- You are born on the same day as Theresa May.
- You are both white women from England, both with quite long thin shins and an air of having grown up in a place where there were a lot of fields all around.
- It’s not a wholesome air, exactly, more just it seems like you would be very keen on village greens and the sounds of men playing cricket, and laughing at things that are not funny on the radio. You both seem like Jilly Cooper would approve of you.
- Also, you and Theresa May both seem like the kind of woman that Christopher Hitchens would have had an ostentatious soft spot for, the way he was always going on about Margaret Thatcher’s allegedly overwhelming sex appeal.
- I can’t remember where I read this, thank Christ, but there was definitely something about Christopher Hitchens saying that Margaret Thatcher had a terrifying, otherworldly carnal energy, like a snake woman, and that even though he did not agree with her politics he simply could not resist that sexy governess-ish quality.
- I imagine Christopher Hitchens saying all this and then doing air quotes around the word “schoolmarm,” and raising his eyebrows in what he believed to be a rakish manner. Jilly Cooper guffawing away and promising to relay this story to the chaps as soon as they have finished playing cricket.
- What is it about a certain type of English man. Why do they say and do this stuff. Do they find it amusing.
- What is it about this Olde England business that makes me so livid. Why does it make me think of the word “naughty.” Why can’t I just let a totally imaginary cricket match go on in peace, without wanting to march in there and ruin it somehow, maybe by shooting an air gun repeatedly into the navy blue evening sky, or by releasing a whole lot of locusts onto the field?
- What does any of this have to do with you, actually?
- Maybe nothing.
- It might be that you hate all quaint English things, and that you have firm and correct opinions on Brexit, and that you bitterly resent being tarred with this appalling brush just because you were in Mary Poppins.
- I don’t have the energy to investigate the matter further, somehow.
- I really do hate this stuff an inordinate amount.
- It makes me both cross and exhausted.
- What did posh dickheads playing cricket ever actually do to me, other than offend on a sort of conceptual level?
- Maybe nothing.
- Happy Birthday.
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