Friday, June 13, 2025

New pitch, old foes (Blood Bowl match report)

This month's Blood Bowl game was played on a new pitch (it was bought second hand, but it was new for me and Bryan) and as it was a dwarf pitch design, Bryan dusted off his dwarf team. Because Bryan was going old school, I decided to use my skaven team, which has been boosted recently with some currently still unpainted additional models. 




The aesthetic of the pitch is nice and clean making it very easy to see the squares and play the game. 

I only included one of my skaven star players in my roster - Hakflem Skuttlespike. He  scored the first down of the game.


Bryan almost scored an equaliser but his dwarf runner tripped while trying to sprint an extra square meaning he dropped the ball as he crossed the line!


However, a little later, a daring pass was fumbled by the dwarf in the end zone, bounced into the crowd, was thrown back and then caught by the dwarf who fumbled it meaning he made the touchdown anyway!


The skaven still had two turns to try and grab a winner. Despite punching a hole in the dwarf defence allowing Hakflem and some gutter-runners to pour forward, a failed block attempt brought the game to a sudden close. 


Final score: 1-1. (Our second draw in a row.)

I needed the new reserve players, as a lot of rats ended up getting carried off injured. 


My extra skaven came from a team box set for the "Underworld Creepers" that was another second hand purchase.


The team is usually half skaven and half goblin, but I've split it up to provide reserves for my skaven team and the Big Pink Nightmares black orc team. Maybe they'll get an outing next month!

Tuesday, June 10, 2025

Football season 24-25 review - Futbology badges

It's been a decent season for Futbology badges. My biggest achievement was hitting the 600 games mark in April.


Earlier in the season I passed a milestone for the number of games I've seen at Jenner Park - which, incidentally, is now the stadium I have seen most games at.


And in my last game of the season I hit the half century at Cardiff City Stadium.


Almost half those games haven't involved Cardiff City, which is quite amusing to me.

I got a couple of smaller milestones for other teams - including Caldicot where my friend Ben plays.


And Penybont, mainly for all the Barry games I've seen against them.


I also got a ten-game badge for Cardiff Corinthians - although I only arrived at this game at half time so really it should only be a nine and a half games badge!


I decided to go to the Welsh Cup final. It was a good game and I was able to pose with the actual cup before the game. Getting a badge was a bonus.


And a couple of international games at the end of the season came with badges too.



Not a bad season haul at all!

Monday, June 09, 2025

Football season 24-25 review part 2

Last week I went to two international matches - watching Wales women lose to Italy in Swansea and Wales men winning in Cardiff - and with those two games I've brought the curtain down on my 2024-25 football season. In part 1, I wrote about the fortunes of the three clubs I follow most - which included a promotion, a relegation and a nothing-particularly- memorable. 

But now the season is finally over here's my Futbology round up of the season:


My total of 61 games is a few less than last season's 65, but is still my second highest total ever. In the four seasons since football restarted after the pandemic, I've been to 60, 57, 65 and now 61 games. It's been four years rather full of football. 

Some highlights - four cup finals, one play-off final, only one penalty shoot-out (very early on in the season). The highest scoreline I saw was an 8-2 win for Cardiff Dracs, which edged out Barry's 9-0 drubbing in a friendly at Oxford City right at the start of the season. I made it to a game in Scotland, which was also my nephew Finlay's very first football game (as mentioned in my post about my weekend in Edinburgh). That game was the most northerly of the 15 new football grounds I went to in the season. Here they all are on a handy map:


You can see from the map that most of my new grounds were in South Wales. I haven't quite got to saturation point there, but I'm close. I'm not far off totalling 150 grounds and I might need to start travelling further afield to tick them off next season. Hitting that total is one of the, admittedly modest, ambitions I have for next season. I'm not going to list them here, but I might put them in a kick off post for next season.

And so, as the curtain finally comes down on my 61 game season, I want to give a shout out to the many people who kept me company at all kinds of random grounds watching all kinds of random games. So here you go -  if your name isn't on the list and it should be, then let me know and I'll add it in! 

So, thank you for your company Steve, Paul and Val, Paul (Podge), Dave, Joy, Zac, Dan, Finlay, Ella, Scott, Sara and Leanne (and Cadi and Payton), Tom, Matt, Jim and Nik, Dan R and Emma, Jon D, and the Barry hoppers: Tim, Ian, Joe, John, Nick. I'm looking forward to seeing you all again next season!


Wednesday, June 04, 2025

Book of the Month: The List of Suspicious Things

An early 'book of the month' this month because I had already finished reading this by the end of last month for one very simple reason: it was that good I tore through it on one of my return train trips to London, starting it somewhere just outside Cardiff on the way there and finishing it somewhere between Newport and Cardiff on the way back!


And also a shout out to whoever designed this book cover because this delightful scruffy crow on the cover, pilfering milk from a doorstep delivery caught my eye while on a wander in Griffin Books in Penarth. So I picked it up, read the back cover summary and thought 'hmmm'. Although - spoiler alert - crows don't feature much in the book. 

This is a fictionalised semi-memoir that carries a ring of authenticity heavily swirled in nostalgia. It is loosely based on Jennie Godfrey's own experience of growing up in Yorkshire during the early 1980s when Peter Sutcliffe, who was branded the Yorkshire Ripper by the press, murdered multiple young women. 

The two best friends in the story - Miv (Mavis) and Sharon - are drawn to the horror that starts overshadowing everyday life and follow the police's advice to look out for suspicious things. They start to create a list of things - and men - they think are suspicious. And along the way their investigations uncover a whole heap of other secrets in the lives of the adults around them.

It's a very engaging story and remains believable right up to the very end. I was worried that the story might turn silly with Miv and Sharon catching, or just encountering, the Ripper. But that doesn't happen. There is enough drama going on without fabricating that. Although it turns out there is a connection between Miv and the Ripper, based on the author's own childhood connection which meant she was just one step removed from the Ripper in real life. 

I have one very minor criticism: there are some slightly heavy-handed nostalgia drops into the text. As someone roughly the same age as the author I recognised the descriptions of certain fads and fashions and how particular brands were the must have thing among teenagers but the name checks amused me. I also recognised the freedom I had as a child, as Miv and Sharon head out after school on adventures with no phones, just an understanding they would be back for tea. 

Many of the secrets that Miv and Sharon uncover have very deep themes - loss, betrayal, unhappy marriages, child abuse, mental illness and racism. The girls grow up as they learn more about the people living around them, and while most of the characters have a happyish ending, several do not. There's a real emotional punch to the conclusion to the story, which shows how much it drew me in.

It's to the author's credit that there are no absolute villains, just hurt and broken people hurting and breaking other people. There's a deep underlying sadness for communities that are shifting sideways as the manufacturing industries abruptly shut down and despair kicks in, with some people kicking out in response and wounding others in the process. It's as much a nostalgic tribute to those disappearing mill towns as to the author's own family and childhood. 

This is the first book I've read this year that I would whole-heartedly recommend. I'm very glad the eye-catching rascal of a crow on the cover made me pick it up!

Sunday, June 01, 2025

May 2025 round up


Every month I'm saying it's been a busy month... guess what! It's been a busy month!

It included a trip to Europhilex, a big stamp show at the NEC. I went on from there to Shrewsbury for the weekend. It was nice to spend time with my mum and the rest of the family on a 'normal weekend'. On the Sunday morning I went to watch Zac play in his final game of the season. He scored the opening goal in a 9-1 win and created several other goals for his team-mates!




I've been travelling quite a bit for work, including two trips to London. I had a brief interlude as a tourist and walked from the London office to Tower Bridge and then along the river. I blogged some photos from my London wandrin!

Another work trip was to Exeter to visit some laboratories where incredible work is being done to try and find a cure for type 1 diabetes. We took some young people involved in our programme and we all got to wear lab coats and have a go at science stuff. 


With my colleague Sophie

My football schedule was also hectic, with three cup finals, a promotion play-off, and seeing Cardiff Draconians clinch their league title. (Read about the Dracs in the first instalment of my review of the season.)

At the Welsh Cup final, Paul and I got a chance to pose with the cup itself - I think this may be the oldest original cup still presented because the FA Cup has been replaced a couple of times.




The cup final was a good game, with Connahs Quay Nomads pushing TNS all the way. However TNS won to make it a domestic treble in Wales. 

My second cup final of the month was an under-17s game, with Shrewsbury's side playing Cardiff City at the Cardiff City Stadium. As it was within walking distance, I had to go - and the Salop juniors won 2-0! 


The third cup final was the Ardal Southern Cup final, played between Cardiff Corinthians and Chepstow Town on Taff's Well's famous sloping pitch. It finished 5-2 to the Corries but, true to form, all seven goals were scored up the slope!




A week later I saw Chepstow play again, this time in the Ardal South promotion play off against Ynyshir Albions. It was a bad end to the season for Chepstow as they lost 2-0 and missed out on promotion. It was a bad week for them!

Those matches took me up to 59 games for the season - and it's not over just yet! Almost, but not quite.