When not busy writing this page, End Game likes to while away the day composing fiendishly worded freedom of information requests, mainly because the ingenuity so many public organisations display as they find reasons to not respond to them is a joy to behold.

So take a bow, Northamptonshire County Council, which came back to an enquiry about inpatient care with this stonker:

“You refer to ‘people’ in question 1 of your request. Please can you provide clarification of this before we log your request?”

Wiping our monitor clean of the tea that we’d just sprayed all over it, End Game wondered whether the council might be able to save a bit of cash if it released all its non human inpatients.

Then scrolling down, we realised our correspondent wanted to know whether we meant children, adults, or both.

We meant both, but good to know the FOI system is flexible enough in Northamptonshire to accommodate us even if we didn’t think children counted as people.