No shit.

So after little more than 450 days of stewardship of the Ashes urn, we have surrendered it to the Australians. Who'da thunk?

Still, I don't consider this too much of a relapse by England. The Australians are oddly cock-a-hoop, which sits rather uncomfortably with their swagger as the natural owners of the urn. "IT'S AS GOOD AS OURS," screamed a headline yesterday, the byline promising the imminence of the Ashes returning to "where they belong". Yet if it were so much the natural order of things, you wouldn't think it would be such a big thing - particularly since the achievement of taking the Ashes back from a team shorn of Michael Vaughan, Marcus Trescothick and Simon Jones, and carrying numerous other injuries, has all winter had me thinking, unsurprisingly, of a line in The West Wing:

BARTLET: You know, I got elected to Congress by this state. This state sent me to Congress three time and elected me Governor, all without your help.

LEO grins.

BARTLET: Don't start!

LEO: No, seriously, that's a real political accomplishment considering that your family founded this state. Were you even opposed in any of those elections?

Indeed, the Australian reaction appears to have been one of relief more than anything else. It would be one thing to lose the Ashes in England, as it were in a surprise attack, when the Australians could easily point to a certain complacency - but in Australia, after weeks of intensive training and fired by the determination to regain them, against a decimated English team? That would have been humiliating. Fortunately, anyone even remotely connected with English cricket in a non-playing capacity appears to have fallen over himself in order to hasten the return of the urn to the Australians.

1. The ECB. England, by virtue of being the only country in the Northern hemisphere to play Test Cricket, is the only country to spend both summer and winter playing Test Cricket. Every other country gets at least the occasional (Southern hemisphere) winter off, since they can't all tour England at once. With no thought for the players' longevity whatsoever, the ECB has become hypnotised by the potential income on offer and has committed England to some 14 Tests a year for the last few years, not to mention a truly farcical number of one-day matches, at which England hardly excels, and which therefore merely acquaint the players with the losing habit. 14 Tests a year are particularly hard on fast bowlers, with the result that merely two years after finally having managed to put together a fast bowling attack worthy of the noun, it is in tatters due to injury and overwork. Andrew Flintoff's left ankle will from now on probably be permanently suspect; Stephen Harmison has sore shins and back trouble even when his radar and rhythm are working properly; Simon Jones has been out since September 2005 and may never play again. Only Matthew Hoggard, of the first choice pace quartet, remains unfettered. This has been a sharply exposed weakness in Australia, with England struggling to bowl Australia out twice in any match so far.

2. The ECB (again). When touring a country like Australia, players need to acclimatise and get a feel for the conditions before playing a Test series. Unfortunately, England were detained dicking around in various one-day competitions on the sub-continent and played one first-class match in Australia prior to the First Test. What idiot signed off on that touring schedule, wondered Australian fast bowler Brett Lee, and I with him.

3. The ECB (yet again). England's Australian bowling coach Troy Cooley did a great job with the aforementioned pace quartet in 2004 and 2005, culminating in their total neutralisation of one of the world's best batting line-ups, including Matthew Hayden, Ricky Ponting and Adam Gilchrist, who between them managed two centuries in five Tests in 2005. Naturally, the ECB felt that the thing to do was offer him less money than he was earning at present to stay on, so he took himself back to Australia. The blooding of a new attack to replace the injured parties has not been quite so successful without him.

4. Duncan Fletcher. Ian Botham called him pig-headed, and that is likely to be an edited-for-television version. The star debut of 2006 was Monty Panesar, whose left-arm spin claimed some of the most heavyweight wickets in Test Cricket, including Sachin Tendulkar, Mohammad Yousuf, Younis Khan and Inzamam-ul-Haq, was dropped from the first two Ashes Tests because Ashley Giles was back from injury after more than a year out of the game. His performances reflected that long sabbatical in the First Test, yet Fletcher picked him again for the Second Test, where once again he failed to shine and managed to drop Ricky Ponting on 40 into the bargain. Finally getting the point, he picked Panesar for the Third Test; Monty promptly took twice as many wickets in Australia's first innings as Giles had managed in the first two Tests.

5. The ECB and Duncan Fletcher. I can pinpoint the moment England lost the Ashes. It was back in September and I was on the DLR, reading about how Andrew Flintoff would captain England in Australia - this in spite of his demonstrably lacklustre performances as captain in India and Andrew Strauss' unmistakeable relishing of the role in England against Pakistan. Flintoff is like Botham. Captaincy doesn't suit him. It suits Strauss.

Roll on 2009.

Drinking with the Enemy

I always feel like a spy when I meet my friend P for a drink. This is because he's a hardened campaigner, in the self-righteous, we-know-best, climbing-on-power-stations sense. Yes, he's a greenie, with an unshakeable faith in the benign potential of ever-more oppressive legislation to achieve his aims and a not unrelated instinctive hatred of business. Honestly, if we hadn't been at school together, in a hideous market town, where intelligence and discerning brought people together simply by virtue of their astonishing rarity; if we hadn't, in other words, forged our friendship in the fires of provincial school hell, I very much doubt we'd have enough in common to become good friends now. I love the guy, but there it is.

Before embarking on a career of directing others' lives to his personal satisfaction at Greenpeace, he cut his teeth trying to prevent them from defending themselves at the Campaign Against Arms Trade, and it was with a pair of CAAT newbies that I found him last night, giving them an informal seminar on activism - running meetings, soliciting funds from rich soi-disant "progressives", differentiating between internal and external politics, etc.. I was impressed with his fluency and grasp of technicalities (anyone can spout meretricious arguments, of course: it requires a greater acumen to do so successfully in the public arena) - although no doubt P would feel, given my notably unstellar record in the professional sphere, that my approbation is on the worthless side.

This is all by way of saying that, inevitably during such a conversation, they digressed briefly into an actual discussion about arms - which, equally inevitably given the philosophical pedigree and employment history of the three involved, was not so much a discussion as it was a mutual reaffirmation of adherence to the "progressive" line. When they'd gone, I asked P if he knew what the Second Amendment says. He didn't. From memory (it should be "well-regulated"), I said,

"It says that a well-ordered militia being necessary to the security of a free state the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed."

This is, in legal terms, shockingly ambiguous language, particularly for so vital and latterly so divisive a clause. There's an interesting page here that discusses the possible interpretations of several of the words - "militia", "well-regulated", "the people", "keep and bear" and "arms" - but in my view it misses out the most important and consequently the most ambiguous of the lot: "being". Is the statement declarative or conditional?

"A well-regulated militia is and always will be necessary to the security of a free state and consequently the right of the people...."

"While and only while it remains the case that a well-regulated militia is necessary to the security of a free state, we accept that the right of the people...."

Personally, I go with the first: I simply don't trust government enough for them to have all the guns. An armed citizenry is a powerful disincentive to tyranny. This is, of course, to interpret "militia" as a private group of individuals on whom the government may call if necessary but who are in no way beholden to it and are therefore free to act in their own interests and in the interests of a free state - and that's without discussing the value of an armed citizenry in matters other than insurance against an overmighty state, such as protection of the person and of property. An armed citizenry is, famously, a polite citizenry.

The difficulty of going with the second interpretation is that it raises a whole raft of new problems, most of which come under the auspices of arbitration. Who shall decide if the time has come that a well-regulated militia is no longer necessary to the security of a free state, say with the establishment of a professional military and police force? By whose judgement should the people relinquish their right to defend themselves and their freedom on the basis that those are now adequately defended for them? This, of course, overlooks the fact that certainly the military and to a lesser extent the police force are under the control and in the pay of government anyway, so are hardly likely, except in extreme matters of conscience, to place others' liberty ahead of their own security. The assumption, in other words, that such a time might come to pass that individuals could safely surrender their right to protect themselves is as naïve as it is egotistical to assume the right to pronounce that time as having arrived.

So what of this country, with its knee-jerk handgun bans that have kept Olympic shooters safely out of the world rankings but spurred the criminal underworld to greater heights of gun violence, safe in the knowledge that they have nearly all the guns? To be honest, it's too depressing to bother with.

P might argue at this point that this is not CAAT's primary aim; rather it is to stop the international trade in arms to regions of conflict and the (insert emotive but intellectually empty word like "grotesque" here) profits being made from it by (insert Masters of War lyrics here). I would say: sorry, it's all part of the same thing. People want arms to protect themselves from people who already have arms. This applies to people you like as well as people you dislike. And expecting them to lie back and wait for government to come and protect them is like me lying back and waiting for Jennifer Connelly to fall out of the sky on to my dick. She was 36 a couple of days ago, by the way. Happy Birthday to her.