Double standards: an explanation (with an example) for those who are still unfamiliar with the notion. And the MP and the blonde spy. Or is she really just a lass with loose knickers?

There often seems to be a rather disturbing broken link between what many would like the world to be and what is actually the case. Here is a good example: Gaddafi tried to escape from Sirte, but the convoy in which he was travelling was shot up by Nato planes. He hid in a drainage pipe where he was discovered by Libyan rebels (although now they are no longer rebels). He was hauled out, roundly abused, then at some point shot at point blank range. There are now calls for an inquiry into what happened, accusation that the Libyans engaged in an 'extrajudicial exection' and generally those who like to think they are the conscience of the world are thoroughly outraged and even considering an official complaint God.

Now let me take you back several months to the beginning of May. A gang of U.S. marines (who we, in deference, are obliged to call 'Seals') flew in by helicopter to a villa in Pakistan which they invaded and went from room to room searching for a chap called Osama Bin Laden. Once they had found a him, they shot him dead. At first there were claims of a 'gunfight' but that was bollocks, then there were claims that he used his wife as a human shield, but that was later admitted also to be bollocks. Oh, and the whole raid, including the killing, was watched live by Barack Obama and his staff sitting comfortably in the White House, courtesy of a camera fixed to the helmet of one of the marines. There was general admiration by the world of how smoothly the marines carried out the raid and murder, there were no calls into an inquiry into what might also have been regarded as an 'extrajudicial execution', and, crucially, there were no calls to consider an official complaint to God.

How, I ask myself, except in detail, do these two killings - call them murder for all I care - differ? Well, I don't believe they do. Both Bin Laden and Gaddafi were thorough wrong 'uns and not the sort you would have in for a glass or two of sherry after Sunday service (and, yes, I know both were muslim, but you will have gathered I have merely chosen to make a point) and their deaths have been welcomed by many who suffered because of them. One relevant detail, of course, is that although the gang of Libyans who captured Gaddafi were split over whether to keep him alive or kill him, his death seems to have been the result of anger and passion. Bin Laden's death, on the other hand, came after years of intelligence work and weeks of meticulous planning, and was done in cold blood. Oh, and it was done by our allies and highly trained soldiers who were to a man honourable types and undoubtedly brush their teeth every night. Those who saw off Gaddafi, on the other hand, were a bunch of unshaven Libyan louts who make an awful racket firing their guns into the air at random whenever they are pleased and Lord knows what they get up to on a Saturday night. As for 'brushing their teeth' . . . well, I'll let you decide.

So there we have it: the murder of Bin Laden did us all a favour, the guys who did it were marvellous chaps and let's hear no more of any nonsense about whether or not it was legal. The murder of Gaddafi, on the other hand, was done by a bunch of uncontrolled hooligans and it is high time we put a stop to this kind of behaviour: holding a full-blown inquiry into exactly what went on. So the next time your young son or daughter asks you: 'Mummy/Daddy, what do they mean by "double standards"', here is a rather good example to help you set your offspring safely off on the road to a life of moral probity.

. . .

Here in Britain we are having a lot of fun - oh yes - following an appeal brought by a Russian woman the authorities would like to see the back of and are trying to deport. The story is spiced up by the involvement of an old codger called Mike Hancock, who is not just a Lib Dem MP who sits on an important defence committee, but who also has a great deal of trouble keepin his dick in his trousers. From whichever angle you view this one, it is rather odd, so I trust my account won't be too confusing.
The woman is a twentysomething blonde called Ekaterina Zatuliveter who is not adverse to jumping into bed with whichever chap takes her fancy. Nothing wrong with that, you'll say, except that our stalwarts at MI5 aren't too sure she doesn't do so more at the behest of the Russian secret service rather than because she simply likes a decent amount of sex. Katia, as everyone likes to call her, studied languages at St Petersburg university and worked as a chaperone of Europeans visiting conferences in the city. She screwed quite a few of them, including a chap from Nato. Somehow she ended up in Britain and somehow she found herself a position working as an intern for Hancock, who issued her with a pass to come and go from the House of Commons without being bothered by coppers on duty and that kind of thing.
As far as the ladies are concerned, Hancock has form. Most recently he was accused of 'sexual harrassment' by a constituent who came to him to discuss a problem she had with noisy neighbours, but no charges were brought. Katia is halfway pretty so it is no suprise that she caught Mike's eye, and they went on to have a four-year affair. At one point they even lived together.
The problem MI5 had was that Hancock is an MP for Portsmouth which has quite a few sensitive defence establishments, is an outspoken pro-Russian and, crucially, until recently sat on the Commons defence committee and would have had access to quite a few secrets. And he was shacked up with a Russian they believed might well be in the pay of the Russian secret service. What will have spooked them was the case of Anna Chapman, who really was a spy, and who used her charms to wheedle quite a few secrets out of guys smitten with her. MI5 didn't want anothe such case on its hands and so decided to deport young Katia.
Hancock insists that Katia never had access to sensitive documents. Well, up to a point, Lord Copper: if she did and if she is a spy, she wasn't exactly going to tell him, was she?
What puzzles me is that all this is coming out at an appeal against deportation at which a certain ZZ (MI5 officers don't have real names in court) insists Katia was employed by the Russian secret services. But if that was the case, why didn't they arrest her on spying charges and put her on trial? That they haven't would indicate that they haven't got any evidence to do so. On the other hand, just because they haven't got any evidence doesn't necessarily mean she is telling the truth when she claims she and Hancock were in love and that she is not a spy.
Another, rather bizarre aspect is that she is 26 and quite pretty, but he is 65 and looks like an outtake from Planet Of The Apes. What's the phrase? Oh yes: he ain't no bloody picture book. So would it be too cynical of me to suggest that we should take with a large pinch of salt her claim that theirs was a love affair?

A whinge, and I go out on a limb and come clean. Will it end in tears?

Not written here for a week or two because quite simply I have nothing to write about and I don't feel in the mood for waffling or bullshitting (not even for fun). I thoroughly enjoyed my break with Mark in France and, as usual, was just getting into the swing of it when we had to come home again. And what then? Before my holiday, I was looking forward to it, but now there ain't really much on the horizon which is exciting me. About the only thing is that by Christmas I shall, for the first time I shall be out of debt. I shan't owe anyone a penny. I was once in that position a few years ago when, for one or two reasons I shan't go into here, my stepmother sold the shares she inherited from my father and gave all of use four stepchildren a sum of money. I shan't say how much, as I feel embarrassed that I more or less frittered it all away. But how exciting is 'looking forward to not owing anyone a penny'? Not a great deal, really.

I am sitting outside a pub near Mark's on this Sunday night enjoying a pint or two of cider and a cigar or two. I can connect to the net courtesy of the pub (The Atlas in Fulham, which begins just a few hundred yards from Mark's flat in Kensington and Chelsea) and have been trying to download a pdf manual for a piece of music creation software (a lite version) which came with a midi keyboard I bought earlier today at Maplin's. Trouble is that for some reason I can't download the manual. I have also been eavesdropping on some dickhead or other who is so full of it that it makes me laugh.

I shall tell you what I have gathered so far: he must be in his mid to late 20s, is married to someone he refers to as Masser, which probably means her name is Mary or Maria, sounds as though he went to public school, is sitting with a friend but, as my father used to say (about me, if you have to know) permanently on transmission. His friend isn't really getting a word in edgeways. He is a qualified accountant and 'financial analyst', hopes in the future to start his own firm, once lived in Newcastle and has more opinions than you can shake a stick at. He and his wife are going to get the builders in to extend their house, he lives next to a woman whose house was once a council house, which means his probably was, too. He thinks Britain should cancel all foreign aid, cut taxes drastically, cancel national insurance for firms, feels democracy in Britain is a sham ('we're no more democratic than China'), wonders why 'stupid people' also have the vote and is generally a pain in the butt. At some point in the future he wants to live and work in Ireland ('when all this nonsense is over') and his friend works there now. His friend wonders whether or not he should move back to London: out in Ireland he is one of a few in his firm's branch, back here in London he will only be one of many. He has spent the past ten minutes outlining why almost all the civil service are useless and should be sacked.

. . .

What else? Nothing, really. Not feeling fed up or anything, but I'm wondering what there is to look forward to.
OK, so I'll come clean. I have in my head a novel I want to write. I have the mood, the 'attack', the style, the setting but I don't have a fucking story. Nothing. One central character is Simon Smugg and his wife Sian, who are childless as yet. You will gather their personalities from their surname. He works in a juniorexecutive position for a newspaper. The newspaper is where I want to have my fun. There is one angle I want to use, but I don't want to use it quite yet. (Pain in the arse: 'We should never have bailed out the banks.') It will consist more of dialogue than description (a trick - I shan't call it a technique because that would be too high falutin') I shall crib from Armistead Maupin. It worked for him, so why shouldn't it work for me. I gather some would-be writers simply take off and see where they are taken, but there are great dangers doing that, and I want to have some kind of basic structure on which to build and to keep it all in shape. Hence the need for a 'story'.

I'm afraid that as it deals with newspaper people, it won't have many attractive characters, although I dare not take the risk of making everyone a bastard (the technical word is 'a cunt') because that will - actually, I'd better play safe and say 'would' - put people off. ('Would' rather than 'will' because if you didn't know it you'll find out now, there must be a million and one would-be writers out there of whom something like one-thousandths actually finish 'my novel', and of those less than one-thousandth find a publisher and of those novels less than one per cent is any good. And of those that are published - not necessarily the good ones - about one in a million is read and makes any money. (BTW I subscribe to the unfashionable view that payment is the sincerest form of flattery and a writer who doesn't write for money is wasting his or her time. So, in the the grandest way possible I am setting myself up for pissing in the wind big time.
. . .

There is also another piece I want to write which, oddly, as far as the thinking is concerned, is further down the line in that I do have a four well-defined characters (in my head), a story and - hey - a 'theme'. But that is a little more 'serious' in that I want to do it well and don't want to go off half-cock. A teaser: central to it is the following limerick:

An ambitious young poet named Hinds,
wrote limericks with the usual five lines.
Then a change in the law,
made the maximum four.

It's not by me but by a former flatmate and fellow hack I used to keep up with every so often. Haven't been in touch for years. He last worked for the Daily Mirror, which is called The Mirror now, I think.

The point about that particular limerick is that, strictly, it isn't a limerick: it doesn't have the accepted form of a limerick - only four lines. Yet because of its content - read it again - I am prepared to argue that it is a limerick, though a very unusual one. And from that I have drawn my theme: 'description' and 'prescription'. When does 'description' evolve into 'prescription'? Or how does 'what we do' evolve into 'what we should do'? The problem I face with my 'story' is how to mesh together that train of thought and illuminate it with the 'story' I have thought up? Answer: I still don't know. And that is why I want to leave it on the back-burner until I do know and can do it as best I can.

Let’s hear it for amorality, the only truly ethical position I know of. And a death to rival that of Di — St Steve has passed on

The good news for some might have been that a certain Anwar al-Awlaki, an American-borm al Qaeda leader has been killed in a drone attack, for which read assassinated in a drone attack. Well, it might be good news for some, but I can’t raise even one cheer let alone three. When is this kind of assassination acceptable? Or, to put it another way, when is murder acceptable? I’m not about to engage in a pro or anti capital punishment rant, for although I am against it, I think at least the arguments put forward by supporters are, at least, intellectually respectable. But the recent killings of al Qaeda leaders, which began a few months ago with that of Osama bin Laden (whose killing was watched live in the White House, we are told), really can’t go unchallenged. And before I go on, I hope that whoever is reading this will agree that I am not some tree-hugging, wishy-washy liberal.
To put it bluntly, I would be far happier if, after the death of Anwar al-Awlaki, the U.S. had come out and said: ‘He was against us, so we killed him.’ But they are not doing that and they didn’t do that when they bumped off bin Laden. Instead, they resorted to various means in order to try to justify and legitimise what, to my eyes at least, was simply a murder. And even were I to agree that the world is better off without bin Laden, I simply refuse to accept that ‘their murders’ are evil and despicable, whereas ‘our murders’ - although we don’t call them that - are justified because we have ‘right on our side’. I can’t remember

anyone coming out and putting it as crassly, but that is what we are all being asked to believe. Well, it does’t wash, squire. For if that argument is good enough for us, it is good enough for al Qaeda and anyone else who opposes the West and can be used to justify ‘their murders’, too. But they, too, believe they have ‘right on their side’ and that is exactly the argument they use, although, oddly we don’t accept it. Note, that who actually has ‘right on their side’ can never be established in this world or any other. At the end of the day it comes down to what we chose to believe. And they chose to believe one thing and we another.
So it comes down to this: an argument is respectable if we use it and complete nonsense if our enemies us it. And you don’t need a college degree to see what utter nonsense that position is.
As I said before: I would be far happier if Washington had simply announced that Anwar al-Awlaki, one of its enemies, had been killed because without him alive it believed its enemy would be weaker. And Washington should have left it at that. Naturally, there would have been uproar around the world, and it would have been far from pretty but it would, at least, have been honest.
The danger is, of course, that were China to use the same argument to take out someone who it no longer wanted alive, we would be outraged, most certainly, but we would not have a leg to stand on. They are reasonably entitled to ask: ‘If you do it, why can’t we?’ To that we always reply: because we live in the free West in which free and fair elections are the norm and where we have the rule of law. And to that they might reply: ‘Well, if you have the rule of law, why was Anwar al-Awlaki killed without judicial process? And if you have the rule of law, why were several hundred people detained by the U.S. without charge at Guantanamo Bay specifically because the establishment was outside the jurisdiction of the U.S. courts? And they might add that if you feel it is acceptable to detain without charge those you believe to be a threat to your state, why is it not acceptable that we detain those without charge who we feel are a threat to our state?
What makes it all the worse for us is that we are too ready to take the high moral ground. We are all too ready to convince ourselves and anyone who will listen that ‘right is on our side’ and that because ‘right is on our side’ our actions, or rather those actions which are intended to strengthen that right, are somehow sancitifed. But, of course, it’s all complete nonsense.
Kill Anwar al-Awlaki, kill Osama bin Laden, kill anyone else you want to kill but please, please, please don’t pretend it is anything else but murder.

. . .

The essence of the dilemma is that hoary old problem which manifests itself in a variety of different ways but which is, essentially, the same old problem. One might call up the ‘is/ought’ gap to try to describe it. One might refer to the problem of relativism. One could tackle that same dilemma by examining arguments for and against the existence of God or, if someone feels uncomfortable doing that, arguments for and against the possibility of the absolute in the world. But I’m not going to go into it here, even if I could. Which I can’t. Another time, squire.

. . .

Call me a cynical old bastard but the bizarre outburst of sentimental guff which is marking the passing of Apple Steve Jobs merely goes to show that we here in the West have too much time on our hands. But then I would expect nothing less from the ‘Mac community’ who see themselves as the very definition of cool, sophisticated, enlightened, informed and generally only to be wholeheartedly admired by us lesser folk. For Jobs’s family his death is sad, especially as it came at the very early age of 56 and his children are still relatively young. But I do wish the rest of the world would get a sense of proportion.

The arrangement of candles shaped like an Apple apple (above) was set up in China. But that is just a mere detail. The outbreak of utterly over-the-top geek grief is universal.

Out of office, Labour can be as wacky as it likes. And one for hacks to chew on, then spit out as worthless

The standard view is that once out of government and into opposition, political parties are able to breathe a sigh of relief, stretch themselves, once again drink too much and indulge themselves in all manner of off-beat behaviour in the certain knowledge that it doesn’t at all matter, that nothing matters for a year or two because no one is taking a blind bit of notice. They are, for the time being anyway, yesterday’s men and women. For the older ones, the outgoing PM and his Cabinet, it might sting a little, or even a great deal, not having the chauffeur-driven sedan and no one touching their forelock any more, both metaphorically and literally, every time they brush past on their way from one important meeting to another. But for the former party grandees there are the compensations: a berth in the Lords for some, several journalistic sinecures perhaps, a well-paid directorship or two (and we are talking of Labour as well as those fucking fascist nasty Tory cunts - I would hate to be ambiguous here). The older ones can also look forward, now that the pushing and shoving of political life is over, to easing themselves gently into the role of eminence grise and that of a man or woman whose informed opinion should be sought by those with the money to seek it. They will even allow themselves a degree of indiscretion, spilling the beans a little on the past failures of colleagues.
For the younger ones, the former junior ministers and ambitious MPs, opposition is the time to make their mark, to climb the party’s greasy pole and get down and dirty in an awful lot of boring, though utterly necessary, manoeuvring, so that when the party to whom they lost power in turn finally loses the plot - as, of course, eventually they always do - they are in prime position to present themselves for selfless public service, knowing that the old guard is well out of the way and regularly getting pissed in the genteel bars of the Lords.
But before that grand moment comes, there is a year or two of hiatus before the real jostling for power and position within the party begins. Most certainly it is going on in the background, indeed, it never stops, but as far as the public is concerned they can relax a little: after all no one is taking a blind bit of notice as the public knows this lot will be in no position to form the government for five years at the very least and so they have nothing to lose.
So it was with Labour after May 2010. The Coalition government was formed here in the United Kingdom by the Conservatives, who won most of the votes, and the Liberal Democrats who were buggered if they were going to form a coalition government with Labour. (Although they often seem appeal to the same constituency and like to present themselves as the ‘caring party’, the Lib Dems and Labour hate each other just a little bit more than the Conservatives and Labour hate each other. So despite a little virtual flirting with Gordon Brown after the last election - which was all nothing more than strengthening his hand when it came to bargaining with the Tories - Nick Clegg plumped for coalition with the Tories as we all knew he would.
Labour needed the break. Like the Tories in 1992, they were knackered, not just out of ideas, but out of puff and, to push a phrase more or less to utter breaking point, out of sorts. The problem the Tories had in 1992 was that everyone - Labour, the Lib Dems and, crucially, they themselves, confidently expected them to lose the election, which would have meant a few quiet, relaxing years in opposition and time to top up the personal coffers and take the wife to that lovely little hotel in Dorset they used to visit before they married and where she gave him his first blow-job. As it turned out, the bloody electorate played silly buggers and re-elected the Tories for another, utterly miserable, five years in government, which caught everyone on the hop and persuaded everyone, as if they didn’t already know, that you simply cannot trust the voters.
So now it is Labour’s turn to drop their guard and come out with all the wacky things they privately believe but, as a rule, are too wise do support publicly.

. . .

The outstanding wacky idea of these past few days was the suggestion by some idiot or other (i.e. a chap called Ivan Lewis who bears an uncanny resemblance to Lembit Opik, a former Lib Dem MP) at this week’s annual Labour party conference in Liverpool that all British journalists should be ‘licensed’ by the government and that if they behaviour in any way fell short of what the licensing committee deemed fit, they would be ‘struck off’. On the scale of wackiness, it almost scores a perfect ten. Leave aside completely the ethics of a democratic government deciding who should and who should not form that country’s free press, the true measure of quite how daft the suggestion is is the sheer impossibility of making a licensing system work. Whichever idiot is was spent the best part of three seconds thinking it all through. What, for example, would the state do with those bolshy individuals (of which, thank God, Britain has more than its fair share) who were unlicensed but still indulged in some kind of journalistic activity? What sanctions would apply? A fine? A short term of imprsionment if the fine remained unpaid, and most certainly it would? A longer term of imprisonment for persistent unlicensed behaviour? And what would constitute ‘journalistic activity’? Would this kind of blogging be regarded as such? Or would all ‘journalistic activity’ be tolerated as long as it did not touch upon a list of sensitive subjects drawn up by the government’s licensing committee?
And how exactly would the government stop ‘unlicensed journalistic activity’? Yes, it might impose fines, followed by imprisonment, followed by, for persistent and unrepentant offenders, the death penalty, but this would, in practice, prove to be cumbersome at best and a bureaucratic nightmare at worst. In the meantime, all those saintly types who now work for the ‘Indy’ and the Guardian and all those gin-soaked fornicators who now work for the ‘right-wing press’ - none of whom, irrespective of their politics, would for a second agree to the government dictating what and what they might not write - would rapidly form a thriving underground press.
Lewis’s suggestion has, unsurprisingly received a universal raspberry from members of the press of all stripes, ranging from Helen Lewis-Hasteley in the News Statesman to Tom Chivers of Her Majesty’s fascist press who writes a blog for the Telegraphy. I should, incidentally, mention that Ms Lewis-Hasteley is a case in point that the daft chararacterisation by many of the caring left-of-centre press and the nasty right-of-centre press (or the other way around, if you get my drift) is at best simplistic. Ms Lewis-Hasteley, or Helen as I shall call her simply because it is shorter, now writes for the New Statesman, avowedly left-of-centre. Odd then, if the simplicissimi are to be believed, that before she took up that job and agonised over the plight of the downtrodden many, she worked - very successfully - for the fascist Daily Mail (whose editor is widely believed to eat at least two babies for breakfast) as a commissioning editor and features executive.
Somehow, I don’t think a list of British journalists, licensed and regulated by the government, will see the light of day.

. . .

I have not previously come across Ivan Lewis, who, apparently, is Labour’s shadow cultural secretary. But not for long, I should think. Lembit Opik (once described by Private Eye as ‘the well-known anagram’) also has something of an odd history. He began his career as a Lib Dem MP showing some promise and was, I think, even considered by some of them as a ‘coming man’ (always the kiss of death). But as time went on, he made more headlines for his love life than as a politician and things started going pear-shaped. First, there was a longish romance with a Welsh TV weather presenter (who cut up rough as increasingly it didn’t ever seem likely to end at the altar and was eventually dumped). Then the youngish roue took up with a Cheeky Girl, one of two Romanian sisters who had a very minor pop hit and who then found fame as to Romanian sisters who once had a very minor pop hit. It seemed an unlikely pairing, and so the Cheeky Girl involved seems to have decided for she gave her beau Lembit the boot. What he does now I don’t know and care even less.
As for the ‘regulation of hacks’, it less of a chance of seeing the light of day than a snowball surviving in Hell. But never say never, so if, by chance, there does come a time when hacks are licensed by the government (with that nice Ivan Lewis holding the licensing committee’s casting vote), I want to make sure from the off that I am ruled out completely. I could and would never countenance being regarded as in any way ‘acceptable’ by anyone in authority. So let me say publicly: Ivan Lewis is a complete prat. That should it, if the guy has even a modicum of self-respect.

Tweedledum and Tweedledee: which is which? You decide

How a change of rules and new technology helped me realise I and rugger buggers can exist in the same universe. We don’t have to mix of course (which would be too much to ask of me)

Here’s today’s question: what do Finland, Luxembourg, Vanuato, Norway, Monaco, Nigeria, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Guam and Tahiti in common? Give up? Thought you might, because it’s not obvious unless your answer was that vast majority of the citizens of those ten countries have two legs. Well, the answer is that they are all in the bottom ten in the International Rugby Union board’s ranking of national sides. Perhaps you would have cottoned on a lot sooner had I asked what New Zealand, South Africa, Australia, England and France have in common - they are all in the top five and of all the many connections one might make between the five of them, being rugby nation would not necessarily come too far down the list. But what suprised me was seeing how many nations around the world play rugby. Monaco? Really? Surely the place isn’t big enough for a full-sized rugby pitch? Finland? Well, as sure as eggs is eggs it will be a summer game up there, unless they play rugby on skates.

I am something of a recent convert to rugby, despite being impeccably middle-class with quite marvellous manners to boot and charm most others would die for, and despite the fact that I shall never see 59 again. In fact, I used to loathe it, and, to be honest, there are aspects to rugby I still loathe. I suppose it would be more truthful to say I have become a fan of the game of rugby when it is played during the Six Nations tournament at the beginning of every year and, as now, during the World Cup, now being staged in New Zealand.

To clarify my earlier loathing (now downgraded to intense dislike) a little more, it is English rugby and its so-called ‘rugger buggers’ I dislike: their attitudes, their vastly

OTT – and for me wholly unconvincing – swaggering machismo, their apparent conviction that man was put on earth solely to get arseholed on beer when he is not actually out training or playing, and, if I’m honest, the fact that so many very fanciable women are rather taken with the ‘rugger bugger’. On that score the only way I can console myself – i.e. that there will not be a snowball’s chance in hell that those women would ever even give me the time of day – is that it is more than likely that they are just as stupid as the men and that any conversation between us when not restricted to the possible size of Lawrence Dallaglio’s balls would surely be over within about three-and-a-half minutes, if not sooner.

I am happy to point out that this intense dislike is solely restricted to English rugby. In Wales it is very much the national sport played by all, and although Scottish rugger buggers have more in common with their English cousins than their fellow Celts, I don’t find them half as irritating. For one thing, they often share their fellow non-rugger buggers Scots sense of humour. My loathing started when, at the age of 13, and after four years attending German schools the last three at a Jesuit college, I was sent to the Oratory School. I was unfeasibly innocent – I remember suggesting to my mother that one sure way to tackle world over-population, a contemporary concern in the early Sixties, would be if all men and women simply stopped shagging. She laughed but did not (and possibly could not) explain why my solution was something of a non-starter – and life at and English boarding school (oh, all right, public school) was not so much a wake-up call but a nightmare for this tender young lad. I knew nothing of ‘queers’, ‘stiffs’ and ‘wanking’ and after just a few days got very, very homesick. I know realise that all the other boys had also been very, very homesick at one point, but as I was the only one of two in my year’s intake of 40 who had not previously been to a prep school, my homesick came later on in my school career. Those poor saps had gone through it all when they were seven or eight and were first shipped out as the inconvenience many middle-class parents regarded them. Football – soccer, to you Yanks – was the game I liked and followed, but it wasn’t played at the Oratory. Rugby was, and the connection between English rugby and an almost blinding unhappiness was made. It didn’t help that at 13 I had reached my teenage weight, but not yet my teenage height and was rather chubby to boot. My first nickname was ‘Preggers’ – perhaps you can guess why.

So there you have it: the reason why I find English rugby, its followers and everything about it loathsome. There is even a certain accent which, whenever I hear it, is like a stab in the back. Irrational? Certainly, but then someone once observed that what distinguishes humankind from animals is not that we have the capacity to be rational, but that we often behave totally irrationally.

. . .

But I have come to appreciate the game a great deal more, and for two simple reasons. The first is the various rule changes which have made the game far more fluid. When I was forced to play the game – and occasionally watched it – you often had to guess what was going on as the ball would get lost for what seemed like hours in a pile of rugby forwards and mud. This made it all rather boring. But rules changes mean that union is now almost as fluid as league.

The second change which made watching rugby (and, by the way, cricket) more of a pleasure was the gradual introduction of new technology which meant numerous replays, often in slow motion, and several angles were available, which helped one understand the game far better. Admittedly, many already did, but I wasn’t one of them.

These days I support Italy in the Six Nations. They have almost always been coming last, but they are getting better and better, for one thing they seem to have more in common with the Australian, South Africans, New Zealanders and French than those awful rugger buggers.