I think this one explains itself. The problem is being resolved, so expect something about Wembley soon.

We lost, by the way. So don't expect upbeat.

I'm moving. Literally. Not as in I have a velocity which when multiplied by my mass gives my momentum, but as in my possessions are in transit. Or on transit, in this case, the vehicle in question being my brother's flatbed truck.

So my schedule is this.

Wednesday. Move. Teach for a couple of hours. Don't play chess. Rush to be done in time to watch Champions League final.

Thursday. Two classes, both in the same place but annoyingly separated in time. Arrange my possessions pleasingly, or at least turn them all the right way up. Write about final, if moved to.

Friday. Wave brother and sister off to Greece, try not to trash their house for the next six months.

Saturday. Go to Wembley, watch City beat Hull and get promoted.

Not a lot of writing time, I'm afraid. I'll write about City though.

Click on this link at 5:30 on Saturday, to know if I'm happy or sad.

BBC Interviewer to Gary Johnson: And now you're ninety minutes away from playing Ronaldo. Johnson: Yes, that's if we don't buy him. That's what we've needed, a manager with chutzpah. And look how far it gets you.

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.