Some of the best stories about Harold “Dickie” Bird involve his pathological fear of lateness. There was one occasion when he arrived at Buckingham Palace at 5am for one of his 29 meetings with the Queen.

And another when he felt a policeman’s hand on his collar as he tried to climb over the front gates of the Oval, some six hours before play was due to start.

So it was a surprise to arrive at his 17th-century cottage in Barnsley, around 10am last Tuesday, and find Bird frantically fiddling with his shirt buttons. “Alarm clock ran out of batteries,” he spluttered.

Keith Lodge, his old friend from the Barnsley Chronicle and the co-author of his latest book, hovered indulgently like a favourite nanny. “Good thing I rang you, Dickie,” he said. “We would have been standing outside in the cold all morning.”

It was a humorous moment, and Bird saw the funny side. But there was an element of pathos too.

As he approaches his 80th birthday on Friday, his health is not as robust as it was. Four years ago, he suffered a stroke that robbed him of his morning bounce.

“It struck at 3am,” he said. “I had a severe pain in my neck and then it worked down my body. I stuck it out until the morning and managed to dial 999.

“The ambulance came and got me away pretty quickly to the hospital, and then they kept me in for five or six weeks.

“I gradually got my strength back, but I have to speak slowly, because if I speak quickly then I can’t get my words out. It’s also left me very emotional – I was always emotional, but not like I am now.

“And you’ve got to make yourself go in the morning every day, because you don’t want to get out of bed, you just want to lie there. You get depressed at times.

“But you just have to fight against it. I can drive now. I have all my movements but I find buttons and shoelaces difficult. But I can’t grumble because some of the cases that I saw in hospital – dear me.”

The carers have left and Bird is independent again, still living in the house that he bought as Yorkshire’s opening batsman in the 1960s.

Today, it has become a shrine to the persona he inhabited for another three decades after that. “Dickie Bird here, Test match umpire,” he still likes to say, when he rings up to discuss the latest local prospect – or, more likely, the evils of the TV review.

The walls are covered with photographs of Bird himself, standing in his white cap behind the stumps as Richard Hadlee, or Kapil Dev, or Imran Khan roars in to bowl.

The desk carries a miniature version of the statue erected to him in the centre of Barnsley. “It stands on the exact spot where I was born, 100 yards from the town hall – trips come from all over to see my statue and go around the market.”

Neither would you want to put a dirty mug down on the living-room coffee table, so crammed is it with memorabilia. Pride of place goes to two books with gilt-edged pages.

One is a commemorative copy of his autobiography, which sold a mind-boggling 750,000 copies. The other is bound in red leather and was presented to him by Eamonn Andrews when he appeared on a 1992 edition of This Is Your Life.

So how did the umpire’s book come to outsell those of the men whom he invigilated? “People have took to me, haven’t they? I don’t know what it is. I talk to everybody and I think that’s why.

“The characters have gone out of all sports haven’t they? There’s no Lambs, Bothams or Dennis Lillees any more. We used to have a laugh in Test matches, which they don’t today – they don’t even smile.”

There is a very British charm to Bird, a Norman Wisdom-style twinkle. A man with a wide variety of nervy mannerisms, he occasionally forgot to laugh at himself – as when the water-pipes burst at Headingley, and he was left wagging his finger at an irate crowd.

But he would banter with the players as if he was still one of them, and they loved him for it.

On the field, Bird was known for being a not-outer. Our own cricket correspondent, Derek Pringle, has never quite forgiven him for turning down an lbw against Gordon Greenidge; the wicket would have completed a hat-trick.

But then Bird, so cautious by nature, could hardly help taking refuge in the “benefit of the doubt”. As a batsman who made only two hundreds in 93 first-class appearances, anxiety was his Achilles’ heel.

“If you’d seen me in one net batting and Geoffrey Boycott in the other, and I’d said to you ‘Which is the England player?’ you’d have said me,” Bird explained, while tapping a finger to his forehead. “But Boycott had it, something up here, more mental strength.

“If I got a series of low scores I worried. A lot thought that I would never make it as an umpire because of that. But it was amazing. I told myself once I crossed that line I were going to enjoy it, have a smile and a laugh.

“I used to have a joke with the crowd, but I never let it interfere with my decision making. And that took all of the pressure off me.”

Inevitably, Bird laments the passing of the glory days, when decisions went unchallenged by ball-tracking technology and Ian Botham could smash spectacular sixes after a night on the tiles.

It is hard to see Steven Finn stopping in his delivery stride to sneak a rubber snake into the umpire’s pocket, as Lillee once did. And nor do relationships achieve the same depth when there is always a plane to catch the morning after a game.

“You can’t buy respect, you have to earn it,” Bird said. “And I can honestly tell you I had not one problem with any professional cricketer.

“If I went to Pakistan, Imran Khan and Javed Miandad invite me round for a meal at their place. If I go to Australia the first man to ring me is Dennis Lillee.

“If I go to est Indies, the first man on the phone will be Garfield Sobers, the greatest that’s ever lived. You’ll never see another like him, not in your lifetime.”

Yet Bird still loves the modern game, even if his passion may not burn as bright as it once did. He remains an ever-present in the stands, both at Yorkshire’s home matches and those of Barnsley FC.

“It’s still the greatest game in the world, cricket,” he said. “I think young Joe Root is one to watch, because mentally I have never met anyone like him.” He leaned forward and tapped his forehead again. “Played up here, is cricket.”

And now it was time to go, because Bird’s solicitor was at the door. “I want to go back over my will,” he said, with a slightly unnerving grin. “My plan is for my ashes to be buried under my statue. What do you think?”

• Dickie Bird – 80 Not Out, written with Keith Lodge, is published by Hodder & Stoughton, priced £20.