30 March

It’s horrible living in a sentimental age. Take this cricket saga, where we’ve moved from outrage last week, to guilt and forgiveness this week at the sight of the trauma Smith and Bancroft showed. Rather than treat the whole thing as a symptom of the way cricket is being run, we slip into the usual Days of Our Lives melodrama of the personalities involved, and get our rocks off with the roller coaster ride from outrage to grief. That’s what sentimentality is.