Anything he can do I can do better

AKA a blog post which could also be called "If he can put up pictures of his pants then so can I!" or, "If the world really is going to end, I'm getting the last word..."

As Gordon mentioned here, in a rather overly-sensationally titled blog 'Pants: how Victoria saved the Beckham's marriage', you go through rather a lot of underwear here, taking a clean pair of knickers every time you have a shower. It's a struggle to find cotton ones here, I was regularly running a bit short, and getting a bit bored, of my plain black and plain white pants so I put out an SOS to my lovely mum.

She didn't let me down.

Yes, those are pants with stars, stripes, polka dots, flowers, and even ice cream cones.

Told you I could do it better! ;-)

Pants: How Victoria saved the Beckham's marriage

I don't think that we're getting acclimatised to the heat in Cambodia, more that we're just getting used to sweating a lot. One of the effects of constantly sweating is that you end up changing your clothes quite a lot, especially your pants (or since we have American readers, your underwear). This means that you tend to need new ones after not too long, which is where it got rather interesting in my first few weeks.

I first had to go and buy new pants after only being in the country for about four weeks, and was still in Kompong Cham. I went to a shop and had a look around but could only find pants that didn't have a hole at the front - you know the flap thing that men can open to allow them to pee standing up. For those of you who don't, below is a picture of the standard British design from good old Marks & Spencers.

You can tell Markies make quality pants, because these pants have lasted this long in Cambodia - much like Duracell batteries and Fairy liquid outlasts all pretenders.

Undeterred, I went off to the market on my search for pants with a hole. Markets are Cambodia's equivalent of the internet (they do have the internet hence this blog) - you can find anything and everything there. But shockingly, all I could find were more pants like the ones in this picture.

No hole, just a line down the middle.

Figuring that I must be doing something wrong, I attempted to ask Toll, the night porter at our hotel and beer seller at the riverside, if pants with a hole/flap thing are available in Cambodia. At this moment, I would like you to turn to the nearest person to you (or phone somebody if alone) and try to describe the hole thing in a pair of man's pants.

It's not the easiest thing to do, and certainly not when he is Khmer and I've been in the country for four weeks. I didn't manage to get any answers to fill the 'hole' in my knowledge. But I put this lack of pants with a hole as an example of the different challenges facing people outside of Phnom Penh and that soon I would be back there and able to buy proper pants.

The Russian Market (so called because all the Russians went there during the 1980s when the Soviet Union was a big influence) is known for stocking clothes more appropriate for your western man. I even managed to find a pair of flip flops big enough for me there. So, I strode in pretty confident that I could retire my Markies pants to be replaced by brand, spanking new ones...

And it was then that I found the secret as to how Victoria had prevented David Beckham from ever cheating on her again. Using their peerless power to control fashion, she ordered the sewing up of all the pants in the world as this holeless design proves.

I had to make this picture large so you could see the branding on the badge.

I hope we're all well
Flash Gordon