On Slim News and Sledging.

I’ve been searching the news pages for things to write about but nothing much is happening at the moment. China has built a very big plane that can land on water, but that’s no major surprise. They’ve got an awful lot of water in China. I expect the Americans would have got there first if only they didn’t have to share the Great Lakes with Canada. And the sports pages are full of Aussie cricketers insulting us poor old Poms as is their frequent wont. We ignore them, of course. What do you expect from the land of beer bellies, barbies, obsessive suburbanism and the ultimate nanny state? Our dear English cricketers’ stock reply should be: ‘We only come to play cricket, mate. What other reason is there to come here?’

And just in case anybody doesn’t get the joke, maybe I should explain that the issue of ‘sledging’ (barbed insults which cricketers hurl at each other on the playing surface, often couched in language which the more respectable journals decline to repeat verbatim, and the practice of which Australian cricketers consider a particular forte of theirs) is a big one at the moment. And my pejorative description of the land down under was carefully contrived in the hope that I might be the first person in the world to be accused of anti-Ozism. It would be nice to be a world leader in something.