I’m planning to go out there some time soon to re-start the sadly neglected pint-sized blog I write, which was going great guns until work and Christmas just took it over.

Yes, according to professor John Samuels, business professor at the University of Birmingham. I’m interviewing him tomorrow about his new book, described as:-

“a book for football fans who are fed up with reading about the successes, the transfer dealings, the wage negotiations and the scandals of the few ‘elite’ clubs.Why have some clubs hit the big time and so many more missed out?Will the game be up for many more struggling teams, or can they claw their way back to the big time? “The Beautiful Game is Over” argues convincingly and urgently for change”

I’ll be hoping to find out some of the financial reasoning behind the dire performances of West Midlands clubs in recent years, in one of the traditional strongholds of the game.z I’ll also hopefully be finding out what can be done for the future of Villa, Blues, and the rest to help them catch up with the big boys of professional football.

More to come in the Birmingham Post, probably on Monday. Link then.

NB: speaking as an Oxford United fan, the beautiful game is most definitely over for me

Well I’m blogging, eaten a reasonably healthy dinner, haven’t been drinking, went to the gym this morning, thought happy thoughts and hardly complained about things at all. So today at least I’m doing well with the massive numbers of resolutions that will keep me entertained for the next week or two.

I was looking at some Web 2.0 tool that are supposed to help you manage your goals, some with the help of an online community geeing you on.

But having thought about it, I’m not going to share this one with the net. Think personal resolutions, or at least mine, are probably kept private (i.e. off the internet). And at least then, when they peter out about the same time as January does (if that), then no one will notice…

On a lighter note, today I’ve been covering the news that fancy-dan Midlands crisp makers Tyrrells have got the go ahead from the planning permission guys to set up a vodka distillery at their farm in Herefordshire. Cue lots of workplace discussion, and a terrible Warsaw/Walsall joke in a leader column.

In the Post tomorrow, on the web at some point in the future, as always.

I know the updates have become a little thin on the ground recently, apologies everyone. I’ve recently been absolutely inundated at work, having to plan out Christmas stories for both news, the Enterprise pages and now I’m doing media and marketing stories while my colleague Joanna Geary is in Hong Kong. More to come soon hopefully, when it calms down a bit at the Post.

…or despite public indifference, whichever you prefer. After deleting my old blog for various silly reasons about a week after it started, here I am back and as opinionated as ever. For the readers who are neither related to me nor work with me (however many there are), I’m a young-ish trainee journalist at the Birmingham Post, where I’m Enterprise editor, as well as doing a variety of other tasks.

So here I am once again,  writing about various stuff that happens in my life and my job (much the same thing, sadly). Journalism, beer, football, food, learning arabic, films, television, music. Whatever, I’ll decide later.