We talked about his greyhounds, the colourful lorikeets he had kept in former years and about how some people really did used to eat, and relish, rook pie. (Indeed, I have just found a recipe for it on page 751 of my copy of Mrs Beeton’s Book of Household Management.)

It was because of sport that this happened: my interlocutor and I connected purely and simply because we had both turned out for the same team, albeit three decades apart.

Much of our conversation, accordingly, involved cricket, and stories such as the time when he captained a schoolboy team at Lord’s and was given a bat by Sir Pelham "Plum" Warner, a well-known figure in the English game.

I have devoted a lot of time in this space over the years to detailing the shortcomings of international sport and its often self-important, hard-to-dislodge administrators.

I make no apology for this: there is just cause.

But it is as well, every now and again, to remind ourselves - and myself - that I do this because sport can be, and very frequently is, a good thing, a gift to the world, a trigger of great memories, a distraction from the humdrum banalities of everyday existence, a source of fellowship, a route to better health and wellbeing.

More basic than any of these, however, sport is a builder of unexpected bridges - such as the one that popped up last week leading to my new nonagenarian friend.

It magics up links that would not otherwise exist.

If you want a broader example of this, I was once told by the editor of a Middlesbrough football fanzine how a road accident that sadly took the life of a footballer’s son in North Korea had led to letters of condolence being dispatched from the Teesside town in north-east England.

Why? Because Middlesbrough was where the North Korean football team beat Italy in 1966 in what remains, for my money, the biggest upset in World Cup history, and the victim was the child of one of those players.

Sport has also acquired the status of a global language, a bit like English, or music - an idiom that can give people of fundamentally contrasting backgrounds some common ground.

This is not in and of itself a good thing: a global language can be a vehicle for great evil, as well as great good, and everything in between.

Writing in Tribune in late-1945, soon after a visit to Britain by the footballers of Dinamo Moscow from the then-Communist Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), George Orwell declared sport "an unfailing cause of ill-will."

But its hard-won universality has also invested sport with immense potential for doing good.

Cricket, again, was the common language when some team-mates and I visited the so-called jungle encampment that had sprung up near Calais on the north coast of France a few years ago.

I suppose most donors would have concentrated on food and warm clothes.

Our contribution included cricket equipment and kit, with a view to alleviating the crushing tedium of living in such a place, in conditions of near total insecurity.

It was a small enough gesture, but the enthusiasm with which we were mobbed on entry left a deep impression on us, as did the joyous pick-up game we proceeded to play, with laws of cricket scrupulously observed, on an expanse of grey sand beside the autoroute.

This game, in common with most sport played around the world, attracted few if any spectators.

But there are some sports encounters, of course, which are screened to audiences of tens, even hundreds of millions.

You can understand, in such circumstances, why sport has become a favoured platform for virtue-signalling, along with commercial advertising in many forms.

If leaders of those fortunate sports properties with regular mega-audiences wish to maximise the good they do in the world, they should be thinking as hard about how most effectively to support their chosen causes as multinational corporations do about how marketing can best augment sales.

Sport has the capacity to build the unlikeliest bridges and beam messages to huge numbers of diverse humans.

In today’s uber-connected yet increasingly fractious world, it is probably more important even than in Orwell’s day to make sure that the content of these sport-amplified messages is both well-intentioned and convincing.