a room with a view...of sorts

And, no the view from my room is not great - it’s the balcony of the next door neighbour. What’s more, the ‘curtains’ are strips of very thin material that only cover about four fifths of the window. This now means that any strutting about in the buff calls for a certain amount of caution so as not to offend the conservative Muslim sensitivities of the elderly matron across the way; my arse-in-the-moonlight walks will have to be suspended.

Before I had a chance to pen a strongly worded letter to the Radio Times, copy to the Member of Parliament for Bromsgrove, complaining about this appalling state of affairs, we were whisked off to the VSO office where we were all formally introduced to each other, as well as to the Project staff.

The cast of this particular development-in-Bangladesh spectacular (the working title is currently 'Devbangtacular! - an old shaggy wives' dog tale') is large and varied so right now I’ll stick to a couple of key players and expand later on. Firstly, there’s the lovely Marufa. She runs the induction programme for volunteers and has essentially been holding our hands from day 1.

In terms of my fellow volunteers, there’s my fellow Brits Jo, Meagan and Laura who are on the same programme. They’re kind of like Charlie’s Angels, except they share an unshakeable determination to raise awareness of gender as a cross-cutting theme in international development. I’m not saying that Cameron Diaz doesn’t, but it’s certainly something she doesn’t seem to bring up very much while she’s solving crime in a bikini. She’s probably too busy being coquettish and sassy.

And then there’s Keith. Keith is a great bloke, from the US, who shares a similar sense of humour to my good self. While waiting for the introduction session and then subsequently in the lunch hour we thus swiftly descended into a full-blown (and I dare say, somewhat stereotyped) transatlantic exchange of profanity. It went kind of like this:

"How 'bout you pour yourself a nice, tall glass of shut-the-hell-up."

"I bite my thumb at you sir, with aplomb and gusto I do bite my thumb."

“Screw you, you douche bag.”

“Prat.”

“Jerkoff.”

“Git.”

“Quit harshing my mellow.”

“Montebank.”

(brief pause, Keith looks like I've physically slapped him) “What the hell is a ‘Montebank’?”

“Traditionally, a montebank was a purveyor of quack medicine.”

“Uh-huh.”

“So then, ‘harshing my mellow’…”

There will be more exchanges between myself and Keith in my next blog entry. Sleep tight everyone!