Snow joke and other updates.

Most of the blogs I've looked at today tend to consist of photos of peoples' gardens or streets covered in snow. Yes, it looks pretty, but it's a right royal pain in the arse.

It never ceases to amaze me how unprepared this country is for snow. It happens EVERY FUCKING YEAR, you think we'd have the mechanisms in place to deal with it by now, but no, of course we haven't. We can find untold billions to pay for missiles to rain down on Iraq, or to pay for the Olympics, but when it comes to dealing with snow, we're fucking hopeless. I bet Canada are laughing their bollocks off at us right now. I mean, our capital ground to a complete standstill, no buses, trains or planes at all. The 7/7 bombings never managed that!

This recent snowfall apparently cost the economy an estimated 1.2 billion pounds, and there's more on the way and we might run out of road salt. I'm not an economist, but surely spending a few million quid making sure we can deal with snow and making sure people can get to work and supplies are delivered, etc. will save us billions in the long run.

Still, at least the kids had a nice day off from school.



>Update on the previous post, my recent appearance on local and national news has now only bleeding gone online. See my full bell-endedness in glorious full colour. I apologise in advance for making you listen to Ace Of Base's (note the apostrophe!) 'The Sign'.



> My shoulder's still not brilliant, but it's a lot better, thanks for asking.


>Since Johnny Dixon passed away last week, two more Villa alumni have gone on to play for God's XI. Vic Crowe, former player and later manager of Villa died last week, and Monday saw the passing, at the very young age of 46, of Paul Birch. Birchy's death is particularly sad for me, because he's a player I actually remember, he was part of Graham Taylor's fantastic team of the late Eighties. I remember him marking Inter's Lothar Matthaus out of the game in our 2-0 win over them in the UEFA cup (the less said about the 3-0 defeat at the San Siro in the second leg, the better). I had an old Panini sticker of Birchy on the inside cover of my school hymn book (along with Gordon 'Sid' Cowans and Derek Mountfield and a posh foil sticker of our old round crest) He was a player from the time I used to go down to Villa Park regularly (those days are long gone! Can't afford it these days.) and though it's often claimed falsely that a player always gave 110%, Birchy always did, and that is why the Holte End still sing his name in our version of 'My Old Man'.