Someone once told me that you only get on average of seventy summers in your lifetime. When I was setting up my new business I always had this in the back of my mind. Life should be about living and experiences not about money. The by-product of success can often be money, but it shouldn’t […]
Through the barricades
I planned to take Alice to the Heineken Cup quarter-finals in Toulose on Saturday, 12th April 2003. The Saints were playing and I had ear marked a trip, but this was just a ruse. I had asked her father’s permission to take his daughters hand in marriage. I wanted to do it the traditional way, […]
Streets are pathed with gold
We were growing a very significant business at the same time as having great fun. There was one person who was my rock throughout this period and that was Alice Bufton. I met Alice through Todd Williams, a former Australian hockey player who was a client of RT and was renting my house in Northampton. […]
One sip of champagne from the Heineken Cup
Whilst I was worried about performing at Franklin’s Gardens for the Saints, the rest of the world were worried about the Y2K bug, which experts thought could result in a world wide computer meltdown in the lead up to the millennium. The millennium bug was a failure for most computers to be able to recognise […]
Harvey Harvey
I was surprised when on the 10th June, at a press conference in Edinburgh, Geech announced that he would be quitting Northampton to work alongside Scotland coach Jim Telfer in preparation for the 1999 World Cup. Apparently, this was the only job that could have tempted him away a week after he had written his […]
We are not turning back
The 1997/98 season was finished off with an invitation to attend the South American Tour with the Barbarian Football Club. I had never been to Argentina and Uruguay and without hesitation jumped on a plane. This is the longest continuous flight that I have ever been on. It was 6,846 miles from London to Montevideo […]
The grand European tour
The great thing about starting a business from scratch is that you have no points of reference. At first, we set it up as a way of improving our CV whilst playing rugby. The business was not restricted in terms of the products it could sell or the geographies that it operated in. The business […]
The dampening of the Corinthian Spirit
The great thing about the professional era was the amount of rugby on offer. I loved any opportunity to play, but the fixture list became congested. Leicester and the Saints joined forces in the 1996/97 to take on two touring sides, Western Samoa and Otago. This gave me another opportunity to play in front of […]
The birth of Rodber Thorneycroft
However bizarre The Discovery Tour of West Africa may have been, it came a very long second to the World Hairdressing Championships that I attended in Washington DC that summer. The world’s best hairdressers converged every two years for seminars, exhibitions and hair performances, which in 1996 were in the Washington Convention Centre. Jake Richardson, […]
The Discovery tour of West Africa
Up until now none of us had been paid to play the sport we loved, so you can imagine the surprise that ensued when the club I was playing at and the England A squad decided to pay players to play rugby. This didn’t happen immediately but there was an understanding that we would get […]
