As you can imagine it has been a reasonably quiet week for us cricketers. The weather has been horrendous which has meant not one ball being bowled for 10 days. A friend of mine was telling me that even his son's rugby was called off due to a waterlogged pitch! Rugby called off in May? Says it all really.

However, we move forward and this week sees the visit of Essex to the Swalec Stadium.

I’m sure most of you realise that this will see the return of our former captain from last season, Alviro Petersen, to Cardiff.

It would have been nice to see Alviro opening the batting for Glamorgan this season but circumstances didn’t allow that to happen.

He has though returned as Essex’s overseas player for the first six weeks of the county season.

It was certainly an interesting battle with him yesterday and to be fair he struck a terrific century on day one.

From one overseas player to another and we welcome the arrival of our Australian batsmen Marcus North to the club this week.

Unfortunately he arrives during the game so plays no part against Essex but is looking forward to getting us back on track as soon as possible.

He is a vastly experienced player who has represented Australia on 24 occasions and Glamorgan will become his sixth county that he has represented.

He will bring experience but also that touch of class you need in your batting order to help the guys really push on this season.

And so from an Australian overseas player to a local South African... Confused? It sounds a little strange but we also welcome the arrival of Martin Van Jaarsveld to the county.

Martin has played nine Tests and 11 one day internationals for South Africa and has also enjoyed fruitful periods at Northamptonshire and more recently Kent. He will join us purely for the Twenty20 competition which gets under way on June 15.

Martin has been in fine form for his franchise the Titans in South Africa during their T20 competition and comes highly recommended by our former player and coach Matthew Maynard.

Martin joins us under the Kolpak ruling, which allows us the luxury of signing another overseas player to join him and Marcus North for the T20. Before that starts we have two CB40 games against Hampshire and Scotland. We start on Monday when we travel down to the Ageas Bowl in Southampton for a 1.45pm start.

This season it has been decided that we will all travel to and from one-day games on a coach on the same day. This is a good way for the boys to chat about the game and maybe celebrate a few when returning back to Cardiff.

You're probably thinking that Scotland must be seven to eight hours on a coach? And yes, you're right and that’s why all the boys are flying to Glasgow apart from two.

And guess what? Yep, myself and our bowling coach Steve Watkin have been volunteered to drive the kit van all the way to Glasgow, probably stopping in numerous service stations, sampling a wide range of Ginsters pasties washed down by every type of coffee known to man.

But we are hoping to start our CB40 campaign off on the front foot and hopefully be in the running when the league picks up speed in the latter part of the summer.

I look forward to writing about a first championship win of the season and a successful start to our CB40 campaign... if I return back from Scotland in time!