Training with the GB Olympic hockey team

With only 14 days to go until the Beijing Olympics it was very exciting to spend a day training with the Mantell brothers - key players of the Great Britain hockey team. The article I wrote can only touch on how difficult the game is at this level. Aching shoulders, bad back and ripped stomach was suffered from the next day!

The smell of kerosene

Fast cars are cool - the men who drive them are cooler. This six page spread I wrote for FHM unearthed the real meat-heads of motorsport - such as Dave Burnham, who races a battered Citreon at 100MPH on ice, or Guido Cappellini who races F1 power boats (at 150MPH in zero visibility, while fighting brain numbing G-Forces).

Inspired

I've been going to the gym for six years. And I'm still puny. So it's great to get to talk to people who have done something amazing in the gym. The 'Inspiration' page in Men's Fitness is where men like Richard Miller talk to me about the experience of losing an incredible amount of weight and turning their lives around.

Nuclear powered

Faslane is the Nuclear base in Scotland, as famous for it's Greenpeace protest camps as it is its nuclear submarines. Visiting the complex as a journalist was just about as good as it gets for a men's lifestyle writer...

If men had their way

Sometimes life is hard. And sometimes I get commissioned to write a feature called 'If Men Had Their Way' - and get given a model for the day and told to do what I like with her. It was all in the name of giving New Woman's readers an insight into the male psyche. Scary...

Hair today, gone tomorrow

EVERYONE gets hairy as they get older. Not everyone gets paid by FHM to have it all waxed off once you've spent 18 years growing it however. And when I say ALL I mean ALL. Even FHM couldn't publish the pictures of my privates - which was a shame actually, because I felt afterwards that as I went through the torture of some man giving me a back, sack and crack wax, the very least that FHM could do would be to show the resulting mutant member.

You make me sick!

Freelancing as a writer at The Sunday Times and being published in a Sunday newspaper that's average circulation is 1,195,422 felt good. And because i'm such a healthy chap, ahem, i'm on the health pages. This week I managed to combine health and another 'hobby' of mine ... puking ... with a piece on travel sickness...

The body beautiful, ahem

Your only chance to see me naked...

The high life

Ahhhhhhhhh for the good old days. I was young, free and single (ok, so apart from the young, some things never change). I worked for FHM and could spend £10,000 on a feature (ok - if you're going to quibble - £9, 864). Really. I spent £9,864 to put together a photoshoot and write the feature. Oh, did I mention that it invloved using a heat sensitive camera wired to five models and subjecting them to various stimulous to see what turns them on. Classy...

I'm a winner! Kind of...

I should have known - when do you ever get anything free from a mobile phone company? I took this photo in Pakistan. I had 3 seconds, whilst sat in a tuk-tuk which was hurtling along like a tin can down an alley in a hurricane, to snap this dignified looking gent about to toke on his shisha. When I returned home Orange were holding a photography competition so I sent it in.

And I came fourth!

Ok, so it's not quite first prize from Tate Modern, but I still thought I might get a T-shirt, a book or a free text or something. I got nada. Nothing. Ziltch. The future's shite...

HKYworld

In a week of milestones (or should that be millstones?) I also launched HKYworld - a global, digital magazine for hockey players around the world. STOP! Don't go away - it's REALLY exciting. Actually, it is - it's a digital, page-turning, multi-media, cutting-edge production. Don't just believe me though, Lucozade's PR bod said:

· Excellent content – new, fresh, good mix of hockey and personality stories
· Really good look and feel – young, will appeal to players
· Incorporation of videos is excellent – I’ve just watched them all

· The ‘controls’ for page turning/zooming etc work very well and are very clear
· Overall really good initiative and Chris should be congratulated

Ok, ok - so she just wants free editorial space...go have a look yourself: http://www.hkyworld.com/

Rangers Football Club

I have reached a new milestone in my journalism career - I got comminssioned to write a book. 30,000 words on my favourite footy team - Newcastle Utd ... then the plug was pulled on it and I got given Rangers FC - a perfectly excellent club of the highest order - but one I knew nothing about.

Three 30 hour weekends plus many, many mid-week 2am sessions later I finished it yesterday. I was so relieved I decided to celebrate. And promptly collapsed in bed from tiredness at 8pm.

Here's my favourite extract - part of an introduction for a chapter on a 'Fantasy 11' team. It'll be the one part of the book that the editor deletes. I bet you...

It’s an obvious statement – how do you begin to choose 11 players when there’s over 100 years of history of sublime players? Polling the fans is an obvious start but has one drawback: four Gers [Rangers fans] on top of a mountain were arguing about their all-time greatest team. The first yells: “this is for the 1997 nine-in-a-row squad!” and jumps off the side of the mountain. Not to be out done the second shouts: “this is in honour of the first treble winning team in 1948!” and leaps off the side. The fourth then bellows: “this is in defence of Bob McPhail!” and pushes the Ally McCoist fan off the cliff. Arguments rage, opinions are spouted, feathers are ruffled and no one can agree.

Other (personal) highlights include getting in the quote from Ally McCoist: "‘I’ve lost a buttock and three chins and I’m feeling really fit’" and discovering Gazza's best ever pranks:

*Approached by a reporter for post-match comment he burped into the microphone.
*He crashed the Middlesbrough team bus causing £10,000 worth of damage.
*On a trip to London he asked a workman for a go on his pneumatic drill and proceeded to mash up the pavement.
*One hour after playing in an international for England he went to a pub in Hampstead still wearing his full kit and got drunk with Chris Evans.