I HAD to tread a bit carefully with Mrs H on Sunday evening.

And the one thing I definitely didn't say was: "Well at least you didn't go all that way to see them lose."

This is one of the things you absolutely don't say to a football fan. It sits right up there with 'Never mind, it's only a game' in the list of expressions most likely to get you a punch on the nose, even from your nearest and dearest.

Mrs H is an Aston Villa fan, and has been for many years.

I can find no rational explanation for this. Born in Coventry, she moved to Brixham at the age of four and then to Paignton at the age of 20.

At no time in her life has she ever lived in the shadow of the Aston Expressway, nor in the streets around the ground, where cheerful scab-kneed street urchins will offer, in their 'Brummie' accents, to 'mind' your car for a fiver on match days.

This, should you ever encounter it, is a protection racket. What they are saying is that for a fiver they will not spend the afternoon writing obscenities down the side of your car with their keys, bending your aerial into the shape of a V-sign or letting your tyres down.

This happens at big football grounds all around the country, by the way. Cheerful scab-kneed street urchins abound near all of them.

We once failed to observe the 'Give-The-Urchin-A-Fiver' code — not at Villa Park, I should add — and returned to our car to find the back window smashed and the contents nicked.

The Guidelines advice on these occasions is 'Arrive earlier — park further away — get bus'.

Anyway, Mrs H is an Aston Villa fan, and has in the past held a season ticket to Villa Park. For a while she drove up and down the M5 to home matches, or occasionally caught trains to watch her team in action.

With one eye on the bank balance and another on the fact that Torquay United are really the only team for me, I used to wait at home like the wife in the Ripping Yarn 'Golden Gordon', removing all the breakable ornaments in time for the spouse to return from the match, bellowing 'Eight-one! Eight-bloody-one! And even that were an own goal!' and smashing anything they can lay their hands on.

It was always particularly bad when they were playing Manchester United, because they would inevitably take the lead, play heroically and then lose to a disputed goal or, at the very least, one scored by their least favourite player.

One night after an FA Cup match I had only just finished stowing away all the breakables and hiding all the sharp objects and shoelaces when she got back, having seen Cristiano Ronaldo score a late winner to beat the Villa.

This year they got through to the Carling Cup Final, and the match was duly played on Sunday.

Mrs H and Younger Daughter, who has caught the Villa bug from her mother and the Torquay United virus from her father, leaving her lumbered for life with a passion for two clubs that will inevitably raise her spirits from time to time only to break her heart in the end, tried desperately to get Wembley tickets.

But Villa's allocation seemed to have gone, quite rightly we supposed, to people who do live within sight of the Distressway, so we had to watch the match on TV.

Mrs H was too nervous to watch the first half, she said. She opened her laptop and studied things about knees and ligaments, but I could see her peeking over the top of the screen.

For the second half the laptop had been put away, and the match had her full attention.

And, sure enough, Villa took the lead, played heroically, and lost out to a late goal from Wayne Rooney.

I said that, well, Rooney was at the peak of his form at the moment and is currently England's only genuine world-class player, but strangely it didn't seem to help.

Referee Phil Dowd's final whistle was still echoing around the stands at Wembley and Mrs H was already in the kitchen attacking potatoes savagely with a very sharp knife.

I thought it best not to mention Wayne Rooney again.

Reg went and curled up in his bed and waited for the storm to pass.

And I knew what she was feeling, because when a football fan is forced by circumstance or lack of tickets to miss a big match, there is always a nagging feeling that, had they been there, things might have been very different.

I always wonder what might have happened if I had been able to follow Torquay United to the old Wembley for the 1998 play-off final against Colchester United.

Had I been there, I might have added a hundredth of a decibel to the noise levels inside the horrible old concrete shell.

John Gittens, hesitant in the face of the increased noise, might not have raised his arm quite so high and, therefore, might not have been deemed to have handled the ball inside the Gulls' penalty area. Colchester might not then have been awarded the penalty. They might not then have won the match, and Torquay might have gone on to win.

History would have been changed. Who knows what the consequences might have been.

But I wasn't there. I was in my car.

We had rashly booked a family holiday for the Whitsun half-term week, giving no thought at all to the fact that Torquay might actually make the play-offs.

We had to be at Dover to catch a ferry in the early hours, ready for a long drive down through France, and there was no way round it.

I thought of getting the family to pick me up in London after the match, of shortening the holiday by a day to accommodate the match, or even of not going on holiday at all, but in the end I accepted the inevitable.

And as the horror unfolded through the static-laden hiss and hum of Radio Five on the medium wave on that terrible Friday night, I was driving on the half-empty M25 just a few miles south.

We were somewhere near Guildford when the penalty went in.

Had we won, I was planning a slap-up feed at Ashford Services. As it was, we silently munched our way through motorway-special bumper bags of Doritos and pressed on through the gloom, through the roadworks, through the dark and wordless night towards the Cinque Ports.

And nobody said: "At least we didn't delay the holiday for the match."

We know better than that.

THE boys are back in town, as they say.

Torbay's new online radio station, Riviera FM, went live yesterday, and on Friday there will be a touch of Guidelines on the airwaves.

After a three-and-a-half-year absence, JonPaul Hedge and I are being let loose on the radio again.

Every Friday between 7pm and 9pm we will be mixing music and chat — you know the kind of thing, beer, chips, Roy of the Rovers, dancing at the 400 and wishing the Riff Power Band would get back together again.

Log in to www.riviera.fm to listen live.