Nov 5
Thank God.
After seemingly years, we have finally made it to Election Day in America. Please, people of the United Kingdom do not complain about your irritation of a four-week election campaign.
Today American’s go to the polls, well those that haven’t already voted, and then the fun begins.
Please click for moreAmerica has been in total eclipse meltdown today, although not literally hopefully.
Mind you I was standing on Wall Street in New York earlier and was about the only person on the street without those eclipse glasses. The sun was bright and I am not sure my ray-bans cut it.
Please click for moreA spell of quick work trips was the warm up for a much longer one. I am in San Francisco, California after travelling here yesterday. I am due downstairs in a few minutes to jump on a bus for what has been flimsily described as a team bonding day of wine tasting in Napa Valley. One of my happy places so the team building should be effortless.
Please click for morePhew. That was quite the show, and to think they skinnied it down. I bet the queue for the Abbey’s loos goes right around the block.
I thought Charles could have cracked the odd smile and after 70 years of practicing you’d think he would know his words off by heart. The prompt cards were a little unnecessary, but again we do know how to pull off a bit of pomp and ceremony. No one does it better or with more grandeur.
Please click for moreThis such a sad tale.
Ex-Addicks defender Richard Rufus has been jailed for seven-and-a-half years at Southwark Crown Court for fraud and money laundering. (more)
Please click for moreWith Hurricane Fiona battering Bermuda last week, Hurricane Ian has wrought devastation across south west Florida moving across the state bringing rainfall measured in feet, and is now heading back into Charleston in Georgja for second dibs.
Those of you that read these pages regularly will know that we have a house in Sarasota, Florida, which is between Tampa and Naples on the Gulf Coast. It has been another worrying week.
Please click for moreI have lived overseas for 19 years, but I was never prouder to be British than yesterday. I am a (South) London boy and the world’s best city was resplendent as the country and the world stood still to witness the first state funeral in almost everyone’s lifetime.
It was an emotional yet beautiful spectacle as the world watched every tiny detail so perfected that not even the biggest budget or best film director could recreate. The Queen meticulous to the end as every rehearsed and planned aspect was executed perfectly. Real life theatre showing history being made. It was a wonderful tribute to the most loved sovereign.
Please click for moreThere has been many days or times when I had wished I could be in London, walking its streets taking in the moment. July 7th, 2005, the opening of the Olympic Games in 2012 to name two.
I am no royalist, but today is another one of those days where I am kicking my heels at home with all the TV’s on.
Please click for moreWhat a very sad moment in history. I feel a quite numb if I’m honest.
She was for generations as the world changed for better or worse all around us, the only true constant in our lives. I like many other millions have only known life with her as our Queen. It will be so strange now.
Please click for moreHow was your Platinum Jubilee weekend?
I have never been much of a royalist, although after living in America you get to appreciate the pomp and pageantry and how jealous Americans are of it. My overriding thought this weekend was that no one could do it like we can.
I do always remember my dear Nan though when stoking the coal fire she would casually stare up at the Queen Mother on TV and say to no one in particular “I’d look that good if I’d never done a days work in my life.”
Read moreSaturday’s home game against Ipswich will be played at 12.30pm on the same day to avoid HRH Prince Philip, the Duke of Edinburgh’s funeral.
The biggest adversity the world has seen in many a generation. I truly hope that you are all staying safe and healthy.
A crazy and worrying time, harrowing for some, as the Coronavirus or COVID-19 sweeps every little corner of our world taking no prisoners. A global pandemic, only previously in the deep imaginative minds of movie writers, scientists, historians and risk officers. Now part of all of us, every day, every minute.
I’d like to add my condolences to Leicester City fans and the family of their owner Vichai Srivaddhanaprabha who died in such terrible circumstances yesterday after the end of their home game with West Ham United. It is yet unknown who else was in the helicopter when it crashed just outside of the Walker Stadium.
This news spread widely yesterday and has now appeared in the national press of two current Charlton players arrested and subsequently appearing in court in Ibiza over an alleged rape attack on a teenage British holidaymaker at a hotel earlier this week. A third older man
Last summer we spent a week for my birthday in the volcanic Caribbean island of St. Barts, or Saint Barthélemy (St. Barths) as the French call it in the French West Indies. Miami is 3.5 hours away and St. Barts lies 160 miles east of Puerto Rico and immediately south of the French and Dutch shared island of Saint Martin, where we flew into to jump on a noisy seaplane for a 15-minute journey across the water to St Barts. The flight is not for the faint hearted but there is the option of a boat, which takes slightly more than an hour.
The island has a jet-setting reputation of photo shoots, paparazzi and huge homes owned by billionaires that mostly sign idle. The haunt monde reputation began in the 1950’s when David Rockefeller bought two plots of land, including one on Gouveneur Beach. That move compelled the Rothschilds to follow and they arrived with a suitcase of cash and developed an estate in a coconut grove nextdoor to the Rockefellers. Today the Rothschild property is the Hotel Guanahani & Spa.
The island certainly has an air of chic. A mixture of St-Tropez sophistication with Caribbean laissez-fare, but the island doesn’t come across as pretentious. Just over 9,000 people permanently live on St. Barts, although around 200,000 tourists visit the just over 9 sq. miles during it’s summer months.
I have had a tremendous summer of travel, but my head spins when I think about where I have been and some of the absolute sadness and tragedy that many of these places have had to deal with, and how lucky I’ve been to miss some of these awful events.
Outside the rattling of the windows has been replaced by the lullaby of the tree frogs as Nicole moves away from us and although the island is still under storm watch, driving around tonight you’d never know this place got battered all day by 125 mph winds. Bermuda really is a resilient little country.
Where we live the back end of the storm after the eye passed over around midday was no where near as bad as the first lashing we got. The east end of the island nearer the airport, Hamilton Parish and St George’s if you know it appeared to fare far worst. I think the airport and the causeway connecting it to the rest of the island sustained damage.
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Rain is swirling outside like a Catherine Wheel firework as gusts of wind are now close to 100 mph with the eye still two hours away but with the wall of the eye just approaching us now.
Nicole’s eye is 50 miles wide, which is twice the size of the island, which will mean a very surreal experience when it moves over us. The weather nerd in me is looking for way to seeing that in about 90 minutes.
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The worst hurricane to hit Bermuda since Fabian in 2003, which claimed 4 lives, sits just 200 miles outside of my window tonight. Nicole is currently a CAT 3 with sustained winds of 115 mph and will give the island a direct hit around tomorrow lunchtime, only the 4th direct hit since 1950.
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A lot of people have asked me if Bermuda was impacted by Hurricane Matthew. It wasn’t, but the lesser scrutinized Tropical Storm Nicole will come over the island on Thursday and will give us plenty of rain and winds of 50mph.
Matthew impacted me in that it meant a mate and I’s weekend in Miami had to be shelved as we couldn’t get there from Dallas in time to make it worthwhile. That’s more the annoying because Matthew’s track moved away from Miami and all they really got was a downpour.
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I see that Addick Patrick Collins is going to retire on January 31st of next year. The Mail on Sunday journalist is 70 and plans to spend his last day working covering the Rotherham game at The Valley, if his boss allows him! (more)
Patrick, whose son Mick, is also a huge Charlton fan and a terrific writer, has worked at the Mail on Sunday since it was launched in 1982 and has covered 10 World Cups, the first being Argentina ’78, and every summer Olympics since 1972 apart from Montreal in 1976.
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Never forget where you came from, or at least last was. Today in Chicago the temperature sunk to -23C, a record for this day. An arctic chill blankets North America and cities around the country are expected to plunge to their lowest temperatures for 20 years.
Anyone that has visited Chicago will know how windy it can be. I used to say that it was windy all year round, it was only the temperature that would change. Today the ‘wind chill’ temperature out near the airport was -50C as a polar vortex delivered a large-scale freezing cyclone from the North Pole. Wind speeds were as much as 100mph.
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Tonight something worthwhile and newsworthy amongst all of the rumour and conjecture going on around the club at the moment. Jason Morgan who founded the Charlton’s community initiative over 20 years ago has been awarded an MBE in the New Year’s Honours List.
Jason began working for the club in 1992, the year we returned to The Valley and formed the Charlton Athletic Football in the Community Scheme. Jason has worked tirelessly and selflessly beginning with an idea and a bag of footballs to pioneering an organization that now employs 80 full-time staff and interacts with 10,000 young people every week and epitomizes everything that makes you proud to be a Charlton fan.
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“When a man has done what he considers to be his duty to his people and his country, he can rest in peace.” – Nelson Mandela
I life well lived.
I was very sad to hear that the author James Herbert died today aged 69. Once I progressed from listless kids books I found James Herbert when I was probably as young as 11.
My Mum was so scared of mice and rats that she made me cover his first book The Rats in brown paper, thank god she never got to peer inside the pages because Herbert wrote in such a graphic and horrifying way that I couldn’t put it down. Certainly there was no point not finishing it before I went up to bed, because I’d never have slept anyway.
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America is a great country, I’ve lived there and I may live there again one day. Today 28 people were shot dead including 20 children, babies in fact at an elementary school in a prosperous town in Connecticut. Elsewhere in that great country today 84 people were killed by a gun, and more than twice that number have been injured. That is the daily average.
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I picked a good night to go the Bermuda Rugby Classic. Every night this week it has pissed down and Wednesday the corporate tents were flooded out, but last night it was dry and warm as Canada took on Italy in the Plate semi-final and after the Lions played Australia in the main event.
Canada booked their place in the final with a close fought win over the Italians 10-7, and will play France in Saturday’s Plate final. In the later game the Lions gave a good account of themselves against a much stronger Wallabies side.
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It wasn’t close was it? Barack Obama was returned to office just after midnight on the east coast. Obama won 303 of the electorial votes and the President also won the popular vote perhaps eventually by as much as 3% once the final numbers are counted on the west coast. Florida not for the first time has yet to be decided but is leaning towards the Democrats.
Out of the 10 major swing states, Obama won 9 of them, if I include Florida. Romney did gather together a lot of the conservative support and I am sure won back supporters that the Republican’s lost to the Democrats in 2008, however I just get the impression that this will further divide the countries conservatives and for me they have all the early symptoms of the Labour Party in the 80’s.
America is moving on and whilst old grey-haired men poo poo abortion, gay rights, immigration, foreign allainces, climate change and rely on God’s way young people, Latino’s and women in particular are taking this great country in another direction.
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I don’t actually think it’ll be that close tomorrow night. It suits the American media to talk up an Election too close to call but they don’t tell the whole story and mostly only the facts that their one-eyed audience wants to hear. As an aside I’m watching now from afar (650 miles across the pond) America becoming increasingly split. Split between the have and have-nots and very differing liberal and conservative thinking.
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Almost a week after Sandy invaded New York and the entire Atlantic coastline of the United States, the impact is still being felt far and wide. Incredibly as many as 60 million people in 24 states were directly affected by what is now known as Post-Tropical Cyclone Sandy. At the peak of the storm, the diameter of winds stretched 1,040 miles and extended 520 miles from the center of circulation making it one of the largest ever recorded.
To give you a further sense of the scale of Sandy’s consequence, it knocked out power to more than 8.5 million customers across the US, and 2.5 million still remain without electricity. The storm caused extensive damage to electrical grids, mobile phone towers and nine oil refineries. Over 20,000 flights were cancelled in 4 days including mine, swarths of the famous New York subway was flooded and the NYSE was closed for two days, the first time for weather since the Great Blizzard of 1888. Over 100 died in the US alone.
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As I anticipated we never made it back to Bermuda tonight as our flight was cancelled due to Hurricane Sandy passing Bermuda at it’s closest point around about our expected arrival time and American Airlines unsurprisingly were not prepared to run the gauntlet.
The good bad news is that the solitary daily flight from Miami to Bermuda tomorrow (if it goes) and Tuesday are fully booked, so we will have to slum it here in Palm Beach for another 3 days. I am having great difficulty convincing my 3-year old daughter that not every birthday entails a week in Florida!
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I too would like to add my condolences to Radostin Kishishev and his family following the loss of his wife Krasimira who died of cancer yesterday at the desperately young age of 38.
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If it was strange that the Daily Mirror bothered themselves with the Paul Elliott to be the new Charlton chairman story, it is perhaps even stranger that Michael Slater has used the mostly worthless News Shopper to deny it. Slater has usually turned to the South London Press for his sound bites and as has been par for the course steers clear of the Official Site.
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Did you watch that? It was insane. On You Tube 7.1m people watched Felix Baumgartner jump 24.2 miles from space, free-falling at over 700 mph for 4 minutes and 22 seconds and then with his parachute activated he floated to a landing in the New Mexico desert. The whole thing took 10 minutes.
It was incredible viewing, watching a man sit on a window ledge 128,000 feet in the sky with a view of the planet and then jump and spin through space at quicker than the speed of sound. Blokes a legend.
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A few people have asked me if we survived, and the answer is quite comfortably. Leslie passed by here gathering speed on Sunday night and is now belting Newfoundland. It left as it started on Saturday night with an incredible sunset, and the island breathed a huge sigh of relief.
Scattered power outages affected around 800 people but not us, roads were littered with debris, ferries, buses were cancelled and the airport closed but business was pretty much back to normal on Monday. Ostensibly what happened was a very wet and windy and boring tucked up indoors of a weekend.
The photo is of Leslie captured by NASA’s Terra satellite as it moved past Bermuda on Sunday.
Remembering today the thousands that tragically and needlessly lost their lives 11 years ago including 176 of my work colleagues. RIP.
Outside the one window facing the Atlantic Ocean that is not boarded up I am finding it hard to decipher the sea and the sky, it’s just a canvas of murky grey. The rain is coming at the window like someone is stood outside with a power washer but the winds aren’t that bad.
According to the eminent Bernews 800 homes are currently without power, we are currently ok, although the telly is a little shaky and the Weather Channel’s Jim Cantore is giving us regular updates stood on the beach at Elbow in his waterproofs.
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Hurricane Leslie has finally got itself into gear and is now motoring at 8mph across the Atlantic Ocean but fortunately she is still driving in a direction away to the east of the island.
Leslie has dropped it’s strength and is now classified as a Tropical Storm (sustained winds less than 74mph) and is located approximately 250 miles south-southeast of us. The sea temperatures down there apparently are a little chilly but there is plenty of warm water ahead and it is then that Leslie will regain hurricane status. Hurricane’s are powered by warm surface sea temperatures.
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The waters are very flat around the isles of Bermuda today. Glass like in fact. Yet 400 miles away from us lies Hurricane Leslie and she is looking at us licking her lips. If she was a bus she would have ‘Bermuda’ written on the front of it, because that is her next stop.
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Over the years we have often had to dig deep to find a true “British sporting hero.” Bradley Wiggins has been at the pinnacle of his sport for sometime but these past couple of weeks he has burst into our lives with immaculate timing. There are just days left until the opening of the London Olympics and we hope for more British achievement, but it is hard to imagine anyone coming even close to what Bradley accomplished today.
Team player first, when Wiggins should’ve been swigging champagne and waving to adoring fans on the Champs-Élysées, he instead hurtled to the front of the peloton to give compatriot Mark Cavendish every chance of sprinting to victory, which he conclusively did. We must also remember that Chris Froome came 2nd overall to make the podium. Unfortunately both had to grin and bear Lesley Garrett mullering the national anthem, which would at least have given the Parisians a laugh.
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The hurricane season officially began on June 1st and ends on November 30th. I know a lot of you worry about me, especially after Igor paid us a visit in September 2010, so I thought I would share this year’s hurricane predictions.
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Bit of a rubbish weekend really. Our little girl was struck down with gastroenteritis at the end of last week and didn’t eat for 4 days and could hardly keep anything down. A dinner we had planned with some friends Saturday we blew out and basically we just camped out in our bedroom watching a couple of films (Albert Nobbs and My Week With Marilyn) and of course the Diamond Jubilee River Pageant.
I had to laugh because I would get embroiled in so many arguments with Americans who used to say to me “I love London, but it always rains.”
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Bermuda goes to work tomorrow and Tuesday, whilst sovereign states, crown dependencies and other overseas territories are off waving flags, necking Pimms, eating pork pies and celebrating Her Majesty’s 60 years on the throne.
I shouldn’t complain too much, we get more than our fair share of public holidays here on the rock, but it did interest me that the government in election year decided against observing the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee.
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The weather has been ultra kind to us since we arrived on Wednesday. The beautiful Secret Garden was swathed in sunshine yesterday for my mate’s wedding. A week ago we would have had our coats and wellies on.
The wedding was superb, my speech went down a storm, even if I say so myself, and it was brilliant to see so many of my old mates and my family altogether in one place.
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Although my fingers are hovering over my keyboard without really knowing what to say, I felt compelled to write something, a tribute of some kind following the really tragic death of Gary Speed this morning.
Speed was a model professional, a rare breed respected by all supporters whatever their bias, who played at the top level until he was 40 years old. He made 677 appearances and played for his beloved Wales 85 times.
I see the Huddersfield game got put back to the Monday for Sky. Obviously this gives me the opportunity to watch the game but I have to agree that a Saturday afternoon would have provided a cracking atmosphere with, so far, the best two sides playing in the early winter sun to a packed house.
Monday night football is not quite the same and Huddersfield could easily be coming to us on a 43-match unbeaten run and I’m manfully trying to forget the cameras.
When I was at home this past weekend I got the opportunity to watch BBC’s Football League Show with Manish Bhasin and Steve Claridge, football’s answer to marmite. BBC do the show a million times better than ITV ever used to and I’m a big fan of Mark Chapman and Mark Clemmit, whose recent interview with Chris Powell was excellent, if you missed it.
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I was walking back from lunch with a client just by the steps to the Lloyds Building in the city when we heard a few whispers that a plane had flown into the World Trade Center in New York City. The whispers got more frantic and we walked into a nearby office and watched the tragic drama unfold on a television.
My client had a sister in New York and was desperate for news of her, while I thought about my colleagues that occupied 8 of the top floors in the No. 2 South Tower. 176 of whom sadly lost their lives, 2,606 altogether at the WTC site and 2,977 in total not including the 19 cowardly hijackers.
That terrible day still doesn’t seem real, it was so horrific that even the most creative of film writer hadn’t thought of a plot so deplorable.
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With one eye on the telly watching CNN’s saturated 24-hour hurricane coverage and one eye on my daughter in her playroom yesterday I suddenly saw out of the corner of my eye her inflatable turtle, which earlier she’d been sat in half full of water, fly by the window followed by a couple of garden chairs.
I rushed outside and there he was Tropical Storm Jose careering past Bermuda 50 miles away packing winds of 40mph. My little excursion out to the garden got me soaked and when I returned to the telly there was Anderson Cooper on CNN stood in the middle of a deserted New York’s Greenwich Village desperately looking for sign of rain, let alone a hurricane.
Hurricane Hyperbole is nothing new, especially since the invention of 24-hour news channels, and the American’s have rarely been known to overreact, but when one anchor proclaimed that the storm to be as “big as Europe” it was enough for me to turn over.
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Day’s like today make me pretty homesick. All the pomp and ceromony, pride and history, flags and smiles. I love it.
Bermuda, as I understand it, is the only British colony without a day off today, even though Premier Paula Cox is at Buck Palace now quaffing bucks fizz. We were up early in our house this morning sat with our 18-month old watching the events unfold with our peanut butter on toast. The roads were quiet on the way into Hamilton this morning, but there does appear a real apathy here towards the future King’s wedding. No flags, no bunting, no smiles, no history. I’ve just put the telly on in the office though. Enjoy your days.
My work involves understanding and protecting our clients from all kinds of risk, both those created by man and mother nature. Our office is always awash with talk of natural catastrophes. Fault lines, hurricane forecasting, flood plains, tsunami models, tornado radar detection, volcano activity…. all pretty scary stuff.
There are many ways to anticipate and diminish risk, but no way to eradicate events like Friday’s. Earthquake’s don’t give any warnings like say hurricanes do and one can only imagine what it must feel like to survive a huge quake and realise the tsunami warning sirens are piercing the dusty sky.
Like always, I’ve been glued to the coverage from Japan, a country I have visited and loved for all of it’s quirkiness, history and it’s gracious people.
The ongoing nuclear crisis is somewhat overshadowing the human tragedy caused by Friday’s double disaster, which pulverized Japan’s northeastern coastline. More than 10,000 people are estimated dead. Some of the footage is horrific and my heart sinks when I watch it. Japan is a proud and sagacious nation used to disaster and my heart goes out to those poor people.
New York, New York
