‘It’s like a summer fling, but I’m not sure cricket is for me’

“It’s good if you have a day to spare,” he tells me, which both helps and doesn’t.

I am here as part of an attempt to watch one new sport a month, in the hope of finding one that suits my tastes. I’m over 30, childfree and underemployed, and in dire need of a way to spend my acres of free time. Yes, my diamond shoes are a bit tight actually, thanks for noticing.

I ask someone else for a sales pitch and they seem confused by the premise of the question. Would you ask a fish why it enjoys the ocean? I arrived at Lord’s at 11am with two things: a desire to see if cricket could become my sport of choice, and a mild hangover I would term “globulous”. Sometimes you drink too much and, the next day, the whole world feels spiky. Today, I feel like someone wrapped my brain in cotton wool, and my heart is full of gentle love for my fellow man.

Though I did watch a slice of T20 at the Oval a few years ago, my Frenchness has, until now, prevented me from taking cricket seriously. This changed on Good Friday, as I watched the first day of a county championship game by myself. It was, in retrospect, a move akin to going straight from a first kiss to peeing with the door open.

I enjoyed it at first. It struck me as an intimate experience. There is something poetic about watching this small group of men lost in the middle of a vast green lawn.

We’re not really watching sport, but watching people watching sport. It helps that their reactions – cries of joy and frustration – were louder than our own. In a way, it seemed closer to theatre than, say, football.

Then there is the repetition. The subtle variations between balls must be striking to those who actually understand cricket, but all I saw was the same thing happen again, and again, and again. It was both hypnotic and oddly reassuring. In the beginning there was bowling; in the end, there will still be bowling.

I probably could have learned a bit more about the rules. Whatever happened on the board just made me panic, as you can tell from a note I wrote at 12.43pm, which reads: “Why are there decimals on the overs? How many more? How can you have a little bit of an over?”. I have yet to find out. The game stopped shortly after that, and that brings us back to lunch, where I end up making a terrible mistake. Done with my little interviews, I do something awful: I order a coffee, then I drink it. The bell rings and I return to my seat. Quickly, I realise that the spell has been broken.

The languorous aura of the morning is gone: I’m too awake, too aware of the agonisingly slow pace of it all. I check my phone, then check it again. By 2.30pm, I worry that hearing a bat thwack a ball even once more will drive me to madness. I run away from the grounds.

Still, on the way home, I notice that my soul feels lighter than it did when I woke up. I think back to this point, a few hours earlier, when the sun was shining on my face and one of the players was dutifully cleaning the ball with his shirt, like a little boy, and everything felt perfectly still and perfectly fine.

I’m not sure cricket will ever be the sport for me but I now see the appeal of it. Like a summer fling, it slows down time and allows you to experience brief moments of grace, in the middle of a life which so often lacks them.