Give your sporting hobby a super-rich upgrade this summer
telegraph.co.ukBy Alex PrestonThere’s something slightly unseemly about three middle-aged men pampering themselves. We’d had a rough few years, but we’d hardly been at the coalface of Covid – three writers, continuing through the pandemic much as we had before it.
But the bleakness of the preceding months certainly helped to heighten the joy of one of the great days of my life. The Newbery Bat Builder Club is the supreme indulgence for any cricketer, and for one brief day, we felt like elite sportsmen.We are members of the Authors XI Cricket Club, a team of writers initially founded by PG Wodehouse and Arthur Conan Doyle in 1895.
JM Barrie, AA Milne and Alec Waugh have all played for the team in the years since. We now count Sebastian Faulks, Peter Frankopan and Richard Beard among our number and have played at many of the country’s finest grounds as well as touring from Iceland (we lost) to India (we lost dozens of games on several trips) to the Vatican (the Pope’s XI trounced us).
The average age of the team is around the half-century mark, and many of us have notched up more sporting injuries than we have runs.
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