To give up football is to change the pattern of your life. You will drop suddenly a whole series of habits. Someone will invite you down to Winchester for the week-end; there is an admirable train from Waterloo, they will tell you, on Friday night. Without thinking you will begin to excuse yourself. You are very sorry, but Saturdays ... and then suddenly you remember--that is all over now. You can go when you like, and where you like. And you are appalled by the enormity of your liberation, and hastily begin to form other habits, to fling out fresh feelers, to take up golf, or to join dining clubs that meet on the second and fourth Wednesdays of the month; to be once again entangled in the pattern of recurring engagements; once again to be the lackey of custom, the creature of use and wont. There is always cricket, though; and summer weaves of its four short months a surer, clearer pattern than the winter does. There is cricket every day, and there is the county championship. And if you follow closely the fortunes of any county, as I follow those of Middlesex, you have a firm framework for your personal peradventures. I find it difficult, even now, at this early date, to place with immediate accuracy the date of any given winter circumstance. “When did that happen?” I ask myself. I try and build round it a frame of associations. What else was happening at about that time? What book was I reading? What suit was I wearing? What friend had I just seen? And gradually, detail by detail, I re-create the scene. But it takes time. And football only occasionally helps me. There are no championships in rugger. There are no figures, no individual scores, to help one. One game is so like another. Season after season one plays against the same teams, on the same grounds, and with only slightly varying results. It is difficult sometimes even to place offhand any particular game in its right season. And anyhow, football is only a key to week-end associations. It is of small assistance in the dating of a meeting that took place in the middle of the week. It is different, though, with cricket. People tell me sometimes that I have an uncanny memory for dates. “Did you ever,” they will say, “see that film ‘The Old Nest,’ that was on at the Alhambra about two years ago?” “Yes,” I will answer, “I went there the last Monday in August 1921--the 29th, I think it was.” But it is not “The Old Nest” that I remember. I only remember it through its associations of Lord’s and the second day of that wonderful Middlesex and Surrey match; the morning of inexplicable failure; Donald Knight’s magnificent innings in the afternoon; tea-time with Surrey in an impregnable position. Two fifty runs ahead and eight wickets still to go. And then afterwards that startling, that glorious collapse. Nigel Haig taking wicket after wicket from the nursery end. Fender trying to play for keeps, and being taken by Murrell wide on the leg side off Hearne. The match a match again.