He would therefore have approved of the increases in player salaries. As a senior professional in 1980, he was paid £4500. In the wider economy, salaries have roughly quadrupled for equivalent jobs over the period, but his successor is now paid more like 10-12 times as much, which in real terms means that he would be earning two to three times as much today.

Interestingly, it appears that the rewards for playing in high-profile media circuses have increased by the same factor: Brain could easily understand why his county colleagues Mike Procter and Zaheer Abbas had gone to play for Packer at £20,000 a year, which scales up to about $500,000 today, or what such players might reasonably expect for an IPL contract. (Those who think Procter would have been worth more may not realise that his powers were waning by 1980; he came off his full run in only three or four of Gloucester’s games and mostly bowled off-spin when using the old ball.)

On the other hand, Brain might not have appreciated the change in his after play routine. The hot bath followed by a trip down the pub for a few beers and a game of darts is now an ice bath and a quiet Powerade before an early night. Worse still, he is pictured waiting to go into bat against the touring West Indies: that he has on a then-new helmet with a perspex visor is merely nostalgic, but the caption exults in his ingenuity in managing to smoke a cigarette while wearing it. Brain would not have enjoyed today’s healthy asceticism.

But whatever has changed, I hope that today’s players still get wonderful invitations such as the one Brain received from the Indoor Corridor Cricket Association at St Andrew’s University. Indoor corridor cricket was apparently ‘a quasi-religion which involves a squash ball of gruesomely variable pace and bounce, a plastic beach mat, mega-long-hops, the occasional kitchenette, plenty of nicks and a perpetually humid atmosphere that favours the bowler who keeps plugging away there or thereabouts and is always looking to do a bit.’

The letter went on to say that the Association had elected him, by a 7-1 majority over Leicestershire’s Ken Higgs, their Honorary President, ‘a position which carries with it absolutely no responsibilities whatsoever except a letter of delighted acceptance and permission to use your name when recruiting new members. The term of office is one year, whereupon you will become a life member which will entitle you to absolutely nothing except our veneration, which you already possess.’

The difference is that today’s player might feel able to afford slightly more than the nil donation which Brain enclosed with his acceptance.