Dear Cricket Monthly,

The Scots have the perfect word for days like this: dreich. It's 8.30 on a Monday morning, it's winter in Yorkshire, and it's cold, wet and grey, as if the world were drawing its warmth and light from a five-watt bulb somewhere far, far away. My feet are wet, and in the identikit coffee shop in which I sit, I've just been asked for the third time if I want a sickly looking pastry for £3.50.

It is the sort of Monday morning that for much of my life only one thing really brightened: the sudden flare of recollection on waking that somewhere distant and sunny, England were playing a Test match. Usually it seemed they were battling for a draw - I did grow up in the 1990s after all. But somehow, after Test Match Special, and tea, and the bittersweet excitement of following England, life almost always seemed more bearable.

I say "almost always" because for eight years cricket writing became my job, and cricket inevitably became more complicated. Anxieties crept in: That stat, could I use it somewhere?… Reporting at Chelmsford: will there be an edible sandwich inside a mile?… Will I have a job next year? And also "almost" because, as a sufferer of depression, there were always a few days that not even cricket and Test Match Special could redeem. Indeed, that failure was a kind of warning sign that things were bad.

It is now five years since I swapped laptop for whiteboard-marker and became a schoolteacher. Stepping back beyond the boundary, what have I found? Is the game the same glorious distraction as ever? What is the cricket-following life of a reformed cricket writer like?

I suppose I actually find following cricket hard. I struggle to find ways of doing it that I really enjoy. Sky TV is expensive and grating. I'm reluctant to pay 1/25th of a new teacher's wage to listen to Ian Botham tell me that a ball I can quite plainly see is "racing to the boundary". I can't help thinking the English board's TV-rights own goal is one reason that just one boy among hundreds I've ever taught had real enthusiasm for cricket.

Like TV, the best cricket writing has always painted pictures too: "I imagine that the Lord one day gathered together a heap of Yorkshire clay and breathed into it and said, 'Emmott Robinson, go on and bowl at the pavilion end for Yorkshire.'" The great Cardusian tradition produced cricket writing that was poignant, funny, evocative and stylish. It ran through Fingleton, Arlott and Engel. All possessed something hard to sum up, something like a sense of cricket's importance and unimportance in that vast, mysterious tragicomedy we call life. But now - with Peter Roebuck gone, and Gideon Haigh and Rahul Bhattacharya often otherwise engaged - there is no cricket writer I'd make a special point of reading, for the first time I can remember.

At its best, following cricket was like listening to great jazz - on top of the settled rhythm there was wonderful variety

All of which makes me treasure Test Match Special even more. In truth, there have been times I have wondered whether what I truly love is cricket or just Test Match Special. In a world of sports coverage by obsessives for obsessives, here is a wonderful exception. It still feels like having a chat with the funniest and best-informed people in the house, and I beg the BBC not to fiddle with it. Vic Marks' voice, Jonathan Agnew's mastery of tone, and unvarnished Boycott are worth the licence fee alone.

Another snag can be working out what's on when. There is just so much cricket: even the gourmand's appetite is eventually dulled. In 2015, England had 96 days of internationals scheduled (13 Tests, 26 one-day internationals and five T20s). Put another way, they were playing about every fourth day. As any English teacher knows, "They are as sick that surfeit with too much as they that starve with nothing."

To cram it all in, the schedule has taken on a frenzied syncopated rhythm that is almost impossible to follow. No one knows when anything happens. Test matches nudge closer to starting in April, a month famed for rain since at least the time of Chaucer, G. Ashes series arrive in gangs. Tests are piled one on the other without breathing space. The fallow periods have gone and the magical rhythm of Thursday, 11am, every other week has been broken. And it becomes very confusing very quickly.

I'd like more variety too. At its best, following cricket was like listening to great jazz - on top of the settled rhythm there was wonderful variety. English players emerged from public school and pit and almost everywhere in between. Venues were really different: Karachi and Lord's and the old unsanitised Hill in Sydney. Pimm's in one place and a pig with Botham's name written on it in the other. Different cultures produced a richness of methods and philosophies. Now, the days when England field a team wholly made up of players from private schools streamed through county development programmes must be very close. Will there ever again be an England XI featuring a university graduate or a former labourer? The Test world is more professional - but it seems greyer too.

But stepping back from cricket as a job has let me see some wonderful things more clearly too. I can play again! The feeling of ball pinging off (somewhere near) the middle, or a ball that spins inside the bat and hits the stumps… love it! From outside the cocoon of press boxes, I love the morning hum at Lord's and the sheer unapologetic Yorkshire-ness of Headingley. It's one of life's greatest pleasures to enjoy a glass of wine in the stand as are watching Kevin Pietersen, and Mark Wood's horse without worrying about what I'll have to write about it. On winter's nights I read cricket books for pleasure again! Most of all I am grateful for the company of all the extraordinary cricket people who've become my friends.

So, while not exactly joyful, the view from beyond the cricket-writing boundary seems far from desperate either. Now, if you'll excuse me, I have a lesson to plan…

Yours faithfully,
Paul Coupar

Paul Coupar is a former features editor of the Wisden Cricketer. He now runs an educational charity, The Linacre Institute

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