brought a level of razzmatazz, superfluous padding, ad breaks and general clattering and careering that was all quite bewildering and spell-binding. And, dare I say it, rather boring. The game seemed to develop with all the momentum of a steam roller making an assault on the 1 in 3 gradient of the Hardknott Pass. Presumably it still does. I’ve not watched it for years. And I’ll not be stapling my eyes open until 3.30am to watch it tomorrow. If I want my flabber to be gasted or my bam to be boozled, I’ll stick to documentaries about spoons.