See what happens when you look under a cricketing stone

Yesterday, without much pleasure in the act, I registered my disquiet at the impending re-appointment of Peter Moores as England cricket head coach – primarily based upon my conviction that, generally-speaking, there’s little to be gained from ‘going backwards’.

I’m fond of the word ‘serendipity’ [the act of discovering something positive by accident]. However, it doesn’t quite apply to the situation that I wish to describe and, if there isn’t a word that covers what I’m referring to, then one surely ought to be invented.

(Answers on a postcard, please to this address …)

It’s that phenomenon where you come across something novel – e.g. a new word/definition, or a first revelation as to how two hitherto separate (to you) geographical locations ‘fit together’ on a map – and, from that moment onwards, it suddenly seems to appear constantly upon your radar.

One possible explanation of said phenomenon [are you keeping up with me?] is that – in actual fact – you had come across the piece of information concerned previously, possibly many times. However, simply because your brain hadn’t taken the knowledge on board at the time, it had ignored it.

To take ‘serendipity’ as a case in point.

I well remember that, once I had first consciously registered the word and sought out its meaning, I was soon noticing instances of it appearing in all sorts of books and articles, where previously I hadn’t. Surely it couldn’t be the case that ‘serendipity’ had suddenly started materialising all over the place? Much more likely was the possibility that, down through history, it had always been used with approximately the same frequency – and the only difference now was that I had just begun noticing it.

To get to my point.

Having in my above-mentioned article touched for the first time upon the complicated world of English cricket in all its manifestations, it now seems as though I am not alone in having deep misgivings about the ‘state of the nation’ and civilisation as we know it.

Here are just two examples:

Scyld Berry writing in the Daily Telegraph – PETER MOORES RE-APPOINTED

Andy Wilson in The Guardian/Observer – DOWNTON ON KEVIN PIETERSEN