Jeremy Clarkson writes??..

Not once in five years of expensive public school education was I ever encouraged to read a newspaper. We were never asked to discuss Vietnam or the rise of trade union power. But twice a week, everyone was frog-marched onto the playing fields and told to play cricket.

Everyone, that is, except me. I would take two hours of detention instead, arguing that this was half as long, twice as interesting and did not involve the school giant hurling rocks at me.

Actually, I did play once. Having analysed the rules, I appointed myself as captain, sent a weedy boy out to bat and declared after just one ball for nought. The other team scored one, won and everyone went to the pub. Except me. I was expelled.

You can go to the pub at a public school and they won't mind. I once set fire to another boy and they didn't bat an eyelid, but drop your eyelids while holding a bat, sonny, and you're out. Mess with cricket and you're history.

Since my truncated schooldays I have harboured a deep-seated and passionate loathing for cricket. I've explained time and again that it was designed to while the hours away in a distant corner of the Empire and that today, there is no Empire and we've all got jobs to do.

I've even pointed out that as a sport, it's fundamentally flawed. I could field a team of blind people with prosthetic limbs and if the rain came we could draw with Pakistan.

People have said that all I needed was to see an international game live. Then I'd get the point, see the light, become a mason. So last week, I went to see England play New Zealand at Lord's.

And truly, it was amazing. As the batsman took his place at the hallowed crease under a blazing sun, the crowd settled back for a day of gentle applause, some Pimm's and the sound of leather on walnut. Being drowned out by my mobile phone, which I'd programmed to play Colonel Bogey, very loudly.

The bowler began his run and a hush fell over the stadium, like a big, matronly blanket. He threw the ball pretty hard and, wisely I thought, the batsman stepped out of its way.

It was then scooped up by a man in big gloves who tossed it back to the bowler. The hush came again. He bowled again. The batsman got out of the way again and the man with big gloves picked it up again, and threw it back to the bowler. Again.

This went on and on until, to get an even tan, they all changed ends. then it went on and on and on again.

I'm told the batsman sometimes hits the ball, but this didn't seem to be a desperately interesting prospect either so I began to watch some builders ferreting away on the skeletal roof of a nearby tower block. Their job seemed to have a point. Like one day it would be finished.

Meanwhile, back in the stadium, I noticed that to keep everyone alive, the MCC had provided ties that had been modelled on those reflective orange and yellow plates you see on the back of lorries. The idea being that as your head lolls downwards, the glare jerks it back up again.

Sadly, it doesn't really work. After a couple of hours, they were going down like ninepins. And this is a nightmare for the stretcher-bearers because when you die of boredom, rigor mortis sets in before the heart actually stops beating. So, they'd be struggling away, trying to winch a body out of its seat when the bell would toll to signify another one had croaked. And they'd have to be off in a do-or-die race to get there before the flies. By lunchtime, there were hundreds of bodies stretched out in the shade of the stands. To keep the smell down, I suppose.

Even the young people at a cricket match are old. You see fathers and their sons dressed in matching blazers and slacks, as though women hadn't been involved in the breeding process at all. You just open up the chap like a Russian doll, and out pops another one.

Unsurprisingly, there's a 20-year waiting list to become a member of the MCC. One chap I know was told he'd be admitted in 2014 because there hasn't been a world war recently. "We need one once in a while to cull the membership," he was told. They must have been livid when Milosevic threw in the towel.

Desperate for some human company, I went to that spaceship which appears to have landed at the Nursery End. Inside, I found my old schoolmate, Mike Henderson, who is now the chief cricket correspondent for The Daily Cricketgraph. He was with some bloke called Gatting, talking about Tuscany and meaningless batting averages from a time before he was born. "Three hundred and fourteen, if I remember rightly," he said for no reason to a fat man in the lift. "Aye," said the fat man.

I read his piece the following day and was amazed to discover the former Rochdale boy had described the match as "quite frightful". Well, what did he expect? They were playing cricket.

It is an idiotic pastime. You go out there to take part and you get taken apart by another team that just want to win. So you fight back by bowling underarm and they say: "Steady on, old boy. That's not cricket."

Channel 4 is quite wrong to say cricket "just got better", because it hasn't. The only way it could ever get better is if they put it on the radio. And we all listened with the sound turned down.