Cricket Season Starts Today!

Boys, boys, boys (and Alison). It's back. The cricket season is back! It starts today, at 9pm at Tiffin School with Winter Nets.

And don't you know that Mrs Wickman is actually quietly pleased. Not just because she'll get the Sky+ remote control every Thursday night for the foreseeable future - Wickman's secret lair will ring out to the theme tunes of Property Ladder and Escape to a Mansion or How to Get Your Husband to do DIY jobs. No - more importantly she will be able to re-display the Wickman heirlooms and other knick-knackery that has to be cleared away every November. Here we find one of Wickman's proud collection of smurfs...

It is cleared away, readers, to prevent the crashing square cut and the ferocious pull shot from decapitating figurines, smashing vases and eviscerating flower displays. It is cleared away to protect the world's stock of superglue and while she's at it the Wickettes are warned to stay away from the sitting room for fear they connect with 2.9lbs of English Willow around the gizzard.

For, Wickmen, the only place with a big enough mirror to practice cricket strokes in the closed season is Wickman's sitting room. The big mirror in there is perfect for the illustration and ironing out of every technical flaw. In November Wickman is a right-handed Gower, an English Keith Miller a surburban Brian Lara.

Tonight, he'll be a ring rusty club cricketer in Kingston, Surrey. But oh my, like the first mini-skirt in Chelsea or shades on the train or cuckoo in Spring, the first net of the year is like a clarion call. Summer is coming...