I know virtually nothing about cricket. Not bothered. I'm from Scotland and we don't really have it there. Before an extended trip to India, though, I once had a two-hour crash course in a pub with a friend from Yorkshire, so I'd be able to hold my own. It didn't really work. On chilly December evenings in Delhi, I'd wrap up in a blanket on my balcony and watch local youths holding epic, chaotic games in the grassy square down below. I felt like the kid on the beach who couldn't swim.

So no, I don't know much about cricket. I'd have to guess how many there are in a team and I don't how the score works. So I'm prepared to concede that there could be some technical reason why it's not a shameful, outright blaring disgrace that the England squad might not return to India to continue the tour abandoned after the terrorist attacks in Mumbai. I can't figure out what it would be, though. Nothing from those two hours in the pub rings a bell.

One of the most touching and surprising things about India is the fondness and respect that Indians, for the most part, have for the British. Your average Brit might be startlingly ignorant of the time that our two countries spent meshed together, but for Indians, there is a bond. Our culture has leached into theirs, in all sorts of ways. For one thing, there is cricket.

For another, there is that slightly unquantifiable sense of duty and form in India that is pre-1960s Britain all over. You may have read about Karambir Singh Kang, the general manager of the burnt-out Taj Mahal hotel, who stayed at his post even after his wife and two children had been killed. “Sir, we are going to beat this,” he is said to have told his boss, afterwards. “We are going to build this Taj back into what it was.”

That's not just heroism. That's stiff upper lip.

We used to be like that. With the odd, almost tongue-in-cheek exception (brave Prince Harry of Afghanistan, brave John Smeaton of Glasgow Airport) all modern Britain's heroes are sporting heroes. When they behave in a manner that is not heroic - when stories trickle out about threatened refusals to get on aircraft and demands for round-the-clock protection from crack Indian commandos, for example - it looks bad. No matter that, in their position, we might do exactly the same. These people are not supposed to be like us. They are our gods.

In truth, they are just lads who are good at hitting stuff. And, I seem to recall, catching stuff. They're in Abu Dhabi now, and might be going to India after all. Still, they shouldn't have been in this position in the first place. Fifty years ago the authorities would have told them what to do, and the sportsmen would have quietly and patriotically done it. This time step one should have been to announce boldly that the squad was going back. Safety considerations, important as they are, should have been step two.

Instead, in cricket-mad India, they've seen 11 British gods struggling to muster enough jellied backbone to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with anyone, and that matters, even if you don't give two hoots about cricket. If you do, and that should have been 10 gods or 15 or even 22 then, like I said. Scottish. Not bothered. Sorry.

Oh, Mandy

I've been playing a little mental game recently. Try it. Basically, whenever I read a quotation attributed to an anonymous source, about anything, I assume that it comes from Peter Mandelson. “Of course Gordon has always been in favour of a higher tax rate,” a Cabinet source tells The Daily Telegraph. Mandelson? “Obama will want to work with a united Europe, not the 27 divided nations envisaged by a David Cameron,” a senior Labour source tells The New Statesman. Surely Mandelson. “Kate Moss was distraught when she realised her car had been broken into,” a friend tells OK!. Clearly, absolutely, undeniably, Mandelson.

My favourite, so far, is this from a Daily Mail article yesterday about, erm, Peter Mandelson. “Peter has taken over much of the day-to-day management of hundreds of things Gordon was too busy to look after,” says a Cabinet source. “He is signing off on all the announcements and posters and strategy decisions. Gordon is deferring to him daily.”

I mean, that really is Peter Mandelson, isn't it? Who else could it possibly be?

Snorting with laughter

Why are youth-orientated public information campaigns always so thoroughly bonkers? I've been trying to make sense of this new anti-cocaine one, starring David Mitchell, as a dead dog called Pablo.

Pablo is a dog, but also a mule. He's dead, but he wakes up. Then travels around, still being dead, and has conversations with a gun, a pill, a heart and a nostril, as well as a few coked-up people, whose bad nights are rendered amusingly worse by stilted conversations with a dead dog with the voice of the guy out of Peep Show. What is the point of any of this? Why a dead dog drug mule? Why not a dead person? Rather than put people off cocaine, you'd be forgiven for thinking it was just intended to give people something to snigger about while they are on it.

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