It’s a gorgeous day. The Griffin looks resplendent in the early May sun. Matt Spencer, walking into the ground, starts videoing the lovely tableau stretched out before him, only to realise there are two U14 girls games happening, and promptly deletes the footage.

Everyone is here nice and early, and everyone’s in good spirits, excited for some soft play on what looks like a soft pitch and indeed a very soft outfield. There’s sand all over the ground, which, as Benny Cobbett points out, is known as ‘top dressing’, done to improve soil drainage and encourage stronger root growth by getting more oxygen in there.

Buoyed by this unsolicited lesson in turf management, Leo Nieboer heads out to toss. The Chelsfield skipper calls wrong, and the 2s are batting.

Jo Hockings, down to open with Michael Ainslie, is not in a good way. He’s had two large bagels for breakfast — packed with turkey bacon, egg, cheese, and honey sriracha — and now his stomach’s all distended like a foie gras goose. He can’t digest it. He tells Nieboer that he may actually shit himself if he goes out there to open, and asks to drop down, so Nieboer moves around the order and heads out there with Ainslie instead.

Despite Chelsfield’s skipper telling Nieboer that Ploughmans would likely smash them, the visitors start very nicely. They’re bowling tight lines and the pitch is slow, and anything that beats the infield holds up in what now feels like Brighton beach, out there in the middle, so it’s a tough little start. Nieboer looks comfortable but then foolishly tickles one off his pads to the keeper for 7 (16), and Jay Patel is then bowled for 4 (6), and suddenly we’re in a spot of bother.

But then things calm down. Ainslie battles on for a bit before being triggered for 22 (59). After that, Joe Woodcock and Jo Hockings take over, both knuckling down and scoring gutsy fifties. Because of all the sand, they have to run endless twos. Excellent shots into the gap completely die in the sand and often only yield one maddening single.

“This is the worst 50 I’ve ever scored,” Hockings is saying to Nieboer, now umpiring. “I haven’t timed one shot.”

It’s a turgid sort of affair. Boundaries are nearly impossible. Chelsfield are struggling in the heat. One of their bowlers runs in and his phone starts ringing, so he stops to answer it. Over on the other side of the pitch, there’s an extremely hostile-sounding football game taking place, people screaming at each other constantly. Beyond the fence, cyclists in lycra are lashing themselves around the velodrome, the announcer droning out generic things like “Let’s hear it for the racers!” followed by no applause whatsoever.

On the sidelines, there’s a decent Cheer XI forming, enjoying the warm sun. Harry Wright is here with his laptop. Nieboer asks him to score, but he says he needs to do some work, then immediately opens up Play Cricket, which in fairness does take up a sizable chunk of my work day, too. Fred Gumpert is dressed in a lovely floral shirt and extremely hungover. Nieboer had in fact been with him the evening before, sinking many beers at the Hanover with Alex Gordon-Walker and Giordy Diangienda’s mate, Nathan, who angered Nieboer by insisting that David Moyes would have succeeded at Manchester United, then simply disappeared, presumably to die of alcohol poisoning in a ditch somewhere in the Kennington area.

Following some nice late hitting from Spence (14 off 14), Plough finish on a very respectable 202.

Almost as soon as we walk off, the weather does a total 180. The wind picks up; the temperature drops; the air feels pregnant with rain. The sun is now hiding behind a sheet of low dark clouds, and the sky looks grey and ugly.

Our tea is delivered in the shed by Stuart, the Griffin caretaker and a lovely man. Today it’s just sandwiches, but he insists he could do us green curry next week, or even bolognese, which is terribly nice of him.

Giordy is in a weird, cantankerous mood. He insists that he “doesn’t care” about what end he has in a tone that suggests he very much does care.

“Let’s just get this game on, really,” he keeps saying to no one in particular.

So we do. Spence brings down heat so ferocious that the batters can’t get near it. At the other end, Giordy is superb, bowling in exactly the right spot. He takes three wickets for nine runs off his five overs — two of them LBW, the latter hitting the guy at calf height, standing in a front-on French cricket pose, not using his bat. It’s a strange sort of leave.

But then something horrendous happens. Spence comes in, lands, and his knee completely goes. Oscar and Nieboer, stood at extra cover and mid off respectively, can actually hear the terrible crunch sound. Spence cries out in pain, writhing on the floor. It’s a terrible thing, but he’s pretty sanguine about it, once the initial agony abates. As we carry him off, Nieboer informs him that the ball he bowled in the process of completely f*cking his knee was actually caught at mid wicket by Jay Patel.

“I’ll finish my bloody spell then!” he cries, genuinely delighted to have taken a wicket, despite the horrors.

Instead, Nieboer finishes his over, bowling four dot balls, one of which Ainslie is convinced the batter hit. It is perhaps worth mentioning at this juncture that Nieboer was the only Plough bowler who didn’t go for any runs this weekend.

Oscar Sawyer takes a wicket, reducing them to 29-5, and then the rain really does start falling. The light is terrible. Nobody fancies coming back on; instead we hunker down in the Griffin and drink multiple beers, nibbling at some Squashies, which do not pair well with beer, sadly. Ajay John starts titillating Nieboer with talk of a sushi spot that actually does sea urchin roe, which he would happily take a bath in, if money and social guidelines would allow.

We head over to the DSG for more beers. Some new Plough — Leo Towers, Joe Woodcock, and Will Gray, all of whom are mates and very good at cricket — are getting right amongst it. Nieboer’s vape is getting relentlessly hijacked by about six different people. Sean McGurn keeps talking about calling in a bomb threat in Herne Hill, for some reason. Dom Scott tells me he’s expecting a child and explains the various ways he plans to make the kid as non-woke as possible, like showing him old WW2 footage, in colour, and not touching the thing at all until he or she turns 18, when they’ll get nothing but a firm handshake and no eye contact.

More bad gibberish follows. Bob Keogh and Rahul Nair are here now. Bob dropped an egg on the floor earlier, so we keep shouting “WHERE’S YOUR EGG NOWWWW, WHERE’S YOUR EGG NOW” at him, which would be a rather strange thing to experience if this was your first time sinking beers at the DSG.

As Nieboer tries to leave, he’s informed that the DSG gates are shut. Apparently hooded men with knives have been cycling around. Or maybe Sean really did call in that bomb threat. There was also a shooting in Brixton a matter of hours ago. Definitely some bowl first conditions knocking around. As Chris Morris once said, ask anyone today and they’ll tell you that the UK actually stands for Ultimate Krimewave.

Jackie unlocks the gate for Nieboer, and the street is perfectly calm — no sporting gentlemen on bicycles threatening to carve a little Z on his forehead; no nice men in vans asking him if he fancies a jelly snake or perhaps a gobstopper. So he jumps on a Lime bike and zooms east, off to meet some other degenerates, smiling at what was — cheap dismissal and Spence’s now dismally inflated knee aside — a pleasant afternoon in this strange and schizophrenic city of ours.