The Last Flannelled Fool: my small part in English cricket's demise and its large part in mine
Appropriately for a book about English cricket, the enjoyment of The Last Flannelled Fool is frustratingly delayed. If I said the first few chapters were like a reading a medium-pacer on an overcast morning at Arundel, I might come close to the dispiriting series of clumsy metaphors and jokey references which have somehow escaped the editor's knife.
However, the premise of the book is a nice one: a cricket-mad actor, whose injured foot temporarily rules him out from playing for his social team, decides to tour the country and re-acquaint himself with the places where his nerdy love of cricket was first nurtured. He revisits the sleepy ground at Hove where he had watched Sussex play after school and he visits Derbyshire's Queen's Park, in Chesterfield, where he has an amusing encounter with a band of sexagenarians called The Moaners.
Simkins's Betjemanic nostalgia for a country before the days of shopping centres and sponsorship is delivered without gloom or bitterness. His list of the grounds which have succumbed to concrete and town planning reads like a mournful dispatch from the Western Front, but he ends up with plenty that is good to say about the state of his beloved game. This turns out to be not the irritating stand-up routine it begins as but a touching tribute to an important national tradition from one of its most committed disciples.