There are few things in life as exciting as hearing one's name mentioned on the radio. I still get a tingle when I hear colleagues talking about me on-air, just as I hope the listeners do when it's my turn to do the mentioning. Better still, those occasions on which that mention is accompanied by 3 or 4 minutes of sheer indulgence, where a favourite record is played seemingly just for you... Magic.

With the technology to find and play just about any record from our home PC in just minutes, the concept of the request show may seem a little dated, but in fact, the thrill it brings is timeless. And to prove it, take a look at this:

Earlier today, I had a call from BBC Berkshire's reception, to say that a parcel had arrived for me. Hand delivered, the sender in question had issued such firm instructions to "pass this on to Mr Sheppard", that security guards had assumed I was expecting it. I wasn't!

Inside, accompanied by three 332.5g chocolate bars (yes, almost a kilogram of my preferred brand of chocolate!), was 'All the Roadrunning', the fantastic new album from Mark Knopfler and Emmylou Harris which I'd been planning to put at the very top of my Christmas list. A postscript on the label directs me to Track 6, 'Love and Happiness', to which I'm listening as I write. I'm moved to tears by the words, and by the overwhelming power of a gesture well made.

Though there's no further message, I'm in no doubt as to the identity of the sender. The choice of Mark Knopfler points to the most loyal of listeners, a lady who clearly hears every word I blather at all hours of the day and night. The chocolate, which usually arrives weekly with a card and a request, confirms it - though this week the request show has been turned on its head. Suddenly I'm the one getting the tingle.

Track 6 will get a play this weekend. In fact, it'll get more than a play; it will receive the most heartfelt dedication I've ever given on the radio, to the lady who this time didn't text or email or write with a request, but actually sent me the CD from which to play it. Listen out - this will be just for you.

Post title from the lyrics to 'Love and Happiness', written by Emmylou Harris and Kimmie Rhodes.

I must now possess one of the best percentage-win records I've ever had for a season supporting Manchester City.

Up til this season I've usually managed at least 20 matches in each league campaign, reaching a monotonous nadir in 2005/06, when I managed to attend 14 matches without a single victory.

This season work commitments have vastly curtailed my ability to follow City, to the point where this is only the second match I've been able to get to. The first one was the opening game of the season, away at Chelsea, which needless to say we lost.

Tonight, however, we dispatched Aston Villa 3-1 at Villa Park, and we did it with quite a bit of style by City's standards. Darius Vassell opened the scoring for us against his old club, and Sylvain Distin - usually at least 40/1 to score given his position at centre-back - stormed through to wrap up the win in the second half.

By the way, if you're a Reading fan reading this, you can put the pitchforks and torches away - every time I'm working on a Reading game I'm very much a Reading supporter, and I was at the Bolton play-off final in 1995 (which Reading somehow lost despite, at one point, being two goals up with a penalty awarded).

I was only 10 years old at the time so it's fair to say I don't remember much detail from the game. I do, though, remember screaming something about one of the wingers in a high-pitched 10-year-old's voice, to which the old fella next to me (no, not my dad) turned round and said: "You're bloody right, son. Keep talking sense like that and you'll have a bright future."

If ever I apply to do commentary on a game, that's going down on the CV as the one positive observation on my footballing knowledge.

To further reassure Reading supporters, it's important to point out that when Reading beat Ciy 1-0 earlier this season, I spent the last 10 minutes desperate for Reading to cling on.

Granted, this was primarily because I'd already written the match report. And I'd accidentally clicked the wrong button and published it on the BBC site - with a 'Reading 1-0 Man City' headline - five minutes before full time. So I had a vested interest in the scoreline staying the same, but even so, I was crying out for that Reading win.

Back to tonight's game and the best thing about it was the fans. For a start Villa's fans were very quiet, which is always a positive (the attendance was a pitiful 30,000 in a ground that can probably hold half that again). But equally the City away fans I was stood next to behaved themselves, which is practically unheard of. Maybe it's just because I've spent a lot of time in their company, but I maintain that City's away support has the biggest moron-to-seat ratio in professional football.

Tonight they just watched the game and sang at the appropriate points, which was a godsend compared to the traditional smell-of-drugs added to the equally essential turn-up-late-from-pub and scream-abuse-at-anything. Once or twice we've had the delightful fall-off-row-behind-you-onto-you, most notably when Uwe Rosler chipped Peter Schmeichel at Old Trafford in the mid-90s. OJ might remember that: he was there with me and ended up hugging a complete stranger.

So in summary the game was good, the team played well, and the fans behaved. It almost makes me feel like I'm missing out... but then we're at home to Watford on Monday night. And we're unbeaten at home all season. That's a match we're guaranteed to lose - I'll stay at work.

As ever, anything I write which approaches the category "film review" is completed long after everyone else has seen the film in question.

So I'm more interested in whether you agree or not than I am in providing you with a taster of a film you've doubtless already consumed, digested and, er, removed. If you're Borat, you'll have popped it in a plastic bag and taken it back down to your rather refined hosts. (An eerily similar incident really did happen to a friend of a friend, but I shan't relate it - you might be eating.)

I liked Borat a lot. Not the individual, of course, even allowing for the unrepentant charm of a man who goes swimming with his pet bear, asks women how much sex with them will cost while walking past them in the street, and sings a national anthem pertaining to potassium in front of an angry American rodeo crowd.

This is a knowing film, of course. Many times the punchline hoved into view minutes, hours before Borat finally delivered it, but as with classics of the limb-gnawing genre - think Meet The Parents - it's the agony before the pay-off which hits the mark. The moment Borat is shown meeting a group of American feminists it's not the how, but the how long.

The question mark lingers longest over the length. At the end of the film my companions - all a few years older than me, so perhaps more mature (though I'd argue that point) - seemed to feel Borat had outstayed his dubious welcome. I reckon that, at approaching 90 minutes, he was hardly trying to construct a Kazakh Lord Of The Rings (and heaven knows which rings those would be, given some of the action we see in a hotel room). It was like watching a television special on the big screen. You might not like that idea, but it sat well with me.

The odd thing is, despite the reservations all three fellow Borat voyeurs expressed at the end, I swear none of them stopped laughing right the way through the film. You can't spend the whole movie finding it funny, then pop a straight face on as you emerge and pretend you're above all that puerile nonsense. If you laughed, you laughed - admit it, a man with a chicken in a briefcase burning a copy of an old Baywatch annual made you giggle.

Of course you may not have laughed. I can think of a number of people to whom I'd never show this film. Horses for courses, as they sometimes say. In Borat's case, bears for ice cream vans.

It's not often you'll find me commenting on sport. Normally, I'd be happy to leave that for Ollie and his considerably more than passing knowledge of such matters, but since he's been busy posting about buses of late, here's a full account of Sunday's match between London Irish and Northampton. They're both teams who play rugbee leeg, I'm told...

Actually, you won't come close to getting a match report from me. It's a wonder to me that even the most talented of commentators (such as 'our Graham' at BBC Berkshire) can decipher what's taking place on a rugby pitch, let alone manage to describe it with any clarity for the rest of us to comprehend. What I can do, though, is give you an account of the day's entertainment, both up-front and backstage - for I was one of the lucky few who got to see both.

Courtesy of the Voice of the Balls and Seamus O'Connor (manager extraordinaire), I was amongst those enjoying the views from Suite 3 at the Madejski Stadium, being kept well fed and watered as you can see. The party consisted of the two acts who opened the match, Eurovision alumni Donna & Joe and the legendary Foster & Allen - all providing as fine entertainment over lunch as they did on stage - plus Michael King from Radio 1, Deadly, myself, and some of Seamus' family and friends. Sir Terry had threatened to put in an appearance, but as Alan pointed out in his opening, "decided he couldn't afford to be with us after all".

Having been snatched from the sponsor's hospitality suite, Alan was pressed into service as compere for the proceedings, being handed the microphone by the Madejski's regular announcer who was slightly awestruck at the prospect!

First up, Donna & Joe, whose performance was first class, if a little wasted on the small crowd who were still trickling in from the rain. Their latest, 'Hands Up', is a catchy number, and sounded great on the Mad Stad's sound system.

Thoughtfully, Joe McCaul came off and immediately warned Foster & Allen that the 'live' pictures being beamed to the big screen, directly in the performers' eye line, were a good few seconds behind reality - "Don't look!" was the advice. Undeterred, the boys took to the stage, and the crowds went wild.

Despite our best efforts to put him off from the box, Deadly completed the wooing of the crowds, who were left in high spirits for the start of the game. We munched meantime, and enjoyed a great 80 minutes of rugby (even I found it nail biting, although Irish maintained a good lead throughout, finishing London Irish 40-5 Northampton).

During a quiet moment, Joe managed to tempt the Irish mascot, Digger the Dog, up to the box. Dogs love their wine, it seems...

Irish coffees downed, farewells said, it was back to our drivers for the journey home. Or so it seems. My next memory is waking up at home around midnight, dressed in just a shirt and a sock, wondering if it had all been an elaborate dream...

A fantastic day - with thanks to all for having me along.

Two items on tonight's agenda.

Number one: for reasons not immediately clear, somebody arrived at Dayorama earlier today from the forum of the Scottish Licensed Window Cleaners' Network.

The network, or SLWCN for short, appears to be a group of Scottish window cleaners intent on providing a better service. Good on them. They've even supplied a page dedicated to explaining how the group came about. Here's an abridged version:

The first organisation to represent window cleaners throughout Great Britain was started in the late Forties and became known as the National Federation of Master Window Cleaners, then the National Federation of Master Window and General Cleaners and is now the Federation of Window Cleaners. Rightly or wrongly, it was perceived as being stuck in the past and not being proactive enough for some.

Some frustrated Federation members - along with window cleaners who would never have joined because of how they considered the “Fed” to be - decided to form the Association of Professional Window Cleaners.

As only Scottish councils license window cleaners at present, Tam Kay, who was involved in the preparatory days of the APWC, decided his efforts would be better directed in forming the Scottish Licensed Window Cleaners Network. It’s not part of FWC or APWC in any way.

It has to be said that the FWC certainly sharpened up their act in the months leading up to the APWC launch. The change of name and logo was already in the pipeline, but to accompany that, the members’ quarterly magazine – WindowTalk – was revamped with a more up to date style.

For the full version, and to find out more, click here. I'd have to register if I wanted to discover precisely which page refers to Dayorama but, with just 27 members at the time of writing, I'd feel a tad self-conscious doing so.

Second on the agenda are the many vacancies in the Doctor Who production offices at BBC Wales.

In an email circulated today, no fewer than seven job opportunities - working on the likes of Dr Who Confidential and Totally Dr Who - were announced.

Why have all these vacant posts suddenly appeared? Is there something slightly fishy going on in Cardiff? Have the Daleks exterminated the previous appointees, or should we be looking in the bowels of Torchwood for the unfortunate seven?

All highly suspicious. Still, you can imagine the horror for Amy J when it's announced the Dr Who offices are looking for new Tennants...

You might be a basketball or ice hockey fan. You might support your local non-league football team. You might watch rugby in National League 1. If you're any of those things, you probably know what it's like for the media glare to point squarely... elsewhere.

Minority sports, and majority sports at a minor enough level, are very easily ignored. After all, the people who shout the loudest often get the most attention - and there are more Reading fans to shout than there are Maidenhead United fans.

That's why it usually takes something like the FA Cup, or a bizarre story, for local sport to hit the headlines. But therein lies an advantage for anyone with the freedom and inclination to devote a little extra time to these sports - if you go to places no one else goes, you'll find stories and characters no one else knows about.

This is the spark behind Sportsweek, a new part of our BBC site designed to focus on sports clubs which don't normally get our attention. Yes, Five Live got to the name first, but it fits the bill so I've stolen it.

We have two world-beating hockey teams, an Elite League ice hockey team, a top basketball side, two or three top rugby clubs and plenty of strong non-league football sides in our patch, so there's plenty of people to be talking to.

For our first week we've got interviews with figures from Newbury rugby club, Basingstoke Town FC, Reading Rockets basketball team and Slough ladies' hockey club - plus London Irish analysis from our reporter Graham.

Click here to take a look. The Reading Rockets interview is particularly good, since the team are embroiled in a tapping-up scandal with rivals Worthing Thunder. Just because a sport's out of the public eye, doesn't mean nothing ever happens.

If you've been on a bus or train, especially in London, you'll have had an experience where some eejit's playing their music through the speaker on their mobile phone, just because they can.

Clearly Ken Livingstone knows the God-that's-annoying-but-they-might-kill-me sensation all too well. Earlier this week he declared that people playing their music to all and sundry on London's buses could be stripped of their travel passes and thrown off the bus in question.

What he didn't say was by whom:

Speaking before the London Assembly last week, Mr Livingstone said ... Transport for London (TfL) was adapting an upcoming campaign "to incorporate the playing of music on buses".

The campaign by TfL is designed to reduce anti-social behaviour and crime and improve "passenger perception of safety on the bus network".

Calling for an "absolute prohibition on playing music from a mobile system" Mr Livingstone said "people will be asked to leave the bus and in the case of a child with free travel concession they would forfeit it".

[source: BBC News - 'Mayor calls for music-free buses']

Ken, that's great. I hate loud music on buses too. But you're not going to catch me confronting anyone about it, and according to to Jim Buckley of the T&G workers' union, you're not going to catch many bus drivers at it either:

"It would mean the driver having to get out of his cab, thereby putting himself in a situation of potential assault," he told the BBC News website. On that basis, we don't want anything to do with it."

Can you blame them? Only this morning came another story of violence on public transport in London: a 12-year-old girl 'brutally' attacked. In that report, the driver gets rapped for not doing more:

[The girl's mother] criticised the bus driver for failing to do more to help her daughter. She claimed the bus driver did not intervene, call for medical assistance or even stop the bus ... An Arriva London spokesman said: "It would be totally unacceptable for a bus driver to behave in the manner described. We expect drivers to make the safety of customers a priority and summon the emergency services via the bus radio if requested."

[source: This Is Local London]

Granted, you'd want your bus driver to get the emergency services in an incident like that. But get out of the cab and confront the perpetrator, whether it's a knife-wielding maniac or a bloke playing Girls Aloud at 120 decibels? I think any bus driver doing that has a death wish.

The solution for Northern trains has been to employ a private firm on their services:

Private security guards are to ride trains in the north of England to crack down on the abuse of rail staff.

The action follows more than 300 incidents of abuse and assault on Northern Rail staff so far this year.

Rail union RMT said some of its members have been kicked in the head, punched in the face and so badly assaulted that they have taken weeks off work.

Some rail staff have suffered verbal abuse, threats of violence and have been spat at by passengers.

[source: BBC News - 'Security guards on train journeys']

If you're facing statistics like that as a bus or train driver, you're hardly going to go looking for trouble by staring down boisterous youths with mobile phones at full blast. Clearly the trouble is perfectly adept at finding you without you finding it.

I'm no David Sheppard in the Mastermind category of 'bus nostalgia', but I can't help feeling conductors on buses stopped this from even being an issue. Take away the authority figure and it's no wonder mindless hooligans can do what they like on our public transport networks. Even your chavviest teenager can work out that bus drivers need to drive the bus, and won't bother risking anything by coming back there and trying to deal with that loud music. If you get on your bus and you're welcomed by a conductor with nothing better to do than watch you like a hawk, you might share your Jay-Z collection a little less casually.

Having said all this, I'll be delighted to stand in David's bus playing music when he eventually learns to drive it. I'll set my drum kit up in it...

Meet Twink and Winky, two of the Wombies:

With Twink and Winky, I share a compulsive love of Wine Gums, which often explains why whole clumps of the little coloured gems go missing from your bag whenever I'm nearby. I rarely make it from any main-line railway station to a tube or a bus without first buying and consuming an entire cylinder in two mouthfuls. I once stopped at the Severn Bridge services to buy a 250g bag "for the journey", but managed to consume the lot before I'd reached Wales.

Unlike the Wombies, though, I don't like the yellow ones much. Widely supposed to be lemon flavoured (at least, according to Wombania's study of The Great Wine Gum Flavour Debate), it's unlike the other colours in its corrosively bitter taste, and if you've ever stopped to compare the smell... yuck.

For most, the black and red gums have the edge, to the point where you can guarantee they'll be first to be exhausted at the hands of cherry pickers (who have the gall to call themselves friends, despite leaving you with a bag of yellows to finish up). You smile, but herein lies an important thing about human nature. One of the big Wine Gum manufacturers (Maynards, I think), played on the popularity of the red and black gums some time ago, and began selling bags of just those. Legend has it they were a flop, whilst sales of the standard gums continued to flourish.

So, it seems we'd rather have both ends of the spectrum. The bitter and best. One makes the other seem much better.

Yet, which of these leaps out at you?

Let's be honest, you could use a roulette wheel to select your chosen gum.

That I seem to buck this quirk of human nature is bugging me as I listen to a compilation CD I made this week. Much as I do love i-Tunes and its many cousins which answer my long-term prayer to be able to store all my music in one place, I'm also still a fan of the trusty compilation CD, which allows me to enjoy a select few favourites which work well together - if you like, the black and red records in isolation.

This week, my informal theme was "so rarely heard, but every one a winner", and the resulting collection is so good it hurts. The ecstasy of hearing Elton John's 'Part Time Love' rubbing shoulders with Captain & Tenille's 'Love Will Keep Us Together' is beaten only when Toto's 'Hold the Line' breaks in with that marvellous single drum beat and, oh, that piano, to be followed by China Crisis' "Wishful Thinking" at Track 4... And so on.

The problem is, by the time I've worked my way through Carole Bayer Sager, Chris Rea's 'I Can Hear Your Heartbeat', The Korgis, England Dan & John Ford Coley, Air Supply and more, to The Carpenters' beautiful version of 'You' (a favourite of the late Dr Wally), I feel like doing it all again. And invariably, I will - all night long. It's exhausting.

So how come the black and red Wine Gum venture failed? Sigmund Rowntree (the well known psycho-confectioner) might have concluded that to appreciate the high points in life, humans must know the other extreme; to enjoy the black, one must endure the yellow. I'd tend to agree, but for the fact I'm a self-confessed glutton, who'd happily plough his way through packet after packet of exclusively black and red Wine Gums with the same unending enthusiasm which has led to my re-starting 'You' six times (so far) this evening.

So while Twink and Winky are busy chewing their way through the yellows in search of happiness, I'll be laying back and basking in an ecstatic sea of red and black, playing The Carpenters over and over and...

If you're familiar with the concept of Facebook, you'll recognise this as an extract from a news feed:

For the uninitiated, Facebook is all about interacting with 'friends' who allow you to share their news, photos, blogs, etc. and the news feed alerts you to the latest developments in your Facebook community.

So, you might think it's strange that I appear from the above to be interacting with myself, and accepting my own offer of friendship. Well I'm not - I'm actually interacting with Dave Sheppard, from Bristol University. Yes, that's right. But a different one!

To prove it, and I feel I must, here's an extract from my profile:

And here's an extract from Dave Sheppard's profile:

Great hat, but it just wouldn't match my eyes...

As the name would suggest, he seems a very nice chap; at least he appeared to see the funny side of my invitation to become 'friends', and accepted. Good job too; as an alumnus of the University at which he's currently studying, I'd hate to think of my good name (quite literally) and reputation being besmirched by anything less than a good man with a nice hat.

Ah, coincidences... Aren't they always so impressive?

Fancy another one? Okay, try this man:

Dr David Sheppard, Senior Lecturer, Department of Physiology.

Yes, another one. Not a student, but on the staff.

And guess where he's a Senior Lecturer at the Department of Physiology? Yes. The University of Bristol!

I intend to lobby Dave Sheppard (Undergraduate) into helping me persuade David Sheppard (Senior Lecturer) to sign up for a Facebook profile. We can create our own little group; organise little get togethers where we take it in turns to phone the restaurant and ask for David Sheppard; sign each other's bills. Endless possibilities. And how many other David Sheppards might we discover at the University? Time will tell...

On another note, you'll also see from my news feed that I'm off to London Irish v Northampton tomorrow with some rather prestigious company. A full explanation and report will follow tomorrow, but meantime, I just hope he doesn't show me up. That's probably why they've put us all in a box, to keep us from offending.

I'm very much looking forward to it, always assuming it is me who's off to the rugby, of course. It says David Sheppard on the ticket...

Post title shared with Terry Wogan's second autobiography (2 of 3), a long term catchphrase from Radio 2's Wake Up to Wogan.

Just a quick one to say what brilliant pictures from Stormont this afternoon, where convicted loyalist killer Michael Stone attempted to break into proceedings armed with a gun, a knife, and very possibly a bomb.

Conveniently it was a pretty big Stormont meeting, which means all the major photo agencies were there. There can't be many occasions where what could have been a grisly attack was captured in finest detail by professional photographers.

All credit to BBC News Online for putting the pictures to full use - there's one expandable image and a gallery of a further five in their article, here.

From women and rugby (see below) to women and cricket: it's a fine night for Oxford University's female cricketers, honoured at tonight's Sports Federation Ball as the Team Of The Year. Congratulations!

To quote team member and Dayorama regular Amy J, pictured above with the Team Of The Year trophy:

"Howzat? Tell Fletcher and Flintoff we're available to fly to Australia at a moment's notice."

I think that's a plan, if only to dispel the popular Aussie notion that the England team play like girls. Our girls are better.

Although as for 'a moment's notice' - with proceedings likely to go on for some time at tonight's event, it could take them til the third test to even regain consciousness...

Bitter experience tells us that we should never expect things in life to appear as they do in the picture. Amy and OJ certainly received something of a shock on Saturday, when they realised I'm nothing like the rather average-looking twentysomething who appears in my place on the Dayorama banner, but actually a 7ft tall, tanned sex-god. I assume that's why they both gasped.

Usually though, it's a disappointment we prepare ourselves for when visiting a holiday destination we've seen (post-Colourist) on our television screens, or removing food from an optimistically illustrated box. When was the last time your Big Mac looked anything like the giant portrayal on Ronald McDonald's price list?

When this extends to ordering some flat-packed furniture, we go one step further in our anticipation. Sense tells us to prepare for the inevitable disaster on wonky wheels, which after hours of hard graft and Allen key embossed fingers, looks just about fit for the bin.

I was fully expecting this to be the case with my new desk.

What I wasn't expecting was to find it in the bin in the first place.

This is how I met my new desk, roughly three hours into the five hour delivery window I'd been given yesterday afternoon. It was a chance encounter brought about by a need to visit the wheelie bin, and indeed the only moment where I'd dared to stray from the front window in case I missed the delivery van's arrival (our doorbell is currently out of action). No van had appeared, so we can only assume that delivery had taken place earlier in the day, and in the spirit of my relationship with Argos so far, their man had decided to ditch the goods in the least obvious/probably most suitable place. Remember, I paid for this 'service'.

Actually, in spite of my frustration at waiting three hours for a man who'd already been, the desk has proved a surprisingly good purchase. It was fairly easy to assemble, and although bought only as a temporary measure (which inevitably means it will end up outlasting me and my grandchildren), it seems built to last. It does everything the billing suggested it would.

Some final wall fixings are needed, then I might consider presenting a photograph to you. If you've any sense, you'll never believe how good it looks - but I reckon it actually does.

Well done Argos. Nearly...

In the world of rugby union it is a sombre time for fans and players at London Irish, as the club languish in the depths of a losing streak.

But could this be the face, if not of a revival, then at least of some life blossoming in the Irish camp?

I spend a bit of time on the online message boards used by London Irish fans, either advertising our coverage of the team (whom I've now adopted at the cost of a rather nice fleece jacket), or just checking up on the discussion between supporters.

I also, separately, work quite hard to improve coverage of women's sport, and have done quite a bit with Reading's women's rugby club, so I keep a look out for any reference to women's rugby.

All this means a message board thread entitled 'London Irish Womens Team PLEASE HELP' was bound to intrigue me. I'll let Neale, the man writing it, explain:

"Last Saturday I went clubbing in London and met a great girl. She gave me her number at the end of the night so we could arrange to meet up next weekend. To my horror, when I tried the number today it didn't work. [But] she was 19 and told me she plays for London Irish women's team.

"Can anyone help me? Where do they play, does anyone know the team or the coaches? I apologise that this isn't strictly rugby related, but I really like this girl, and this is the only thing I can think of to try and contact her."

Rugby-related or not, this has become an immensely popular talking point with online fans of London Irish - click here to take a look for yourself. Since Neale wrote his begging letter late on Tuesday it has received more replies than any of the preceding 30 topics on the message board - his letter has, at the time of writing, been viewed over 300 times.

And what sleuths the London Irish fans are proving to be!

So far, in the space of two days, they reckon they have the girl's name and her MySpace account, with accompanying photos (from whence the one above has arrived). Neale tried to help where he could, with recollections like these:

"She and her German step-mum implied to me that they were strippers. Her step-mum borrowed my mobile briefly to ring someone and I thought that number could help me out.

"I texted it saying, 'You know a German girl who knows this Irish girl,' etc, but whoever he or she was didn't want to help me. They just texted back saying 'I'm not her PA.'"

The breakthrough came when a man named Paul somehow - God only knows how - found her MySpace account, which you can view here. Her name is Roisin, which certainly chimes with the London Irish connection, and someone had left a message on her MySpace page about her liking rugby and going out to a club. It all made sense!

Lovelorn Neale kept us waiting for almost an entire day after this revelation before replying, but when he did, how we all felt for him:

"Well well well, I didn't think I had much chance in finding her. Thanks Paul!

"I thought I'd try messaging her before I posted on here again. I messaged her last night and she has logged on [to her MySpace account] today so she would have read it - but she didn't reply.

"I feel a bit silly now. She's not interested. I guess I can safely assume she put her number in wrong deliberately..."

At least he had the decency to wish London Irish well against Northampton this weekend. After all, most Irish fans are feeling about as dejected and pessimistic as our Neale.

Tradition has it that when broadcasters fill out little Q&A forms for their profiles, there's a question which asks for their worst moment on radio.

Take the BBC Radio Five Live profiles, for example, which ask for each person's worst on-air nightmare. Here are some answers:

Asmaah Mir | "When Ian Payne made me corpse during the news and I just couldn’t recover."

Nick Mullins | "Telling actor David Tomlinson that I thought he'd been great in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. He'd actually been in Mary Poppins. He didn't speak to Radio Kent again."

Dalya Raphael | "Losing my voice after having rushed up five flights of stairs to make a news bulletin on time. I was so short of breath when I opened my mouth I simply couldn't talk."

Mark Saggers | "Once, I’d been banned from Old Trafford by upsetting Sir Alex, so we set up across the road on a grassy verge. All was okay, until one of the engineers accidentally touched a cable to a power line, and blacked out half of Manchester!"

If you asked me that question now, the answer would read like this:

"We turned up to do a live commentary on a local FA Cup match, and everything was fine all the way through 45 minutes of pre-match chat, up until about 5 minutes into the game.

"At that point our microphone decided to start cutting out, and we had to drop off air to switch to one of the three or four pieces of back-up kit we keep in our radio car.

"As the first half of the match went on with no commentary (songs were going out on air instead), we slowly and painfully discovered that every single item of technology was in some way broken, inoperable or useless in our situation.

"Eventually at half time we gave up - cold, humiliated, and verbally abused by a fair percentage of the local supporters."

To give you some idea of the evening, we had to set our own commentary position up using a picnic table and an umbrella next to the pitch:

Our gravest error came when we removed the umbrella, since it stopped raining. Once the game started, about 20 or so young football fans clambered onto our bench to get a better view, nearly shook it apart, and then our microphone died - my evening along with it.

My co-commentator tells me it's the worst broadcasting disaster he's had in six years at the station, so it must immediately rank as my top on-air nightmare. Hand me that Q&A form to fill out - then I'm going to go to bed, to weep softly into my pillow.

It's good to know that in a consumer world which so often leaves us spoilt for choice, I can't seem to find a bloody thing I want to buy.

That's certainly the case when it comes to furniture. With much leaning over books to be done during the next few weeks, I devoted a portion of today's revision time to buying a desk. It's something every young bachelor should have, but I've been holding out since moving in the hope I'll eventually see just the kind of desk I'm after; nothing fancy, no sliding gimmicks and glass panels to collect the dust - but a good, solid desk that's the right shape and colour for me.

As yet, nothing has come to find me, so I decided I'd throw myself at the mercy of Reading's plethora of cheap furniture stores, who'd surely be thrusting so many eligible desks in my direction that they might manage to surprise me. After all, you can hardly enjoy an ITV programme these days (ain't that a fact) without at least four outlets falling over themselves to push perennially discounted furniture your way, so surely this would be a quick and painless solution?

Finding those outlets certainly wasn't difficult. In Reading, as in most places, they hunt in packs on modern retail parks just outside town. They're all there, DFS, MFI, Furniture World, Homebase; all of them, the Auntie Wainwrights of the flat-pack age, waiting until you come close enough to have something sold to you.

Though it wouldn't be a desk, apparently. Not only were pickings slim in terms of what I had in mind, but desks in general seemed to be in short supply. Yes, there were a few in-store, but they all seemed perfectly comfortable with their topping of papers and telephones, as did the assistants sat behind them, who hardly put themselves out to help me with my mission. They were probably too busy planning for Boxing Day.

Perhaps I've underestimated the popularity of the forthcoming Certificate of Professional Competence in Passenger Transport exam, which could explain why there just aren't enough desks to go round? Or perhaps these out of town horror-stores are just as rotten as the few desks they actually offer for sale? 'Outlets' in every sense of the word.

Accelerated by the need to lean on something, I resorted to visiting the Argos catalogue online (the paper version isn't smelling the same, these days), hoping that the quickest of fixes may still be found. Wrong. Plenty of desks, some quite reasonable, but for anything up to 36 days they exist only in pictorial form.

Above is the billing for the one which would arrive soonest. It's clearly a small flat-packed item, by definition easy for both the manufacturer and supplier to store. Yet, Argos (like so many others today), seem to have subscribed to the idea that, rather than making every effort to keep the stores themselves well-stocked, they won't even bother to offer the option of store collection. Instead they'll allow the customer to endure the inconvenience of a long wait. So much for choice.

I grudgingly accepted the inconvenience, and paid the money.

But hang on, how much money was that, exactly?...

Look closely, and you'll see that, not only am I being forced to wait for the desk to be delivered when really I'd prefer to collect it myself, but I'm also being charged for the privilege. Aren't I a lucky boy?

I'm reminded of a glorious email we once received on the evening show at BBC Bristol. It came from a listener who claimed to have sent it to his local B&Q store:

Come Wednesday afternoon, I shall read it time and time again throughout the five hour window I've been forced to write-off, sitting at home, waiting for my 'convenience' shopping to come to fruition. £4.95 well spent, I say.

Perhaps I should buy a chair and really make a day of it.

A lot of people really like the BBC. A lot of other people really don't, and like to have a crack at its reporting whenever they can.

My main problem with the usual abuse the BBC is given is that some people act like every BBC employee is working on the Middle East desk at News 24 or News Online. If you remove from the equation people with a vested political or personal interest in the Israel/Palestine conflict, the number of people lobbing verbal molotovs into BBC inboxes declines a fair whack.

From my point of view it's sad, and unfair, that people prepared to tear apart the BBC's coverage of the Gaza strip don't recognise that people like me spend our whole working week right in the middle of our communities, trying to do good things - even in our very small way - that people will enjoy.

And when I say communities, there will be people expecting that to bear out a supposed attitude some dub 'hug-a-Muslim'. It doesn't.

I have spent my entire afternoon processing match reports from junior football games around the county - taking reports from parents and coaches, sub-editing them, formattng them and adding them to the web. It might well not be a service you'd ever hope to use in your life, but every match report is 20-plus kids with their names, or at least their team name, in lights on our website. The feedback we get from parents is great: their children love finding the reports online and it feels like a real public service when I'm doing it.

I have absolutely no idea, nor do I care, what creed or colour the kids playing football are. From their names I can gather that some are of Asian origin, some are of European origin, many more are of British origin, but it's the very last thing on my mind.

I've covered a few junior football matches first-hand in the past couple of months, giving up a Sunday on top of my working week to go down to a game, take photos, and interview the young players as though it were a miniature Match Of The Day. I do it because it's great fun and, for the 100 or so players and parents there, it's an extremely visible sign that the BBC is trying to do something good for them.

If junior football isn't your bag I can guarantee the BBC has someone, somewhere, doing exactly the same thing for your pastime of choice - be it music, cars, gardening, wheelchair basketball or computers. It's a shame, for me, that cynics glued to the Middle East news items don't notice it if it isn't political. We just seem to get referred to as "you BBC", as though many thousands of individual employees, each often working in entirely non-political fields, all made Barbara Plett cry when Yasser Arafat died. We didn't.

On a related note, some journalists go beyond the call of duty in ways I could never dare (sacrificing Sundays is not something for which I'm about to demand a medal - I only use that to make the point that it's not something I do because I'm forced).

Dilawar Khan Wazir is a BBC Urdu reporter based in an area of northern Pakistan running along the Afghan border. He's gone missing, months after his young brother was killed and his family attacked by militants in the area. It's likely he's either kidnapped or dead.

I find it highly unlikely Dilawar Khan Wazir is "you BBC", watching militants attack and kill family members while he reports on an area where Osama bin Laden was once thought to be hiding - an area charged with political tension. We're all individuals and some take immense risks to try to find out what's really happening. And no matter what some people may say, that's the driving force behind the vast, vast majority of reporters you will ever meet, BBC or no BBC.

I'm proud to work for the same organisation as Dilawar Khan Wazir, and I hope he returns safe and well.

It's not every day a global rolling news network launches, so the debut this week of Al Jazeera English was always going to make waves.

But the way AJE have gone about poaching top talent from British, US and Australian networks, in a direct bid to appeal to those audiences, lends the network something of an audacious air as it starts broadcasting.

A few days into its broadcasting life, does AJE provide a natural home for the likes of Rageh Omaar, Sir David Frost and Riz Khan?

Watch the very first five or so minutes of Al Jazeera English here:

I've spent all afternoon with AJE on and it's definitely not out of its depth - that was never likely given the funding the network has, the technology they've acquired with it and the names lured across.

Particularly impressive has been some of the newsreading talent. In the same week as I watched Channel 4's Samira Ahmed make a dog's breakfast of two lunchtime bulletins, it's good to see Channel 4 export Hamish MacDonald making it look so easy for AJE, and the same goes for David Foster (ex-Sky).

Newsreading should be warm, intimate and assured. Under no circumstances should you look or sound uncertain on air, which was Samira's problem in my view and it's not one AJE are without. The lady presenting alongside Hamish MacDonald in their Doha studio has an odd way of appearing genuinely petrified with her eyes while reading stories, which does very little for anybody's faith!

Some of the reporting has been hit-and-miss. The obvious area where AJE will come under scrutiny is Middle East coverage, where AJE have led with two big stories today: an Israeli air strike killing one person in Gaza, and a suicide bombing in Baghdad killing a group of unemployed builders in a queue for jobs.

The Gaza report has both sides represented - the Israeli military and Hamas each get a say - and you can feel AJE straining to make sure that's the case, even if a group of Palestinians acting as a human shield seem almost to be praised for doing so in the script. (Of course, condemning them for that action would be equally as bad, the idea is complete objectivity, or as near as is possible.)

AJE produces exclusive footage of Iraqi resistance fighters next, which must be where the channel comes into its own in sourcing that kind of material. I may have missed it but I've never seen anything similar on the likes of the BBC, ITN or Sky, and it was pretty compelling to watch the guerrillas trying to kill our armed forces as they train for the job. Again, it felt like the report had been treated carefully (as it should be!) and the script wasn't afraid to point out that these people are terrorists in many people's eyes.

Away from the mainstream news reporting, AJE has a global outlook which I don't think can currently be rivalled if you live in the UK. That's not because the BBC or Sky are worse, it's because that's not their aim. News 24 and Sky both want to tell you about UK stories first, because they've got a UK audience. AJE is broadcast globally and so has far more freedom to go anywhere in the world in the search for an interesting five minutes of TV. I'd like to think BBC World does the same thing but, of course, we can't get that in the UK - so AJE fills that gap.

I've seen two or three top quality reports from corners of the globe you rarely hear about via domestic UK news. The reporters that stand out in my mind are John Cookson, who went down illegal gold mines in the Congo, and Juliana Ruhfus, who posed as a tourist to film in Turkmenistan as part of a series entitled 'People & Power'. Both told their stories exceptionally well, delivering reports with personality and insight as well as good pictures. Some of the other reports I've seen this afternoon lack that personal touch, some even lack a decent voice-over.

Maybe I'm biased given my job, but for me by far the worst problem at AJE is their website. You have to pay to watch AJE on broadband, are allowed only a 15-minute trial of narrowband, and at the time of writing no video reports are available online. Plus, to be honest, the website just looks dull:

That's the main front page of the AJE site - good use of images in terms of their size, but the whole point of images on the web is their ability to grab the attention. Rendering them in grayscale might make things look a little more refined and polished, but these pictures lose any attraction to the eye and there's no life to the page. Look at the difference if you inject the colour back into them all:

Furthermore, AJE don't seem to have an equivalent of the BBC's "Also in the news" section - reserved on the front page to remind us it's not all bad. Looking at the AJE home page there's not one potentially uplifting story, it's all death, destruction, conflict and politics. One tiny sports headline about Roger Federer provides a lone glimpse of light relief. I know people might think it's dumbing down or pandering to the lowest common denominator, but I'm a strong believer in reporting the good things as well as the bad.

So the summary is: AJE looks like a strong, well-funded service populated by reporters keen to tell stories from parts of the world you won't normally hear about. In as much as that's the case, I don't think AJE is a competitor to the BBC or Sky, certainly not on a domestic level. In fact, I'll use AJE as a stand-in for BBC World to get news from a broader field when I'm fed up with UK stories.

How annoying that I'll have to leave the country to see how AJE and BBC World compare, but then people abroad I've spoken to say AJE's made little or no impression. My Iranian friend hadn't even heard of the service, while my friend Adam, in Egypt, says nobody in the country has been watching. He goes on to say the BBC's proposed Arabic TV news service will meet with similar indifference - "if you're watching in English you'll watch the BBC, if you're watching in Arabic you'll watch Al Jazeera". If that's the case, AJE might be a costly exercise in futility.

Last night, for the very first time, all four Dayorama writers gathered in the same room - and we even let one lucky winner (alright, our friend Anthony) join us for the evening.

Amy took on the role of hostess and head chef to prepare a sumptuous dinner gratefully wolfed down by all.

Meanwhile David played a Facebook-inspired game of 20 questions with Anthony to discover which friend they had in common.

And I received a healthy supply of mildly belated birthday gifts - a badge, a car air freshener, an intriguing book and a lovely scarf, which you can see in the photo.

The journey from work to Amy's flat had gone so well that David and I, to our surprise, arrived first. But it's safe to say the journey back didn't quite go to plan. We got back to Paddington for 11:55pm, only to discover that the next Reading train didn't leave 'til the ungodly hour of 1am.

Refusing to believe this we scurried round the concourse, establishing that since 9pm all the fast services to Reading had been replaced by buses, but all these buses had long since departed. So we were left to fend for ourselves with the few hundred remaning poor ingrates.

Some meticulous, almost Machiavellian planning (primarily to keep us occupied) saw us grab seats on the train in the inevitable melee when it eventually turned up, but the train proceeded to take half an hour longer than had been billed, finally arriving at almost 2.30am.

As David said, "What a lovely evening!" And as I countered at two o'clock in the morning, "If only it would end!" Many thanks to Amy for her wonderful duties as hostess and how nice to all be in the same room.

This little chap looks as though butter wouldn't melt, doesn't he?

And generally, it wouldn't have done. From all reports, he was a sickeningly sweet and good natured child, not unlike an Andrex puppy in his playful temperament, and just like those puppies, we all hoped he might never have to grow up.

But even Andrex puppies have naughty days, and today for Old Shep (the dog as he turned out), one came back to bite.

My local hair salon has just taken on a new girl, and needing a cut in something of a hurry, I decided to give her a go rather than waiting for Ms. Tried and Ms. Tested. She sat me down and made me feel comfortable, and it became abundantly clear that she was the kind of hairdresser who intended to find out all about her client, chipping her way chronologically back through the years with every grade of the clippers.

She was strangely familiar. Very distinctive in appearance and speech, almost Jade Goody-esque, though actually more like the person of whom Jade herself reminded me when she first turned up on our screens.

She was just like a girl called (shall we say) Rachael, who as a child we knew as "Boggard", a cruel playground taunt which spread like fire through our primary school. So widespread was the legend that the children developed their own Boggard variation on the game 'It!', where one naughty boy would itch himself, tap another on the shoulder and declare that he'd passed on "Boggard's fleas". To my shame, even I was guilty of passing them on from time to time (albeit because I actually did think I'd been given fleas, and wanted to get rid of them in the manner I'd been taught best).

Could this be her, all these years later, in another part of town cutting hair for a living? I concluded not. She was probably too old to be Boggard. And too tall. Yes, she was far too tall...

Moments passed, and the hairdresser was embarking on tales of adolescence, when she was interrupted by a colleague making tea.

"Fancy a brew, Rachael?", she asked.

Oh God. It was Boggard, innocent victim of childhood teasing, now a grown woman and taller than I, and... yes, she was brandishing scissors.

I went pale to the point where I was offered tea. I declined, but asked was there any way we might be able to speed up the hair cutting process a little? Mercifully, there was, and the mirror was held up just moments before the topic of primary school was due to be broached.

Judging by my resulting haircut, she probably didn't recognise me. After all, there's very little that's puppy-like about me these days. But I did feel a terrible guilt about what had happened to her at school, and although my part in things had been minimal (as a bit of a fatty, I was more often a fellow victim of gentle playground teasing), I knew the past had come back to make me blush. She'd mentioned she was a bit short of money, so I tipped generously. The very least I could do.

The haircut's taken years off me. I rather like it. The only problem is, as with any haircut, I'll be itching for days.

No, it couldn't be...

So, where's Osama bin Laden then? My Iranian friend reckons he has an answer. We'll call him Keith, which is manifestly not his real name, because he's extraordinarily paranoid and reckons the Iranian secret services will bump him off any day now.

Keith insists it's a dead cert that Osama bin Laden is in Iran - or at least, was until recently. It's a theory I'm willing to entertain as highly plausible, although Keith has so little evidence that I'm not about to worry I'm missing the story that could make my career (cue egg on face when all this proves true).

Here's Keith's reasons for believing Osama to have been in Iran:

"I went to Mashad - it's a huge city close to the border with Afghanistan, and there's this posh hotel a bit out of the city centre. It was the most expensive hotel in Mashad, called the Qasr, which means 'castle'.

"We drove past it and my uncle told me to look at it. The hotel is meant to be closed for refurbishment but that's odd, because it's massive. You wouldn't close the whole thing down for refurbishment, and apparently it had been closed for ages.

"I couldn't see any sign of refurbishment - like scaffolding, builders etc - but the place was completely and utterly surrounded by soldiers and tanks. That's weird, because the place is very quiet and out of the way.

"Another uncle of mine said he was dispatched as part of a security team, taking various politicians to a secret location in Iran using an army helicopter.

"He tells me Jack Straw and some US politicians were there, and that it was all being kept very hush-hush."

Keith went on to tell me Straw and the US politicians had been negotiating for Bin Laden's release from Iranian custody to a neutral country. ("Hello, Switzerland speaking? ... Oh for God's sake, have you any idea the trouble we got into last time?")

Now I'm not so sure about the part involving Jack Straw. In fact, I reckon this is symptomatic of all the problems engulfing speculation as to Osama's whereabouts. Yes, the above information is consistent with Osama hiding out there, and yes, other articles freely available online suggest the same thing, but where's the evidence? I've just had to fend off accusations from the very same Keith that the BBC are wilfully suppressing this sort of information, But, with the greatest will in the world, how is anyone supposed to report that?

There's absolutely no evidence for the whereabouts of this man. If you know otherwise, I'd love to hear from you.

I'll be missing the live television extravaganza that is Children In Need tonight. From your point of view that's probably a good thing or else I might have ended up live-blogging it, which would only compound your misery if you're no fan of such things.

It feels like a decade since I actually last watched the main Children In Need event, and not even Terry Wogan's bubbling pecs will tempt me back into the house tonight, but good luck to all - I'll still be making a donation.

Of course, for some people Children In Need has already taken up hours of their time. On that note congratulations to Dayorama's very own Mr Sheppard, who formed one half of a team broadcasting right the way through last night to raise money. I assume he made it to the end! I certainly didn't and I imagine he's still sleeping it off, so we'll have to wait for him to tell the full story.

Last year Children In Need raised in excess of £33,000,000, which is a fantastic amount. If this year's total is similar, it stands to be beaten four times over by this week's EuroMillions jackpot, running at £120,000,000 according to all their advertising.

I can tell you right now that if I win that, I'll donate half of it to Children In Need immediately. That's how confident I am that I won't, although I've lobbed a never-to-be-seen-again £6 at four EuroMillions attempts. So, what could I do with £120m?

• Renew Dayorama for the next two million years
• Pay for a third of the BBC's relocation to Manchester
• Purchase roughly half the Chelsea squad
• Buy an Airbus A380 superjumbo
• Buy a fleet of three hundred Pagani Zondas, and maybe give Amy J the use of one
• In these environmentally friendly times, replace the Pagani Zondas with a fleet of six hundred bendy buses, or, alternatively, fund the operation of 60 London bus routes for a year

Or how about the grand combo: renew Dayorama for the next 50 years (£3,000), waive my BBC salary for the rest of my lifetime (let's say £1m), buy Shaun Wright-Phillips back for Man City off Chelsea (£24m), buy a Learjet (£5m), three Pagani Zondas (Amy J will crash two of them, £1.1m), subsidise one London bus route with ten bendy buses I procure (£4m), and throw in a country house with 100 acres, football pitch and swimming pool (£3m).

All that and I've only spent a third of the prize money. Sod it, Pudsey can have the rest.

In the past, I've often gently scoffed at people who lay claim to that near-oxymoronic status, "working at home". It's a little like those students who write into radio programmes and claim to be battling with a dissertation, or intensely revising for an exam (I did that throughout my GCSEs, A-Levels and degree courses, so I know it's a lie). Really, they're listening to the radio.

But in my case, over the next 23 days, I will be working at home. More precisely, I'll be working my way through this:

This is the home-study course which prepares you to earn a Certificate of Professional Competence in National Passenger Transport, or Passenger CPC as we budding experts are allowed to call it. It's a qualification which the transport manager of every bus and coach firm in the country must have to his or her name, and since we aspire to begin running our own bus company in the new year, I too must have it.

It's surprisingly comprehensive. Roughly equivalent to an A-level in its difficulty, it covers everything from the rudiments of running a business, to the very specific laws affecting bus and coach operation. I'll be required to answer 70 short questions, and 8 extended response questions on a case study.

When will I be required to do all this? Well, in precisely 23 days from now...

The exam, a full-day affair, takes place only three times a year, and if we miss the next one, we can wave goodbye to our hopes of being up and running much before July 2007. So with great haste, I journeyed to Wembley to pick up my CPC pack from instructor Henry, who thinks it may be just about possible to meet the December 8th deadline.

It's been over two years since I last crammed, and then it was done alongside running a student radio station and working at two BBC local radio stations in the evenings and at weekends. Today, I fear I may have to combine the two once more, and since time is of the essence, I may even end up taking the books into the studio.

Let's see if it really is possible to listen to the radio and study at the same time...

Having attended a (very useful) training day run by one of BBC News Online's sub-editors yesterday, here's an error I imagine he'll be wanting to correct.

From a story entitled 'Man raped after night out in city':

A 27-year-old man has been raped after a night out with friends at Manchester's gay village.

The man got into a car with his attacker, locked him in and threatened him with a knife before raping him.

Read that one more time. The man got into a car with his attacker, locked his attacker in, threatened his attacker, then raped him?

I think we're missing a "who" before the word "locked", but it's an unfortunate word to be missing in a very serious article.

This man could turn one of my dreams into reality.

Here's what I wrote back in late April 2004:

I have been doing some thinking. And I have concluded that the world's ills will be solved by a single invention:

The ability to beam power.

What this means (well, it should be fairly self-explanatory, but Amy reads this so it needs expanding upon) is that just as we beam radio signals, visual signals, light signals etc, so we should eventually work out how to transmit power without the use of wires.

[source: Dayorama - 'Power Crazy']

Click the link above and you'll find I proceeded to go a bit mad with this idea and envisage a future where we all kill each other.

But the concept of being able to somehow wirelessly transmit power is extremely exciting, even if I'm hardly the first person to have thought of it - some bloke called Tesla got there before me. It's strange that, for a technology that would transform our lives, wireless power has barely been mentioned... until now.

US researchers have outlined a relatively simple system that could deliver power to devices such as laptop computers or MP3 players wirelessly.

The concept exploits century-old physics and could work over distances of many metres, the researchers said.

[source: BBC News - 'Physics promises wireless power']

It's Prof Marin Soljacic, whose portrait sits at the top of this article, leading these advances in wireless power. The big plan he and his team of researchers have is to use resonance - the concept whereby something vibrates at a certain frequency. Apparently if you try this with electromagnetic waves, you get wireless power.

At least that's the theory (and I imagine the theory is a little more complex than that, but that's the basic premise). The team have only tested this in computer-based simulations, but according to the article these models 'suggest it will work'.

I'll believe it when I can't see it.

It's a bit grainy and certainly not broadcast quality, but it's a home video from the very early 1990s which has been freeze-framed then snapped on a mobile phone camera, so we may be asking a bit much. But I hope you get the general idea. It's a kids' football match at a birthday party, and a penalty is just about to be taken.

Now, can you recognise the protagonists?

There's plenty more where that came from. Maybe next time I'll find a way to convert the entire video (including the penalty - do you reckon OJ scored it past me, or not?) into a form suitable for posting online. This is a veritable treasure trove, I tell you...

Let me explain what you're looking at.

The map is a satellite view of Long Ashton, near Bristol.

• purple shows the route I took in my car;


• blue shows the route I took down along Providence Lane;
  
• the gold dotted line shows the A road I could perfectly well have carried on going down.

Right, now let's explain what Providence Lane is and why I ended up going up, and down, and up, and down, and up, and down it.

Trying to get back down to the M5 from Bristol after a training day, I was following my sat nav, which is extraordinarily reliable. Whenever it doesn't work properly, it's because I've messed up. And so it proved in this instance: it wanted me to turn left, I couldn't get into the lane to make that turn, so I had to carry on into the village of Long Ashton.

The sat nav spent about a mile insisting I turn around, but I couldn't fnd a suitable spot to do so. Eventually it gave up and said, well, why don't we just go down Providence Lane. That'll get us back on the right track.

The moment I turned right into - or rather, up - Providence Lane, I knew we were in for some trouble. It's called Providence Lane for a reason, in that you need divine providence to somehow make your way along it unscathed.

Initially we were met with such a steep gradient that we almost rolled straight back down it even in second gear. As the Dodge slowly struggled up the incline, Radio 2 saw fit to strike up with the James Bond theme tune. This was to prove a fitting accompaniment for the next five minutes.

I strongly urge that you go along Providence Lane once in your life, simply to experience what it's like driving down a road expecting to get killed. It's like having your own pocket Basra just outside Bristol. For the truly authentic Providence Lane experience, do it in the dark and the rain like me.

Providence Lane just becomes more terrifying with every hairpin bend. It starts as a normal road on a steep incline but that easy section is complicated by cars parked on all sides, reducing the road to a single thoroughfare but seducing drivers into thinking you can do a fair speed down it. Ten seconds later you're forced into the most almighty test of the brakes you could imagine as a 4x4 swings round the bend, lights on beam, into your face.

Get past the tarmac stage and we're into proper farmland. Click here to take a closer look at the satellite route and you'll see features I had no idea were there as I tried to keep myself alive: a golf course, football pitches, a quarry (for God's sake!), another golf course, and so it continues.

At the end of Providence Lane you need to leapfrog a B road down which cars are rattling at breakneck speed, and that'll take you onto Longwood Lane. At the end of Longwood Lane is a second B road, at which junction the cars get a second chance at you - hurl yourself blindly across that and you're on Weir Lane, then Manor Road, which emerges a mile or so later onto the A road of our choice at Abbots Leigh. By this stage we are single-track all the way through dark, damp, dense foliage.

Do remember, however, not to check your route when you get home. Otherwise - and at this point I refer you to the dotted gold line - you will realise you could just have stayed on the A road you were on to start with, gone half a mile further down it, and ended up in the same place. But where's your sense of adventure?

Everybody's in bed here in Somerset, on the first night of my five-day escape from the world of work (although true to form, I've managed to crowbar a BBC training day into it so as to avoid withdrawal symptoms). Nothing is stirring, not even a mouse (I'm using a touchpad).

So when my mobile phone buzzed in the other corner of the room, I let it go, since I can never keep my voice down and I'd only wake the entire street answering it. But five minutes later it did its trademark ultra-long voicemail buzz, so I answered it and waited for the message.

Knock me down with a feather, but long-time Dayorama reader Amy J has somehow teamed up with short-time Dayorama contributor David to record a voice message! In the extraordinarily funny sequence that followed they left me with no idea how this had been arranged, but made it abundantly clear both were decidedly tipsy.

Listening again it takes the pair 20 seconds to get past "hello", then another 20 describing how scared I might be. Then we have David on a pet topic - pubs - which Amy interprets as secret BBC code, and complete confusion descends.

Bless them, they don't seem to understand that I can't answer the phone. They've just tried to ring back and left a second message calling me a coward. And to think, as my mother would say, "that David says you drink a lot when he's on air". (She's threatening to boycott the show if he continues to peddle such lies.)

Still, as for the real Dayorama drinkers, it's nice to know they're both enjoying their Monday night out. It's going to be a long week, and I'm hundreds of miles away from either of them...

OK, so I posted to say I was fed up with references to buses. And then one broke down outside my flat. So how could I not include a little photo?!

Surely I've had that subject title before? People are complaining that I haven't posted recently. I've got the day off work today (for not particularly pleasant reasons), but I suppose I have a few moments to post. What is new in my life? I have too many clothes. My Father told me this yesterday. He may well have come to this conclusion since my entire bedroom had become my wardrobe. But, Dads being Dads, he just built me a new one. Well, he sort of discovered a new one. Anyway, the long and short of it (short in my case) is that I now have another wardrobe. I can buy some more clothes now.

I'm getting a cleaner. OJ laughed when I told him this. But there is good reason. OK my flat is a box. But I'm in work, sometimes for 16 or 17 hours a day. Come Saturday morning I don't want to spend my time cleaning. Nor do I want to come home to an un-clean flat. It is always tidy, but it will be rather good not to have to worry about the cleaning part. At least I won't be like my Mother: she always used to clean before the cleaner came. It drove my Father bonkers.

I need to do some ironing. I missed by Sunday evening slot. Do they repeat Songs of Praise?

I'm getting concerned by the number of references to buses on this website. A reader came up to me the other day and started discussing buses, and talking about how amazing it all was: I looked pretty blank.

I've never been a fan of following recipes. It's partly good sense, because I firmly believe that understanding the principles of doing something will always serve me better than following somebody else's solution.

But it's largely because I'm a stubborn fool, and tend to think I already know best.

This is why I decided to leave our "Grow Your Own London Bus" in incubation for 24 hours longer than suggested on the packet. I think you'll agree, the results after 98 hours are extraordinary...

Like all buses, fine if you have the time to wait.

But for those who are glad to follow recipes and instructions, I'm happy to concede that the kit is just as satisfying and worthwhile a project:

(Yes, another embryonic one has been sought for comparative purposes.)

The past 72 hours have been a joy. Each morning, often in the wee small hours, I've rushed to the kitchen to check on the overnight progress of our little red friend, excited about what may be waiting, yet ever anxious about some aspect of its development. Should it really be turning banana-shaped? Perhaps it's my fault the water's turning cloudy? Maybe I should be monitoring its temperature, or the light intensity? Am I such a terrible bus grower?

It's the nearest I'll ever come to being pregnant...

Yet there we were, 72 hours later, and The Diabolical Gift People (supplier of the Routemaster embryos, and other 'specialist' gifts it seems) had kept their promise. The bus looked every bit as healthy as it did in the packet, only it had grown, albeit not to 600% its size as claimed, but certainly to four times its original volume. And in any case, the fact that it had grown at all was enough for me.

The bus industry has always held the Routemaster in such high esteem because of its "fitness for purpose"; every aspect was designed with ease of use and maintenance in mind. This little kit has done its job with the same aplomb. Okay, so I might not really have ended up with a full-sized Routemaster, with working engine, lights, horn, etc., (things which were never part of the billing on the packet, but nonetheless will be secretly hoped for by everyone who ever buys one of these little kits) - but we've had some fun trying.

Besides, where would we keep another real one?

One of the joys of broadcasting is being able to laugh yourself senseless when your colleagues mess it up live on air.

This has happened twice in the last week with two different BBC newsreaders. One had the computer die on him just as he went into the studio, so he attempted to ad lib the news, failed miserably (you try it), and had to admit defeat. The second got to the story about a rocket up a gentleman's backside and lost the plot entirely for the rest of the bulletin.

The reason this is always so funny is partly that you know it'll be you next, so you're very much laughing while the going is good.

So far I've not come up with anything truly tragic. My finest on-air calamities to date have all involved my mind going completely blank at the exact moment I need to open my mouth - a feeling I'm certain is well known to everyone who works in radio.

It happened a couple of weeks ago when I was interviewing a young band, five 14-year-olds, on the verge of a trip to compete in a national competition. 14-year-olds aren't usually given to supplying loquacious answers and, true to form, each one I spoke to summoned up a three-word answer and left it to me to carry on talking.

This was fine until we got to the fourth band member of five. I asked him a short question, he gave me three words back, and I had expended so much verbal ammunition that I had nothing left in the tank. There was a two second pause, followed by me blurting out something horrendous about getting my thoughts together and being "overwhelmed by the celebrity in the room", desperately trying to prevent an abject silence as my mind raced for a new question. Eventually we got there, but I returned home tail decidedly between my legs.

And today it happened again, just as I thought I'd banished the demon (I don't think this demon is ever going to go away, on closer inspection).

I had the privilege of attending a brilliant FA Cup football match between Stafford Rangers and Maidenhead United, providing updates on the game throughout the afternoon. These are always between 40 seconds and a minute in length, and involve the presenter handing over to me, me trawling out the latest news from the ground, then handing back. You hear this sort of thing all the time on Five Live, for example.

Maidenhead went a goal behind on 15 minutes, so I hollered down the microphone to our producer, who passed the message on to the presenter as I frantically scribbled notes on what I was going to say about the goal and the game so far.

Thirty seconds later I heard the presenter hand over to me, and all started well: "Thanks, it's Stafford Rangers 1, Maidenhead 0, the goal coming around the 15 minute mark..." - and there it stopped.

I wanted to say that Stafford's captain, Wayne Daniel, had scored a header from a Danny Edwards corner. But for the life of me, my brain simply wouldn't start the sentence. Imagine trying to start a stubborn car that simply won't get past that initial cough and splutter. That's exactly how it felt inside my head. All the information was on the paper in front of me but for two or three seconds I mumbled who-knows-what before getting my act together. The rest of that update was then ropey as hell as I tried to recover (and in the ensuing updates my voice was no doubt tinged with a mild terror lest it happen again).

Away from the private little hell of my brain powering down, the game was fantastic. Maidenhead had two players sent off but somehow contrived to earn a replay against Stafford, who are two divisions above them. Maidenhead's keeper, Chico Ramos, performed miracles, not least saving a penalty - the Maidenhead fans stormed the pitch to celebrate (and knock seven bells out of a Stafford fan or two, and vice versa) at the final whistle. Once again, and we've said this quite a few times over the past few weeks, it was a great advert for non-league football.

Meanwhile Basingstoke, the other team we were covering, beat Chesterfield, a massive giant-killing act, so when the draw for the FA Cup's second round is made tomorrow, we've still got plenty of interest (far more than I think any of our sports team expected!). The Basingstoke fans are all singing the praises of the full commentary on their message board while the Maidenhead fans seem slightly non-plussed at a perceived lack of attention (and probably the idiot who couldn't get his words out doing their updates). But they've got a replay coming up against Stafford, in Maidenhead, and I'll be there for that without a doubt. Let's hope my ability to speak joins me for the ride this time.

Since time began, through the days of imperial and metric, our nation's sense of scale has been derived from the three most basic of measures: football pitches (for area), swimming pools (for volume) and double-decker buses (for length, width, height, volume of people, and lateness).

Sadly, after almost 48 hours, our little specimen hasn't quite reached the point where he might lay claim to the definitive proportions of a double-decker bus, but he's certainly well on his way.

To give an idea of his current size, here he is parked alongside a OO-gauge model of a Bristol Cityline minibus...

You'll see that, roughly speaking, the two are the same height, and therefore we might say that in OO-gauge terms at least, our double-decker bus has grown to roughly half of its natural size.

Of course, in reality, this gives you no true sense of the bus' size at all. Unlike the real double-decker bus which pops into the spotlight whenever a building or statue requires a sense of scale, a minibus remains the most subjective of measures. How small must a bus be before it becomes 'mini'? Is it to do with the number of people it has to leave behind at the bus stop each time it becomes full to capacity? Certainly, I've just returned from a rugby match as part of a crowd of 9,000 people who, in blocks of 60 or so, were ushered onto a fleet of supposedly full-sized single deck buses. Under the circumstances, they seemed pretty mini to me.

Let's return to our pound coin measure. Our "Grow Your Own London Bus" started out with a length roughly equal to the diameter of a pound coin. Now look:

You'll note it's almost tripled in length, taking it to around 39mm... that's the length of 0.00456 double-decker buses.

Oh. Still some way to go, then...

Remember that stage of adolescence where every part of the body seems to grow at its own pace? Well, here's how it looks for a bus:

After 24 hours in incubation at our very own reincarnation of the AEC factory, our "Grow Your Own London Bus" has reached the equivalent of its teenage years. Distressed, blemished, disproportioned and even smelly, XRM 1 (as London Transport would doubtless have coded it, 'X' denoting 'experimental') has begun to grow out of its infancy. And crucially, it's showing great potential for the future.

Aesthetically, the net change isn't for the best:

If Douglas Scott - designer of so many British industrial icons over the years - wasn't happy with the final look of the Routemaster (as he never was), he'd hardly be impressed by our little attempt so far. Some parts have started to grow, while bizarrely, others have shrunk or apparently disappeared altogether. The lower deck windows and canopy, for example - whatever happened to them?

But when we consider overall size, the bus is showing good signs of development. As a measure, let's pop into the AEC laboratories and check it against the packaging in which it first arrived as a fledgling Routemaster:

After 24 hours, overall size has increased from the diameter of a pound coin to roughly that of a 2p coin. Not quite enough room for standing passengers just yet, but moving in the right direction.

There are one or two concerns at this stage, though. For a start, the water is starting to become rather cloudy, and if I recall correctly from my all too brief attempt at keeping goldfish alive, this could be a sign that something unhealthy is afoot in the tank. Also, the bus seems to be developing a distinct bow, giving it something of a Titanic-like appearance at the bottom of its 'ocean'...

... two parallels which hardly instil confidence for the hours ahead. Hold very tight.

What can I say. I had an amazing time. New England in the Fall. Shopping on 5th Avenue. The New York Marathon. A talk by the firm's namesake. A few too many gins. Great.

FirstGroup, the bus company, have set up a new driver recruitment centre - in Poland.

To help new Polish drivers learn the way the British talk, the company then show new recuits examples of British television:

A FirstGroup spokesman said new Polish staff were shown different TV programmes depending upon where they were going to be posted in the UK.

For example, a new recruit going to Glasgow may be shown a DVD of Scottish comedian Billy Connolly.

While someone heading to the English capital might be shown an episode of much-loved sitcom Only Fools and Horses, which is set in the London borough of Peckham.

[source: BBC News - 'Polish workers shown UK TV shows']

All those worrying about the influx of immigrants from eastern Europe being too much for our country to cope - you can breathe easy.

Imagine you're a Polish bus driver, sitting down in your Polish recruitment centre for your introduction to the part of Britain in which you will be working.

Onto your screen walks this man:

Half an hour later you are definitely, 100 per cent not leaving Poland just to have to deal with something like that wanting to get on a bus. Potential overcrowding problem solved!

Pocałunek is the Polish for "kiss".

Great excitement! A wonderful, lovely person turned up this morning to deliver a shiny new (well, shiny-and-new-to-me) video camera and all its accompanying goodies.

I am now the proud owner of a camera exactly like the above, except my microphone is fluffier and there's a radio mic kit in there somewhere, which is very nice indeed.

The only problem now, of course, is that I have to put my camera skills where my mouth is. Ever since coming back from my video training in Newcastle last month, I've been hassling for a camera and the prerequisite editing software, promising all kinds of lovely video the moment these things were put in place - but all the while safe in the knowledge that acquiring the kit would take forever.

So the blindingly improbable speed with which someone has actually found me a camera - and I'm promised the software in the next week or two - is frightening enough that I now need to find stories to go with it.

It's a shame the camera didn't turn up earlier in the week, or else I could have used it for my barometer story. The gist of this is that new EU legislation banning the use of mercury in products has certain ramifications for people who trade in antique barometers or build new ones (the real problem is for the latter group, since it looks very much as though the EU will call a halt to the production of new mercury barometers). You can read the full story in this feature about one of the world's leading barometer specialists, who happens to live in Berkshire.

Barometers are fairly photogenic pieces of wall furniture so a short video piece would have been nice, but that was far from my mind this afternoon when the phone went. Blow me down, it was only the European Commission ringing up, wanting to know more about the morning's radio piece and asking to be given a platform for their take on barometer legislation!

Apparently the European Commission has people monitoring the media for this sort of mention. They must do a damned fine job, because with the piece coming up at 10:10am, the first anyone listening would have known about it was when our presenter mentioned it at 10:07am. That's a whole three minutes for the European Commission to get on the case.

Clearly it is somebody's responsibility to listen to BBC local radio and make a note of such things, since my understanding is that the gentleman from the European Commission hadn't actually heard the piece go out on air. All highly unexpected (though they're perfectly entitled to get in touch, and actively encouraged - certainly not complaining).

By far the most enjoyable moment of the barometer story was when our presenter, reading the carefully prepared introduction to the piece which I had written for him, suddenly departed from the script entirely:

"Hang on a minute. I've got a barometer hanging up on my wall at home and I'm certainly not getting rid of it!"

Always nice to have a presenter with a little personal interest in a story.

Tomorrow there's a meeting with Reading Traffic Control (yes, I know, I'll be breaking a lifelong moral stance and taking Pro Plus beforehand), then it's a weekend of sport - starting with a trip up north to cover Stafford v Maidenhead in the FA Cup. The very first long trip for the Dodge to cope with! Let's hope I don't end up on air from the side of the road awaiting recovery again...

If you're familiar with the A4020 as a route into West London, you'll know there's khaki coloured iron bridge by which the Great Western main-line to Paddington crosses. Years ago, the bridge proudly carried the legend "London's Buses Are Made Here", painted across its full span in huge white letters.

Look across from the bridge, and you'd have seen this, the somewhat unassuming facade of the factory where it all took place, the world famous AEC works in Southall.

Along with most of the British commercial motor industry, it's long since gone, and in its place now stands (among others) the headquarters of Noon Products, a producer of Indian food for the UK market. London's buses meanwhile are plucked from far off pegs in Germany and Sweden, with only a handful of bus factories remaining in the UK.

Great news, then, that a new one opened its doors today. Albeit three days later than timetabled, London Bus production has returned to the UK, here in my kitchen...

Here you see me reviving one of the many skilled, precision processes in bus production which must have been a familiar sight at Southall in the 1960s. Rows of craftsmen, masters of the mixing bowl, lining up in front of their kitchen taps ready to 'sink another red one' (as it's known in the trade). Apparently singing used to make them grow even faster...

I have high hopes for my "Grow Your Own London Bus" kit. It may not be quite the way RML 2394 came into being, but it promises to be an interesting few days, as my embryonic second Routemaster grows from the size of a pound coin to... well, who knows.

20 minutes into the process, it's showing little signs of activity...

... but then, at 0120 on a Thursday morning, it's hardly the rush hour. Even an embryonic Night bus might be found having a quiet moment at this stage. We're all just far too impatient when it comes to waiting for a bus.

More from the new AEC works as it happens. Ironic that here, in stark contrast to its predecessor, buses now grow where curry once cooked...

One of life's beautiful little vignettes is playing out in front of me.

Looking out from my bedroom window I can see a small top floor window belonging to the house next door, overlooking our garden. It's a frosted glass window so you can never see much, not that I've really tried.

About five minutes ago the window opened, revealing a relatively slender, teenage figure - male, by the looks of it - silhouetted against the lights inside the room and blurred by the glass.

Thin wisps of smoke then began to appear around the edges of the window and it soon became apparent, from the extended arm of the shadowed figure, that he was smoking a cigarette. All the while he held the cigarette outside the window, occasionally glancing back towards what I assume is the door.

After a couple of minutes of this, there was a bang from down below in the neighbours' garden. It was probably someone opening the back door or emptying the bin, but our shadowy figure immediately slunk back inside and swiftly, silently closed the window, leaving it just an inch ajar - faint little lines of smoke winding their way out through the gap.

The banging stopped after only a few seconds. Then, half a minute later, the window furtively re-opened and a hand snaked back out, cigarette in tow. Another minute and he was gone, the window once more closed without so much as a peep, the frosted shadow vanishing into the confines.

Hands up who thinks the family next door may include a young man hiding a smoking habit from his parents?

Birthdays can occasionally turn out to be a little stressful. A self-assumed centre stage puts you in the spotlight of your nearest and dearest, bringing the pressure to perform and smile even whilst being sung to down the telephone. Yes, for all these reasons, Birthdays can indeed turn out to be stressful.

They can also turn out to be stressful if you own a cat.

You may remember that feline interaction chez Sheppard is at something of a minimum at present, as we continue the wait for the world's most introverted cat to find his paws. Still happy to conduct his affairs from the cosy confines of an office beneath the bed, Basil the Cat must be applauded for his dedication to the cause. Never before has one cat remained so loyal to one spot, or indeed, to anything, for quite so long.

Until, that is, Henry the Hoover had cause to move in. Having worked wonders on various aspects of DIY around the gaff, flatmate Bryony's parents, Tom and Gail, even set about hoovering the carpets yesterday. With particular reference to the bits which are seldom seen, let alone cleaned, the hoover made light work of various bits of fluff and fur. Just about everything disappeared from under the bed... including Basil.

After a few moments spent searching the house (as Ollie pointed out, the first place we should have checked was actually the hoover bag), we stumbled upon the most terrifying sight of all: an open front door. Fearing the worst, I immediately took to the streets in search of our little escapee, whose confidence and appetite for the outside world had themselves apparently enjoyed sudden liberation.

At first on foot, then by car, I swept the streets with an eagle eye for anything remotely resembling a cat. After several fruitless conversations with autumn leaves and discarded crisp packets, there came a moment of great relief as I spotted them; two triangular ears sticking up from behind a neighbour's bush, followed by two nervous little eyes peeping up on occasion. Thank goodness.

Opening the passenger door, I began beckoning, then calling frantically, but still he would not move. Only when I dropped to my knees and began patting my thighs did the cute little ginger moggy come running... clearly not Basil, but instead the cat of a woman who, all too quickly, I realised had been watching my gesticulations from her front window all this time. I nervously waved like an old friend, patted the cat, and sped away as quickly as my car could manage.

Saddened by the loss of our little friend, I decided that a good strong coffee was needed.

And what d'you know...

Well... I didn't recognise him in daylight.

Yesterday turned out to be the most wonderful Birthday. Perfectly relaxed, with so many lovely cards, good wishes and really thoughtful pressies from all my best friends and family. I stayed up 'til the wee small hours feeling genuinely humbled by it all.

Basil may have beaten me to the coffee, but I reckon I got the cream.

As the well-known video above proves, cats and cars rarely mix. Once I placed a 'fake' cat - a model of a sleeping cat curled into a ball, made with very life-like fur - into the back of my car. No sooner had I done so than my dad, on the verge of breaking into the car, rang me to ask if I knew how the 'cat' had managed to get in. Even non-cat cats are a bad idea around cars.

But we can't just take that for granted, we need somebody to go out and crunch the figures on crunched kittens. So I give you the very latest research, conducted over the last two years and wittily entitled Meowch!.

Here's my analysis of the findings:

• Researchers: "A cat is run over on our roads every two and a half minutes. Drivers hit 630 cats every day."
  Me: Does narrowly missing a cat, stopping, getting out and giving it a good slap count as "hitting" the cat?
• Researchers: "Bristol is pinpointed as the UK's cat accident black spot."
  Me: Now why should that be? Are the people of Bristol less vigilant while driving or do they just have a particular dislike for cats? Or maybe it's cats from Bristol which are peculiarly dense, of course...
• Researchers: "Three out of four drivers confessed to having no idea what to do if they were to hit a cat."
  Me: Pull over, wait for the cat to pull over, get out, inspect the damage - all the while not admitting fault, nor apologising to the cat - then exchange details, take statements from witnesses, and notify insurance company.
• Researchers: "Grimsby and Dundee are cat heaven, having the lowest number of reported incidents in the last year. "
  Me: Grimsby and Dundee are such grim places that any cat burdened with the misfortune of living there spends its days curled up on the couch watching Eastenders, possessing no desire to test the cat flap. Grimsby cats, having followed the scent of fish, are far more likely to be hit by incoming trawlers.

Reading places sixth in the cat calamity league table, behind the likes of Nottingham and Swindon (bound to be trouble with that magic roundabout). Here's the full top ten, er, rundown:

1. Bristol
2. London
3. Swindon
4. Leeds
5. Nottingham
6. Reading
7. Jersey
8. Manchester
9. Cheltenham
10. Glasgow

By the way, if you're absolutely appalled having viewed the video at the top of this article, you might be interested in an Observer article written about it a couple of years ago. Traditionally when these online-only adverts surface it's assumed they are amusing spoofs mocked up by individuals. In this case, it seems the car company portrayed may have been behind it all along.

Last night my Canadian friend Amanda, a woman far more proficient with a hockey stick and some skates than I, mentioned she had a copy of NHL 07, the latest offering from EA Sports.

I used to love the NHL games so I dashed out today and bought it. The control system has entirely changed since I last owned a copy so, with only a couple of games played so far, I'm in all kinds of trouble. But the important thing is everything else appears intact - the look and feel, the ultra-slick, ultra-fast gameplay, the commentary and 'atmosphere' far in excess of anything EA Sports have ever conjured up for their FIFA football games.

Not only that but the whole bloody game is sponsored by none other than...

How amazing is that! I've always had a very keen sense of brand loyalty - just looking around me I can see brands like Diet Coke, Toshiba, Sony Ericsson and, indeed, the BBC, all of which I would fiercely defend if anyone so much as dared utter a bad word. So the pairing of a computer game I've always loved with the latest brand to consume my heart is a marriage made in heaven.

Still, we'll leave ice hockey behind because its grass-based namesake occupied my thoughts for most of Sunday.

That there is Richard Mantell, officially one of the top 16 hockey players in the world. He plays for Reading and England, and he's a nice bloke from the little I spoke to him. His Reading side trounced Surbiton 6-2 yesterday before Reading's ladies went on to lose 6-1 versus Slough - 15 goals being a reasonable return on an afternoon's investment.

Field hockey's also great fun for taking photos. I met Gareth, a freelance photographer who spends a lot of time at Reading hockey club, and he said as much. Both of us spent a happy afternoon snapping away from all angles.

The fruits of our collaborative labour and a report on the day's matches, plus audio interviews with Richard and others, can be found here.

Small terriers, eh.

Small terriers were put on the planet on an omnipotent whim, when He realised most of the animals were really quite boring after a while. In His wisdom, He scraped what was left out of a distressingly smelly jar marked 'Dogs', and - lo and behold - small terriers came into being.

Small terriers like this one, terrorising a water jet at Reading hockey club's Sonning Lane astroturf today:

I tried to shoot a video of him on my mobile phone but I won't humiliate us all with the resulting pixellated mess.

Instead I'm sure you can imagine the scene. Take your average small, yappy terrier, and unleash it on six different powerful jets of water, arching back and forth across a hockey pitch. It went mental, charging between each jet, barking at the damned things to STOP! with all the success you'd expect. The owners had little choice but to wait for the jets to be switched off, before reclaiming their half-pint hydropower Hitler.

More tales of Reading hockey club tomorrow, sadly with fewer terriers involved.

Remember this?

Yes, that's the car that previously bore the number plate S921 OCW. But you will recall that my new car, the Dodge, now proudly displays that very same plate. So the Nissan Micra has been given a new plate, but of course there's no way I'll ever know what that is.

Unless, improbably, the DVLA are so crushingly incompetent as to somehow make me the owner of the Nissan Micra when processing the documentation, then send me the new registration certificate. A bit like this:

So it's three cheers for S373 BDP! If this is now your car, then:

a) Aren't you slightly concerned it's registered in my name?
b) Congratulations! Treat her kindly, and
c) Is the penguin still on the dashboard?

I suppose with my track record, it was bound to happen soon. I've bought another bus.

And here's how I'm hoping it will look in a few days time:

According to the vendor, it'll require very little effort on my part. He's bound to say that, of course; but all indications suggest it's structurally sound, a very quiet runner, and overall a good, solid bus. Besides, for the modest sum of £2.50, how could I go wrong?

Here she is in 'as purchased' condition:

Apparently she's likely to consume more water than the average Routemaster (she must be immersed for 72 hours before service), but in return, she'll grow to more than 600% of her current size. There's another trick the Bendy Buses can't do.

I'll begin the immersion of my "Grow Your Own London Bus" on Monday. Expect full updates here.

Meanwhile, in the world of already fully-grown buses, three exciting bits of news. Firstly, RML 2394 will undergo its Class 6 MOT tomorrow, the stringent test which buses and coaches must pass before they can be used in fare-paying service. Our aspirations to become an operator will depend on a successful outcome at some stage - and our nerves are counting on that being tomorrow.

Another test looming is my Operator's CPC exam, now confirmed for December 8th. This will follow a home-study course on the rudiments of bus and coach operation, and if passed, will name me as a competent person to run a bus company. If failed, it will have cost us lots of money, will leave us without said competent person, and will delay the venture by a number of months. No pressure, then.

Finally, on Monday I reach the age at which insurance brokers will allow me to drive a bus on my current (car) licence. In theory, provided there are no more than eight passengers on board, and none of those has paid a fare for the privilege (I can't imagine they would want to in my first few months of bus driving), and provided the bus is also over 25 years of age, I'm allowed to take the wheel.

Question is, will my "Grow Your Own..." be ready in time?

It's a universal truth that, wherever you live, and whatever you do for a living, there will always be some people in life who make an effort, and some people who don't have to. The latter tend to be people so naturally gifted, rich, handsome (shallow, vain, etc.), they know that however little investment they make in life, things will always turn out right in the end. How we hate those people.

Personally, I'm always in favour of effort, especially when it comes from those who could so easily have coasted along if they'd so desired. It's effort from those quarters which goes into the making of truly great and memorable things.

And if you're looking for truly great and memorable things, try this:

A real-life witch in what could conceivably be her natural surroundings; a grotto below-ground, dripping with cobwebs, lethal potions hanging by the dozen from the walls, and the sound of cackling bouncing from every nook.

I'm almost sorry to say this is all an illusion (you're surprised, aren't you?), for in reality, it's the lunchtime barmaid from The Old Green Tree, one of Bath's oldest pubs and, frankly, the best. I've been here twice before, then during the Summer months, and both times I've been spellbound by what I've seen. This time, that was the intention.

Here is a pub which has no need to prove itself. You can't help but fall in love with the atmosphere, and if I could, I'd probably go there at the slightest whiff of a special occasion. Locals and tourists alike would have poured in last night for exactly that reason, to enjoy Halloween in an environment which, intrinsically, lends itself to spooky celebration. It could have just opened its doors and let them in.

And yet, still everybody had gone the extra mile. The witch was dispensing skeleton lollipops with every pint (if you look closely, you can see my second being offered), and whichever way you looked, you'd find some clever little knick-knack which gave a sense of occasion. Even going to the loo was a treat, taking your pick between the doors marked "poltergeis" and "poltergals"...

The regulars were on fine form, too, but then I can't imagine them ever being otherwise. One man quipped to the barmaid, "You dressed up for something special, love?". Another looked his well turned-out wife up and down (after putting away the most exquisite looking platter of what had modestly been described as 'slices', not slabs, of beef), and warned, "Darling, you have a cobweb on you". You can imagine the warm reception I received when I asked the witch to hold up my lollipop for a photo.

"You Londoners want everything, don't you".

I felt like one of the gang.

Bath as a city is just like its finest pub. It's breathtakingly beautiful in every respect, and yet it still makes a huge effort to go one better. No lazy town planners have allowed modern, incongruous structures to dilute that most distinctive of architectural flavours; the streets are immaculately clean and free from rubbish, as is the River Avon at this point; and, though of course it must have its troubles, it feels like a proud and happy city, home to many proud and happy people.

Having torn myself away from The Old Green Tree, I later visited a pub whose marking of Halloween extended to dumping a skeleton on top of its lifeboat collection tin. (My fault for being lured into a 'traditional English pub' [apparently] which specialises in Thai food - alarm bells probably did sound, but I couldn't hear them above the pinging of the microwave out' back...)

I didn't stay long. Like the spotty chancer who inevitably knocked on your door last night, dressed in civvies, and demanding 'trick or treat' in the name of Halloween, a little bit of effort would have gone a long way.

Still, I'd already had one treat.

The following things went wrong with tonight's Basingstoke Town v Worcester City commentary:

1. The commentary team were unable to use their broadcasting kit of choice because it was locked in the car of our rugby reporter, who proceeded to lose his car keys and was thus unable to rescue the kit from his car. He later found the keys in a local newsagents.

2. The commentary team therefore had to drive to the Madejski Stadium, where I was covering Reading's reserves against Arsenal reserves, to pick up two spare microphones. It took the team an hour to travel the three miles from our newsroom to the stadium.

3. It took the team a further hour and a half to reach Basingstoke from the Mad Stad. This meant they were still in traffic when our sports special started at 7pm. Our 4pm-7pm presenter had to stay on and present 45 minutes of the sports special in their place.

4. Our commentary team finally appeared on air at almost the precise moment the match kicked off, but they were unable to use their headphones and therefore had no idea if their commentary was going out on air. For the entire duration of the first half they continued with their commentary in the blind hope that it was being broadcast.

5. They would have been told all was well by our producer back at the studio, but the "talkback" function allowing presenters and producers to chat was broken. Our producer could communicate with the commentary team solely by text message (she sent them 22 messages over the course of the evening).

6. The moment our commentary team took over the broadcast, I was no longer able to hear them in my headphones at the Madejski Stadium. This meant that if the commentary team chose to cross over to the Madejski for an update from me, as they undoubtedly would at some point, I wouldn't hear them and would not speak on cue. Our producer spent 15 minutes hitting buttons until she found one which improved the situation. In the mean time I had to deliver one update while listening to the radio station on my mobile phone to hear the commentators cross to me - the mooted alternative, as in the title of this post, was that the producer would yell "GO!" in my ear the moment it sounded like the commentary team wanted me to talk.

7. It later emerged that while dashing from the car to the gantry to begin their commentary, one of the commentary team had to vault a fence, live on air, while talking.

8. To complicate matters further, during my first update a goal was scored, then disallowed. During a later update a penalty was awarded and scored. It's good to be kept on my toes.

9. Midway through the second half the battery on the commentary team's broadcasting kit died, causing them to temporarily drop off air.

10. As though all this weren't enough to kill lesser broadcasters, the match went into extra time, then penalties, then sudden death penalties. It took eighteen penalties for the match to be decided (Basingstoke won). The commentary team returned to base at 11:35pm, just as I was leaving.

And if you were listening, you'd never have known a thing was wrong. I am surrounded by some of the best professionals you could wish for.

Not least Amy J who, while a lazy student and not a professional, accompanied me to the gantry at the Madejski and proved extraordinarily helpful. It's useful having a second pair of eyes - ones that can see better than mine, come to that - to pick out which players did what, and when. It's far more useful to have a second pair of hands and legs which can nip down to the concourse, buy hot dogs and chicken balti pies, and rush back. Our desk looked like a picnic area by the time we'd finished.

So I've spent the evening at a reserve match, shivering to death in an all-but-empty stadium, listening to FA Cup commentary being held together by the skin of its teeth, talking down the line to a producer on the verge of self-destructing with the stress of it all. And I wouldn't have swapped this evening for anything else. Happy Birthday Me, I'm doing what I love.