KEY POINTS:
An unusual cricketing event occurred in Martinborough last weekend: at one stage in our game both batsmen at the crease had runners. For the uninitiated, a runner is a teammate who runs between wickets on behalf of an injured batsman.
I won't go into the positioning and communications protocols that have to be adopted when a runner enters the fray. Suffice to say, it's a recipe for confusion and frequently disaster.
Throw a second runner into the mix and the to-ing and fro-ing soon resembles those chaotic Keystone Kops car chases, full of sound and fury but going nowhere.
Even at a reasonably serious level of cricket, the chances of both batsmen and both runners understanding their precise roles as strikers and non-strikers would be slight. In a social cricket context, you're looking at a statistical probability of the order of being killed by falling space junk while roller-skating along Tamaki Drive.
The Prussian military theorist Carl Von Clausewitz coined the term "fog of war" to describe a situation that prevails on the battlefield in which both sides are uncertain of the other's capabilities and intent. Well, Martinborough was shrouded in a fog of cricket and she was an absolute pea-souper.
The reason there wasn't a run-out was that while the batsmen and their runners didn't have much idea of who was meant to be doing what and at which end of the pitch, the fielders didn't have the foggiest.
Although I'd never encountered the dual runner phenomenon in decades of playing and watching cricket, I can't say it surprised me. Cricket is that sort of game - you learn to expect the unexpected.
Sometimes the strange hold that cricket can exert gives rise to a magnificent obsession. Take Oliver Roki, a winemaker on the Croatian island of Vis in the Adriatic Sea.
During the Napoleonic Wars Vis was for a time home port to a British naval squadron which in 1811 routed a much larger French force in the Battle of Lissa (the old name for Vis).
The British squadron was commanded by Captain William Holte, a protégé of Horatio Nelson and upon whom the character of Jack Aubrey in Patrick O'Brian's epic series of historical novels was partly based. The terrific movie Master and Commander, starring Russell Crowe as Aubrey, was based on the first book in the series.
Roki discovered that Holte had introduced cricket to Vis. It didn't survive the island's handover to Austria in 1815, following the Congress of Vienna at which the winners of the Napoleonic Wars redrew the map of Europe at the expense of the losers.
He decided to revive it and today the island is proud home to the Sir William Holte Cricket Club.
Take the Dormer family who in 1994 decided to create a practice wicket in a disused cow paddock on their property at Loburn in North Canterbury.
The project grew like Topsy into the magical Willows Cricket Club which each year hosts more than 20 college 1st X1s as part of its wider cause of supporting and developing secondary school cricket.
Recently I watched games at the Willows and in the pleasant surrounds of the Canterbury University campus in brilliant spring sunshine against a backdrop of snow-crested foothills.
At such moments it's easy to understand why Cantabrians are so good at sport and so pleased with themselves.
Take Paul Melser and friends who, when they couldn't get access to a ground in the early 1980s, rolled a strip in a paddock on Melser's Wairarapa property.
Twenty five years and 25 tons of clay later, the Bottom Paddock Cricket Club is still going strong and the five founder-members are still turning out, often alongside their sons.
Take John Saker, former professional basketball player and Tall Black turned writer. Last year the author of How to Drink a Glass of Wine ventured to Vis as part of his dogged quest to sample every last one of the world's 10,000 grape varieties. (A white wine, Vugava, is unique to the island).
Within hours of his arrival he found himself umpiring a cricket match and resolved to return as head of the first New Zealand cricketing expedition to the Adriatic, which he duly did this year.
Every successful social cricket team is founded on the rock of a single-minded yet serene individual. Our rock is Saker, whose leadership is unquestioned despite his mystifying and totally futile penchant for the reverse sweep.
And yes, he was the other hamstrung statue. At least I had to call for my runner in mid-innings; Saker brought his out with him.
