There was a meteor shower on Saturday night. It comes every year on the same day, December 14, early in the morning. So I went outside at about midnight when our dinner guests left, stood there for about 2 minutes and was absolutely amazed by the sight. There was nothing there. Sod all. Not a sparkle, not a shooting star, nor a whole bunch of Geminids that had been promised on that clearest of nights.

I realised two things: firstly that you probably needed to stay there for a few hours, and it was fucking freezing (literally so as I stood there in an open shirt and no jacket/coat/sweater) and secondly that you probably need to know roughly where to look, and the sky, if you haven’t noticed, is very big.

So could the people who arrange this annual event be a little more considerate to the viewing public, please. Can we have it in the summer, could the asteroids come a little earlier in the night, say about 10-ish, and can they put up pointers so we know where to look. Otherwise, quite frankly, its easier to watch them on youtube or just buy the dvd.

Though one star which continued to shine ever more brightly as Sunday progressed was Harry Kane. As I said yesterday, my confidence in my football team is almost limitless. And even though I named former ‘director of football’, Damien Comolli, instead of current tosser, Franco Baldini (artistic license), Spurs indeed went marching on.

You watch Harry Kane and he doesn’t really look like a proper footballer. He looks more like a heating engineer. His touch is a little wayward, his running rather clumsy and his style of play not very compact. But what he lacks in intrinsic skills he more than makes up for in effort, passion, determination and grit. Unlike so many of the current team, Harry really wants to be there. He’s hungry for the ball, he chases back, he is every manager’s dream. He is the most un-diva-ish player in the league. And he scores goals. I just love his spirit.

Especially on a really shitty day in Swansea, with the rain driving down and in a match that quite frankly, Spurs had absolutely no right to win. Outplayed, out-possessed, out-everything, our wayward, often completely absent defense managed to hack its way through 90 minutes of sustained Swansea onslaught and, as in so many matches this year, relied on Christian Erikssen to score the winner in the 89th minute. I almost felt sorry for Swansea, though managed to stop myself at the last minute, instead choosing the moment to leap around the tv, dancing and shouting with joy. I felt that was better use of my time, in the situation.

So now, as everyone pointed out yesterday, Spurs are just 4 points off 4th place now. Wow. What they didn’t point out is that in the time it will take us to get those four points, all the teams above us will have earned 9. But maybe, just maybe, we’ve now ‘turned the corner’. Though corners in the world of Tottenham are generally not simple right-angles, but complex, 6-dimensional, chaos theory type geometrical constructs.

Happy optimistic Monday

A xxxx