Peace at last

The announcement today that this years Nobel Peace prize has been awarded to President Obama, took many by surprise, including to his credit the man himself.

The announcement was so unexpected that when one US journalist contacted the White House for a quote, they thought that he was joking!

It is a surprising decision in that he hasn't really done anything significant in this first year of office that instantly springs to mind as an action or series of actions after which we all said "well that's the Nobel Peace prize sorted this year". What he has done is take the USA back onto the world stage as a country who are prepared to negotiate again. The BBC correspondent, Mark Mardell, said on the radio this afternoon that  he thought he had got it for "not being George Bush!"

Any way well done Mr President, it's good to see your efforts (???) are being acknowledged.

Paint me down

One of the "ahem" benefits of relegation to League One is that Saints get to take part in the mighty Johnstone's Paint Trophy.

The competition is divided into two halves, divided North and South (to reduce traveling) and the winners of each half meet in the final at Wembley. Each half is also divided into east and west to further cut down traveling although that's less logical as tonight for example in the South west section Bournemouth went to Northampton!

Saints naturally are also in the South western section and after a bye in the last round, tonight they hosted Torquay from League 2 at St Marys. Tickets were very cheap and allied with a 7pm kick off meant that over 9000 turned out to watch.

The game itself started badly with Saint going in at half time losing 2-0!! The second half produced the required comeback to that at full time it was all square at 2-2.

Penalties! We scored all five, they didn't. Wembley is slightly less of a dream!!!

Perfect

Tonight's TV.

1. How I met your mother.... (Which ended with Roxy Music's "Mother of Pearl")
2. 2 brand new episodes of  "Two and a half men"
3. Chuck
4. 30 Rock

After a day like today I really need to watch and not to think!

Movin' on up

Will and I went to St Mary's this afternoon to witness our biggest win of the season , 4-1 against the mighty Gillingham.

We also went last Tuesday when a late injury time goal gave Bristol Rovers a 3-2 victory. To be honest we played slightly better on Tuesday night than we did today, but today the big difference was that we took our chances. On Tuesday when 2-1 up we had agreat chance to make it 3-1 but the Bristol keeper made a good save and then later when 2-2 another good save kept the score line level.

Today having taken an early lead, we let Gillingham back in through sloppy defending, but this time two chances were converted and eventually we eased to a fine victory.

This means that, at last, we have a positive points score (+2) and hopefully we will start to clear the gap on teams above us and begin to climb the table. After all we're only 16 points off of a play off place!!

Rio

Today the IOC selected Rio to be the venue for the 2016 Olympic games, which means that with Brazil hosting the 2014 World Cup, South America (or more accurately Brazil) is going to be THE place to go in the next decade.

Some thoughts:-

• Obama has been snubbed!
• Girl/Boy from Ipanema will be either BBC or ITV's theme tune for one of the events?
• They're 4 hours behind us so we could be watching sport at midnight quite regularly
• Let's hope that the inward investment brings lasting change for the country and it's poor.
• "Samba" will be the most over used word for a while each summer. 

October

Or should I say "blogtober", as this month I'm going to try to turn my blog into more of a diary?

Today's highlight's. Car had a service at Nissan Westway who hang out at the end of the Totton fly-over. This meant that, having planned my diary so that I could be in the office all day, I could drop the car off and then walk the mile or so across the fly-over to the Bank. The Nissan dealership looked after the car when Dad owned it and are very helpful and not too expensive, so I've carried on using them and the closeness to my office is the clincher. I also quite enjoy the walk to the office. Everything went like clockwork and a cleaned and valeted car was ready at the end of the day.

After that, tea at Mum's mainly to retune her freeview box. She actually had done a pretty good job herself, thanks to both the Daily Mail and her brother (down the phone!). A free meal is too good an offer to overlook, however, and I wanted to just check what she had done and make sure that she still had all her favourite channels (BBC1 & 2)

Finally..Pompey players haven't been paid. If they could only go into administration that would be a great start to the month.

Proud

After we went to the Greenbelt Festival, my son Matt, rather than write a blog, recorded a video blog and posted on his blog. You can see it here

That was good on it's own, but now...now Greenbelt have only gone and put it on their website, next to the official podcast and apparently they all stood around and watched it together. Genius! You can find the "greenbelt version" here.