Our thoughts and prayers go to the family and friends of John Brook, a member of our church, who died today.

With everything to do in Bucharest, Southampton failed to do anything. Well, they tried hard, and Gordon is rightly proud of their efforts, but the list of destinations on this year’s European Tour is rather short, and will get no longer. I guess this is what’s good about supporting a team that isn’t Man Utd or Arsenal: you have to take the rough with the smooth, the bad times as well as the good. Read more...

After some abuse of the comments system, mostly by dirty spammers, I have decided to implement the following set of rules. Any contraventions shall be punished by deletion and IP-address banning. No commercial posts (i.e. spam). No swearing or foul or abusive language. No personal attacks. This isn’t the playground. Attack my ideas by all means, but if you can’t make your point without attacking me, then you need to learn how to better formulate a counter-point. Read more...

Kathy & I, along with Lorna and John, went to Cornwall for a long weekend. We stayed in (or rather, near) Polperro at Seaview Holiday Village. The Web site makes it look wonderful. The reality was post-war prefab "cottages" with flat roofs that birds would walk on early in the morning, waking us up. Ho-hum. It didn’t matter, really. We went fishing in the sea off of Looe, went stone-skimming at Seaton, paddled in the moonlight at Talland Bay, played cards (Chase the Ace, Rummy), Cranium and Articulate, and ate and drank well. Read more...

I found this in the Evolution 1.4 Users’ Manual: “If you don’t have SpamAssassin or other junk mail filtering on your mail server, there’s still hope, although it’s not quite as simple. First, download and install SpamAssassin from http://spamassassin.org You'll need to download the "spamassassin" and "perl-Mail-SpamAssassin" packages, and you can install them with Red Carpet by selecting Install Local Packages from the File menu. Further instructions are at the SpamAssassin web site. Read more...

Meh. The frustration. To go from the sublime of thrashing Spurs 3-1 to the ridiculous of losing to Middlesbrough (AKA The Smoggies) 1-0 at home is a little hard to take. As usual, it could be worse: Portsmouth, at least, lost 2-0 ;) UPDATE: The Sultan of Brunei wanted to give his three favourite sons a Christmas present, so he asked each one what he wanted. The first said he wanted a motor car, so he gave him Rolls Royce Motors. Read more...

Our wonderful Government plus Bush+cronies said we were going to war because Iraq had Weapons of Mass Destruction. They don’t. The Government lied, but continually refuse to admit it. So, if the General Populace had a conversation with the Government, I suggest it would go a little like this: UK+US Govt: “We’re going to war with Iraq because they have WMDs.” General populace: “Don’t be stupid. Give the inspectors time. We know this is just about oil, you conceited load of dullards. Read more...

Southampton beat Spurs 3-1 at White Hart Lane, with two goals from Beattie (that’s an average of a goal per game now) and one from Phillips. I thought we might extend our clean-sheet run (we managed over eight hours of football without leaking) but at least we won! Saints are now fourth with 12 points — only one point behind new leaders Chelsea. All the teams above us have played a game more, though. Read more...

Talk like a pirate tonight…

I had a phone call from the Moss of Bath Service Centre to say that the MiniDisc player I got from the tip was reparable, but it would cost about £125, which is more than the cost of a new machine. The environmentalist in me wanted to say “OK then” to stop yet more landfill, but the consumer in me won out. A new machine would be money better spent.