So here I am, beginning the expedition in the time honoured way, with the apparently compulsory visit to Tom and Jerry's pub. On the table before me are three large bottles of Tuborg. I am with a couple of old friends, the music too loud as usual. Can't even hear my friends nless they shout, and in a corner above the bar hangs a television with cricket, where the commentary also struggles hopelessly against the ambient cacophony.My neighbour leans across to yell into my ear, I can only hear half of what she says

"...blah...blah ...going up to Khumbu again...blah ... blah...you must have one of the best jobs in the world!"

"Yes, I suppose I have..." I shouted back.

Glancing up at the television, I was just in time to see a superb catch being taken by the slip fielder. It may have been the alcohol, it may equally have been the noise; but I think it was the cricket. I just could not concentrate. I kept thinking back to my student days, huddled over a drawing board. It was high summer. Windows open, doors banging in the wind. A leaf or maybe stray blade of grass blowing into the room. The radio purring away in the back ground, .I used to listen to TMS (Test Match Special) on long-wave. In those days the voice of summer was John Arlott. A west country poet who brought out the beauty of cricket with his language. He loved it. I don't know what Arlott would have made of the modern game. The betting, the corruption, and now the suspicion of murder.

Where was I ? Oh yes, back in Tom and Jery's... Yes, like Arlott, I love my work too. What could be a better office than the high mountains? And it is wonderful to see the climbing, the trekking and the travelling through the eyes of others. My brother Adam has come from San Francisco to trek up the Khumbu valley with us. Earlier in the day we were sipping coffe in the Java coffee house, looking down on the world. He has never been in Asia before, he saw the same things as me here in Kathmandu but observed a different world to the one I saw. I saw a bustling city. I saw heat dust and the danger from motor bikes to microbes everywhere. Amid all this confusion and distraction I have to pack for the expedition, sort out kit, find out where the less than helpful banks have wired the money to, and worry about the hotel bookings. Meanwhile this is what Adam saw; in his own words;

"The most overwhelming thing here is the traffic and the polution. The streets are crouded and full of tiny little cars, motorbikes, rikshaws and bicyclists who all compete to run over pedestrians. I heard someone mention that breathing Kathmandu air is worse for you than smoking. So many wonderful sights and sounds.

I woke this morning to the sounds of two crows fighting over a dead rat. Along with these crows there were more crows, starlings whistling and dogs barking, and of course, cars honking. This afternoon I stood at the balcony of a resturant watching the street below in which I saw an itinerant cobler sitting on the ground repairing shoes, a bhudist mong talking on a cell phone going by in a rickshaw, and two orange-turbaned and bearded old men playing strange pipes to several baskets of semi-comatosed snakes which occasionally tried to make a half-hearted strike at a passing tourist or a child.

This evening, as we walked past the royal palace, we stopped to ask directions of a Nepali soldier armed with a sten gun. He was small - no more than the size of a child, but in full battle uniform with a helmet and fatigues. He turned out to be very friendly and it was 5 minutes until we could tear ourselves away from his strange pleading questions and observations about England - mostly about what a beautiful and cultured place it was. The conversation was a little slow because of frequent repetition and the fact that the person wanting to do all the talking could not speak English (and we speak almost no Nepali). In short, I am having an absolutely wonderful time."

That was so different from what I had seen in the same time that I resolved there and then to look on the world with fresh eyes; to step back and really look. Even with the best job in the world you sometimes get too wrapped up to see the other, more interesting picture. Step back. It is wonderfully refreshing.

I clutched my beer to my chest, and looked up at the screen again. A near run out, hands going up to appeal.. Ah yes, I remember now, the tiny little trigger for all this rambling. John Arlott, sometime poet, cricket commentator and wine writer for the Guardian newspaper. He also said, and no one could disagree with him, that he had the best job in the world; being paid to watch cricket and drink wine. Not bad eh?