The end is nigh

The final day was spent sightseeing and shopping by most, although a few preferred to lounge by the pool. The shopping was an endurance test with the weakest-willed being singled out for attention and flattery by street vendors with worse chat that Henry Watkinson but a marginally better strike rate. Rather like a pride of lions circling a wounded Wildebeest, it became a question of when the most frail victim would succumb rather than if.

Steve Bailey – who due to an error with form filling the CCI reception referred to throughout as Mr Kitty Bag, despite his protestations that they could at least call him Kitbag – was our tour Wildebeest. He bought his 11-month daughter a “genuine” unique eighteenth-century sextant for RS2000 only to see an identical one 20 yards down the road for Rs1800. He purchased ten giant balloons only to find that the bag contained nine tiny ones. The end came when he bought a fan for Rs20 when the vendor was poised to sell him ten for the same price. Word got around and hawkers flocked to the city centre to try to fleece Kitty Bag.

The sightseeing was undertaken with mixed enthusiasm. Mike Payne led the hard-core travellers who lapped up the sights, although the squeemish baulked at his gleeful enthusiasm to go and watch vultures pecking at corpses. At the other extreme Pete Hobbs, a philistine to the end, survived three minutes at the Gateway to India before making an unfavorable comparison to obelisk at the end of Cranleigh High Street and making his excuses.

In the evening we held the end-of-tour fines which doubled as an excuse to punish Tristian Rosenfeldt for his attempt to sink the self-styled legends 24 hours earlier. Donned in a fake Manchester United shirt with the badge cut off to reveal a glimpse of nipple, he downed eight glasses of cheap Indian champagne as well as two unidentifiable savoury delights specially purchased from a street vendor with more sores and scabs than a smallpox colony. Rosenfeldt was a broken man.

The batsman of the tour was Alan Cope, the bowler Tom Hufton and the fielder Nathan Ross. The man of the tour, to great acclaim, was Mike Payne who was also celebrating his 71st birthday. Quite how much of it he will remember remains to be seen, although the taxi driver he attempted to kiss several times on the way home might take longer to recover.

David Banford, an OC from the sixties who now runs a wine business in Mumbai, kindly and convivially hosted a reception and dinner at one of the city’s most exclusive restaurants. The bill was £90 a head, an astounding feat even in London let alone India. The hardliners went on to a nightclub described by a regular frequenter of such establishments as being “too loud, too crowded and too expensive but otherwise fine” where the remains of their cash was soon separated from them. Perhaps the fact they were made to enter through the kitchen was an indication that it might not be the best of places.