The Two Faces of Football
This morning the news of the threats against Neil Lennon broke.
This evening, I’ve just watched a marvellous display of football as Tottenham and Arsenal fought out a three all draw.
Now, when I was young and growing up in North London, the rivalry between the two North London teams was fierce and probably on the same level as it was between Rangers and Celtic in Scotland at the time.
The rivalry is still there in North London, but it is still at a fierce but fair level. I would doubt there have been any more than a handful of arrests tonight. How many will we see in Glasgow on Sunday?
What has gone so wrong in Glasgow?
How To Get Up a Coeliac’s Nose
If there is one thing that annoys me living here, it is the amount of junk I get through my letter box. Most is flyers for fast food restaurants, none of which I would dream of using. As most of the food on offer is gluten-rich, it would do me harm.
I actually had one today from Subway, who claim that all their meat is halal. But their gluten-free offerings can be counted on the fingers of Nelson’s right hand.
I shall be sending a copy of this post to Subway.
The Blind Saga Ends
I posted earlier that Juhn Lewis mucked me about with the blinds for my house. In the end a few weeks ago, I did get the blinds for my bedroom on March 14th. And very nice they are too! They work as intended and couldn’t be better.
One thing that was rather annoying was that they’d originally charged me for the two larger blinds for the living room and the one for the bedroom was cheaper. This wouldn’t have mattered too much, as they refunded the difference. But because of all the messing about, the refund didn’t go through on the same statement, so I ended up with having to pay interest of £29 on my credit card account. I did get a few extra points, but their mistake in making up the wrong blinds cost me money as well as the embarrassment of being without bedroom blinds for several weeks.
Now that I’m happy with the bedroom blinds and as I’ve replaced the two broken panes in the living room, I felt a week or so, ago, that at the right price, the blinds might do for the living room, as I know the style and quality.
In fact, when they delivered the wrong blinds, I was asked if I would accept them for a consideration. I said no, as at the time the windows needed replacing in the living room and my glazier preferred to do this before the blinds were fitted.
So I wrote to John Lewis, saying that if the right consideration was on offer, I might accept the blinds for the living room, that were now sitting in their store.
Yesterday, I got a phone call on my mobile from John Lewis asking if I wanted the blinds. As I had told them before to call on my landline and I was busy at the time, I asked them to phone back in the afternoon.
But as in a couple of cases before, they didn’t.
So today, I took the bull by the horns and went to the Oxford Street store and saw someone in person, to whom I told the whole story. He said he needed to talk to the departmental manager and he would be a few minutes.
Whilst he was away, I looked at several other blinds on offer and felt that as I had signed nothing to say I wanted the blinds they had made in error, there might be something that was better and possibly cheaper. You also have to take into account, that I’ve firmed up on the chocolate colour scheme highlighted by brass, since I had the room measured for the blinds. So perhaps they need to be different anyway.
The consideration that I was offered was not in my ball park, so I politely declined the offer and left.
So this morning was a complete waste of time.
What I will be doing I do not know, but I think my days of dealing with the accident-prone curtain and blinds department in John Lewis are over.
What they do with the blinds they accidentally made for me is totally up to them!
Sniffing Out Cancer
The title of this post came from a little article in the Metro about a device called the Na-Nose.
Here is an article which describes the technique in more detail.
Florida Tourism
I can’t understand why anybody would want to go to the United States for a holiday and especially the state of Florida. After all according to this list from an official web site, they have executed 69 people since 1976.
I did hear though on Radio 5 this morning, that the clean-up after the Gulf oil spill has gone well and that the beaches are clean and tourism is on the rise.
But then you have the murders of James Cooper and James Kouzaris.
You wouldn’t catch me going.
It would appear that the murderer of the two Englishmen, is just 16 and will be tried as an adult and could face the death penalty.
So at least Florida has its priorities right. Tourism is more important than cleaning up crime.
Surely to improve tourism, they must do the other. But of course without using the death penalty. But then American justice is not about justice, it’s about vengeance.
Scottish Football Gets Uglier
And now there are parcel bombs to Neil Lennon and two fans. There is also this story on the BBC about a Facebook page threatening the Celtic manager.
I can understand why Scottish football is in so much trouble. We certainly don’t want Rangers and Celtic in the English leagues.
As I said before they should form their own Glasgow Premier League and perhaps play behind closed doors. But would that make the domestic violence linked to the games as reported here, better or worse. Certainly that report in the Glasgow Herald, paints a grim picture of the matches.
And then there’s the sectarian songs, that have got Rangers in trouble with UEFA after the match against PSV EIndhoven.
UEFA were soft on Rangers and they should have banned them from Europe.
The Anonymous Widower 