When I was about 12 I committed some misdemeanour in class and as a punishment the teacher ordered me to write a thousand-word essay on baseball and hand it in the next morning. This was something of a challenge as being an English kid I knew absolutely nothing about baseball other than it was some weird ritual they indulged in across the Pond.
Of course, there was no internet in those days so I was stuffed. I couldn’t write 10 words about baseball let alone 1,000. Fortunately, my mother came to the rescue, discovering an ancient encyclopaedia which contained basic information about the game. I couldn’t understand a word of it, but somehow managed to cobble together a couple of hand-written pages.
When I handed it in the next morning the teacher didn’t even bother looking at it,…
