When I first had the idea to travel around the UK without using guidebooks I wasn’t sure if it would work. Would the advice and generosity of visitors to this web site really be enough to get me around the country?

So when my team, Forest, inexplicably got themselves into a position where maybe, just maybe, they might be able to secure promotion on the last day of the season, I decided to trial the idea with a quick visit to Nottingham.

Well, I’ll be damned if I did just have one of the best weekends of my life.

The highlights included:

- a pub crawl through the finest real ale establishments that ended with me on a sofa surrounded by pizza scraps and the DVD menu of Kung Fu Hustle on a continuous loop.

- Forest going up, in front of a sell-out crowd, after a pulsating game and fortuitous results from other grounds, followed by the biggest pitch invasion I’ve ever seen.

- a theatre performance based on Richard Benson’s book The Farm in a tiny Leicestershire village

- more real ale, this time listening to a skiffle band called Kick ‘n’ Rush who interspersed their ditties with really bad working men’s club jokes

- a night in sleeping in Toton’s premier Tiki Lounge, followed by a morning listening to rare Northern Soul 45’s

If the trip continues in this vein it’s going to be one of my best ever - and the death of me!

Yep, Nottingham has set the bar high. (Big, big thanks to Al, Martin, Kath, Tim and Nick.)

Now it’s up to the rest of the country to step up to meet the challenge.

Essex and East Anglia are next.

After I lay down for a bit.

A couple of weeks ago I wrote a post asking for advice on where I should go on a planned trip around the UK. In typical fashion, you guys responded with some really great suggestions.

Well, things have progressed since then and I have definitely decided to write a book about my adventures studying ‘Life in the UK.’ What’s more, I’ve decided to ditch the guidebooks and rely solely on tips and advice from visitors to my website. And, if anyone makes the offer, sleep on their couches.

As such, I needed something a bit more practical than the comments section in a blog post for people to leave their suggestions and for me to interact with them. So to that end I’ve set up a Blimey! website here with it’s own forum here.

I should point out that while all the nuts and bolts work, the Have Your Say forum looks horrible. To that end, my web gurus at e-CBD are feverishly working up a template to apply to it so it looks like the rest of the site, and more importantly, makes navigation back to other parts of PeterMoore.net a snap.

Applying the template won’t affect your registration details or your posts so please feel free to go and start telling me where to go right now.

Yesterday I mentioned the song ‘Throw Your Arms Around Me.’ So, today, on Anzac Day, I thought I’d have a bit of a dig around on YouTube and see if I could find a clip of it for all the non-Aussies out there.

This is a version by the Hunters & Collectors who recorded it initially:

Then I came across this absolute gem:

Enjoy!

I woke this morning and was struck by the thought that today is a bit like a metaphor for my life at the moment - a day that falls in the crack between a day celebrating English nationality, St George’s Day, and Anzac Day, a day that defines how Aussies feel about themselves.

After four years living in the UK I feel like I’m in limbo myself. Neither an arm or an elbow, as my dad would say. When I went home for Christmas last year I was so excited to be back in Sydney. But after six weeks I was ready to come ‘home’ to England.

Having said that, I didn’t feel any particular surge of English pride yesterday. I went into town to do an interview with Robert Savage for the St Christopher’s Inn website. I was struck by how well-suited the Thames is to misty weather but the sight of St George’s Cross flapping atop white vans scuttling about the city didn’t get my heart a flutter.

Tomorrow is Anzac Day so I’ll get the chance to test my levels of Aussie pride. I’ll wander into a Walkabout somewhere, order a Crownie and see if the sight of a Boxing Kangaroo flag and the sound of Mark Seymour belting out ‘Throw Your Arms Around Me’ on the jukebox still does it for me.

I love this song by Speedmarket Avenue. And I love the fact that the film clip was shot in Skansen.

Dorky guitarist. Feisty girl in a red coat. And moose.

What more could you want?

As of last month I’ve been living as a permanent resident in the UK long enough to apply for citizenship. All I have to do is sit the new citizenship test, cough up a sizable wad of cash and I can get my hands on a British passport that’ll allow me to live and work anywhere in the EU.

Luckily both Australia and the UK are cool with dual citizenship so I don’t have to do anything crazy like renounce my Aussie roots and support the Poms in cricket. But I do have to brush up on life in the UK before I sit the test.

The Home Office have produced a book to help aspiring British citizens called ‘Life in the United Kingdom - A journey to citizenship.’ I bought myself a copy along with a ‘The British Citizenship Test for Dummies.’ (Yep, there is such a book!) Now I annoy all my English friends by asking them questions from it and laughing when they get it wrong.

Flicking through it has made me realise how little I’ve done since I’ve been here. I’ve wandered around London a bit. And been to a few places like Inverness, York and Bury St Edmunds to do some events. But that’s about it. Even the sporting events I’ve popped along to have involved Aussies.

I’ve decided to change all that. Before I sit the citizenship test I’m not just going to study life in the UK, I’m going to experience it. And I’ve got the next three or four months to do it.

That’s where you guys step in. Where are the places I need to go and what are the things I need to do to fully understand what makes this place tick? I’m looking to those of you who live here to give me some insider tips. And those of you who have only visited the UK I want the places and things that struck you as quintessentially British when you visited here.

My future as an Aussie/Brit depends on it!

One of the downsides of running a blog is dealing with the spam comments - the ones promoting online casinos, car insurance, dodgy meds and women with no clothes on. A plug-in called Akismet gets most of them (94,176 spam comments since I installed it) but some slip through and I have to delete them manually.

Lately I’ve been getting some comments from cheeky chaps trying to promote their own travel websites. Yeah, that’s right Bjørn Christian Tørrissen and Andy the Hobo Traveller. You thought I didn’t notice, didn’t you?

I could have used my omnipotent power to delete them but I didn’t. To be honest, I admire their chutzpah. And to be fair to both of them they did make salient, well-informed comments before slipping in a little bit of shameless self-promotion.

I remember how hard it was when I was first starting out. I did all kinds of things to get noticed, to build my profile. So so if a comment here can get a few visitors to their web sites and help support their endeavours, all power to them.

In fact, Andy and Bjorn have inspired me to start up a new section on PeterMoore.net to highlight travel websites set up by my readers. You’ll find it here and if you want your website featured email me the URL and a pithy one-line summary of what it’s all about.

Before I go though I’d just like to congratulate Bjørn Christian Tørrissen on his URL, Bjorn Free.com. Quite simply the best EVER name for a Scando travel site.

Just thought I’d alert you to an interview with Paul Theroux in the Guardian today. He was one of my biggest influences when I was starting out - particularly his book The Great Railway Bazaar. In the piece he talks about the genesis of that book and his views in general on the travel writing genre. You’ll find it here.

I particular like his thought at the end of the article.

‘I think travellers are essentially optimists, or else they would never go anywhere,’ he says. ‘A travel book ought to reflect that optimism.’

I couldn’t agree more.

I’ve just been reading Blood River by Tim Butcher. It’s an account of the author’s journey through the Congo following in the footsteps of Henry Morton Stanley. Tim is a foreign correspondent for the Daily Telegraph (UK) so it is extremely well-researched and full of interesting stuff on the history of this troubled corner of the world.

It has been anointed as one of Richard and Judy’s books this year so those of you who live in the UK will have seen it everywhere. The upside of such ubiquity is that you can pick it up cheap in Tesco. Like I did. Or on Amazon where it’s half price at the moment.

Having travelled across the Congo myself - it was still known as Zaire back then - I was interested to see if things had changed much in the intervening years. From what I can gather, it’s pretty much the same, just a little more lawless. I don’t think I could get away with giving corrupt officials a cling-on koala when they asked for a ’souvenir’ like I did back then.

I don’t know whether the barge trip from Kisangani to Kinshasa is still as horrific as mine was. I spent six weeks in a little nest I made surrounded by kidnapped baby chimpanzees shitting themselves to death. Tim cadges a lift down the river with the UN.

Having said that, it was still one of the most amazing journeys of my life. Hopefully you guys will get to read about it when my book about going around the equator finally sees the light of day.

In the meantime, he’s a pic from the trip. This guy heard that there was a westerner on board and paddled out to the barge in a pirogue to try and sell me this wooden model of the steamboats that used to ply the Congo River. Before they were looted for parts. And wood. And any metal that could be sold as scrap.

It’s funny, of all my trips, it’s the one I did from London to Sydney that seems to capture people’s imagination most. I’m always getting email from people about to set off to do it themselves. And cornered after talks by travellers who have attempted all or most of it.

I’ve even had a beer with two Canadian guys in Sydney who actually managed to get a boat from Bali to Darwin. It cost them $US1,500, the captain locked them in a cabin for the entire crossing and then they were arrested by the Australian Feds when guns and drugs were found on board too.

Some of you may have seen the piece I did in The Observer Magazine over the weekend. They were doing a special travel supplement on the world’s greatest journeys and asked me to contribute. Now the National Geographic Traveller blog wants to have a chat. 14 years after I did the trip it seems it’s an idea whose time has come.

There are two reasons, I think. First, the guys at OzBus started up a ‘regular’ bus service between London and Sydney. (The fact that it’s a great idea can be seen in how many other more established tour companies have jumped on the bandwagon since.) And secondly, the whole global warming thing. For some reason, travelling overland is seen as more carbon friendly than sitting on a plane for 24 hours.

The inconvenient truth is that one ten minute Tuk-Tuk ride in Bangkok probably spews out enough carbon to warm up th earth by a degree or two.