CENSORSHIP by Lord's has become as damagingly fatuous as it has always been feudal, and Lord MacLaurin's new broom should sweep it away forthwith. Blue pencils have smudged the century – from Peel and Parkin, through Laker and Lamb– and it has done nobody any good, least of all high-horsed and, in these cases, so often ludicrous `authority'.

St Johns's Wood should have thrown in the towel after the unilluminating pickle over Raymond Illingworth's book and Devon Malcolm's newspaper columns. Censorship denied Allan Lamb and his Championship fields of England a mutually bonny farewell parade last summer. Perhaps Lord's thought they'd get away with that – nobody gives a hoot about ball-tampering, and anyway Lambie's style has always had the whiff of a romancer and a chancer about it for all his popularity. But when it comes to defiance Jack Russell is a very different kettle of cove. Jack digs his heels in, and his teeth into the trouserleg. In a Test innings, Russell glues his principles to the crease with no compromise or fancy flourish (except for that leave-alone curtain-rail shot). Jack is stubborn in the 29-in-4½-hours or 55-in-5-hours class. Ask them in Jo'burg or Bridgetown.

Tony Brown is the ECB's censor. It used to be Donald Carr. Once Donald summoned Graham Gooch to discuss censoring one of Graham's beefs in a book (doubtless, because it invariably was, something undiplomatic about Comrade Lester Bird of Antigua). `This must come out,' said Donald. Said Graham, `Rather pointless, Donald, this is the paperback reprint of everything you passed in last year's hardback.'`Er, yes, quite so, sorry, ol'boy.'

As Russell began growling last month, Brown justified his blue pencil with the hypothetical example, `If someone writes So-and-so is a plonker, then So-and-so rushes into print himself and says Well, I think he's a plonker too, then it all gets out of hand.' Well, long freed by authority's restraints, on this page in April Mike Selvey called one of his old new-ball muckers, Simon Hughes, `a pillock'– and the truth didn't seem to do either of them any harm, did it?

 Jack doesn't call anyone a pillock or a plonker. But you get the gist all right. And why not?

In fact the book is no Waqar indipper of any ferocity. Russell just wants his say, without compromise. HarperCollins have cornered this market, give them their due I suppose. They seem to operate a sliding-scale re fame – Botham's best-seller went to nearly 400 pages, Gooch's the mid-300s (just over 333 in fact), Lamb was allowed 280 pages, and our Jack 40 less than that. Doubtless too, this pagination reflects the amount of lolly paid. How much, and how many pages, for The Shaun Udal Story or Craig White: My Life at the Top?

 Russell is interesting on Gloucestershire and how, once he had given up the booze himself, the old lags and barflys in the club and on the circuit began (he perceived) to despise him. Bill Athey and Syd Lawrence stuck by Jack at this time, and, relevantly, they were the other two to play for England. Also a real goodie and generous encourager, poignantly, was Andy Brassington, the 1st XI keeper, and a damn good one too, whom young Jack had replaced.

This spring, Jack returned from his enforced heel-kicking hol with the England team with, as Baldrick might put it, `An extremely bold and cunning plan.' He booked in at a secluded hideaway in Cornwall for a few days `to clear my head and give it undisturbed thought'. Then he returned to the county ground at Bristol and said he'd only accept the captaincy if he could also be secretary, chairman, sole selector, catering-committee supremo, the lot – you gathered he also volunteered to work the scoreboard once he'd got out. As he writes, he demanded `total responsibility for all aspects involved with the cricket, at all levels in the county … I would gladly put my neck on the block, but I wanted to control the destiny of my own neck. They were a little shocked, I think, by the boldness of my ideas.' I am sure they were. He didn't get the job.

All the dear nut's fads and fancies and foibles are chapter-and-versed. They seem to out-Knott Knott. You would not have thought that possible. But finding a Weetabix inedible unless it has been `soaked in the milk for precisely and exactly 12 minutes'– well, I ask you.

On tour, on Christmas Days, his faraway wife back home has to hold the telephone to the television so he can hear all the Queen's Speech, and the full anthem top and tail. He may be a fervent royalist, but Jack wouldn't give Her Majesty his ex-directory number. Only his wife and mother are in on that secret. Not a soul at the county ground knows it nor, apparently, his address. It must be somewhere up near his art gallery at Chipping Sodbury.

Like Jack, I was brought up around Stroud and, like him, romped those blissful hills and hillocks and golden valleys. Away to the south, over Woodchester and Nailsworth's steep climb and along the top of the Cotswold escarpment's first sentry, nestles Chipping Sodbury. Us Stroudites used to call it Soddin' Chipbury and seldom visited for, legend has it, its folks were, well, `right queer'– a stubborn lot, suspicious too; lovely blokes in their way but not quite all there or with it. Nicely daft, in fact. So no surprise really, is it, that Stroud's most deservedly famed and celebrated modern son soon moved down Soddin' Chipbury way?

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