I have a few more deatils about the Wayne Rooney shirt now:

• The shirt was purchased from a reputable dealer,
• It has many differences from a standard replica shirt, including:
• the Premier League specification size and material name, number and sleeve patches,
  
• larger air vents and Nike motif,
• no wash labels,
• the shirt is basically superior in every way,
• a similar shirt was auctioned at Christies recently with a guide price of £800-£1000.

I am currently trying to find a way to get Wayne Rooney to sign the shirt, this will substantially increase the status of the item and help the fundraiser a great deal.

If you have any ideas or know how the best way I might approach Wayne Rooney/Manchester United for a signature then please let me know.

Well here is the first picture of the Wayne Rooney shirt coming to you courtesy of sunny Salford.

For those of you joining me for the first time, the Rooney match shirt was swapped with David of memorabiliainvestor.com for the Xabi Alonso Champion's League shirt with no sponsor.

It has been a long slog to get this far via a piece of old rope, 18 pairs of craft scissors, a Sydney 2000 stewards shirt and a signed photo of Peter Beardsley.

I would like to thank everyone who has taken part so far for their generosity and hope that others will join in and help me to make the next trade bigger and better than the last.

Thank you.

Sorry, no photographs...

I got home tonight to find that the camera I use to take pictures for this blog had gone kapput. I have the Wayne Rooney shirt in my hands but no way to get a picture to you out there. My camera phone is primative at best and with no flash in artificial light the shirt barely registers.

I will however endeavour to get some photographs for the site tomorrow.

'til then, goodnight.

It would be impossible to leave a blog today without mentioning Wayne Rooney's goal against AC Milan last night.

The score was 2-2 at Old Trafford and in the 90th minute Rooney scored to make it 3-2. I've embedded another YouTube video for all those who didn't see it last night. You will, quite correctly, hear the commentator call Rooney a prodigious talent; to have a match winner like Rooney in the team has made Manchester United this season.

You can have his shirt if you want, it should arrive today. All you need to do is think of something that you would like to trade, it could be anything, the more rare and unusual the better. I will think seriously about all offers and make a decision once I feel that an offer meets up to or exceeds the value of a Wayne Rooney match shirt.

Once again, enjoy:

The next trade is to be announced...

The One-of-a-kind, generously donated Xavi Alonso Liverpool Shirt is to be traded with an equally generous man who emailed me the other day.

He owns the site www.memorabiliainvestor.com, an online trade and discussion venue for collectors and reputable dealers of various forms of memorabilia.

Anyway, onto the the trade.

The trade is for a Wayne Rooney match shirt. This may seem like a side-ways step to many readers outside of the UK; however, Wayne Rooney is quite possibly the best player of a generation, he is also much more well known than Xavi Alonso.

Alonso is a fantastic player but he keeps his head down and works hard, unfortunately that doesn't get you as well known as it probably should in a perfect world. Rooney on the other hand seems to court controversy, is in and out of the tabloids weekly and is absolutely magic to watch when he is on form.

There seems no better way to celebrate a player nowadays than with a youtube montage, enjoy.

Volcanoes have been very much on my mind of late. There is much debate amongst vulcanologists about exactly when a volcano goes from being active to dormant and then to completely extinct.

Some volcanoes erupt everyday and are easy to classify, they are clearly active. Some haven't erupted in a hundred thousand years but there are still signs that they might do something sometime soon, they are clearly dormant. There are some however that refuse to listen to what they're told. Millions of years after they last erupted they suddenly burst back into life with a bang and become active.

Ok, so it's only been three months since my last post - not exactly millions of years, but in blogging terms it might as well be. But I am coming back with a bang.

Watch this space...