It's got football, it's got statistics, and if it doesn't actually make you come I'll want to know the reason why.

It's the Football 365 stats page.

Here's the Bristol City page. Best viewed large, and at length.

I still haven't moved, by the way. It's now happening on Tuesday. Yes it is.

And it's Hull.

It's not quite chiasmus, but there's a pleasing symmetry between this title and my second last. Merge them, and you get the composite title Bristol City 4 Crystal Palace 2. It could just as easily have said Crystal Palace 2 shit goals from defensive errors, Bristol City 4 belters. 4 being higher than 2, we win.

It could all have gone horribly wrong. After dominating the first half, we'd conceded a stupid goal from a poor headed clearance, and they were much better after the break. It took a penalty miss from their top striker to get us to extra time. We did hit the bar twice, mind. I wouldn't want you to go underestimating us.

For all my American readers, extra time is just like overtime, and the scores are totalled over the two games. We'd won 2-1 at their ground, which combined with their 1-0 after ninety minutes made it 2-2. In any other competition, we'd have gone through on the away goals rule, where the team who's scored the most goals at the other teams ground wins, but rather annoyingly that rule doesn't apply in the playoffs.

I say annoyingly, but actually it gave us the opportunity to witness two brilliant goals. Firstly Lee Trundle scored another cracker, from a loose ball on the edge of the box. This was just before the turnaround (15 minutes each way in extra time). Then Michael McIndoe hit a great one from a well worked free kick. That's seven goals in three games, and six of them wondergoals.

After that Palace lost heart, and we just played out time. Our fans were briefly confused about how many we were winning by, and decided to ask the opposing manager if he knew. Warnock, what's the score? Warnock, Warnock, what's the score? I'm fairly certain he knew, but he wasn't letting on.

The whole experience was unknown territory for Neil Warnock, who'd won all his previous playoff semi-finals. Mind you, he'd never had to play us before. He also lost the Dignity and Composure as a Playoff Manager in a Press Conference to Gary Johnson, by a shocking margin. Yes, that's our Gary Johnson. We love him, you know.

And boo! to the last bus, which left so soon after full time I didn't have time for a drink. I had to come home instead, and settle for some cans of Guinness and a bag of Minstrels on my own instead. The chocolates, you understand. I don't like troubadours any more than the next man, but I'd never be so needlessly cruel.

So what now? Now we play one more game, at Wembley, against Hull or Watford. Hull won 2-0 in the first leg at Watford, so it's probably them, but we find out tonight. The winner plays in the Premiership next season, the loser stays in the Championship. Promotion is generally reckoned to be worth about £60million in revenue, making the playoff final the biggest game in world football, when considered from a financial point of view.

Incidentally, did you know the Championship gets more spectators every season than the top league in Italy? OK, there's 24 teams as opposed to 20, so 552 games against 380, but even so that's a remarkable fact, and testimony to the popularity of football beyond the world of oil gangsters and galacticos.

And it says something about City as well. Most weeks we get 15,000 or so, and we're playing teams whose home gates are 20-25,000. So everything we've achieved has been done against teams with much bigger budgets than ours. Hooray, hooray, hooray for us. Especially, hooray for Gary Johnson, the best thing that's ever happened to City. How do we feel about him? I think you know.

The evocatively named Hermione Eyre does the TV review in the Independent on Sunday. Writing about Clarissa Dickson Wright's documentary about Richard II's fourteenth century kitchens, she says this.

She also managed to reel off a list of medieval kitchen staff with an (almost) straight face. Quite a feat given they sound like the habitués of a particularly debauched nightclub. At work in Richard II's kitchen were: mincers, boners, spit boys, and roasters. Bona butch jobs indeed.

Ooh-er, what a carry on. I wonder why sex and meat have such a similar language.

First off, let's hear it for Teletext. Slow and uninformative it may be, but when your computer crashes with five minutes left in the biggest game of the season so far it's refreshingly reliable.

Society moves on and finds new technical solutions, but sometimes they falter, and when they do you may need to go back to the old ones in a hurry. I keep my old VCR plugged in for precisely that reason, and on my bookshelves there's a Bible, just in case science, humanism and basic human decency all fail simultaneously. Yes, I do always have to go too far. If you don't go too far you haven't gone far enough, if you ask me.

Of course, there's going too far, and then there's being frankly rather silly. Like Europe's sports administrators, who have been trying to get the European Parliament to classify sports matches as performances. If they got their way results would become a form of intellectual property, and we might lose Teletext, BBC match reports and other vital emergency services. There's a report here (MEPs deny sports 'intellectual property' landgrab). Thanks as so often before to striqun for the link.

The article is confusingly worded, but it turns out they've failed, on the grounds that sports events, unlike plays or concerts, aren't predictable.  I guess MEPs don't follow the Premiership, which gets the same top four teams every year.

Frankly, I'm surprised they thought it was worth even trying. Who's going to win the support of governments, the people who organise soccer games or the people who run television? How deliciously disconcerting to find yourself on the same side as Rupert Murdoch.

However that may sit with us, at least we the people can carry on finding out scores without having to pay Trevor Brooking a tax. Today, for instance, it was 2-1 to City. Which means that as long as we win or draw in the return game on Tuesday, we're off to Wembley in a couple of weeks.

Here's the BBC match report, with interviews with both managers. Your homework is to listen to both and tell me which manager is the manager with dignity and composure, and which is the ignorant oaf.

I think you'll find the finer qualities residing in the Bristol City dugout, in the person of Gary Johnson (we love him). Truly a prince among men. If I was a lady in waiting he'd get my rosette every time.

And he's getting noticed in the national media. Last week he was in the Observer, now he's in the Guardian (Johnson takes his low-key methods to new heights). They say it's remarkable that Gary Johnson is so relatively unheralded, and they're not wrong. Well all I can say is, I'm doing my bit.

Beyond football in Bristol there are other games, with other rules. Do you know the best thing about sport? Apart from Gary Johnson. It's the seasons. Every season builds to a dramatic climax, in every division and in every country. And because the seasons vary from one sport to the next, there's always something happening somewhere. Every second of every day. It's like being on a miniature train, endlessly riding the same route round an ice cream factory. Had enough mint chartreuse flavour? Never mind, there'll be some raspberry whipple along in a minute.

Are you anti-sports? Are you waiting and waiting for the off season? Then it's as if you dwell on a planet which orbits many suns, all of them far too close. You yearn for the night, but it never comes, and meanwhile the heat of the day goes on and on and on, and the shelter and relief that you crave is forever denied you. Good. Now stop whingeing and get with the program.

You all remember last year's floods. Some (well, one) thought they were God's (perhaps slightly underplayed) response to gay marriage. Others (also one) suggested that they might trigger a canal-based renaissance for Somerset. That was me, and I was drunk. The Bishop was depressingly sober.

And you've probably heard they're building housing estates on flood plains, and tutted at their criminal folly. Well it turns out they're felons of an even more foolish ilk than we'd realised.

For not only are the lowlands of old England dotted with Barratt homes, they're also full of power stations and sewage works. The BBC has a report here (Flood risk fear over key UK sites).

So if you live on one of the new estates, the problem isn't just boring old floods. It's electrified floods with millions of human turds floating in them.

Way to go, British Government. I think you've missed a trick though. What you should be doing is seeding water meadows with shark eggs. Then you could purge the countryside of people entirely, and make it safe for junior ministers' weekend getaways with their secretaries, without the hoi polloi hanging about.

But not for us. We're in the playoffs, and we've got Crystal Palace, while Watford go to Hull. The winners play each other at Wembley in a couple of weeks. I'll keep you posted, although I'm moving this weekend, so don't go expecting epics.

It's all been enough to earn Gary Johnson, henceforth known as Gary Johnson (we love him), a profile in the Observer (Fanfare for people's man fashioning a Bristol boom). I'd like to become the first manager to go from the Conference up to the Premiership through promotions, albeit with two different clubs, and hopefully we're four games away from that, he says. He's too modest to mention it, but that would be four promotions in six years, two with City and two with Yeovil. When you think of the mess he inherited in his first year at City, when the team was bottom of League 1 at Christmas, that's an even more remarkable achievement.

Before that, he was manager of Latvia. He's still honorary president of the Latvian Football Association, so when we say we love him, we means everyone with any connection with City no matter how tenuous, plus a whole country.

And for the first time in ages, we played really well on Saturday, beating Preston 3-0. This kind of thing never happens. We never score three. We never take the lead then kick on, we take the lead and fall back to hold on to our gains. We never shoot from distance, we certainly never score from distance and we never play with such flair and élan.

The much maligned Lee Trundle is showing the kind of form he's never showed for us before, and David Noble scored the kind of free kick we never score from. For the second goal, Trundle and Michael McIndoe managed a neat little one-two in the opponents' penalty area. Even in the kind of game where things that never happen happen, this is unprecedented.

In other news, it's St George's Day in Bulgaria. I don't think they'd be keen to learn he was Turkish either.

In more recent yet even less important news, I've just found a letter on the doormat. An apology, it's headed, and there's a Royal Mail logo on it.

If they've started apologising, it's hard to know when they could ever stop. I open it. I know you didn't ask me to write to you.[...] You're probably just thinking "oh dear, not another charity asking me for money". If that's the case, then I'm sorry. [...] the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children.

They've touched my heart, with their diffident approach. I shall write to them immediately, and forgive them.

On a less wholesome note, here's Bug Girl. Not her, she's a constant delight, but the subjects of her post, I have pubic lice in my mailbox. If that sounds like a euphemism, it isn't, she says, and we all breathe a sigh of relief for her. Until we read the piece, and begin to worry about the world instead.

And just to make up for my little tease, this is the website of the NSPCC. Give them some money, they do good stuff.

You probably won't hear from me again until I'm in Totterdown. It's a fifteen minute walk and a whole world away. Can't wait.

That's Albert, not Abbie or Dustin. Abbie killed himself in 1989 and Dustin's still alive, which after Meet the Fockers is definitely the wrong way round. One F and two N's in Albert Hofmann, apparently.

Mrs Tilton mourns his passing, which brought it to my attention. Turns out the old guy made it to 102. So now you know the secret of long life - be Swiss, and invent a psychedelic drug.

I've written a little about my acid experiences before, or more accurately their imagined aftereffects. To cut a long story short, I thought I was experiencing mild flashbacks, but it turned out the world was just a little weirder than I'd realised. Well, if it wasn't for Dr Hofmann none of that would have happened, the highs or - well, actually there weren't any lows. So just the highs, then. Thanks Bert.

zombizi celebrates his legacy with this picture. For today's competition, please explain why. This competition is open to everybody called zombizi, and the prize is another post by me about football.

Just to fill the ball-shaped hole in the meanwhile, Ronaldo's been caught with some transvestite prostitutes. That's the Brazilian Ronaldo, not the Portuguese one. Apparently he knew they were prostitutes, but didn't know they were transvestites. I'm not quite sure why he thinks that sounds better.

It's a tense business, being a football fan, and sometimes the last bit is the worst.

There are times when the other team is all over you and you're hanging on for the final whistle, knowing that one goal could snatch it all away. I swear, at times the clock goes backwards. I've sweated it out for City often enough, and it's no different for fans of other teams.

So congratulations to lowly Chester, who eked out a 0-0 draw against Stockport tonight, and secured their survival in League 2. Rarely can a team have failed to score at home against Stockport and made their fans so very happy. The Shropshire Union Canal will be awash with Carlsberg tonight. Commiserations though to Mansfield, who now get relegated to the provinces instead. League 2 teams are only just full time professionals, so going down threatens jobs as well as reputations.

The evening's other game was quite a tense affair too, but Man United scraped through against an unlucky Barcelona to earn a place in the Champions League final in Moscow on May 21.

Both teams in the final will be English, as Liverpool and Chelsea settle the other semi-final tomorrow. Bearing in mind that Liverpool knocked out Arsenal, this means that no English team has been knocked out this year by non-English opposition. This is unprecedented.

Not that there's any cause for nationalistic fervour. It's all about the money, you see. English teams are rich rich rich because of TV rights for the Premiership, so they can afford to buy the best players. Contrary to popular opinion, it isn't actually the warm beer that tempts them over the Channel, but the cold hard cash.

Should be a good final though, whichever team wins tomorrow. I'm just glad I don't work for a Russian airline. Imagine trying to fly two such antagonistic groups into the same city separately. And then there's the fans to worry about as well.

No news is rarely good news in blogging, and you may have guessed from my extended silence that the Stoke game didn't go entirely as hoped.

We lost 2-1, and as a result they're sitting pretty in the automatic promotion spot which we just don't seem to have the bottle for (here's the Championship table). If we'd won 2-1, we'd be sat there instead of them. But we didn't, because we were crap.

It's an fine example of the mind-body problem. Because minds ascribe meaning to the precise location of footballs, thousands of tons of human flesh encased in millions of tons of metal will most likely be hurling themselves along the motorway to Stoke next season, rather than Bristol. 32 small panels of plastic are stitched together to form a sphere and booted round a field, their location, vector and velocity act upon the cognitive pathways in our brains, and months later the coaches roll. 150 years after the birth of Max Planck, it's still not obvious where the momentum comes from.

Not that we should be jumping to any dualist conclusions, partly because Descartes' solution to the mind-body problem is a total crock but mainly because the promotion race isn't quite over yet. If we win both our last two games and Stoke lose both of theirs, or lose one and draw one, we can still beat them. Alternatively, there's still the playoffs.

As long as we can amass two whole points from our last two games, anyway, or failing that as long as the other teams carry on being as shit as we are. Otherwise, we could still finish the season as low as eighth. Which we'd have been thrilled at if we'd known at the beginning of the season, but which hardly seems adequate now.

Saturday is Sheffield United away, then we've got Preston at home for the last game of the season. We could go into this game still hoping for automatic promotion, but we could also go into it one defeat away from falling out of the playoffs.

Oh yes, and a happy St George's Day to you all. Did you know he was Turkish? And his mother was Palestinian. Now you know, you surely ought to go outside, find a drunken, flag waving patriot and burst their xenophobic bubble for them. You know it makes sense.

This is another one I wrote ages ago, but never got around to actually publishing.

I've been telling you for ages that religion isn't inevitable, you know. You have to remember that it's a sociological phenomenon like any other. Such phenomena are characteristic of the societies where they occur (talk about tautological arguments -  I can't believe I ever wrote something that banal), but once the society changes, they can come to seem - well, perhaps rather quaint.

Religion has been a dominant theme in most times and places throughout human history, it's true, but that's also true of other ideas whose time has been and gone. The idea of the divine right of kings, for instance, much invoked by Charles I, was upheld by royalty across the world and across the ages. The worldly and heavenly powers attributed to the monarch/deity tag team varied from one benighted tyranny to the next, but the principle itself remained solid for millennia. Similarly, human sacrifice has been a constant in human history outside the monotheistic era (in which it was banned for blasphemy, not for cruelty).

And now there's some evidence which suggests religion might be about to go the same way. Let's start with Britain. According to the Times, Over half of Britons claim no religion (full UN report here). We are now no longer a faith community, no longer even a patchwork of different faith communities, but a faithless community.

This data fits with the Guardian survey of December 2006, but not with the census data from 2001. In that survey, 72% of respondents identified as Christian. Although the generation who were raised in a solidly Christian country during and after World War 1 have been dying off in the last six years, I suspect that the main cause of this change is something else.

I think that when people said they were Christian, what they meant was C of E. In other words, they'd been baptised in a Church of England church, maybe they'd got married in one, maybe they'd buried people in one.

Since then, religion has become a political issue. Obviously Islam has been in the news almost constantly since 9/11, but also militant atheism has been in the media a lot, and people have become more polarised on the issue. As a result, people who don't believe in God no longer get their kids baptised, they no longer get married in church, and they no longer say C of E on official forms.

And when Richard Dawkins turns up on the telly and says religion is a pile of cack, the majority of people in Britain think you know, I think he's right. And when some wanky old bishop or Madeleine Bunting or somebody starts going on about how extreme he is, most people think who the fuck are you? At least science is a proper subject. Your specialist subject is like Santaology. Not a small cabal of militant rationalists. Not just the educated, not just the articulate. The majority.

This simple fact provides the context for Rowan Williams' recent remarks about sharia law. The Church has realised that the only way they can hang onto special status is by extending that status to other religious groups. Even with Catholics, Muslims, Jews, Sikhs, Hindus, Buddhists and Jedis on board they're still in the minority, but at least that ad hoc theistic caucus gives them control over the Labour Party, which is what matters for lawmaking.

Globally, religion remains mystifyingly popular, but even there we can see encouraging trends. Here's an article in the Atlantic. And if that's too much to take in, here's the same thing in a nice picture.

It can rapidly be seen that there's an inverse correlation between material comfort and religiosity. Standards of living are rising across the planet, so the implication is that secularism should infect everywhere. Other inversely correlating factors are material security (eg health care, pensions, unemployment benefit), political freedom, education and geographical mobility.

So as you can see, it all comes down to the coming global crunch. If we can get through global warming, adjust our economies to sustainable practice and make a world where everyone gets a slice of the pie, we can wave goodbye to bishops, imams, pastors, shamans and the whole sorry gang. If we can't, and if the vision of a decent standard of living for all turns out to be a mirage, then they'll be back, and looking for vengeance. I don't want to get all Churchillian on your ass, but what do you want - broad sunlit uplands or the abyss of a new Dark Age, made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted religion?

Cheer up, it might be our finest hour.

I wrote this about a month ago, but when I hit the Publish button I forgot to take the tick off Draft. As a result it's been sat there tantalisingly out of reach for you all, if you can really be tantalised by something you don't know isn't there.

First off, the Great Tantra Challenge. Nothing to do with Sting, this was the showdown between magic and rationality. In the blue corner, barking mad tantric magician Surinder Sharma. In the red, Sanal Edamaruku, President of Rationalist International and my personal hero for the day [in fact, my personal hero for March 20th - Ed].

The challenge was for Sharma to kill Edamaruku with tantric black magic. In India as in Glastonbury and Totnes, self-proclaimed magicians earn a good living from the fears and desires of the credulous, and Edamaruku wanted to show one up on TV across India.

It's a fascinating tale, well worth the reading, but Edamaruku suffered no ill effects (obviously), and the world is now fractionally less gullible than it was. Well done.

Ben Goldacre of Bad Science has been at it as well. He linked to this video explaining the physics behind homeopathy. When I say explaining, what I mean is saying things like "Well, you know that Energy is equal to mass times the speed of light. But as a friend explained to me, the whole mass of the universe could actually be fitted into a space the size of a bowling ball, so that equation actually reduces to Energy is equal to the speed of light."

I paraphrase. I have to, because the video has been taken down. Presumably it was just too embarrassing. So, Goldacre and Edamaraku. Who said there were no more heroes any more?

And now the fuckers are gonna get explained. It's the worst thing we could possibly do to them, and the best thing we could possibly do for everyone else.

But what's that, in the distance? It's the sound of whining. Once you've taken away religion, magic, quack science, what's left? What is there that makes life worth living?

Well, dog robots, obviously. Thanks to Zooillogix, for staying on top of this stuff so I don't have to.

[And because you're only getting this now, it gives me the chance to add in Richard Dawkins and Lawrence Krauss in conversation].

You'll want to be sitting down for this one.

Bristol City aren't top any more. We're not even second. We're third.

After a dismal defeat in Southampton and a home draw against Wolves (Wolverhampton Wanderers, not a pack of wild dogs), we've been overtaken by West Brom and (again) Stoke.

As previously explained, only the top two teams get automatic promotion, so falling to third is cataclysmic. If we don't beat Stoke next week, the playoffs are a near certainty.

I went into a deep sulk for about three hours, then Sean cheered me up. Have you seen this week's Venue? he asked. You're in it.

And so I was. In the list of Bristol's best blogs. They've listed twenty, in no particular order, and I'm one of them.

I'm touched. The last time I made a shortlist for anything it was 1985, and the shortlist in question was an injunction. It was only a snippet (in Venue, the injunction was quite detailed), but it's all grist to the mill.

Jon Eccles talks about religion (which he's against) and Bristol City FC (which he's all for), it says. Both assertions are true, but what happens when they conflict?

I found out the other day. Our goalkeeper, the peerless Adriano Basso, is a born again Christian, and rumour has it he's been taking Bradley Orr to services with him. They're two of our best players.

Dave told me about this at work, and what were the first words out of my mouth? Well if that's what it takes, I said. I can't believe I was willing to write off two human beings to the ignominy of medieval superstition, just so we can get promoted. Never mind throwing the Christians to the lions, I was fully prepared to countenance throwing two of our lions to the Christians. The shame of it. How can I go back on the Richard Dawkins website now?

But as if to refute the very notion of karma, the universe has forgiven my grubby little lapse and granted me a new superpower. I just put the lights on in the living room, and one of them didn't come on. I reached into it to change the bulb, grabbed the old one and twisted it to remove it. Instead of popping out, it lit up.

The power of electricity, at my fingertips! Just one touch, and dormant light bulbs spring back to life. I might use it to give our front line a bit of a jolt. Pour encourager les autres, that's what I say.

Last weekend, I was discussing server farms with my good friend Glenn. In particular, we were wondering about their energy consumption. He sent me a link about Google server farms in the week.

Apparently Google have about 450,000 servers, globally scattered but locally clustered. According to the article, that number of servers would have an energy consumption roughly equal to about 200 megawatts.

A watt, of course, is one joule per second. Even the biologists in my readership know that. The point is that it's a way of averaging energy consumption over time. My lightbub says 100W on it (you can't use the energy saving ones with the dimmer switch in my lounge, unfortunately), which by my calculations means Google are costing the planet about two million full strength lightbulbs.

Is this right? Because it seems like bugger all, amounting to 1/2500 lightbulbs per human, and I'm sure Google must be more evil than that. You'd think it would take that much power just to monitor all the dissidents for the Chinese government. If anyone can fill in my uninformed prejudice with something more considered, this is the place to do it.

Also, who else runs an equivalent level of server farms? Flickr? Yahoo? Actually, that's the same thing. Which reminds me, Sean says you should all stop using Flickr, which he describes as the MacDonalds of photogalleries, and start using Gallery instead.

Also also, is it the case that server farms can basically be anywhere? Because if so, surely they could be where it's windy, wavy or sunny. With the obvious benefits thereof.

You tell me.

It's the headline all fans dream of. City chairman promises to spend, it says.

For a Championship team, being promoted is worth about £40m. That's for extra TV rights, a share of the gate at the big stadiums, increased sales of merchandising and so on. Steve Lansdown says £30m of that would go on players.

I'd like to offer my services right away. I've been standing aloof for so long now, quite literally cheering from the sidelines, and it's time for me to throw my hat in the ring. I wouldn't need the whole £30m, that would be unfair on the other players and contrary to my egalitarian values. A third would be fine.

But what would I bring to the team? I found out the other week on Match of the Day. One of the old Arsenal back four, who seem to have metamorphosised into the BBC front four, was talking about what it would take to stand up to Man Utd. You'd need a good, solid defender to sit on Ronaldo from start to finish, and take him out of the game, he said.

And there you have it. My USP. I could guarantee to sit on Ronaldo for as long as required, and frankly we aren't just talking about taking him out of the game. I just hope the little urchin's got tough ribs, or I'll take him out of the whole season.

But we need some points, or none of this will happen. Starting with three at Southampton tomorrow, ideally.

Exhaustive calculations have revealed that the earliest date Bristol City could possibly be crowned Champions of the Championship, an official and euphonious title to add to their unofficial one of Queen of all our Hearts, is Saturday April 19. On that day we travel to Stoke for one of this year's most crucial games.

I can hear the crass taunts from my less mature readers now. We're going to Stoke? You're going to Stoke with them, are you?

Yes I am. Yes I am going to Stoke. Four of us have tickets for the game, and we're all going up in Dave's car. So ha! to you, jejune readers, and may you wallow in the juice of your own contrition for all time, or at least until the end of the season.

It's my first away game, and I'm quite childishly excited about the whole thing, especially now I've realised I could witness our grand instalment as lords of all we survey. Admittedly the odds against it are in the order of 450 to 1, but still. We could also guarantee a top two place, which means automatic promotion. The odds against that are only about 80 to 1, which is a comparative certainty.

So mark it in your diaries, and bookmark the page you need. You'll have to go BBC Sports Championship live scores for the crucial facts, at about 19:20 GMT. It's particularly important for all my American readers, as your news channels will be busy covering the buildup to some dreary election, and won't have time for the real news.

I'll be no use, because there's a 1 in 80 chance I'll be dead drunk. Expect an avalanche of slightly late match reports, gossip and unsubstantiated speculation over the next few weeks though.

I'm sure by now you all know Bristol City are top again, but many of you will be unsure what that actually means. Inter alia, it means these things.

The division we're top of is the Championship. Each team in the Championship plays 46 games. You can see from the table that we've got 5 games left. There's three points for a win and one for a draw, we've got 70 points now, so our maximum total is 85.

Apart from West Brom, no other side has a higher maximum than us. The top two teams are automatically promoted to the Premiership, the Major League of English soccer for my American readers (welcome back Major League, by the way), so if we win all our remaining games no-one can stop us. This situation is always described by players and managers in interviews with the following sentence. It's in our own hands. It's kind of the law that they have to say that. Especially managers, who have to toe the rhetorical line in case they lose the dressing room.

At the end of the season, the clubs placed third to sixth play off in their own little miniature tournament, and the winner gets promoted with the top two. The three bottom teams in the Premiership replace them in the Championship. The word for this is relegation, which originally meant being exiled from Rome to somewhere a bit more basic in the provinces, as happened to Ovid. This captures the sense of the event very nicely.

Of course, smartarse commentators predict exactly this for City next season, should they be so impertinent as to actually get promoted. In fact, they regard this as so likely it's considered hardly worth our playing the actual games. They forget one thing though.

They forget that it actually doesn't matter so much that we're highly likely to get dismembered by Man Utd and Arsenal, because Man Utd and Arsenal dismember everybody. They're the giant hornets of football, cutting all the lesser teams apart with mechanical efficiency.

So as Dave pointed out earlier in the month, survival isn't about those games. It's about doing well against Middlesbrough, or Birmingham City. It's also about beating the teams that come up with us.

For let us be frank, the Championship hasn't produced any world beaters this season. To see this, compare our division with League 1 and League 2. The top teams in those divisions have 82 and 85 points, as compared with our 70. No-one in the Championship has dominated. As a result it's still very exciting, but it's made some people think the promoted teams will go straight back down again. This ignores the poor quality of football being played at the lower end of the Premiership, where the number of points needed to avoid relegation this season may well be the lowest number ever.

It's a sign of the narrow range of teams in our division that we're top, despite having a goal difference of only +2. We've scored 49 goals, but we've let in 47. The bottom team, Colchester, has actually scored more goals than us, 55. It's just that they've let in 76.

Some ignoramuses have tried to argue that this shows we've been lucky. How shallow they are. In fact, it just shows the brilliant success of the City gameplan, as orchestrated by our managing wunderkind, Gary Johnson (I love him).

For the typical City game goes like this. Lots of effort and attacking play in the first half an hour, a goal up, but hanging on until half time as the midfield run out of puff. The half-time tea and cocaine make for a zestful resumption, but then they come down, and it's all hands to the hatches until the final whistle. In the rare event that we're not winning, a big rush in the last five minutes to grap a last ditch winner.

Not that I'm recommending cocaine for sporting endeavour, you understand, and this is one reason why. Thanks to Glenn for the link.

The point though is that somehow, week after week, we scrape out of games with a narrow victory. Unfortunately, we've lost a few away games by three, four or even five goals, and that's what's done for our goal difference. What might at first glance appear to be a sign of vulnerability, when understood more deeply can be seen as a testimony to Johnson's almost magical ability (don't start - I said almost) to extract the best from his squad.

So who's going up? Well, the team with the easiest run in is Watford, but they've been in terrible form recently. Wolves are down in sixth, and play four of their last five games against teams in the top half of the table, so can probably be discounted. That leaves three from four. My guess is West Brom, Hull and us, with Stoke missing out, but then again I've got a terrible record in these matters. Last World Cup I predicted a final between Brazil and Argentina, only to see both eliminated in the next round, and wrote off losing finalists France early on.

Incidentally, inter alia just means among other things. It's a literal translation which adds nothing to the phrase at all, and I could just as easily have said it in English.

Which is a statement of intent. I've decided it's time to relax my eternal vigilance against the least hint of bombast, and start to indulge myself a little. I'm sure there are times when you weary of my constant obsession with plain English as much as I do. From now on I'm going to cut my prose loose from its quotidian moorings.

Why just say things are turning red, when you could have them rubesce? It isn't even a word, but rubescent is, and I know I can trust you to work it out. In fact, I may just skip the Renaissance middle men altogether, and start posting entirely in Latin. It's not like I've got a dressing room to lose. Just my lovely readers, and you're not going anywhere, are you?

Vale, amice. Plus pila quam primum.

Now before I start, I need to make alternative arrangements for some of you, who may just be a little bored by the subject of football.

So here's a link to a page that's all about camera lenses. It discusses every camera lens in the fucking world in the most exhaustive detail possible, so there's absolutely no danger of anyone being bored in any way.

Still here? Then you must surely care that Bristol City are top again, after a dramatic winner against Norwich in injury time. Good old Stevie Brooker headed his first goal for City in a while.

For he's had a difficult time over the last year. After a short prison sentence following a fracas in a nightclub (it isn't just Premiership players that do moronic things), he had a nasty injury, and recently he's been on loan to Cheltenham, which is surely enough karmic retribution for anyone. He's been banging them in there, and Gary Johnson's brought him back for the promotion push in the last few games.

You can see the table here. Or, for those who are only able to engage in anything if it's first passed through the medium of a photographic website, here it is on Flickr.

Best viewed large. I think I might submit it to DMU.

In other football news, players and managers have been struggling to express themselves through the medium of words. Russell Brand in the Guardian, watching Fabio Capello being interviewed after the France game, noticed that he was clearly understanding questions in English because he started to answer before the interpreter translated, but still chose to give his answer in Italian. Ray Wilkins on Sky was on hand to explain. "With foreign", he said, "you can understand it but you can't speak it". In my experience of foreign it's the other way round if anything. I can rattle off a form of foreign known as French at ten to the dozen, but I still need French