#8 Boston, Fenway Park and the Red Sox...

They hadn't won a world series in 86 years!

The legendary "curse of the bambino" - Babe Ruth - had haunted the Boston Red Sox baseball team since 1919, after their then owner, Harry Frazee, sold their star player to the New York Yankees for a measly $100,000. All so that his missus could finance a Broadway musical; a musical that ended up being a complete flop anyway. When Ruth was sold, against his will, he "cursed" the Red Sox, saying that they'd never win another World Series without him. He was right. His last year at Boston - 1918 - was their last championship while he was alive. He ended his days a New York Yankee, who went on to become the dominant force in baseball for the rest of the century.

This was pretty much one of the first things I learned when I became part of the "Red Sox Nation" back in 2001. I have been a fan of North American sports since I was 5 or 6 years old. I am now a mad-daft fan of baseball, ice hockey, American football and basketball. I came to each one at a totally different time in my life and each in their own unique set of circumstances.

My love of baseball started when I was living on the island of Paros, Greece, in 1998. That was the year that Sammy Sosa and Mark McGwire captured the imagination of baseball fans everywhere by slugging it out to see who could get the most home runs in a season. The record was definitely going to go... the only two questions on everyones lips were by how many runs was the record going to be smashed by and which of these two amazing players was going to win out?

To be fair, I'd never really noticed baseball before, but the bar I frequented was owned by a Greek-American called Costas, who had relocated there from Los Angeles, to get back to his roots and to escape the madness that is California life. He had the TV on everyday, tuned into some sports network that showed the games. I spent a lot of days there drinking free beer and watching the games with him. He became my unofficial baseball tutor.

That was where my love of the game began, but when I got back to London that winter, it disappeared from my life after the World Series had ended - not that anyone really noticed it happening. Apart from the fans of the teams taking part in the post-season, the rest of us were totally absorbed in the "slug-fest" and couldn't have cared less about what entire teams were doing. It was the most compelling, gladiatorial struggle between two professional sportsmen since Borg and MacEnroe.

Anyway, that was where it all started. I still didn't follow a team, but when I started university in 2001, one was chosen for me. I met a really nice young girl from Boston with a typically Boston-Irish name, called Shannon and we became good friends. She was a Red Sox fan and spent many an afternoon extolling the virtues of her city and her team. The truth wasn't sugar-coated though - she warned me about the inherited pain of becoming a Red Sox fan, the fact that we never win and the fact that we hadn't won since 1918. I was well-warned about the heartache of so many lost World Series; like the gut-wrenching, emotional rollercoaster of the '86 WS, when the Red Sox lost to the New York Mets in dramatic fashion at Shea Stadium in New York.

I had been a Hibernian fan for many years and figured that this made me the ideal candidate to join the ranks of the Red Sox Nation. My Edinburgh football team hadn't won the league since 1952 and their last Scottish FA Cup win was 50 years before that - I was used to disappointment. But the dogged determination to follow each of these teams til we die is what makes us some of the best sports fans in the world. I can't help wondering if the Irish connection to both teams has something to do with the obstinate dedication to the cause - no matter how hopeless it might seem.

When the chance came up in 2004 for a 10-day holiday to Boston and then onto Niagara Falls, I started making instant plans for a trip to Fenway Park to see my beloved Red Sox. There are loads of games a season to go and watch and they're very well varied between road and home games. The team were playing a 3-game home series against the Detroit Tigers and after a quick look at the schedule, I chose the game that had my favourite pitcher on the mound, Pedro Martinez.

My missus, Fawzia, had been told by some American colleagues that in order to get tickets, it was best to get down to Fenway early. Since the game was starting in the early evening, we got down there for around lunchtime and managed to get a spot that was only around 30 or 40 people from the front of the queue. The weather was hot, humid and mixed with the grimy air from interstate-90, which is right over the other side of the small row of buildings opposite the stadium. The Lansdowne Street side of Fenway Park is all part of the iconic "Green Monster" - a 37-foot-high green wall that forms the left field boundary and contains and old-fashioned manual scoreboard. The queue we were in was the other side of the Green Monster and I couldn't stop looking up at it, thinking: "I can't believe I'm actually here!"

I already had a Red Sox baseball cap, that had seen better days, but Fawzia didn't look like much of a fan, so I tempted her into going into one of the Red Sox stores strategically placed across from the ticket office. We asked some of the lovely people in line to keep our place while we went to the store and they agreed, but I got the impression that it wouldn't have mattered if we hadn't. I got myself a new cap and Fawzia got herself a Red Sox vest top. She got a huge cheer from those around us in the queue for managing to change into it under her other t-shirt.

After waiting a couple of hours for the ticket office to open, we filed in and got our tickets. Everyone else just seemed to be staying inside the stadium, so we did the same. There were plenty of little food and drink stalls tucked away underneath the stands, so we got ourselves some of both and wandered around, drinking in the atmosphere of this oldest of ball parks. It is a well-known fact amongst my friends that I have no sense of smell whatsoever, but I got the distinct impression that, for once, I was really missing out on something. Fenway Park looks like it should smell of baseball, in the venerable sense.

We found our seats, on the lower tier, way out in the right field, just past the famous "Pesky's Pole" (the right field foul pole named after Johnny Pesky - a Red Sox player in the '40s and '50s). We had a pretty good view of the field and a great view of the Green Monster and the bull pen (where the pitchers warm up during the game). The teams came out to warm up and I got a close up view of Pedro warming up with teammates and occasionally tossing a baseball to one of the hollering kids hanging over the small perimeter wall around the field.

Everytime I have visited the United States I have felt the same sense of awe borne out of the fact that we here in the UK only ever see the US on television or in the cinema, and so it has always felt like wandering around on the world's biggest movie set to me. This was no different. Once the ballpark began to fill up and the noises got more intense as game time approached, the sense of being a part of something intensified. I had been to see Arsenal versus Manchester United at Highbury some years before and, like that night, there are certain events, in certain places that just cannot be replicated or equalled. Fenway was one of those times. The feeling that I was being included in the American national past time was overwhelming.

It was hot and sticky, but made bearable by the army of vendors walking around amongst the fans selling beers and hot dogs. The sun still shone over the top of the main stand as the players came out to take the field. The game itself was amazing, but I won't bore you with a play-by-play account... suffice it to say that the Red Sox came out victorious 5-1 and the difference between a televised game and the real thing was immeasurable. One thing I never knew until we went there was that in the US, simply because of the distances involved, they have no idea of the concept of "away fans" and this meant that unless the team was up against it, then there was very little in the way of chanting. This, of course, was entirely alien to me. Since I had decided to "represent" that day, I had gone to the match wearing my Arsenal shirt and during the three and a half hours of the game whenever I got a little bit bored (and after a few beers) I would stand up and start singing "ARS-EN-AL, ARS-EN-AL, ARS-EN-AAAALL!" This went down quite well with the Red Sox fans nearby, who blatantly hadn't a clue what this crazy Brit was shouting about, but who always welcome something a little out of the ordinary, in much the same way as a streaker always gets a cheer at a football match here in the UK.

I knew the Red Sox were having a good season and some of our players were hitting their top form at the best time of the year, since there were only around 30+ games left of the regular season. We finished second in the American League that year and made it into the post-season in the "wild card" slot, those damned Yankees having pipped us to the league pennant by just three games. While the whole of the Red Sox Nation was overjoyed to see the team get to the post-season at all, it was, of course, met with the same feelings of dread that the team would only go ahead and do the same thing they had been doing to Red Sox fans since 1918 - get tantalisingly close and then blow it. Again. Just to keep us all topped-up with heartache.

It would be very easy to sit here and say that I knew something was different now that I know the outcome of the whole thing, but with the players we had, there was definitely a buzz around the online chatrooms and in the media. Would this end up being one of those years where they took us to the very brink and then didn't win it? A curse is a curse, after all.

Then the team manager, Terry Francona, and the boys really started messing with our heads properly. To get to the American League Championship Series (which is a semi-final for the World Series - which , in turn, is always played against the winners of the National League Championship Series) we had to get through the Anaheim Angels... which we did in stunning form, winning that best-of-five series 3-0.

And who should be waiting for us in the ALCS... it just had to be the bloody New York Yankees and because they had finished above us in our division they had four of the seven possible games at home. Yankee Stadium remains the most hostile place for the Red Sox to visit and the prospects were not looking good. To cut this part short, we won an amazing ALCS 4-3, having been 3-0 down and are the only team to have ever come from 3-0 down in the post-season to win.

Once the Yankees were out of the way, the rest was agonising. We came up against the St. Louis Cardinals, who had finished the season with the best record in baseball, with 105 wins and only 57 losses.

The Boston Red Sox team of 2004 blew them away four-zip and won their first World Series in 86 years and, finally, laying to rest the curse of the bambino.

I know that I had nothing personally to do with their success and I wasn't even there for any of their momentous post-season matches, but I have always been left with a sense of having been a part of it. I had been a part of that season.

I still like to think that it was damned nice of them to wait until I'd been to see them play before they went ahead and won it.

With the curse broken, they only went ahead and won it again in 2007. Strangely enough, the Yankees won it in 2000 - the actual last year of the twentieth century - and haven't won it since.
There is some justice in the universe after all.

#9 My 30th birthday...

...Or how I learned to stop worrying and started to appreciate life.

For the six months leading up to my 30th birthday, life had been really rather shitty. I was still trying to get over my recent divorce and had had to leave London and suspended my studies for a year so that I could sort my head out.

I had moved up north, to North Anston, near Rotherham. My best friend Ali lived there with his lovely wife, Jules, and he had come to my rescue when I needed to get London and everything associated with it out of my head. I stayed with them for a little while and then moved into a little one-bedroomed flat across the street - the only time in my life I have ever had an entire flat to myself.

Ali had introduced me to a friend of his that owned a restaurant and I managed to get myself a job there, working as a chef. I've always been good at cooking and had even worked as a cook in a pub kitchen before, but this was something new to me and, although I was there for a short time, I learned quite a lot.

So... life was ticking along. I was still messed up over the divorce and as my birthday drew nearer, I began to reflect about where my life was and where it was going. University had already taken much longer than it should have and I'd had to repeat my second year twice already - the first time after being attacked in the university bar and having my face smashed in, then, while I was trying to get over the PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder) that it caused, my Grandmother died, after a prolonged illness. It knocked me flat on my arse again.

The PTSD probably made dealing with my Gran's death a lot harder than it should have been. It ended up being just one more reason that I couldn't get my head round the studying.

My contemplation about the preceding decade had lead me to decide that, actually, my twenties weren't all that. I wasn't where I had imagined I would be in life, I hadn't achieved all that I had dreamed of when I was 19. Plus, I wasn't getting any younger. Like most people, I didn't look as good as I used to. I wasn't as fit as I used to be. I was getting wrinkly! It's a pretty depressing place to be. My world was crashing in about my ears.

There weren't any concrete plans made for my birthday yet and it was only brought home to me how close it was when Ali's birthday came round all too soon. His birthday is exactly a month before mine and I had taken great pleasure over the years by giving him earache about how old he was. I'd done it to him every year since we were 19. I'd gotten quite creative with it too. After several years of having a whole month of me making jokes about him being yet another year older, he was hardened to my jibes.

One year - I think it was when he turned 26 - I had a flash of inspiration in response to his resistance to giving me a rise. I turned to him and uttered a phrase that I know has bugged him ever since: "You know the best thing about doing this to you? It's never going to be your turn!" He went nuts. The mere thought of not ever being allowed to direct the same ribbing towards me narked him. Which probably means it's just as well for me that he's not bigger than I am and that he has a bloody good sense of humour.

Ali had a 30th birthday party at his house, which I enjoyed, but it only served to make my ominous feelings stronger. Rather than it being the sort of tear-up we had been used to in previous years, it was mainly his family in attendance and it resembled the sorts of family birthday parties I remember the 'old folks' in my family having when I was a kid. Of course, the fact that Ali and I ended up drunkenly dancing around in his diningroom to Cotton Eye Joe, only came flooding back to me in a wave of cringe-worthy 'morning after' shame. We really had turned into that 'someones Dad' figure that dances around at weddings and birthdays insisting:"Look kids! Yer old man's still got it, eh?"

Strangely enough, I gave Ali very little in the way of ageist abuse during April that year. I knew what was coming and I didn't like it one little bit. The nearer it got to the end of the month, the more depressed I felt.

Now, I bet you're wondering where this is going, since this is in my Top 10 of great moments from my life so far.

There was something to look forward to. A friend from university, Carrie, had gotten in touch at the start of the year and she and her husband-to-be, Mattie, had invited me down to Bedford for my birthday. Ali worked almost every friday and saturday night anyway, so I figured that he would be busy. I made my way down there on the saturday morning, even though my birthday was the sunday. I thought why not make a weekend of it?

It was a beautifully hot and sunny day the first time I set foot in Bedford. Mattie had come to meet me at the station and was to make sure I didn't get lost finding the others. The walk from the train station to the pub that she was in was just the right side of being too long for the heat and sun we were bathed in. The reception I got from Carrie was, as usual, as warm as the weather outside. One of the reasons that she and I were such good friends is down to her having the same sense of humour as Ali and myself, which meant that I wasn't surprised when she launched straight into how old and fat I was looking. Despite my feeling depressed about it all, this was the sort of banter that never really causes any offence. If anything, the irreverent nature of it, bizarrely, made me feel more relaxed.

We had a couple of drinks, had a laugh, did our catching up and then we went back to their flat, which was a small place upstairs from a dingy little club called The Angel. I was staying over, so I dumped my bag there, had a shower and got myself ready for that evening. I had already met Mattie some months before, but other than him and Carrie, I didn't know anybody. I was still made to feel very welcome and we went out in Bedford and had a fun night getting drunk and acting silly.

I can only vaguely remember carrying Mattie down the street, over my shoulder, at the end of the night. While I was doing so, we bumped into to a bunch of Carrie's friends. Among them was Almo, an absolute giant of a man, who I had no idea was going to end up my landlord and housemate later that summer. After being told to put Mattie down, we weaved a path through the human traffic back to The Angel, via the kebab shop across the street, and went upstairs.

They went straight off to bed and I went through to the spare room and out onto the flat roof above the nightclub for a cigarette, it being a non-smoking flat. I don't really remember what time it was when we got back there, but I do remember being awake for the rest of the night and sat outside, on the garden furniture that Carrie and Mattie had built on their 'roof garden'.

By now, it was well past midnight and we were officially into my birthday. I was born at 5:37 a.m. and have had the very odd habit of being awake at that exact time, either by accident or design, for almost every birthday I can remember. Sure enough, as the first rays of sun were just beginning to kiss the chimney tops, I was sat there, alone, on the roof of the club, the slightly sozzled feeling just wearing off. I began to think about what it meant now that I had reached this milestone. I tried to remember turning twenty and couldn't remember it specifically. The kinds of thoughts I was having were a world away from what I had been feeling back then.

At 20, I couldn't wait for the following year, so that I could have a big party and have everyone make a fuss of me, and so that I needn't have to worry about getting ID'd for nightclubs. Now that I was 30, I was full of mourning for the loss of my twenties and sad at how quickly they'd come and gone.

The night of my 21st birthday, my uncle and I had sat in his house and drank a really nice bottle of Glenmorangie between us. He told me something that night that I didn't pay any attention to at the time. He said: "The next 365 days are going to go by so fast; it'll make your head spin." It didn't really mean much at the time, but, the day I turned 22, I got home from work and was getting ready for the night out ahead when the phone rang. I picked it up to hear a voice say: "Told you." What was most annoying about it was that, not only did I know who it was, I knew exactly what he was talking about. It felt like he had told me about how fast it was going to go by only the day before.

The years only get faster and faster and I had now hit 30 a lot faster than I felt I should have. It was like the last decade had been a blur. Then I began think of it like this: I hadn't enjoyed my twenties and I didn't want to be sat there at 5:37 a.m. on my 40th birthday ruing the fact that I hadn't enjoyed being 30. After all, when I got to that age, I was surely going to look back and wish I was 30 again, wasn't I? I started to realise that every milestone age was going to leave me wishing I was younger than I was and that from this moment onwards I would view 30 as being a lot younger than I did for the six months leading up to it.

Something in me changed there and then. I had made the conscious decision to enjoy being 30 for the sake of being 30. I was never going to be that age again, so why not enjoy it for what it was? When I looked back on some of my happier years, I had enjoyed being 18 just for the sake of it - even if it didn't mean exactly that to me at the time. I vowed to make the next ten years better than the last and, almost instantly, I stopped worrying about it. It was like a huge, dark cloud had cleared and revealed the beautiful sunrise I saw before me.

I went to bed and rewoke around midday to hear Carrie and Mattie moving around the flat, having showers and various other morning stuff. I got myself up, washed and came out of the room to meet them. I had been expecting some sort of build up to another night out - it was, after all, now officially my birthday. It came as a bit of a disappointment then when Carrie asked me to hurry up getting myself in order because she and Mattie were off round to his parents for sunday lunch. I shouldn't have been so self-centred about it, but I had just assumed that ,when she had invited me down on the saturday, we were simply making a weekend of it.

We all said our goodbyes and they dropped me off at the train station. I hope they didn't see the disappointment I was feeling, but I also know that I'm pretty crap at hiding these things; it's usually written all over my face.

The biggest surprise of the day was when I got back to Yorkshire and discovered that Ali had had his gig cancelled and that he and Jules weren't busy.

When my ex-wife and I had split, we did the usual division of possessions. I hadn't really given it much thought myself, but I had gotten custody of our large set of poker chips, so that night we got ourselves set up for a bit of poker and some drinks. Ali had a large piece of green baize that he used for gigging (after being accused of scratching pub and club tables with his equipment one too many times) and we threw that over his diningroom table to make a fairly realistic looking card table. Ali figured that it just wouldn't be poker unless we had a large bottle of Jack Daniels to go with it, so after a quick trip up to the local shop for booze and nibbles, we sat down and started playing.

None of us is very good at poker, but I had been playing for a little longer than both of them and I started winning a lot of the chips, mainly down to some ill-advised betting by the others. I did my best to let them in on any little nuggets of information I remembered as we were going along to try and even the odds - we weren't playing for money, after all. One of the things I imparted was that a lot of the time, you're not really playing the cards, but rather what peoples reactions tell you and also that I had learned that poker seemed to be 95% psychology to me. I could be wrong, but that's how I look at it.

As the evening wore on, it turned into humorous farce. I, apparently, have a really annoying habit of picking up a stack of about ten chips and just clicking them through my fingers. It drives Ali mental and Jules found it quite distracting as well. Ali, for his part, discovered that when he laid the cards out in the middle of the table, if he laid them out all square to each other, except for the last one, that I couldn't leave it alone. I didn't even realise that I was reaching over and straightening it up until several hands had gone by and I couldn't figure out what the two of them were laughing at so much.

We played. We drank. We laughed. We took the piss out of each other. It was everything that a birthday spent with close friends should be. It went on until Jules looked at the time and shocked us by announcing that it was after 4 a.m. She was supposed to be going to work in the morning! Ali and I stayed up about an hour after Jules went to bed and had a few cigarettes in the garden and a few more JDs. When we finally floated off to bed, I drifted off to sleep on their sofa with a big, contented smile on my face.

All in all, it had turned out to be one of the best birthdays I have ever had. For having had no plans made at all, the few friends I still had nearby had made it a thoroughly enjoyable weekend. Over the years, I have had many different kinds of birthdays, but you can't over-estimate the value of these kinds of nights. I can only hope there are many more of them.