If reading The Troublesome Offspring of Cardinal Guzman was like navigating in the a pitch dark tunnel, then Mad World, My Masters was like, well, driving a fast car without a fixed destination in mind. It was thrilling, absorbing and time went fast one pages were turned. It was breezy all day yesterday and I could not think of anything better to do except for trying to find out what happen next.
As someone who seldom has television on, or at least not for news, I have never watched Simpson's World or John Simpson's television reporting in great length. But the fame was such that when Have I Got News for You chose to tease him on his outfit in one of his assignments to the middle east, I found it incredible that even a highly respectable journalist (not politician) would get 'treatment' like that.
Then when I reached the recollection on the Hong Kong handover, especially the remarks on what MIGHT be inside the minds of the Chinese mandarins at the function hosted by the Chinese government, which he was not invited, a light shed on my brain and that episode of HIGNFY suddenly seemed to make perfect sense. There he was doing what a professional journalist should have restrained from doing: allowing himself to form a casual generation of a group of people/country/regime he did not know well enough. His opinion was neither new nor strange in Western media; in fact, that attitude and approach of his towards all things to do with Communist China underlies the majority of the British media coverage. In reflection, I was only disappointed because I had expected him to be an exception.
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