Spring has sprung and the dawn of a new speedway season is upon us .. and it's time to end the 5 month break in writing the blog.

Unlike those fans at Edinburgh (good evening Ian) and at Poole, who probably didn't want last season to come to an end, the one at Swindon went out with a whimper rather than a bang. One minute we were on our way down the M4 and M25 to cover the Lakeside v Swindon clash for the BBC and the next minute (or rather 6 hours later) it was all over - dumped unceremoniously out of the Play Offs by a rampant Lakeside team and a sexy pink changing room (check out the blog of that meeting here if you want to know more).

There were rumblings of a last match so the fans could say farewell to the 2008 team but we ended with a sidecar meeting if the memory serves me right. Of course, on track we couldn't have dreamed that we would get as far as the play offs in the first place - after all, we were "relegation fodder" as far as the press and correspondents in the comic were concerned at the start of the 08 season. But success, especially when it's against the odds, encourages high expectations, and mid season Swindon were riding high. That it should all fall apart on the tight turns and rock hard surface at Lakeside was so depressing.

It was about then that I decided to end the Blog. It had served its original purpose - to show the cynics who thought we just packed everything up and returned 5 months later, that work on a speedway track really does take place over a 52 week year and not just between March and October.

But in its first two years the blog had become something bigger. Readership figures which sometimes hit the heady heights of a 100 hits a week were now striking 700 a day. Over 200,000 visitors in 2008 and steady sales of the Blog's first book, showed that people beyond the boundaries of Swindon were reading and actually enjoying it. So when I called a halt in October 2008 my email box exploded. Good friends, made through the blog, ,like the esteemed Jeff Scott and Alan, from the brilliant SpeedwayPlus web site, together with Chris Seaward and a host of others wrote such nice things that it was clear that whilst I needed a break from writing the blog, often three or four times a week, I would have to revive it. And so here it is again.

We've been up at the track this week trying to ensure that everything will be ready for the first meeting (arguably the biggest at Swindon for many years). Gerald and I reflected that it hadn't been the easiest winter at Blunsdon. "Graham, I just wish that you'd kept the blog going over the winter," said my laconic Rhodesian friend. "The readers wouldn't believe it."

Gerald was right - at times I felt we were bit part players in a soap opera, at other times members of the chorus in a Gilbert and Sullivan light opera.

So I thought I'd start this season's blog with a review of the closed season, or as much of it as I can remember, with the help of photographs taken (fewer that last year) and my diary entries.

Start off classy and then descend into dross might be a way of describing these memories, so I thought I used Shakespeare as my muse to start.

The obvious title was always going to be "A Winter's Tale" but there were times when it all felt a little more like "A Comedy of Errors" or "Much ado about nothing." I was reminded of Macbeth at one stage - It is "a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing ..." and that seemed to fit the bill, but I'll stick at "A Winter's Tale".

But "The Winter's Tale" does feature that wonderful line of stage direction: "Exit pursued by Bear" in Act 3, Scene. So who will be our bear?

Act 1 coming shortly to a computer screen near you ...