Jonathan Meades: Win back the Ashes? It's another case of self-delusion

Hauled in to make up numbers in an inter-school game, I dropped a sitter offered by their best bat; went in as the runner for our best bat who had a leg injury and ran him out within an over; was bowled first ball of my own innings. I don't like creeket, oh no - I loathe it: and I'm also unkeen on that right-on grin of a song, "Dreadlock Holiday", an early essay in making cricket cool, though not so early as Mick Jagger's very important pronouncement that he was a fan of Dennis Lillee and Bob Massie.

Do I loathe cricket because of my own childish inadequacy? Because of my inhumed resentment that I would never be another PBH May or ER Dexter or MC Cowdrey, whose very initials were the patriotic exhortation of an expectantly prescient father? Equally obviously, I was never to become another Duncan Edwards or Richard Sharp - yet I have spent a rewarding hundred or so hours per annum of my adult life watching the two major codes of football on telly and in the expensive flesh.

I borrowed so that I could get to Barcelona to see Cruyff, Neeskens and Migueli. I was at Old Trafford that fateful day when Victoria Adams made the club lottery draw at half-time and was invited to dinner by David Beckham. I prayed that God himself, Matthew Le Tissier, would keep Saints up. My prayers were answered. Indeed my devotion to that player was such that, stranded at Guernsey Airport by the oxymoron called BBC Transport, I passed the time reading the several pages of the phone book listing the island's hundreds of Le Tissiers. But I never entertained prepubescent fantasies about soccer or rugby, about playing at Wembley or Twickenham.

Cricket was different. Despite my uselessness I dreamt of opening England's batting with my imaginary best friend, the scion of the Parker pen dynasty. Was I then virally infected by the spirit of the preposterous Newbolt? Is England today thus infected?

It is striking that cricket should have become a demotic preoccupation at a moment when questions of national identity have attained a popular paramountcy. It is, after all, the most English of games. It is an instrument of cultural colonisation - hence the pitches that dismally constellate south-west France and are as inappropriate as a corrida in Somerset. It is almost exclusively Anglophone: the only mainland European country to play it seriously is Holland whose sportsmen famously tend to speak better English than English sportsmen. Of course, the obvious cause of all the excitement is that Michael Vaughan's team has a chance of winning the Ashes. It is an interesting prospect because the very likelihood of that victory would be the exception that reveals a persistent trait in the collective English psyche, the vast capacity for congratulatory self-delusion.

We are enjoined to believe that next year's football World Cup will be won by a team that is heavily reliant on Real Madrid's former fifth-choice striker. We are enjoined to believe that being "awarded" the Olympics is some sort of triumph when there is no rational cause for celebration unless you happen to be riding the gravy train that is regeneration.

This trait is by no means restricted to sport. It colours our attitude to more elemental matters. We work hard at convincing ourselves that we are not a northern nation. Architects work especially hard at this: a piazza here, some street life there, open air this and that, Tuscan hill towns in Yorkshire. Every time I hear the word vibrant I long for drizzle at early dusk.

Climatic delusion causes us to dress inappropriately: the uniform of a T-shirt, a pelmet and very blue legs that Newcastle pioneered has spread across this cold country. It causes us to eat inappropriately. The Indian subcontinent and South-east Asia consume heavily spiced food because it is environmentally apt. Two features of Soviet Russia were ice cream and Italianate architecture. Stalin decreed this so that his subjects might believe that the climate was more cheerful than it in fact was. The English do the same of their own volition, without the mediation of a dictator.