The kid in the sweet shop

Fatty Batter - How Cricket Saved My Life (Then Ruined It) by Michael Simkins (Ebury Press), 314pp, £10.99

This book is unfair. For a start, it comes pre-wreathed with critical laurels. "An instant classic," says Stephen Fry. "At last the work of genius," says Tim Rice. Once you've read it, adds Mike Atherton, "you'll never want to read another ghosted autobiography by a Pietersen or a Vaughan again."

Here's something else. It carries a powerful subliminal message: cricket makes you thin and handsome. Evidence? On the front cover there's a snapshot of a stout lad aged 10 or thereabouts, wearing knee-length grey shorts and lace-up brown boots, a cricket bat limply pendant between dimpled thumb and forefinger. Inside the back cover is a movie star lookalike in whites, bat now casually battle-taped. The gaze and set of the lower lip in both pictures declare this is the same person, one Before Cricket, one After.

Between the photographs runs a narrative which nimbly turns The kid in the sweet shop their contrast into a running joke. This is so funny and shrewd, selfdeprecating, evocative, observant and laugh-out-loud-true that any reader will ration its reading to make it last while desperately hoping the author may turn out to be a long-lost cousin.

Perhaps the greatest injustice is that its author is an actor. Anyone who reads The Guardian knows from his column that Michael Simkins can write. Now here's a thumping great wad of evidence that he writes very well indeed.

In 1966, aged 10 and while consuming a chocolate bar with gourmand intensity, young Simkins happens to see Colin Milburn left on television coming down the pavilion steps. "He barrels down, two at a time, his huge stomach wobbling up and down each tread like a giant blancmange, the flesh straining against the flimsy buttons of his cricket shirt. He seems an amalgam of every fat kid who has ever sat in the corner of a school changing room having gym shoes thrown at him by his classmates."

From this fatal attraction grows a fixation, initially fuelled by solitary games of Owzthat between players he names, (for sweet-related reasons) Callard and Bowser. With a plastic beach bat he learns the rudiments of the game in the stock room of his parents' sweet shop. The story of the acquisition of his first flannels could be by Dickens out of the Brothers Grimm. Cricket inspires him to get into grammar school and slow down on the creme eggs.

In real life, he also says, he is so bad at it it's funny. Except the chapters where he becomes a ball-by-ball commentator, passes for an MCC member, invents and organises a Sunday team and finds himself a plaything of Hardyesque gods, caught between the last day of the final Ashes Test of 2005 and a nice little earner in a TV drama with Martine McCutcheon, seem cumulatively to suggest he's rather better than he's letting on.

All of which, not to mention Simkins on love or on the incongruities of thought when a parent dies, is clear evidence that this man is too good to hang around the boundary ropes, hoping for a bit part in The Bill. He's a born writer, damn and blast it.