When I was at school, I wasn’t very good at sport and didn’t like it much either. Most games didn’t offer much in the way of get-outs, but as anyone who has ever watched a game of cricket knows, it generates a multitude of statistics, and so there is actually a role specially designed for academic and lazy boys who want to get out of physical activity, ie the scorer.

So as a result I got to sit at either (depending on how glamorous the school we were playing was) a table, or in a large scorebox, watching my school-fellows exhaust themselves running around the place.

The quid pro quo was that you did have to concentrate quite hard, not only watching intently everything that happened on the pitch so that you caught everything the batsmen were doing, at the same time as not taking your eyes off either umpire so as not to miss any casual signals, but also meticulously recording everything that happened in several places in the scorebook.

But I enjoyed the challenge and had a fun time doing it. I even - this will surprise some of my current colleagues - had a reputation for putting together a particularly neat and legible scorebook.

And on occasion I even ended up by accident getting quite a bit of exercise. The school had once hosted a proper cricket match and in payment had received a fairly full scorebox, with full sets of scoreboards and designed for between two and four scorers to watch and record it all. Sometimes the other side failed to send a scorer so I had the place to myself - and when a wicket fell the challenge was to work out the name of the bloke who’d caught it, record it in the expiring batsman’s line, the fall of the wicket in the bowler’s line and all the various places in the book which wanted to know about it, as well as put the scoreboard for the batsman back to zero, update the ‘last wicket’ and ‘last batsman’ boards, and climb the ladder to replace the number of the outgoing batsman with the number of the incoming one - all between the old batsman walking and the new one making it on to the pitch. You had to get it all done in the right order or you would find yourself half way up a ladder where you couldn’t see the pitch when the next ball was bowled - and if once you miss a ball that’s where it all starts to unravel…

All this I had forgotten until Sunday afternoon when my cousin Jon’s 40th birthday saw me back with a scorebook in my hand for the first time since I left school fifteen years ago. Suddenly it all came flooding back - so I slipped cheerfully back into the routine of noting all the dot balls and responding to increasingly urgent requests to know how many overs had gone, and how many balls were left in the over (I mean, I have to do all that, and all the umpires have to do is to count to six, but they always seem to find it a challenge).

Or at least some of it came flooding back - I found myself desperately trying to wrack my brains to remember what the mark for a wide was (it got used quite frequently), and trying to be sure that leg byes do indeed count against the bowler, but not for the batsman (is that right?). Fortunately it wasn’t too serious a match, so when I wasn’t entirely sure of what the Laws had to say about a situation, I took an executive decision on their behalf….The important thing is to be confident about what the score is, you see.

But all in all it was quite the way to spend a warm summer Sunday afternoon, with a pint in hand. The latter was a bit of a new feature since my schooldays, and didn’t necessarily keeping on top of it all easier as the afternoon wore on…