When I was chatting to Mr Ng my physio guy last Friday, it emerged that he is from Malaysia. By the way, he said that it’s good to get the patients chatting as it stops them moaning about the pain as he pushes them into ever more awkward positions, not that I ever moan of course!

Anyway, we have been to Malaysia on a couple of occasions and were mightily impressed with the fantastic thunder and lightening storms, which we encountered, on a couple of occasions. Firstly whilst sitting on the veranda of tiny wooden restaurant, we marvelled at the storm taking place somewhere out in the south China sea and then back in Kuala Lumpur we got caught in the middle of a huge storm which cancelled any plans we may have had for going back to our hotel, as the whole of that enormous city ground to a spectacular halt. Mr Ng told me that Malaysia has more thunderstorms than anywhere else in the world and the world’s foremost expert on these amazing feats of nature and particularly the impact they have on the built environment is a Malaysian guy. It seems that for several years people have been trying to tempt him over the USA to carry on his work, but he is quite happy to stay in the place that he loves (which is the best place for him to work) surrounded by friends and family rather than take the bucket load of cash which is being waved at him.

I thought that this was a lovely thing to hear, as a football fan, I get really fed up hearing about players who earn a fantastic salary, demanding that they are allowed to move to a bigger team (for an even more obscene wage), whatever happened to those great days of player loyalty? Wouldn’t it be great to hear of more players who were prepared to follow the example of that fine Malaysian fellow? The superstars of the game could be spread around, rather than the top clubs having huge groups of players who hardly ever get to kick a ball in anger, because their team already has 20 international players.

The other day I bumped into an acquaintance of ours who has turned his back on a highly lucrative career for a while to try his hand at some journalistic work. He has the safety net of new job on the horizon in the winter, but thought that he would use this time to fulfil a long held ambition, which seams to be working rather nicely. He has already had a couple of features (complete with his own splendid camera work) printed. I think we were both slightly amazed to find our selves doing the sort of job that we dreamt of as schoolboys, although for both of us it will be a fairly short lived period of employment.

I’ve always fancied the idea of doing some sort of semi serious writing, indeed one of the motivations for my foray into the world of blogging, was to write something (anything!) on a regular basis, with the hope that this could provoke some latent talent to emerge. Well so far that remains a dream, still in the past year one dream has come true, who knows what could happen in the next twelve months?