I try to lead an active lifestyle and play a lot of sports including football and tennis, but have found it hard recently because of my recurring shoulder and lower back pain. I have been to the doctors and he said that I should rest, but it is hard when you have to work and look after the children as you are bound to do a bit of lifting and stretching.

I’ve been looking at booking some massage treatments as I have read that it can help the muscles to repair by stimulating the blood flow and can remove metabolic waste faster. I have had a couple of acupuncture sessions already and they seem to have helped and I hope that having a few sessions of sports massages will aid my recovery even quicker.

I have searched Google and found a couple of places that are local to me specialising in sports massages, so will ring up and book some sessions later today. Hopefully I will be back to playing football soon, at least before the end of our local league season and be ready to play a few games of tennis with the kids when the weather gets better.

I’ve been looking at updating my bathroom for some time now and have been looking at fitting an underfloor heating system as well. This proved to be difficult as I also wanted the floor to be tiled, but conventional tiles can block some of the heat generated by the system making it less efficient.

I recently found what I hope to be the solution in Travertine tiles. Travertine is a natural stone which is porous, so it is ideal to use with an underfloor heating system as it lets a good amount of the heat through the tile.

What is also great about travertine is that it is relatively cheap and comes in a variety of different styles and colours. I am also looking at tilling the walls with travertine tiles and have found some nice looking mixed mosaic tiles which would suit the bathroom down to the ground.

I’ll keep you posted on what I end up choosing and will try to take some pictures of the finished bathroom (when I eventually get round to finishing it).

I was looking through the mirror (The Tabloid) online, and noticed that they had a page dedicated to the Cheltenham Festival. They are also offering a free bet to the value of £2 which would be best spent on an outsider, as on a favourite you might not make that much money.

I’ve seen a horse I fancy today in the 3.20, its going to be an each way bet as its larger odds but its looks good and its won at the distance before and conditions seem to suit.

I think I’ll go to the shop at lunch and put my bet on, I don’t mind doing it online but if I get any returns it can take a while for it to be deposited back into my account. Going into the shop i can also use my free bet voucher.

My dad is a big fan of Hookah pipes and tends to spend a lot of his spare time smoking them back home. I’ve been looking at getting him a vaporizer to try, so ideally need something small light and portable due to postage prices.

I’ve found him an iolite vaporizer which retails at around £150 but its small lightweight and portable and it comes in a range of four colours Black, Blue, Green and White.

Hopefully it won’t cost me more than £15 to send the Iolite vaporizer over to him and it should only take a few days, i might send him a few packets or herbal smokes if I can fit them into the box.

The F1 was an interesting race in the face that Redbull have a fancy new Exhaust which exits at the rear of the car and not at the sides. Adrian Newy has designed the car so i expect he knows what he’s doing as he’s built championship winning cars before but it just seems like an odd step to me.

Well Alton towers have got back to me about my t shirt printing idea and they are thinking of starting this summer season.

They are buying direct from the t shirt manufacturers such as Gildan and Fruit of the Loom. They are looking at charging a low price per unit, and doing all the t shirt printing within the booths that do the printed photos. They are only offering T shirts for the time been and if the campaign is successful then they will expand in to other printed items.

They are saying that it will be around a 15 minute wait from your photo bee picked to it been ready to wear on your day out.

I can’t wait to see what the t shirts will look like, hopefully they’ll be really fancy and graphical like only Alton Towers could do.

While driving home from work last night, I ended up stuck in traffic (as I so often seem to) behind a large 4×4. As my commute routinely involves 40 mins in slow moving traffic, I habitually spend a large portion of my time staring at the back end of various cars. This one was unremarkable, save for the fact that it was sporting a personalised number plate, reading 17A. As I continued my walking-speed journey home, I found myself thinking the two thoughts I always think when encountering a personalised number plate –

1) What is the significance of the numbers and letters?

2) How much did it cost?

Of course, the first question sometimes answers itself. “Boss 1” or “J4MES” are pretty self explanatory, but sometimes it’s not so clear. In this case, what was the significance of 17A..? Presumably the number has some special meaning to the owner; in particular (as I intuitively thought) as it must have been expensive.

Which brings us to question two – price. I’m aware that private registration plates can be hugely expensive. In fact, I’ve flirted with the idea of getting some myself, despite the dark looks and mutterings of “mid-life crisis” from my wife. They are unique and individual, and would add that extra special touch while adorning my Merc. However, then price can indeed be prohibitively expensive. Plate prices can range all the way from around a grand, to being more expensive than your average super car. Indeed, the most expensive licence plate ever sold simply read “1” and was purchased at a charity auction in the UAE in 2008 for the eye-watering price of £3.5 million. So possibly not the cheapest car accessory you could come by…

Of course, there was no way of knowing the cost of that 17A private number plate, or what it stood for – but I wondered all the way home.