I like my friends.
Tautological, I know.
I like my friends, and I like to be able to go on being friends with them, and to like them as people despite occasional lapses on their parts into see-icon-and-remember-Stein-remarking-on-the-Tugendbund.
It is therefore with profound relief - the relief of a man who sees some prospect of keeping his temper and thus his friendships after all - that I note that the England ODI tour of India, simply by its, providentially, beginning tomorrow, affords me a timely, temporary excuse for reduced interaction hereabouts.
With any luck at all, when that is done and dusted, the erring amongst my friends shall have returned to the lands of the sane, and left off being, variously and severally, captious, intellectually abject, sheep-like and uncritical retailers of intellectual dishonesty and false claims, morally obtuse, deliberately ignorant of matters on which they opine, and all the rest of it. I presume there to be some illness of the mind going about, or a phase of the moon, or the influence of a silly season I had not remarked.
I shall not address this unpleasantness further. Comments w/r/t Bairstow, Bopara, and the state of the pitch in Hyderabad, or w/r/t writing, or Spurs and Newcastle on Sunday, or anything else, are of course welcome.
I like my friends, and I like to be able to go on being friends with them, and to like them as people despite occasional lapses on their parts into see-icon-and-remember-Stein-remarking-on-the-Tugendbund.
It is therefore with profound relief - the relief of a man who sees some prospect of keeping his temper and thus his friendships after all - that I note that the England ODI tour of India, simply by its, providentially, beginning tomorrow, affords me a timely, temporary excuse for reduced interaction hereabouts.
With any luck at all, when that is done and dusted, the erring amongst my friends shall have returned to the lands of the sane, and left off being, variously and severally, captious, intellectually abject, sheep-like and uncritical retailers of intellectual dishonesty and false claims, morally obtuse, deliberately ignorant of matters on which they opine, and all the rest of it. I presume there to be some illness of the mind going about, or a phase of the moon, or the influence of a silly season I had not remarked.
I shall not address this unpleasantness further. Comments w/r/t Bairstow, Bopara, and the state of the pitch in Hyderabad, or w/r/t writing, or Spurs and Newcastle on Sunday, or anything else, are of course welcome.