Reading on the job

One of the many benefits of ignoring alcohol, and admittedly it comes down the list a bit, is the amount you end up saving out of your allowances. And so, when I was in London for the ICC brand launch recently, I found myself trudging off to Charing Cross Road where Sportspages have a lovely book shop.

There was another reason I wanted to go there. Over the last few years I have exhibited an alarming addiction to television. I tried initially to explain it as homework for my profession but that excuse has long since passed into the domain of the unjustifiable. Add to that the daily hour scanning the Internet, reading newspapers and magazines and the book as a valued customer of time has virtually withered and gone.

Part of the problem is that I cannot read in cars and trains for it makes me sick very quickly. Years ago, the bus, with its unhurried movement, used to be my biggest reading ground. I suddenly remembered those days very fondly and incidents from those books that I thought my mind had let float away came alive.

There was a passage from Sir Garfield Sobers's King Cricket that I had read several times. In the final Test of the 1966 series in England, Sobers's cousin David Holford came out to join him with the team in a lot of trouble. "You just stay there," big brother told Holford and, armed with the power of those words, Holford did. Those four words were a recurrent theme in my childhood cricket and they accompanied me to bat almost every time. They didn't quite work the magic they did with Holford at that age but I remembered them often as I grew up. They work.

I remembered reading Rohan Kanhai's Blasting for Runs and being moved by the fact that the first Test he played was the first Test he saw. And Conrad Hunte's experiences with the Moral Re-Armament Movement first introduced me to Rajmohan Gandhi. When Gandhi briefly became a Union minister, he was a character out of a cricket book to me.

One of my favourites though, was Colin Cowdrey's MCC. I read about Tonbridge and Kent, about his family (later, when I got to know Chris Cowdrey well, it was another character from my past coming alive) and remember feeling completely let down when I read that his marriage was over. The Cowdrey I knew from the book loved his wife dearly; she was present in many of the photographs that went with the book. Years later, I wrote what I am convinced was the true story of a happy marriage between Mohammed Azharuddin and his wife Naureen, only to see it break up within two years of my words being printed.

I loved the way Martin Johnson sounded exactly like David Gower when he wrote the latter's autobiography. In later years I visualised Parramatta, a thriving suburb of Sydney, from the way Richie Benaud described it. A few years ago I happened to be on a train and fought my way to a window seat when I realised it was going to stop at Parramatta.

Even as a child though, I longed to read books about Indian cricketers. I had an indoor cricket game with little statues of Umrigar, Phadkar, Manjrekar, Hazare and others of that generation and it didn't seem to matter that all the statues looked just the same. It wasn't until my father bought me Sujit Mukherjee's Romance of Indian Cricket that these names, and others like Gul Mohammad, Amir Elahi, Shute Banerjee and my favourite, Jaoomal Naoomal, acquired a deeper meaning. A couple of months ago, thanks to Ramachandra Guha, I met Sujit Mukherjee. There he was, in flesh and blood, and yet a character from my own childhood romance with cricket.

Since then I have read Sacred Hoops, Phil Jackson's amazing story of life with Michael Jordan and the Chicago Bulls. As I write this, I am 50 pages into CLR James's Beyond A Boundary. For a while, my obsession with the present and the immediate (the hazards of being in live television) had divorced me from the past. I am hoping to rediscover an era in cricket writing where the phrase was as delicate as the shot - and Beyond A Boundary has been a wonderful companion so far.

That is why Peter Roebuck should be essential reading for every young man and woman hoping to be in journalism, for he captures his "twin loves of cricket and the English language" more delightfully than anyone else.

Long may those two stay married; longer than Mr Cowdrey and Mr Azharuddin did.