TIME flies as you get older, or so they say. Actually, I think my recollections are getting mixed up, so some things that occurred only recently feel like they took place decades ago and I think events from years back happened only yesterday.

But it was a bit of a shock when watching the highlights of the England rugby union team’s weekend win over Australia to learn that prior to the game the Twickenham crowd witnessed a celebration of the tenth anniversary of our boys winning that sport’s World Cup.

Was it really ten years ago that I joined the many thousands leaping for joy (and relief) in the massive Sydney stadium as that last-minute drop goal went over?

Looking at the players parading for the crowd on Saturday, you could tell from the added lines on their faces and (in some cases) the added pounds on their frames that their finest hour didn’t only happen yesterday.

And what a finest hour it was, because their victory was no fluke. Guided by Easingwold School old boy and head coach Clive Woodward, they dominated world rugby from the middle of 2000.

Indeed, in the season before the 2003 World Cup England defeated every other major rugby union country at least once, including remarkable home-and-away victories over the All Blacks and a first-ever test win in Australia.

I had long wanted to travel to Australia, to see the country and my relatives who had settled there after living in various Pacific islands and New Zealand.

So it made sense to combine that aspiration with going to the 2003 World Cup, but staying in Sydney and getting match tickets would still clearly be fairly expensive.

What decided me was my belief that England would win – a highly unusual and frankly pretty illogical confidence in a sporting result, but one which remained unshaken until almost the end.

Wales “winning” the first half of the quarter-final didn’t bother me, because I was actually flying to Australia at the time and all I saw on the TVs in Singapore Airport was England squeezing them out in the second period.

The boys in white dominated the semi-final against France in torrential rain, but before that I’d seen Australia get a surprise but deserved win over the All Blacks, so England were up against the home side in the final.

That was when my nerves kicked in; not when Australia went ahead at the start but when they clawed back England’s lead and took the game into extra time. That also took us into uncharted territory and the wind out of my sails. Surely we weren’t going to fall at the last hurdle?

Well, as we know, the boys took the ball downfield, got it back to Jonny and the rest is rugby history.

The team’s achievements were perhaps undermined in the notoriously short-term sporting memory when England’s form dipped in the ensuing seasons, though they still managed some memorable victories and, perhaps most unlikely of all, defended their title in the 2007 World Cup final.

Now we have the prospect of the 2015 World Cup being played in England and a team which, while not yet anywhere near the level of their 2003 predecessors, have played some promising rugby, including that flawed but welcome win on Saturday.

So maybe we can once more look forward to some positive sporting distractions from the serious stuff of life.

• STILL on a positive note, one of the joys of living somewhere like York is going down its historic streets on a bright autumn morning and seeing a soberly suited man walking along carrying a very large axe.

No one even gave him a second glance, perhaps thinking he was either connected to the nearby Jorvik Viking centre so there was nothing to get excited about, or he was a serial killer so staring wasn’t a great idea.

For the record, he appeared to take himself and his axe into a side door at Jorvik.