"Will you get a column out of that?" Charlie asks, again.

It's become a regular refrain, thanks to the tendency of amateur cricket sides to sledge each other rather than the opposition. Every boundary (few), every dropped catch (some), every misfield (many): will you get a column out of that? Well, here's your answer, Charlie: "I'll get a column out of you asking me repeatedly if I'll get a column out of stuff."

 

Cricket can be a terrible game. Three weeks ago, I had one of those innings when you're glad to get out. You know your team needs to up the rate, but you can't lay bat on ball, and when you do, it goes straight to the fielders. I'd scored 3 off nine or ten balls - a top-edged pull that fell short of deep fine leg, a firm prod dropped at gully, and a mistimed drive that plopped over the bowler's head and between mid-off and mid-on. When the bowler finally gave me a full toss, I looked gleefully to club it straight back past him but mistimed and hoicked it over mid-on, who took a very good catch over his shoulder running backwards.

I thought then that it might be time to give up. I just wasn't good enough. I was taking up a place in the team that would better be filled by somebody else. It was a decision I'd taken in hockey last season, reconciled to the fact that age had gnawed away at pace and fitness and, having only taken up cricket again last summer after a decade away from the game, it didn't seem like too big a wrench to knock that on the head as well. I planned another regretful column on bidding farewell: the weary batsman aghast at the upraised finger of a white-coated Father Time, the pebbles of the final over clacking in his pockets as the autumn sun dips in the evening sky…

A couple of hours in the field did little to change my mind, as I hurled myself alternately left and right on a damp and uneven outfield, dotted with dogshit, watching vainly as their No. 3 hammered boundary after boundary, making a match-winning century that I probably would have enjoyed had I not been watching it from quite such close and painful quarters.

The doubts were strong that night, but the next day I was asked if I'd be free to fill in for another team. I said yes, realising this was a great opportunity: no pressure, no sense of letting anybody down, just a one-off game to see what happened. It was rained off, lachrymose angels united in mourning at the fading of another star.

Thankfully a similar opportunity presented itself the following week, to play for a team of journalists captained by the Times' diarist Patrick Kidd against Essex CID at Fenner's in a charity game in aid of Macmillan Cancer Support. It was very gentle and very good-natured. I made 19 in an innings that, while far from graceful, was at least fairly rapid. So what if only two runs came in front of square? So what if I was out, palpably lbw, to a horrible hoick across the line? This was a form of cricket in which I could fit.

I even took a wicket with my very occasional crooked-wristed offspin (its main weapon being that at first, batsmen can be conned into thinking they're facing legspin), an experiment in bowling a topspinner to a batsman that produced a skiddy offbreak which jagged alarmingly to square the batsman up and flick the top of leg stump.

I got another 19 on Sunday, not out this time, and again at more than a run a ball. The first three scoring shots were all fours - did my mind go to John Emburey's all-boundary 46 in Tasmania in 1986-87? Of course it did, and one of them was even a straight drive - my first boundary from a front-foot shot since, I think, a horrible drag over midwicket playing for Lord Denning's XI at Whitchurch in 2001. (Now that I've started fielding regularly at backward point, and given I can only really play the late cut, I've effectively reduced my sphere of influence to a tiny segment between square on the off and about 30 degrees behind square.)

Like the match at Fenner's, it ended in a draw, which is perhaps the way friendly cricket should end; more importantly, the 38 scored in those two games mean that I've scored more runs this summer than I did in the last, and that whatever happens in the final game of the season, I'll average in double figures. Given I'm averaging 29 with the ball this summer (okay, it's only two wickets, but that's two more than expected - and both were bowled, which seems somehow more satisfying to me, particularly given both actually turned, albeit not exactly as intended), that seems a season rescued at the last into respectability. Father Time and the weeping angels, their valedictory favours unrequired, turned tail and trudged away.

As I approach the last game of the season (the autumn mists descend, the remorseless count of overs bowled clanks on a further notch), for the Authors against the Vatican - a fixture that feels almost dreamlike in its oddness: me, dropped in a field with a load of novelists and historians (proper writers, not sport-spewers like me - although if they have the words, I have the Twitter following), playing a bunch of seminarians - it seems bizarre that I felt like giving it all up three weeks ago.

As a wise team-mate put it last week, at our level, it's not really about winning or losing, or about form or averages - it's about the generation of anecdotes. And if playing with famous writers at a country house against the Vatican doesn't do that, I don't know what will. Can I get a column out of that? The truth is, Charlie, if I couldn't, I wouldn't be here at all.