When did tears become compulsory

At the conclusion of the Wimbledon final, after Andrew Murray’s big girl’s blouse routine, I was tempted to tweet something uncharitable about men who cry in public. I don’t consider myself to be a stick-in-the-mud reactionary, but there’s something about men who turn on the waterworks that brings out my inner Sir Bufton Tufton. Whatever happened to the stiff upper lip?

But I thought better of it. I’d only be deluged with hundreds of angry responses from those who found the sorry spectacle ‘honest’ and ‘moving’. Twitter is the perfect medium for herd opinion. If you say something genuinely heretical, the Twittersphere lights up with indignation. It’s like a machine for enforcing politically correct dogma. I’ve now been called a ‘c***’ so many times on Twitter that I’m beginning to grow weary of ever saying anything non-conformist again.

Then I drank a bottle of wine and thought, ‘F*** it.’