India, March 7 -- For ten-and-a-half months, from the middle of March 2020 to January 1 the following year, I wrote a column (called Dispatch, and numbered) every weekday on Covid-19. By the time I stopped the column (or thought I'd stopped it), I had written 238. My colleague and HT's managing editor Kunal Pradhan, who edited almost all - everyone needs editing - would typically stop by to tell me the cricketing significance of the number of columns I'd written till that day.

He didn't have a nugget of cricketing wisdom to share on 238, but we discovered a few days later, when Kane Williamson made 238, that until then, it was the second-lowest score never made by a batsman. As it turns out, the column didn't end when I thought it had. T...