GRAHAM Onions assures me he did not deliberately get out in the final over on the first day so he would be available for interviews just before play began the following morning. Having been sent in as a nightwatchman, he failed to enhance his reputation with the bat by dragging an attempted hook into his stumps.

It worked out very well for we media people as he didn’t have to strap his pads on and occupy centre stage following the news of his England selection. Radios Newcastle and Tees wanted to interview him from back at base, so he had to climb some steps followed by a ladder to reach the BBC box at Taunton, which is the equivalent of a garden shed on the roof of the stand opposite the pavilion.

He said he had wanted to keep his feet on the ground after people like me tipped him for England selection following his performance against Yorkshire. Now he was having real trouble keeping his head out of the clouds as he climbed the ladder and I had visions of him slipping off it and missing his Test debut with a broken leg. The sight of the garden shed swiftly disabused him of any notion that he was ascending to the stars.

IT always seems to be late or early season when we visit Somerset, rather than high summer. As I always head 15 miles west, through Wiveliscombe to Waterrow, to stay in cosy cottage, the more daylight available the better.

The River Tone, which runs close to the cricket ground in Taunton, also flows past the bottom of the cottage’s garden. Last September it was a raging torrent, but it has now reverted to babbling brook status, which made the third day’s rain all the more annoying.

I managed a couple of evening visits to my favourite pub, the Royal Oak at Luxborough, tucked away in a steep-sided valley in the Brendon Hills. It was there that I read Craig Kieswetter’s column in the West Somerset Free Press, a gloriously old-fashioned publication which ought to remain free of such unnecessary intrusions. It was the usual stuff about how Somerset had already sounded a warning to the other counties that they were “a force to be reckoned with.” It was quite amusing to read this on the day they had been dismissed for 69 and followed on 474 behind. It made the wonderful Exmoor Ale taste all the better.

DURHAM’S Cumbria connection is promising to pay dividends. On the opening day of the North East Premier League season Ben Stokes scored 143 for the academy, which also includes another highly-rated all-rounder in Jamie Harrison, from Sedbergh School.

Stokes went to Cockermouth School but was born in Christchurch, New Zealand. His father, a Rugby League player, emigrated from there to play for Workington. Ben, who will be 18 in a month’s time, was restricted by a stress fracture of the back last season but is so highly-rated that a first team debut is not out of the question this season.