Dennis Norden spoke for all cricket fans when he said, "It's a funny kind of month, October. For the really keen cricket fan it's when you discover that your wife left you in May."

It is not May yet but I believe that my wife already feels deserted and is what in the old days would be called a 'straw' or 'grass' widow, meaning a woman whose husband is temporarily absent.

In this case, there is no vegetation whether dried or fresh involved, no widow's weeds so to speak. I maintain that it is not my fault she married a sports freak.

I know that she might devoutly wish a conclusion, or even a rare and occasional consummation, but I am into consumption of continuous cricket brought from Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, England and beyond by the almighty and all nightly box.

Television might be a medium but it does sports well and it is the only box that beckons when the umpire calls play.

I suppose at this point one can make a passing reference to the often quoted statement by playwright Harold Pinter when he was interviewed by the Observer on October 5, 1980, "I tend to believe that cricket is the greatest thing that God ever created on earth - certainly greater than sex, although sex is not too bad either."

Cricket drama

This passion for cricket is shared by many of us throughout the world. While some Americans think it is 'baseball on Valium', the true cricket fan realises that each cricket match has its own tempo and cadence, its own special appeal. To the insider, cricket is indeed drama.

My favourite humourist, P.G. Wodehouse, who was also a playwright and novelist, was also a very serious cricket fan. While he is known as the creator of Jeeves, the incomparable valet to Bertie Wooster, few of us know that the name was a tribute to Percy Jeeves, the Warwickshire bowler, who was killed in the First World War.

Wodehouse's nickname was 'Plum' and he later said, ""I rather liked it, particularly after I learned during my boyhood that a famous Middlesex cricketer, Pelham Warner, was called Plum."

While I devoured his books about Mike Jackson, the cricketer, and his friend Psmith, the Wodehouse piece that best captured my own cricketing career was a poem called Missed.

It starts:

"The sun in the heavens was beaming,

The breeze bore an odour of hay,

My flannels were spotless and gleaming,

My heart was unclouded and gay;

The ladies, all gaily apparelled,

Sat round looking on at the match,

In the tree-tops the dicky-birds carolled,

All was peace - till I bungled that catch.

The final stanza talks about giving up cricket for golf so I'll leave it out and use the penultimate paragraph which recounts an emotion (and experience) that every cricketer, regardless of prowess, has experienced many times in his career:

"O, ne'er, if I live to a million,

Shall I feel such a terrible pang.

From the seats on the far-off pavilion loud yell of ecstasy rang.

By the handful my hair (which is auburn)

I tore with a wrench from my thatch,

And my heart was seared deep with a raw burn

At the thought that I'd foozled that catch."

Tony Deyal was last seen quoting P.G. Wodehouse to some of his media colleagues, "That is why it is, on the whole, preferable to be a cricket spectator rather than a cricket player. No game affords the spectator such unique opportunities of exerting his critical talents. You may have noticed that it is always the reporter who knows most about the game."