Talking to Vic Marks down the phone line had been strange enough. TMS, only through cables, rather than by wireless. He even did his infectious chuckle. Well, just a month into my job at The Wisden Cricketer, and now for the Plaisterers’ Hall, the Cricket Writers Dinner. An invite had been casually chucked across my desk some weeks before. “Another one for your diary, Benj.”

Another one for my diary indeed. This wasn’t the Saltex Equipment Fair in Windsor. Or even the Village Cup final at Lord’s. This was the Cricket Writers Dinner, where all those I had read and heard for years and years were going to be present. Moving and talking. And, absurdly, I was somewhere in the mix.

I might say it was the party where you cling on to someone because you don’t know anyone else. But I did know them, sort of at least. It was like cricket’s Madame Tussauds. Sometimes I felt I was looking at them as wax figures until a jolt of expression would suddenly remind you that they are living, moving, talking. Human beings would you believe.

Atherton and CMJ were hardly a ruler’s length from me. And the further afield I looked the more I gawked. In fact, if you were there and saw a young-looking lad, gawking, a tad star-struck perhaps, that was me.

But of course no-one knew me. I passed unnoticed. Which made the museum feeling all the more acute.

At one point I drifted outside, needing a little fresh air. On return to my table, a place I otherwise never strayed more than a couple of metres from, things had changed. Mike Selvey had made serious advances while I’d taken a breather, and was almost upon me.

I backed up against the wall under the cover of an experienced friend of the magazine, who afforded me some company and a couple of introductions.

Shortly after I slipped away, bedazzled, a little drunk, but gradually coming to wonder what all the fuss was about.

Benj Moorehead is editorial assistant of The Wisden Cricketer