A Comedy Of Errors

This could only happen to me.

It all started with a broken wheel. Right hand side at the front of the chair. Something had gone badly awry, and the whole wheel and castor was swinging off at wild angles. It looked like Eduardo's leg must have done when Sky refused to show it following THAT injury at Birmingham a couple of years ago.

Having nearly fallen down the toilet and crashed into a wall outside the office, I made the emergency call. Very kindly, the NHS pays for a company to come out and service and repair chairs when needed. All of which sounds good, but it doesn't always work out how you might expect. Last time I dealt with them they insisted on taking my chair away with them for two days because they couldn't provide something as simple as a ball-bearing. Anyway, choice is not something I am blessed with in this matter, so I arranged for them to come out to see me at work this morning.

The traditional thirty minutes after the agreed time they managed to do this. I was contacted from the security desk downstairs (we work on the third floor of our building) and told them that I would be down shortly. Except I wouldn't. Seemingly at that precise moment, and with a beautiful irony the likes of which I have never seen, BOTH lifts on the third floor stopped working.

Absolutely in no way panicking I reported this to the security desk. They never let the facts get in the way, so they informed me that one of the lifts was still operational. It wasn't. I tried again. It wasn't. I rang back to inform them of this and they finally agreed to 'send someone up'. A few minutes later, someone came up offering to lift me down the stairs to meet the chair mechanic. I declined, and instead a colleague was kind enough to go downstairs and ask him to come up to our office. At this point the mechanic informed me that I had a pin missing from my front caster, and that he didn't have one with him. Of course he didn't. Why would he when I reported to him yesterday that the caster was swinging away from it's normal position and that something in it would probably need replacing, if not the whole thing?

He took the chair away and I carried on working. No chair, no lifts, third floor. The only usable disabled toilets are on the ground floor. I was reminded of that scene from Phoenix Nights in which Brian gets stuck at the top of the stairs because his stairlift is broken. Gerry comes in and asks him what the smell is, and he says 'never mind that smell, I've been stuck up here all night!' A mercifully short 10 minutes later the man returned with the chair. Lo and indeed behold he had found a pin that earlier he definitely hadn't got.

So with the chair sorted I could now go to the gents at least. But lunch? I was living the dream if I thought I was going to be able to go out and get some lunch. Another kind colleague finally had to go downstairs and pick me up a sandwich from the canteen (I bet you can't guess which floor that is on?). The lifts are still not working as I write, although one or two colleagues say they have at least now seen men working on them. Earlier reports that they would be here to do it within half an hour of my reporting it proved to be somewhat exaggerated.

My boss has just asked whether I want to go home now, because there is no guarantee that the lift will be fixed today or that the relevant people will be around to assist me down the stairs at the normal finishing time of 4.30pm if it is not. I have declined this kind offer because I'd rather spend the afternoon doing my job and give myself the opportunity to eventually go downstairs safely and in comfort, than suffer the indignity now for the sake of a couple of hours off. If it is not fixed by 4.30 then it's the evac chair I suppose, but no need to do anything as rash as that just now. It's finally lunchtime, just in case she's wondering what I'm doing telling you this story right now. She might read. Apparently it wouldn't be the first time.

I really need a wee now.

Children In Need

This probably won't flow. I just felt the urge to write about it.

Today saw the annual Children In Need telethon. Every November BBC1 clears it's schedule for one night to put on a star-studded night of entertainment. In return they repeatedly ask you to call their hotline or go online to donate some of your hard earned money to help the more disadvantaged youngsters in the UK.

And when I'm finished writing this that is exactly what I'm going to do. Visit www.bbc.co.uk/pudsey if you'd like to follow suit. I think you should. Here's why;

I'm nobody's idea of a sensitive bloke, but Children In Need affects me every year. I challenge anyone to listen to some of these kids stories and not feel suddenly overcome with an urge to do something to help. I don't like to think too much about how a child can end up so poor that their family cannot even afford a fridge, or a bed which is not infested with insects. Or of how a child with cerebal palsy can be bullied to the point of feeling a complete sense of worthlessness. Or even of how children as young as five can find themselves in the role of 'carer'. I just know it's all wrong and that through events like this there is something we can do to help.

The entertainment itself is mixed at best, but it's uplifting to see what kind of difference celebrities can make to young people, even in trying circumstances. JLS are musically rank, but if they possess the power to light up a child's face, to make them so excited that they scream and shout manically, then they're doing some good in the world. It's ever so easy for me to sit and sneer at them and their like, but to do so in these circumstances misses the point by a breathtaking margin. I'm even going to give Cheryl Cole a big pat on the back for her involvement. Although she was shite.

Not all celebritites have the power of JLS, but it is nice to see them try. John Barrowman disguised himself as a paramedic visiting a school to give a demonstration. When he removed the disguise to surprise twin girls they seemed to look at him as if he had just landed from Mars. There was a genuine moment where they did not seem to recognise him. Or if they did, they weren't impressed. Thankfully, he rescued the situation beautifully by informing the twins that they were about to meet the stars of the Harry Potter films, and attend the premiere of the first installment of Harry Potter And The Deathly Hallows. That Emma Watson's new hairstyle makes her look like a boy without a winkle hardly seems to matter.

While the Eastenders meets Coronation Street sketch could have been cut in half and still been twice as good, the script had genuinely funny moments in it and a clever ending. I'm not even that irritated by the crap interpretation of Bat Out Of Hell by the Hairy Bikers. And did you know that Dr Who sex-pot Karen Gillan and I share a phobia of moths? It's a sign and you know it.

But the highlight so far has to be the performance of Take That. It's the first time I've seen them perform live since Robbie Williams rejoined and I have to say it seemed a bit odd. There he was stood on one end almost breaking into a dance, but you got the feeling all along that he was just bursting to grab his microphone, move to the front and centre of the stage and start barking 'come on!' and bellowing about power chords. The showman in him looked as if it might have to be physically restrained. Meanwhile Jason Orange and Howard Donald missed notes badly, but Mark Owen seemed beside himself with joy at the prospect of finally getting to perform 'Never Forget' with five members.

As I leave you, Peter Andre is murdering Man In The Mirror. This is a great song made famous by the late Michael Jackson and I have a majestic cover performed by James Morrison on my MP3 player. Yet Andre's act of sacrilege is still not going to stop me going over to the BBC website right now and splurging a sizeable (for me) wedge for the cause.

Follow me. Please.

Dancing With The Doc

I've been to see the doctor this morning.

I didn't mean to. I had to. See, I've had this infection. It's a biff thing. We're prone to it. It's all about foreign bodies. My bladder is in ruins, which in turn damages my kidneys which in turn gives me a bad attitude towards doctors, the NHS (though I strongly believe it should remain free), and a general mistrust of anyone known simply as Mr So and So.

Consultants have no people skills. Mr Singh had nothing positive to say to me at our last meeting three years ago except 'Stephen, you do know that there is no reason why someone with spina bifida shouldn't live into their 60's these days, don't you?' On reflection I'm not sure how positive that was. He spent the rest of the time shaking his head and telling me that my kidneys were 'chronically impaired'. Much like my character and my faith in humanity, then?

So I am in the doctor's room, and I meet Dr Richards for the first time. Dr Richards looks in several directions at the same time, which is quite a talent, but distracting nonetheless. He trots out all the old hits.....'You need to have your bloods done'......'We'll need to take your blood pressure'........'Have you had a flu-jab?'..........and of course the crowd pleasing 'The consultant will know better than me but.........'. He's very little help, but we both know why I'm here. Neither of us are very comfortable with it but it's a necessary evil so let's get on with it. I feel like a virgin in a brothel.

He sends me away to provide a urine sample. I'm being nostalgic here but does anyone remember the days when it was easy to provide a urine sample? Any male with even modest endowment should be able to pee into a bottle, right? That was too easy, so they've freshened up the challenge. Now you have to pee in a plastic cup, drive a plunger with a straw attachement into the revolting, smelly cup, and press to draw your liquid wastage into the specimen bottle. The same specimen bottle that is about a quarter of the size of it's predecessor. The changes are all in the interests of hygiene. Hygiene and misadventure.

It's all a bit like a science experiment at school. The son of an engineer, I nevertheless hadn't the first clue about science and hated every minute of it at school. At that time the science teacher was the worst person I could think of in my life. Thatcher had yet to make an impact, and what I knew about Hitler was horrific but it seemed so long ago. And he never made me spend two hours trying to work out which was live and which was earth.

So I'm back with my bottle of wee and the hits just keep on coming. And the dance begins. 'Take another sample in a week or so when you've finished this course of leeches. It'll check how much protein is in there and that might give us a better idea of kidney function' he says. Ok, but so what? It's all negative. Sorry to sound selfish but there's nothing in this for me, so I'm wasting my time. I've said that before.

If there was anything that checking my bloods or peeing in bottles could achieve I might be more motivated. I've already been told there isn't, and been given drugs to protect what little remains of my blancmange of a bladder and kidneys. I'm happy with that. Ignorance is bliss. Must we keep doing this bewildering boogie every three months when I rock up with a bit of a whiffy waterwork? The medical profession has become like an overbearing mother whose 14-year-old still can't cross the road on his own lest he drop his ice cream on the way back.

I'll take my leeches, the problem will go and I might be something approaching myself once more. I have been a little zombified these past few weeks. I've been drifting, letting the infection get worse because I don't want to do the dance with the doc and I don't want to take any more time off sick. But I'm not completely stupid. I know that eventually there's a stage when I can't just ignore it, when the pain becomes debilitating and I end up on the sofa watching Angela Griffin's day time chat show for a fortnight.

Which is even worse than the dance with the doctor.

Pizza-Poor Performance

You won't know because none of you read about it, but Emma and I went to the cinema the other night. I mention this because prior to the film, we took the outlandish leap of faith that is a visit to Pizza Hut.

We don't seem to have much luck in that place. I recall an episode some years ago when we almost missed our film, so long did it take the service staff to fulfill their highly complex duties. We ended up leaving the premises with a boxed up pizza which, when you get it home, never looks as appetising and leaves you wishing you had passed on the whole thing and gone straight home to order one in. I can't remember which film it was, but the experience ruined it. Probably.

This time they surpassed themselves. Our film began at 7.30pm. We both work in Liverpool so even allowing for the drive home in the currently gridlocked traffic jams around The Royal, we still had plenty of time. Emma finishes work at 5.00 and has a short walk of less than five minutes to the University where I work and where we park the car. We were back in St.Helens for 6.00.

So on arrival at the serial offender of a restaurant our first problem was not time. It was the cold. It is the middle of November, and so to be greeted by a notice telling us that the premises might be 'a bit cool' due to a problem with the air condiditioning was not ideal. Describing the temperature in there as 'a bit cool' is a bit like describing Wayne Rooney as 'a bit greedy'. If there is anything it was not, it is cool. It was very uncool. Freezing is a better word.

Undeterred we allowed Cathy the waitress to show us to a seat (cue gags about me bringing my own). Foolishly we took our coats off briefly, before having an even more brief moment of indecision. Should we make a run for the warmer climes of Wetherspoons now while we still could? By then, laziness had set in and we stayed put, stubbornly freezing half to death like extras in Titanic. The coats went back on and we ordered. Cathy seemed nice and helpful, but the relationship was about to go sour very quickly.

Occasionally, and especially in such frugal times, fat-cat companies like Pizza Hut like to tempt you with offers. Forgetting that you never get anything for nothing we took the bait. Two courses for £8. We'd share a starter, have our own individual pizzas and then share a dessert. I eat like a caterpillar and Emma may or may not be on a diet this week, so it seemed more than enough for us. And it would have been, had it worked out that way.

Fighting the formation of icicles around our extremities we otherwise happily began and everything was fine. We finished the starter, but it was some time before Cathy could arrange for the pizzas to make an appearance. Yet still we were not really clock-watching. We'd given ourselves 90 minutes to have a pizza, remember. Time passed, and passed, and passed. Then the pizzas arrived. By when it was around 6.40 and things were getting a bit tight. And things were beginning to get frozen too.

I eat pizza slowly. I'd imagine a caterpillar would take a long time to get through a Hawaiian all to himself, and I did. Yet by 7.00 I was done and dusted. Still 30 minutes to get through dessert. Easy, right? Cathy could make us four desserts in that time. Wrong. Again the clocked ticked by and the realisation sunk in that, like the Titanic extras, we were not about to be rescued. It was 7.25 by the time Cathy emerged from the kitchen all smiles and 'what's the problem?', dessert in hand. Emma explained that we didn't have time for dessert, and to be fair they knocked £3 off the bill. But it's not about the money. I'd rather pay and have good service than get crapped on for free.

As I mentioned this is not the first time we've had problems at Pizza Hut. I can now also recall an occasion when myself and my work colleagues visited the branch in Liverpool One. We were offered pizza and garlic bread for £4, and quickly found out why it was so cheap. The pizza was straight out of the freezer from Iceland across the concourse, and one colleague is still mocked for having a slice of pizza missing from his plate. He's always been once slice short, but elsewhere there were furious complaints and one or two justifiable refusals to part with a hard earned £4.

Food could be the death of me. On the way home from work today Emma reminded me of an occasion a couple of weeks ago when an entire crate of food fell off the back of a lorry in front of us on Edge Lane Drive. It was early in the morning on the way to work. The truck's doors inexplicably flung open and it unloaded, missing us by a matter of feet. I could see boxes of cornflakes amongst other things hurtling towards us.

Emma seems to think we have cheated death but so far I've just shrugged it off. But should I? It was a heavy vehicle carrying a heavy load, so maybe she's right. It's all a bit like that scene in Pulp Fiction when Travolta and Jackson are sprayed with bullets by a gunman bursting in from the next room. Only all of the bullets miss. Jackson thinks it's a miracle and just wants Travolta to 'fucking acknowledge it'. Travolta shrugs, no big deal.

Anyway, I told Emma that things falling off the backs of lorries in Liverpool was not a freak occurence by any means. It's an industry to them.

35 And Not Dead

As most of you will know (and thanks for all the kind messages by the way) I had another accident with my calendar at the weekend.

Apparently, and according to something called 'time', I turned 35 years old last Friday. All of which seems barely conceivable but I'm going to have to accept it at some point. So I thought I would start now, and here, in the one place where my inner-most thoughts are kept. That way I can rest assured that only about 20 of you at the most will ever find them.

The most striking thing about being 35 is the fact that if you are, then most if not all of your mates are. Or older! This causes all manner of social problems. Having arranged a post-work gathering we got to Friday lunch time in the frankly embarrassing predicament of having only four people confirmed to attend. Everyone else is too old. They're 35. They've gone off to do grown-up things like have kids, go to ASDA or put shelves up in their spare rooms. I'm 35, but I don't want to do any of those things. I want to get drunk, play on my Wii and watch Match Of The Day. All at the same time if possible.

And so I'm in some kind of tragic limbo. I'm staggering around drunkenly, looking for the sign on the wall where it says I'm supposed to grow up now. I have a mortgage and a long-term girlfriend but that's about as far as I'm willing to embrace adulthood. Even shaving my face really grinds my gears. I reach the point where I haven't done it for over a week, by when those cheap disposable razors that the infinitely more grown-up Emma buys from ASDA struggle to get through the thick carpet that has slowly developed around my chin. And then I cut myself, but it's more to do with clumsiness and cheap razors than any desire to self-harm.

Because you see I'm not unhappy. Not really. Yes I was close to some sort of mental breakdown on Friday lunchtime when I realised just how unpopular I could be, but the moment passed. It always does. In fact I was rather pleased with the turn-out in the end, and as I alluded to earlier there were dozens of good wishes from some very nice people indeed.

I have many things that I want. I want to be in a long-term relationship AND unmarried. I want to go out to my local and drink (on my own if need be) on a Saturday night if the alternative is the bloody X-Factor. And I can. And I do. The only problem is I feel I am being judged by the family-orientated people my age. They're all so much more mature than me, and therefore they're just better people. They're leading a good life, doing their bit to maintain the human race, whereas people like me well.......we're all about ourselves. Ourselves and our Wiis and our beer. Who needs kids when you are one?

But I'm not. I'm 35.

Yet that in itself cannot be all bad. Another birthday means another year passed without the buggers getting me. Three years ago my specialist looked at a scan of my kidneys, rubbed his chin and told me they weren't going to last much longer. I'm no specialist (though I like to think I have better people skills than most of them) but I know that continuing to exist becomes difficult without kidneys. I'm quite sure that many people have died from the lack of any functioning kidneys. And so it is with some relief (with the odd slice of weariness on bad days) that I continue to breathe your air, eat your food and drink your beer. If and when I reach 40 I'm going to throw a huge party to celebrate not being dead. I'll get drunk and wake up feeling like I am dead.

But I won't be, and that's the important thing.

Strange But True

Intruder

Assuming you've even heard of the place, Thatto Heath gets a bit of a bad press. It has a reputation as being a little rough around the edges. Yet apart from the odd murder and the occasional discovery of infant remains that have lingered there for over 20 years, there's very little bother.

Not where I live anyway. I have lived on our estate in not one but two houses and until yesterday had never encountered anything even approaching crime. Somebody once told me that 'Heathers' don't rob from their own. I was quite prepared to believe it too, but my illusions are now well and truly shattered.

It was a twist of plot more bizarre than anything seen before on these pages. More surreal than the hedgehog or any of the antics of Northern Rail. I'd taken the day off work via the magic of flexi, and had spent most of the day slumped on my sofa watching Europe win back the Ryder Cup. Considering the misery of the Super League Grand Final at the weekend, this was as close as I was going to get to enjoying a perfect day off, when I was rudely interrupted.

I never even heard the front door open. There is another door which divides the tiny hallway and the living room, and as I sat on the sofa trying to find something to watch that did not feature Anne Robinson or Noel Edmonds, it swung open and there before me stood a complete stranger;

"Who are you?" I enquired, not unreasonably.

"Erm......I've just come to buy some ciggies." he said nervously.

At this point I thought I had entered a Coen brothers movie and rather than a rational fear of a man who could have been carrying a weapon, I experienced only a blind fury at his temerity;

"Get the bloody Hell out of my house." I shouted, bewildered and outraged in equal measure.

"Can't you just serve me?" he asked.

I quickly got back into my chair and, trying hard not to butcher the English language too much, ushered him out of my living room and towards the front door. At which point the man pulled a fist full of £20 notes from his pocket and pleaded with me to sell him 20 Regal.

"Does this house look like an off-license to you?" I asked

"So you don't sell ciggies then?"

"No I bloody don't! I just live here!" I raged. I'd gone a bit John Cleese at this point, and was only moments away from giving him a damn good thrashing with a tree branch.

Finally the man grasped the concept that I was not a cigarette salesman and began to apologise as he backed towards the front door. Finally rid of him, it was only then that I started to consider the possibility that he was not just a mental case who genuinely thought I worked for Lambert & Butler. It was more likely that he was a grubby little thief who was sizing up the house for a good old fashioned ransacking.

Oh, and for whoever said they don't rob from their own, well he did have a scouse accent...........

Do you Peg Feed?

Turn the clock back two days, and our evening out for the Super League Grand Final. I'd rather not talk about the game if you don't mind, so instead I'll relay another strange tale. It's another true story, though I can scarcely believe this sort of crap happens to me.

I needed a wee. That's not a pleasant thought but there it is, we all do it. I entered the gents (no disabled toilets at the Springfield, you have to slum it in the urinals) and a burly and incredibly drunk man stood next to me;

"I'm not being funny mate but........." he started.

I hate that. Whenever I hear that phrase it is without exception a prelude to someone being funny. And not funny ha-ha, but funny rude or funny plain ignorant. He didn't let me down.

"I'm not being funny mate but do you peg-feed?"

"Do I what?" I asked, with no small amount of exasperation in my tone.

"Oh no mate sorry, I've got it wrong, I'm really sorry. It's just that I work with a lot of people with learning disabilities and a lot of them do so I just thought that......you know?"

No I don't know;

"I haven't got a learning disability, mate. I've got a degree."

"Oh no no no, I wasn't saying you had I just........."

You just were assuming I had cos I have a wheelchair. Because you're a plant pot and because you are representative of Thatto Heath's staggeringly ignorant able-bodied community.

"What is peg-feeding anyway?" I enquired.

He wouldn't tell me. He told me it didn't matter and that he was sorry.

Other people eh? Bloody Hell.

Epilogue

I've just found out what peg-feeding is. The peg in question is an acronym, standing for Percutaneous Endoscopy Gastrotomy. Basically it is feeding a patient through a tube directly to the stomach if, for whatever reason, they are unable to feed themselves orally.

However I remain confused. The man in the pub clearly stated that he worked with a lot of people with 'learning disabilities'. With that in mind his assumption seems even more staggeringly ignorant. The term 'learning disabilities' surely relates to those with say, autism, or something not immediately obvious like dyslexia. Surely it is more likely that someone with a very severe physical disability would have a greater need for this type of thing? I have met and been educated alongside many such people, and can assure our burly pub-goer that they do not necessarily have anything resembling a learning disability.

On the contrary, they are more clued up than he obviously is.

Sheffield - Part Two - The Football

We were told not to have breakfast.

It wasn't that the food on offer was sub-standard, but rather that there was a buffet planned for us at 1.15. We were going to the football. To Hillsborough to be exact, to see Sheffield Wednesday's League One encounter with Carlisle United.

All of Emma's family on her dad's side are Sheffield Wednesday fans except for her Uncle Ray. To his great credit, Ray tolerates football at an even lower level by supporting Rotherham United. He does so avidly, and whenever we meet his main topic of conversation is the Millers, although I never fail to be impressed by his knowledge of rugby league and in particular, the goings on at Saints. Ray's my kind of man.

But this was Sheffield Wednesday and so Ray was not in attendance. On arrival at the stadium there was a lengthy debate about car parking. The club had informed us that we would be able to park in the car park just outside the club shop, but had issued us with a pass for a completely different car park. We were informed of this by a slightly dozey and bog-eyed young chap who clearly felt that it was more than his job was worth to turn a blind eye to officialdom. He did at least allow us to unload the cars while the drivers moved on to the right car park.

We met back at the club shop. Emma was looking for something to buy her new niece or nephew who is expected to arrive into the world some time in October, but she clearly hadn't found what she wanted. As I rolled around I browsed only half-interestedly at the replica shirts, tee-shirts, socks, hats and so forth on display thinking that you would have to be a real fan to buy any of this. It's not like in a foreign country where you can buy merchandise from say Barcelona or the Tampa Bay Rays as a souvenir. Being English, you cannot be seen in the colours of any other English side, lest you be arrested and hanged for treason. Someone once told me that watching another team was like cheating on your wife.

I haven't got a wife, but then I'm not buying a Sheffield Wednesday shirt either.

Another striking thing about the Sheffield Wednesday club shop is that, this not being the most successful period in their history, there are not too many recent highlights playing on the numerous monitors dotted around. There's myriad clips of David Hirst, Benito Carbone, Paulo Di Canio and.....er.......Paul Warhurst in their pomps but not too much sign of Marcus Tudgay, Chris Sedgewick, Tommy Spur et al.

From the club shop we were led around the corner to a small door. An official and portly-looking man in a suit greeted us and led us into a window-less room with white walls. It had the feel of a prison cell, or at least my idea of a prison cell from watching Cell Block H and The Bill. This was not the kind of room you would want to be alone with Jack Bauer in. Not unless you find Jack Bauer attractive and are absolutely certain that you are not a mole behind a massive terrorist plot.

I'm not exactly sure what was on offer at the buffet but I stuck to garlic bread and potato balls. I was also still recovering my poise from the previous night's shenannigans and so decided to drink coke. There would be plenty of time for alcohol later. Soon after other families started to enter the room, all chomping on the buffet (I think it was chicken now I think hard enough) and downing a few pre-game lagers. Little did I know that you would need a stiff drink inside you if you were about to watch Sheffield Wednesday and the result could decide whether or not you had a nice week.

I should have known. At kick-off time Wednesday sat top of League One, but this was still Wednesday after all. This is a club which was in the top flight a decade ago but which has hung around in the lower reaches of the Championship for the last five years before finally succumbing to another relegation last season. Financial mismanagement has crippled them. It is only days since yet another threat of administration and of a winding up order has been staved off.

The view from our vantage point inside Hillsborough was first class. They have a ramp to ensure that wheelchair users are not left with a restrictive ground level view, and so from a position about half way between the half way line and the goal you can see most of the action clearly. Emma's only beef was that she was sat in a seat behind me as opposed to next to me. The row I was on had space only for wheelchair users, and initially she didn't seem happy. I remembered this happening at Castleford once and thinking the worst. My only other visit to Castleford resulted in my car window being smashed by youths who thought my car was that of referee Stuart Cummings so they are not happy memories.

Yet after a while we settled into the game which was, in all honesty, pretty average. Limited skill levels are more visible in the flesh than they had been on television during Wednesday's 1-0 defeat at Brentford a week earlier. At times it seemed like park football but with much better facilities and smarter kits. Carlisle had the better of it for the most part, with goalkeeper Nicky Weaver forced into two excellent one on one saves in the first half. Yet he could not stop Craig Curran from curling in from the left edge of the box as Wednesday players stopped to debate the thorny issue of whether or not to attempt a tackle.

Carlisle edged a similarly scrappy second half but could not add to their tally. There was a humorous moment when a Wednesday defender almost drove a screamer into his own net but apart from one close call at the end from a James O'Connor shot, Wedensday never quite looked like getting back into it. The majority of the entertainment came from the crowd, from the little boy sat next to me who constantly pleaded for the referee to give Wednesday a penalty regardless of where the alleged offence took place, to the man next to him telling Wednesday manager Alan Irvine to 'sowert it art!' at regular intervals, this was an unsettled crowd.

Wednesday's defeat saw them slip from top to sixth in the early snakes and ladders table. Despite their chants of 'We are top of the league' Carlisle's victory left them second, behind Peterborough on goal difference after the latter had enjoyed a thumping 5-0 win. For us it was back to the cell with Jack, for more tea and a post-mortem. Wednesday's former Wigan and Derby midfielder Gary Teale took most of the blame and it has to be said that his performance was one of perfect ineptitude. If Wednesday have serious designs on a quick return to the Championship, they need to show far more than what was on offer here.

And yet we are already making plans to go again. Despite the low quality of football, despite the white-walled, windowless cell and despite the car parking mix-up, it was a thoroughly enjoyable day. For the first time in a while I could actually see a reason why thousands of fans turn out to watch teams like Wednesday (and Ray's Rotherham) every other week. Suffering is all part of it.

They go to Tranmere on Boxing Day. But I'm having my breakfast that day.

Sheffield - Part One

Orlando was exotic, York less so but still respectably grand, so where better to continue this downward spiral than Sheffield?

On the occasion of Emma's something-somethingth birthday we decided to spend the weekend in the city of her birth. She has family there, and if you are still not convinced about our reasoning then how about the fact that one member of said family works at one of the city's Holiday Inn hotels and can therefore get us cheap accommodation? As my mother's son, there is a part of me that would buy two Jim Davidsons if one were free.

None of which was necessary as the Holiday Inn turned out to be quite a decent place to stay. Disappointingly for this column there were no access issues, and so the only thing to moan about was the South Yorkshire weather and the fact that going away for the weekend means you're missing the cricket. Still, I had a coat and the current England v Pakistan one-day cricket series is as predictable as an episode of Lie To Me. There was no excuse.

We'd done our research and to tell you the truth Sheffield does not rival York for it's tourist attractions. The principle reason for leaving the hotel on Friday afternoon was to visit the Wheel Of Sheffield. Or, should I say, the Hallam FM Wheel Of Sheffield. Yes, just like everything else with even the remotest market value, the Wheel of Sheffield is sponsored. As a consequence of this, the in-ride commentary comes from one of Hallam FM's dullard disc jockeys.

Fortunately you don't really think about the commentary when you are up in the skies overlooking the city landscape. This is no London Eye (that's according to Emma whose been on, I would just be making an arbitrary estimate), but though it lacks the Tower of London and Westminster, it does have Cathedrals and the Crucible Theatre, home of the World Snooker Championship. The view remains exciting and interesting enough to keep your attention.

All of which is a bloody good thing, for if you were to listen to the Hallam FM Wheel Of Sheffield commentary brought to you by Hallam FM in association with Hallam FM, Wheels and Sheffield you would be immediately reminded of Mike Smash and Dave Nice. Not half, but not really a reassuring or even an informative voice when you are hundreds of feet in the air wondering why your pod appears to be rocking. That is not a sentence I expect to be writing again in the very near future, but it is accurate nonetheless.

The Hallam FM Wheel Of Sheffield is somewhat quicker than it's London counterpart. For your £6.50 you get to go around five times (though some debate this suggesting that they have been on when it has been only four), and takes about 15 minutes of your time. Emma tells me that the London Eye ride lasts for the best part of an hour. For our part we definitely went around five times, but the pod only stopped for any great length of time on the first cycle. It is this moment which makes the whole thing worthwhile. It's a bit scary, but the scenery from that kind of vantage point really is breathtaking.

The other item on the 'to do' list from our research was the Winter Garden. As we dizzily exited the Hallam FM Wheel Of Sheffield we stumbled towards an even dizzier information guide who assured us that the Winter Garden was just a 'couple of buildings further down' to the right. Despite being advised that we could not miss it, we missed it initially. It wasn't until we had been moving for around 15 minutes and past several hundred couples of buildings that we noticed a sign for the city museums. It had to be that way, surely?

It was. So what delights does the Winter Garden hold? Well, to be honest you might be a little underwhelmed. That is unless you are an enthusiast of someone called John Ruskin. Ruskin has an entire exhibition devoted to him here, the bumph on which explains that he wanted people to acknowledge the power and beauty of nature and to themselves use nature to be more creative. I find that Ruskin's own contribution to this honourable goal is a little lacking in substance. I still can't work out whether he was an artist or a scientist or both, but I do know that he must have talked a lot to inspire this kind of tribute.

The Gardens themselves contain exactly what you would expect, lots of indoor plants. This time the blurb explains that these particular plants (the name of which has already escaped me) were the main source of sustenance for dinosaurs. However, whereas the dinosaurs died out in the meteor blast, these plants survived and evolved. Yet the philistine in me will always point out that their longevity and startling evolutionary capabilities do not preclude them from being as dull as a house plant. Or even as a Hallam FM Wheel Of Sheffield commentator.

A friend of mine had told me to sample the cakes in one of the small eateries in the Gardens, but time constraints and Emma's diet rather put paid to the idea. They looked nice though, I will concede. As many people were sat sampling their delights as were strolling around the indestructable greenery.

Once Emma's family joined up with us we decided to head for an Italian restaurant called Antibos in the city centre. By now I had lurched from worrying about the cricket to having seizures about the rugby. Saints were playing their first play-off game at home to Warrington at about the same time I was tucking into my enormous pizza. I have to admit to checking the score on my phone a little more often than might normally be thought of as socially acceptable at the dinner table.

I overdid it on the food aswell, and felt shockingly sick by the time Emma and I got back to our room. I'd preceded the pizza with a piece of garlic bread as big as Kent, and followed it with something resembling chocolate fudge cake which I ordered through sheer bloody mindedness and a determination to keep up. With a big day ahead I needed rest and besides, it was all I could do not to regurgitate the whole lot by then.

On the plus side, Saints won........

Hedgeblog

'There's cat shit on the floor in here' said Emma as she looked into what used to be our conservatory and is now a chaotic laundry room.

From my angle and with my 7.00am blurry eyed goggles on I couldn't see what she was talking about. I wasn't taking any chances though, and there followed a brief 'exchange' on the subject of who might have left the conservatory door open and who should therefore clean up the mess.

Thinking no more of this episode other than to resolve to remind Emma to shut the door next time, I went about my usual business. A full day's work, an evening meal, an hour-long soak in the bath, and a two-hour visit to my mum's house. It was Thursday, and my mum's house is the only real safe haven from Private Practice, Grey's Anatomy and Third Watch.

I got back late to find that Emma had already gone to bed. It was after 11.00 and so I put the television on with a view to having half an hour of the tennis and then retiring. James Blake's second round match against a man whose name I can't even recall now was never going to hold my attention for all that long, and so I headed towards the bedroom. As I did I could hear what I thought was something or someone shuffling around in the kitchen.

I called Emma's name. No answer. I tried again, no answer. Finally I approached the kitchen to investigate, and found that Emma was nowhere to be seen. Yet I could still hear something shuffling around. It sounded like it was coming from behind the washing machine or the fridge freezer but I couldn't be sure. And so I did the only thing that any rational man would do in this situation. I woke Emma to help me investigate further.

Emma's not at her best when she has just been involuntarily woken up, so it did not help my cause when she followed me into the kitchen to find that the shuffling had stopped. There was nothing. Deathly silence, and no sign of any living thing other than ourselves. We looked around hesitantly for five or ten minutes, decided there was nothing to see, and went to bed. It was well after 12 by now and we are not great at getting up for work at 7.00 at the best of times.

A short doze followed, but by around 1am I was awoken by what I thought sounded like the fluttering of wings. I now downgraded my initial assessment which had been that there must be a mouse or a rat on the loose, and decided instead that it might just be a moth at worst, and at best a butterfly with a seriously flawed sense of direction. Emma put the lights on. The noise stopped again. If he hadn't been dead for at least five years I'd have been waiting for Jeremy Beadle to pop his head round the bedroom door.

A moment later the shuffling noise returned, but it was much louder. We were still in the bedroom but we could hear it coming from the kitchen area. Emma shot out of the bed, opened the door and announced;

"Shit! There's a hedgehog in the house!"

It was pure Victor Meldrew from then on. I literally did not believe it.

When I got out of bed I found the proof. The hedgehog was there behind the sofa next to the telephone wires. We'd obviously startled it because it had decided that the only way out of this prickly predicament would be to curl up in a ball and do nothing. All of which meant that Emma had to physically roll it through the front door with some kind of cleaning implement. I sat guarding the living room in case it roused from it's stupor and made a run for the other sofa. Fortunately it did not and she managed to manouver it on to the ramp at the side of the house. We've found hedgehogs on the ramp before, but this was the first time one had managed to infiltrate the four walls of our home.

Before we returned to bed we contemplated the fact that, in all probability, the 'cat shit' from early that morning had in fact been hedgehog shit, and that therefore our spikey little intruder had spent the whole day somewhere in our house. The crafty little bleeder had managed to go 18 hours undetected. It is more than likely that he spent most of that time curled up and motionless, what with hedgehogs being mostly nocturnal creatures. They only wake up when Babestation comes on.

The whole affair is just incredible. We left the house this morning pleased to note that there was no more shit around, and that the hedgehog had left the ramp area. It must still be alive then, which was a relief to Emma who was mortified at the prospect of murdering an animal with a mop. A colleague of her's has warned us that hedgehogs are territorial creatures and so it may try to come back. He has advised us that if it does we should drive it at least one mile away and release it in a field or a park somewhere. Fine, just as long as it doesn't release any of it's waste in our house again any time soon.

I don't believe it.

The Tony Blair Interview

For those of you who have been unable to tear yourself away from Ultimate Big Brother in recent times, I'm afraid I have to inform you that Tony Blair is about to release his memoirs.

You BB fans remember him, right? Great big toothy smile, softly spoken, never wrong about anything? He'd fit in well as a housemate were it not for the fact that his IQ is significantly higher than 30. Still sketchy? Ok, he used to be the Prime Minister. Got him now?

Ahead of the book release Mr Blair has given an hour-long interview to the BBC's Andrew Marr, screened earlier this evening (Wednesday) on BBC2. If I didn't know that all the book proceeds were going towards the British Legion to help those affected by the war that HE caused, I'd suggest that Mr Blair's interview is a shameless plug for the aforementioned tome. But I do know so we'll crack on. There's still plenty to complain about.

As I alluded to earlier Mr Blair is never wrong. Well, rarely by his own admission at any rate. This is a recurring theme in Marr's 60-minute examination of the man who held office for a decade. He was absolutely not wrong to stay on for a third term of office despite agreeing to hand on to Gordon Brown after two, absolutely not wrong to push ahead with plans for ID cards, tuition fees or foundation hospitals, and of course absolutely not wrong to authorise an illegal war in which the death toll continues to rise some eight years on. He's sorry about the latter, but he's not wrong.

The explanation of the decision to take military action in Iraq is somewhat confusing. Previous forays into Sierra Leone and Kosovo had brought about successful regime change. As such it came to pass that the removal of a despot was a good enough reason to start a war. All well and good so far. Perhaps Iraq and maybe even the world is a better place since the death of Saddam Hussein, but where's the consistency in that? Zimbabwe, anyone?

Mr Blair concedes that it would not be possible to go into Zimbabwe to remove Robert Mugabe and effect regime change, but doesn't explain the difference. This is where Marr misses a trick in not pushing for a more satisfactory answer. Perhaps both men think that the answer is obvious but, and you can call me thick if you like, I don't know the difference and I would have appreciated some elaboration on that. I'm plucking this from nowhere, but it might just be that Zimbabwe is a nation more capable of defending itself than Iraq, which has itself inflicted enough bloodshed on us. No PM wants to preside over a British version of Vietnam.

Mr Blair does express mild regret about fox hunting and freedom of information. He confesses that having looked futher into both he can now see that legislating on both was a bad idea. Suddenly fox hunting is not just 'a lot of toffs running around hunting foxes' but actually an essential method of pest control. Pity we didn't have someone around to control him when he was being a pest, which was almost always post 9/11.

He calls legislation on freedom of information a 'disaster', arguing that it became impossible for government to discuss issues frankly, lest they fall foul of the potential to offend the public. What he seemed to be saying, unless I needed to adjust my television set (which by the way will be digital whether I like it or not), is that politicians can only make informed decisions if there is no chance of anyone ever finding out what has been said in arriving at those decisions. Mr Blair would have you believe that the whole political process is in danger of falling down if some lilly-livered careerist suit is too afraid to say what he thinks, just in case the public find out about it later on.

It's only when Marr moves on to the latter days of Mr Blair's Premiership that you fully realise what has happened to the former PM. The wild-eyed (actually he's still wild-eyed), ambitious left of centre Labour man of the people of 1997 has morphed into a tyrannical, opportunistic egomaniac whose facial expressions throughout remind me of the demonic villains portrayed by Tim Curry in that Musketeer movie with Kiefer Sutherland. By his own admission Mr Blair has turned completely to the dark side, although the way he phrases it is that he is not a Conservative or even a conservative but a 'progressive' politician.

'You can't run the country in 2010 like you did in 1950' he pleads. He may be right, but I'm pretty sure you can keep the Labour Party sufficiently left wing to be both true to it's values and electable in the space of a decade. So far has Mr Blair travelled ideologically since Things Can Only Get Better And All That in 1997 that he couldn't even bring himself to launch an attack on the present and shambolic coalition government.

'I don't want to start attacking David Cameron' he said;

'Why not?' asked Marr, not unreasonably.

Maybe because they are not that different now and he recognises a lot of himself in Mr Cameron. Yes the current Prime Minister has gone a little cut-crazy in the face of the financial crisis, but essentially he's an extension of Mr Blair. All spin, monumentally self-satisfied despite his propensity to commit astonishing gaffes, and more than a little too concerned by legacy and his place in history.

The sad thing is that Mr Blair, unlike Mr Cameron perhaps, started from a much better place. His new memoirs could have been so, so different.......

Knowsley Safari Park

I've been to animal parks as far afield as Orlando and Tenerife, aswell as Whipsnade and Longleat. Surprising then that until today I have no real recollection of visiting Knowsley Safari Park.

I'm almost certain I have. I have vague memories of being carted around there some 25 years ago or more in a Variety Club Sunshine bus. We used to cruelly refer to it as the window-licking bus. I don't know if they still have them now. It's been just that long.

Whether I had or I hadn't been before, I was certainly due a visit. Well, what else are you going to do on a sport-less Bank Holiday Monday in August when cinema options extend to another God-awful Adam Sandler 'comedy' or a tit-drenched re-make of Piranha? Actually.............

It was a pretty reasonable £14 for both Emma and I to gain entrance into the park. For that you apparently get almost five miles worth of what they call 'Safari Drive', plus entry to pedestrianised displays such as a sea lion show, a falconry demonstration and a house full of disgusting bugs. More on which later on.

This being England, there is an access issue straight off the bat. Were I in possession of fully-functioning legs I would also have been able to take a stroll through the woodland trail area. Since I am not I was not able to do so, and so missed out on whatever weird wonders lurked therein. I have seen something similar in the Lake District and so can only imagine that it is mostly greenery, birds (and not the kind found in the Piranha movie), squirrels and foxes and maybe the odd badger. You may take the view that I am not missing out on very much, whereas I take the view that any opportunity to complain about inaccessiblity at tourist attractions should be seized upon instantly.

With woodland trails out of the equation we began our Safari Drive. Accompanying the drive is an audio guide. In other words, a CD containing commentary on all the species living in the park. Unlike it's Longleat counterpart which is far more generic and therefore helpful, this effort was recorded during an actual Safari Drive taken by a broadcaster and someone called Dave (obviously). Dave was one of the people responsible for the foundation of the park in 1971, and clearly knows his stuff. What he doesn't know about animals could only be gleaned by repeatedly torturing Terry Nutkins and Chris Packham. However, since he is speaking during an actual Safari Drive, he is making reference to sightings and events that are clearly not happening back in the real world;

"Yes and now we have an emu blocking the road, and we could be here for a while." he says philosophically, while we were actually sat in a queue of at least 10-15 cars, the drivers of which had stopped to watch a group of elephants. There wasn't an emu within 400 yards. He went on to describe visits to his vehicle from squirrels and of course the obligatory baboons, none of which were present in reality.

The park was not busy considering today is a Bank Holiday, but at one point around the elephant section all three lanes of the road were gridlocked. This is all very well if you like looking at elephants, but even so it can only keep your attention for a limited amount of time. My advice would be to pause the CD at this point, lest you find yourself listening to a description of lions and wildebeest when all you can see are elephants. And some Mondeos.

If all this sounds like a complaint it isn't. It's preferable for the drive to take up a significant amount of your time. There would be little point in racing around there in 10 minutes, regarding these magnificent beasts in the same way that you would a group of cows in a field by the M6. They deserve better and they are going to make damn sure you pay attention to them.

The best examples of this came in lion country. Many zoos might have two, maybe three lions living on their land, all of which are cooped up rather sadly in hardly adequate caging. Not so here, where a full pride of what must have been 10 or so lions had the run of the woodland. Acres of space, as sports commentators would have it. One lioness brazenly crossed the road metres from the front of the car. She didn't even stop to look at the gormless people who had come to gawp at her. Instead she merely plodded on and returned to the rest of the pride for what lions love best, a bit of a lie down. Seeing a lion roaming around from those sorts of close quarters was something special, even if it didn't have the social skills to acknowledge us. Lions these days............

Other roadblocks were provided by a stubborn and slightly aloof camel and several baboons. We'd chosen the car-friendly route to view the baboons. We've had enough trouble with our car this year without subjecting it to the bottoms of potentially 140 mischievous monkeys. Barely a week goes by without some kind of warning light coming on and some mechanic stroking his stubble, taking a sharp intake of breath and saying.......'it's gonna cost you'. I pride myself on my ability to waste money but the budget is not limitless, and anyway there is the principle of not giving your cash to cowboys isn't there?

Anyway, back to baboons. Despite taking the safe route we were still offered a fantastic view of the animals. You can see close up all of the gullible folk who don't mind losing the odd windscreen wiper driving along with five or six baboons on the roof. To be fair most of these cars seemed to contain very young children with delighted faces. Perhaps it is worth losing a windscreen wiper or two to see your child's face light up like that. I can only speculate. What I hadn't expected was the sight of several baboons blocking the passage of many of these cars by simply lying in the road. Today has been a reasonably warm day but you would think they could find somewhere safer to sunbathe.

Now, remember that bug house I was telling you about? It was a truly horrifying place. People have offered me the argument that snakes and spiders are 'cute' and are perfectly acceptable pets but of course this is arrant nonsense. Snakes are ugly, spiders even more so. Matching them in the ugly stakes are crocodile newts, leaf-cutter ants, salamanders, brightly coloured poisonous frogs and the utterly revolting legless lizard. He's not drunk, he literally has no legs. The major difference, apparently, between he and a snake is the presence of eyelids. Snakes don't have eyelids. They don't have personality either. There's also beetles, tarantulas and scorpions on view if you are so inclined.

Of far more appeal to me was the sea lion show we witnessed following our escape from the bug house. Reggie and Biffo (falling out of my chair laughing at this point, Biffo? Tell you what, you can call him Biffo but he walked better than I can) performed an array of fairly standard tricks ranging from clapping when directed to leaping out of the water to head a football. Of course there was the time-honoured balancing of said ball on the sea lions nose, although at only 14 months young Reggie clearly still has much to learn on this one. You get the impression that Biffo could keep the ball up there all day, while Reggie can manage only a few seconds at the moment. Apparently he's getting there, which is a feeling I'm sure many of us can identify with.

From there it was on to the falconry display. A handler, complete with Sam Allardyce-style audio headset, gave us the lowdown on Max the eagle, Nibbles the vulture and Pablo the hawk. Quite how anyone can bring themselves to name a bird of prey 'Nibbles' is beyond me. It's not very macho, is it? Nibbles didn't do much flying, preferring instead to walk around a lot. By contrast Pablo went to town with the whole flight thing. His party-piece was to fly just above the heads of the watching public, every man-Jack of whom ducked as he approached. Our guide assured us that his vision is such that he will never crash into anyone during flight, though I am sure I felt his wing brush against the side of my head towards the end of the display. Maybe I was imagining things. I've probably become sensitive to it after being violated by Stitch in Orlando (see earlier blog, we are not going there again you'll be happy to note).

Max was my personal favourite of the three. He flew at a sensible, safe height, and he didn't look at you in the vein hope that you might keel over and die and thus provide an easy meal in the way that Nibbles did. Strangely, Nibbles was not bald as we imagine vultures to be. Although it could have been a syrup.

There's barely enough cyberspace left to talk to you about the meerkats, otters, giraffe and all of the farm animals residing at Knowsley. The pigs were among the noisiest creatures I have ever encountered, although to be fair many of them were only a month old and were spending the entire afternoon chasing after their probably exhausted mother. No wonder all parties were a bit tetchy. Ponies and donkeys offer a quieter option for the kids to stroke, and if you really want to see something cutesy then there are lop-eared rabbits also. And sheep and goats, but nobody likes them, do they?

Like them or not, there is certainly enough I do like at Knowsley Safari Park to suggest that it will not be another 25 years before I visit again.

Spotify

"You'll find loads of Joss Stone songs on there that you haven't heard." Emma told me the other night.

She was talking about Spotify, but I scoffed at the prospect. I refused to believe that the aforementioned Soul Angel had made a single sound since about 2004 that I had not picked up on. Well actually she probably has but I'd rather not go into that. I'm talking music now. Anyway, how wrong I was. Suddenly I was like the proverbial child in the sweet shop as I discovered dozens of what I thought were new tracks. It has probably been there years, but as with all other technological developments I have been a bit slow on the uptake where Spotify is concerned.

Mercifully for all you nay-sayers and philistines out there, this is not another pro-Joss propaganda article. The point is that Spotify is a brilliant little invention which, when you type in the name of an artist or a song, will list endless tracks associated with that artist or song title. The only down side to it is that after every three or four tracks chosen you are subjected to an advert (usually for Spotify or a related music product) whether you like it or not. But it is almost always only the one, so it is not long before the music world is once again at your filthy, disturbed fingertips. And unlike YouTube, you don't get tracks that sound like they have been recorded from inside a beer barrell, nor do they cut off before they have actually finished.

I tended to get a bit bamboozled by the choice, even within the limits of a list relating to a single artist. It reminded me of that Monty Python sketch about spam only instead of spam, spam, spam, spam and spam I was left to ponder over Joss with James Brown, Joss with Melissa Etheridge, Joss with Leanne Rhimes, Joss with Jeff Beck, even Joss with Robbie Williams. There's even a cover of the old Beach Boys classic 'God Only Knows'. By the way, in the interests of balance I should point out that Mr Williams has an extensive collection of Spotify tracks of his own. Be warned though, for every Morning Sun there is a Rock DJ, and for every No Regrets there is a Rudebox. Or something. Yet irrespective of which artist floats your boat you will find a veritable array of treats here. You can just skip over the garbage.

You can, if you are sad enough, lose hours on Spotify. I told myself repeatedly that I would just play one more song, but by the end of another 100 one more songs it was well after midnight and I was cursing Spotify for the exhaustion I knew lay ahead in the morning. For all the things that Spotify can do, it cannot get you out of going to work, nor getting up at 7.00 in the morning with the distinct feeling that you are three stones heavier than you were when you went to bed.

Give it a try. You'll find loads of tracks on there that you never knew existed. No, really. You will.

Chaophraya

I don't like Thai food. In fact I don't like any food except cheese. Not Thai, not Chinese, not Indian, not French, not Greek, not Spanish not anything. Strange then that I should take the decision to join my old work colleagues at Chaophraya, a Thai restaurant in Liverpool One.

Yet there is method in this madness. A couple of these people are leaving and so they were celebrating. Celebrating is absolutely the operative word here, but it takes someone to leave for everyone to get their sociable heads on. I worked there for a year and social outings were rare. Jennifer Anniston and Angelina Jolie get together socially more often than we did, and it is more than possible as people start leaving their jobs that we might never get together again.

My first problem was getting there. This being August it was of course hammering down with the kind of rain not seen since well.........since the day before yesterday. Undeterred I plodded on, but managed to get lost. I was rolling along quite absent mindedly with the MP3 player on when after about 10 minutes I found myself heading towards a pub. I would have called in for a drink had it not then dawned on me that firstly I was already on course to be very late, and secondly that the pub in question was at the bottom of the street where I work!

Having resolved to concentrate on what I was actually doing rather than trundling around in circles, I found Liverpool One with no more drama. Finding the restaurant was a different proposition. I'd been told it was near to the Hilton hotel, but what I didn't know is that you had to get into the lift from there and go up to the fifth floor. I found this useful titbit of information from the Tourist Information Centre, which I also found quite by accident.

By now around 20 minutes late I exited the lift to find a row of restaurants at the top of the ramp. Only Chaophraya wasn't one of them. It was on the other side of the complex, hidden away like Dr Evil's lair. It crossed my mind that Liverpool One could make good use of maps, but it's a place that seems to think it is too cool for that. You're slumming it if you offer people help in getting around. Liverpool One is only for pseudo-trendy people, and pseudo-trendy people don't need maps. Except perhaps to find their way up their own backsides to retrieve their heads.

As expected I couldn't eat much, yet I could still have done without one of our number asking the waiter if he could get me some chips. Chaophraya thinks it is up-market, and it is not the sort of place where one can sit there eating a split and fish while all around you are tucking into their Thai curries and their duck. I managed some chicken and some strange bread-based concoction smeared in sesame seeds, but that was about my lot. The chip request sparked something in the waiter, who spent much of the rest of the time dashing over to our table to offer me alternatives. Chicken nuggets? No thanks. Prawns? No thanks. Ice cream? No thanks. It was all a bit Mrs Doyle. Say you will. You will, you will, you will, you will, you will. You will. I won't.

I wouldn't even have a dessert. I could easily have shifted some chocolate cake but it didn't seem appropriate having declined everything else. Except beer. I had beer. Budweiser is Budweiser, irrespective of foreign cuisine. We moved on to a few pubs and I thankfully started to feel a little less like everyone was looking at me, willing me to eat a spring roll. It was still raining and I was still hungry, but I was still glad to have been there.

York - The Last Word

So where was I? Oh yes. In York.

Those of you still with me from part one will remember that I was initially turned away from the Jorvik Viking Centre due to fire regulations. I wasn't carrying any matches or fidgeting gormlessly with a cigarette lighter. They told me that they could not accommodate more than one wheelchair user at a time.

All of which disability inaccess led to our arriving on Friday morning for a second bite at the cherry. Clearly they had ran out of excuses to dismiss us, and they let us in without too much fuss. Via a small lift we made our way down to the visitors centre, the main feature of which is it's glass floor.

It may not sound all that exciting, but when you take into account the fact that the room is only lit by the glare of the television monitors dotted around it changes your perspective. It genuinely looks like there is no floor in the middle of the room, and the model of the old Viking Digs set a few feet below the glass only adds to the effect. Despite what your eyes tell you, it is quite safe to step (or wheel) on to the glass and have a look around. The Digs aren't much to look at however, and the main pleasure to be gained is a kind of Homer Simpson-esque delight at being able to skim across the top of a seemingly invisible floor and not fall face first into the rocks below.

The Jorvik Centre has it's own ride too. It's not The Hulk at Universal Studios, but it is very similar to some of the more gentler attractions that a place like Orlando has to offer. Another miracle of access (could this be the reason for their strict one at a time policy?) allowed me to board one of the carriages which takes you on a historical tour of all things Viking. The idea is to educate you on how the Vikings used to live, hunt, work and behave.

Undoubtedly though, the highlight is meeting the gentleman who gets caught short on his toilet. Upon being greeted by the ride's audio narrator the man lets out an embarrassed and muffled Scandinavian utterance before promptly 'dropping the kids off'. For authenticity the air suddenly becomes filled with a decidedly ploppy smell. I found all of this hugely amusing but I think Emma felt a little queasy once the smell escaped.

Excrement is a theme at the Jorvik Centre, as on display there you will also find what I can only describe to you as a lump of shite. There, in a glass case all of it's own, is a sample of human excrement accompanied by some scientific jibber-jabber about how much we can learn from the chemicals in shite or some such. To my mind it looked like something you might get out of an old fashioned joke shop at Blackpool but then I should remember that it fell out of it's human vehicle some 1200 years ago. It's bound to have let itself go.

Our final destination would be the Merchant Adventurer's House. The Merchant Adventurers were basically tradesmen who sailed the world trying to sell their goods and make a bit of wonga. It is perhaps best to think of them as an early version of a worker's union, and the house is a grand old place where they would hold their meetings and social events. Your tour of the house is accompanied by a free audio guide which on appearance looks like the Sky Digital remote handset. 'Press your red button now to watch Lord Poncemby sail to Bordeaux to buy wine live and exclusively in HD'. The trouble with this little gizmo is that it cannot be paused, so you find yourself struggling to keep up with the descriptions of the art work and other exhibits on display.

By the time you have sussed out how to get the right information at the time that you actually want it you have reached the chapel, and you get the feeling that you are just about done with religion and churches. For a little light relief, and to keep the house in touch with the technological revolution, there are touch-screen games which place you in the Merchant Adventurer's boat and challenge you to sail the world trading your products. I visited Bordeaux first obviously, but also took in Bilbao, Copenhagen, and somewhere in Belgium on my way to a glorious £8 profit. I was then informed that while my haul was a worthy one allowing for economic inflation, I still had to pay my crew and so would probably only have gone away with enough money for half a hogs head for the banquet.

But that's York. It's a wonderful city but it proves that you really can't have everything.

York - Day Two

The first bus left for the city centre tour at 9.55am. Of course, this being us, we were never going to be on it. Not when you consider my long-standing feud with public transport. Again it would be one of the themes of the day.

Four buses pulled in an and out of the first stop-off point without offering even the merest hint of wheelchair access. Nevertheless our patience held, only because the leaflet insisted that 'most' buses were accessible. One in five is not my idea of 'most', but it probably satisfies some half-arsed Disability Discrimination Act criteria laid out by politicans who are suspicously devoid of disability. Not of the physical variety, in any event.

What the leaflet doesn't tell you is that when you finally find yourself an accessible bus, you will have an innaccessible driver. Sporting the kind of ludicrous grey mullet normally reserved for Barnsley cab drivers, our man looked promising when he let us on to the bus without charging us. Sadly, he did so because he didn't actually know how much to charge us (that scary chair thing again) and had to pull up so that he could ask the guide on the upper deck. Turns out it was his first day on the job. You can imagine the conversation at Head Office beforehand;

"I'm not sure about Bob, he doesn't seem to know what he's really doing yet."

"Ah, just stick him on the accessible bus, he'll be fine. Nobody uses that thing anyway. I mean, accessible buses? Do me a favour."

What I can also tell you about York's City Tour Bus is that the stops on the map mean nothing. Stop 8 is Dick Turpin's grave, the only problem being that the bus can't actually stop there. It can stop 200 yards down the road, which would be slightly more helpful if the guide had explained that you can't actually see it anyway. Not since it appears to be on the inside of a locked church.

Stop 3 is the Richard III museum, though it remains unclear exactly where stop 3 is. It doesn't appear to be in York. Maybe it is innaccessible and they didn't have the heart to tell us. Or maybe 'Bob' just doesn't know and felt a bit silly asking so many questions on his first day.

By now we were a little weary of buses, and so made our way to the Castle Museum. Not the castle itself, you understand. That would be living the dream, located as it is up an absurd number of steps on top of a large hill. Even Emma would have had difficulty climbing that many steps, so we moved on to the museum down the road. Parts of which were, you guessed it, inaccessible.

And free. We were allowed in for nothing. The museum staff are obviously mortified by the fact that they cannot manage to make their building fully accessible and so do not have the audacity to charge a fee. Not helping their cause is that it is difficult to put many of the exhibits into any kind of context, such is the lack of information supplied. You can stare at a box full of watches, belts, buckles, tools and clothes for as long as you like, you never really get a sense of their relevance to York Castle. To make up for this, a life-size model of a horse and stagecoach is slapped straight in the middle of one of the cobbled streets containing said exhibits. This fascinates young children. There's also a fire engine.

It's not until you get to the prison that you start to get some idea of what life in and around York Castle might have been like hundreds of years ago. A selection of devilish and dastardly characters are brought to life by short films projected onto the walls of the cells they once occupied. This is where you find out the grizzly good stuff, with crimes ranging from high treason and armed robbery to stabbing one's spouse to death with a variety of sharp kitchen utensils. We finally located Dick Turpin, but he was unable to shed any light on the location of his grave, what with him being a professional actor beamed digitally onto a concrete wall.

As far as we could tell, nobody had ever been placed in York Castle's prison for whistling on a Tuesday, nor were there any executioners called Ploppy. We were understandably disappointed by this.

York is a city which loves a museum, so from there it was on to the National Rail Museum. That is after we had visited the model railway exhibition, the main attraction of which is the ability to press buttons and watch things move. And not just model trains, but windmills and cars and flashing lights and maybe even a few animals. If you want to be really childish (and I do) there is the Thomas The Tank Engine section too. I'm sure there was a time when kids would have been enthralled at the prospect of bringing all of the characters to life with the push of just a few buttons. Then somebody invented X-Box.

The National Rail Museum is actually a truly impressive place. You don't have to have any previous interest in trains or transport to walk into the Great Hall and be awed. I went on board a Japanese Bullet (well ok, it was never going to move) and can remember thinking that nothing as good as this would be leaving Thatto Heath for Lime Street on Monday morning. In a truly ironic twist, the NRM had managed to make their trains more accessible than those actually in use across England's railway stations. I headed on board a steam train too, not to mention another used by the Royal Mail. Any more excitement than this and I might just have wet myself.

Information relating to the history of rail travel is dotted around the NRM. My favourite snippet was the Duke of Wellington's (tea, man, tea!!!!!!!!) assertion that he was against rail travel because he feared it would allow too much movement from the 'lower order'. He wasn't talking about England's batting line-up from Graeme Swann downwards, but rather the lower classes of England at that time. It was a classic piece of outrageous bigotry, and I tried to imagine David Cameron coming out with such wisdom without having half a brick thrown at his perfectly coiffured, public schoolboy head!

I visited the city's art gallery alone. Emma wanted to re-visit the crypt at the Minster, and I wanted to feel as though I was at least half-way cultured. Normally I hate art. I find it offensive that a woman can write names on a tent and be lauded for her achievements, or that the same praise and reward can be lavished on a man who hasn't made his bed. My opinion hasn't really changed, despite the fact that there is some great art work on display. There's also too many photographs which I'm sure I could have taken, and paintings which didn't seem out of the ordinary either. However, it should be remembered that when it comes to art I don't really know what I'm looking for. I just know it isn't a tent with names on, an un-made bed or a photograph of a 13-year-old girl performing a martial arts manouvre.

In the evening we had energy only for a meal and a bottle of red, whereupon I discovered that I don't like egg on pizza. I like egg in every form imaginable, but I was eventually left feeling a little sickly after munching my way through a large Carnivora pizza. If you're wondering, it contains pepperoni, sliced ham, salami and the offending egg. It can, if you dare, be purchased for a reasonable price at the Tuscany Restaurant in the centre of York.

On the table next to us an obnoxious man with two American daughters complained to the manager because his pizza hadn't arrived within 27 seconds of his order. The manager chewed the waitresses ear off in full view of the diners. She returned to the obnoxious man's table and he was all hearts and flowers, apologising profusely and assuring her that he had not meant to get her in trouble. I was willing her to smash his wine bottle over his head but she let me down. I hope he had egg in his pizza and spent the whole night rolfing it down his hotel loo.

Thankfully, I'd stopped in time to save myself that fate.

York - Day One

With a whole week off from work we decided that, rather than stay in and watch True Movies and old episodes of Monk, we would get away for a few days. We chose York just because it was somewhere we had never been together, and there seemed to be a lot of places of interest to visit. No doubt some or all of these places would be inaccessible.

On the journey there I was disturbed to learn that Emma is a Lady GaGa fan. She has a CD with THREE tracks on it which can be rightly attributed to the gobshite Madonna wannabe. That's Lady GaGa, not Emma. Keep up. I myself detest Lady GaGa in a way that is difficult to explain and so I will offer you only the following evidence;

'Rah-Rah-Ah-Ah-Ah-Ah-Roma-Roma-Mamaa-Ga-Ga-Ooh-La-La-Want Your Romance'

I think you get my point.

If you are thinking that a disability-related mix-up and subsequent farce is hurtling towards this story then you would be right. It's as predictable as one of Baldrick's cunning plans unfortunately. Two hours of the A1 behind us, we arrived at the Saxon Hotel just outside the city to find that not only was our room inaccessible, but so was the rest of the hotel. There were two steps at the front by the pavement and another in front of the doorway. Not to mention the three more that went down to the only bathroom on the ground floor.

Luckily Emma has experience of putting up with this kind of crap, and so she made a few phone calls. Laterooms, with whom we had made the booking, blamed the hotel for supplying incorrect information, while the hotel staff blamed Laterooms for not informing them that someone would be having the temerity to turn up using a wheelchair. They even took the credit for moving us to a much nicer hotel in the city centre. You get what you pay for though, so it cost a little more. They gave us the £20 car parking fee.

Finally settled into our thankfully accessible hotel we headed off into the city for a snoop around. We found large bridges built on slanted roads which made pushing even short distances feel like a road session with Tanni-Grey Thompson. By the end of my marathon we still had a few hours to kill before the Ghost Walk we had planned on joining in the evening. We tried to visit the Jorvik Viking Centre but made the staggering discovery that due to fire regulations they were unable to admit more than one wheelchair user at a time. I checked with Emma to make sure it really was 2010, before reluctantly agreeing to make a booking for the Friday morning.

And so instead we visited the famous York Minster. If it is not as famous as they like to think and you don't know what I'm talking about I should explain then that it is a cathedral. It has stunning architecture both inside and out, but then it ought to since they are charging you £8 for what is essentially entry into a church. Even that fecking priest from my nephew's Holy Communion service would balk at that. What I noticed most about the Minster was the amount of death in there. There are rows and rows of plaques dedicated to fallen soldiers, noblemen and other such luminaries, many of whom died in gruesome circumstances. A service was taking place which seemed to attract a lot of visitors but after my anti-religious rant I decided not to get too close. I'm not a hypocrite, but at the same time I think that such a historic piece of world class architecture is worth preserving, and visiting for that matter.

The Ghost Walk, or something similar to it, is something we had experienced before in Stratford. This particular York version (there are at least four in what is becoming a thriving tourist industry business) was a little funnier than that, if a little more embarrassing also. It started at the Shambles market, and did so with our Ghostly guide strolling down the road, coming to a stop for fully 10 seconds before scaring the bejesus out of an unfortunate lady with her back to him;

"ARE YOU.....................!" he bellowed;

"Ghost hunting, tonight?"

She daren't say no at that point. And so began a pleasant walk around the city, inter-mingled with spooky stories of York's ghostly history. Saddest of all was the tale of the young girl who is said to haunt one house after being abandoned there by her parents because she had developed black boils under her arms. Her parents believed it was the plague and left her there and then, locked in her room. To boot, they painted a big red cross on the front door to warn any passers by not to enter the house. Our guide claimed that she can still be heard and seen screeching for help and scratching her nails down the bedroom window in an effort to escape. This is the cynical bit. Bollocks she can.

If you are going to go on a Ghost Walk then you better hope you are not chosen by the guide as his comedy prop. The unfortunate Dave seemed to have been chosen only because of his height, but his ordeals included being given a broken horn to blow, and being told to stand in a corner while the rest of the crowd backed him into the wall;

"There's no going back now." the guide quipped.

For his finale he tried to humiliate everyone who had, after all, paid their £5 for the privelege. He walked the group to a position opposite an Italian restaurant and instructed them to wave in unison at the diners. More than one of the restaurant customers waved back stupidly, and far too enthusiastically. For an encore he led the group to the window and had them blow a great big raspberry at the customers. Thumbs pressed into cheeks and everything. The real deal. You can't help but laugh in a situation like this but you get the feeling that if you didn't you'd cry.

It might have been a cheap laugh, but it was a good deal more creative than;


'Rah-Rah-Ah-Ah-Ah-Ah-Roma-Roma-Mamaa-Ga-Ga-Ooh-La-La-Want Your Romance'

Kennedy Space Center

Yes, I know that Center is an incorrect spelling, but that's what it's called so that is how you spell it.

Regardless of correct spellings, there's a story to tell. Before I went on my anti-religion rant, and before I got all steamed up about being called 'Steve', I was telling you about my recent trip to Florida. Sadly for you I hadn't quite finished. Humour me.

The first thing to say is that Kennedy Space Center is not as easy to get to as the theme parks. It's almost two hours drive away from where we were staying and it is spread across three sites, none of which are within walking distance of each other. To get the full experience you have to take the bus tour, upon which you will be shown space travel-related DVD's and spoon-fed information about the USA's space programme by knowledgeable but worryingly distracted bus drivers. Our man somehow took a wrong turn by some important-looking launch-pads, and then spent the time it took to get back on track delighting in his mistake.

First port of call on the bus tour is the Apollo/Saturn V Center. Here's where you will find out more information than you can possibly digest about the numerous Apollo missions of the 1960's and 70's. Of course this includes the historical moon landings by Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and that other bloke (Michael Collins), but it also covers the doomed Apollo 13 mission documented in the film with Tom Hanks and Gary Sinise. Interestingly, the background information on Apollo 13 is tucked away behind a dining area which makes it incredibly difficult to get to, as if it's failure is something that NASA would rather you didn't go into. I made a point of squeezing through the crowds to read the information anyway. All in the interests of balance, you understand.

Impressively, the enormous rocket used in one of those early missions is the centre-piece of the display. It stretches across the entire room and is an awe-inspiring, slightly intimidating presence.

Positivity is very important at KSC. As is paranoia. Listen to their tour guides and you will find out that the US space travel programme is all about exploration, discovery and the progression of the human race. By contrast, the Russian expeditions are the result of a sinister plan to attack from above. It still irks the Americans to note that the former Soviet Union managed to put a man into space before they did. To emphasise the point we were in a bar on International Drive a couple of days later, and were talking about our visit to the singer. He expressed his concern about what the Russians 'were doing up there', before lamenting President Obama's plan to get rid of Space Shuttles because of the expense.

Maybe even Barack doesn't believe that Armstrong ever walked on the moon.

Nevertheless, the moon landings are celebrated richly here, with an impressive video and stage presentation about the mission. I never realised that the crew came so close to being fried alive, but then I recall an episode of The Simpsons in which one scene was accompanied by the caption 'Dramatisation - May Not Have Happened'. I don't suppose we'll ever know, but your writer is a natural sceptic.

The International Space Station is truly underwhelming, so we will head back to the Visitors Centre at this point. We saw an excellent 3-D IMAX presentation about space travel and walking on the moon (narrated by the ubiquitous Hanks. It was very entertaining, and I only regret that we didn't have time to see the other film in which the Hanks role goes to Leonardo Di Caprio. I don't know what happened to Sinise, though I'm sure I heard his voice at Mission: Space at Epcot. Emma's mum and dad visited the launch simulator at KSC but their view was that it was nothing like as good as the aforementioned Sinise vehicle at Epcot, which I can assure you makes you feel quite ill and turns your brain to mush. By all means experience it, just don't eat before you do.

We were fortunate enough to visit on a day when a rocket launch was planned. Twice it was postponed because there was half a cloud in an otherwise brilliant blue sky, but eventually we witnessed the launching of an actual space rocket. There was nobody in it, but watching it shoot skywards and disappear out of the atmosphere was still quite an experience. Our singer friend grumpily informed us that the rocket is part of a series of tests to see if those rockets can be manned, and thus replace the pricey shuttles. Those darn Russians............

There was just time for a quick look around a shuttle, which from the outside looked magnificent but from the inside was a bit of a disappointment. There's a platform inside so the viewing area is around the size of my front drive. To distract you from this they have exhibited a model of an astronaut complete with authentic space-suit and shuttle control pad.

Before we left the coach for the final time the driver gave me what he claimed was an exclusive, commemorative NASA coin. I don't mean to be ungrateful, but it looked like one of those chocolate coins my mum used to put on the Christmas tree with the chocolate Santas. I'm afraid I have no idea where it is but if I find it I'll have to remember not to try to eat it.

Strictly speaking KSC is a two-dayer at least. There are numerous simulators and exhibitions we didn't get to see because of time contstraints. The tour itself takes three and a half hours, and that is before you factor in rocket launches and chocolate money. Yet I'd recommend a visit to anyone, if only so you can see for yourself just how paranoid NASA and the American public can be.

Holy Crap

Religion............  Shit it!

I've stolen those words, I confess.  They were Stephen Fry's response when asked about religion in a television interview.  They also happen to express my own views on religion almost precisely.  I was reminded of how much I detest religion only yesterday (Sunday, naturally) when I attended the first Holy Communion Service of my youngest nephew Patrick.

I'm wincing when I imagine what Patrick and his family have been through.  It is not just a simple case of turn up on the day and walk off with the spoils.  Oh no.  If you want to be accepted into Catholicism (actually they don't but they have to, more on which later), you have to prove your worth.  For about as long as I can remember now my brother-in-law has terrified me with tales of rehearsals, weekend church engagements and, worst of all, having to be nice to a priest!

And not just any old priest.  I fear a lawsuit should I mention his name.  You never know, there could be more than two of you reading this.  However, what I can tell you is that whoever I have spoken to, regardless of their religious views or denominations, they have universally condemned this man.  His faults seem to range from a staggeringly misplaced arrogance, to a religious fascism and an unnverving presence around small children.  And he sings badly too.  Jeez, does he sing badly.  And he's one of those priests who, the worse he sounds, the louder he sings in blissful ignorance.  Tell me Catholics, are your priests all like that?

So back to the plot.  Why do I object to religion so much?  Where to start? I'm mindful that some (one or maybe even both) of my readers may have religious sensibilities so I may have to tone this down a little.  In a nutshell my problem with your God is that he never shows up, except perhaps to start a war.  I can't weave my tender brain around the notion that he lets bad things happen as some kind of test.  That strikes me as being a bit like me coming round to your house with a few gallons of petrol and setting you alight to test the strength of our friendship.  I'm unlikely to be invited back.  At the very least you wouldn't be buying that brand of tea that you know I like again.

My natural cynicism can't help but remind me of the bad things that your God has done.  Where was your God when my best friend died at the age of 26?  Did he do that?  Did he have a hand in the death shortly after of another of my friends aged just 30?  No, make that two aged 30.  I prefer to think not.  Science did these things, because only science and nature could be so cruel.  Naturally then it follows that if God is not responsible for the horrific things I have seen happen, nor can he take the credit for the happiness and joy I have experienced.  He did not send me Emma.  He did not get me a job in the funniest barn yard in Britain.  He did not keep my family fit and well for so long.  Fate did all of these things.

What makes me especially queasy about religion is it's desperate attempts to hold on to power and influence in society.  It's awful beyond my comprehension that Patrick and the other children in his class have to go through this brainwashing facade so that their parents can get them into the school of their choice.  The government play a role in this of course, but in forcing children to belt out 'Our God Reigns' in a tuneless manner until they are old enough to know better, the church is desperately clinging on to it's relevance.  It's like a mad gunman taking hostages until it gets what it wants.  Except nobody dies.  Well, at least not until God decides to test their faith in him.  Tea anyone?

Eye-bulgingly, God even goes begging.  Blow me if a woman didn't come around with a velvet bag intended for the reception of our coins.  At one point I thought it was the FA Cup Third Round draw.  Number 52........Southend United..........will play number 13..............Tranmere Rovers.  Emma actually put money in.  Ok, so it was only 45p, but honestly I would rather donate my hard earned (ok earned) money to the IRA.  Amusingly, my Dad seperated all his copper coins from his golden nuggets and big silvers, only to drop the wrong pile into the bag.  The priest's flight to Las Vegas leaves just after last mass next Sunday.

In trying to find the root of all of this anti-religious hatred (for I hate God every bit as much as he loves me but don't worry, he's already forgiven me) I think it might hark back to a trip to Lourdes I took as a child.  Just because all of my mates had been I wanted in.  My abiding memory of the trip is of noticing not a single person emerge from the font of alleged miracles in possession of a miracle.  Not only that, but the statue of Mary steadfsastly refused to weep.  Recently, my Mum has been telling the story of how I told her that Sue, the person responsible for my care during the trip, kept coming back to the room drunk at 3 in the morning.  I have no idea whether this is true or whether it is just something that a nine-year-old might say just for the attention.  If it is not true, may I take this opportunity to apologise to Sue but if you are going to take me to France bothering non-existent Gods then there are going to be consequences!

Religion................Shit it!

My Name Is Not Steve

I've always considered myself the sort of person who would never worry about his name. I'm the son of a man called Donald after all, so who cares what people call me, right?

Well yes, but I can't help but get irritated by the use of the name 'Steve'. Maybe it is because I'm getting older and therefore grumpier about such a trivial matter, but I truly do detest it. I rarely pull anybody up for referring to me by this repugnant version of my name, but that is mostly because I can't be arsed and not, as you might think, because I think being called Steve is cool.

Coolness is not high on my list of life's priorities, but then there is no need to make such an uncool person even less cool by calling him Steve. I can't think of a single cool person called Steve. Go on, name me a cool person called Steve. Coogan? One great character and an array of embarrassing attempts to match it. The Richard Ashcroft of comedy, if you will.

Or how about Steve McClaren? The former England manager is hardly the epitome of cool. It doesn't matter how many titles he wins in Holland, Germany or any other league in which they spit in each other's mullets, for the English McClaren will be forever remembered as the man who failed to take us to Euro 2008. The enduring image of McClaren is of the Wally with the Brolly, standing there non-plussed in the rain while his England team were denied a ticket to Austria and Switzerland by a combination of the kind of ineptitude we have just seen from the class of 2010 in South Africa and the goalkeeping skills of Scott Carson.

I might be alone in this but Steve Carrell doesn't shout 'cool' at me either. In stark contrast to Coogan, Carrell has had a number of similarly successful comedy roles, but none reside in the same stratosphere as the genius of Partridge. Carrell's comic creations are mildly rib-tickling, causing the kind of laughter you might force out if someone you really fancied made a reasonably glib remark. You can apply all of that to Steve Martin too. Martin's comic career is such that the last time I saw him on television he was playing banjo with his hill-billy friends on Later With Jools Holland. Jools is a much cooler name all around.

Steve Davis, Steve Guttenburg, Steve O, The Adonis Steve Beaton, Steve Naive, Steve Strange, Steve (insert your own adjective that clearly is not a surname here). None of these people are to be admired or copied. For every world title won by Davis there is an insurance advert, just as for every scene in Police Academy 29 that made you laugh there is one which caused you to hide behind the sofa in fear of the bloody slaughter of comedy. Steve is not cool, ok, so bloody well stop calling it me this instant!

There aren't many Stes outside St.Helens, so consider instead the relative coolness of people called Stephen. Stephen Fry is perhaps the greatest living Englishman, able to act, write, present, run away from a job and dance the fandango with the best of them. Stephen Hawking is widely renowned for his brilliant scientific mind, proof indeed that you do not have to be able to feed yourself to be able to make a lasting contribution to mankind. Stephen King is among the best selling novelists in the world, while Stephen Hendry's prowess on the snooker table makes even that of Davis look modest. Steven Gerrard (ok, so we're haggling over spelling now) is a prat, but an immensely talented prat. A prat talented enough to be able to drag a bunch of relative pub players up to the level of European champions in 2005, and then to score two superhuman goals in the FA Cup final a year later, one of which came deep into injury time when he was walking at about the same pace as I do.

God forbid also that we forget Steven Spielberg, without who we wouldn't have Jaws, Indiana Jones, Back To The Future or middle aged men who think beards look good.

As I reach the end of my breathless ranting I have finally thought of one man called Steve who deserves all our respect and admiration. Steve Prescott MBE is without question one of the most inspirational figures around today, especially for folk like myself living in rugby league areas where his influence and astounding courage are most prominent. Yet without name dropping I have met him on several occasions, and can't help but get the feeling that it was the sports media who christened him Steve. His name is Ste. Or Precky, but unlike me he is far too classy an individual to rant and rave about being called Steve.

Too cool, for sure.