Ian's blog

London at Christmas and New Year is mostly eerily quiet

Londoners tend to escape the capital as soon as they can before the festive period kicks in and so, whilst it isn’t exactly a ghost town or like that scene on Westminster Bridge from 28 Days Later, you can actually drive around without your blood pressure spiking 99% of the time and the relative lack of pedestrians affords you the chance to look around you at some of the stunning but less heralded architecture - both old and new - in the City.

But then there’s Alexandra Palace.

(This blog comes courtesy of a reminder about this weekend from fellow Blues fan Mark who emailed me via this website …thanks Mark!)

Saturday (7th December 2024) will mark precisely half a century of me going down to watch the Blues.

And what a 5 decades I have had loving, hating, bigging up, knocking down, praising, criticising and so much more around the players and managers of Birmingham City Football Club

August 7th 2024 marks 2 decades since I first took root at talkSPORT, an occasion that was marked by my great friends Hawksbee and Jacobs on air last Friday whilst I was in the News Building working on our live coverage of the Paris 2024 Olympics. It was only a little 10 minute chat with Paul & Andy, but we crammed so much into that 10 minutes; my last-second cover shifts for Alan Brazil; Throwing up on air; reading an entire Steve Bruce murder mystery novel as “Steve Bruce” for listeners during lockdown and cosying up to Gene Simmons.

Laundry was the most pressing concern for Team Red when we finally got to our Dusseldorf base for the last few days of my trip - all 3 of us were down the last t-shirt/socks etc, so we were grateful to be able to use the hotel 24hr housekeeping service, although as most folk know, such services don’t come cheap!

Apologies for the lack of updates - due to a lot of travelling and prepping that hasn't left an awful lot of time for blogging! So let's catch up...

Well, I spoke too soon about the whole “rarely stayed in a hotel booked for us that felt dodgy” thing in an earlier blog on here.

Having let the train take the strain from Berlin to Dortmund on Saturday morning and then negotiated a very lively station concourse filled with excitable Portuguese and Turkish fans heading for Signal Iduna Park, Team Red found its collective way to our next accommodation.

Our Berlin hotel was rather swish. I guess any hotel that puts its indoor pool on the highest floor yet not on the roof is something of an indication of poshness.

There are always a few downsides to being away from home for an extended period. Mostly missing your partner in my case. But even though my social media is full of election posts and threads, I’m kind of glad that I’m not being bombarded with it like I would be back in Blighty. I should be back in time to vote though. That will be enough involvement for me.

Stuttgart - or at least the part of the city that we are staying in - is charming. Our hotel is on the fringe of a little community suburb with nice houses and a very relaxed vibe indeed.

The hotel itself is lovely too. As you’ll no doubt have experienced at one time or another, booking a hotel is something of a lottery as you never quite know what to expect when you arrive, check in and then open the door to your room to see what you are presented with.

Today was mostly a travel day for Team Red. After the usual ‘don’t leave your seat when on your own at the breakfast buffet as everything you’ve left gets cleared away before you come back’ dance, the three of us checked out to catch a flight due south from Hamburg to Stuttgart where we will commentate at Germany v Hungary on Wednesday.

And so to day 3 and my first game of the tournament. You spend the night before flapping that you haven’t prepped enough, that you don’t have the pronunciations right for half the players, you think you’re going to lose your train of thought completely multiple times during the game etc etc etc. The excitement of doing the job is almost matched by some odd belief that you can’t do that job no matter how experienced you are in tournament football.