An Evening with Lawrie McMenemy

A long day today starting with Ambassadors' Business Breakfast Meeting at Grasmere House Hotel in Harnham and then back to Winterslow after calling in at Staples to purchase stationery. This afternoon Sara attended a meeting at The Rectory and I attended a meeting of the Parish Standing Committee having only just realised that there was, indeed, a meeting!  I arrived five minutes late but managed to quickly print off the minutes of the last full PCC meeting as an agenda.  This evening, Richard and I went to Bournemouth to spend an evening with Lawrie McMenemy at the Bournemouth Pavilion Ballroom where he was the guest in a chat show hosted by Paul Harris of the BBC.  He spoke of his early days in Gateshead, his days in the Coldstream Guards in London, he spoke with much fondness of his time with Grimsby Town and latterly about Southampton and his charity work.  A really lovely man, a gentleman and without question one of the best football managers ever.  Even when talking about some of the bad times he did so with a grace and politeness one rarely sees today.  Afterwards I had an opportunity to have quite a long chat with him telling him how our lives had crossed - the fact that I came from Grimsby and eventually married a girl from Chandlers Ford who attended the same church as he and his family and had mutual friends and acquaintances and how I was now a Southampton season ticket holder.  He really did enjoy his time with The Mariners and spoke about how he had taken his players on to the Fish Docks and shown them how hard the dockers and fisherman worked in cold freezing conditions.  His words to the players sum up his whole attitude to football and football clubs "These men work day in and day out five days or more a week in these freezing conditions so that they can earn the money to pay to come to Blundell Park on Saturdays to see you lot play.  Remember that on Saturday afternoons and play your very best for them! They deserve nothing less" . I manged to get Richard to take a photo of us together with my Grimsby town scarf although, unfortunately, the resulting photo was not too good because of the poor lighting in the building and my flash was inadvertently switched off.   Afterwards, Richard and I went to an excellent Indian restaurant called The Eye of the Tiger in Old Christchurch Road where we had Baltis and the best nan breads either of us can ever remember.  A really lovely evening.  My attempts at observing Uranus were thwarted again tonight.  The sky did clear and I saw the planet closer to 44 Piscium than the other night but before I could get my higher magnification eyepiece attached the clouds came rolling in again.  Frustrating!