At a quarter to seven on Thursday evening, just as the sun was starting to dip and the shadows to stretch out towards the wicket, the ground staff switched on the floodlights and shortly after the players walked out for the final session.

It was all a little discombobulating. Not for the players, who seemed to cope easily enough – Alastair Cook batted on regardless, entirely unruffled – but for the fans. A lot of them left before the end, so the stands were emptier in the final hour than they were in the first, which is the reverse of how this is supposed to work. But then those who stayed behind were making more than enough noise to cover for the ones who wanted to beat the rush, because they seemed, in the large part, to be steaming drunk.

You wonder whether it was this way when they played the first game of floodlit cricket, at Highbury football stadium in 1952. It was a benefit match between Middlesex and Arsenal, which was broadcast live on the BBC. They say cricket errs on the conservative but it took the ECB only 65 years to follow it up by organising a day-night Test match. In its defence, there has been an awful lot to ponder. How well would the pink ball compare to the red? How hard would it be to bat in the twilight? And, the principal consideration, what would it all mean for lunch and tea? Cricket, as Bill Bryson once pointed out, is the only game to incorporate meal breaks. They are the architecture of the day’s play.

The tea break was, surprisingly enough, an Australian invention. It was brought over to England by their skipper Joe Darling on the 1899 Ashes tour, and fixed in the county championship in 1919. The rhythm has been immutable ever since. The old Nottinghamshire batsman George Gunn had such firm ideas about the timings that, so the story goes, he got himself out on purpose during a match at Canterbury when he found out the umpires had moved the interval back by half an hour. “I always have my lunch at one o’clock,” Gunn was supposed to have told the umpires as he walked off, bat under his arm, middle stump flat on the ground behind him. There may be trifle for tea, but tea is not a trifle.

The ECB, mindful of this, decided the simplest solution was to shift everything back three hours. Which must have seemed the straightforward thing to do but in fact it created its own, unforeseen set of problems. The lunch break started at four in the afternoon, which seemed just a touch bohemian. At that hour, it scarcely qualified as lunch at all, but another category of meal altogether. Trunch, perhaps. It could be one of the great accidental inventions, like Post-it Notes and Play-Doh. It may end up as the ECB’s one indisputable contribution to western civilisation.

The advantage of Trunch is that it also meant everyone had the opportunity to sneak in a second breakfast earlier in the day, sometime after elevenses. As for tea, it now doubled up as dinner, and came at twenty to seven in the evening. A 20-minute break that gave everyone just enough time to make it halfway through the queues at the food stalls. Although by that point, to be honest, a lot of spectators in the Hollies were too trollied to worry. The late start had surely cut into the profits at the coffee shops but these losses were outweighed by the gains made at the ground’s many bars.

Cricket fans never seem to have any compunction about starting early. Social norms do not apply any more than they seem to at airports and cross-Channel ferries. And in the view of the eight men in fancy dress at the All Bar One in Birmingham New Street early Thursday morning, as well as, you suspect, one or two others among the 21,000 who turned up, the great advantage of day-night timing seems to have been that it meant they could start drinking earlier and go on drinking longer. Warwickshire made sure they were well catered for. There are, at a rough count, 30 bars around Edgbaston, among them two fully blown pubs serving a selection of real ales, a cocktail shack, a gin shop, two wine bars and a camper van offering a selection of Pimm’s cocktails.

By 5pm, then, three fancy dress cops were chasing half a dozen fancy dress robbers around the ground. Along with the more traditional round of applause, Joe Root’s hundred was celebrated by a couple of bold sorts whipping off their tops and waving them around their heads. And by 8pm, Mr Blobby was leading Dick Tracy, the Mario Brothers, four Teletubbies, Gandalf, Noddy Holder and the Jamaican bobsleigh team in a conga line around the grandstand.

The final session was played to a chorus of Neil Diamond’s bah-bah-bahs and Tom Jones’s la-la-las. Pretty much everyone left in Edgbaston seemed to be absolutely blotto.