Charles Dickens opened his seminal work, A Tale of Two Cities, with one of the most iconic - and longest - sentences in the world:

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom…blah, blah, blah…

I won’t subject you to the full sentence, because Dickens had more of an aversion to dots than Jaco. But if ever a quote was to sum up a day of cricket, this one felt pretty apt.

It didn’t get off to a good start when negotiations to get a key for the changing rooms proved fruitless. Either a £20 pound deposit or car keys were required; well they must have seen my beat-up Dad-wagon coming a mile-off because they wisely refused my car as collateral. Thankfully the skipper was more than willing to put his wife’s car up as insurance, and we were in business. Or most of us were.

You see, Azeem ‘AA’ Aktar was waylaid by yet another motoring mishap. Far be it for us to act as your agent Azeem, but surely you’ve given a certain namesake breakdown provider enough work by now that sponsorship opportunities should be on the cards?

I’ve probably delayed getting to the game long enough…

Jedders won the toss and in to bat we went. Noz and ‘New Pads’ Nye opened - Noz going through the gears, New Pads nurdling to a nine before edging to slip. Noz followed soon after with an innings top score of 36. Liam and Az put together a nice partnership before Liam attempted to reverse-sweep a straight one and was out bowled the last ball before drinks. In his defence, he said he “didn’t mean to do it” and to be fair, with how often he tried it in winter nets it may well simply be an automatic reaction by now.

Having given advice to incoming batsman Dhruv not to get tempted by playing across the line to the spinner, AA did just that and brought Jaco to the crease - who must have misheard the advice to ‘bat long’ and thought Russ had advised him to ‘go long’ as he proceeded to try and smash the ball back into Bedfordshire. It was fun while it lasted, but it didn’t last long unfortunately. The rest of the tail wagged a little, notably Dave with a lovely cover drive to sneak the total up a little before we were all out for 146.

Onto bowling and it was a valiant fight, but Cheshunt must have had dinner plans and they tidied things up shortly before drinks with only two wickets lost. On a different day Dave, Guy, Jedders and Stefan could well have had a wicket or two each - but today was not one of those days.

Not a lot left to say, but we’re well and truly in the season now which means: get down to Tuesday training, get your availability in and let’s go again.

And speaking of availability, in the words of that great Dickens character Oliver Twist - “Please sir, can we have some more…”