A Guinness a day...

Heading for Dublin for 10 days tomorrow to celebrate Christmas with the in-laws, so was delighted to spot this among the most read news items on the BBC website this morning!


Guinness good for you - official

The old advertising slogan "Guinness is Good for You" may be true after all, according to researchers....

Go listen...

Have newly discovered the delights of Sigur Ros and Sufjan Stevens this week, and have really enjoyed having the below to accompany my essay writing this week:

Sigur Ros - Takk

Sufjan Stevens - Come on feel the Illinoise

and on a festive note:

Acquired taste some of it maybe - but I'm enjoying them and definitely recommed!

Have also enjoyed a re-discovering (though not to Lisa's liking unfortunately!) of the delights of Led Zeppelin via their new compilation album Mothership. Treated myself to the bonus edition with a live DVD included. Fantastic!

Go read...

Have really enjoyed reading this over the last few days. Really engagingly written, and extremely moving and thought provoking. Click here for a brief synopsis. Won't say anymore than that, other than to highly recommend if not read already. Also just heard that it has just come out as a movie - will be interested to see how they have done it in film form, so that will be a trip over the Christmas period.

4 goals and a baby!

Came home from my essay writing at college yesterday slightly on edge about Liverpool's match away to Marseilles which they had to win to stay in the tournament. Was not expecting my pre-match tension and build-up to be rudely interrupted by a phonecall to say that my sister's baby was on the way 9 weeks early! Louise had taken herself to the hospital for a quick check as she had not felt quite right during the afternoon, only to find that she was 8cm dilated and the baby was coming! 40 mins later just a short while after the football had kicked off had another phonecall announcing the birth of Joshua Ethan - less than 2 hours after Louise had driven herself to the hospital!! He's now in the special care unit being well cared for and may be there for some time, though he seems to be doing well at this stage and not giving any particular causes for concern. Here's a few photo's:

The proud parents.

And proud grandparents.

So congratulations to Louise, Kev & Nathaniel, and welcome to Joshua - thank you for forcing me to keep my nervousness about silly football matches in proper perspective!

Having said that, despite everything going on it was still a pleasure to see Liverpool win what could have been a very tense and difficult match so comfortably. 4-0 away in Marseilles is a great result! Torres and Gerrard were amazing. So from a position of needing to win all 3 matches to qualify Liverpool have beaten Besiktas 8-0, Porto 4-1 and now Marseilles 4-0. Fantastic! But it makes even more of a mockery of the silly results in the earlier matches that left us in the position of needing those 3 wins, and also mean that we only qualify in 2nd place from a group that we should have won comfortably. Means we're likely to end up with a far harder tie now in the next round against 1 of the likes of Real Madrid, Barcelona, AC or Inter Milan etc. Still Liverpool have shown that they can beat anyone on their day in these European knockout stages. Here's hoping we'll do it again!