Saturday dawned sunny, and Bill was up early with the day was spent relaxing. Bill took Shoe the seagull chick out with him to the lawn, and also let it splash around in a shallow stretch of water. The evening was given over to catching up on Euro 2008 football matches, with Spain beating Sweden and Russia trumping Greece.

Sunday, June 15, and a positive media explosion. The Daily Express had a colour photo of the Stones poster Exile On Main Street and a two-page spread by Jeffery Taylor headed Rolled-up Rock Art Goes Gold.

A selected quote reads:

Jeffery Taylor (Daily Express Art Review 15.6.08) said: "Glaring from the end wall in the small upper gallery is one of the collection's rarest finds, the Rolling Stones' 1972 Exile On Main Street poster. "Unless you are old enough," says Tim [Maddison], "or lived in the US at that time, you will never have seen that image."

In addition to rarity, the Stones also provide the most expensive treasure on offer. In the lower room hangs a remarkably fresh looking promo poster of the Rolling Stones' celled 1973 tour of Japan, one of less than ten surviving worldwide. The tour was axed because of Jagger's drug arrest in 1967. The exhibition catalogue designates this object of desire as "extremely rare" with a price tag of £2,250..."

The Times has a front-cover photo of Bill playing cricket, along with Mike Rutherford and Mark Ramprakash, and a large article by David Walsh headed The Bowling Stones. It was continued inside, with a new header The One Love Affair Bowling Stone Bill Managed To Hide From The World.

The article reads:

David Walsh (Times News Review 15.6.08) said: "Had you been travelling near the village of Cranleigh, Surrey, last Sunday, you could have followed the signs to the cricket match and made the most extraordinary discovery…  Startling, though, was the familiarity of the faces inside the boundary.

The tall guy with the gentlest batting stroke - wasn't that Mike Rutherford, the guitarist from the old rock band Genesis? And the one over there, standing in the outfield, who looked like he didn't want to age, that was surely Pink Floyd's Roger Waters… now playing cricket on a Sunday afternoon…

In the middle of them all, directing banter around the wicket, stood Eric Clapton. An earnest cricketer, let us say. But it is the little guy in the gully who rivets you. Bill Wyman, the old Rolling Stone, in his 72nd year and still up for it.

Wyman stands in the gully, one hand ready for the catch, the other poised with a St Moritz cigarette between middle and index finger.

Wyman has played these cricket matches for 22 years. Trawl through the pages of cricket's bible, the Wisden annual, and you will find him in the 1991 [False 1986] edition. It says: "Bill Wyman, fielding at gully, caught the ex-England captain Brian Close, one-handed, with a cigarette in his other hand." The team is called The Bunbury XI and it is the creation of Clapton and his friend and fellow cricket-lover, David English.

Clapton has helped to rope in leading figures from show business, English ropes in leading figures from all kinds of worlds and they have been playing every summer for two decades. Along the way they've had a lot of laughs, raised a lot of money (£11million) for charities and given Wyman the chance to dance with one of the loves of his life…

…There is something about this band of brothers. Not quite the Rolling Stones but it has given him a sporting life that in his youth he craved but never got. He could bore you with the names of the Bunburys he has shared a wicket with: lan Botham, David Gower, Phil Collins, David Essex, Georgie Fame, Mark Ramprakash, Elton John, Rory Bremner, Viv Richards, Adam Faith, Brian Lara. On and on the list goes and there's a lot of stories that Wyman could tell.

Like the day at Reigate Priory, Surrey, in 1993 when he got Michael Holding out. At the time, Holding was a star in the West Indies team and one of the world's most feared fast bowlers. "I bowled him with a googly," says Wyman. "He came up to me, all the way up the pitch, and he's six feet five, and I'm five feet seven, and he stood about two inches from my nose and said, 'Wait till you bat, man, I'm going to give you some chin music'. I tried to be cool because he had to be joking. 'Oh yeah', I said, 'I'm looking forward to that'. He then stomped off towards the pavilion and all our players were saying, 'You haven't half annoyed him', and I'm saying, 'Nah, he's only winding me up'.

So we went to lunch and a couple of the guys come to me and say they had heard that Holding was ranting and raving in the dressing room, saying what he was going to do to me. I said, 'Stop messin', Holding's not like that'. Then Holding came walking towards me in the clubhouse, right behind me, and he whispered in my ear, 'You wait till you bat, man, you gonna smell the leather'. They called him Whispering Death because of the speed of his bowling.

I'm No 4 in the batting order and in no time we've lost two wickets and I'm walking towards the wicket. As I do, the ambulance parked in the corner of the field starts going 'di, dan; di, dah;di, dah'.

Holding wasn't bowling, but as I walked to the wicket he came from the outfield and took the ball from the bowler. This was halfway through the over, very irregular. It made me a little nervous. I looked out in front of me and there was no one. All the fielders had disappeared. I glanced behind and they were all there. Six bloody slips, two gullys, a deep fine leg, a third man, a leg slip and they're all 30, 40 yards behind the wicket. Then I look at Holding who's gone back 30 yards and is scowling. I still don't believe he's serious but I'm not sure any more. I'm thinking: he's a world-class pro, I'm only an amateur, he can't be intending to do this.

Then he starts tearing at full speed and about a second before his arm came over, I thought: bloody hell, he is serious. His arm spun, I didn't see a thing, I mean he bowled at 100 miles per hour. I lost a sense of what was happening, could hear him saying, 'Whoosh man, how's that', I looked around, the wicket-keeper was throwing the ball up in the air, they were cheering and congratulating him, the umpire was saying 'out' and I was confused. 'I didn't hit that,' I said. 'It was so quick, I didn't even see it. So how could I have hit it?' And Holding is all pumped up and again two inches from my nose. 'Of course you didn't see it, man, because the wicket-keeper had the ball all the time', and everyone just fell around laughing. The scam had worked perfectly, I'd been done. Lovely, lovely man, Michael Holding."

When Wyman is driving his daughters, Katie, Jessie and Matilda to his place in Suffolk, he slows the car through the villages and tells them about the England of his dreams. "See, there's the duck pond and the village green where people played sport, especially cricket. Where one village would play against its neighbour, where the blacksmith went in against the vicar, and where everyone came to watch. It brought the community together."

You can easily picture the scene in the car because he still has an innocent sort of optimism; the years of rock'n'roll didn't take everything and his love of cricket burns as brightly now as it did in his youth. The torch first came to him from his maternal grandmother, Florrie Jeffery, an intelligent and well-read woman who inspired her grandson.

"I came from a slum area of Penge in southeast London and, before going to school, my grand-mother had taught me to recite the alphabet backwards. She went into service at the age of 13 and worked in a big house in Upper Sydenham which happened to be next door to the legendary cricketer, W G Grace. That's where she got her love for the game. During the second world war I was sent to live in my gran's house to ease the pressure on my mum. Later she used to watch the cricket with me on this six-inch black-and-white television…"

He was one of three boys from a class of 52 in Penge who made it to grammar school but he was not allowed to forget from where he had come. "At the grammar school I was desperate to play cricket but I couldn't get any coaching and I didn't have the gear. I didn't get a chance in the school first team, nor the second or third team. Cricket was for the richer boys from Orpington and all around there, the boys who were the best dressed, the most well spoken."

He and his friend John Blagden got the job as scorers for the Lloyds Bank cricket team who played at Beckenham and when they had rustled up enough money they went to their first Test match at Lord's. Sixty years later it is still vivid to him. To the Rolling Stones, Wyman brought his love for cricket. "I was lucky, Mick [Jagger] and Charlie [Watts] were great cricket fans as well. No matter where we were, we followed England's Test matches. On tour I would read books about cricket, the older the better."

In the midst of all the attention on Wyman's many love affairs, his passion for cricket was the only one that remained beneath the radar. "The people who interviewed the Rolling Stones weren't interested in that…

Before the Bunbury cricket club there was the Eric Clapton XI, before that just a friendship between English and Clapton and a shared love for cricket. Clapton's interest wasn't like Wyman's, he didn't have the archivist's fascination with history but he loved the game, especially the spirit of lan Botham…

Wyman was there when, on July 11, 1989, the Eric Clapton XI passed away: "We were playing at Penn Street, near Amersham in Buckinghamshire. Eric had a big tour of Japan coming up, his manager Roger Forrester was wicketkeeper and he and Eric were a bit nervous about an injury. I was in the slips with Eric and every time someone snicked a ball, Eric would dodge out of the way. I said, 'Eric, you're not even trying'. He said, 'I've got to watch the fingers, got Japan coming up'. But I said, 'Well, we got to try, we got to go for it, that's what we're here for'. It must have got to him because he went for the next ball and it knocked his finger. He groaned, held up his broken [False: Sprained) finger and there were shouts of 'ice bucket, ice bucket'. You could see the finger was pulled right back. Eric walked towards the pavilion, so concerned about his finger that he didn't feel the bee land on his other hand and sting him.

We heard the second set of screams. What's up now? 'A bee has stung my other hand'. It swelled and Eric's sitting there with his hands in ice buckets and the rest of us roaring with laughter. We're still laughing when the game resumes and the next ball comes flying down the wicket, takes a bad bounce and hits Roger Forrester right on the forehead, knocking him out. Eric decided that maybe having his own cricket team wasn't the best thing and the team became the Bunbury XI. Of course, Eric still plays with the Bunburys."

Wyman's greatest day in the Bunbury shirt came on May 6, 1995, in a match to mark the 50th anniversary of the ending of the second world war. It was played at the Oval and the match was televised live by Sky Sports… and Wyman became the first man to take a hat trick in a televised match at the Oval. Gary Lineker was first to go.

"It was his first ball. He was used to hitting sixties and eighties, so he was rightly pissed off. Then Trevor McDonald went. And the last one was Charlie Colville, the Sky cricket commentator, and everyone was happy with that. I was man of the match. It's one of the things I love about cricket, the people. I haven't met many people in cricket that I didn't like. There were a couple that were a bit dodgy. Imran Khan wasn't the nicest person in the world, I must say. But few and far between, and I enjoyed every minute I spent among them."

After the Oval hat trick, Wyman thought he'd be clever and bow out. But he could no more leave cricket than he could kick the St Moritz habit and, of course, he was sucked back in.

He turned up in Cranleigh last Sunday, not even kidding himself that it would be the last. They had a fine lunch before play and during the habitual auction, they put up a bat signed by the great Australian Don Bradman. It made Wyman think of Watts, perhaps his best friend from the Rolling Stones days. How he and Charlie talked cricket in far-flung places and when the touring was over Charlie started collecting cricket memorabilia. He has quite a collection now and Wyman, trying to remember when his birthday fell, thought the Bradman bat would make a fine gift. Typically, he worked out how far he would go in the bidding. He decided to go to two or three grand, but he didn't even get close. The bat went to Waters for £20,000…

That afternoon, when the match began, Wyman's team was being made to look laughable by the style of Mark Ramprakash's batting. One of the finest English batsmen of his generation, Ramprakash was hitting sixes or fours on virtually every ball. Then, four months short of his 72nd birthday, along came Wyman. On his third ball, he bowled his trademark slow and looping delivery. Ramprakash seemed to go for it but missed, the ball crashed into the stumps and the Surrey superstar was walking towards the pavilion.

"Afterwards, I met him and said, 'Hey, man, thanks for that'. He just smiled at me and I didn't have the impression that he had given me a present. I mean, people have been trying to get him out for years. I don't think he gives presents."

And so old Bill Wyman, who got to be a cricketer in his fifties, rolls on to the next rendezvous - the Bunburys play an Eddie Jordan XI at Stowe House, near Silverstone, early next month. He supposes he'll have to be there - he's got a reputation to defend, a passion to satisfy. To that, who could say no?

The next day - Monday, June 16, and Bill is up early taking care of his new charge Shoe, then Shoe was shipped off to the PACT Animal Sanctuary at River Farm in Norfolk to be looked after - and Bill also gave them a cash donation.

The next two days were spent with Bill working on his projects, including up-coming gigs and photo exhibition. Bill also continued updating his Stones archive, with bouts of footie watching in between.