Australia

Only a few hours before the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge landed in Sydney for the start of their much-hyped royal Australian visit, Barry O’Farrell, the popular Premier of New South Wales, stunned the nation by resigning. His reason? He couldn’t remember having quaffed a bottle of wine. (No ordinary wine, mind you, but a bottle of 1959 Penfolds Grange, valued at around GBP 1,700.) In years to come, no doubt among Barry’s many regrets will be the fact that he didn’t get to hob nob on the harbour with the glam royal couple. A timely coincidence, because what links these two events goes to the heart of why Australia’s

A few weeks ago, I accompanied my daughter to an Open Day at Roehampton College, where she is hoping to start a teacher training course in September. I enjoyed it — and was impressed by the broad mix of motivated young men and women who, if all goes well, will soon be teaching the next generation of primary school children. Towards the end of the afternoon, the co-ordinator said she wanted to offer a few tips about the interview process that would begin once all the applications have been submitted. It turned out she had only one main tip: avoid upspeak. She stressed the point vigorously. Indeed, her message for

Englishmen used to be deported to Australia as a punishment. Now they get sent back to England as an act of mercy. There was not much of a campaign to ‘free the press box three’ after Australia’s immigration services ordered the eviction of the men from the Sun, Mirror and Daily Mail before the winter’s wretched Ashes tour was over. Having arrived with the players for the warm-up matches and watched as defeat followed humiliating defeat, they were the last men standing when the one-day series got under way. Other papers had kindly brought home their ‘dukes’ after the Test series and sent the ‘butlers’, as cricket reporters call each

By god, you know matters have come to a wretched pass when you feel inclined to defend and protect the International Cricket Council. And yet, remarkably, such a moment is upon us. Like the old Roman republic, the ICC is threatened by a triumvirate. In this instance, Crassus is represented three times as India, England and Australia bid to carve up cricket’s empire between themselves. Few people doubt change is needed. The ICC has been broken for ages. It is easy to conclude that it has outlived its usefulness. Nevertheless, that does not mean any proposed alternative is going to produce better outcomes for cricket. The proposals for reforming cricket’s

Apologies may be in order. A few weeks ago, I was advocating aid for Australia. As we had set the place up, we had a duty when this once-proud daughter house was sliding into decline. We used criminals to get the country going, which worked well. Hard, amoral characters, they built a nation in their own image. That was Australia for two centuries: hard, amoral – and good at cricket. Then everything seemed to be going wrong. Perhaps it was the southern sun’s fault: melting down toughness and leaving a vacuum for decadence. It was time for the mother country to come to the rescue with fresh supplies of convicts

We agreed that it was the gravest crisis facing mankind. It has led to dashed hopes, widespread grief and a universal loss of confidence in the future. As the scientists seem powerless, the world is thrown back on superstition. If the learned have no answers, one may as well listen to old Jacques, who remembers his great uncle’s advice about coping with phylloxera. I refer, of course, to oxidisation and white Burgundy. The 1996 was supposed to be superb and long-lasting. Friends of mine finally decided that the moment had come to begin enjoying their Chassagnes, Pulignys and Chablis grands crus. Aargh. Instead of vinous glory, harmonies of structure, subtlety

Here we go again. Time for another round of that perennial game so wearily familiar to England cricket supporters: Hunt the Positives. It is a mean game because, most of the time, there aren’t any. Certainly not today. England were abject in Adelaide. Scarcely any better than they had been in Brisbane. If, borrowing from Evelyn Waugh, we classify sides as Leading team, First-Rate team, Good Team and Team we must acknowledge that England, at present, rank as Team. And as Mr Waugh would have put it, Frankly, Team is pretty bad. Less a team, in fact, and more a rabble. With the exception of Joe Root’s second-innings knock England can take nothing but

Nations seek their souls in the strangest places. We English, for instance, have illustrated ourselves to the world and to ourselves with a stark choice between Cool Britannia and Ye Olde Tea Shoppe. When not hawking to tourists in London those T-shirts scrawled with obscenities, we picture ourselves in country lanes and rose-covered thatched cottages. A few of us actually seek out the vestiges of that countryside world and live a pretend-rural life there; but most Spectator readers would be bored to tears after ten minutes of Morris dancing; and a fortnight of hobnobbing over a honeysuckled garden fence with a rosy-cheeked jam-maker who had never heard of the Today

Don’t say you weren’t warned. You were. “Australia will win at least one test this winter…England will have a bad test or Australia an extremely good one…This is an Australian side learning who it is. There are signs of improvement, signs that on their day they could be formidable. (The question being, as before, how many of those days there will be). Meanwhile, England are solid but not perhaps quite as good as they think they are. Brilliant individual performances saved the English collective in this series. They are not a team in transition but nor are they quite a team going anywhere.” That was this blog’s verdict on the