1. Make sure you have a hair cut before you go, and, if travelling with your girlfriend, pretend that you are already married. It will save a lot of time in jokes from the man on customs. (He was, however, a very nice man who got us through with the minimum of fuss!)

2. Always wear a hat if the sun is out. I learnt this the hard way when I almost died on a ferry between Coronado Island and San Diego because the heat was simply tremendous, like nothing I’d ever experienced before. I hadn’t had anything to drink that day either, which may have had something to do with it. I remedied this problem by buying a ‘Schlitz Malt Liquor’ baseball cap for $5 from a pharmacy, which remained welded to my head for the rest of the holiday.

3. Get as many of the souvenir pennies as you can – I only got a few, but each one is very special as a keepsake of places that you may not have got anything else from. They literally do them everywhere – see how many you can collect! Cheques to the usual address.

4. Never leave the doors to your car wide open in a hotel car park in Hollywood when about to set off for a day’s sightseeing on foot. Somebody (definitely not me) left Sid’s (our trusty Kia Sedona) sliding door open for the entire day, but luckily nothing was stolen and we all counted our blessings. You all think it was me, don’t you? OK, it was.

5. Make sure you’ve got an appetite. The food is BIG. (Luckily, I never found this particular obstacle much of a problem)

6. Always take more spending money than you think you will need. I was on target for the first week of the holiday, but visits to Amoeba Music and Guitar Center soon put paid to that. While we’re on the subject of Guitar Center, though…

7. If you’re going to buy a guitar while in America, don’t bother looking in the Used section of the stores unless you’re staying there for a very long time. I found a lovely used white Les Paul which I was prepared to buy for $249, only to be told that it wasn’t for sale because it hadn’t been cleared through the police computer as not being stolen yet. However, if I was prepared to wait thirty days for it…eventually, I caved in and bought a new one instead.

8. When visiting Seaworld, it’s wise to leave all of the actual ‘getting wet’ until the end of the day. The amount of people I saw walking around freezing because they’d been on the rapids first was astonishing. And also, it’s $5 a go in the full body driers that they have there. Bide your time and go and look at the penguins (smelly, but cute, a bit like yours truly) first.

9. Always leave an extra day at the end of the holiday to allow your body clock to recuperate. I thought I was going to make it after staying up for thirty two hours on the Saturday and going to bed at the normal time, but one hour’s sleep on the night before my return to work soon proved me wrong.

10. Rachel is a brilliant travel companion, apart from when there’s a bit of turbulence on the plane. To be fair though, it was pretty severe – to the point where my newly purchased can of Miller Light cascaded down onto my right foot instead of into my mouth where I was planning to put it.

I hope you’ve found this article informative and have had as much fun reading it as I did writing it. Coming soon will be Juggernaut news, more Doctor Who stuff, and lots more. Keep reading! X

This move was met with both intrigue (my friends) and dismay (my Mum – ‘You gave this bloke A HUNDRED POUNDS?’)

I only tell you about all this now because, a couple of days ago, I received a box through the post containing the items I’d paid for all that time ago – namely, a veritable feast of goodies that are all based around the release of Luke Leighfield‘s new album ‘New Season’.

I first discovered Luke in 2009, when I picked up on a tweet by an artist I was already a big fan of, Josh Doyle (who you should also be checking out, by the way) saying that he had just downloaded an album that he really liked, and that his followers should give it a try too. It was a pretty slow afternoon in the George Ward School IT office that day, so I clicked the link and downloaded what turned out to be Luke’s third effort, ‘Have You Got Heart?’. And I was hooked immediately. I listen to as much new music I can (mainly thanks to the majesty of the Derby branch of That’s Entertainment) and most things I choose to listen to are pleasant enough. But I knew this was special stuff.

You may think that a hundred pounds is a shade too much to be paying for a CD album and associated bits and pieces. But it goes a bit deeper than that.

You see, ‘New Season’ is an album that has been funded entirely by Luke’s fans.Before he even started recording the album, he sent out that video asking his fan base to pledge as much money as they could in advance of the release date, for which, in return, you would receive different levels of goodies on completion of the project. You could pledge as little as £10 for a CD copy of the album, or carry on up on a sliding scale to a maximum donation of £200 (I think). When the opportunity came up to be able to help this extremely talented man make some more music for everyone’s enjoyment, I felt a sense of duty and had to get involved. After all, I had enjoyed his previous work so much, and if I didn’t act, another album might not get made, and then where would we be?

My decision to pledge £100 meant that in the end I would not only get the album, but my name would be listed in the credits, as well as getting loads of other cool stuff like a t-shirt, badges, stickers, a canvas bag, guestlist to a gig of my choice etc. I could have also actually been on the album, singing gang vocals on a track with all the other pledgees (Pledgees? Is that a word? Ah well, it sounds right) but alas, I was unable to make it to the studio on the night in question.

Tracks from the album have already garnered plays in such high places as 6Music, and the positive reviews following it’s release continue to flow in. It pleases me greatly that I was able to get in on the ground floor and help in a small way to produce something really amazing.

My own chance to make it big in music might just have already passed me by. But with our help, and in the face of everything that the cut-throat music industry has to throw at him, Luke might just achieve what most of us that will forever be shackled to the toilet circuit never could. So visit the website, buy the album, and let’s help to strike a blow for music as it should be – pure, honest and created by artists who work from the heart.

And as for my Mum? I gave her the canvas bag to carry her lunch box to work in, and she was very pleased with it. Every cloud.

Here’s the video to one of the tracks from ‘New Season’. I hope you enjoy it and that I’ve insired you to go and pick up a copy of the album today!

You can donate to Sam’s cause here. While we’re on the subject, my colleague Andy Sayles is also running the Bath Half tomorrow, for a cause very close to my heart, Dorothy House. You can donate to Andy here. Please dig deep and give what you can!

‘NO YOU’RE NOT, YOU DISEMBODIED BASTARD!’ I shouted at the voice, whilst shaking my fist. Then, realising I was embarrassing myself, my girlfriend and everyone else waiting for the next train, I shut up pretty quickly*.

Yes indeedy, it was Valentines Day and Rachel and I were on our way to sunny Bournemouth to spend a couple of days on the seaside in order to celebrate our first one, ever. And possibly our last, if I kept this kind of behaviour up.

We had returned from Manchester the night before, where we had seen the amazing Gavin DeGraw at Academy 2 (not forgetting Juan Zelada supporting!) and Tuesday would be my fifth consecutive day on a train, and also the fifth out of seven in eight. For someone who was previously wary of crossing the Shire boundaries, this was definitely an achievement. After swapping gifts in the morning (I got a great framed photo of us both, which is currently pride of place on my desk, whilst Rachel got the classic trio of Valentines gifts from me – big fluffy teddy, yummy chocolates and a nice card) we arrived at the station in plenty of time which allowed a little sojourn into the town centre to enable Rach to find something lovely to wear that evening (she didn’t  – this was Chippenham, remember), and on the way back up the hill I stopped in a flower shop to buy my beloved some roses. However, remember, this was Valentine’s Day, which meant that each rose (each INDIVIDUAL rose, this is) was £4 per stem. I almost bought some before Rach stopped me, which was a wise move as it probably would have left me unable to pay for anything else during our break.

Back on the platform, and our train had been cancelled due to a broken down train on the line somewhere towards Swindon (what this had to do with anything, I’m still to figure out, as I thought Bristol and Swindon were in two different directions), which resulted in a much later train and some panic over whether our ‘morning only’ tickets would still be valid. However, the rest of the journey passed without incident (in fact, our tickets weren’t checked once during either the outward or return trips) and we arrived in Bournemouth a little late, but no less enthusiastic.

One leisurely stroll from the train station later, and we had arrived at our destination, the Bournemouth Central Premier Inn, Westover Road, Bournemouth. Our room was on the fourth floor, and was absolutely fantastic, despite the presence of the world’s slowest kettle. The large windows gave us a great view of the pier and the sea, and there was a lovely little blue uplight on the balcony for when the evening rolled around.

We dropped off our bags and decided to go into town for a little while to investigate our new surroundings. It was here that Rach found her dress for our evening meal, a rather lovely green number, while I thought about buying a scarf. I didn’t.

On the way back, we found that our hotel was right next door to an old fashioned arcade. Naturally, we bounded right in (there was a casino on the other side, but that would have been far too grown up) and started wasting whatever small change we had left over from the journey and our tentative shopping trip. It was all rather fun, until I came across a machine which, for 20p, would drop a rubber ball over a series of holes, which would then win you however many tickets it happened to be labelled with. Everyone’s a winner.

I put in my 20p, pressed the button, and the ball dropped. Almost in slow motion, it bounced around in its glass cage, and then landed straight in the hole labelled ‘JACKPOT’. For reasons unbeknownst to me, it then decided to come back out of this hole and fire itself straight into another one marked ‘BONUS’. Then, there was lots of lights and noise, and nearly one thousand eight hundred tickets started spewing out of it.

We were there for nearly fifteen minutes or so, desperately trying to keep up with the tickets and fold them up into a manageable size as they came out of the machine. Once we had finally collected them all up, we then had to spend another fifteen minutes feeding the tickets back into another machine, which counted them all up and then gave us a single ticket which we were able to take to the prize counter and swap for whatever we desired. Boy, was I excited! I immediately had my eye on the Hello Kitty stereo headphones, but unfortunately at seventy thousand tickets they were a little out of reach for us. In the end we settled for a really big plastic lollipop which had twenty normal sized lollipops inside it. And very nice they are too. (NB. When we left the room on Thursday, I decided that carrying a large outsized plastic lollipop all the way back on the train wouldn’t be very convenient, so we left it behind. I would like to think it’s now being kept in one of the many cleaning cupboards at the Premier Inn as some sort of trophy.)

Once the evening came around, it was time for us to head back the way we came in the afternoon to the Ask Italian for our Valentines’ night meal. I’ve got to say, as a connoisseur of fine Italian food (I’ve been in as many as two Italian restaurants, plus eaten countless pizzas over the years), I was extremely impressed, and so was Rachel. It was a really lovely romantic evening, with great food (we won’t mention the £6.15 beer) and a great way to celebrate our first Valentines together. I should think that we’ll definitely be returning at some point in the future!

Wednesday was our only full day in Bournemouth, so it was designated as our ‘do everything’ day. We rose early and headed to a branch of Wetherspoons down the road from the hotel, called the Brass House, and had a massive breakfast for around £4 each. Not a bad start at all!

Much money spending followed, including a few welcome additions to my DVD and book collection, and I also finally got my ear pierced. We walked around for ages looking for an independent place, but gave up in the end and went to Claire’s Accessories, who were very professional about the whole thing despite not usually dealing with twenty three year old males and having a group of pre pubescent girls crowding around wondering what was going on. It was only when the needle was about to go in, in fact, that Rachel nudged me and pointed out that there was a tattoo parlour directly opposite the shop that we had somehow managed to miss.

A stroll along the pier and on the beach in the unseasonably warm and sunny weather followed, and into another arcade, where I foolishly decided to ‘No Deal’ all the way to the end on the ‘Deal Or No Deal’ machine and unsurprisingly, ended up with nothing.

In the evening, we went back to the Brass House for dinner, and in the queue I was lucky enough to experience Bournemouth’s most cantankerous man, who held up the already impatient queue for a good five minutes in order to complain about the fact that the kitchen was freshly out of roast chicken.

After the food, we retired to the pool table area where Rachel swiftly dispatched me in a best of three competition by two games to nil. Not to be outdone, I immediately challenged her to a race on the nearby two player Mario Kart machine. She won that as well, and got a free game for her troubles. Suffice it to say, I haven’t been allowed to forget about this particular sequence of events just yet!

When Thursday morning rolled around, we were extremely sad to be saying goodbye to Bournemouth. It’s such a lovely place, and everything we needed was pretty much in immediate reach of the hotel, as well as being close to the sea. We’ll definitely be back in the summer!

*This may or may not have happened.

As some of you may know, I am a big fan of Doctor Who.

And already, I find myself needing to clarify what I mean before we can progress. When I say Doctor Who, I do of course mean the original Doctor Who that ran for twenty six almost unbroken years between 1963 and 1989. Not the teen soap opera it appears to have become today. Yes indeed folks, that is the level of nerdliness we’re dealing with here.

Recently, I’ve been re-watching all of the stories in order. I say recently, I’ve been at it for over a year now and I’ve only just managed to get to the end of the second season. Suffice it to say, there are a lot of stories and episodes to get through. Indeed, one of the stories in the upcoming (well, for me) third season is eleven parts long! And that’s a lot of italic writing, too!

I tried many times thing afternoon to start writing an article with little bits about every serial I’ve seen so far, but I found myself relying on Wikipedia for serials I can’t remember anything about, which I didn’t think was very good. So here, in the form of bullet points, is a brief summation of everything I can remember off the top of my head about the first two seasons of Doctor Who.

• Ian’s appalling hand-jive to ‘Ticket To Ride’ by The Beatles in ‘The Chase’.
• Peter Purves’ hilarious appearance as southern American tourist Morton Dill (or something like that) in the same serial. The companion he would go on to play, Steven Taylor, was introduced in the final two episodes.
• William Hartnell heroically fluffing the word ‘bothering’ during the tour of the TARDIS that the Doctor gives Steven in the first episode of ‘The Time Meddler’. ‘…sheer poetry, dear boy! Now will you please stop buggering me?’
• The Meddling Monk, played by Peter Butterworth from the Carry On films. Ah, Mr Farkyhars!
• A nice bit of continuity in ‘The Space Museum’ as Ian bangs his fists together whilst walking out of the TARDIS, and is still doing it when it cuts to the exterior shot of him walking out. It really does give you the impression that the TARDIS is bigger on the inside, than the outside…
• The sheer grandeur of ‘Marco Polo’, even if all the episodes are lost and the whole thing was reconstructed from on set photographs.
• The Aztec bloke’s pronunciation of Ian’s name in ‘The Aztecs’ (Eearn)
• ‘The Web Planet’ being extremely boring and complicated.
• ‘The Rescue’ being extremely ridiculous.

So, there you have it. And from now on, I’ll be posting reaction to each serial I watch, as and when I watch them. I’ve just watched the first episode of the first serial in the third season, Galaxy 4, so I’ll post some notes on it when I’m done. Please do expect this feature to still be running on this website in 2042.

I had also seen an Aston Villa ‘XI’ take on Oxford United at the Kassam Stadium in a friendly in the summer of 2009, but as the side that night was basically our youth team, I’m not sure it counts.

There were four of us going to the game, and a travel plan was hatched thus – I would travel to Bristol with Sam in the car, whilst James and Luke, keen to get themselves properly fed and watered before the game, would take the train to Bristol instead and arrive in the city a couple of hours before us. We had tickets for the Uplands Terrace, a section of which was reserved especially for the away supporters – but as our gang included two Aston Villa fans, one Bristol Rovers fan and a neutral, and we had the intention of staying together, the main Rovers part of the terracing it was. I would have to keep my celebrations to a minimum when (if) we scored. Earlier in the week, James, my Aston Villa oppo, had said that he thought we were the underdogs in this game – slightly extreme, perhaps, but enough to make me worry slightly that I could be present at the upset of the round, should things go wrong. Luckily, that happened up the road at Swindon instead.

I met Sam at the Texaco garage at the back of my house at twenty five minutes past three (a rule of thumb when going anywhere with Sam Perry – always add ten minutes on to any time he might tell you he will meet you) and, after a quick visit to the pumps, during which Sam, much to his embarrassment, was informed by a helpful lady in the queue in a very loud voice that he had left his filler cap open, we were away.

Conscious though that we were missing a vital relegation six pointer for Corsham at the Southfields ground in Radstock, I made several phone calls to our secretary Rich Taylor during the journey, but all to no avail. It would appear that we were being blanked for missing such an important match. In the end, we finally got a score out of Sam’s uncle Chris – Corsham would lose the game 1-0 through a goal scored in the first twenty seconds of the first half.

After admirably fighting our way Sam and I managed to find a parking spot in a side street about ten minutes walk away from the ground, and after a pause in the car to listen to Macclesfield take the lead in their cup tie against Bolton, we found ourselves following a group of men all the way to the game. One of whom was casually supping on a can of Special Brew. Now, I don’t know about you, but I have never seen a can of Special Brew being consumed anywhere other than outdoors. I’ve also been told that it’s like drinking treacle that tastes of vodka. However, as if to prove that Special Brew doesn’t necessarily mean you should judge a man by his cover, after he had finished his drink, he placed the empty can carefully in a recycling box that had been left outside a house that we passed. Anyway, I digress.

We arrived at the ground just in time to witness a minor scuffle break out between two Rovers fans queuing to get in. We had agreed to meet outside the turnstiles in order to distribute the tickets, and a quick phone call to James informed me that they were just getting into a taxi and that they would be with us in fifteen minutes. We passed the time by taking a quick look at the match day programme, and I was excited to discover that Howard Webb would be taking charge of the game. It meant at least that I would get to see a World Cup finalist in action this evening.

Half an hour later, our friends had still not made it to the ground, and another phone call uncovered the fact that they had in fact been stuck in traffic for the last twenty five minutes. With kick off only a matter of minutes away, Sam decided enough was enough, took his ticket and made his way into the ground, leaving me outside to meet them. He needn’t have bothered, as a few seconds later, I spotted my friends and we joined the throngs of late comers rushing to get in before the first whistle sounded.

As a consequence of this unfortunate hold up, by the time we managed to get into the ground itself, the Uplands Terrace, which was all on one level of footing, had filled to capacity and we were forced to stand around five rows from the front, which, as you can imagine, did not guarantee the best view. James and Luke decided to go and chance their arm elsewhere, while Sam and I stayed put. Indeed, things were so bad at the start of the game view-wise that I decided to visit the deserted pasty stand instead of trying to watch the action (three pounds well spent ) and text my girlfriend Rachel instead, whilst trying to follow what was going on at a football match I was actually at by checking the Aston Villa Twitter feed instead. The two wanderers soon returned, not having managed to find a better vantage point, and we struggled on for the rest of the half. We did, however, manage to stand on tiptoes just long enough to witness Marc Albrighton slot the ball through the legs of on-loan Rovers keeper Michael Poke after picking up a sumptuous through ball from Stan Petrov to make the score 1-0 to the Villa.

As the venerable Mr Webb sounded the half time whistle, we prepared ourselves for the inevitable rush of the Rovers fans leaving their spots on the terrace in order to go to the toilet, or get a pasty, or a beer, etc. As Rachel had advised me in a text whilst the first half was in progress, ‘Maybe if people go pee etc at half time you’ll be able to move forward a bit?’ Sound advice if ever I’d seen it. Except that, nobody went to pee. Or get a pasty. Or, indeed, go to pee and then get a pasty. Everyone stayed exactly where they were – they weren’t going to give up these spots easily, oh no! This led to another parting of the ways, and again Sam and I stuck together while James and Luke went off to try their luck in another part of the ground, with the promise to text me if they found a good spot. However, within minutes Sam and I managed to do just that ourselves – a matter of yards to our left stood the wheelchair enclosure, behind which nobody appeared to be standing. We moved ourselves to this spot and were afforded a great view of the pitch – better still than James and Luke, who we later found out were two rows from the front on the terracing below us and weren’t having much more luck there.

The second half started, and Sam and I quickly found ourselves surrounded by others who had had the same great idea as us. By now I had slipped easily into the charade of pretending to be a Rovers fan, applauding their substitutions and tutting at misplaced passes, whilst secretly wishing that the Villa would hurry up and score again to make the game a bit safer. For most of the period, standing behind me but a little off to the left  was a lady in her mid forties who would choose the strangest moments to shout ‘COME ON YOU GAS’ directly into my left ear. With her was her father, who continually muttered ‘for fuck’s sake’ under his breath for the entire time he was standing within my earshot. This peculiar case of football Tourette’s increased once Gabby Agbonlahor, on for the ineffective Emile Heskey at half time, dispossessed the Pirate’s Cian Bolger (later voted man of the match, much to Sam’s disgust) in midfield and curved a shot home from the edge of the area for 2-0. Not once did I hear him offer a word of encouragement to his team – indeed, as the home team’s Eliot Richards came off to be replaced by Lee Brown with ten minutes to go, the gentleman turned to Sam (perhaps he had sensed that I was a Villa fan in disguise) and, talking across me, began to berate the withdrawn player for shaking hands with Villa left back Stephen Warnock as he left the pitch. Once Ciaran Clark had danced through the Rovers defence from midway inside their half and slotted Villa’s third goal past Poke, they decided enough was enough and headed for the exit.

However, they managed to miss a grandstand finish, with the veteran McGleish pouncing on a mistake by Dunne, who had been rock solid all evening, and chipping the ball exquisitely over the onrushing Villa goalkeeper Brad Guzan, currently enjoying a run in the side due to Shay Given’s ongoing injury problems. There was more to come, as three minutes of stoppage time was announced, Warnock handballed a cross in the area and Mr Webb had no hesitation in pointing to the spot. McGleish stepped up once again, but his poor penalty was easily saved by Guzan, and the Rovers comeback was over.

3-1 the final score was then, and a satisfying result. The best was yet to come, however, when on the way back to the car I saw a small boy with his father, walking in the opposite direction to us, wearing a home made Bristol Rovers hat – which was made out of an upturned large brown envelope with a picture of the club’s crest stuck to it with Sellotape. It was something I would have done as a child if I had been able to go to games regularly, and it made me smile on the inside. Making me smile on the outside though was reading out Sky Sports’ report on the match to Sam on the way home – Villa make ‘light work’ of Rovers and ‘stroll’ past them into the fourth round, or words to that effect. It could possibly be another fifteen years before I see another Aston Villa game, so I was happy with that.

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