Something very strange happened the other day, as I was receiving a handful of Smarties from a neighbourhood 12-year-old I’d caught trying to steal a cat. The handful just didn’t look right.

“When did they start making blue Smarties?” I wondered aloud.

“They’ve always made blue Smarties,” said the kid, but if there’s one thing I know about kids, it’s that they lie. They also break things, don’t meet deadlines, steal cats and eat ice cream without getting fat, but mainly they lie. I followed up the issue with some candy-loving adults of my acquaintance and discovered to my astonishment that the blue Smartie, that...

My buddy Yash has a strategy for fixing the mental frailties of the South African cricket team.

“We already have a strategy,” I told him. “The strategy is we keep on calling them chokers and reminding them that they always choke, and we keep doing it until they stop choking.”

“But isn’t that the same strategy the Australians used against us, except they did it to make sure we did keep choking?”

“So?”

“So if you want a certain result, why would you continue doing something that has in the past brought precisely the opposite result?”

That’s what I don’t like about Yash. He always tries to bring a rational element and emotional maturity into conversations about sport. Add a comment