Restaurants and their attendant press advisers put a lot of time and effort into trying to lure London-based restaurant critics (for we are the ones that count) into the countryside. They usually begin by telling us that they have a chef who formerly worked at Tom Aikens, Claridge’s or the Square, just to make it clear that we won’t be wasting our time with a chef who has learnt his trade outside the M25, where the plates are awfully round, foams are for the bathtub, and families still gather round a nice fat weasel on Sunday. After all, we wouldn’t want to travel all that way to eat the food of a chef who has had a couple of ideas of his own, would we?

Then what they do is, they tell us that they have lovely rooms and that they would be delighted to put us up if ever we should “venture out this way” or “deign to cross the river”, or “brave the horrors of the North” (up which, they always feel compelled to echo, it is not as grim as it once was).

But we cannot – and I think I speak for all of us – accept such offers, since then we would be, a) not incognito and, b) guests. And thus hogtied by etiquette and unable to speak freely. The restaurants protest that if we are left to our own devices then we will almost certainly never get around to travelling all that way just to eat what may well be a very ordinary plate of food, and we say that, yes, they are probably bang right there.

Then they tell us that there is a lovely view; but we have seen pylons before. They extol the joys of being woken by birdsong; but we have, many times in the past, been roused from drunken snore at four in the morning by hollering rooks, and rather prefer the peace and quiet of Kentish Town. You cannot kid us about ease of access, either. We will be on the A3 for a month and a half and we both know it. Nor can you speak proudly of locally sourced yadda and authentically farmed blah, for that is the root and wellspring of every decent restaurant in town these days, too. There just isn’t anything you can do. I will eat when I am out of town, of course, but I will not leave town specifically to eat.

I’ll tell you what I will specifically leave town for, though. I will leave town if you build me a cricket pitch. I will leave town when my friend Jim phones up and says: “You know that cricket pitch we laid last year at my dad’s place in Sussex? I’m going down there on Sunday to see if the wicket has any bounce, do you want to drop by for lunch and give it the once-over?”

Now, that is an invitation.

Surely, you’ve seen Field of Dreams. And, surely, you loved it. Surely, it changed your life. Oh, what a movie. Kevin Costner hears voices in the cornfield saying, “If you build it, he will come …” He wonders who will come. We all wonder who. He builds a baseball field (obviously) and the long-dead Shoeless Joe Jackson comes, the most beautiful hitter of all time, and the rest of the long-dead 1919 White Sox. But it is not for them that we are waiting, it is someone even greater…

So when a friend with whom you have been playing cricket for 20 years gets a pitch laid, with a view to holding an annual festival of cricket in one of the prettiest parts of England, with all your old mates, and a barbecue, and a DJ and camping, and he asks YOU to come down and test the wicket ahead of the inaugural match, well, you’re going to feel like he did the whole thing with your own unique variety of orthodox left-arm spin (toss it up high, hope it lands before it gets to the other end, then go and get it from the river) in mind. You feel, in short, like Shoeless Joe. And on the way down there in the car you cannot stop muttering to yourself, “If you build it, he will come…”

The pitch is a beauty, lovely slope on it from left to right as you run in, like Lord’s, lovely pond for swimming in between long hot spells of 7 for 14 off 12, views of the South Downs. We were in trunks. Jim took guard at the tennis court end, I marked out my run (“If you build it…”), I tossed the bright leather cherry from one hand to the other, and back again (“If you build it, he will come…”), I lolloped in, I turned my arm over and … twoingggg!

My shoulder came out of its socket. Or something. Or maybe my neck. I hit the floor. I did not bounce. I cannot speak for the ball. I do not know where it went. I lay on the short grass. Beautifully clipped, beautifully rolled. The sun beat down on me.

For the star of this story – far from being a long-dead sportsman of the Golden Age – is a 38-year-old restaurant critic who has not played cricket in years. And the truth is that if you build it, he will probably sprain something.

I squinted up into the sun, and the worried faces of Jim, his father and the random flopsy I had brought down for company. “Is there anywhere good for dinner round here?” I asked.

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