Anderson, Swann and the real contents of the urn

When Hussey had added one quick single, to reach 82, Aleem Dar gave him out leg-before to Anderson. Hussey immediately called for the replay and won a reprieve. Channel Nine used to use HawkEye, as Sky do in England, but switched to a New Zealand-made system called Virtual Eye. It would be interesting to know if HawkEye would also have decided the centre of the ball had landed outside leg stump. Anderson persevered. He beat Hussey past his inside edge and outside edge. He beat Hussey when he defended and attacked.

Swann's bowling survived the ravages of "Mr Cricket", a fact confirmed by the excellent delivery which forced Marcus North, such an obdurate figure at times in the last Ashes series, to nudge a catch into the slips. That brought some of the old hauteur back to Swann – and also a rare burst of unstinted praise from maybe the most acerbic of all critics of English cricket, Geoffrey Boycott. He declared: "Graeme Swann has had so much success in Test cricket and not many starts like the one he has had here. When the Australians, and particularly Hussey, attacked him it was a bit of a crisis for both Swann and England – but I thought he came through it very well indeed."

Florence was the present Lord Darnley's grandmother, and she later told his mother, her daughter-in-law, that it had been a veil, easily enough mistaken for the word "bail", that she and her friend Lady Clarke burnt that day. As for the venerable urn itself, Lord Darnley thinks it was a scent bottle, probably taken from Janet Clarke's dressing table. All of which sounds to me like a much likelier story than the many variations that have circulated through the decades, and in Lord Darnley's study on a cold Herefordshire morning it carried proper authoritative weight.