… when cutting down trees is where they are likely to fall. It’s all very well doing “back-of-an-envelope calculations but if a branch gets caught up somewhere all of your plans can come to naught.

Keen readers of these pages last winter will recall that I had a domino effect – one tree into another and that one into a third. This year I managed to drop two trees across the Cortina and the Merc. Ahhh well!

Luckily there was no serious harm done to anything.

But I remember Liz noticing the look of consternation on my face as Terry used a years supply of wood to get his bonfire going the other day. “Don’t worry” she said. “There will be plenty more”. Well, she wasn’t wrong, was she?

But we had more snow today – piles of it. I was trying to clear up the wood but on two occasions I was driven inside by heavy falls. And by the time 17:00 came round and I was soaked to the skin and all my three pairs of working gloves were saturated, I called it a day, came inside, made myself a coffee and watched Fandango.

Now Fandango is a magnificent, vastly underrated Road Movie that should be part of everyone’s DVD collection. The music is superb. But talking of the music it contains one of the most astonishing out-takes ever. The film is set in 1971 as it quite clearly states, yet the theme music is “Saturday Night’s All Right For Fighting” from Elton John’s Goodbye Yellow Brick Road which, as any fule no, wasn’t released until 1973!

In other news, keen readers of these pages will recall an incident from a few years ago concerning a Welsh Premier League match at Porthmadog. A supporter shouted out at a linesman “Who’s the Paki with the flag?”. He was apprehended by a couple of supporters, marched down to the club’s offices, made to apologise to the club and the linesman, and then booted out of the ground and banned for life. However the Welsh Football Association charged Porthmadog with “failing to control its supporters”, fined £13,200 and docked 3 points. And so earlier in the week at Llanelli a group of supporters made monkey chants at Port Talbot Town’s Drew Fahiya, who is of Afro-Caribbean descent. The supporters were unidentified.

Now this sounds something like 10 times more serious that whatever happened at Porthmadog, but there are one or two subtle differences. Porthmadog is a small rural club run by a group of volunteers and continually bounces along the bottom of the league. Not the kind of club that will put up a great fight especially when money is tight and three points here or there is pretty meaningless. But Llanelli is a big city club – a leading light in the Welsh Premier League and run by high-profile businessmen. The club is challenging for the Championship and a place in the European Champions League, and the fortune that goes with it – is at stake. There are many eyes, including mine and several hundred others in Porthmadog, who are following this case with interest and awaiting the Welsh FA’s next move with bated breath.

And in other other news, I have a candle lit in my room sending a message to a dear friend who departed from this plane of existence a year ago and who I am desperately missing.

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