ENJOY THE FEAST ... Tractor was temporarily stalled by a miscreant bee, but eases into second with a report on Somerset's progress to date.

In the year 43 (After Dominoes), some blokes left their horse-chestnut tree-lined avenues in Rome and conkered England. They settled in Bath where they sorted out sewerage problems, straightened out a few twisty-turny roads, invented some hot spring water and built posh public bathrooms. But they had to leg it back to Rome when outnumbered by Bath & North East Somerset councillors demanding they sort out flaking paint problems in the bathrooms. Welcome to Bath!

Since the 'narrow' tsl home defeat against Yorkshire, we lost an incredible 4-day game at home to Durham by just 1 wicket despite significant batting contributions from Hildreth, Cox, Parsons and Dutch, and with the ball from Johnson and Caddick. Somerset then did well to bat for most of the last day to secure a well-earned draw away to Derby where Blackwell, Turner and John Francis scored well, Caddick again taking a good haul of wickets. Somerset comprehensively beat Derby in the tsl game, Gazzard scoring a massive 157 and Parsons taking 5 for 39.

Returning to Taunton for the 4-day match against Essex, Somerset eventually ensured a close draw with great knocks from Bowler, Cox, Johnson & Caddick, and wickets for Caddick & McLean.

Black bank holiday weekend followed when Somerset were unceremoniously hurled out of the C&G away to Worcestershire on Saturday, Bristol City didn't make promotion to the first division Sunday and Somerset were undone by Middlesex at Lord's in the tsl Monday. That said, this Tractor Driver still enjoyed himself! Hopefully we might grab a 4-day win with games against Glamorgan at Swansea, and Nottinghamshire at Bath, and resume our good tsl form in the game against Sussex at Hove.

Today's visitors Leicestershire suffered that embarrassing defeat in their C&G match against Devon last month (Daffy out for a duck), but let's not forget they were very worthy runners-up in the 2001 C&G final. Just £4 gives you access to the 'Friends of Bath' tent where you can usually purchase an ale, lager or Blackthorn out of real glasses. They run quizzes, raffles, guess the weight of the cake & treasure hunt competitions, and new for this year, place a cross on a map of the ground where you think Jamie Cox is going to break his thumb!

Today, I'm going with Lucky Number 5, lucky colour maroon, and lucky brolly 'The Crook handled 23" traditional style umbrella with wooden crook handle, shaft and tip' - a shade better than the rest.

The previous competition answer was of course 'Marcus Trescothick is known as Banger because he likes sausages.' Out of 5,493 correct entries, Bert the seagull selected Mr T Driver's entry as the winner, so well done to him. He picked up another napkin. He also picked up another pint of Blackthorn which he'd put down earlier. Bert is totally incapable of long-haul flights, so just for today, it's one of those fascinating numbers games just for fun. Think of a number between one and a thousand. Double it. Divide the answer by 3. Divide the new answer by the number of times letter 'L' appears in the correct spelling of 'pavilion', multiply that answer by itself, then subtract 9. The result should be 7. Uncanny isn't it? How does it work? I dunno. If you didn't get the answer 7, try starting with number 6 and run through it again.
Now get out that picnic with the hard-boiled eggs, the mature cheddar, the garlic sausage, the pickled onions, the spring onions, and I'm sure there'll be the sweet smell of victory in the air.

COME ON SOMERSET!!!