A point gained or two points dropped? At the time I did feel that we let two points go begging as we didn't take advantage of our first half domination. Leon Best had a couple of good efforts, one from just outside the area and another that was somehow cleared off the line when it looked like the ball was going into the back of the net. That would have made it 2-0, as it was it finished 1-1 and in retrospect it seems a decent result.

I WAS hoping the next time I came back to the UK would be to fight, but thanks to Tommy Tolan, that's not the case.

I've come back home early to Sunderland because the cut I picked up above my eye in December re-opened in sparring.

I got it in my last fight, against the very dirty Tommy Tolan in December. I know he deliberately headbutted me in the second round and gave me a massive cut before I knocked him out. I'm very pissed off with him.

We needn't have worried about the Hutton coal seam at all - albeit this is the seam worked most widely in the northern half of the Durham Coalfield and this adjoining block north of the Tyne. We caught the Hutton in an unworked spot! The drill bit entered the seam at 108m below ground, and swiftly proved 1.3 m of pristine coal. So that fracture at 92m depth certainly wasn't a bed separation feature, just a natural fracture in the sandstone.

We've now had no bother from either of the first two seams we feared might hinder our progress - the High Main and the Hutton - and we've to drill another 60m before the next possible zone of workings is reached, at 168m below ground in the Harvey Seam.

I'm beginning to think we are drilling through an old "shaft pillar" - that is, a zone without any workings other than the roadways connecting the main bodies of workings to the shaft itself. Shaft pillars were always left around mine shafts to ensure the stability of this vital link to surface. It looks like our geothermal drilling might well be benefiting from the shaft pillar associated with the North Elswick Colliery shaft nearby.

Just back from a spell on site with the drilling team - Scott, Aaron and Jason - where I found them successfully vanquishing an incident of "lost circulation". What's that? To explain, I first need to explain that when we're drilling, we pump a drilling fluid (basically water with some special additives, typically natural muds and harmless biodegradable polymers) down the borehole to flush the rock cuttings up to surface. We soon notice if not all of the drilling fluid comes back to surface: this is what we call "loss of circulation". Usually the loss isn't total, and it wasn't in this case. But if you lose a fair proportion of the circulation then the cuttings don't get flushed to surface and it becomes really hard to advance the borehole. In this case, the loss of circulation occurred about 17m metres into a thick body of coarse-grained, gray-white sandstone, which we originally entered at about 75m below ground.

It's likely that we hit a large fracture in the sandstone at about 92m depth, and this is what the drilling fluid was entering. We first tried adding the mineral mica to the drilling fluid, as this occurs as very play fragments that stick together when wet. That wasn't quite doing the job for us, so we added a mineral fibre substance called N-Seal (made by Baroid, part of Halliburton well services). It's made of harmless silica minerals (cristobalite, tridymite etc), which is the same chemical composition as the sandstone, but a different physical form. The fluffy particles of N-Seal get carried into the fractures where, as they wet-up, they turn to the consistency of putty. That did the trick for us, and we began making good drilling progress again.

Highways between cities are closed off. The country may come to a stand still, or even enter a civil war, in the next few days. We hope that protesters and police will not resort to violence. We are being advised to stock up on food and remain indoors.

My next blog will be much more comprehensive on what has been going on - personally and nationally - as well as what will be happening in the streets, all over Iraq.

Today's the day we started drilling in earnest, and we've made great progress, even though the team had to break off from regular work many times throughout the day to make sure we gave our guests from the press the chance to capture the coverage they needed. It was an early rise for us, as we had to be on site by 6:30 a.m. to meet the early risers of the journalism world, from BBC Radio 4's Today programme and the BBC1 Breakfast News TV programme.

BBC reporter Alison Freeman was first to brave the chilly dawn, from our windswept vantage point high above the slowly lifting "Fog on the Tyne". Down the headphones, John Humphries on Today remained in convivial form even when I corrected him for diminishing our 2000 metres to 2000 feet! He cleverly provoked me into a swift explanation of the low-carbon benefits of deep geothermal energy by asking: "Why would you drill to 2000m for hot water when you could just pop the kettle on?"

IT CAME to me when the Joker, as played by Jack Nicholson, was making Kim Basinger cry on TV.

My husband was watching Batman when Otis looked up and said: "nasty, turn it off".

He wasn't joking either, and my husband and I had to acknowledge that the time has come when we can only watch age-appropriate TV in front of our son.

IT CAME to me when the Joker, as played by Jack Nicholson, was making Kim Basinger cry on TV.

My husband was watching Batman when Otis looked up and said: "nasty, turn it off".

He wasn't joking either, and my husband and I had to acknowledge that the time has come when we can only watch age-appropriate TV in front of our son.

Here we are, all set to start drilling for real in our biggest adventure yet: pursuing natural hot water which we have good reason to believe is lurking 2000m below the unsuspecting streets of Newcastle upon Tyne.

My name's Paul Younger, and I'm Director of the Newcastle Institute for Research on Sustainability (NIReS), based at Newcastle University. By profession I'm a geologist and environmental engineer, and drilling boreholes is a large part of what I've spent my adult life doing.

For a Government that promised to be open and transparent, is this extraordinary? For freedom of information campaigners, it must be like a red rag to a bull.

I submitted a freedom of information request about the closure of courts ordered by the coalition. It went into the Ministry of Justice (MoJ), the department responsible for the closure plans.

It rejected the request, offering only partial information that it held - and that's despite acknowledging public interest in releasing the material.

But I think the reasoning was stunning: "Government ministers need a private space to discuss issues freely and frankly (both with civil servants and other ministers) without fear that such discussions will be subject to public scrutiny, particularly when they are considering difficult and controversial decisions such as those related to closures of courts.

"Such debate makes for robust and strong policy-making and it is not in the public interest that the policy-making process is undermined."