Some of you reading this - how I love to pretend my readers are in the plural! - are, like the Referee, both male and English. You know who you are. Anyone fitting this description should turn away at this point. In fact, one might almost say that reader discretion is advised. Except that that wouldn't make any sense.
A riddle. I am cut short if it rains, and I always stop for tea. What am I?
The church fete? No. The annual outing of the Mothers' Union? Wrong again. Cricket. (See, I warned you.)
Cricket is dull. There's no two ways about it. Dull, dull, dull.
My gender and my nationality, when taken together, suggest that I should be first in the queue (or line, as they insist on saying over here) when it comes to drinking warm beer, wearing a floppy sun hat and discussing the finer points of the Duckworth-Lewis method. But somehow, I just don't get it.
(By the way - two cricket fans in the pavilion. One says, "So, do you really understand the Duckworth-Lewis method?" The other replies, "Well I thought I did. But Vanessa got pregnant anyway".)
I realise that this will make me something of a pariah as far as many of my fellow countrymen are concerned. To them, I can only apologise.
To make things even worse, I have for many years harboured a secret regard for baseball. Long before our move over here was even a twinkle in my employer's eye (or something), I could occasionally be found staring at Channel 4 at 2am, trying to follow the mysterious statistics being measured during a passionate clash between the Cardinals and the Astros.
But I wasn't an instant convert. At first, I couldn't work out why I was fascinated by a bunch of fat blokes in baby suits playing rounders. But fascinated I was. Perhaps it was the lightning-fast fielding; perhaps it was the explosive power of the home run; perhaps it was the unfathomable terminology. Yes, I know that cricket has the equivalent of all these things - but it's still very dull.
Last week, for the first time since moving over here, I took my kids (and visiting father) to the legendary Yankee stadium. New York Yankees v Oakland Athletics. A tight and fascinating game, which the Yankees won 2-0, thanks to home runs from Rodriguez and Williams, and some brilliant pitching by Wang. The atmosphere was astonishing - particularly in the 5th inning when Johnny Damon came up to bat with the bases loaded - despite a damp evening and a relatively thin crowd of 47,000.
This - and the fact that baseball is known here as the "national pastime" - got me thinking. Sitting in the crowd, I came to the conclusion that cricket - despite all the similarities - is the wrong comparator. The place that baseball holds in American hearts makes it much closer to football (Asocceration football, that is), seen from a European point of view.
I have long had a theory that everything a visitor needs to know about Blighty can be picked up by sitting in the crowd at a football match. Foul-mouthed blokes with tattoos; women and children left indoors; cold, damp weather; dry, self-deprecating humour; suspicion of outsiders; cold meat pies. I rest my case. (Now, don't get me wrong - I love the homeland dearly. But, if you think any of the football staples mentioned here doesn't have a resonance with wider British society, you'll have to tell me which it is.)
Perhaps the same was true of baseball. Was it possible, I wondered, to get to the essence of America by sitting in the Yankee stadium? Well, it's early days in the development of this new theory, but the initial results are encouraging. Communal singing of the Stars and Stripes; prayer for the troops; communal singing of God Bless America; top-notch hot dogs; giant, flashing signs; three strikes and you're out.
You know it makes sense.
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