Headingley, and what a day’s cricket! Pietersen completes what, for him, is a measured double hundred. Matt Prior weighs in with a doughty 75 and having amassed 550 for 7 England declare and promptly skittle the West Indies for 146 in 37 overs.

And what a story this is: the recalled Ryan Sidebottom, after one solitary wicketless test in 2001, returns with an addition to his armoury, the in-swinger to the right handed batsman, and promptly takes a four wicket haul.

As I say, in the words of Henry Blofeld, what a splendid day’s cricket. Sadly, our tickets were for the following day, the Sunday, which was a washout. The first day completely lost to rain at Headingley since 1980.

The moment of waking on a day you have planned a visit to the Test match should retain a smidgen of childhood magic. The bounce out of bed followed by the curtains being flung open with a flourish. I duly bounced and flourished only to gaze upon a scene of unremitting greyness. It took only a millisecond to register the bedraggled front garden; the wet road and the horizon smudged in a way that only West Yorkshire horizons can be smudged. Naturally, I thought the scene would be much brighter ten miles up the M1 in sunny Leeds.

It wasn’t.

We sat in our car in the Park and Ride car park and looked forlornly over the rooftops towards Headingley. Ours was a party of three: my wife, Hertfordshire born and totally unaware of the vicissitudes of following northern sport until, in what she calls a moment of weakness, she agreed to marry me, and my father, eighty six not out as they say in cheesy birthday cards, formerly a dashing opening bat and eagle-eyed slip fielder for British Rail Sports Club, Carlisle. Subsequently he was an all-rounder in epic cricket matches on various beaches of English seaside towns. He regularly bowled some flighted off-spin with a tennis ball to my mother and sister whereas my brother and I faced him off his fuller run with the hard ball. The marshes at Burgh by Sands was one of our most favoured venues, it provided a lively track where the cut, played from a position retreating towards square leg, was a vital defensive shot.

Tragedy was sometimes wont to strike though and we were occasionally cooped up in the black cortina saloon (sure evidence of the affluent sixties) as the rain beat a tattoo on the windscreen and the wipers provided a mournful rhythm.

History works not in straight lines but in circles. Who said that? Voltaire? Marx? Whichever great thinker it was, they must have had moments such as this in mind. For here we were again forty years on with the rain and wipers in tragic harmony. The rain was heavy, the gloom was deep and we were confined to the car, denied our cricketing pleasure.

Eventually though, encouraged by an over-optimistic weather report on the radio, we donned our cagoules and waterproof trousers and trudged like remnants of one of Scott’s polar expeditions for the bus. Only there wasn’t a bus because after twelve o’clock it ceased to be a Park and Ride scheme and became simply a Park scheme. The solitary attendant was helpful though. Pointing his arm in the general direction of the stadium, he grunted, “That way.” We narrowed our eyes, stiffened our resolve and set off.

Now let me lay my cards on the table about Headingley. Headingley was my first Test ground. And like my first fifty and the first time I eased my hand inside a girl’s blouse, it has a hallowed place in my memory. But whereas memories of an easy-paced track at NewcastleRoyalGrammar School, and the divine Carole Jones are suffused in a pink haze of nostalgia, the Headingley memory retains a hard edge of reality. A very hard edge.

My brother had borrowed a car and we made what was then an epic trip over the A66 to Scotch Corner and then southwards to Leeds. England versus New Zealand. The prospect didn’t really quicken the pulse, but nevertheless, it was a test match and it offered the chance to see John Snow, Geoffrey Boycott and whoever was playing for New Zealand in action. In the event it was Bev Congden playing for the Kiwis and he batted steadily if unspectacularly for most of the day. If my memory of this innings is mainly one of dourness, the Western Terrace benches on which we sat no doubt affected it. Don’t get me wrong, I had been a church chorister, I had known hard pews and endured many a boring sermon on them, but these benches were something else, the severest test for buttocks of such tender years, agony and anguish, they put the f into uncomfortable.

All around us the Yorkshire crowd grumbled and grumbled. From somewhere, memory tells me that this was the test where Keith Fletcher was preferred to Phil Sharpe of Yorkshire and the unfortunate Fletcher dropped a catch. Was it really that game or have I embroidered a fabrication? I really must consult Wisden sometime although it would be a shame to let the facts get in the way of a good “I was there” story.

Anyway, miraculously, Chris Old, one of Yorkshire’s own who was selected, took three late wickets to close the innings. The crowd could stand and cheer and quite frankly, because it was an opportunity to let the blood flow reach my benumbed bum, I would have given a peanut seller a standing ovation.

England batted out the remaining time and after spending the night at a Yorkshire-based uncle’s, we returned the following day in keen anticipation of an England run feast. Again, I betray my naivety because Geoffrey Boycott was opening the batting. But to be fair to Fitzwilliam’s finest, after a careful look at the wicket, Boycott did play a couple of trademark cover drives and we could look forward to a master class if not a carnival.

Until the heavens opened that is. Scything down they say in Yorkshire. Well it scythed and scythed some more and we beat a hasty retreat to the car and an equally epic return over the A66.

To suggest that Headingley is only about rain affected matches would of course be totally unfair. In my lifetime, Headingley has been a site where history has been made. Just to pick a few cherries from the pie, there was Boycott’s hundredth hundred still vividly remembered with the Greg Chappell full toss clipped through a vacant mid-on for four, the acclaim from all sides of the ground, but nothing to match the batsman’s self-adulation. Earlier in the season, Boycott had run out the local hero, Derek Randall in the Trent Bridge Test. Undeterred, he batted on throughout his innings and career without giving the matter another thought apparently. Or did he? This is what he had to say in Boycott, The Autobiography, published in 1987.

“Then I ran out Derek Randall on his home ground, in front of his home crowd. I can see it now, me running head-down to safety while Derek gives up the ghost and Rodney Marsh demolishes the stumps. Artless, heartless Boycott sacrificing another victim. If the ground had opened and swallowed me at that moment it would have been a mercy. I have never felt so completely wretched on a cricket field. My own failure would have haunted me but to actually run somebody out…” (page 219)

Well the remorse and the anguish are almost palpable but readers may find it difficult to get beyond the phrase, “me running head-down to safety.” Certainly cricketing fans in Notts would be unimpressed. I know because I lived and played my cricket in Nottinghamshire between 1985 and 1990. I played for a colliery team during a period when the whole industry was under threat and previous solidarity was split by a strike that caused grievous damage to whole areas, villages and families. What mattered was unity of purpose, sticking together. It wasn’t happening in the pit towns and villages, but surely cricket could hold higher values? Not so. The incident was remembered with a renewed bitterness. So much so that I could have sworn that the run out incident had taken place while I lived there. Not so. Check the date, England versus Australia, TrentBridge, 1977.

What was generally agreed was that Boycott had pissed on one of his own. Self had been favoured in place of the common good. Thus cricket can often mirror our human failings and articulate our deepest insecurities.

Headingley was also the site for the Botham miracle of 1981, although the word miracle hardly does justice to the events of that Test. The BBC has played the tape so often that it must be worn thin by now. And no, I wasn’t there. I was in even deeper exile in Hertfordshire. But neither were most of the people who claim to have been there. Watch the video, there’s hardly anyone in the ground.

I was there when Graham Gooch scored a hundred en route to defeating the West Indies, another rain affected day but we’ll let that pass, and I was definitely there again in 2001 when Mark Butcher scored 163 in an unforgettable defeat of the Aussies.

The same party was involved: my long-suffering wife, my father and on this occasion my son was also present. We’d taken advantage of one of those last day offers which looked like a bargain even if it was only to see a probable triumph by the baggy green cap mob. Ten pounds for adults, five pounds for under-16s and O.A.Ps free. A day’s cricket for a party of four for twenty-five pounds. A bargain? You bet.

My son was watching his first live Test match and in a sense one of my aspirations had been achieved. Most parents want better for their children than they had had, it’s a well-known social phenomenon. In place of the granite hard benches of my youth, Tim had a moulded plastic seat with a much better view, Headingley having tiered the seating much better in one of those occasional ground revamps. In addition he had picked up an A4 size card with the numbers 4 and 6 printed on either side. With Butcher’s first elegant cut through point for a boundary, Tim was out of his seat marking the four with extravagant and enthusiastic sweeps of his arm.

Oh the dilemmas of parenthood. At what point do you take your son to one side and proffer sage advice about the facts of life? When do you equip your offspring with the knowledge of things that can only guide them through adulthood? When do you effectively curtail their innocence and tell them about such things as the English batting collapse? I didn’t have the heart. I could only mutter things like, “Don’t get too excited, the Aussies have got some good bowlers: Glen McGrath and Brett Lee.” Tim took no notice. Nor did Mark Butcher. He peppered the offside boundary all day and amassed his match winning score. Truly wonderful, and I was definitely there for that one.

And back to May 2007. Tim wasn’t there that day. In a career move, which had taken his English teaching dad by surprise, he had gone off to University to read physics. Now my sense of responsibility extended to my father. It was wet and cold and the cricket, which he loved to watch, was not going to happen. At three o’clock with no visible break in the clouds, I pulled the metaphorical stumps out of the ground and suggested we go home. No one demurred. We left the ground, found to our delight that the Park and Ride scheme was now living up to its name, and returned to our car.

With a cup of tea from the flask inside us we laughed about the day we’d had; the hopelessly small umbrella and the great view of the play we would have had if there had been any. And I thought again about cricket and how it can keep confronting us with those two impostors: triumph and disaster, how it weaves a place in family history and the national psyche. Time to go home.

On the following day more history was created at Headingley. England duly dispatched the West Indies and won by a record margin – an innings and 283 runs. We listened to it on the car radio as we drove my father back to Carlisle, to the terrace house where he and my mother had raised four kids. The house backing onto the railway line, which for 47 years had offered him a living, and the house, in which he now lives alone.