It must be over 20 years since the Six Nations - or Five as it was then - registered in my consciousness.

I can still remember the crackle of the black and white television - almost as old as the championship itself - in my grandmother’s living room in Catford as my Dad turned it on and the commentary of Bill McLaren reached our ears a good 10 seconds before any sort of picture materialised.

A quick repositioning of the aerial atop the old wooden set and there they were, England and Scotland battling it out in a game I had little or no understanding of.

I had no idea what that ornate silver teapot being held aloft by some mud-spattered, bloodied player at the end of the game was all about, and knew less that two decades on I’d be trying to recall the first time I watched a game of rugby.

I was into football then. Played it, watched it, had a Mexico ’86 bedspread, a completed Mexico ’86 sticker album, I wanted to be Gary Lineker.

Times changed.
By the end of the 1980s the England rugby team had its own pin-up boy, a 22-year-old centre by the name of Will Carling. He became the youngest ever captain of England around the same time I became skipper of my primary school team, appointed by our new rugby-obsessed PE teacher Mr Pooley. The dashing Carling would soon be leading his men to back-to-back Grand Slams and a World Cup final.

I was leading St Albans Primary School to a gallant junior semi-final defeat against some much bigger boys from Canning Town.

My uncle, a billposter, furnished me with a billboard-sized image of Carling, though quite how much of it he thought I would be able to put up in the box room of my parents house was a riddle I never solved.

No matter, the rugby bug had well and truly taken hold.

The memories foremost in my mind from those early years of my fascination with the Five Nations: England kissing a Grand Slam goodbye at Murrayfield; France going the length of the field at Twickenham; the Underwood brothers’ mum jumping up and down like a demented evangelist; Mick Galway lolloping over the line at Lansdowne Road, prompting my mother ‘to do a Mrs Underwood’ in our living room; Ieuan Evans mugging Rory Underwood at the Arms Park.

Times changed again.
By the time I attended my first championship game at Twickenham in 2000, there were six teams instead of five, I was wedged in the back of a ‘borrowed’ Southampton Institute minibus, nursing an almighty hangover and more concerned with texting the girl I’d met in the student union the night before than whether England would defeat Italy that afternoon.

We took our seats in the front row of the top tier at Twickenham. My friend to my left sat rigid in his seat, paralysed by his until then undiscovered fear of heights, and a hangover the size of the West car park. England buried the Azzurri that day, and I buried the pain in my head with a crate of Stella on the way back down the M3.

Eight years later times have, inevitably, changed once more.

England have won a World Cup, nearly won another, but only added one more Slam to their collection. France, meanwhile, have added a further two, Ireland have been stockpiling Triple Crowns, Wales have been recycling coaches and squeezed in a first Slam since 1978, Italy have progressed quietly, Scotland, er, look menacing this year. Mr Pooley has become a priest, I have moved in with that girl from the student union, International Rugby News has this all-singing, all-dancing, new website.

See, a lot can happen in a short space of time. A lot more will happen over the course of the next seven weeks. The championship is here again.

Enjoy it.