Football transfer rumours: Cristiano Ronaldo to leave Real Madrid for PSG?

Today’s fluff wants your help in tracking down Richard Reinhart

Laurent Blanc is a happy man. Happiness can come from all sorts of sources – be it seeing someone else unhappy or seeing someone walking into a glass door face first when singing Stayin’ Alive by the Bee Gees – but Blanc’s happiness comes from his shiny new Crosley Cruiser Record Player sitting in the corner of his office. Even the fact that he wanted it in pink, but the girl in the store with the nose ring and the words ‘You aren’t a waste of space’ tattooed on to her right wrist said they only had dark turquoise left, cannot sour his mood. On the floor, next to the turntable, there is rack that people generally use to put lifestyle magazines that they once bought to impress the person behind the counter but have not looked at since and will never throw away just in case someone should come over and be impressed by their reading material.

But this time it is not filled with back issues of Kinfolk or radical philosophy or Tiny Pencil but with old albums whose covers look like they have been Instagrammed to within an inch of their lives. He is most proud of the original Music from the Original Motion Picture Coffy that he got a long time ago in Music City Records, a small shop near the corner of Florence and Broadway in Los Angeles. He only bought it as he was tickled by the tagline – “They call her ‘Coffy’ and she’ll cream you!” – but that record was the beginning of his love affair with jazz. But he’s very specific about his love. He does approve of that beige jazz you suffer in elevators and he has problems with Whiplash (though not as many problems as he had with Her) – in fact, with increasingly few exceptions, he will listen to listen to nothing released after the late 1960s. Anyway, there is another reason Blanc’s is happy and it has nothing to do with his dark turquoise friend. He has just put down the phone from a conversation with the suits at Real Madrid. “Give us £728m and Cristiano Ronaldo will be posing in a PSG shirt sooner than you can say the smell of green apple and refreshing cucumber, combined with peony and violet and a hint of cedarwood offers all the excitement of new beginnings …” they said. Only the reception in Blanc’s office is as bad as his Spanish he didn’t quite hear it right. “£72m? Sure, we’d be making money,” he thought to himself.

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