Sun in March? This is New!

I phoned my mum yesterdat and she held the phone out of the front door so that I could hear the hail-stones hitting the street outside. As I was talking to her, I was wearing shors and flip-flops on the beach at Cascais. Briliant!

Only when your friends and family are suffering with crappy weather can you truly enjoy the sunshine. Fact.

Over the last couple of weeks, spring has sprung. It has suddenly become much easier to get out of bed in the morning and everything is just better when it's sunny. Just reading a newspaper or having a beer become grand events when accompanied by the warming rays.

Last week, I went to see Portugal v Uruguay in a rugby world cup play-off. It was a really great day out, improved by the fact that rugby is a small but growing sport here so most of the people at the game were not taking it too seriously. At half-time and at the end of the game, people were actively encouraged to take to the field to talk to the players and throw the ball around. One excellent bit of red-tape before the game: our bags were searched as we were entering the ground and anything that could be regarded as a 'missile' had to be removed. Our 'missiles' included a pen, a bottle top and a boiled sweet. Somebody had two cans of deodorant, one with a cap and one without. The one with the cap had it's cap removed but was allowed into the ground. The one without the cap (and therefore nothing that could be removed) was not allowed to enter. I didn't understand either. The situation was made even more laughable when you got inside and found that items for sale included bottles and cans of all varieties that would have made considerably better weapons than a Werther's Original. Especially when you consider that the people that you would be aiming the offending articles at weigh 18 stone and could break your spine with an angry glare. Apparently, rugby players can handle crashing tackles and ten-man punchups, yet crumble under the force of a bottle top.

Anyway, Portugal got a surprise victory and the family next to us taking their young son to his first sporting event left happy, so it was a good day.

On a different note, thanks go to Darius for his advice about my tattoo proposal. His comments will be taken on board, but I don't know how much weight to attach to the suggestions of a man who happily let an old Japanese bloke cup his balls in the middle of the street. You know what I'm talking about, Fagan.