Hello again and welcome back to the blog. Sorry for the 48 hours of inactivity but I caught some type of bug that left me with sore throat, limited voice, hot and cold spells  and sleeping for more than 90% of the weekend. If it happened to a woman you’d say you caught a cold but as a bloke let me tell you it made for a miserable weekend. I’m about 40% now, coughing and sneezing every few minutes but not needing a nap every 90 minutes as I did over the weekend…well enough for a blog post anyway.

it just won't run without fuel....

I’ll confess I’ve not actually had time for any great research since the last post so it leaves me to share the winner of the Strummer tattoo competition that we had about a week ago – and the winner in a very close event was tattoo number 2 – The black Strummerville logo (Joe on the Diving Board) just edged out one of the most impressive tattoos I’ve ever seen. I’ll try and locate the owner and offer them a lifetime subscription to the blog via RSS feed or something. In another poll we held recently it seems that the fine readers of the blog are well clued up on things other than The Clash as our preseason premier league poll (English soccer for some readers) showed the favourite pick to win the league this season as Chelsea, which I think is wise money. I’ll still stick with my prediction that Arsenal will take 2nd spot with some aplomb – to see the full results and my banal predictions have a look at this link. I warned you at the start of the post that I’ve not got a great deal of news for you this afternoon but on a personal level I wanted to share my newest Clash related pride and joy. You may recall about six weeks ago when my car tags expired I decided to order a new (mystery) Clash themed license plate for the car. Some suggestions I received and considered myself included H8FUL   TRNVAIN  COMROCK  WMiHP  PRTXBLU  CASBAH1 4HRSMEN   JIMJAZZ  MAG 7 and others, I made my decision thinking I’d only need to wait two weeks and not six – but when it arrived last week I must confess it felt like Christmas for a 6 year old for a few hours. The results are below – sorry the photo isn’t too wonderful, I’ll take more when its on the car itself. I’ve just have had an awful time finding a 1975 Ford Cortina.

The new ClashBlog license plate

I’ll definitely be back on a more regular basis in the days ahead, we’ve got Clash Cup, Video Clash, Westway Traffic, Clash Shopping, Gorillaz tour preview part 3, an NME feature, and news from Carbon Silicon and the UK press all coming up this week plus more I’m sure. Thanks for being patient – oh and the ClashBlog cat is doing a bit better (I won’t tempt fate and say she is well yet) it is a proper infirmary around here lately.