My son, Norman Junior III, plays competitive junior tennis. When I watch him play, I tend to stand at a distance and remain completely silent. Outwardly at least. I always try to offer positive encouragement - congratulations if he wins and commiserations after a defeat. My son wins some matches and loses a handful more. However, he always enjoys playing, he doesn’t scream and shout or thrash his racket into the ground. He wins and loses with the same good grace which makes me just as proud as his sporting prowess. ...

A minor irritant with uninteresting email cluttering up my Inbox has resulted in some minor changes to my Web 2.0 first-team squad. Akismet, the popular and widely used anti-spam solution, was letting an increasing trickle of irritating comment and trackback spam through. As I had configured email notification for all blog comments, this was generating pointless, tedious, worthless emails that simply had to be deleted. A complete waste of time and energy. ...

Dear Cathy and Claire I wonder if you can help me. I recently was asked to host a deluxe barbecue for some Scottish friends who live in a town called ‘Glasgow’, near Scotland. I live in London and had stocked up on decent cuts of meat, firelighters, barbecue coals (impregnated), vegetable kebabs and fish because some veggie always turns up unannounced. As my wife is so quick to prepare her lovely potato and pasta salads and often brings the baked potatoes out before my BBQ is actually hot enough to start cooking, I took the precaution of stocking up on a few gas canisters and hundreds of gallons of fuel accelerant. She won’t mock me in front of my friends this time. Oh no. ...

Newly appointed Manchester City manager, Sven Goran Eriksson stunned the football world today by opening the transfer kitty and swooping within hours of his appointment, to announce two high profile signings from two major Premiership rivals. The new arrivals are a combative 24 year old midfielder and an experienced, classy central defender Joey Barton (Newcastle - £18.4 million) Silvain Distin (Portsmouth - £7.2 million)

Seven weeks ago on this blog, I predicted that Manchester City would appoint a foreign manager. ‘However, I have a horrible feeling in the pit of my stomach that, in seven weeks, Manchester City Football Club are going to appoint a foreign manager.’ I also suggested the name of ‘Sven Goran Eriksson’ as the most likely candidate to be appointed. Now, seven weeks ago, you could get decent odds from your local bookie on Eriksson being appointed: 100-1 in fact. ...