We were warned not to travel British Airways – because they have the worst record of losing luggage, they said. We shrugged – partly because the fares were higher everywhere else, but mostly because we thought our luck was better than that.

There was no reason to think that though; our colleague Sreeram’s visa was still not through – weird, because we had a letter from the ICC inviting all three of us to present our paper at the Centenary Conference. Weird, because we’d applied together and yet only two of us had got the visa so far.

Jatin, in his first international flight, was edgy as it was, but Sreeram’s impending absence from the conference filled him with dread. I felt disappointed because Sreeram had actually been the most excited about the trip, going to Lord’s, putting faces on names he’d only read about in black-and-white and making contact with interesting people who might contribute some day to our cricket website HoldingWilley.com. We still hoped he would get the visa today so that he could take the night flight and make it to Lord’s.

Near the end of our thankfully uneventful flight (which included being offered vegetarian food as they’d “run out” of non-veg) the Brit head purser announced that England had won the second Ashes Test to go 1-0 up in the series. The message was repeated in Hindi by an Indian stewardess, who obviously had no interest in cricket, let alone the Ashes, given how many things she mispronounced in her rather short sentence. Clearly, it had suddenly become protocol to announce this – the Brits are not so used to winning after all.

Later, at Immigration, the Van Morrison look-alike eyed me suspiciously and asked my agenda in the UK. I mumbled something about the ICC inviting us and congratulated him for England taking the lead in an Ashes series. “When’s the last time that happened?” I asked him. I thought I was being friendly, but Van’s famed temperament seemed to have rubbed off on him too as he gave me a contemptuous stare that seemed to say – “Go fuck yourself, you cricket pansy.”

Relieved to get our luggage back unscathed, Jatin and I grandly made our way to the taxi stand and got into a black taxi with an extremely courteous driver who gave us the low-down on how quickly the Test match had ended. Jatin’s eyes, still taking in his first new country, unfortunately fell on the taxi meter within the first two minutes itself, and couldn’t tear themselves away as the numbers kept reeling. Despite trying to appear cool and unruffled next to him (after all I am 18 years older), I was feverishly making mental projections of where that blasted meter would eventually freeze – it promised to be more than what we were paying for our stay at the hotel (which in turn was my monthly salary in 1993).

I tried lapsing into the “dissolve the thought, focus on the physical sensation” mode that had been somewhat addressing my chronic depression of the last few months. London seemed truly beautiful, especially given its scale, and the weather was fine. And we were here for a worthy purpose – to unveil our own invention and the unprecedented study that supported it.

At the hotel (Blue Bells at Notting Hill), we found out to our dismay that Sreeram still hadn’t got his visa. He would now miss the Lord’s get-together but could still make it in time for the conference at Oxford.

I was going to make a presentation after almost 15 years (and even before that I’d probably just presented 3-4 times in my life), and my history of stammering made me somewhat anxious. But somewhere I also felt quite assured by the belief that what we were putting forward was refreshingly new and would hold interest regardless of the style it was presented in. We needed to not come in the way of its comprehension, that’s all.

Sreeram didn’t get his visa the next day either, and things were now getting very irritating. For us, because we had to now incorporate his part in my presentation, but for him, I can only begin to understand the frustration of being at tenterhooks. Jatin was palpably depressed and I had to give ourselves a pep talk to focus on what was required. We had to prevent our energy from dropping.

After a long search to get a plug adaptor for my laptop (which ensured that there would be no rehearsal of our presentation), we went back to the hotel to change into our formal clothing. Again, it was after ages I was putting on these clothes – suit, tie and it really felt like I was going to a fancy dress party dressed as someone utterly not me.

The Pakistani cab driver who dropped us to Lord’s was sentimental about Indo-Pak relations and he narrated incidents that suggested considerable harmony in the UK rather than in our own countries. On reaching the WG Grace gate of Lord’s, my mind malfunctioned, and I forgot to take the change back from the driver (who, for all the harmony he was passionate about, didn’t volunteer it himself). As we walked in to Lord’s, Clive Lloyd strolled in right next to us, and the surreal dream had begun.

(Jatin adds: For me, the big name cricketers were not the main draw of the conference. My interactions with the statisticians and the historians would be much more enriching, I was always sure of that.)