I may be alone in this, but I don't want Michael Phelps to win his eight gold medals. And here's why.

I've got issues with swimming. I've always had issues with swimming, ever since I had to be dragged screaming into primary school on Fridays knowing that it was swimming lesson day. For many a year people tried to teach me to swim, and for many a year they more or less failed. They were still trying when I was 12 or 13 and getting openly derided for it. These days I have to take my kids swimming, and I just sit in the shallow end trying not to panic as they show me how long they can stay underwater. I hate going under the water. Water is dangerous. People drown in it.

So anyway, for me swimming has always been something that you can either do or you can't. Like holding a tune, or mental arithmetic. Such activities can be honed and advanced, but if an individual doesn't have it in them in the first place they'll never get the hang of it. Phelps is clearly someone who can do swimming, and he's obviously worked incredibly hard to get to a position of such dominance and I applaud him for that. Here's my problem with the eight gold medals though. It will be eight gold medals for doing more or less the same thing. Freestyle, butterfly, breaststroke, it's all just swimming. To win a decathlon gold, you've got to be pretty decent in ten different disciplines, and even if you put them into broadly similar categories you still have skills as diverse as running, throwing and jumping. Phelps just has to keep on swimming, swimming, swimming, and people start calling him the greatest ever Olympian. I hope Steve Redgrave gets to award him one of his medals, preferably with a little smirk.

Swimmers out there will, I don't doubt, disagree with me, telling me that swimming butterfly is as different from swimming freestyle as pole vault is from dressage. And speaking from a position of profound ignorance I am happy to be corrected. But I'll still hate swimming.

A while back I joined the FHM mailing list in order to enter some contest they were running. A few weeks ago I filled in a survey - you got entry into a draw for Amazon vouchers for doing it - and they asked if I wanted to be on a panel where I would get sent occasional surveys, each of which has this same draw element. They take about 10 minutes and I figure someone has to win these things. And anyway, as irresponsible as this may sound, ever since I fabricated statistics when working for the Metropolitan Police I've liked contributing to surveys to try and help them be as ill-informed and pointless as they unquestionably are. These FHM ones are perfect for that. I am so not the demographic for which FHM is aiming, which judging by their e-mails is the XBox-playing, binge-drinking, income-disposing 18 to 25 year old, that all of their surveys ask me about stuff about which I know absolutely nothing.

The latest one started by asking me how interesting I think the idea is of them getting people to say which artists have influenced their taste in music. I had to say whether I was intrigued to hear what shaped the tastes of musicians, general celebrities, members of the public or "other". Why on earth would anyone care what shaped the taste of members of the public? Or for that matter general celebrities, whoever they are - probably people like the woman I flicked through on Channel 4 this morning on some Big Brother offshoot programme, who when asked by the sub-Russell Brand host whether she would like to see two of the contestants on the cover of a magazine in loincloths asked "What's a loincloth again?" Are people not capable of formulating their own taste in music without having the reassurance that some cast member of Hollyoaks agrees with them?

The survey got better when I had to rate the following brands on a range of 1 to 10 from Completely Outdated to Extremely Innovative.

Nokia
FCUK
Samsung
Peugeot
Ford
Renault
Carphone Warehouse
Orange
Xbox 360
Fiat
O2
Sony Ericsson
Facebook
Virgin
Adidas

If you had to make a list of brands which better reflected the aspects of modern living in which I have no interest, you could hardly have made a better job. I don't drive, I don't own a mobile phone, I don't play computer games. There is barely a man alive in Britain today less appropriate to make these judgements than I am. I merrily dotted away all over the screen, my wantonly ignorant clicking hopefully causing great confusion to some London-based media focus group. I decided that Peugeout is Completely Outdated and Adidas Extremely Innovative. Who knows why? I know I don't. Then I had to do the same in other (apparently different) categories: Uncool to Very Cool (Ford is Uncool, Orange is Very Cool), Hate It to Love It (Hate FCUK, Love O2), and finally - it's almost as if FHM are reading my mind - I had to rate them all from Irrelevant To My Life to Completely Relevant To My Life. If I were being honest, I would mark every single one as being irrelevant. But the purpose of this survey is not accuracy, and thus while I so don't care about Virgin I am passionate about Carphone Warehouse.

The only area where I told the truth is when they asked me how my spending on eating out and holidays had been affected by the credit crunch. I could honestly click "It isn't an area of expenditure that I am looking to cut down on", given that it's hard to spend less than nothing.

How marvellous to hear from a bona fide, genuine Steve Bingham. Not Steve .... Bingham you understand - don't get too excited - just plain old Steve Bingham. The one who, according to his website, The Independent called an "extraordinary performer" (interestingly it doesn't say in what capacity). The website which has a frankly disturbing picture of some sort of Boys From Brazil experiment gone wrong, with dozens of Steves gaily Binghaming around the parks of Norfolk. Steve Bingham who has the self-effacing good humour to take a pretty stupid post on my part a couple of years back in the benign spirit in which it was intended. Well played Sir.

As a classical music Philistine, I was all geared up to point people towards Steve's site without being able to recommend anything myself, but his YouTube clips of his looping performances of While My Guitar Gently Weeps and Philip Glass are simply stunning. I only wish I had more than three sporadic readers who might find them as a result of this.

Just 24 hours to go then, to the biggest sporting event of the year. You have to feel for the Chinese - years of work and billions of yuan poured into the Olympics, only to have the attention of the world diverted from the opening day by Barrow against Oxford.

So, are you excited about the new football season? No, me neither.

When I was a kid it seemed like a lifetime from one season to the next, but these days it seems like I haven't digested the one just ended before the next one is upon us. Part of this is undoubtedly just me being older, because we all know that time passes so much faster as we age. (A while back I booked tickets for Stevie Wonder and noticed that it was exactly three months until the concert, and realised that when I was young that would have passed so slowly. Without me noticing, it is suddenly only five weeks away.) But another part of it is definitely the sort of blaring, endless hype parodied so brilliantly by David Mitchell here.

That said, it will be nice to be watching a football match I actually care about, as opposed to one in which I have little more than an academic interest. History is a curious beast, is it not? I imagine when Oxford played their first ever league game against Barrow on 18 August 1962, the Cumbrians must have wondered what they were doing playing a lowly team like Oxford. And I bet that many an ignorant Oxford fan will be thinking the same tomorrow. Let's just hope that playing on TV against the biggest team in the division - sad but true - doesn't inspire them the way it did the titans of Droylsden and Histon against us last season.

Anyway, time to resume my non-league travelogue. Barrow was a small fishing village (32 dwellings and two pubs in 1843) until the Industrial Revolution, when it became a centre for shipbuilding. From the 1960s nuclear submarines were built there, but the end of the Cold War has not been good for Barrow and unemployment has risen. Some Barrow nuggets:

1) In 2002 Barrow suffered the UK's worst ever outbreak of Legionnaire's disease - seven people died.

2) The population of Barrow has barely altered in 100 years, fluctuating between 73-75,000. The ethnic population constitutes just 5.7%, the non-white population a mere 2.8%.

3) 23% of people in Barrow are on benefits (the national average is 14%).

4) Former England football captain Emlyn Hughes was born in Barrow.

5) So was original Jethro Tull bass player Glenn Cornick.

OK, I'm struggling now. Incidentally, Glenn Cornick has a website full of wonderful old pictures of his time in Jethro Tull. It's a really tremendous resource for people interested in the band. Makes me wish I was one of them.