Nearly away.......

Having completed a two-stop whirlwind sibling tour taking in the sleepy seaside village of Aberystwyth and the bustling spit stained streets of Manchester, I am now in the charming, if overly pretentious, academic stronghold of Cambridge, visiting Mr Jimmy Wright, boxer and professional social climber. It's been a good week so far, tainted only by being in Wales for the final games of the Six nations, in a pub stuffed with a hundred or so Welsh fans and watching Ireland crumble and fall. Still, Saint Paddy's day more than made up for it; after drinking enough guinness to kill a small (but fully formed) horse, we ended up in a random reggae gig in the back of some pub. Nice.

The week has also been slightly marred by a growing sense of doom, as it was on the 22nd of February when I last saw my passport, the single most crucial document I need to go anywhere. The Russians, wise to my plan of taking over their country, had been keeping it from me for over a month, causing me to call and call, begging, threatening and pleading with the bored receptionists of the Russian Embassy in London. Because I was to be running around England for over a week, time would still have been slighty on my side had it not been for one more "tiny" problem - the Belarus transit visa I need to go through the former Soviet state on a damn train.

To cut a long and predictable story short, I eventually got my passport back today the 24th of March, which just happens to be the very last day I had in which to get it back if I still wanted to travel - tomorrow is Easter Friday so no post, and I leave early Saturday. Lordy, lordy, lordy. My life. It's like an annoying and crap melodrama. All I need now are three failed marriages, a long lost brother to turn up and an argument over the ownership of a pub.

But the main thing is I have my passport! Everything is now complete for my plan of world domination.... first Russia, then the former Soviet states, then...... the WORLD.

But first, a spot of Cambridge style punting with the two Jims I think.