If you run a shambolic cricket team, the bleak midwinter is a crucial time of year

It's the fixture-gathering season - which is a delicate operation, and more than a little nerve-racking

Marcus is dreaming of warm, languid days (Ping Zhu)

Hooray for woollen socks. Three cheers for scarves, and let's hear it for thermal long johns. The heating has been on semi-permanently and the boiler is making some terrible noises. Every time anyone puts on the electric fan heater in the bathroom I imagine wads of £20 notes being thrown on the living room fire. If we had a fire in the living room, which we don't. I could get one built in, if there was any money left over from heating the bathroom.

Every instinct tells us to hide under the duvet and wait for spring to come. But for anyone who runs a shambolic cricket team, as I do, this is a crucial time of year. This, the bleak midwinter, is the fixture-gathering season. While the land sleeps, we alone are harvesting. Our work now will determine the shape of the summer to come. It's a delicate operation, and more than a little nerve-racking.

My team, as I may have mentioned, consists mainly of old crocks in their forties, fifties and, increasingly, sixties, all of us raging at the dying of the cricketing light. Because we don't know how many seasons we have left, we all want to play as often as we can, which means we need a fixture every weekend between late April and the end of September. And not just any fixture, either. We like playing in pretty villages, and we don't like playing against teams who will crush us just because they can. Very, very few teams aren't better than us. It takes a certain imagination to make a decent game out of a fixture with us.

Each year, then, there is wastage. There are teams you simply don't want to play again. They are too young, or too good, or they are run by a psychopath. Actually I weeded most of those out long ago. The real problem now is the teams who don't want to play us again. Since we became a touring version of Last Of The Summer Wine, a few opposition sides have lost patience. Is that fielder ever going to pick up that ball that just sped past him? Yes, but give him time. The all-run five is a threat in every game we play.

Most teams like to play on the same weekend every year, but leap years present their own problems. Instead of going back two days (last year Sunday 26 April, this year 24 April), some teams choose to go forward five, and we have gridlock. It is like knitting with spaghetti. I have 12 games set so far, a few others to fit in, and options running out. Soon I'll be asking one team to change the date to accommodate another team, which will then free up another weekend for a third team, and so on. For it all to work out, you need the patience of Job, the luck of the Irish and the negotiating skills of Captain Jean-Luc Picard.

Fortunately, fixtures secretaries start to form bonds with other fixtures secretaries, as they are the only people who truly understand what we are going through. Sometimes fixtures secretaries marry other fixture secretaries and have hordes of little fixture secretaries.

And all we dream of, in between our endless emails to each other, is the summer, of warm, languid days; bickering with our team-mates and glaring at the opposition; of chocolate cake, and cheese and pickle sandwiches; of catastrophic umpiring decisions and soft dismissals and dropped catches and anguished post-mortems in the pub afterwards. This is the way we get through winter, and it's far warmer than any duvet.