sat at home waiting for skip to arrive, so i can junk the contents of the cellar. having spent a whole day yesterday preparing for the new term i'm returning to the book today to get it in shape for sending off. i think its going to be a fairly dull day 
along with the skip i'm also expecting a gardener to tackle the jungle that has grown up in the past month or so. he wasn't too enthusiastic on the phone yesterday - grumbling that he had too much work. so he might well take advantage of the night's heavy rain to cry off. bleedin workmen eh? one minute they complain that work is scarce, next that they have too much. why doesn't he just employ some eastern europeans since the country is (apparently) overrun with them? its funny how some people like to have their moan and eat it. its a bit like the housing thing. we live in a capitalist society, one that has swallowed the thatcherite pill - i.e. that the 'market' is the panacea for all our troubles. but when a bank collapses (northern rock*) or the housing market goes into meltdown the state is expected to step in and bail us all out. whatever happened to market forces? likewise when industrious essex plumbers head off for Oz to earn huge wads of cash fixing the cisterns of ramsey street no one complains, but when 'hordes' of poles descend on peterborough to pick butternut squash they are stealing work from the locals and putting pressure on the NHS.
lets move on to football. as usual wenger has not smashed his piggy bank this summer while all around him the world of football goes mad. Manchester now has a new kid on the block in the shape of abu diabi united (the club formerly known as citeh). they have more money than sense (and even more than the russian in west london) and have swiped robinino from under the noses of the chavs. hah! good for them. but is it good for football? probably not. i suspect that by the end of the season at least one if not two other teams get snaffled up by foreign investors. you have to wonder what the FA are doing about all this wheeler dealing (FA you answer!) After all, thaksin singersowingmachine was hardly a 'fit and proper person', abramovich is almost as shady, and are we really happy about oil rich sheiks running our clubs? in fact this morning i'm quite pleased to support a team that is run by an old school member of the british elite - a beacon of tradition in a sea of chavs, beer swilling geordies, corporate yanks, F1 playboys, russian oligarchs, Scandinavian eggheads and arabs with pockets as deep as their oil wells. then again we would be sold next week if fat and orange had their way.
its hardly cricket is it?
*by the way is there a london bank called southern softy?
