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 “Oh - Arctic Monkeys,” says the faintly glamorous, ash-blonde, middle-aged lady sitting in front of me in the seats at Kent County Cricket Club’s St Lawerence ground in Canterbury. Her husband, who is wearing a club sweater and concentrating on the Kent batsmen’s poor start against Sussex, mumbles back something back. The lady does not look up from the club members handbook she appears to be reading from – I haven’t a clue why it would mention the Arctic Monkeys -  and then, after what seems like about ten minutes, says:  “You have heard of them.” After another ten minutes, the husband says something else that you have to have been married to him for 25 years to understand, and then, as the crisp shadows of late morning shorten out on the golden-green pitch,  his wife eventually looks away into the middle distance and says “No, loads of people have heard of them. I'd love to see Arctic Monkeys. And Elton John.” Another pause. “And definitely Neil Diamond.”.

 I haven’t been to a county cricket match for more than ten years, and had been a bit worried that the modern cricketing era of daft haircuts, wraparound sunglasses and ostentatiously applied sunblock might have seen off the old Panama-hat-and-smell-of-cut-grass atmosphere, but it's ok. At the St Lawrence ground you can still park you car and have a picnic on the edge of the boundary, and browse the secondhand book stall in the tea break. What does strike me, perhaps because my neighbours sound as if they have wandered in here from the pages of a lost Samuel Becket play, is the crowd and how calmly unselfconscious they are.

 These days, there is a kind of official version of how you’re supposed to act if you’re a football or rugby fan – you go mental, you shed a many tear, you secretly hope you get caught on camera  so you can watch yourself being a real fan when you get home. But no one talks much about what being a cricket fan is, which is a shame  because they are quite stange, interesting people. Lots of them come on their own, and watch the day’s sport in a contemplative way that is a sporting equivalent of staring into a fire, or out to sea. The ones that come in couples and groups tend to have slow-motion, Samuel Becket-type conversations like my neighbours. “Last time we lost by nine wickets, so we do seem to lose,” says the lady, as the last ball before lunch is bowled, and a solitary seagull, white like a cricketing bird, keens overhead. “Shall we get a bacon roll?”

 I go to have a look around the ground, and in the pavilion stand I see the Kent Messenger reporter leaving the press box and calling over to some of of the player sitting out on the balcony to ask how they think it’s going. I can’t imagine that at a football match. I also have a look at a display of plans for a four star hotel, a conference centre, and new offices on the ground. This depresses me a bit, but I don’t suppose that these days anything can be quite as quirky and pleasant as the St Lawrence ground is now and make money.  Anyway, they’re still keeping the famous lime tree that has always grown within the boundary of the pitch, so at least they grasp the charm of what they’ve got, which is something else you don’t find in football.

 As I sit back down for the afternoon session I think about the tree, and the quirky conversations, and all the men dressed up in creamy linen suits and hats and the smart stewards on the door of the pavilion, I feel that sense of mild surprise and happiness you get when you go to a new town and find it hasn’t been taken over by fast food outlets and estate agents. It’s funny really; when I was young in the 80s, I would have regarded  Kent County Cricket Club as a bastion of English conservatism that needed to be overthrown. Now it seems like a glorious point of resistance against that bland, 21^st century Americanised saminess. I suppose none of us knew back then that the alternative would involve quite so many unpleasant chain stores.

 Kent rally, and begin to dominate the game. Out on the pitch, shadows lengthen.

“Warm,” says the lady.

 “Nice” says the husband.