just a bit of fun with our pommy brethren

[Ken Gargett]

just a bit of fun, from the guardian.

though it seems that a great many guardian readers failed to see any humour in it.

i do remember coren going on endlessly in the most supercilious pompous manner (clearly, i find him far less humorous than he finds himself but perhaps i have missed something).

one of the responses from a guardian reader was to suggest that the only good thing about australia was that it was convenient for getting to new zealand. to which a further response was posted - "i wish someone would tell the kiwis that".

enjoy but please don't take it too seriously.

Why pommie bashing is so much fun

English cricket is back in the doldrums and its champions have fallen silent. It's time to send back a few home truths

Steven Smith and Michael Clarke celebrate after taking the wicket of James Anderson in Brisbane. Photograph: David Gray/Reuters

Finally. Once again the Death Star of Australian cricket is fully operational. England has not just been beaten, but bitten by a pack of junkyard mongrels we feared might have been neutered.

The first Test at the Gabba wasn’t just a win, but an old-school Australian bad winner’s win, a sledging, bouncing, snarling KO by a flat-track bully. Australia is back in the game, and the real game is baiting the English.

We should be honest here – no Australian wants an even contest against the Old Enemy. My own dream result is an Ashes series so one-sided cricket gets banned by the Queen: every field salted, every bat thrown into a bonfire, even the word “cricket” expunged from the language, like a damnatio memoriae in the old times. Then the Poms go off and get beaten at rounders by the Dutch.

That’s how it is, no quarter given, no quarter given. Or how it was, the new version being no quarter given, and the lack of quarter being complained about by the English papers.

When they were on top, I don’t remember those pious organs piping up over rotating casts of substitute fieldsmen, or time-wasting, or any of the other tweaks that put a bite of fire in the spirit of the game.

I remember Giles Coren sledging our nation, asking what we had when we didn’t have any cricket any more. “You look at the wider Australian cultural scene and you are forced to ask: ‘What have you got when Rolf goes?’” That’s Rolf Harris for Australian readers – he’s part of Britain’s cultural firmament, and look how that’s turned out.

Now that English cricket is back down in the doldrums (AKA its natural habitat), and Australia is on top again, it might be time to send some of that crowing back return-to-sender. Coren is an English restaurant critic (poor bastard), a position a bit like coaching Eddie the Eagle to a “Most Improved” award. So his job is to be irascible.

But his criticisms of Australia seemed a little stale, like they were trapped in 1979. So much has changed since then – in those days, Britain was still facing a bitter winter of social unrest, failing infrastructure, and a Conservative government cutting services to the quick.

The line of attack Brit jingoes chose was a strange one. Australia was vulgar! Yes, but vulgarity is what inoculates us against sclerosis. Australia is stuck in the past! We’ll get to that.

Coren even questioned our country's record with Indigenous populations and film production, thereby constructing the biggest glass house since the Crystal Palace. Who says Britain can't build things! Anyone who has ever been there and tried to use a train or a toilet, it turns out.

Sydney has notoriously bad public transport, but it's Switzerland compared with Britain, which seems to have a system imported from the former Soviet Bloc, only with less friendly customer service. On my last trip from Stansted, the seat was decorated with the standard melange of wet tissue, trickling tea cup and apple core that some call "Stansted Express still life".

The point of innovation was filthy water dripping from the roof, the ominous calling card of a sprinkle of snowflakes. Second-world infrastructure was about to become third-world chaos. Sure enough, before long they were prying open the doors with a crowbar and shifting us to another train.

There's no phrase that sums up the experience of modern Britain better than “run out of grit”, except maybe “the train is delayed due to leaves on the track”. Spirit of the Blitz!

Of all the haymakers swung at Australia by English sneerers, “stuck in the past” feels the most off-target. Have these people ever been, say, into the cocktail bar at the Savoy Hotel? It’s like something out of an Evelyn Waugh novel, only not funny. I felt like one of those fisherman who catches a grotesque amphibian formerly believed extinct for millions of years.

I was the only man in the room not wearing a dinner suit, a holding pen of pallid scions with doodled jaw lines and clammy comb-overs, the oldest young people in the world. That room isn’t Britain’s vestigial spleen, it’s the brains of the operation. The overbite goes all the way to the top.

No matter how embarrassing and backward Australia is, we’re still a rung up the evolutionary ladder from prostrating ourselves to suck the toes of an idiot future monarch. At least we’re trying to prise ourselves out of this ancient boondoggle, instead of buying a picture of it on a plate.

The only aspect of British life that feels both modern and truly functional is the surveillance culture. It’s the world's first police state with the reach of a dictatorship, but the mind of a suburbanite curtain-twitcher, obsessed with littering, TV aerials, noisy teenagers and the foreigners next door – Eurasia run by Disgusted of Tunbridge Wells.

So it’s natural and right that the summer sport is won by the place where the sun shines, rather than the place where it doesn’t. For now the English must go back to their traditional method of basking, where employed, corpulent men in their underpants lie in public parks, milking whatever fleeting rays they can get.

Fortunes will turn again. But until then, in the immortal words of Ricky Ponting … actually it probably wouldn’t get past your firewall.

[CaptainQuintero]

Love it! Actually giggled like a school girl at:

That’s Rolf Harris for Australian readers – he’s part of Britain’s cultural firmament, and look how that’s turned out.

[Pilgrims]

just a bit of fun, from the guardian.

though it seems that a great many guardian readers failed to see any humour in it.

i do remember coren going on endlessly in the most supercilious pompous manner (clearly, i find him far less humorous than he finds himself but perhaps i have missed something).

one of the responses from a guardian reader was to suggest that the only good thing about australia was that it was convenient for getting to new zealand. to which a further response was posted - "i wish someone would tell the kiwis that".

enjoy but please don't take it too seriously.

Why pommie bashing is so much fun

English cricket is back in the doldrums and its champions have fallen silent. It's time to send back a few home truths

Steven Smith and Michael Clarke celebrate after taking the wicket of James Anderson in Brisbane. Photograph: David Gray/Reuters

Finally. Once again the Death Star of Australian cricket is fully operational. England has not just been beaten, but bitten by a pack of junkyard mongrels we feared might have been neutered.

The first Test at the Gabba wasn’t just a win, but an old-school Australian bad winner’s win, a sledging, bouncing, snarling KO by a flat-track bully. Australia is back in the game, and the real game is baiting the English.

We should be honest here – no Australian wants an even contest against the Old Enemy. My own dream result is an Ashes series so one-sided cricket gets banned by the Queen: every field salted, every bat thrown into a bonfire, even the word “cricket” expunged from the language, like a damnatio memoriae in the old times. Then the Poms go off and get beaten at rounders by the Dutch.

That’s how it is, no quarter given, no quarter given. Or how it was, the new version being no quarter given, and the lack of quarter being complained about by the English papers.

When they were on top, I don’t remember those pious organs piping up over rotating casts of substitute fieldsmen, or time-wasting, or any of the other tweaks that put a bite of fire in the spirit of the game.

I remember Giles Coren sledging our nation, asking what we had when we didn’t have any cricket any more. “You look at the wider Australian cultural scene and you are forced to ask: ‘What have you got when Rolf goes?’” That’s Rolf Harris for Australian readers – he’s part of Britain’s cultural firmament, and look how that’s turned out.

Now that English cricket is back down in the doldrums (AKA its natural habitat), and Australia is on top again, it might be time to send some of that crowing back return-to-sender. Coren is an English restaurant critic (poor bastard), a position a bit like coaching Eddie the Eagle to a “Most Improved” award. So his job is to be irascible.

But his criticisms of Australia seemed a little stale, like they were trapped in 1979. So much has changed since then – in those days, Britain was still facing a bitter winter of social unrest, failing infrastructure, and a Conservative government cutting services to the quick.

The line of attack Brit jingoes chose was a strange one. Australia was vulgar! Yes, but vulgarity is what inoculates us against sclerosis. Australia is stuck in the past! We’ll get to that.

Coren even questioned our country's record with Indigenous populations and film production, thereby constructing the biggest glass house since the Crystal Palace. Who says Britain can't build things! Anyone who has ever been there and tried to use a train or a toilet, it turns out.

Sydney has notoriously bad public transport, but it's Switzerland compared with Britain, which seems to have a system imported from the former Soviet Bloc, only with less friendly customer service. On my last trip from Stansted, the seat was decorated with the standard melange of wet tissue, trickling tea cup and apple core that some call "Stansted Express still life".

The point of innovation was filthy water dripping from the roof, the ominous calling card of a sprinkle of snowflakes. Second-world infrastructure was about to become third-world chaos. Sure enough, before long they were prying open the doors with a crowbar and shifting us to another train.

There's no phrase that sums up the experience of modern Britain better than “run out of grit”, except maybe “the train is delayed due to leaves on the track”. Spirit of the Blitz!

Of all the haymakers swung at Australia by English sneerers, “stuck in the past” feels the most off-target. Have these people ever been, say, into the cocktail bar at the Savoy Hotel? It’s like something out of an Evelyn Waugh novel, only not funny. I felt like one of those fisherman who catches a grotesque amphibian formerly believed extinct for millions of years.

I was the only man in the room not wearing a dinner suit, a holding pen of pallid scions with doodled jaw lines and clammy comb-overs, the oldest young people in the world. That room isn’t Britain’s vestigial spleen, it’s the brains of the operation. The overbite goes all the way to the top.

No matter how embarrassing and backward Australia is, we’re still a rung up the evolutionary ladder from prostrating ourselves to suck the toes of an idiot future monarch. At least we’re trying to prise ourselves out of this ancient boondoggle, instead of buying a picture of it on a plate.

The only aspect of British life that feels both modern and truly functional is the surveillance culture. It’s the world's first police state with the reach of a dictatorship, but the mind of a suburbanite curtain-twitcher, obsessed with littering, TV aerials, noisy teenagers and the foreigners next door – Eurasia run by Disgusted of Tunbridge Wells.

So it’s natural and right that the summer sport is won by the place where the sun shines, rather than the place where it doesn’t. For now the English must go back to their traditional method of basking, where employed, corpulent men in their underpants lie in public parks, milking whatever fleeting rays they can get.

Fortunes will turn again. But until then, in the immortal words of Ricky Ponting … actually it probably wouldn’t get past your firewall.

Feel better now Ken? Hope you enjoyed typing that all out!

When you coming to London again? (By the way Stanstead is nowhere near London).

[Philski]

My own dream result is an Ashes series so one-sided cricket gets banned by the Queen: every field salted, every bat thrown into a bonfire, even the word “cricket” expunged from the language, like a damnatio memoriae in the old times. Then the Poms go off and get beaten at rounders by the Dutch.

Frankly, there's a lot of truth in that article. Especially the bit about arriving at (any of) the London airports and travelling into town.

Much of it is due to us having helped to prevent German becoming the dominant language in Europe! (Apologies for raking over old coals...)

[Ken Gargett]

Feel better now Ken? Hope you enjoyed typing that all out!

as mentioned, from the guardian.

even i have managed cut and paste.