Hearty in Hartlepool

One of the great things about football away trips is that they take you to places you'd probably otherwise never visit. Often you discover that a distant town you'd idly dismissed as dull/grim/rougher than Mitcham is actually rather interesting, sometimes even welcoming. They do say that travel broadens the mind. One northern town I unexpectedly warmed to was Hartlepool.

Roving Around Wrexham

Wrexham has always seemed a bit of an anomaly. The town is indisputably Welsh but is geographically much closer to the great English conurbations of Merseyside and Manchester than it is to Wales's big population centres of Cardiff, Swansea and (if you must) Newport. If this has given Wrexhamites something of an identity problem, those who follow the football club have forged it into a fierce rivalry with Chester, less than twenty miles away but, crucially, just across the border in England.

Hankering for Halifax

What's the best away trip in the National League? We each have our favourites, chosen through personal criteria. For me, some interesting local history, a ground within easy reach of the railway station and (most importantly) a good choice of real ale pubs are the key factors. The three 'Ha's (Hartlepool, Harrogate and Halifax) are all high on my list. Of those, Halifax might just have shouldered its way into pole position.  What follows may help to explain why.

Sixty in Stockport

There are good and bad times to reach a 'significant' birthday. Those of my schoolmates whose birthdays fall in balmy April, for example, will have been ‘celebrating’ their 60ths in a virus-induced lockdown. And, for once this year, I'm really quite glad that mine falls in bleak mid-January, as I was able to mark the start of my seventh decade by, you know, going outside, to places.