Vote of Confidence

Footie fans across the Country have been gnashing their teeth with some degree of anguish, as a pre-Christmas merry-go-round of managerial changes have been taking place.Its quite strange though how the managers seem to come off best.

Take Ian Hollowords for example. He resigns from the Argyle, and joins Leicester allegedly for £400k per annum, almost doubling his salary. His wife and kids have just moved into a new house in Plymouth, and now have to leave for Leicester. Not ideal. He gets replaced by Paul Sturrock, who leaves Swindon where he has no money, and no prospects as they stumble from one failed takeover to another. There are no indications of his salary package yet but I suspect he will do better from it than previously.

The rumour mill indicates Steve Cotterill will take over at Swindon. He parted company with Burnley a few weeks ago, with an agreed compensation package, so has not been out of work long. Burnley replaced him with Owen Coyle from St Johnstone, North of the border and Derek Mcinnes has replaced Coyle, a promotion from within the ranks.......

So, all the fans have been frustrated, but the managers seem to have sorted themselves pretty well.

A similar situation is occurring in the Premiership. Wigan part company with Hutchings, who took over when Paul Jewell left the club. Steve Bruce has now left Birmingham to take up the reins. Birmingham have acquired the ex-Scotland boss, Alex McLeish, and Billy Davies, sacked from Derby, indicates he would quite like the Scotland managers job. Meanwhile the aforementioned Paul Jewell steps smoothly into the Derby hot seat, and everybody is rockin' and rollin'.

All we have to do now is fill the England job, but wait a moment Rafael Benitez will get the sack tonight if Liverpool lose in the European Champions League, and the roundabout can start all over again.

Manuel meets Chantelle

I started my working career in an office near East Croydon Station. it was a good time in my life. I worked shifts, I still lived with my student mates in a flat in Balham, gateway to the South, and started playing rugby for Shirley Wanderers.

Croydon was/is a place of high rise offices dominating the skyline, and had the reputation as one of the easiest places to drive into and a little swine to drive out of!! It has one of the largest council estates in the country down the road in New Addington, and all the other inner city suburb planning blight which was synonymous with the sixties. That said, we had a few good runs ashore in the town, particularly after the end of our evening shift at work.

You will appreciate, then, why a smile crossed my face recently when it became known that Croydon was to re-invent itself as Britain's own equivalent of Barcelona. Now let me see, is Croydon by the sea? No. Is its architecture inspired by a classic designer like Gaudi? No. Does it have a footie team who qualifies for the Champions League every year? No. Does it have anything to inspire comparison with Barca? Well, I suspect crime might be comparable.

The architect behind the regeneration is Will Alsop. Previously he has tried to get Barnsley to reinvent itself as a walled Tuscan hill town! His plans for Croydon include a 30 storey high equivalent of the Eden Project, the reintroduction of the River Wandle, presumably with accompanying gondolas from Venice, no doubt to be followed by Croydon bidding for the World Rowing Championships.

Nice try Croydon, but stick to what you are best at, doling out visas to 3rd World refugees (well meaning Brazilians excluded of course) and the invention of the Croydon face lift.

Just Coming

I had to laugh this morning when I read of the street in Morda, on the Welsh Border, which had been named Cae Onan. Apparently it means 'Masturbation Meadow'!! The locals think it should have been named Cae Onnen which translates as 'Ash Meadow'.

Oswestry Borough Council who administer such things said there were no plans to change the name as it was 'not something that would be generally picked up on'

Its in the national papers so I guess a few people might now know!!!

Tom Toms

I have never got round to embracing the sat nav culture. I guess its part of the macho 'I know where I am going' philosophy which the family would be delighted for me to ditch. Together we have discovered more back doubles, dead ends and dodgy areas than a sat nav could ever get me to drive through.

The Scouse House is not on some sat nav systems, which means we are often talking delivery or visiting drivers in, but I had to laugh last night, when, at about midnight it sounded like the Tardis had landed in Chis.

As I pulled back the curtains, there reversing down the road was a juggernaut, a huge juggernaut if that is not tautology. Silver Cres is just that, a crescent, and when combined with Thorneyhedge Road it will allow you to turn back on yourself along Chiswick High Road. If, therefore, that is what the lorry wanted to do, the sat nav was accurate in its directions. What it clearly did not take into account was the fact the hairpin bend at the top of the road is impossible to navigate in a lorry when a full compliment of residents vehicles are parked up.

How the trucker reversed all that way without damaging a car was a great testament to his driving skills. No sign of Billy Piper though.

Kipper Tie

Well what an eventful few days on the property ladder, and I don't mean just Silver Cres. lets start there though!!

So far you will remember that since I put the house on the market there have been two mortage interest rate hikes, a sub-prime mortgage crisis in the States highlighting the Northern Rock exposure, and a subsequent financial market nervousness which has affected house prices and shares. Couple that with the two properties next to mine going on the market for less that I am asking, the plumbing springing a leak, and the toilet seat breaking, and all in all its been a fretful selling process. Can it get worse?

Well, kind of. Last week Transco scheduled to replace the gas in the Crescent, and Thursday was my day. What they do is replace the main under the pavement, and then feed a new pipe into your house through the old pipe. Sound plan if the old pipe can be navigated, but, and you are all ahead of me here I can tell, mine had a 90 degree turn in it so their draw string broke inside the old pipe and they could not get the new pipe out as it was wedged tight.

So, they are now digging the garden up as I speak, they need to install an external box for the meter, and lay new pipe under the front door and into the kitchen. Nightmare!!

Luckily nobody is schedule to view today, but on the plus side, the house next door but one is now under offer, so I am the last man standing so to speak. They are getting divorced so needed to sell fairly quickly so their price was a bit below mine, a situation I was happy with, although my agent may not have been.

Elsewhere on the property ladder our youngest daughter took ownership of her new flat in Birkenhead on Friday, and she and her Brummie boyfriend have been working to get it habitable. Big sister, mum and his family have been doing most of the painting and decorating. I need a bit of isolation when I do DIY, a fact well known to her, so I will get the snagging list and can go and do it at my leisure!!

Her sis is also quite chuffed at the moment as it seems she is about to move into a new rental property in Jesmond in the centre of Newcastle. Jesmond is know as a shrine to the Virgin Mary, where apparently an apperation was seen many hundreds of years ago and a church has stood on the spot ever since. The Liverpool Catholic Mothers will be over in a shot to visit!! She is moving in with a work colleague and leaving the countrified environment of Yarm for the bright lights of the City, Whey Aye Man! Bryan Ferry used to live in Jesmond, not many people know that.

It will be the end of an era as her current house mate is moving in with her boyfriend, so both girls are embarking on a new life challenge.......surely mine can't be too far behind?

Left here, no, LEFT!!!!!

Our trip through the lanes and byways of Yorkshire was punctuated by the occasional ring road. 'I wonder who invented them' asked SWMBO, talking about roundabouts. So straight home to my Shell Book of Firsts, a volume from 1974, which does just what it says on the tin, almost. Roundabouts in this sense were actually listed under carousels. Still not to be outdone, I searched further and found that the first roundabout was constructed in Paris around the Arc de Triomphe in 1901, closely followed by Columbus Circle in New York City in 1904. The first British roundabout was five years later, in Letchworth Garden City in 1909 - originally intended partly as a traffic island for pedestrians. This was interesting from a wifely point of view, as the first traffic islands had been constructed in Liverpool at the suggestion of John Hastings, a saddler who kept a shop on busy and potentially dangerous corner. In 1862 six islands were constructed across the city.

So the Book of Firsts did have a use after all.

Searching through reference books used to be a regular pastime for the members of the Richmond Monday Club, a group of like minded drinkers who met after work in the Angel and Crown public house. Dave and Jackie, the hosts, had, with our help, assembled a wide and varied collection of reference books. They were just the thing you needed to settle arguments and debates, and included amongst them were, The Book of Hit Singles, the Rothmans Football Year Book, Pears Cyclopedia, The Book of Lists and an atlas. It was 10p a dip and the money went towards the next volume of the collection, usually brought second hand from a junk shop.

I think every boozer should have a library, I wonder where ours ended up?

Fanny Street

We have just spent the weekend exploring the Yorkshire Dales. Some of it was by design, other bits were forced upon us by the great British motorway system.

Our main objective was to travel to Whixley near York to visit the latest art exhibition by Neil Simone, a surrealist artist we both like. We have a couple of his prints and thought an original oil might be a good idea. We left Liverpool in good time, knowing the gallery shut at about 4pm. A quick detour to Knutsford allowed us to drop Maxines engagement ring into a jewellers to get repaired, and then off the the M62 for the majority of the trip. Wrong.

J24 -J23 near Huddersfield were closed, so a quick(sic) detour ensued. We went to Harrogate via Halifax, Bradford and other quaint sounding Yorkshire villages, driving across the Penine Way en route. If I hadknown Brentford were playing Bradford we might have taken a break there, but as it was, we crawled along a number of A and B roads along with everybody else who had been diverted off.

We got to the gallery just after 4pm but luckily Neil and his wife were still there and were very welcoming, providing tea and coffee to ease us into the viewing. Sadly for them, we did not see anything we wanted to purchase, but it did give us a few ideas about the pictures we already have, and how the newly positioned piano may be made more an integral part of the furnishings.

Luckily SWMBO had suggested we stay over in Harrogate, so that we did. We had a room overlooking the Styne, a large public space, which had a free firework display. We could enjoy it from the comfort of our hotel room while deciding on which attractions of Harrogate we should enjoy.

A pub full of women dressed as GI Jane, and a very pleasant french restaurant filled the evening and an (average) full English set us up for a cruise back home.

It was quite a coincidence that the Leeds-Liverpool canal seemed to plot a path for us to follow. We picked it up at Skipton after passing close to the Menwith Hill listening station and seeing the beginnings of the new wind farm on the other side of the valley. It is a real shame that high, exposed moorland needs to be exploited by such monstrous structures, simply because height and exposure is their key to successful operation.

Anyway, we enjoyed exploring the basin of the canal around Skipton, and then moved on to pick the canal up again at Saltaire, the philanthropic development of Titus Salt, who built the village to house his mill workers, in the same way as Lord Levelhulme built Port Sunlight on the Wirral to house his factory workers. Salts Mill is now a gallery specialising in David Hockney works as well as home design shopping and an antiques fair. Salt himself was a god fearing man so built his village on strict Presbyterian lines. It does bring a smile to the face to see the local bistro and bar named "Don't tell Titus".

We lost the canal after going from Shipley to the M62, which thankfully was open this time, but picked it up again on the outskirts of Liverpool in Crosby and Waterloo. This is the part of the canal which I used to run along when we lived close by. It looked a bit too obstructed to be navigable now, although plans to open the Western end of the canal to the Albert Dock and the River Mersey may see all that change.

With Tesco now delivering to their major supermarkets in London via the Thames, who knows what the Leeds-Liverpool has awaiting it?