Carry on my wayward son

Earlier this week it was announced that the major supermarkets had reduced their carrier bag usage by 48%, which is an excellent performance.

My involvement in this achievement has been to build up quite a collection of "bags for life" which I have acquired by accepting free ones and paying for some. They sit inside my front door in a box for usage. But sadly that is all they do. It doesn't matter how hard I try, I end up in the queue at the checkout and remember the pile at home.

I would like to say sorry to the world, I will try harder.

Starting over again

I've watched the events unfolding at St Marys over the last 97 days with a mixture of dispair, fear, horror, laughter and finally relief!

While the "Pinnicle" groups takeover had, on the face of it, lots of things going for it, in reality it increasingly became "the foolish man built his house upon the sand". When they pulled out, however, it did look pretty bleak until Markus Liebherr re-entered the bidding. It does appear that he was close to securing "exclusivity" before Pinnicle beat him to the punch.

Now Saints have a new German owner (who live in Switzerland). He is worth over a billion and says he is in it for the long term. But who ever says anything else? He's already sacked the manager and the press release is couched in words of quiet Germanic efficiency.

This time last year I was quite taken by JP and is youth policy, look where that ended! Now I'm a bit more circumspect.The choice of manager will be crucial to our progress next season, it may even be the good old director of football/coach scenario, who knows?

I'll watch the next few weeks with interest.

Bring me sunshine

Next Wednesday the Ashes start and for the two months we'll be gripped by what we hope will be a titanic battle, resulting in the victory for the England team (or should that be England & Wales)

Here are some of my thoughts:-

• KP is not scoring runs as flowingly as he should. He will need to change this, but is capable of rising to the occasion
  
• Cardiff as a venue for the first test match is, as "Yes Minister" would put it, a brave decision. It could be even courageous!
  
• Sky Sports have given me the ability to watch the "action" live on my laptop. As I'm a Sky Sports subscriber, for free.
  
• We appear to have better spinners than the Australians; it's a long time since we've been able to say that.
  
• This series will either make or break, Andrew Strauss as England captain.
  
• Ricky Ponting needs to have a great series with the bat for the Aussies to retain the Ashes, if he doesn't the effect on the rest of his team could be terminal.
  

  It's all very exciting and let's hope at the end, like Eric Morecambe, we've got our hands on the little urn.