The proposed trip to the Faroe Islands has been put back to next year. We couldn’t all take a full week off work and didn’t feel it was a trip we wanted to cram into a weekend, so we decided to go in the springtime instead, giving us more time to plan and longer to spend out there.

Justin and I, however, were still up for doing some sort of trip this autumn, even just a short one. We put a pin in the European Championship qualifiers fixture list and came up with Latvia.

Our reason for choosing the Faroes were numerous but one of them was the lure of the totemic clash of Faroes v Lithuania, in Scotland’s group. So the Latvia trip will allow us to see a match from another qualifying group as the home side take on those giants of European football, Iceland.

I’m looking forward to the trip already – Justin has booked the flights and we’ll now start investigating accommodation options for our two nights in Riga and one in Berlin en route.

However, my knowledge of Latvia is entirely limited to my undergraduate dissertation at university, which was about the influence of identity on the security policies of small states, using Latvia as a case study.

That should be something to break the ice in the pubs and bars of Riga…