It’s been a weird few months, this period of time when everything I do, every decision I make is made with the knowledge that I’m going to be leaving the country for a year. Take my time at CCFC. It’s been really good, and has opened up doors which were previously nailed shut, and I’ve met at least one person who has had a profound impact on me.

The issue with that is that I’m leaving in 10 days - and there’s nothing I can do about it. In normal circumstances I’d like to think we could make each other very happy. We get along, have lots in common, and she is stunningly beautiful. But there’s no prospect of a relationship, and when I come back in a year we’ll have lost that bond which has formed over the last couple of months. There’s also the career implications of my year abroad. I think I could probably stay in England and get a job in football - lets hope that remains the case ‘pon my return, should that be an option I’ll still be keen to pursue.

It has to be said though that the old mantra of ‘never meet your heroes’ rings true. Granted, my hero isn’t a person in this instance but a football club. I saw my first game when I was 3, Coventry City vs Liverpool FC at Highfield Road (we lost), with my dad. I watched on as as infant when the FA cup winning side paraded the silverware through the city centre, and for as long as I’ve been - I’ve been a Coventry City fan. Things just aren’t the same from the other side of the curtain, where a football club is exactly what you’d fear it would be, a soulless enterprise like any other, focused not on on-the-field gains, but on what they would mean in financial terms for the business. It’s the bastard offspring of the sordid affair between the sports and entertainment industries, and it is a hungry beast which demands money, and lots of it, from people all too willing - through a blind love for the game - to hand it over. You can’t blame football clubs for that of course, but the game has come a long way since the innocent charm of a Saturday afternoon spent sat on your fathers knee observing a spot of good old fashioned 80’s hooliganism.

If (other than meeting that one phenomenal colleague) there is one thing the experience has given me, it’s this: I do not want to be a print designer. People kept referring to me as ‘the designer’ or ‘graphic designer’. I’m a WEB designer, a completely different animal, and not one suited to working on colour profiles and crop margins. I started off appreciating the tactility of print design compared to that of the web, but as time has gone on, the limitations of my skills and knowledge in the field coupled with my unfed passion for web design has begun to take its toll. Give me IE6 and some code soup, I genuinely missed it.

So, I met the girl of my dreams, I grew to loath print, and opened some potentially useful doors. And pretty soon I’ll sod off and probably wonder ‘what if?’ for the next couple of months.