AA Thomson writes

My Life in Cricket Scorecards is ten years old. The first post was published on 30 December 2009. The promise was:

Some posts will feature one of these scorecards, some will record going to the cricket now, and some will be on random topics, historical and contemporary.

Which is more or less how it has turned out. Thanks to all who have shown an interest, particularly Brian Carpenter who has twice given me the pleasure of seeing my name in Wisden.

A series of posts that created more interest than most was the re-creation, fifty years after the event, of the 1967 season in England. There were daily posts on Twitter and weekly summaries here. I will repeat that exercise when I have more time, probably focusing on the 1970 season with its splendid combination of cricket—the Rest of the World non-tests and Kent’s first Championship since the First World War—the football World Cup, and a surprise result in the general election.

One of the pleasures of the 1967 project (if it may be so grandiosely phrased) was to rediscover the writing of AA Thomson, then a member of the distinguished cricket reporting team on The Times, along with John Woodcock, Alan Gibson and John Arlott, among others.

It was to be his last season; Thomson died early the following summer. I have picked up five of his books from the Basin Reserve bookstall and similar sources, though this represents less than half of his cricket books (as listed in Wikipedia) and less than a tenth of his total output, which embraced plays, travel, history and even a book of poetry. There is also The Times archive and some copies of Playfair Cricket Monthly from 1966/67 (I was an unusual child in my reading).

The plan is this: to post a daily tweet taken from AA Thomson’s cricket writing. Some days it will be vaguely topical, or follow a theme for the week, sometimes entirely random. I’m off to Sydney on 2 January for the third test between Australia and New Zealand, so something relevant to that seems a good starting point. The way the series has gone so far, I’ll need something to keep me cheerful.

The tweets will be on @AAThomsonwrites. This is a reconditioned account that used to be @Lifeincards, so some readers may already be followers. I’ll link from @kentccc1968, the Twitter account that is associated with the blog. There will be such commentary from time-to-time on the blog as seems appropriate.