The last 8 years overall have been amazing! And that’s one of the main reasons I kept putting off doing an update here as I felt a bit cringe to post after a long gap boasting about how well I'm doing when I no longer posted regularly here. Of course, there's been plenty of lows over the period, but for a long time now I've been in such a good place that I never get too low when it is a tough period. I think the main reason for that is I'm just so content in myself and who I am, mainly I just feel very comfortable in my own skin and living the life I am.
There’s so much gone on over the last eight years, most of it I can’t even remember as my memory is honestly scarily bad, but I’ll try to touch on some of the main things that have gone on.
Summer of 2018 was likely my best ever Summer, bitB made the amazing gesture to take me on an all expenses paid trip to Russia for the World Cup, twice! I went to the Columbia game when we won on penalties, top 3 lifetime moments, if you know me you should be able to easily guess what my top 1 is but more on that later. After the Columbia game I came home, then they invited me back out for the Semi Final against Croatia. That one was brutal, think I travelled 40 hours total in two and a half days there and back, if we’d won we were all staying and going to the final so that stung for a while.
Fast forward a little to 2020 and Covid hit, this was a testing period personally, bitB decided to stop staking and so ended the team which was something I’d always been dreading, also my Mam got Cancer. We were very lucky though as she caught it early, it was stage one so I always felt extremely positive that it was all going to be ok and thankfully it went that way. This was a big realisation moment for me in how I emotionally dealt with that experience. I’m very close with my parents, I speak to my Mam everyday, and all throughout the experience I quite vividly remember I always had the feeling of how lucky we were as a family, which felt odd giving someone I loved was going through Cancer, but I just remember at various points thinking we were so lucky when the situation could’ve been much worse. That taught me a lot about myself and how I can have a positive outlook even in the worst situations.
I stayed in Poker after bitB ended, creating and running a coaching platform. I enjoyed it and it was a success, but it was a solo operation on the management side, and it just wasn’t anywhere near as rewarding as being a part of bitB. So when they reached out to say they were bringing it back as a CFP and wanted me to be a part of it again it took me all of two seconds to jump at the chance to rejoin them on the new project.
I mentioned earlier about my top 1 moment, and that was finally experiencing success supporting Newcastle. Back in 2023 we got to our first final in a long time, and against the team we’ve suffered to most over my lifetime, Man United. I really felt it was written in the stars that we’d beat them and it would finally be our day, so I just had to be there. The only way for me to do so was to join Club Wembley, the way it works is it costs circa £2.5k per year, you get 9 games per season, and you have to commit to 3 years!!! You can sell the games you don’t go to, but many are very low value such as England friendlies, Charity Shield, or City getting to the Semi Final of the FA Cup every year, so they don't sell.
That was a costly experience, one I said I wouldn’t do again as it’s just too much money to justify. Luckily, I had managed to negotiate my way out of paying the 3rd year, that 3rd year Newcastle were back again and I was wishing I’d kept it!
One blonde I’ve become close with in recent years through our love of Newcastle is ToddSwain. He also punted to go to the 2023 final so we went together, he comes up to Newcastle for some games, we went to Dortmund in the Champions League and then Union Saint-Gilloise this season, great times.
Leading up to the Liverpool final I was adamant I wasn’t going to do it again. Todd was getting tempted for sure but had planned not to (he was definitely going to
), I thought we’d very likely lose so it made it easier for me to skip, then one Sunday night leading up to the final he notices an online raffle, £10 per ticket, 500 tickets in the raffle, winner gets 2 x Club Wembley tickets for our Final, he enters last minute, only goes and wins, and then message me telling me he'd won and he's giving me the other ticket for nothing. I was speechless. What a thing to do, he could've instantly got £2k+ for it with zero effort, he's a top top human, and I am forever in his debt for this!
I guess I was just destined to be there, and it was the greatest day of my life. Such overwhelming emotions, I cried like a baby at full time, it’s a day I will never ever forget, and I don’t think Newcastle can ever top it, the first one will always be the sweetest, my dream had finally come true!
Now to the present day, I live a simple life, don’t want or need much, live comfortably, I enjoy as much time as I can with the people close to me, and besides that I just love the day to day of being part of bitB.
It's funny football has dominated most of what I've written about when it's quite a small part of my life, but there you go, great memories.
I’m 40 next week, I just checked back and I was 23 when I started this diary, so much water under the bridge over that time. I’ll aim to get the next update in before my 50th, best wishes to everyone, cheers <3
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