When we moved up into Primary 7 our footballing world changed considerably. Gone were our best players and we didn’t have enough new talent coming through from the year below us to pose a serious threat to anyone. We called in a few of the fringe players from Primary 7 and they actually surprised us even if they weren’t used to playing in an 11-a-side team. The other change was that one of the other local schools was being refitted and their P6 and P7 classes moved into our school for a year. Where we used to struggle to to fill two 7-a-side teams for games at lunchtime we were getting 14 v 14 at times and it became an intense rivalry over the weeks and months that it went on. Games would be started at the morning break if we hadn’t already managed to get a game underway before school actually started in the morning. We’d then have a long ‘half’ at lunchtime where our players would join in as and when they finished their lunch and we would finish it off at the afternoon break. The rivalry went much further than just football though. When it came time for the local school swimming championships one of their players managed to get a silver in the 50m freestyle competition. Their joy was short lived when they realised that Craig had stole the gold and I’d brought home the bronze. I don’t think we ever let them forget that.

This year seen our best result so far and possibly the one result we remember. We didn’t even win and it was our best result. How sad is that? As with almost all schools in the West of Scotland there is a huge rivalry between the catholic schools and the non-catholic schools. Some say it’s a bad thing but at that age almost no one is interested in bigotry side of things as it’s all about the fact we were better than they were at whatever we were playing or vice versa. Our Lady of Lourdes Primary was our enemy. Where we had a healthy rivalry with Kirktonholme as they were sharing our school Our Lady of Lourdes was actually the nearest school to where most of us lived. If I went to the corner shops at the end of my street you could see it. We never mixed with them and so the only time we could get one up on them was during sports. Unfortunately they had one of the best teams in the league. The previous year they were putting six or seven goals past us with ease but this time we were determined to get something back from them.

I’d been moved over to play in central defence by this point and I managed to get a good understanding with the other defenders. Nothing could get past us on the ground as every time the ball came near us we would throw a crunching tackle in and clear the ball back up the park. Where we fell down however was we were still as slow as hell. All it took was someone to realise that we couldn’t keep up with their forwards and boot the ball over our heads and have it come down to a foot race. Our Lady of Lourdes hadn’t worked this out though. We got stuck into them hard during a cup game and pretty soon we were drawing 2-2 with them and the scoreline stayed that way until the final whistle. You would have though we had won the cup given the way we were celebrating. Before the game we were told that in the event of a tie as there was no time for replays and because we were under a certain age and couldn’t play extra time whoever put the most pressure on the other team and won the most corner kicks would be declared the winner. For every corner they had won we must have won at least two we were that worked up about this game. Then their headmistress got involved. It was unheard of for her team to lose like that and was putting in a complaint that the referee was biased towards us. There we were having played our hearts out and finally won something even if it wasn’t technically a win and she was pulling it away from us. I’d skinned the entire length of my leg on the ash park after throwing everything I had into every tackle and ended up having to get a lift back to the first aid room at the school. Whatever happened after that game though we have no idea but we found out at the next practice that we were having to replay the game. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a bunch of eleven year olds make so much noise in disgust before. Needless to say they put about 13 goals past us in the replay.

We took part in a seven-a-side competition in Strathclyde Park about midway through the season and were about the only team from East Kilbride taking part. Sometimes I wonder how we managed to get into these things when we were so far down the league but we never questioned it at the time. In our group stage were three other teams and basically if you didn’t win two out of your three games you weren’t going through to the next round. So the first game we played we were completely overwhelmed. There was no beating about the bush they were just far superior to us. At this point we realised that the team we were due to play next was being managed by Derek Ferguson and as we were almost all Rangers supporters we spent more time trying to talk to him than concentrating on the games. As I can completely understand now he got a little pissed off with us and ended up have our manager pull us away so that he could work with his team. It was at this point that someone realised that the reason Derek was managing the next team was that his younger brother played for them. We were royally beaten but the game didn’t end before I managed to kick the younger brother, Barry, up in the air and almost end his future career before it started*. It wasn’t malicious but I was terrified Derek was going to beat seven different shades out of me. We got stuck in and as with any competition we ever entered we started to play well as soon as it was impossible for us to win anything. We beat that team but we were on the bus home within 5 minutes of the game ending feeling as though we hadn’t won a thing.

Again we finished second last in the league although this time I managed to captain the team a couple of times.

Even 7 years later when I was still playing for hours every night I could never get that feel for competitive football again. Throughout secondary school I never played a game outwith P.E. and certainly was never picked to train with the team. I became more comfortable on the ball and my passing improved and with that my position gradually changed from a centre half to somewhere in the midfield. I don’t play football very often now. Those of my friends that do play all have regular games which I can never get into and to be honest until I get a clean bill of health from the doctors anything that involves me running about is off the cards.

I would spend days and weeks playing Football Manager/Championship Manager on my computer during the winter months whilst waiting for the weather to become good enough to play for real. I ate up anything I could find to read about Rangers and followed every game on TV. To this day I’ve still never set foot in Ibrox and in all honesty I’m not really a fan of watching the game but I still love to play it. I guess it makes me feel like I’m eleven again.

* Barry went on to play for and captain Glasgow Rangers and Scotland over his years of playing professional football.

I’ve been thinking a lot recently about my childhood. I don’t know if it’s because I now have kids of my own or whether it’s because I’ve got back in touch with a few folk from primary school through Facebook but it’s certainly on my mind.

And do you know what strikes me more than anything about that time? The sheer amount of football I played. I’m not talking a game of seven and by on a sunny night when our parents had kicked us out of the house. I’m talking from the age of about five years old playing at least 2 hours of football a night and even more on weekends if the weather was good enough. Even at the age of 18 I was playing 3-4 hours of football on weeknights. My sudden stop when I fell out with/lost contact with they guys during the year I turned 19 basically explains where my gut came from.

Being five years old and the tallest in my class meant that any time I played football you could almost guarantee I would be in goals at some point. We used to play on a huge strip of grass beside my parents house. On one edge there was a swing park and we used the rest of the grass as a huge pitch. To this day I’ve never worked out why we always placed the goals where we did. On one side the hill fell away and was covered in bushes and nettles and about 20 yards in we placed the goals. The other side of the pitch ran all the way up to the road which was about another 100 yards away. The only rules we used with regards to pitch markings was the goal line and the outer boundaries of the park for the sides. If it went passed that it was either a goal or out of bounds but you could keep playing even of the ball went all the way up to the main road.

As with most groups of kids playing in the street the age range usually ran from about fives years old right up until twelve. Any older than that and they found something better to do or better players to play with. We were always in awe of the older players. Brian and Stevie were brilliant and I remember rumours that they had scouts out looking at them later in their football life. At least one of the guys we played with ended up having a trial for Chelsea although I can’t for the life of me remember his name. One guy was just huge. Even at that age you could tell he was going to be tall and when a kid gets the nick name ‘Sherman’ it doesn’t come as a surprise that he ended up playing and coaching for the EK Pirates american football team.

I won’t lie. I was never what you would call a fantastic player. I had great reflexes and my time in between the sticks was spent shot-blocking with the occasional amazing dive across the goal mouth to the tip the ball by for a corner kick. I couldn’t hold on to a ball and to this day I don’t have the confidence to run with it either.

One summers day both myself and my mate Billy were playing at a bit of grass at the end of my street and were convinced that a scout was watching us. We spent hours afterwards wondering who he was from and what fantastic shot or save would have caught his eye. Years later I found out that the guy was actually my neighbours son who was visiting but had been locked out whilst my neighbour was out. He laughed when I told him our story after all those years.

Then came the day we were dreading for a while. The local council sold off our ‘football pitch’ and they built sheltered housing for the elderly on it. We would have to walk twice the distance to our school in order to get to a red ash hockey pitch we could use instead. Needless to say we didn’t go there. We started playing on the hill at the end of my street. Even when we were chased by the police we still went back. The council ended up planting additional flower beds so that we couldn’t actually get a large enough area to play on… We still found a way though.

As the years moved on I finally made it into P6 and they decided to start the school football team back up. At that point we were playing most of our football at school in the loading bay below the school kitchen. It was about a quarter of the size of a 5-a-side pitch and we managed to play 10v10 on there at times. Shots on goal could come in from just about anywhere and at any time so my reflexes were getting a good work out but any time we moved up onto the full size pitch I was useless. I don’t know if it was because I wasn’t used to the size of the goals or if it was that I was that small I could only touch the cross bar if I took a run at it but I went from being a really good keeper to being someone that folk insisted not be allowed anywhere near the goals. I was always a good reader of the game even of I wasn’t the best actual player so I did eventually get the hang of playing 11-a-side on the full size pitch.

The school football team was run by three parents. Mr Paxton, Mr Clapperton and Mr McLaughlin. I have very vague memories of Mr McLaughlin playing for Dumfermline or some other lower division team that I’d heard of but never paid any attention to but Mr Paxton didn’t really know what to do. I was 10 years old at the time so what do I know about managing a team though. When Mr McLaughlin was involved we did circuit training and practiced dead ball situations but when it was just Mr Paxton we played 5’s in the Main hall or took penalties for the fun of it with our outfield players taking turns in goal. Craig McPhee, our captain in P7, took his turn in goals one evening only for the ball to be hit that hard that he broke his wrist against the bench we used as a goal. I’ll keep the rose tinted spectacles off. We were rubbish. I think there were something like 10 teams in the league we played in and the only one we could beat was The Murray Primary School and we loved going there for a game. It was the only school in East Kilbride that had a grass pitch at that point so it felt like we were playing at the end of our street.

We had some outstanding players in that team that year and to this day I don’t understand how we didn’t manage to do better. Craig Purden was possibly the best goal keeper in the league and in James Madden we had one of the best central midfielders as well but the rest of the team couldn’t hold back the opposition. We tried hard and we did have good players but without direction and any tactical know how the end results were usually inevitable. We were also threatened several times with complaints and recommendations that we be kicked out the league. Why you may ask were we receiving this sort of welcome? We had the ‘cheek’ to have a girl play for our team apparently. Usually there was no bother before a game and the schools were very good with providing some sort of separate changing facility for Catrina but by the end of the game and they’d seen how good she was the complaints usually started.

When i joined the team I moved from being a goal keeper to playing at right back. I still don’t know why I was put there as I could never keep up the pace and run up and down the wing like the other full backs we played against and I was never happy with our central defenders. They were good players but they struggled to play as a team and at times forgot that without linesmen you can’t pull the offside trap unless the player is that far offside the ref can spot it from half way across the pitch. So we went from them not communicating very well to both stepping out at the perfect time had we had linesmen giving the attacker that few yards head start that we could barely afford giving the speed of our defence. We leaked goals constantly and in one game a guy called Speedy ripped us to shreds whenever he decided to try and get past us. It was only Craig’s skills that stopped the number of goals we lost heading into double figures I think.

We ended up second bottom of the league that year.

Today is the first day of the rest of my life. I’ve talked about it and, surprisingly, I’ve joked about it but above all I’ve stressed about it. Today I handed in my confirmation letter for voluntary redundancy.

This isn’t me. Well it is obviously but I don’t do things like this. I’m completely out of my comfort zone on this one.

Grant MacDonald @ Flickr

Ten years ago I couldn’t have lived without a wage coming in but it wouldn’t have been the end of the world. I was still living at home with my parents and even bringing home £40 a week would have been enough to survive on. Five years ago I had a mortgage and wasn’t particularly happy at work but I stuck with it. It was an easy job for the money and in all honesty once your in the civil service unless you quit yourself it’s really hard to find a way to end up without a job. It’s safe. This was all compounded when I met my wife and I took on some of the financial responsibility of her son. That job I had was money in the bank. And then not one but three babies came along. That need to provide for them come rain or shine kicked in hard. After a lot of disappointing times at work I finally found a post that I enjoyed but it was a lot of work and between it and my home life my health started to suffer. I was stressed beyond belief and really not enjoying life. A lot of opportunities were passing me by that I wouldn’t, no make that couldn’t take because I refused to leave the safe money.

Fast forward to earlier this year and suddenly after months of denying the restructuring at work would come to this they offered up a voluntary redundancy package to us. Those that know me better than most will know that since gaining that job I enjoyed I have been diagnosed as being dyslexic and almost in the same breath lost out on making that job permanent. I’ve since been sitting in limbo helping out our Accounts teams doing the most brain numbing of tasks. Despite the best intentions my work have been mostly unsuccessful in helping me deal with my dyslexia and our redeployment team just don’t seem to care.* Needless to say I’ve lost all hope/want/desire to carry on working here. Don’t get me wrong. I am completely behind the work we do overseas and I will really miss that feeling of no matter how shit a day I’ve had at work doing the most menial task imaginable I will have still done my part to make the work we do possible. There comes a point however where it just doesn’t balance.

I could write for days on where I go from here. I’ve got university prospectuses to read through, a house to redecorate, a garden to fix, business plans for a new business, funnily enough, to help my wife draft up and even with all of this new things are showing up almost daily. Last night we went out for a family dinner to celebrate my brother in laws 18th birthday to a very popular Indian restaurant in Glasgow. As is our custom we baked a cake to take along although this time it was myself that did the work rather than the joint efforts we usually put together. The owner, at least I think he’s the owner due to the newspaper interviews with him at the front door talking about his friendship with Micheal Jackson, took my wife aside and asked if we had bought the cake or made it ourselves. In the 30 odd years in the catering trade he said it was the best cake he’d ever eaten and gave my wife his business card in case we were interested in in going in that direction.

I am completely terrified that this isn’t going to work out. The UK’s unemployment numbers are starting to bottom out and house prices are starting to rise again but what if I can’t make any of this work? I’ll have gave up a safe job with an OK salary for nothing. I do have to say though that the fear is no where near as debilitating as the stresses from the work itself.

I’m actually looking forward to the change. All my life I’ve needed to have my life planned out. When I was off sick not knowing what I was going to do the next day drove me up the wall. When we go anywhere new I need to know exactly where we’re going and sit with the map on my knee as my wife drives us there. There is no road map from here on in only the hope that just around the corner and with a little bit of work there is a destination that is going to make us all happy. Sure we might take a wrong turn here or there but even if you hit a dead end you just turn around and retrace your steps until you get back on road you were on before.

I can’t wait to get that journey started.

* By this I mean they are in no rush to help us out with anything and so far I’ve asked two out of a huge list of questions I had for them. One question I finally received an answer on two weeks after first asking and the second question I’m still waiting on an answer. They seem to be telling other folk in our office one thing and then not telling us anything. As for helping me with my dyslexia I waited six months for them trying to get me a secondhand PDA only to be told they they’d finally binned the last of them a month ago and forgot about me and anyway as my psych report doesn’t mention a PDA specifically, instead it says ‘all possible use should be made of electronic aids appropriate to Robert’s work’ and so they were going to give me a laptop to do the same thing. Where is the point in that? A PDA costs far less then the laptops we use in the office.

-+ For the record this started out as an email to Wil Wheaton…Don’t ask me why…but it got a little to flowery and I lost track of the point I was trying to make somewhere along the way and instead ended up with this. It is far better as a blog post than as an email to some celebrity that will likely never read it and in all honesty it’s much more cathartic this way.+-

I’ve found out what my problem has been with my writing output. I’ve spent the last six months trying to work out why I can’t keep my output up there where i want it and I’ve finally got to the bottom of it.

by mudpig @ Flickr

A little background first. This blog has been going for years in various formats. My Dice Bag RPG blog has been going quite strongly for just over a year. Every other blog I write for gets articles posted as and when I find something to write for them. That was until I became unwell yet again for more than a few days and my resurgence stopped dead in it’s tracks. Two months later I get back to work and I start writing again. So what am I missing? What is the reason that I cannot write at home?

I don’t have a desk anymore.

When I gave up my desktop PC in favour of a laptop I also gave up my ability to sit at home and type. I can’t comfortably sit with the laptop on my legs and type and I can’t type whilst standing at the kitchen worktop either. Basically my productivity is nil when I’m at home.

Almost all of my blogging and writing these days is done over lunch breaks in the office as I’m at a desk in an environment designed to allow me to type without much distraction. Ok ok so open plan offices aren’t really designed for that but you get the picture. I’m in the correct position to be typing so when I do actually try I manage to get some writing down on the screen. Unfortunately whilst at work I can’t research posts very well due to inane firewalls and nosy-parkers wanting to know why your looking at whatever page I happen to have open on my screen over lunch time. This basically means all my Geekdad contributions have dried up completely. I need to rectify this.

Hopefully with the building work going on in my home just now and the possibility of going back to university in 9 months means that I may actually have both the space and the need as well as the desire to have a place to write.

I think I need to go shopping for a desk.

I hate The Big Bang Theory when it first started. In fact I’m sure I demanded my 24 minutes back after watching the pilot. I was drawn in near the end of season one however and the latest episode spawned some great, if your a geek, Twitter action.

For those that don’t know

sheldoncooper - Mee Maw or no, this isn’t over @wilw. teskas tal’tai-kleon!
wilw - @sheldoncooper I’m pretty sure that I’m the small rock to your enchanted bunny, Moon Pie.
sheldoncooper - I must admit, there’s somehting to this. RT @snickerdoodle85 now now… look at it this way now @wilw is your nemesis, all geniuses have one
sheldoncooper - @wilw In the now-more-relevant-than-ever words of Rondon, “You despicable Mellanoid Slime Worm. Liar!”

I think that’s in the right order.

Forget Stephen Fry… This is the reason for Twitter.

That says it all really. I’m really finding it hard to not lock my front door and never have to deal with anyone out with my immediate family. Most things that get to me are perfectly harmless such as friends going out for a night out and not offering an invite or things happening at work that just scream of them having something against me.

I guess the biggest thing that has hit me in the past few months is that one of my ‘friends’ has been convicted of attempted rape, sexual assault and sexual activity with a child. He also admitted possession of the indecent images. This guy was a school teacher and for the last 15 years had been someone I would have called a friend. It’s true that over the last few years I’ve seen him less and less but at one point he came out clubbing with us almost every week and when we weren’t doing that we were round at his for a few beers. We even went on a lads holiday to Benidorm with him. He wasn’t just someone I knew through friends and occasionally seen out and about.

Where do you start with that one?

I’ve not really talked about it apart from to my wife and to two other friends that know him but even those conversations were short and to the point. When I first found out about it I was standing in line at my local newsagent when the headline caught my eye. When I seen it was Kerr my heart sank. I really didn’t know what to think or say. I told Vonnie and she ended up trawling the internet to find out more as at that point all we knew was that he had been arrested a few weeks earlier but it didn’t go into to much detail. Eventually it hit a local internet forum that I use where I knew a few of his pupils posted and they couldn’t believe it either. It turned out quite a few others new him through his Judo or time as a steward at the QMU at Glasgow University.

I knew him through my best man who had known him for several years longer that I had through the Judo club. I didn’t know if he knew though so I ended up sending him a few texts and then phoning him to make sure he knew and he was all right. It turned out he had known since the arrest but just didn’t know what to say or do.

Over the last few months as information came out through the newspapers or from his family I started to have mixed thoughts about it all. The Kerr I knew would never do something like that but you don’t get smoke without a fire as they say. I refused to get off my fence and felt like shit because of it. On one hand he was a mate that I believed could do know wrong and on the other he was being accused of all sorts and you can’t help your mind wandering and connecting a few dots even if those dots don’t actually make a picture. If he was to have been found not guilty and in my head I had already committed him how would I feel when I next seen him? What if he was found guilty and I’d blindly defended him to the last. How could I trust anyone after that?

I did connect a few dots though and as you always do you look back and realise things never added up. I’ve no idea if they meant anything but it’s got me questioning a lot of friendships purely on the basis that well if one of them can be someone I trusted any of them can. A few things just don’t add up in my head though. Aside from the actual crimes that is. He says he gave up a medical career so that he wouldn’t have to deal with young kids but then he became a teacher? And not just any old teacher but the head of pastoral care no less. That makes no sense.

As a group we all had computers and all had varying degrees of knowledge with how to fix them and despite him being a computing studies teacher any IT help for the group of friends was always dealt with by either myself or Paul who does that kind of thing for a living. With Kerr though we were never allowed to touch his PC. You could tell him how to fix it but you were never allowed anywhere near it to actually show him how to do it.

When we went to Benidorm we thought we’d play a prank on him. He was the new boy as he hadn’t went on holiday with us the previous year so he was the target. We made up fake wanted posters from the Strathclyde Nonce Squad with a photo of Kerr which we managed to get a few of the pub reps to hand out to anyone we seen him talking to in the street at night. His reaction was completely over the top for what was at the time a harmless joke but we always just put it down to how drunk he was at the time. It could just have been that though. This is what I mean by connecting dots that possibly might not be connected.

He crossed the line that everyone knows not to cross and I find myself thinking about whether I could ever talk to him again. Completely taking out the fact that I have kids and a step son almost the same age as the boy that Kerr forced himself on… Who am I kidding I can’t take that fact out of the situation. I couldn’t talk to him again. I’d struggle to be in the same town as him if I’m being completely honest. Barry was saying earlier today when I was talking to him that he couldn’t have him in his house again and that was coming from someone without kids so he could only guess as to how I would react. I’m just struggling to comprehend why he’d even get as far as the doorstep for him being in the house to be a consideration. He has suffered through this as well as Kerr was a close friend to him right up until the day of the arrest. I dread to think how his family are dealing with all this and don’t even get me started on the boy and his family. His statement after the verdict really got me as well as it just looked as though he was clutching at straws and trying to make out that he was good really, that saying sorry was enough for his victim and that feeling hated wasn’t a very nice feeling. Well guess what Kerr… I’d hazard a guess that neither is being sexually assaulted.

I’ve drivelled most of this as it’s late but I had to get it out of my head as it was going to get nasty in there. I’ve always believed that the only person I could fully trust was myself and over the years I found out that wasn’t true. It really fucks you up though when someone that you do trust shits on you, people you care about and on anyone and everyone else that happens to be involved. It takes you back to square one almost.

One of the reasons I haven’t been active on any of my blogs these last few weeks is that I’ve been sick. The other reasons are World of Warcraft and a messy house but I won’t go into those here. Basically I only go near Twitter at work as I’m always in front of a PC there and at home I never really get the chance to veg for 8 hours straight at a computer. Almost all my blog writing is done over lunch breaks which is also something I don’t generally get at home.

ortismj12 @ Flickr

I’ve now been ill for three weeks and I’ve a doctors line for another week at least. So what’s been wrong with me? Well the first week I was suffering from migraines. I wasn’t right at the Shaw’s wedding. I couldn’t quite place it but by the Monday morning I was suffering and that’s when I reached for the migraine medication. Before I took it though I reread the instructions and apparently your not supposed to take any triptans if you’ve had heart problems in the past which made me remember that any time I take the better of the two tablets I get chest tightenings and pains. The other kind of pill doesn’t have that problem but it doesn’t work anywhere near as well on the pain. A quick trip to the doctor later and he confirmed that I shouldn’t be taking them and should make do with paracetamol and ibuprofen until I get checked out and go for a treadmill test. The big problem with that is with my liver problems i can’t take paracetamol and ibuprofen doesn’t even begin to help with migraines.

Anyway… The migraine left after the fifth day and everything was fine. That is everything was fine until I woke up the next day and had the worst stomach upset I’ve had in years. Ever since then I’ve been on a toast and water/flat coke diet. That’s three weeks now. Every so often I try a proper meal to see if I’m any better and it all comes flooding back. For the first week I suffered really bad stomach cramps but I was given an anti-spasmodic which has meant I actually get to sleep at night now. My stomach now feels as though it’s constantly on edge though. I can’t relax and usually can’t get to sleep until I physically can’t stay awake anymore. It’s fun and games in our house. I also have an almost constant fatigue. I have no energy and really struggle to get any get up and go during the day.

To top it all off I have an appointment with the Liver doc on Wednesday to get the results back from his tests from three months ago. His initial diagnosis was a probable layer of fat that had built up around my liver which was throwing off all the blood test results which could be fixed with a diet but I’ve had another doctor suggest it might be Gilbert’s Syndrome which actually covers more of the ’symptoms’ I have so we’ll need to see what happens.

I’m getting really bored with this now. Aside from my problems at work and the upcoming voluntary redundancy scheme that has just been put in place I must be nearing the 6 months full pay limit for sick leave. They should tell me when I get close to the limit but there has been problems in the past with it not happing to some people and overpayments occurring and I’ll be damned if I make things easy for them if that was to ever happen seeing as everything was supposed to be fixed so it didn’t happen again.

It’s way past my bedtime though so I’ll sign off and hope that I’m tired enough to sleep when I hit the pillow.

So our final day in Brighton arrived. We ate our weight in breakfast and then checked out of the hotel. We never really seen much of Brighton on the day before so we decided to let Vonnie wander around the shops for a couple of hours before heading to the car.

When I’d been out the night before the place looked like Glasgow’s east end with a few more shiny shops and a bunch of housing that wouldn’t look out of place in St Andrews behind the shops. Nothing spectacular really. As we walked up towards the main shopping area though we walked down into a side street full of shops. And it went on…and on…and on. The city centre is full of little alleyways full of boutiques, jewelers, toy shops and anything else you could possibly ever find or want to find. It was what I felt a seaside town should be like. Vonnie fell in love with a cake shop that sold the most amazing looking cupcakes whilst the kids found a toyshop that they could spend their entire pocket money from now until they day they turn 18 and still not have bought everything they wanted.

It was around about this time though that I realised there was a LEGO shop in Brighton. A young kid going into the toyshop had a LEGO carrier bag and was obviously out with his gran who was spoiling him. A quick look on the internet on my phone and shuffle around Google Maps meant that I had a plan to get us to the shop. All I had to do was ask if anyone minded that we go to the LEGO shop though. It was heaving. Trying to navigate in there with the pram was almost impossible so Findlay bought himself a Racer and the kids picked up a minifig from the pick’n'mix section whilst Vonnie bought me a teeshirt as a present.

Outside was the worst busker I’ve every had the misfortune to hear. A young emo/grunger/rock kid dressed in neon clothes playing bad music on a ukulele hooked up to a crappy amp. I probably wouldn’t have minded so much if he wasn’t trying to flog CD’s of his music as well.

Once we found the car park again we set off looking for a petrol station. Unlike the day before when we drove west we decided to drive east instead and see if we could find anything nice to see or do. I thought we were just going on a drive before collecting our bags from the hotel and Vonnie had forgotten about the bags and thought we were already on our way. After a bit of discussion about who’s fault it was we ended up back at the hotel, which was on the way to the motorway anyway, the receptionist asked in disbelief about what was in the bags we’d left. The holdalls were fine but the laptop she couldn’t believe the weight of. I think it had both laptops and chargers as well as by books and all my camera lenses in it. Not the lightest of things.

I can’t remember at what point we decided just to drive home rather than stop off at Derby, it might have been around the junction on the M25 for Heathrow, but that’s what we did. We eventually found a service station that had an M&S Simply Foods store in it as it’s far cheaper than most service stations and the grubs better as well. I think we bought them out of sweets and sandwiches. And then we found the Krispy Kreme chiller in the next shop. We’d loved the glazed ring donuts in London so we bought a dozen mixed donuts and really pigged out. They are very disappointing though. Certainly far more hyped than they have any need to be.

We had to stop for diesel before Manchester and so came off the motorway looking for a cheaper alternative to the service stations. The last time we did this we ended up driving around Kendal on the way to France last year and getting lost. We did that again this time as well. One wrong turning on a roundabout, I’m sure the road layout had changed from when our map was printed, and we were completely lost. It took a good 45 minutes of driving to find our was to Crewe, the most depressing town on Planet Earth, fill up the tank and get back onto the motorway at a junction we’d passed over an hour previously. That was a little stress inducing.

Eventually we made it back across the border but the weather was horrendous. I’ve no idea what time we got home at but at points the drive was terrifying. The trucks and artics were kicking up that much spray that you couldn’t sit behind them on the road as you could barely see but if you tried to overtake you went from being able to see 10-15m to barely being able to see past the front bumper of your car for those few seconds. We did get home in one piece though.

So…I know I write these holiday blogs or myself as I usually forget everything but it seems some people actually read them. Well done you guys. You might want to get your sanity checked next time your at the doctors though…

So, our first day in Brighton.

We woke up in time for the buffet breakfast which is novel. Usually if we do wake up in time it takes that long to get the tribe ready that we get there just as they are putting the dishes away. Admittedly I did have to rescue all three kids from the grips of the fold-out bed but we did it. It was going to be a busy day so we loaded up on food whilst I jumped out to put money in the parking meter every so often. Where we had parked the car overnight was free until 9am but only had a maximum stay of two hours after that. We started getting the kids into the car before our time was up but we had went over by the time we eventually managed to get away from the hotel.Just as Vonnie got to the car a parking attendant was about to give us a ticket but thankfully we got away with it.

We drove down to the sea front and headed west with the hope of seeing a bit of the coast and finding something to do. There was a steam engine museum that we tried to find but we couldn’t find it on the map and the road signs just ended up with us getting lost in a housing estate. We stopped off at a local Co-op supermarket for some lunch and ate that in the car park. I’ve no idea if the shop was being refitted, newly opened up or closing down but they had barely any stock on the shelves and what shelves they had would have just about filled a store a quarter of the size of this one. All very weird.

Next it was time to dump the car at an overnight car park which was on the other end of the front from our hotel and walk back along the sea front shops hunting for the best deal in rock and novelty toys. The closer you got to the pier the larger the bundle of rock you could buy for £2. The kids dragged us down on to the beach which was a huge disappointment. For years I’ve heard stories about Brighton beach this and Brighton Beach that and of how it was so great and what we found was a ‘beach’ made up of huge round stones. Not comfy to walk on and definitely not comfy to sit/lie on. With the weather turning yet again the wind was getting up and the tide was right in so the waves were coming in about 6′ high and crashing against the beach with some amount of force. The kids loved it.

Eventually we got them up onto the pier and whilst the sun did come back out the wind just got worse the further out you got until you hit the fairground at the end when the buildings around the edge gave you some sort of protection. This is where the kids fell out with us though. At between £3-5 per person per ride there was no way we could let them on anything. We’d be bankrupt in about 5 minutes!

We decided to at least try and get in the holiday spirit so we went to the restaurant on the pier for fish and chips. I have to say I’ll be hard pressed to remember eating a better fish supper over the last few years.

By this point the kids were shattered as they hadn’t had their usual afternoon nap so we headed back to the hotel to rest up and once everyone was settled I ran back out again to Threshers to pick up a bottle of wine. It took me forever to find somewhere that sold alcohol that wasn’t a pub though and I also got lost after going to far along the front looking for the car park. That evening we sat and watched TV in bed and/or bath depending on who you ask with a glass of wine and wound down. With all the late nights and stress it was the first time we’d ben able to relax all holiday.

Hungover is no way to be when your in a strange city with four wide awake kids and a checkout time that is stupidly early. Thankfully I wasn’t that bad though.

With a squash and a squeeze we managed to fit everything into our bags and put them into the left luggage room at the hotel. We had most of the day to spend in London before heading out so we thought we’d go to the Natural History Museum as we never managed it during our last visit. As the museum was just along the road from us we decided to walk thinking it was only a ten minute walk away. An hour later we arrived at the museum only to have to walk all the way around the outside to get to the entrance that had a lift for the pram. It was quite stressful.

Nairn seemed to love everything and ran about shouting and declaring everything to be ‘way cool’. We wandered under the giant escalator and through into the rooms full of stuffed birds. The owls were particularly cool but Nairn was very taken with the giant ammonite fossil he found.

It was here that we decided to find somewhere to eat as we were all starving and also here that the day started to go downhill very fast. We loaded up our tray with kiddie meal bags as they looked far nicer than most of the other meals on show and started to head towards the till. That’s when we realised we’d left Vonnie’s purse back with the bags at the hotel. We decided to cut our losses and let the kids see the dinosaur exhibition and then leave in the hope that we’d get back to the car before we collapsed due to lack of food.

The dinosaur exhibition is really good but it has to be the busiest part of the museum. We queued up to get in and then pushed along by the crowd like a conveyor belt. The pathway that runs over the top of the exhibits scared the hell out me but then I’m terrified of heights at the best of times but when your on a suspended bridge holding several hundred people moving from side to side I panic. When we reached the far end we weren’t sure what was next but we could hear a tape of a dinosaur shuffling and grunting and thought they just had a video on the go. When we turned the corner there was a giant animatronic T-Rex, it might have a smaller dino though, moving about it’s enclosure. Needless to say Nairn and Erica stood where they were and started crying. We eventually got them moving and the rest of the exhibition looked really cool and if we’d have had the time we could have spent all day in there alone but as I’d left Vonnie back at the restaurant with Greer I figured we should hurry back.

It was when we got back, and I chased away the Australian photographer that was chatting my wife up, that the kids met Charles Darwin. He came along with his box of beetles and his magnifying glass and taught the kids about evolution. He was quite funny and the kids seemed to love it when he talked about dung beetles and giant balls of poo.

So we left there and got the tube. After a little confusion at Embankment thanks to the Victoria line still being off we eventually made it to Clapham and eventually found the car. I was terrified the car would be clamped as the visitor pass we had was for 2008 I think but I shouldn’t have worried. After scoffing some of the food we’d left in the car we headed back to the hotel and off on our way to…well we didn’t know at that point.

It wasn’t until we had picked up our bags that we decided that we weren’t heading back up to Scotland via Derby. Vonnie decided it would be waste to have come all that way and not done something else down there. As I’d suggested Brighton, it was one of the places I’d phoned campsites for earlier in the week we headed there. It took us almost two hours to get from Kensington to the M25 and that was on a Sunday afternoon/evening. I’ve no idea what it would be like on a week night! Eventually we started phoning up the campsites I knew about looking for any spots they might have. Not one single campsite answered thier phone. As we got closer and closer to Brighton I started to panic and we ended up just turning up at the campsite that had originally told me to just turn up if we went down that way as they were sure there would be last minute cancellations. We arrived to find a notice on the gate saying the site was full despite being able to plainly see only half the pitches were taken.

Vonnie took charge at this point and started checking every hotel we passed as we finally drove into Brighton itself. Noone had a family room. In total we must have tried six or seven campsites and about 15 hotels and no one had space. Eventually we found a Radisson just behind the sea front that had a family room available for a small fortune but once we seen it and spent the night there we booked it again for the next night. The ids had a room to themselves with a huge flat screen TV with CBeebies and CBBC to keep them occupied while our room had a four poster bed with another giant TV and a huge bath in front of the bay windows. The wallpaper was £45 per roll! Don’t ask how we know that last fact.

By this point it was late and we were shattered so we got the kids in bed and had an early night ourselves.