Green green grass of home

I used to have a lot of time for Simon Schama as he wrote two of my favourite pieces of popular history, Citizens and The Embarrassment of Riches. But then around his BBC series History of Britain he went off the beam, morphing in a supersized twat, sashaying about the country in that ridiculous leather jacket. A painful misjudged attempt to be Rock n' Roll Historian, he came off like a "cool" dad throwing ten years out of date hip-hop slang into conversations with his teenage kids.

But he has clawed back a bit of respect for his pretty decent Radio 4 series on baseball, the first episode of which is about his (and my) team, the Boston Red Sox. Schama taught at Harvard in the 80s, and that is when he fell in love with the sport and the team. He has a convert's enthusiasm, so you can forgive him some lapses of detail - he says at one point that the Green Monster (above), one of Fenway Park's walls, is in centre field when it is in left. There are also some inaccuracies which a bit of judicious editing should have rectified. At one point he tells us that Fenway has the only old-time manual scoreboard in baseball. Then a few moments later he interviews the guy who runs the scoreboard who says that Wrigley Field and Fenway are the only two manual scoreboards in the league.

Still he gets the overall feel spot-on, particularly about his first encounter with baseball, which is not about the game per se, it is about the senses. One of my abiding memories of childhood is my first trip to Fenway, aged about five, up the stairs from the bowels of the stadium, dazzled by the field with grass the richest and deepest shade of green I have ever seen. And the smells: roasting peanuts, hot dogs, frying onions; and I could even smell the grass itself, which reminded me of the lawn at my grandmother's house. And hearing the jaunty tunes of the organ over the PA, vendors calling out in deep, thick Bostonian: 'Pahpcahn heah! Hot dogs heah!' I do not know how long I really stayed there, but when I think about I seem frozen forever, awed, hand in hand with my father, one of the few times I can recall him touching me.