Stuart Barnes: England v. Scotland, 1993 Five Nations

I have been a long time retired from rugby union. Yet still there are supporters of a certain age who will remind me of the good times. Online, video footage of a few moments distils a long career into a few – dare I say it – rather glorious seconds.

The root and branch English rugby fan remains committed to country over club. The Six Nations is a more valuable commodity for television than the Premiership and European Champions Cup put together. Commercially, patriotically, sometimes I think even spiritually, that old tournament takes all the beating for the rugby traditionalist.

I had a few moments, many of them bad, at test match level. But there was that one second, when time seemed to freeze and I found a way to ignite an England back line that was stuttering for all the talent of Jeremy Guscott and the Underwood brothers out wide.

1993. Scotland and the Calcutta Cup at Twickenham. I had been selected to start after years of frustration behind Rob Andrew. This is no sort of 'told you so'. England might well have been right to stick with Rob's qualities which perhaps suited the nature of the side. I don't know and it really doesn't matter. It happened in another century.

But I digress. Jack Rowell, my coach at Bath, leaned back on his beat up Mercedes on a Monday night, pre-training at Bath. “Now you're in a pickle, Stuart. You've told everyone how good you are; you'll have to prove it.” The words are indelibly inked into my memory although there's no way I can truly remember Jack's asinine comment.

It turned out to be 'my game', in the sense that the English media built the match up around the Barnes comeback. It was always going to be black or white. That's not how life is but our memories are stripped of rainbow colours. Black or white.

Dewi Morris threw me a pass from a line out. It was a misdirected pass, more a lob, way over my head. The Scotland back row saw their chance to cut me into pieces. But hang on, when I see the moment again, its origin was a scrum, not a line out, and Dewi passed to me after someone had crashed into the Scottish midfield. Memory playing tricks... as I did with the opposing back row. A good pass and I would have aimed a kick towards touch. But time was running out as Scotland scented Essex blood and hunted me down.

Then the clock stopped (did it? Memory, you old rascal!) and I knew that this was the matador moment, as the Scottish bulls lunged, a little dull, bovine, in my direction. I waited until there was a hole behind them and stepped off my right foot and away into space.

I was deeply right sided. This was a ploy I used regularly at Bath. Quick off the mark, I was able to create sufficient havoc with a straight running line, before throwing a pass off my right hand to Guscott, gliding up on the outside. Rory Underwood finished it, the crowd seemed content. People talk about that pass to this day but when I see George Ford and Owen Farrell pass as they did to send Elliot Daly into the corner against Wales in 2017 I am a little embarrassed.

Weirdly, no one wants to believe the truth, not the elusive truth as I see it. That day – and many of the fans have told me they 'were there' – has become something beyond anyone's powers to change. Those at Twickenham and the millions watching rewrote the events.

Yes, a lot of fairly flash things went well. I was in a trickster mood. But the restarts, oh they were poor. I knew that. Really quite second rate. No one remembers. They might as well never have occurred. Nor what remains my most satisfying recollection of the day.

Jack used to say "Don't risk your left foot kicking. That leg's useless for anything but standing on", or words to that effect. But I was on a roll. I received a pass, second period, inside my 22, in the middle of the pitch. A long way from touch for a one-legged fly half. But I eased the ball onto the left side and dropped it onto the berated malfunctioning foot. The contact was the sweetest one. It spiralled its way deep into the Scotland half. Aerodynamically going on and on. "Damn," I remember thinking, "You've cracked it, Stuart." The instant in which I knew the rugby gods were with me. This is the unknown second or so which not a single soul on this planet, bar the bloke typing this right now, will consider.

Which brings me back to the subject of memory. Memory doesn't belong. There's individual memory, there's the collective English memory and a tatty, fading Scottish one in which Craig Chalmers leaves the field injured and Gregor Townsend makes a debut. That's one in which my genius is downgraded by Scottish bad luck.

And there's my memory. That whispering contact between my left boot and ball. I wrote a book a few years ago and entitled it Sketches From Memory. The title is a line from a Bob Dylan song, 'Hearts In The Highland'. That's quite a coincidence. The book wasn't based around that day in 1993 but the collective memory shaped my life. Made me a star for 15 minutes, helped get me a job as a writer and broadcaster. All of it based on recollections that disappeared from my mind by the time of the next – and awful – game in Ireland.

If not for the generosity of spirit over the years, that step and incredibly over-hyped pass would have disappeared from my mind altogether. But that left-footed kick. That was real, that is my memory, buried deep within. As Dylan didn't quite sing, "I'll let you be in my memory, if I can be in yours." Memories shouldn't be set in stone. They are fluid. That makes it easy to wander from one version of memory to another. They have, when you think about it, quite a lot in common with a history book. Just spare us the dusty, choking facts and figures. Dream on.