Several years after the low of living with me in Yorkshire my brother (right) has finally hit the big time. To be fair, things went really well after his ill-fated stay with me. He’s spent the past year or so living in Edinburgh and making the most of the rich and vibrant night-life. He got a great job that’s much more interesting than mine (i.e. it’s not writing software) and he’s been having a whale of a time.

He stayed with us this weekend for the last time because he’s moving to California. San Francisco to be precise. I’d normally say he’s a lucky git but to be honest he’s worked hard and deserves everything that’s coming to him. If I were a betting man I’d have said that I’d have been more likely to move to the centre of the software world before he would but it’s funny how life surprises you some times. And how settled I am living in Yorkshire!

For one thing, I’m going to miss him. He’s my brother and my best friend. Barely a few days go by that I don’t speak to him, so for him to be on the other side of the world seems a long way away. However with modern technology like Skype we’ll be able to talk just as much as we do now. It also means I now have a holiday destination for early next year. We did a California road trip a couple of years ago and loved it and I can’t wait to go back.

So to my younger brother Jamie, good luck, all the best and stay off the burgers!

A couple of months ago I bought a new TV that happened to have an integrated digital decoder. This meant that I could receive Freeview which is, perhaps not surprisingly, free. I've had a Sky Digital subscription for the past 6 years and at £40 a month it occurred to me that if I could live without it, I'd have paid for the TV in two years.

On thinking about it some more I realised that the only things I actually watch on Sky (which contains several hundred channels of mostly rubbish) are The Simpsons, some Spanish football and the odd Premiership match. Oh, and a couple of series like Stargate SG-1 and it's cousin Stargate Atlantis (well, we've got to get our sci-fi fix). Since The Simpsons and things like Stargate can be downloaded from file sharing networks for free (as we did with Lost Season 2 - we devoted an entire weekend watching all the episodes back to back - I only wish the ending was worth it!).

Freeview has 30 or so channels including Sky Sports News which meant I could still watch Soccer Saturday from my sofa when I was feeling lazy. So I decided I'd cancel Sky and see how I got on without it. Now that's not as easy as it sounds.

If you try to cancel Sky they'll put the pressure on to try and keep you thereby lowering their churn rate. It's a well known fact that you can get Sky for half price by threatening to cancel, getting offered it at half price for three months, then doing the same in three months time. Oh, call during the week if you want to try it out! But if you really want to cancel then you have to battle through a half-hour gauntlet of hard-sell. I didn't want that because I knew I could be tempted to keep it. So I did the decent thing…

…I told them I was moving to New Zealand! Within 3 minutes it was cancelled and they were wishing me good luck. Although it would be 4 weeks before they actually turned it off. And that happened to be Monday of last week.

So I've had over a week without Sky and it's been tough going cold turkey. I've missed the sound of Homer Simpson saying "D'Oh!". I've missed several good football matches. And I've missed randomly flicking through the music channels. Initially I wanted to pick up the phone and be re-connected, but now I'm realising that there are plenty of other decent things to watch, and more importantly there are many more interesting things to do than watch TV!

Of course it could be that I'm in such a good mood that finally the vastly under-rated yet hilarious Garth Marenghi's Darkplace has been released on DVD that I'm pretending life without Sky will be okay. Only time will tell…

I just got a new mobile phone and since I was switching from Nokia (interesting spelling suggestion right) to Motorola and I couldn’t get the import tool to import my list of contacts I had to painstakingly go through all my numbers one by one and copy them to their new home.

It was a strange and in many ways sad experience. I’ve known a lot of people over the last 10 years or so of mobile phone ownership. Quite a few I’m still in regular contact with but a surprising number of them I’ve not spoken to in over 2 years. A few even longer. And there were a couple who I couldn’t even remember at all.

It’s sad because if you’ve made it into my contacts list then it means you mattered to me when I added you. I only save the numbers of people I want to call again. To see the name of former close friends and wonder what they’re doing now means I didn’t keep in touch like I wanted to. To see the name of someone I can’t even remember feels like a failure. And no, before you suggest it I’m not going to call them!

You see time’s short and life’s short. You can’t keep in contact with everybody. Your life and their lives move on and you can only look back with fondness at the time you shared. There’s no sense looking back with regrets. But if it’s all the same I’m a sentimental old fool so I’ll keep all the numbers. Even if I never dial them again, at least they’re there as a memento of times past.

I’ve spent the past six months playing in an 8-a-side league with work. It’s been an interesting experience. For one thing, no matter how seriously you play football, it’s always a different matter when you’re keeping score and even more so when it’s in a league.

The standard was pretty high, high enough that if we slacked off we’d get punished. One team in particular was full of really good players, we got hammered by skill, youth and teamplay and it was a wake-up call of how hard we had to work to win. We struggled to get a regular team out - some people were put off by how tough it was and others were working away. So with a make-shift line-up each match we didn’t do too well. When we realised we needed to win our last 4 games to stay up we pulled it together and won 3 out of 3, but just fell short in the last game and got relegated. (Well, the last game of the season to decide who went down was forfeit so we went down - a brown envelope full of £20 notes probably fixed that one). It was disappointing but all the clichés they say about football are true. It’s a team game and the league table never lies. We may have thought we deserved to stay up but if that was the case we would have.

And so it came to the end of season tournament. A chance to redress the balance and salvage some dignity. We had to merge with another team to get enough players together and even then we only had 8. Given that we would have to play up to 6 games to win the tournament some subs would have been nice. As it happened one of our players sprained his ankle in the first match so we had to draft in a friend from one of the other teams to join us.

There were a total of 14 teams and you had to get through a mini-league of 3 matches, then on to the quarters, semis and final. We won our first match, then lost the second (we played two in a row and weren’t concentrating). We won the third and that put us through to the next round. We thought we were lucky to get through and the injuries started to pile up. I had an injured hip before I even started (I could hardly walk last Wednesday), one guy as I mentioned sprained his ankle, another had two dodgy knees and our keeper strained his groin right early on.

So into the next round we went and managed to win it against - ironically - the team of the guy who joined us when we went a man down. I almost hoped we’d lose so we could have a rest. Almost. Then came the semi-final. It was close (I came within an inch of scoring which is better than I’ve done all season!) and went to penalties. Incredibly, we won (with me scoring a very calmly taken penalty) and we were through to the final!

All but one of us was now hurting and the lad who sprained his ankle came on again much to my surprise (tough lad). That was lucky as another of our players did his knee in and his day was over. We were up against a good team we’d lost to in the league and they had 4 subs so would surely be fresher. It was agreed we’d play 10 minutes then if it was level go to penalties (we were running short on time and the England match was starting). After some good battling performances (when our last injury-free man got injured) it was 0-0 and the shootout began.

It was quite a demonstration of penalty taking as it got to 4-4 and nobody had missed (including me). Our stand-in player scored, their effort was saved and we won! We couldn’t believe it!

I felt a little bad for the team who lost as undoubtedly they were a quality team but it’s all about results at the end of the day. And while it wasn’t exactly like winning the FA cup, there were 13 other teams there that day who really wanted to win and took it very seriously, and yet it was us who came away with the trophy (right). It’s the first time I’ve ever won a medal for anything and while it may be a trinket you can buy for a few quid it’s a symbol of the 8 of us being the best out of perhaps 140 people. Not bad and I’ll always treasure the memories.

In the end, I think having no subs helped us as we had to pull together as a team more and to say we gave battling performances each match would be an understatement! Anyway, we’ll be in the second division next season so we’ll be looking to bounce straight back up. But at least we’ll have a trophy sitting in the office for the next year to remind us of our achievement!