‘Pavillon now OPEN. Surving FOOD and DRIN’. This sign, propped up outside Spencer Street Station, was attracting a lot of passing attention the other morning. For one thing, the alternative to looking at it was falling over it because it loomed up through the bustling crowd very quickly, and right in the middle of the causeway leading from the station’s tawdry depths. And then, of course, there was its oddity.
Easy to laugh though, I thought, catching myself smiling, as were many normally gloomy commuters. Here, no doubt, were people for whom English was their second, perhaps even third language, trying to make a go with their little café (or their huge pavilion—you couldn’t be sure) in a foreign land and a difficult tongue. Easy to scapegoat the stumbling English of such honest tryers.
Scapegoating was on my mind, I have to admit. (Isn’t it the year of the scapegoat? No? Maybe just the goat.) At the height of the summer, Australian cricketer Darren Lehmann expressed his anger at losing his wicket with a terse, racist and sexist outburst which was within the hearing of the Sri Lankan dressing room, and which greatly and very reasonably offended the Sri Lankan players. Lehmann’s utterance was inexcusable, violent and indefensible. He was carpeted by the match referee, Clive Lloyd, severely rebuked, fined, ordered to attend counselling and called upon to apologise. Already full of remorse, Lehmann apologised in writing and verbally and then to each of the Sri Lankan squad individually. The Sri Lankans thanked him and pronounced the matter closed. Clive Lloyd was satisfied and the Australian Cricket Board (ACB) considered that due process had taken its course in this serious matter.
At this point, the Australian head of the International Cricket Council (ICC), Malcolm Speed, intervened. He said Lehmann’s transgression was of such magnitude and seriousness that it should attract more stringent punishment. He pronounced it a ‘Level 3’ breach of the rules governing players’ conduct, the penalty for which could be a fine, banning from a stipulated number of matches, or both. Lehmann was tried—again by Clive Lloyd—and banned for five matches.
In his great essay, ‘In Defence of P.G. Wodehouse’, George Orwell concedes that Wodehouse should never have done what he did and that certain degrees and kinds of recrimination were in order. Cassandra’s massive attack on Wodehouse, however, in which he brands him among other things a traitor fit for the