This is a wry, acerbic and very funny trip around the world offering real insights into national and cricketing cultures while exploring male attitudes to sex, love and marriage and ultimately revealing what constitutes Englishness. Simon Hughes, a professional cricketer (Middlesex and Durham), played a season in every other major Test match playing country during his 10 1/2 year cricket-playing career - from Australia and New Zealand, South Africa and the West Indies, to India, Pakistan, Malaysia and Zimbabwe. There are fascinating insights into cricket as well as witty observations and hilarious experiences of life abroad, women, bad food, worse accommodation. There are the encounters with the great cricketers from overseas - Richards, Warne, Azharuddin and Ambrose - as well as an evening on the beach with a Sri Lankan homosexual, the fatal attraction of a New Zealand divorcee, managing a double identity in Australia, as best man at an arranged marriage in India and many more strange and funny encounters.