The man at the crease aims to hook it to square leg, but he finds his off stump has been sent tumbling

Not to put too fine a point on it (another partially cricketing term) it is p*ssing it down with rain here in leafy Kingston, and I have greeted the day with a glad scream of anguish.

See, I have this ancient cricketing injury, which I am convinced stems from the days when I was a deceptively languid mid-pace off-seam bowler for Derbyshire Colts.  From only a six and half stride run-up, I would launch tricky deliveries by stamping down my left leg (the guy above is on the follow-through, the right leg is just the brake) and using it as a pivot to hurl my thunderbolts.  As a result, forty years later the knee cartiledge is knackered.

If I sleep on it wrongly (and I always sleep on it wrongly these days), it slackens overnight and so the first movement I make is agony.  If I remember (and I usually forget) I can sleep with a spare pillow arranged just so to prevent it flexing in the wrong direction.  But after I walk around for a short while, it sorts itself out.  It is sorted now.

I didn't have a long cricketing career.  I tried to take it up again, for the Ham team that played out of the 'Hand and Flower' pub on Ham Common, but it wasn't a success - maybe one day I'll tell you about the shower I took with a visiting West Indian team ... strangely, none of my own team-mates were keen to share the experience.  I also scored eight runs that day (not a bad total for the occasion), and I was very proud of one late cut for two in particular .... the West Indians appreciated it, I remember the slip fielder saying something like; "Shit, mon, I didn't see THAT coming outta this guy!"

I was also an opening bat for Derby County, but I didn't enjoy that so much - batsman just have to make one mistake, but bowlers have a chance to redeem themselves within an over.  Once, just once, I experienced batsman nirvana.  It lasted about ten minutes.  I could see the ball coming at me in slow motion, it looked huge, and it seemed I had half an hour to decide where I would hit it on the field, to avoid fielders.  I hit boundaries all over the place, and then the power disappeared as quickly as it came.  Next ball, I played a textbook forward defensive, but unfortunately on completely the wrong line.  I missed the ball, it went by me and the stumps clattered.  Hated that noise.

Had a few occasions of bowler nirvana, they were good.  I swear, I once decided in the middle of a purple patch of seam bowling, when I was visualising and potentially hitting not just the wicket, but a precise area on my chosen stump (this is not fantasy, other bowlers report it) to change from seam to spin bowling.  I reduced my run-up, lobbed the red orb down the wicket with a vicious amount of tweak, and .... I again swear ..... it bit into the sward, turned almost ninety degrees, and laid waste to his bails.  I can still picture the batsman staring at me, wondering what the hell had just happened.  Walk, boyo!

For completeness, I will relate the other two episodes of this nirvana in my life.  I am not making this stuff up.

1)  As a teenager, I was on holiday with my family in Chesapeake Bay, USA.  The hotel had some much-abused games facilities in the basement, and I was playing table tennis with this guy .... and I suddenly realised that I could direct the ball not just to the optimum areas of the table to make it difficult for him to return, but actually hit the EDGE OF THE TABLE so that the ball would squirt off at a totally unpredictable angle.  I did not make a friend that day.

2)  I'm a deeds clerk, I have an attic full of some four thousand individually numbered client files.  If I don't think about it too hard, I can go up there with the four digit number of the file that is required in my head, and sometimes I will just look straight at it.  Ok, obviously I know roughly which series of files are in which section of the attic.   And it doesn't always work.  But when it does, it scares the bejeesus out of me.

I'm a science grad, I do not believe these things are supernatural.  I just think that our brains are incredibly complex, and sometimes they are capable of doing things at an unconscious level which our conscious thoughts can't comprehend.  Fascinating.

And before I leave this topic ... are you a motorist or cyclist?  I bet you are.  So, you're approaching a junction at which you want to turn right, and there's traffic or pedestrians also approaching the junction, and you need to avoid them.  Do you have any idea how complex the maths you are doing in your head, all unconscious?  You need a time sense, a distance sense, a velocity sense and a predictive behaviour sense, overlaid with the ability to do what on paper would be called integral calculus.  Just to turn right.  A non-verbal, purely physical transaction.  So no wonder it's the single most common cause of road traffic accidents.