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Monday 22 March 2021

Champions adventures and where it all went wrong

 Well... what a day it had been. My parents were season ticket holders and got to watch Andrea Boccelli belting out Nessum Dorma at the King Power Stadium as Leicester lifted the trophy. They had no idea who he was, which really wound me up because I love classic music but that was the old season, and the new season came along with UEFA Champions League football.

We made easy work of the group stage, Marc Albrighton gaining a place in Leicester City folklore and history as he became the scorer of the first ever goal in CL for the Foxes.

However, league form was a concern, and a 2-1 defeat in the first leg of the round of 16 away in Seville was too much for the owners. Claudio Ranieri was sacked and the assistant manager, Craig Shakespeare put in charge.

We overcame Seville on a great night to progress to the Quarter finals, actually becoming the sole English team to make it that far. Not bad as people had been saying we would be an utter embarrassment. However, Spanish giants Atheltico Madrid were a step to far for the club and we went out 2-1 on aggregate.

League form picked up and we finished 12th, which wasn’t too bad considering that, at one point, relegation was a serious threat.

 

2016/17 also became a disaster for my writing. I was happily ploughing through the fourth book in the Alex Hayden Chronicles when I discovered that I could not find my USB drive one evening. Having decided not to panic, I waited until the following morning to check my work desk but alas, that is when the panic set it. I had lost it, and it contained all my work that I had written.

Devasted was not the word for it.

Fortunately, I had most of my writers group homework assignments printed out, and several of them had been emailed to beta readers so I recovered all bar one of those. I had my books on email to my editor so again, could recover them, but I had lost the work on Dragonfire (the fourth book), or so I had thought.

After telling Bex, my wonderful editor, about the loss, she sent me the work I had already emailed through to her. I had lost several chapters work but at least, I wasn’t starting from scratch.

I did have several other works in progress that I had not sent to her, as they were not in any fit stage, so those were consigned to history.

Fast forward three months, and a lot of new chapters, and I found out that I was a very slow learner about lessons in life. Plugging my new USB drive into my laptop, it came up with a message that no-one wants to see… drive corrupted!

I was back to square one.

Writing-wise I became depressed. I continued with my homework assignments for the group as we had agreed that once we reached 25, we were going to release an anthology. But my own writing went on hold for months. I tried to restart but whatever I wrote was never as good as I remember having already written and lost.

So, all in all, this was a pretty crappy year! Surely the next year could only get better!

Thursday 4 March 2021

So long to rediscover the blog. Updates starting with 5000/1 and all of that!

 OMG!!!!

I've had a bit of a break... well, maybe a looooooooong break from blogging but rediscovered this in my saved items.

So much has happened since the last post in 2015! I am not going to try to catch up all in one go!


Biggest thing for me was my beloved Leicester City winning the English Premier League for the first time in their history. We became only the 6th team to put our name on the trophy since the leagues were reformed in the early 90's and the first team to win it for the first time since Nottingham Forest back in the late 70's.

I'll admit, the whole season was a roller coaster. We had narrowly avoided relegation the season before and, after a preseason tour of Thailand which ended with the sacking of Nigel Pearson, our manager, we set into the new season hoping and praying that Claudio Ranieri would somehow complete another miracle and keep us up.

And keep us up he did. 3 defeats all season. We proved that a team can overcome a superstar and ended up winning the league by 10 points, surely disproving any "fluke" comment that was thrown our way.



It remains to the day, one of the happiest moments of my life. I've been a Fox since my Dad took me to Filbert Street in the old Double Decker stand to watch us beat a reigning champion Liverpool team 2-0. I was 9 years old. Jimmy Melrose was my hero. And my love of Leicester City began that day.

36 years later, they achieved a feat that no-one thought possible. I will admit that i cried the day that Wes Morgan lifted the trophy. I wasnt lucky enough to get to the ground, but my parents and nephew were there to see Andrea Bocelli perform at the King Power stadium. Being a classical music fan, it was simply another great moment, watching as the world watched. Nessum Dorma is an iconic football song, forever associated with Italia '90 and to hear one of the great tenors in history belt it out was fantastic.

Since then, my club entered the champions league and thats a story for the next post.

From a writing perspective, during this time, I completed the third book in the Alex Hayden Chronicles. "A Cauldron of Fire" was released on the 16th of June 2015 and continues the story of the teenage vampire and his friends as they battle a witch and Lord Clothar. I had fun writing this one, introducing new characters based on friends who were desperate to play a part. Making a dear female friend a witch and getting away with it was brilliant, and even more so that I believe she is a spitting image of Eva Green from Penny Dreadful. Please click on the here to be taken to the Amazon page.





Anyway, that's it for my first catch up. I am going to try to write one a week for the next few weeks to catch back upto date, trying to remember what happened, and my thoughts and feelings.

Once I have, more regular updates will follow.


Peace love and sausage rolls (Ladbaby is the greatest although a little early in the posts!!)