Never patronise an 88-year-old. “You took six for six once,” I said, looking through the headlines of a scrapbook detailing the cricketing life and times of England and Surrey medium-pace bowler, Sir Alec Bedser.

“Did I?” he said. “Who against?”

“Ah,” I replied, holding the small print as far from my failing eyes as possible in a vain attempt to eke out the answer by squint.

“Oh, you can’t see without your glasses, can you. Give it to me. I’ll read it for you.” Entirely minus the aid of spectacles, he immediately solved the puzzle.

“Rhodesia,” he said.

Born on July 4, 1918, Sir Alec is a cricketer from another generation, another world. Immutably tough, unendingly modest and still as sharp as a footballer’s suit, he surveys the modern state of cricket worldwide with something akin to fond disbelief.

“I expect people think I’m an old fogey, but…” His sentence retreats under the full assault of recent events like suspected murder, exposed match-fixing, rampant gambling and England losing (recurring).

Does it make you sad for your sport, I wondered. “No,” he said promptly. “It makes me sad for life.” In his mind’s eye, he can travel back to the 1920s, when he and his twin brother, Eric, would walk the mile to school through the woods, with their sandwiches on their backs, for the express purpose of playing cricket with friends on a patch of old dirt that they would have to first sweep for stones.

Summer days were spent playing cricket from dawn to dusk with one bat between 20 boys. As for keeping fit, they went digging.

“It was the best thing to get fit. I don’t remember ever coming off the field with an injury. Cricketers today aren’t as strong as we were. They go to gyms and all that palaver, but keep breaking down.

“I never went to a gym in my life, yet between April 1946 and August 1947, I reckon I bowled about 3,000 overs. Before Steve Harmison was called up by England recently, he’d bowled about 30 overs. It explains a lot.”

He is not an old fogey. He sounds like a man in touch with considerable common sense when he talks about the slow, gurgling death of County cricket and the dominance of the profit-chasing one-day game.

“I’ve watched the World Cup on and off. Not too much. I think’s it’s overdone. There’s too much so-called international cricket. It’s all for money.

“A bloke only has to take five wickets these days and he writes his life story. When I played for England, we weren’t allowed to write books for two years after the tour and never at all allowed to talk to the press. Winning the Ashes in 2005 was nice, but afterwards we put ’em on a pedestal. It wasn’t good for some of the blokes. It’s all such a palaver because they won a cricket match.

“We did the same in 1953. We played the last game of the Ashes series at The Oval. It all came down to this one match. We played, we won, I went home on the train about 6 ’clock that night after a drink with the Aussies in the dressing room. I was playing for Surrey two days later.