The Ashes 2023: Felix White reflects on dramatic Edgbaston Test

Felix White is a musician, author and co-host of the BBC's Tailenders podcast.

In his second column for BBC Sport this summer, he reflects on the first Test at Edgbaston which will surely go down in history as an all-time classic.

It really can be that good.

For all the fretting that Test cricket demands of us on its behalf these days, it is timely to remember it can be as eye-wateringly, stomach-clenchingly, heartbreakingly good as all that.

The first Ashes Test at Edgbaston this week was, undeniably, an absolute stone-cold classic of its kind; five days of cricket bold enough to dust off any wistfulness for the past and perhaps offer some romantic vision of the longest format's future.

Almost from the outset, it re-imagined itself as not really a game of cricket at all, but a tussle for the shape of things to come.

Of course, there are half-truths aplenty in the sweeping assumptions of Ben Stokes' England as architects of chaos and Pat Cummins' Australia as Test-cricket-as-it-should-be flag wavers, but pleasingly, for the most part, they both played their respective roles stubbornly and proudly.

And if you were lucky enough to bear witness to the cat-and-mouse, principle-poking, flat-wicketed, adrenaline-injected, genre-bending cricket, you will likely only remember it now as a series of heart palpitations imprinted somewhere in your frazzled body, all marked between the hours of 11 and way gone six.

Like anything new, it is best viewed via the familiar.

And on the second morning, after a day of serene strike-rotating and a purpose-signalling Ben Stokes declaration, we got our first fill of 'oh OK, I know this is a classic now' Ashes box-checking.

Stuart Broad has just had David Warner play on to his stumps, a method of dismissal that will become popular in the next few days as batters attempt to force scoring on a lifeless pitch.

Marnus Labuschagne is new at the crease. He is distracted.

Broad stops and turns on his mark, ordering two police officers to sit down behind the bowler's arm, then does the pantomime-rodeo hands gesture he is growing incredibly fond of - generating a swirl of noise behind him as he runs in, before reaching the stumps and swinging the ball away just enough to a cautious Labuschagne.

Labuschagne nicks it!

Jonny Bairstow dives low to his right and takes the catch, one-handed at full stretch.

It is the ball Broad was talking about, the new one that goes away from the right-hander in some idiosyncratic way. The ball worked. The ball is real. And just like that, this is all real too.

Just the same way it was real at The Oval in 2009 and Trent Bridge in 2015.

The sequence of events between that moment and Broad toiling on the fifth day in search of the final two Australian wickets is quite hard to trace.

It is as if every single act inside the Test match, or bizarrely every great Ashes Test match ever, every intake of breath and scream and fielding position you've only seen on a computer game, has been placed in a washing machine where time does not compute in any linear sense.

There has been a Cummins yorker to rival Waqar Younis' best, Joe Root has attempted a reverse scoop from the first ball of the day, Stokes has taken a game-winning catch only to see it bounce out of his hands as he lands.

Jonny Bairstow has walked to the wicket so pumped up that Root is wringing his hands from the fist bump he's just greeted him with, you just want cricket to be the winner. Scott Boland has suddenly become unplayable for half an hour under grey skies, you just want England to be the winner actually.

Ollie Robinson has finally got Usman Khawaja out (dragged on of course), the Hollies stand bellows, Stokes bowls Khawaja in his second innings, just standing there in semi-disbelief as he does, Jimmy Anderson has reverse-swept his first ball fine for four, Moeen Ali has bowled Cameron Green through the gate between his bat and pad.

The oft-raucous Hollies stills to a silence, the scoreboard is suddenly reaching 281 at an intolerable rate, Cummins has hit successive sixes to swing the game in his side's direction.

And finally, I know this for sure, Harry Brook has dived for the ball on the boundary rope only to inadvertently fling it the wrong way for four, as Cummins celebrates a fate-cleansing Australian victory an equal of - eerily so in numbers - the 2005 game here.

There will be all kinds of questions asked to both teams over the next week. Maybe though, we should be asking ourselves one.

How are we supposed to live our lives alongside this? Is there anyone out there who can suddenly book off five days a week for the next six to take all of this in?

Are we genuinely prepared for the frantic, constant buzzing, anxiety-inducing dizziness of this once-in-a-couple-of-decades-at-best cricket just gnawing away at us at all times?

The paralysing fear of not being quite in the right place at the right moment and the 'what's the score' and the 'oh god, I think I need to be there'.

Learn to live with these as best you can, because all the feelings and all the disproportionate caring that this horrifically magnetic, completely unpredictable, myth-made-flesh thing of a series is going to serve up, will be a permanent part of your life until this thing is done. There is no use fighting it.

In essence, we all wake this morning with an empathy for what it is like to be Moeen Ali's spinning finger; at first willing and able, then, blindsided by the reality of what is upon us - all cut up and tortured, bravely continuing, eventually beaten, before now taking ourselves away to heal until we all next surface at Lord's.

• 'England, keep creating chaos but please pick your moments' - Jonathan Agnew column