SOME things are too horrific to write about. Even the seasoned journalist recoils from the truly terrible. Over this past year I’ve written about wars and atrocities, disasters and catastrophes galore. I think I once even mentioned Lord Kinnock.

But there is one subject which I have avoided out of a sense of sheer disgust and it is only now, following our pathetic performance in the Ashes, that I can bring myself to think about English cricket again.

Cricket and I go back a long time. In the 1950s’ hospital wards they used to attach a printed card to the bottom of each patient’s bed indicating religious denomination.

There were only three: C of E, RC and Jewish.

Nothing more exotic had yet crept in. No proclaiming alliance to scientology or paganism.

And certainly no advertisement for trendy, talkative atheists. I felt that my card should have displayed the one word “cricket”.

I was brought up a mile-and-a-half from Headingley, in Leeds, and as soon as I could walk that far I paid my sixpence to sit on the hard benches for the full day’s play.

Of course, I was a Yorkshire fanatic – Yorkshire before England, as with all dyed-in-thewool Yorkshiremen – but really it didn’t matter who was playing, I was utterly beguiled.

There wasn’t much grass in downtown Leeds. So the way the players’ whites stood out against the green with sharp shadows racing across the ground was enchanting. I was so insanely in love with the game that I think I would have sat there just imagining a match even if none was taking place. Often one had to do just this of course for that curse of cricket rain stopped play. There were giants in England in those days: Hutton, Compton, Edrich, Trueman, Statham, Lock, Laker, Close and Johnny Wardle. Cricket was heaven and these were my gods.

And, as in any religion, there were pilgrimages.

In 1955, my grandma and granddad took me for a week to Scarborough: a blissful seven days of milk shakes, candy floss, toffee apples and fish and chips – not all at once, you understand.

The highlight was the day they took me to the North Marine Road cricket ground. Yorkshire were playing Nottinghamshire and play was delayed owing to a sea fret.

We were hanging around the turnstiles and, before they took themselves off to the promenade and the pub, grandma and granddad gave me strict instructions about how I should conduct myself and where I should meet them on their return to collect me at six o’clock.

I noticed a man standing close by and he had obviously heard my grandparents’ lecture.

He said: “I’m a member here. I’ll take the lad in and he can sit with me in the pavilion.”

In the pavilion! Where all the posh folk sat.

Where the players emerged to bat and whence they returned when they were dismissed.

“Sit with me in the pavilion” – it was as if the Yorkshire god had said to me personally: “Sit thee down on high and I will reveal unto thee great glories.” And I did see great glories.

My first time at Scarborough and here’s Fred Trueman doing the hat-trick.

The saintly gent who took me in told me he didn’t have children of his own, so I think he enjoyed the experience as much as I did. He bought me pork pies and ice cream and at lunchtime I got the autographs of Norman Yardley and Willie Watson.

Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive and to be young was cricket heaven…