Does Ed Smith ever imagine how his brief career playing cricket for England might have panned out differently? In a Notting Hill restaurant, a few doors down from his white stucco flat, Smith pauses over his lamb to deliver an erudite lecture on counterfactual history.

But he hasn’t answered the question: does he often think about his three ill-fated Test matches for England? “Yes,” Smith admits in his public school and Cambridge tones. “I used to run the tape back a lot more than I do now, in my mind. I don’t look back on it as a bad period in my life. I wish I’d had more luck, I wish I’d got more runs. But I wrote in What Sport Tells Us About Life that I wouldn’t rather life was more pallid.”