I think, hype apart, that England have deserved to win as they are, on balance the better team. And hopefully they will go on to win the Series in Sydney. To invert Ricky Ponting’s remark – 3:1 sounds much better than 2:2.

If it was only as simple as your first paragraph suggests. But, of course, it is not. We are clearly poles apart, so I think we’ll agree to differ on both this and our positions on the HR Act, which have already been rehearsed elsewhere in this forum.:)

:D:D

All that stuff about strictures being imposed on you from above, and being told how to live your life.

There’s nothing like that in the definition that you posted.

But that is precisely what they are. That definition could not have been written 50 years ago. Now we have to be sensitive of what we do and what we say and how we behave in a way that simply would not have been a consideration years ago.

That, of course, is absolutely true but it is not an ethic with which many Australians have much sympathy. As I think we will discover if they do fail to regain the Ashes tomorrow morning.

Well, despite your smiley, that is something we will never know…….;)

What stuff?

Sounds like what we used to call ‘common courtesy’ when I were a lad.

I wonder why so many people seem to take offence at it?

I cannot see much in common between the common courtesy of my youth in the 50s with the “top-down” imposed strictures by which we are required to live our lives. In fact the two are mutually exclusive, common courtesy being innate and PC being imposed.

And, I presume that offence is taken for precisely this reason.