Slipless in Settle, By Harry Pearson

Though this appreciation of Northern club cricket won Cricket Book of the Year, it should also have scooped the Wodehouse Prize for comic literature.

Pondering cricketing whites, Pearson notes that makers "laboured under the illusion that the human shape is essentially cuboid... When I put on my shirt I was often mistaken for a half-erected marquee."

There is also a bit about cricket per se, though Pearson does not omit to mention that, after "fizzing the ball round batsmen's chins" to skittle six for 42, a Lancastrian bowler "appeared at the boundary in stocking feet, a pint of lager in each hand and a fag in his mouth".