WE'RE down to one or two survivors of the Titanic now, very old women who, as toddlers on the fatal night, were handed down into lifeboats which did not have room for "one of England's greatest men" - as editor W T Stead is described on a plaque attached to a hefty stone outside Darlington public library.

And we'll be in the last few dozens, and subtracting fast, of those who three years later saw Dr W G Grace bat in his last innings. When he was aged 66 in July 1914 he hit 69 not out at Eltham, a South London suburb which has a 14th-century royal palace and a 1990s black mark.

If there's anyone still out there who was dandled on his father's knee only a few years earlier at Darlington's Feethams cricket ground when Dr Grace played there, please will he ask matron to let us know. It would be nice to think it was at the Feethams crease that the bearded leviathan hissed something to this effect at the bowler who had appealed for leg-before: "Quiet, you fool. It's me they've all come to see, not you."

Today's sub-text, then, is vicarious celebrity, the little bit of reflected glory we all revel in whenever we are awarded a usually undeserved walk-on role in one of life's great dramas or, more often, its soap operas. All the world's a stage and, from time to time, a broom to sweep it is thrust into the hands of most of us.

It does not count, though, if you can merely recount exactly what you were doing when Kennedy was shot; unless, that is, you were gawping on the grassy knoll or cleaning top-floor windows at the school book depository.

Let me tell you about Saturday, August 14, 1948. We were on our way by 7am, with a wave to my mother as she closed the doors of the garage dad had built ready for the day when his name came to the top of the year-long waiting list for a Morris Eight with the new sloping back.

My father knew the road well. The first five miles were those he cycled daily to the £6-a-week grind at the button factory near Croydon airport; past the place where a year before he had been badly hurt, a yellow-caped victim of a hit-and-run lorry on a wet night; past the turn he had taken in 1936 when he had pedalled towards the great red glow on the night the Crystal Palace burned down.

He reached down occasionally from his sturdy Rudge 26in wheeler to give his lad, saddle right down on a brand-new Hercules, a helping hand as we puffed up suburban hills. We freewheeled down into Brixton, past large, under-occupied houses already beginning the decay that within 20 years would be rationalised into their demolition in favour of high-rise blocks teeming with Caribbean life.

We were in the long queue at Kennington Oval by nine. We were in standard cricket-watching uniform for the respectable working class, Dad in sports coat and 12-year-old me in grammar-school blazer, both of us with white shirtcollars folded over the jacket neck. An hour before Lindwall hurled the first ball at Len Hutton, we were sitting on the crowded grass just behind the boundary rail, opposite the gasometers and at right angles to the grandstands and our tie-wearing betters.

It was a terrible day. England - including Compton, Edrich and Evans - were all out before lunch for 52. When in late afternoon we returned to where we had left our bikes near the Tube station, the shiny Hercules had gone but the severed chain and the old Rudge remained.

Oh, and the cricketing giant we had pilgrimaged to see in his last match for Australia was at the wicket for barely a minute. A bespectacled almost-unknown, name of Eric Hollies, entered the record books as all-time spoilsport by bowling out Don Bradman, second ball, for a duck.

An unplayable googly from Hollies? Rather, it has been said, it was simply that the great man, even more the finest cricketer of his century than Grace had been of Victorian times (and a far superior sportsman than the sharp-tongued doctor), was a bit misty-eyed.

He can be excused for that, because he had just received a tumultuously affectionate reception as he strode to the wicket for what we all guessed, given the near-certainty of an innings-defeat for England, would be his last time in a Test match.

So I, my dad (and 30,000 others) are to blame, then. Our emotional farewell prevented the Don from raising his never-rivalled batting average in Test matches to 100; just four runs would have lifted it from 99.94, his obituary last week reminded me.

Several other Ridley bikes have been pinched since then, but never on such a momentous I-was-there occasion.

l The ten-mile ride home on the Rudge crossbar was an uncomfortable one. My father, the same age as Bradman, insisted we went a few hundred yards out of our way to pass the scene of his own thwarted sporting ambition. In 60 years of supporting Crystal Palace FC, he was never to see them bring the FA Cup to Selhurst Park.

FUNNY old game, cricket. Indeed, so funny-peculiar that we used to believe that only the English-speaking countries could hope to understand the difference between deep fine leg and extra cover, let alone all the other small print attached to the basic premise that one team is in until it is all out.

In fact, cricket is played in Holland a bit, there is an annual festival of it on an appallingly uneven field in Corfu and I was myself once "caught Gonzales bowled Mendoza" for eight in Buenos Aires.

But even the mildest of chauvinists who have ever risked life and limb at silly mid-on must have swallowed hard when the BBC announced last week that England faced crushing defeat in Gaul.

Well, the Union Flag might as well be pulled down for good if even the French were now thrashing us at the game we invented ... but it turned out the place was spelt Galle and it was in Ceylon.

Asterix had not, after all, turned from clubbing the Romans to bowling bodyline at the Anglo-Saxons.

All this arises from a spot of incestuous lateral-thinking. The Times of London the other day invoked the D&S Times and in so doing linked cricket and the writer Samuel Beckett. From The Times piece came the information that Beckett once signed an autograph: "Carried my bat for a duck."

For Beckett lived most of his life in France and he also knew all about cricket. Indeed, he is the only Nobel prizewinner to get a mention in Wisden, a distinction he carried to his 1989 grave because he had played against English counties for Dublin university in his native Ireland.

On one of his more optimistic days, the philosopher-playwright might instead have vouchsafed to the autograph-hunter: "I bat, therefore I am." Beckett, though, was never one to harp on about the incredible lightness of being, so we can be sure that his quote has a lot to do with one of the constant themes, the apparent pointlessness of most human strivings.

Where does the D&S Times comes in? On this very page, that's where. Our weekly Looking Back item had given an example of someone literally carrying his bat throughout an innings for a duck. George Sumner opened the batting for York Wanderers against Selby 100 years ago, was still at the wicket when his tenth partner was out, yet had scored not a single run.

Perhaps he was waiting in vain for the 12th man to stride to the crease, name of Godot, when he would have at last hit out