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Betelnut is something that's called shupari as well. Being from Bangladeshi origin, I'm fully associated with betelnuts. And I know they grow in very tall sort of trees. When I went to Bangladesh I saw people you know climbing up the trees and just getting them at the time when they were fully ripe where you could use them. There's been a lot of problems too in Bangladesh where people tend to steal them and they tend to have burglars. You know, like in this country we have burglars, people going into people's houses, but you know in a village sort of sense there's people coming and they're climbing your trees and they're taking the betelnuts just before you want to harvest them or something. And that's the issues that tend to happen there.

But betelnut is very common within the Bangladesh community. Well, it does have its health sort of issues like every other food - not having a balanced sort of diet. But since I've been in this country they've changed the focus of betelnut and they made it more sexier, more sort of glamorous than the old betelnut that's hard and it's really, really, really - you know - not tasty. But now in shops - you can go places like Mumtaz Paan House, all the other paan centres - you can design your own shupari with the leaf and everything. And you could have it really, really strong.

And we went in there, and we ordered it. It cost us I think about £1, £1.50 - and we had the strongest one. We had tobacco in there, we had, I mean, you name it, we had all the strongest stuff, and we just put it in our mouths. I think we just took a couple of bites, the juices came out and we just totally spat it out! And my head was just going round in a loop. I mean, I've never had this kind of betelnut - I think it's probably all the tobacco and everything. I went home that day - tried to take the smell away, and my head was just spinning. I had mangos, trying to take the smell away, it wouldn't go away. I had about 6 teaspoon of sugars - the taste wouldn't go away! I thought, well if I could go to sleep, I won't need to have this smell and it'll go away. Honestly, I've had a really bad experience on that, but it just educated me to think well don't have too much of the strong stuff!

But now, traditionally a lot of shops make a lot of sweet paan with shupari, which they add a lot of sweets with the betelnuts. And I mean I've seen especially in Bradford there's a lot of people that are smokers out there, and what they tend to do is, after they have a cigarette or whatever, they tend to get some shupari with the sweets in them and they bite into that to give them a lot of freshness, and when they talk to people. So that's encouraging to see people having different things that they're doing rather than the traditional shupari with the leaf. They're making it a lot sexier, a lot better made so that people interact in it - yeah, I know it is bad but it is very tasty as well!