The new cricket season is now upon us. I have left my fitness preparations until the last minute this year and am in no shape to participate with any rigour for now. Who am i kidding? I don't remember a time when i was ever ready for a season. I am what a sadly missed writer of comedic prose called Willie Rushton would have described as a compleat Cricketer. The miss spelling is deliberate and delineates me from a complete cricketer who is actually quite good at the game. The compleat cricketer a study of hope over experience. A player who has made moderate progress with mediocre talent. The mind is willing but the body... well it gave up a few years back.

I took the game up last year after a few years absence and immediately found that it had almost been too long. Bits of me started to complain in a way they never had before. But worse was the attitude of my fellow competitors. Most of whom were only slightly older than my own children. They treated me as they would a rather dotty grandparent. Not quite sure if i was going to make some sort of embarrassing noise at any moment.

My training so far has been an attempt at some sprint training. I took it out of the latest copy of Men's Health. It was rubbish though. I am so unfit I cannot even complete half the routine and had to cut it down to size so at least I could say I had done all the disciplines. I have also climbed Roseberry Topping once. For those not in the know it is a local landmark in the North York Moors and a good jolly for the moderately fit. That isn't strictly true as i recall. My daughter and myself hauled ourselves up past a couple of whom one had an orthopaedic walking stick and she wasn't far behind us. We stuck to the more arduous north face ascent. There are plenty of ways up it but this one is more direct. The climb is about 750 feet in about a mile and a bit. Captain Cooke was said to climb it as a boy so we were in good company.

The 2nd Baron Mancroft once described Cricket as a game devised by the English, as a race without much spirituality, to give them an experience of eternity. He was obviously not a follower. To the avid supporter the bits in between the action are there for you to fill in for yourself. It is those moments that stick with you long after the dying of the light.

Take, as an example, a great friend of my father who fancied himself as a wit and raconteur. One summer (1981 - but that's another story) myself, my Dad and the hero of the tale took it upon ourselves to spend a Sunday afternoon in the company of Kington C.C and an unidentified opposition. It may have been a local Derby but that is of no consequence. It was one of those days when you just wonder why the hell you bothered to get out of bed. It had stopped raining but the clouds were black and there was a stiff breeze playing across the pitch.

So we took our positions on the boundary and waited for something to happen. We arrived halfway through and saw Kington's reply to 129 all out. I think the TV pundits would have called it a "technical game". The game progressed despite rather than because of the passage of time. As a spectacle it left a lot somewhere else. The only high spot on the field had been the emergence of a heavily bearded Gentleman onto the field of play. A man who was almost completely round in every aspect save for two spindly legs and the regulation number of arms. Between the three of us we decided there could only be one occupation for a man of that stature in a team. He must be a spin bowler of such guile and mystique he could bowl out an opposition without breaking a sweat. His exploits in the field did nothing to change our minds. We were bitterly disappointed to see however that, as the game ended in an inevitable victory for the home side, our man came on and bowled a military medium pace of such guile and mystique that his colleagues were regularly collecting the ball from hedgerows, the street beside us and the allotments at the back of the ground.

What had sustained myself and my Dad throughout the chilly spectacle though had been our erstwhile companion who had a wealth of tales that were unusual if not completely improbable. But that is the beauty of story telling. One of his tales I was able to recite nigh word for word in my exams the following summer.

I am not quite in the same league as our bearded gentlemen save for the military medium pace and bowling that has an affinity with the boundary.

As I said before my cricket is the playing out of hope over experience.