I HAD really wanted to attend The Plague: A Very Short Introduction since yesterday’s uninterrupted sun had put me in such a good mood, but unfortunately had to make do instead with Why Test Cricket Matters.

I only say ‘make do’ because at 1.59pm I was a stupid, callow dupe with all the IQ of a slug.

Thankfully, God tapped me on the shoulder (well, I do help old ladies across the street) and by 2.46pm had showed me the error of my ways.

Of course, God himself didn’t descend from the heavens, but two masters of broadcasting – David Frith and Barry Norman – made pretty good substitutes and held me under their spell.

Frith is the world’s foremost cricket historian (that’s what it says in the Festival programme, okay?) while Norman, a “cricket obsessive” is best known as a film critic.

Never having heard of Frith, I put all my money on Norman delivering the keynote speech, but boy was I wrong.

About cricket AND the growling, snarling judgements of cricket’s very own David Starkey.

I swear, hand on heart, that man single-handedly converted me, like a Mississippi preacher, to the joys of leather on willow. And bizarre as that sounds, it’s true.

Listening to him rumble on in his dry, almost jaded drawl, I suddenly found myself properly awake for the first time since beers in the Grapes at lunchtime.

And what I loved most was his precise, plodding recall of players and matches and the sporting personalities who wanted to kill him.

In fact, based on his own wearily wonderful testimony, it would be easy to mistake him for a street brawler or cage fighter, scarred, battle fatigued and bleeding without care over his immaculate cricket whites, since I don’t actually think there was a single individual mentioned whom he didn’t want to punch or wanted to punch him. Hell, even I felt tempted to cuff the ornery old devil but only out of respect.

As someone who only ever made one catch during a cricket game, and that, painfully, was between my legs, I found myself surprisingly immersed in the lore of the sport.

Chaired by Duncan Hamilton, himself a two-time winner of the sports book of the year award, who kept prodding David like a lion tamer with a stick, the two guests reminisced so passionately and mournfully about the golden age of cricket, their conversation almost garnered a blush of sepia.

Interestingly, right now, as I write this, the two gentlemen in question are but a few feet away, so if you’ll excuse me for just a moment, I need to... confess/grab an autograph/act like a stalker… And having done that (David quite rightly scolding me for letting ‘a ball in the goolies’ colour my view) I think I’ll buy the latest copy of Wisden. It’s a cricketing Bible, apparently, and as I’ve just been baptised, it would feel wrong not to.

  • For details of the festival, click on the link below.