Just leave it, Giles

There comes a day, at the end of the English winter, when everything changes. The air feels gentle, the sky's a less brittle blue, the sunlight not quite as low and harsh, the shadows it casts softer at the edges. It provokes a mix of nostalgia and anticipation, a sense memory of old summers and a pang for the one to come. 

Yesterday was that day, good enough to play cricket on. It went quickly, and the first week of the season, still months away, will be rainy and cold, but that's alright because things have changed. 

Yesterday it didn't matter that England had four bowlers in various stages of knackeredness, that Allen Stanford might be some kind of peasant-slaughtering gringo drug lord and that, with their usual immaculate timing, the ECB's ballot form for tickets to the Stanford Super Series arrived in the post.

The people affected by Stanford are the ones queuing up outside the banks in Antigua and Venezuela trying to find out if they've got any money, not a few adminstocrats with big-man offices at Lord's.

Summer's coming as it always has, and not even Giles Clarke can fuck that up.