If I inherited my interest in sport from anyone, it was from my paternal grandfather. Intensely solitary and private, he spent most of his working life driving red double-decker buses through the streets of central London. He loathed his job and, for relief, used to box in the pubs of the East End. He was, by all accounts, an adept little flyweight - and his unmarked face and strong, straight nose were testament, I always thought, to his dexterity with the gloves on.
He liked most sports - particularly football and boxing - but could never understand the appeal of rugby union. In old age, with his hearing failing and his wife dead, he moved out to Essex to be closer to my father. I visited him often and after the usual initial awkward introduction (Is your mother well? How's school?) we would invariably talk about sport, for what else was there to discuss? But we never talked about rugby, which he did not classify as a sport.
"Why not?" I used to ask. "These guys are as tough as any boxer."
"But they spend all their time rolling about on the ground or kicking the ball out of play."
I thought often of my grandfather during England's victory over the All Blacks in Wellington - the first time they had won in New Zealand for 30 years - because they spent so much of the game rolling on the ground or kicking for touch. Like my grandfather, I could never really see the point of rugby. It was a sport dominated by a certain repellent macho public school mentality. I disliked its misogyny and posturing, and the way the occasional fan was prevented by the insularity of the club networks from ever having the chance to watch England at Twickenham.
In his new book, Muddied Oafs: the last days of rugger, to be published by Yellow Jersey Press in the autumn, the novelist Richard Beard distinguishes between rugby union as it is played today by professionals and "rugger", a fierce contact sport developed in the Victorian public schools to build character and prepare young men for the imperial challenges ahead. According to Beard the "dark side of rugger the man-maker is rugger's embarrassing cousin, the dreaded rugger-bugger", who would often drink too much and take his trousers down in public. And it was the hard-drinking rugger-bugger that I disliked most about rugby.
Then in 1995, I watched the World Cup in South Africa and my attitude changed. I admired in particular the ferocity and technique of a Jonah Lomu-inspired New Zealand. The first half of the celebrated semi-final in which a talented England were crushed by an All Blacks side playing their own inimitable version of "total" rugby (I recall even the number eight, Zinzan Brooke, dropped a goal from the halfway line) remains for me one of the most memorable of all sporting occasions. It was exhilarating to watch rugby transformed into a celebratory art, an exhibition of the ingenuity, muscular mobility and power of the human animal.
That match - rather like the occasion when Hungary thrashed the England football team at Wembley in 1953 - marked a moment of definitive rupture in English rugby, the point at which the administrators recognised that if England were ever to compete with the best from the southern hemisphere, then professionalism had to be embraced and the domestic game entirely remade, if not in the image of football then as something far more competitive and commercially attractive. The era of sham amateurism was at an end.
The England team we see today - athletic, determined, tenacious, skilful - shows how much progress has been made since 1995. In bulk alone, these guys are awesome. It is a long time since there has been an English - indeed British - sporting team as good as this. They deserve to win the World Cup in the autumn, if only to show that all that time spent building themselves up in the gym hasn't been wasted. I think even my grandfather would have enjoyed watching them.
