That leaves Williams to mind the fort until a Flood replacement – possibly his old Scarlets club-mate Rhys Priestland, or Freddie Burns of Gloucester – arrives; certainly for the couple of months when Flood is away with England's Six Nations squad.
The question is, who will British voters believe in when the moment of truth arrives?
But, as Kauder Nalebuff's book illustrates, this is a subject long mired in shame and confusion – there are girls who know nothing about periods until their first one arrives, and assume it is a sign of impending death.
In his place arrives Gian Piero Gasperini, who is expected to sign a three-year contract on Monday, and who managed the club between 2006 and 2010.
Eschewing the grandeur and trappings of his predecessors, he arrives for meetings with heads of state in a blue Ford Focus; he wears old shoes; he astonishes members of the global public who have written to him by picking up the phone and calling them himself.
The restaurant is booked a month in advance but I manage to get a table thanks to a last-minute cancellation, and the food that we foraged earlier that day arrives in various confections of foam, gel or smoke.
And before they know it Boxing Day arrives, they have not trained for two weeks, and the scales are showing they have gained an extra five or six pounds.
Public consciousness, as well as opposition and outrage, will grow as the world's people, not just a handful of diplomats, can read the cables of "the embassy where all information about everything sooner or later arrives".
So much here prefigures the tropes found in modern winter literature: family and friends gather for warmth and jollity, feasting is the order of the day, good cheer is lubricated by heroic quantities of booze … and then the stranger arrives.
Braafheid, a left-back, arrives on a loan deal from Bayern Munich, while the French forward Kamara has agreed a similar short-term move from Fulham.
The most sensitive issue in Michael Gove's in-tray as he arrives at the Ministry of Justice is human rights.
