Yesterday didn’t go entirely to plan.

At 11.10 I boarded a Thameslink train to London where I was scheduled to have a meeting followed by lunch with Ranald Macdonald, MD of Boisdale Restaurants.

The journey to Kings Cross or St Pancras normally takes an hour. However, 30 minutes into the journey (at 11.40) the train stopped at Arlesey, a small station north of Stevenage, where we were told someone had been hit by a train at Stevenage and there would be a delay.

Bit late to this but I am hugely enjoying Bob Shields’ very funny memoir, How Far Is The Nearest Pint?, published in 2006.

Bob was chief features writer for the Daily Record when he joined a Forest expeditionary force that travelled to Paris to meet our French counterparts on No Smoking Day 1999. The following year we invited him to a Forest event in London where we presented him with a Smoker-Friendly Journalist of the Year award.

Still on a football theme (sorry), you may be aware that Chelsea lost the FA Cup final 1-0 to Manchester City yesterday.

No surprise there. City were the favourites, although that didn’t stop Pep Guardiola’s team losing last year’s final to Crystal Palace. Also, Chelsea have a terrible record of late in domestic cup finals, having lost the last seven in which they have appeared.

Celtic play Heart of Midlothian on Saturday in a match that will decide the Scottish Premiership.

Hearts are one point ahead of Celtic so a win or a draw will be enough for the Edinburgh club to win the title. Celtic must win but they have home advantage …

In the wake of the smoking in beer gardens poll, I was interviewed yesterday on Newstalk, Ireland’s ‘favourite independent talk radio station’.

I spoke to presenter Sean Moncrieff for ten or eleven minutes and I rather enjoyed it because it was more like a conversation than an interview.

That didn’t take long, did it?

Less than a week after the closing date for submissions to the consultation on smoke-free public places, the anti-smoking lobby is on manoeuvres to push the government to go even further than the current proposals.

I was in London on Saturday to see the penultimate performance of Jerusalem at the Tower Theatre in Stoke Newington.

Written by Jez Butterworth, the multi award-winning play was first performed at the Royal Court Theatre in 2009 with Mark Rylance and Mackenzie Crook in the lead roles.

My son recently spent a month working on a dairy farm in Devon.

He’s worked there before and this time he was asked to help during the calving season, which meant long days – and sometimes nights – in the fields.