Any gentleman of any game deserves mourning when he passes, but a singular figure such as Jonah Lomu merits a unique response. His death doesn’t quite have the sharp edge of tragedy that it usually would for somebody taken at an early age. There is the same depth of loss, but it’s a more nebulous sense of melancholy, informed by awareness of the disease that was a presence for half his life, and which nearly claimed him earlier than this.
Month: November 2015
Events can have an unpleasant knack of rendering previous forthrightly held opinions not merely obsolete, but downright foolish. This blog has previously written about the Syrian civil war and America’s strategic alliances in the Middle East, topics that are most certainly germane to the heinous attacks in Paris on Friday evening. When writing this post, I firstly asked myself whether I needed to re-examine my previous writings, and if necessary, even recant some of it. The re-examination took place, but – and it doesn’t give me any particular pleasure to say this, for the reputation and vanity of a blowhard commentator is of consequence to nobody, especially when the issue at hand is so serious – I wasn’t moved to forswear the thrust of either post.