This has been a surprisingly good week socially speaking, with dinner invitations, sporting events and nights at the pub. If I wasn't in Bangladesh (and didn't edit out the gossipy stuff) none of this would be of any interest at all. Maybe it isn't anyway but it's all I've got for you this week!

As some of you may remember from pre-departure banter etc. we (i.e. David and I) fully intended to get to see some of the cricket while England were here on tour. It took a wee bit of time but David tracked down a place that sold tickets and bought 6 for the last one day international on Wednesday night. The place in question was a bank where a guy was selling them out of his office drawer. Obviously.

Now, I'll freely admit to not being a huge cricket fan, and in fact the only other time I've seen England play was back when I was a wee lad and my Dad took me to see a test match against New Zealand at the Oval. I don't remember anything about the cricket but we had a great free lunch as part of the deal he'd wangled through work somehow. I digress.

Anyway, we had tickets for the international enclosure so were reasonably confident of finding some barmy army chaps. Sure enough, when I eventually found the right gate and got to the area in question I looked up and was greeted by a sea of smiling Bangladeshi lads all eager to have me as their neighbour, plus a small group of white faces in the back on the right. Guess where I sat then? In the end England won quite easily, with the only sporting highlight being Flintoff winning the game with 2 consecutive 6's - good lad. What made it all interesting though (apart from the cat that ran onto the outfield at one point) were 2 totally random events that even our Bangladeshi mates couldn't explain. The first was the Minister of Sport, the president of the Bangladeshi cricket board and various aides doing a publicity tour of honour round the pitch. Did I mention they were actually doing this on the pitch just outside the boundary? Oh yeah, and England were batting at the time...

The 2nd one needs some background. When I arrived at the gate to the ground a boy scout asked me, not unreasonably, if I had any bottles on me. I had the obligatory 1.5 litre water bottle which I showed him. The boy scout confiscated, not the bottle, not it's contents, but the screw cap. His argument was that without the screw cap I couldn't throw the bottle onto the pitch. Such was the pursuasive logic of his discourse that I submitted my bottle screw cap for detention with a mere shake of the head and a passing "whatever". Now, towards the end of the game I notice that on the other side of the ground there are hundreds of empty plastic bottles literally raining down from the top tier of the stand onto the ground level. The intended targets were a group of 10 Bangladeshis wearing white T-shirts bearing the St. George cross across the chest and brandishing several Bangladesh flags who were just walking along. What were they doing, and why?! BUT WHY?! They must have been trying to achieve something as they just walked along the bottom of the stand, stopped in a corner for a minute, then went back the same way and disappeared no doubt pleased with the amount of missiles that the public had thrown at them.

I'm willing to post the best explanations you send me for this incident. My opening idea is that it was a cunning plan by the stadium cleaners to get all that shit to the bottom stand before the end of the game hence facilitating their clean-up efforts afterwards.

Other social events of note were watching the quarter final games in the Sheraton hotel bar with Bob Willis sitting just in front of me (ask an elder relative who likes cricket if you don't know who Bob Willis is), and watching the England-France semi-final for which the sole Frenchman in the bar had brought in a live cockerel. He had to really didn't he?