Off I go to Cornwall - and there's a miracle at Lords

After all, the last time England beat Australia at the home of cricket Ramsay MacDonald was Prime Minister, Al Bowlly was top of the pops and Spam was still a glint in the food industry's eye.

So when my wife suggested we take a few days down in Cornwall, it seemed a sensible option. As a diehard English cricket fan, I've had too many dreams trampled into the ground in NW1 by those baggy green caps to covet more.

Attending all five days of this year's match would be mere masochism. Instead, I'd watch the first couple in person while there was still hope, and then escape to the West Country before the inevitable occurred. Even Ricky Ponting couldn't hurt me 300 miles away in St Ives.

Australia always win at Lord's. It's one of the inviolate laws of nature, like the theory of relativity and another series of Last Of The Summer Wine; 1934 is the cricketing equivalent of 1066 for every English fan, the one date we can't forget even if we want to, the year in which we last beat the Aussies at the home of cricket.

In the interim, St John's Wood has been a crucible of failure and disappointment, with hopes dashed, victory squandered and belief beaten to a bloody pulp.

Cricketing psychologists have suggested the reason lies rooted deep in our colonial history.

All that pomp and panoply apparently acts upon Aussie sentiments like a red rag to a bull, inspiring them to even greater height: whether it be the old buffers slumbering in their egg-and-tomato ties or all those artefacts from our imperial past arrayed in the Long Room - WG Grace's portrait and Rachael Heyhoe-Flint's bust.

But this time it was different. By the time I arrived off the train late on Saturday afternoon, it was obvious that this time England really were making a proper fight of it. Not that we would win of course. But still

Thus Saturday and then all of Sunday and into Monday were spent, not lazing on the spectacular beaches or walking the cliffs, but in the one pub providing non-stop Ashes coverage on Sky.

Outside the sun shone, the ice cream flowed and the boat trips to seal island were doing a roaring trade: but I sat squirrelled away in the snug of the Queen's Head with other disbelievers, each nursing our pints and chewing our finger ends in between fielding calls from our loved ones asking when we'd be joining them.

This is what alcoholism must be like I thought, creeping in the moment the doors are unlocked and hiding from the light.

Such was the weight of history that up to the last moment the atmosphere in the snug was like the condemned cell.

But when Graeme Swann uprooted Mitchell Johnson's off stump and the inconceivable was made manifest, tears were wept and grown men embraced like children.

I even found myself hugging the man whom I'd noticed tearing the tickets for the pleasure cruises down on the harbour.

"Engine's broken down," he said through moist eyes, before adding with the wickedest of grins: "Busiest day of the year too "

As I stumbled out into the sunshine to start my holiday-proper, albeit nearly three days late, I noticed a sign behind the bar. "The impossible we do at once" it read; "miracles take a little longer."

As a testimony to England's victory, it could scarcely be bettered.

Michael Simkins is the author of Fatty Batter: How Cricket Saved My Life (Then Ruined It), published by Ebury Press.