WE'VE had two different named storms this week, Bert and Conall (who thinks of these names? BTW, just to let you know if it gets far enough through the 'storm' alphabet, M is for Mavis!)

Anyhow, thankfully in dear old Leiston we weren’t affected unlike lots of poor people up and down the country.

I took refuge in the local coffee house with my favourite oat milk mocha during Conall, watching the world go by, literally at times!

I remember that big old storm in '87. Storms never had names in those days they were just… well, storms! And it was a nightmare trying to play football in them.

When I was playing in the Ipswich & District/Tolly Cobbold/Suffolk & Ipswich League, or whatever it was called, even your own goal kicks would sometimes go back over your head into the adjacent fairground area! Rain and snow were fine but wind, we hated it although it did make for some amusing long-range goals and comical errors, and a lot of lost footballs!

Back to today. It's cold and wet, and the dreaded two words are starting to surface, two words that every non-league supporter dreads…PITCH INSPECTION.

I don’t know what current non-league players feel about postponements, but I remember back in my day, admittedly, a long time ago, we rarely, if ever, had such a thing. There was no middle ground. The game was either on or off. You hardly 'inspected' a pitch.

If you actually did turn up with the pitch under water, the trusty pitch fork came out for ten minutes and we kicked off. Now I appreciate health and safety has changed massively over the years but clubs up and down the country spend hours covering, protecting and clearing to ensure the highlight of the week, Saturday football, going ahead.

Player and spectator safety is of course paramount, but we read all too often about a referee inspecting a pitch and it's okay, and then the official match referee turns up and calls it off. What joy! Clubs will have already spent lots of money on food and programmes only to fall foul of an early Saturday failed pitch inspection.

Perhaps the way forward is for every club to have a 3G pitch, but I can’t see that happening anytime soon, so I suppose it's back to the dreaded lottery of the Saturday morning pitch inspection.

And finally... it was a long and quiet journey home from Kettering on the train with TikTok last weekend.

"Late goals are only fun when we score them. I hate football," he shouted as we boarded the 5.58 which took us to St Pancras, the first of 3 changes. We took our seats and he shouted again. "And don't disturb me, I'm listening to the Peter Crouch podcast."

With that we didn't speak again until we got to Saxmundham... I sometimes feel I need different company.