Yesterday afternoon HMS Illustrious popped into my head again. I was fielding at square leg, the batsman had clipped the ball off his pads and I was about to field a cricket ball for the first time in twenty years.

The ball was bouncing away to my right, so close that I could hear the rapid-fire flickaflickaflicka of the spinning seam. Twenty years earlier I would have sprung to my right, possibly even dived, and felt the ball smack into my hands before returning a zinger of a throw right over the top of the stumps.

This, however, was twenty years later.

While my mind was pouncing on the ball with fleetness of foot and speed of return, my body was a little way behind. I realised that instead of a nimble change of direction that would have made a gazelle reacting to a crunch of twigs in the undergrowth think, “I wish I could do that as well as Connelly”, I was inexplicably running in a wide semi-circle to – eventually – chase after the ball at a speed that left me in serious danger of being hit from behind by a glacier.

It was at that moment that I thought of HMS Illustrious. We were, at that moment, as one.

When I’d eventually caught up with the ball – I presume the batsmen had run about a dozen by this time; I’d maybe even missed the tea interval altogether – instead of the low, flat fizzer into the wicket-keeper’s gloves I had in mind I released the ball and saw it arc into the sky, fall towards the ground, bounce a few times and eventually trundle up to the keeper’s feet.

Twenty years in the mind can be a fleeting thing. Twenty years in the body is a long time, and boy, does fielding a cricket ball let you know it.

Things had started quite well earlier in the day, mind.

I’d been coaxed out of cricket retirement to play for The Authors, a club with a fine pedigree of players such as P.G. Wodehouse and Arthur Conan Doyle.

My cricket career had ended in my very early twenties – the combination of a badly broken arm and working on a touring summer musical festival for a few years – and I’d assumed I’d never hold a bat in anger again.

But here I was, in a changing room cladding myself in a motley collection of basic kit harvested from the bargain sections of various online cricket stores, an eager smile on my face and a fluttering apprehension in my stomach.

Batting at number eight I went in with The Authors struggling against the Thespian Thunderers (not, as I’d first misheard, the Lesbian Londoners). In borrowed pads and wielding a borrowed bat, I took guard and prepared to face my first ball in a little over twenty years.

In sprinted the bowler, over came his arm, and with an almost psychic awareness of the location of my off stump I left it skilfully alone, allowing the ball to pass unmolested to the wicket-keeper. Or rather, I lunged forward with an attempted forward defensive down completely the wrong line and was lucky not to be clean bowled first ball.

And, erm, second ball.

The third ball was different, however. It was shorter, outside the off stump and for the first – and only – time all day my twenty-year-old mind and forty-two-year-old body were in perfect unison. I leaned back, swung, and heard the beautiful pock of the ball coming right off the middle of the bat, a cut so perfectly timed that not a single vibration shimmered up the bat handle into my forearms. It was, if I say so myself, a textbook shot, placed perfectly between the fielders and one that fizzed away to the boundary for four.

It was the first time I’d laid a bat on a ball in a proper game for two decades.

That would be as good as it got, however: I scraped a few more singles before playing down the wrong line and losing my middle stump for 9 and we’d go on to lose, heavily as it happens; about as heavily as my legs are moving this morning, in fact.

I may have been as effective as an aircraft carrier in the field as my mind and body struggled to come to terms with each other across the years, but for just one shot; for one fleeting moment, I was the dashing cricketer of my youth again. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to replay it in my mind for the fiftieth time today.

It’s no particular surprise as Tom was undoubtedly the character for whom he was best known and best-loved, and if the waves of affection that have followed his death yesterday show anything it’s that Richard Briers was well-loved.

The Good Life only ran for three years and finished in 1978 yet its characters and situation were so well-drawn by John Esmonde and Bob Larbey that its longevity is now well into its fourth decade and it’s the role by which most of us have come to define Richard Briers.

I might be flying against the received wisdom here however but I think his performance as Martin Bryce in Ever Decreasing Circles was easily his best work, at least on television. The Good Life was fun and reflected a particular aspect of contemporary British life in the 1970s but I think Ever Decreasing Circles went deeper than The Good Life: there was a tragic aspect to Martin that Tom didn’t have and one that Briers portrayed flawlessly.

Martin was a man who was permanently on the brink of losing control of both his life and his world and he knew it. Tom Good had recognised that his life and career – as a draughtsman at a breakfast cereal company – had all been worthless and set out to do something about it. Martin Bryce had long endured a creeping realisation of the same thing but knew it was too late. All he could do to prop up this bottomless chasm of ennui was to make himself a big fish in his small suburban pond.

There was a deep sadness in Martin, a realisation of his own failure and lack of fulfilment, and Briers’ brilliance was in leaving it not just unsaid but effectively unexpressed. It’s an extraordinary feat of acting that he managed to convey all that depth and darkness through the persona of an interfering suburban busybody.

In musical terms, it was all in the spaces between the notes.

Take this clip, for example: an apparently banal exchange with a receptionist that lasts less than a minute yet drips with unexpressed self-knowledge and the emptiness of a life unfulfilled.:

There’s this clip too: it opens with a classic piece of projection. “Poor old Howard” he laments, is “always number two; one of life’s Dr Watsons, never a Sherlock Holmes”:

Three minutes into the clip, see the childlike innocence in his face as he returns to the bar to tell Ann he’d beaten Paul in the snooker tournament. Even the slight swallow before he says, “I won, Ann” says much more about Martin than the lines themselves. I mean, it’s brilliant writing by Esmonde and Larbey of course but their job was certainly made easier by the fact they knew they were writing for Richard Briers.

There was a lot of Tony Hancock and fair smattering of Basil Fawlty in Martin Bryce but it came out through Briers’ performance in a completely different way – through a skilful subtlety. Subtlety is not something you find in many mainstream sitcoms; certainly there are few actors genuinely able to pull it off, but this is, after all, Richard Briers we’re talking about.

If there’d been no nuances to Martin Bryce, if an actor had played the whole obsessive middle-class busybody aspect totally straight, it would never have worked. In the hands of Richard Briers Martin became one of the greatest (and, indeed, most underrated) situation comedy characters we’ve ever seen.

I’ve heard a few naysayers comment that Richard Briers only ever played Richard Briers. They mean it as a criticism. That he made them think this way is probably the greatest testament to his skill of them all.

There is some terrific stuff on there but the further down the page I read the more I realised that my enjoyment was underpinned by a growing sense of recognition. This hilarious lexicon of mild-mannered inner torment was practically my autobiography.

I fear, however, that I may have embarked on a saga of etiquette awkwardness that goes way beyond the remit of that Twitter account; a situation already on an accelerating downward spiral whose hard landing I can only guess at but may involve me having to move house.

Last autumn I moved back to London and into a nice flat on the top floor of a small block where we share a tiny landing with the flat opposite. For the first few weeks we’d hear the person who lived there coming and going and, doubtless, he heard us. We never bumped into him and, of course, the more time that passed the bigger deal the inevitable crossing of paths became.

I didn’t like to knock and introduce myself, partly because it would have been, you know, unforgivably forward, but mainly because whenever I thought of it, it was always potentially at a bad time for him: he’d have just got in from work, he was having his dinner, he might be watching a television documentary he’d been looking forward to all week, he’s probably ill in bed, that kind of thing.

So far all pretty run-of-the-mill stuff, but this crisis of neighbourly etiquette would escalate dramatically at Christmas. We went back to Ireland for a few days and when we returned there was a handwritten note on the door dating from before the season of goodwill.

“Hi,” it said. “I took in a parcel for you. I’m going away for Christmas on the 23rd but if I don’t see you before then I’ll leave it in the electricity meter cupboard. Best, [name] [flat number]”

Of course any rational person would have a) checked the electricity meter cupboard there and then given it was right next to them, and/or b) gone straight over and knocked with the note still in their hand. But no, I went into the flat, put the note on the side in the kitchen and commenced a period of anxious fretting that increased in intensity with each passing day.

One night I plucked up the courage to check the electricity cupboard, waiting until it was very late before creeping out like a cat burglar in case he heard me.

No parcel.

This meant one of two things: either he still had the parcel or he’d put the parcel in the cupboard but it had been stolen while we’d all been away over Christmas.

The obvious course of action was, of course, to knock and ask. I couldn’t really do that though for the reasons outlined above involving work, dinner, television documentaries and bed.

There was now an added factor, though: if it turned out the parcel had been stolen and I knocked to enquire after it he might think I was accusing him of being the thief.

All this ruled out any question of ever knocking on his door as long as I lived and within a week or so I’d given up hope of ever seeing the parcel. It was part of my girlfriend’s Christmas present but, well, you know, I was clearly in a quite impossible position. She’d appreciate that.

I tried to come up with a way around it, even considering contacting the supplier, claiming the package had never arrived and asking them to send a replacement – I’d reached a stage where actually committing fraud seemed a more rational and appealing prospect than briefly troubling my neighbour.

Anyway, about two weeks ago, there was a tentative tap at our door. I opened it and a nervous-looking young man was standing there holding a parcel.

“Hi,” he said, holding out a small cardboard box, “I, um, took this parcel in for you before Christmas”.

“Oh, wow, great, thanks!” I replied a little too loudly and trying my hardest to look like this was the first I knew of it. This involved doing some weird movements with my eyebrows and vastly overplaying my surprise and gratitude to the extent that he must have thought I was either taking the piss out of him or off my face on drugs.

He turned to go. I grasped the nettle and blurted out, “I’m Charlie, by the way.” “Oh,” he said and told me his name which I proceeded to completely mispronounce when I replied that it was nice to meet him. I could tell he’d thought fleetingly about correcting me but decided against it.

We both went in and closed our doors.

It was an excruciating encounter; so much so that three hours later my girlfriend finally found me, squeezed inside a kitchen cupboard, gnawing on my knuckle and whimpering.

Yesterday morning I went out to get the papers. As I opened the flat door to leave, my neighbour opened his at exactly the same time. We caught sight of each other briefly and both half-closed our door hoping the other hadn’t noticed. We both stood behind our respective doors for a moment. Then he closed his. I rushed out and got the papers.

An hour later my girlfriend returned home from staying the night with a friend. She’d forgotten her keys so buzzed the downstairs intercom. I opened the flat door ready to welcome her home and, wouldn’t you know it, my neighbour opened his at exactly the same time. Again we caught sight of each other briefly, again we both half-closed our door hoping the other hadn’t noticed and again we both stood behind our respective doors for a moment.

I couldn’t close our door because my better half was on her way up the stairs and would be here any second. He couldn’t close his because he’d done exactly that when this had happened earlier and feared looking like he was some kind of weirdo who had to open his front door every hour to reassure himself his flat hadn’t launched itself unilaterally into space.

In these brief seconds I knew we’d both have considered and discarded every possible way of avoiding having to interact. But one of us had to do something.

It was me who broke the deadlock, barking a noise that sounded something like, “hahahahahahhahawright?” and giving a strange little wave. He made a similarly strangulated noise in response.

At that moment my girlfriend appeared at the top of the stairs. I reached out and practically bundled her inside.

Both our doors closed.

Both of us are now scanning the ‘properties to let’ pages.

My Twitter page
My Facebook page

Robinson Cruiser

Big Dorrit

Westward Hoes

Tequila Knocking Bird

Adam Bed

The Sixty-Nine Steps

On The Rogering Of Species

Barechester Towers

A Christmas In Carol

Around The World In Eighty Lays

For Whom The Bell Ends

The Lay Of The Triffids

Swallow An Amazon’s

I’ve An Ho

The Book Of Laughter And Fellating

The Executioner’s Dong

The Mount Of Monte Cristo

David Cop A Feel

And of course anything by Rider Haggard.

It is however currently the most famous piece of tarmac in Britain after it was confirmed this morning that the remains found buried beneath it are those of Richard III.

The news that Richard Of York not only Gave Battle In Vain but was almost destined to prop up the Michelins of a social worker called Margaret in perpetuity has excited historians, archaeologists and people like me who write about and have a passion for history.

There will be a great deal written about the implications of the confirmation by historians qualified to do so – and hats off incidentally to the University of Leicester for presenting their findings in such a thorough, accessible way at this morning’s press conference – but for me it’s been great day because we’ve seen just how exciting history can be.

As you’ll know if you’ve read my And Did Those Feet: Walking Through 2000 Years Of British And Irish History (and if you haven’t, well, that link is a short cut to putting that right, that’s all I’ll say), I’m a massive advocate of taking history out of the museums and classrooms and really getting out and amongst it. You don’t have to set off on the kind of odysseys I did, however, because history, fascinating, illuminating history is all out there to be discovered and you don’t have to go far to find it.

From where I write this, for example, if I crane my neck a little bit I can see the birthplace of Elizabeth I and Henry VIII. If I get up and perform an ill-advised – yet daring – leap from window ledge to drainpipe I can see the construction site of Brunel’s Great Eastern. If the drainpipe detaches from the wall and lowers me Harold Lloyd style into the river I’ll end up doggy paddling above roughly where the Golden Hind moored after Drake’s circumnavigation. History is everywhere and it’s all out there to be explored, whether it’s visiting, say, an Historic Royal Palace, standing on a battlefield (I recommend the Battle Of Hastings site for example) or noticing a blue plaque on a building, we can see it, touch it, breathe it.

It’s brilliant news about Richard III, not only because a centuries-old mystery has been solved by top-of-the-shop detective work by historians, archaeologists, genealogists and geneticists, but because it’s once again demonstrated how thrilling and exciting history can be when you take it out of the classroom and museum and put it in a wider context; when the past and the present come together to bring great stories alive and give them a third dimension that dusty tomes and static display cases can’t really provide.

Today has been history in action. Hopefully more people who may have been turned off history by bad and uninspiring teaching at school will have seen the thrilling route of the Richard III story from hunch to confirmation and found their interest piqued.

After all, for heaven’s sake, there are kings under our car parks. THERE ARE KINGS UNDER OUR CAR PARKS! If that doesn’t make you want to get out in the open and explore our history and heritage, well, blimey, you’re missing out. Big time.

It’s where one of my all-time heroes Spike Milligan was stationed in the army between 1940 and 1942 and he wrote extensively about his time here in Hitler: My Part In His Downfall (a book I pulled off my parents’ shelf as a kid and read so many times it fell apart).

The pillbox he occupied during that time is apparently still there, a couple of hundred yards along the seafront and up the hill from where I’m writing this, and it was only yesterday that jam-for-brains here twigged that the pub I’ve been frequenting since I got here, Milligan’s, is named after him (the framed photos of Spike all over the wall were apparently too subtle a hint).

Anyway, earlier today I found an old copy of Puckoon in a second-hand bookshop and sat down by the sea to read it.

Bring Me Sunshine doesn’t have a specific chapter on good weather, something the Radio Times apparently mentions in its preview this week. The reason for this is simple – bad weather has all the best stories – but as I read the opening paragraph of Puckoon I realised that even if I had put in a specific good weather chapter I would never have come close to Spike’s brilliant description of a hot day in Puckoon.

You can read that first paragraph here. It’s absolutely perfect, an astonishing piece of writing, a passage of which James Joyce and Dylan Thomas would have been rightly proud. It’s vivid, evocative and even the rhythm of the words is perfect. When you read that passage you can feel the soupy heat of the air in your lungs and the drowsing heat of the sun on your skin.

It’s now supplanted Edward Thomas’s Adlestrop as my favourite piece of writing about good weather. And that took some doing.

As someone who spends as much time as anyone else going around under and in the weather, I’ve taken it upon myself to examine our relationship with the weather. I tell the story of the weather forecast and the stories of the people who over a period of centuries have all contributed to its many forms: the shipping forecast, the little map in the backs of newspapers and the cheery people standing in front of a map at the end of the news.

It’s a story that features a range of characters as diverse as Aristotle, Frankie Howerd, René Descartes, Mary Poppins, Daniel Defoe, Jane Austen and Steve McLaren. There are plenty of crackpots and charlatans, a fascinating story about what generations of sea captains owe to a young girl’s piano practice and the full story of St Swithin’s only saintly miracle (it’s a bit lame, to be honest). It’s also a story that contains the phrase “a shower of sprats in Great Yarmouth” which is one that for some reason pleases me greatly.

I also develop a bit of a weird weather crush on a fourteenth century Lincolnshire priest and tell the much-much-more-interesting-than-you-might-think story of the umbrella.

Buy it here, innit:

I wish I still had my autograph book. It was packed with the signatures of just about every Charlton player whose time at The Valley straddled the seventies and eighties, many of them several times over. Some were legible (Kevin Dickenson’s signature was, I remember, far classier and more considered than his performances at left back ever were) while some were little more than angled squiggles (from memory Leighton Phillips signed his name in this way, but what I remember most about his autograph was hanging around the players’ entrance after a game and greeting him with ‘better Leighton never’ when he emerged and him laughing rather than justifiably cuffing me on the side of the head).

Some were enormous – my all-time hero Derek Hales’s signature, of which I must have had about a dozen, was a beautifully flamboyant thing; an enormous ‘D’ giving way to curves and squiggles and ending with a gigantic flourish on the ‘s’- while others were hunched up, tiny and almost apologetic. Nicky Johns’s was a bit like that if I remember rightly, looking as if it belonged on a chequebook rather than in an autograph book.

Recently my pal Dave Roberts, author of two of the best football books I’ve ever read The Bromley Boys (now being made into a film) and 32 Programmes, very kindly sent me a Charlton shirt signed by last season’s League One championship-winning squad.

Now, it’s long time since I’ve seen a footballer’s autograph. Since about 1984 the only one I’ve seen at first hand is Ferenc Puskas’s, which I obtained at the book launch of Puskas On Puskas at Sportspages in the mid-nineties (even a grown-up can be excused for asking the greatest footballer in history, bar none, for his signature, right?)

But when I looked at the signatures adorning the front of the shirt I noticed they’d changed a lot since my day. Most of them had numbers, for a start. Squad numbers. Some of them were just tiny squiggles with the player’s squad number underneath.

Bradley Wright-Phillips just had his initials and squad number (although to be fair writing out ‘Bradley Wright-Phillips’ every time someone asked would become a pain in the hoop, I’m sure).

For all the marketing hoop-la and commercial rannygazoo surrounding the modern game I thought autographs would be one of the few things that wouldn’t change as football did; that the ritual of kids hanging around and asking players to sign their names was set in aspic forever. But no, even autographs are different now. Almost like a brand rather than the deeply personal physical proof of a treasured meeting.

I’m not going to claim that autographs were loads better in my day; this is just yet another sign I’m getting old (and to think it only seems like yesterday that I’d look at the ‘five years ago’ section in the programme and think, wow, one day I’ll be old enough to remember being at matches on this page) and that football’s moving on without me.

Not long after the shirt arrived and I started remembering my old autograph book, I signed a couple of books for someone. I looked at the big sweeping ‘C’ at the front giving way to loops and curves and the flourish of the ‘y’ at the end and realised something: my signature is almost exactly the same as Derek Hales’s. Without realising it, over the years I’d gradually begun signing my name in exactly the same way as the greatest goalscorer Charlton ever had.

Now that’s hero worship.

Having said that, if anyone sees me adding a number 9 to the end of it from now on, for God’s sake tell me.

It was the summer of 1996 in London and I was at the launch of a friend’s art degree show, not knowing anyone and feeling particularly thick at not understanding any of the pieces on display. The first floor was galleried and I stood looking down at the crowd below.

The students were all strutting peacocks of colour in clothes that reflected their artistic personalities. They praised each other’s work loudly with air kisses and that enviable confidence that goes with the certainty of youth.

Their parents milled around smiling awkwardly at each other, dads in suits and ties, mums in their best frocks and uncomfortable shoes, all looking around nervously, fingering the stalks of their wine glasses and asking each other what time the train back was again.

One of these parents looked more at ease than the rest though, and was standing at the edge of the crowd listening politely to a young man who was talking animatedly to him. As I looked down, he excused himself from the conversation, turned round and happened to glance up to where I was standing.

And that’s when I made eye contact with Clive James.

I am hopeless with eye contact. I get all shy and flustered and look away immediately, even with people I’ve known for years. This time though, I kept looking, raised my wine glass slightly and nodded. Clive James smiled, raised his glass, dipped his head to me, and disappeared into the crowd.

There are some creative people; writers, musicians, actors, whatever, with whom your relationship is an intensely private one. It’s an appreciation that goes beyond a matter of liking their work; it’s a feeling that you and they understand each other; that they know you as a person because they are also that same person and just, you know, understand.

It’s such an unspoken, private thing that when someone asks you about the people you admire you often don’t even think of them let alone mention them because they’re so indelibly soaked into your personality. That’s how it is with Clive James, who it seems will not recover from his cancer, and that’s why I will always remember that moment at the art show. Without even knowing it he made what was for him a simple, immediately forgotten act of politeness into a shared, personal moment I’ll never forget.

I’ve grown up with Clive James ever since we were set the first volume of his autobiography Unreliable Memoirs for English O Level. Since then I’ve read every volume of his memoirs, his pioneering collections of television criticism, his novels, his poetry and his essays. I’ve watched all his TV series too, from Clive James On Television to the brilliant Fame In The Twentieth Century via his Postcards travel shows.

I didn’t set out to be a Clive James completist, it just seemed to happen organically. Even then I’d read and re-read: this is about my third copy of Falling Towards England, and look at it:

It takes a rare talent to make such a thunderingly huge intellect so accessible and self-deprecating as well as a special generosity to share it so freely. Over the years his work has inspired me, reassured me, made me laugh and made me learn. He taught me it was OK to like Dallas as well as Dante, that both were as valid as each other. He taught me about childhood, family, student life, coping with real life after student life, about work, about television, about literature, about art, about music, about travel and made me realise Harry Carpenter really did pronounce Wimbledon as ‘wmbldn’. If I’d had to pay the going rate for that kind of education I’d have run up a debt the size of a planet. But £6.99 a pop for a paperback? Incredible.

He’s not gone yet though, so this is a rare opportunity to truly appreciate someone before it’s too late. Twitter this morning was brimming with affection for him from people like me, people who have this private, personal relationship with Clive James that’s now emerging into the light and being shared. I hope he hears about it.

I can’t remember the name of the college. I can’t even remember the name of the friend. But I remember like it was yesterday the time I made eye contact with Clive James and he nodded at me.

Because, you know, he understood.

The piece of graffiti I remember most from those days though was in Catford, sloshed onto the side wall of a shop just off the South Circular. It was the late seventies and early eighties and I saw it every time we drove home along the A205: three-foot high capital letters, ‘MARRY ME LUCY? X’ it said, the ‘x’ being a kiss added to the end at a slightly lower level.

It’s years since I’ve passed through Catford and I’m sure it’s not there now (it was a turning on the left after you passed Catford Bridge station going east: possibly the corner of Thomas Lane but I can’t be sure – for one thing on Google Street View there’s a bus in the way) but I’ve often wondered in the years since who Lucy and the amorous paintbrush wielder were. Was it a genuine proposal, sited carefully in the knowledge that Lucy passed that way every day on her way to work? Or was it an anonymous, soul-baring howl of unrequited love given public permanence by someone whom Lucy had barely ever noticed?

Despite the fact that hundreds of people saw it every day there was something about the kiss at the end that gave the message an extra intimacy; there was a certain chasteness about that ‘x’ that raised it above a simple ‘I love Dawn’ or ‘Dave 4 Julie’. This was a direct question, the direct question, and even as a child I felt I was imposing on a private moment by even reading it, let alone actively looking for it from the crumb-strewn back seat of the family Renault 4 as we crawled around the one-way system.

‘MARRY ME LUCY? X’ – thirty-odd years on, that question still remains unanswered, at least to me, maybe even to the person that asked it. There was a story behind that question painted on a wall in south-east London three decades or more ago and I’d love to know what it was.

You’d be at least in your forties today, but oh, Lucy, where are you now?