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The following link takes you to the first one of the series, an interview with Birmingham & Solihull head coach Russell Earnshaw previewing the coming campaign.

In it Russell discusses his summer recruitment, the club's aims for the season, the challenges Bees face and how well equipped they are to do with them.

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Except, of course, the twice weekly two-hour long heat waves that miraculously appear between 7-9pm every Tuesday and Thursday when most over-weight, unfit rugby enthusiasts are embroiled in what is widely known as pre-season training.

It should really be called pre-season draining for there is no other way to describe the sensations associated with the unwelcome return to physical exercise. My personal favourite is the giddy feeling associated with rising vomit and overheating heads that feel as though they are going to explode. The puke usually wins.

Amidst all this widespread misery, however, there are a few individuals who have never been happier. They are the suppressed sadists, frustrated personal trainers and wannabe sergeant majors of the world or - as they are otherwise known, the conditioning coaches.

Like most self respecting torturers they spend a considerable amount of time devising their strategies. They begin with a starting point of effect - 'Make the buggers sick' - and construct the cause around it. Here are my five of my least favourite pre-season routines.

I can't claim to have met all the mal-adjusted psychopaths in the sport so perhaps you'd like to add your own.

The same principle applies to rugby union and litigation. As long as there's an oval ball and H-shaped posts they'll be some club or player that needs a brief. My children would never go hungry.

And so it proves again this year. While the climax to the National One season came several weeks ago the standings have still not been finalised. The players have packed up their kitbags and gone on holiday but the suits are fighting with the vigour one would expect from a relegation threatened team defending its goal-line.

Two West Midlands clubs are at the heart of the action. The fates of Pertemps Bees and Coventry hang in the balance. The blood, sweat and tears shed over the course of eight months and 30 games is rendered insignificant when compared to the cases argued by the club's hired legal guns.

I didn't expect the star-studded British Lions XV that turned up for the first game in 1977 and didn't go thinking it'd be anything other than a knockabout in the sun.

In fact I left feeling it hadn't been too bad an afternoon with some entertaining rugby, excellent performances and more old faces than an early edition of a Who's Who.

But having bought a DVD of the original match my sense of loss became acute. Forget the fact Phil Bennett, Gareth Edwards, Gerald Davies and JPR Williams weren't present on the Common, by comparison the modern version was still sterile.

The other day at Goldington Road someone asked me which is the best try I've seen this season and I had to be honest and say I couldn't recall one that stuck out head and shoulders above anything else.

Given the itinerant nature of my job - I watch most sides quite regularly but none week in week out, it occured to me the quest to find try of the season should probably start with the playes, officials and supporters of our local clubs.

Dan Norton has scored a couple of crackers for Moseley as have James Aston and Uche Oduoza for Bees. Of all West Midlands National League sides Coventry probably integrate forwards and backs better than anyone else which means Butts Park must have seen a few quality ones.

And even though Stourbridge's season ultimately ended in the disappointment of missing out on promotion they have had some great fun along the way,.

I could never, therefore, be described as a traditionalist. To me traditions are not entities that have existed since the beginning of time, they have themselves developed through changing circumstances. If they have a beginning so they must have an end.

But I do get a bit touchy about the Six Nations. Rugby Union has known unprecedented change in the 13 years since professionalism was introduced. Virtually nothing has escaped untouched, neither the club game nor the representative sport.

Yet there are certain non-negotiables that give rugby its defining character. Principles that separate it from rugby league or other versions of football. The Six Nations is one.