Ant Trails Ramblings

It's the fifth and final leg of our Great British Sporting Crusade and Tracy and I are at the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium for the first home game of the season against Manchester United. Just in case anyone reading is not aware, I am a lifelong Tottenham Hotspur supporter. I had a season ticket in the old West Stand at the age of 10 before they knocked it down to build the New West Stand before they knocked the whole stadium down to build the new one. Being a Spurs supporter was never a conscious decision for me, it was a birthright, or some might say a life sentence. The genesis of this situation was when my father, as a young lad, was offered the opportunity to go to a match by his uncle. "Do you like blue or red?" he was asked, to which my Dad replied "Blue". Had he not I would today be a supporter of that other North London team, Woolwich Wanderers. Virtually all football clubs, like Tottenham, stay true to their geographical roots. Every now and again a team ...

No 4 in our Great British Summer sporting crusade and we're at  Wembley for the Rugby League Challenge Cup Final. This event wasn't on our original itinerary but was quickly added when we discovered that the Leigh Leopards (nee Centurions) had made the final for the first time since their glorious victory of 1971. I should explain that Leigh is Tracy's childhood home town so, previously unaligned to any English Super League team, I instantly became a Leigh fan. (Any suggestions that this was seen as a way for a Tottenham fan to be able to celebrate a trophy are roundly rejected.) Leigh Leopards (nee Centurions) also gained a second new fan with the happy coincidence that my daughter Anna had arrived in the country two days before and is actually a rugby league fan herself.  When I was a kid I didn't take much notice of rugby league. It was the game played in places 'up north' that I'd never been to, and showed by the BBC on a Saturday afternoon to fill the t...

  No3 in our Great British Summer sporting crusade and we're at The Oval for day one of the fifth and final Ashes test match.  I am often asked who I support in the cricket now that I am a dual national, it's like a coded way of saying 'I know you've got both passports but what you are you really? Like deep down. In you soul.' And the answer is England, that is how I choose to see my life story. I'm an Englishman who went to live in Australia and also become an Australian. I am not an Australian who used to be an Englishman. Either would be acceptable but I choose the former. I've become interested in this concept of how we see the world, and our part in it, since I read a book about Selfies*. Those who follow Tracy and I on our travels through our Instagram account @anttrails will know that we enjoy taking selfies. In an idle moment, wandering around a bookshop whilst Tracy had her nails done (a prominent feature of Tracy's life story!), I bought said b...

No2 in our British summer sporting crusade and we're at the Royal Liverpool Golf Club for The Open... I remember well the moment when I decided to buy tickets to The Open. Tracy and I were in our study in Sydney in February sorting out our affairs and contemplating our post work travels. On a whim I checked the details of the event and found that it was at Liverpool, not too far from where Tracy's mum Elaine lives and on a date that we could make, just after my birthday. The only available tickets were in the corporate hospitality at a price that I have decided it is better to forget. You know when you are a kid and you decide you really want something when it is around the time of your birthday, so you ask for it as a present even though it is more expensive than in your heart you know is reasonable. Well that was the tactic I employed as a 57 year old and it worked!  In that moment I imagined what an amazing experience it would be to see the world's best players battling ...

In 2023 a Grand Prix is an event where a huge number of people come together to watch a two hour car race and at the end Max Verstappen wins. There is little doubt about this. Some interest lies in who is going to come second and third and at Silverstone this year both were British drivers so the crowd went home pretty happy. This was the first such event the Tracy and I have attended and we learnt a few things about transport, branded apparel, woke toileting and even motor racing... We had been warned that getting 142,000 people in and out of the venue on race day was inevitably going to be problematic and cause us delays. I had ordered a car park ticket which I at first thought meant we would be driving to Silverstone and parking there. How naive I was. A car park ticket actually means that you get to park your car in a neighbouring county and have the privilege of a 40 minute ride on a double decker bus. It's fair to say that Tracy is not normally a bus kind of person. As luck w...

This post is about an experience we had with an Airbnb property but it features a certain football club. A club with a great heritage and loyal support who often finish high up the league but have won no trophies for over 15 years, despite getting to a European final only recently. Yes, I speak of course about ACF Fiorentina! Quite why the Italian equivalent of my chosen English team feature so prominently in a post about Airbnb accommodation will become clear. We've been using Airbnb quite a lot on our recent travels. You do hear some horror stories and the Trustpilot reviews are full of tails of woe. My theory is that people are only moved to upload a review of a big corporate like Airbnb if they are really p*ssed off or have staggeringly good service. It's difficult for a company that is basically just a digital platform to really impress, you just expect it to work. So the feedback you see is the former, and usually it's an issue with the host rather than the platform. ...

I'm generally conflict averse and it is not often that I get angry but our hotel 'Le Louis' in Versailles managed to get me riled with a Fawlty Towers-esque display on the first evening of our stay. We are currently a party of four, having linked up with Tracy's mum Elaine and her companion carer Lizzie for this part of our journey, celebrating Elaine's birthday. We four assembled in the bar area in the evening and ordered a bottle of wine to contemplate our options for dinner. With rain hammering down on the glass domed roof over the central bar, and a restaurant area within the very room that we were sitting,(see pic - restaurant to the left, bar to the right) we took a look at the in house menu. None of us were particularly hungry but we wanted to have something before retiring for the night so we each selected a starter from the restaurant menu and thought we'd eat it where we were sat, in the bar area. Now you know already that it wasn't going to be tha...