18:05 BST Thurs 30th Mar

The Southbank in Melbourne. I can remember vividly how hot the bridge was to touch. Thanks to Matt for sending me the photos.

18:06 BST Thurs 30th Mar

Busking outside Flinders Street Station. My Ray Charles impression didn't bring in the $$$ for some reason.

08:48 BST Wed 29th Mar

For the sake of something to do, and because of the immense sophistication of the industry-leading football traders at work, I am reading, at the most cursory and useless level, a few books on financial mathematics.

Quantitative sports analysis really kicked off with the advent of the personal computer. The Computer Group, adhoc pioneers of statistical sports analysis, were able to crunch the data, model the variables and produce some sharp numbers to bet the handicap and total points markets in American sports in late 1970s Vegas. They were able to attack less sophisticated competition. The sports bookmakers at the time produced prices which were more reflective of public supply and demand. Common knowledge is one thing but it comes from news stories, heuristics and gut feeling. Mathematical analysis allows for colder, clearer thinking and the Computer Group beat the NFL and NBA lines pretty comprehensively.

Baseball always resisted analysis. A sport which has a huge culture of statistics (eg a Society for American Baseball Research, no less) has in the main defied the sports quants, although the numbers produced by the bookies look pretty damn accurate before each game.

Cricket is also very hard to model mathematically. For one thing there aren't enough games from which to extract meaningful data. Off the top of my head I think there are around 500 international cricket matches per year. There are also many variables, such as the state of the wicket or the affect of the weather on ball movement, which determine the course of the game but which defy linear mathematical modelling since they are (perhaps) impossible to quantify.

If you could marry Black-Scholes with Duckworth-Lewis you might make a fortune. The problem of induction would more than likely get you though. The future ain't what it used to be.

18:01 BST Sun 26th Mar

FOR SALE: Made to measure tweed suit (1999). Hardly worn. Suit extremely portly young fogey with fantasies of land ownership and grouse shooting. 48" chest, 42" waist, 31" inside leg. Double vented jacket (a mistake) and general second-rate cut.



Weight loss and change in circumstances forces sale. Not to be repeated opportunity as tailors (Bertie Wooster, Fulham Rd) now closing down. Cost: £580 new. Yours for £150 ONO, squire, can't say fairer than that.



Footnote: Not only does the imminent demise of Bertie Wooster mean that I can't flog the suit back to their secondhand dept (the pictures don't do it justice - in my fatter days I looked like a red-and-yellow check tweed version of the Graf Zeppelin) but also that for the sake of value I was compelled to expand my formal wardrobe.

15:10 BST Sun 26th Mar

After a couple of weeks of burning the candle at both ends I'm finally enjoying a few days off.

I wasn't able to shake the jet lag for the first week and getting up at 3 am for work didn't help either. As a result I went to a casual singles party on the Saturday and fell asleep on a sofa halfway through. I woke with a start at 4 am, apologised and rushed off to the office. Not smooth. I carried the hangover and abiding sense of idiocy for the whole of that Sunday.

Cheltenham was cold, grey and devoid of success. I no longer bet on racing in the belief that I can really make money but rather for a little bit of fun - a quickened pulse and certain satisfaction in being right/getting lucky. This year's Festival brought home to me the realisation that I don't even get excited about winning or losing any longer. In fact the whole idea of betting just generates a faint agita in me. The way to win money is by sniping away on the margins with high turnover and low variance. It's not worth the candle in today's markets. I also no longer want to be in with the tweedy, Hooray crowd. I will keep my hat but was frustrated in my effort to sell my tweed suit [qv].

By far the highlights of that week were the Gothic Nightmares exhibition at the Tate and a performance of Hercules at the Barbican. I confess: for all the potential preteniousness and so on I just get much more satisfaction and enjoyment out of high culture than other 'leisure' activities. Roll on Ruisdael and Michelangelo.

I went to the rugby, had supper with a friend, stayed with the soon-to-be-gutted Lord and Lady Miros, worked the 3rd Test and disgraced myself at the boss's birthday party. Details not suitable for publication.

Through all this whirl I hadn't been exercising to give my knee a chance to recover. There had also been much drinking and pre-racing fried breakfast action so I have gained 5 lbs. I feel bloody dreadful - like a sack of shit again.

Finally yesterday I hauled ass off to Richmond Park and strode out cautiously on the crushed sand and grassy verge of the Tamsin Trail. After 24 minutes the aching returned and I knew I would only make things worse by continuing so I shamefully walked back cross-country.

The park was full of the Saturday morning runners and cyclists who, by dint of their sweaty action, make the lame or lazy feel unmanned. "Why have you stopped when we, the Master Race, are continuing?" is the implied accusation, and it's hard not to feel a little like someone in a Bateman cartoon. I exaggerated my limp as I got closer to their hive (the car park at Roehampton to be exact.)

So now I am trawling the web for treatments for Patellofemoral Pain Syndrome and it looks like I'll be joining a gym, working on my quad strength and swimming furiously for six weeks.

It's going to be light for an hour later this evening, I had my first cricket net this morning and summer is only a few weeks away. I'll be below 15 stone again with three weeks and at my apogee by late May. There - targets!

15:06 GMT Mon 13th

If anyone reading this doesn't own Aladdin Sane by His Davidness then pop down to iTunes, download Cracked Actor, Time and Prettiest Star and send me the bill.


Cracked Actor

I've come on a few years from my Hollywood Highs
The best of the last, the cleanest star they ever had
I'm stiff on my legend, the films that I made
Forget that I'm fifty cause you just got paid

Crack, baby, crack, show me you're real
Smack, baby, smack, is that all that you feel
Suck, baby, suck, give me your head
Before you start professing that you're knocking me dead
Oh stay
Please stay
Please stay

You caught yourself a trick down on Sunset and Vine
But since he pinned you baby you're a porcupine
You sold me illusions for a sack full of cheques
You've made a bad connection 'cause I just want your sex

Crack, baby, crack, show me you're real
Smack, baby, smack, is that all that you feel
Suck, baby, suck, give me your head
Before you start professing that you're knocking me dead
Oh yeah
Oooh stay
For a day
Oh yeah
Don't you dare
Oh yeah
yeah
yeah
yeah
Hoo
Hoo
Yeah

17:17 GMT Thurs 9th

• London is cold, wet, grey, clogged, home to a society characterised by massive economic inequality and thoroughly unappealing.
• My car's heater started making a whirring noise before Christmas. It went away if you switched it off. I took it to a garage in Hampton Court at the end of January - they ripped me off (or at least tried to be deceptive instead of honest) but fixed it so that the noise only occurred when the fan motor was off. They seemed to break the windscreen washers at the same time though. Taking the car to a VW/Audi specialist near work I idly thought I'd get both problems looked at. The noise is a tough problem they said, after poking around in the innards all day. Frankly we don't think it's worth spending up to a grand fixing it, since you can drive around with the motor running on low and there is no problem. Come back next week and we'll fix the screen wash. As I drive away I discover to my horror that their investigations have made the noise a) worse and b) permanent. It drives me crazy.
• My right knee ached slightly after running round Richmond Park yesterday (58m 47s, since you ask). Then it locked up in surprising pain midway through the morning.

Can't walk, can't drive, don't want to be here.

End of moan.

05:21 GMT Wed 8th Mar

30,000 miles. £-19,450. Five new pairs of shoes and a suntan. 

22:49 NZT Sat 4th

Weighed in, weighed in.  The fifth and final ODI is in the books.  Frustratingly the West Indies scraped home and won with two balls and three wickets in hand.  I got a half-decent price about NZ on the toss, although key slow bowler Daniel Vettori was being rested.  

I can’t be arsed to explain what happened but it was another frustrating small loss, bringing the tour to a sour, small-medium loss in total.

Tomorrow I have to check out by 11 am and have eleven hours to fill until NZ018 tries to make it back across the Pacific.  Seems unlikely.  I plan to swim and exercise my nuts off in Centennial for at least four hours and maybe sunbathe.

-

I feel very trapped by the job at the moment.  People are envious of me and with good reason.  Non-industry people marvel that I can get paid for watching cricket and punting on it.  Industry cognoscenti know who I work for and what a privilege that is.

I don’t think I’m any good at this job.  I can guess at percentages blind and normally come up with a pip or two of the market.  Woop-de-fucking…  Proof positive that I can think like everyone else.  I eked out crumbs of value and then shat it all away in an unreasoned and unlucky trade in the third game.

Fundamentally this is a five year position.  There aren’t old traders and you don’t make partner.  No-one retires with a long service clock.  The very best go off and make fortunes on their own bat, the good make a living and there are lots and lots of thirty- and forty-somethings on the scrapheap.

You are also at the mercy of events which are beyond your control a great deal.  The long run is supposed to take care of the variance but with cricket having so few games means that you take much longer to get there.

Beyond which you trade in markets and you don’t control the character of those markets.  Theory would suggest that they become more efficient and harder to beat as they become more liquid.  Alternatively they could dry up.  With the commission charged by the websites and the bookies’ percentages taking money out of circulation you need a pool of losers pumping money in.  These are zero-sum games  and for there to be a winner there must be a loser.  Darwinian selection is at work – the strong prosper and the weak get eaten.  What if the weak find something they like more than being eaten or someone drains the lagoon?  You have hungry sharks flapping their gills on the dry sandbanks, gasping for air.

I haven’t shown good results over the last two months.  I don’t have confidence in my abilities or methodology at the moment.  I can muddle through this using bluff and guesswork for a couple of years maybe, hoping for a little luck.  It’s not a basis for the rest of my life though.

-

And another thing.  One for the oxymoron list.  “Here’s another X-List Classic from Ocean Colour Scene.”  It made me wince.

11:26 NZT Thurs 2nd

Sunday. I had been met at the airport by my contact. Effectively he was a total stranger, albeit one who I have spent a hundred hours talking to on Messenger for work. He turned out to be even nicer than I hoped, giving me a tour of Melbourne and taking me for lunch on Fitzroy Rd with his wife and dog.

Right from the moment we left the airport I was regretting the fact that I only had one full day in Melbourne. The only solution was to pack as much in as possible.

Even if I had flown in straight from New York or Chicago I would still have been impressed by the atmosphere and sights of Melbourne straight off the bat. Coming from Christchurch in a bad mood it was like a vision of paradise.

The skyline and buildings are very modern but driving around St Kilda the scale was much smaller and more human than an American city. People spilled everywhere, looking relaxed and happy.

Not being ‘on duty’ for the SA-Aus ODI I had that hot bath, opened a bottle of Lindauer and watched the first 20 overs in a drunken, fluffy bath-robed haze from the comfy chair, before passing out. See passage below re: hard work.

Monday. Here we go. Hotel gym at eight, lavish hotel breakfast at nine, shopping at nine fifteen.

Thank god I didn’t buy anything in Christchurch. There is no criteria under which I can be judged an enthusiastic or able shopper but my eyes were opened slightly last year under some expert tutelage.

Besides you could pluck someone from an undiscovered rainforest tribe and drop them in Melbourne at ten a.m. with only a bone through their nose and the tribal credit card. By five o’clock they would be fretting about the wash on the last pair of jeans they bought and whether they should go back and look at the watch they found again. It's entirely possible that they could have found somewhere selling nose bones a la mode.

There is nowhere in the world where I have seen so many fantastic shops in one place.

I did the malls north of Swanston St with a fair amount of success before meeting Matt and Sal for seafood on the SouthBank. They were extremely well and very happy to put up with me dragging them down Chapel St despite being on their own quest to buy a banjo.

Chapel St is a long, straight drag crammed with shops. Some of them, probably more than I realised, were chain stores but since these were stores that don’t exist in the UK it didn’t matter. Fundamentally the clothes were much more stylish, cheaper and generally better than anything I have seen in the UK for a while.

The haul eventually amounted to: three pairs of shoes, two pairs of sandals, one pair of jeans, one pair of shorts, five T/polo/rugby/shirts and a pair of sunglasses. Everything that I bought is at least two steps up the style ladder from my current wardrobe.

If a small red warning light didn’t start blinking in Mastercard HQ then it ought to have done.

I rode a couple of trams and savoured the Melbourne city culture – a lot of happy and conspicuously well-dressed people bathed in sunshine.

In the evening I went back to St Kilda with my contact and his wife. We ate Mexican on Acland Rd and had a great time. On the way home I wandered through the Crown Casino, listened to the hordes of Chinese gamblers and stuck my head into the poker room, before heading back to The Westin tired and extremely happy.

Wednesday. Spent Tuesday flying back to Christchurch and incurring a $60 excess baggage charge on the way. Henceforth I shall be known as Imelda. Back in the Hotel Offthesquare in sleepy, backwoods Christchurch with another hateful cricket match in prospect.

There isn’t really much to say about the game. The Windies won the toss and bowled first. The decision was a poor one because it was a flat wicket and a hot day. It was done purely so injured all-rounder Dwayne Bravo could play as supersub and perhaps add some weight to their batting. Most times captains make the best decision on the evidence and experience available to them. Subsequent events (often luck but sometimes factors which were foreseen but not given the right weighting) may show their decision up as poor but that isn’t something which they could control. In this case the decision was clearly wrong.

Vexatiously the Windies bowled quite well upfront and the market behaved a little counter-intuitively. I hitched a couple of small carts to the Caribbean wagon because of the prices. The Kiwis then hit forty runs from nine scoring shots (the minxes) and the game went out of the reach of my brave lads. Bastardos.

Unlike last Saturday I sat on my hands and took my medicine. Instead of getting depressed about prospect of showing a loss on the trip I let my mind wander back to my two amazing days in Melbourne and the memories were more than enough to make me very happy.