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The non-Olympic games project has made me think of games and sport as the expressions of different mentalities.

It's not for the first time this thought has preoccupied my mind.

Talking for instance about cricket in the series Summer of Englishness I tried to correlate that game with English identity.

I have been to Kazakhstan recently and recorded one of their national games 'Asyk', which you can see here

The first part of the game - throwing the joint-bones as a dice - is based purely on a chance.

It reminds me the way nomadic people like Kazakhs have lived their lives traditionally, and are dependant on different random pastures on the steppe, a hazardous place to live.

But the second part of the game is closely connected to skill, you have to hit a row of joints rather precisely, like all nomadic hunters do with their arrows.

When you have you chance you shouldn't miss it. The philosophy of this game echoes the philosophy of a nomadic life.

And the very subject of the game - Asyk or the joint-bone - is a by-product of an eaten sheep or a cow.

For the same token it's no wonder that the English people have invented football.
First of all it's a team game. The aim of the game to get the ball into a net.

It's easy to imagine a nation of fishers, going to sea in teams to get their common catch.
There is another purely English sense of paradox in this game, it's played with feet rather than with hands, whereas all fishing is done by hands.

I understand how simplified is this parallel, but there's something in it to mull about.

Games travel the world and some nations adapt to them even better than the founders.

When you watch skilful Brazilian footballers, they are as light and fluid kayaks to heavy English fishing boats.

English football kept its orthodoxy with every member of the team allocated a special role: if you are Beckham you meant to cross and kick the free-kicks, if you are Crouch - fight in the air, if you are Heskey - miss the opportunities.

Others preferred mobility as the basis of their success.
What I'm saying is that the national character is reflected in the games too.

There are some games which were a part of a national tradition of different countries and now are becoming a matter of a controversy.

Spanish corrida or bull-fighting is one of them.

Though the beauty of toreadors' and matadors' art has been noted over the centuries by poets and composers, writers and artists, dancers and ordinary folk, nowadays animal rights activists fight the cruelty of that game.

This game, however cruel it is, could not be playout out without the skill, bravery and art of a man.

In a dog-fight or a cock-fight - games spread out through Central Asia there is no man involved as an actor, just as a spectator of pure cruelty.

Tough games reflect the tough life of the participants.

Another Central Asian and Afghan game is called Bozkashi or Ulak.

Horsemen fight for a goat corpse, which they should get from the crowd and drop at a finish line.

Once again it's easy to imagine the reality behind the creation of that game, where bravery is mixed up with some sort of greed, the art of horse-riding and the ruthless attitude towards rivals.

So I guess what I'm saying is: show me the game you play and I tell you who you are.

Please, send me your wonderful games.
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If there is a single writer to whom I've done an injustice - it's Charles Dickens.

I must tell you why.

While I was serving in the Soviet Army in my youth, I noticed that I hadn't read many of the 'greats' in world literature and decided to deal with it.

You may know the army logic, if you do anything, you do it in A to Z manner.

So I went to the regiment's library and started from the 'A' shelf.

Luckily it wasn't too long. Aksakov, Aragon, some Appolinaire, and I was done.

'B' took me some time to struggle.

Just one Balzac was represented in a dozen volumes, then there were Barbusse, Bitov, Bradbury and even some Bogomolov - all in several volumes.

It took me a couple of months of reading - mostly sorry to say - in the toilet cabin of our platoon during the night time, while other comrades were sleeping.

'C' was also populous, so when in five to six months I had reached the 'D' shelf with a noticeable 30 volumes of Dickens, 20 volumes of Dostoevsky, 12 volumes of Dreiser and likes - I understood that I was running out of time and would never reach the mid-shelves of the library - let alone Zweig or Zoshenko.

At the same time the Komsomol'skaya Pravd or 'Truth of Comsomols' newspaper started to publish educational articles about the technique of a 'diagonal reading' or 'fast-reading', stating that people like Lenin or J F Kennedy were able to read books like War and Peace overnight.

That was what the doctor prescribed and I started to master this technique while reading volume after volume of poor Charles Dickens.

So, I read all 30 volumes of him in a matter of two to three months.

But what had happened to the content - it turned into an enormous melee of one Dickens, a kind of a mega-novel, where Oliver Twist is a brother of Little Dorith and they leave in turn in the Bleak House or the Old Shop of Curiosities, to be grown up as David Copperfield or Nicholas Nickleby and become a member of a Pickwick Club.

All stories and characters, all plots and locations, all coined phrases and word-plays of Dickens, safely and surely were put inside of me, but in no particular order.

I represent a sort of a Dickensian circumlocution office where all kind of documents enter, but none comes out...

I must admit that coming to England in 1994 to work I had a feeling of deja vu as if I had already lived in this country.

It was subliminal Dickens, sitting inside of me as a hidden guide, teasingly preparing me to any situation.

When people used to break their English and loudly repeat something, I knew that they were trying to be nice to me.

When some of my friends ate quickly and spoke slowly, I was well equipped to recognise a certain philosophical mind in them.

In the local garage I met a local Mr Scrooge, one of my neighbours was an Artful Dodger...

Over the last two years I have decided to put my Dickens' house in some order.

I've started to watch costume dramas made by Dickens' novels.

I watched nearly all of them.

But strange enough, any of them, be it Great Expectations, Christmas Carol, Little Dorrit or David Copperfield - left me with a feeling of something not complete.

After each of the films I wanted to watch the next, trying to understand both Dickens and his literature.

And finally I understood why.

He is still alive inside of me as the only megabook which consists of 30 volumes or rather chapters and what I used to consider as injustice is in fact grace which I carry inside of me all my life from its 'A' to the very 'Z'.

PS I've just been at the BBC World Service World Book Club devoted to Dickens' bi-centenary and particularly to his 'Great Expectations'.

Experts and listeners from India and Kenya, Britain and Canada, from all over the world were discussing the genius of Dickens.

It coincided with the 10 anniversary of the World Book Club.

My congratulations to the team which produce such a wonderful programme, to its presenter Harriet Gilbert and in the spirit of that programme a question to my readers:

Why do you think Dickens used a mysterious birth from unknown parents for several characters as a plot device?

I should have written this entry under the title 'Faces of Bush House'. It's long overdue.

But I'm late.

My friend and my colleague Ravil Bukharaev died of heart attack at the age of 60.

I have known Ravil for the last 30-odd years. I knew him from our youth when we were both young, hungry and ambitious non-Russian poets aspiring to conquer the endless territory of Soviet literature from Moscow.

He became a part of my life, much like furniture one has at home.

You rarely think what do you do to your furniture, right? You can step onto a chair, you can kick a table's leg when you're angry, you can take a tissue and tenderly wipe away dust from your cupboard - it's yours.

It was the same with him.

It's as if nothing stands out about the association, until you lose and understand that a part of your life is irreplaceably gone.

But he was a special - more than that - outstanding, rare man.

I was recently rearranging my home library and with some spiritual amazement and physical annoyance I rediscovered how many books he had written and had given to me.

I wanted to tell him off, jokingly, that he made me work hard that day, but alas...

The books he had written and given me were in Russian, in Tatar, in English, in Hungarian.

Not translated into those languages by others, but written by Ravil himself in the original.

And the range of writing he attained was wide: from the finest poetry to topical politology, from profound philosophy to brilliant prose.

He translated the best of Tatar classic poetry into English, he published a two-volume book 'Islam in Russia', he composed a crown of sonnets in four languages, he brought to London the first ever Tatar theatre, which performed a fantastic fairy-tale of his.

We worked for over 15 years in the same building, in Bush House, the headquarters of BBC World Service.

He used to work in the Russian Service producing and presenting the best of their output, such as the discussion programme 'Radius'.

He was one of the anchors of the service famous for many writers and poets who worked there. He was around whenever he was needed.

When a friend dies
a part of you dies
your sweet or bitter memories,
your common past,
conversations about books which you are writing, going to write, discussions with open ends, which never end, petty complaints, winging, laughing together, just drinking tea, exchanging views on anything insignificant, telephone calls out of blue, when you want share something and promises, plans, plans, plans...
all of that die...
When your friend dies
you die...

Our mutual friends -Alyona from Kazan, Ak from Stockholm, Rollan from Almaty, Rustem from Kiev, Jean-Pierre from Paris - all are devastated by this sad news, he has left such a big hole in this world.

He wrote a poem 'Bee', which was about him, a man who was so generous in giving himself to this world, to people, to his wife Lyda, to his family...

And without Ravil a sweetening taste of honey will be missed in our lives...

Bee

I am sitting here and writing with a ball-pen;
To the window-pane above I turn my eyes.
In the porch outside a hazel-tree is blooming.
Like a little yellow cloud upon the skies.

The pollen hangs so heavy on the branches,
A brook runs bubbling through the deep ravine;
A bee crawls over my blue sheet of paper,
A wild striped bee that haunts the forest green.

Outside the bee has gone from flower to flower;
I carefully examine it and see
How it has stained its wings and its proboscis
With pollen from the flowers on the tree.

Indeed it has been working very wisely,
Collecting every drop of nectar there.
I must return to my blue sheet of paper,
So I release the bee into the air.

Working in a lonely house takes patience;
How long we need to wait to have our wish
For lines of verse like clear, transparent honey
To shine and sparkle on an empty dish!

Our hearts go to Ravil's wife Lydya and his family.