Having just read “Auntie’s Season”, an exquisite recount of holiday cricket with family in Devon by Raymond “Crusoe” Robertson-Glasgow, it’s remarkable similarities to the Australian backyard game surprised me. One thinks only of the origins of English cricket to be either proper school boys at Eaton or Harrow or grubby monosyllabics after a ‘day at pit’.

Crusoe was famous for his writings about the grassroots of the game and this familial battle with his Aunt, in teams of two as Hobbs battles the Australians at Lords, is delicious. A contemporary of Neville Cardus, he chose to emphasise wit over dour descriptions of play. Cricket was always to be fun, a relief from the battles of life, not a reflection of them.

Dubbed by Gideon Haigh as possessing “torentual eloquence and concealed sadness”, he frequently inverted the game’s triangle, making its pinnacle face the bottom of the page and highlighting a boy, his Auntie and cousins as the most important participants of the game. Haigh would know, himself being among the best writers to have illuminated cricket and its characters and events. However, he rarely ventured where dogs roamed, alert at cover point.

Crusoe was a first class cricketer for Oxford and Somerset and was spoken of as potentially an England cap all the way to Bodyline but mental ill-health and his sense of fun and integrity prevented it. The desperate depressive episodes of bipolar saw several complete breakdowns and departures from public life. In 1953, his permanent self-imposed departure from the press box was lamented intently by John Arlott.

He released his best book, “46 Not Out” in 1948 and for those who harbour the twin love of words and cricket which border on the obsessive, it is compulsory.

In 1965, he took an overdose of barbiturates, ending a life of colouring the dreariness for others whilst surviving often in empty blackness himself.

A blueprint for another famous Somerset player, well credentialed with bat and pen, to unfortunately follow. Their like is gone, never to return and whilst we can be grateful for the time they gave us, we would be less than human to not want for what was lost.