I was pondering this morning how a lot of Arsenal's foreign stars, past and present, haven't been as pindownable in terms of nationality or extraction as they seem.

The most interesting example is Patrick Vieira. Everyone knows he comes from Senegal and is naturalised French, but I didn't find out that neither of his parents are from Senegal till I got hold of a copy of his autobiography. His mother is from Cape Verde and his father is from Gabon.

Robert Pires is half Spanish, half Portuguese and didn't speak a word of French till he was 5 apparently. (If you look down Portuguese wine lists, some of them have the word Pires in them!) Thierry Henry has one parent from Guadeloupe and the other from Martinique, but I can't remember which way round. Both of Emmanuel Adebayor's parents are Nigerian. He was born in Togo, but went to school in Ghana because they lived close to the border - meaning he is fluent in French and English, as Ghana is an English speaking country.

And that's just Arsenal. The whole Premiership has been full of interesting cases for years. Tim Cahill's father is second-generation Irish, his mother is Samoan, and he grew up in Australia and moved to England aged 16 to play football. Neither of Marian Pahars' parents is Latvian, although I don't know the details, and Danny Cadamarteri could have played for at least 5 different countries - he is part Irish, Italian, Nigerian and Jamaican, and born in England. I have a feeling at least one of his parents was born in Scotland, but Wiki can't prove that for me:)

This led me to ponder: Is life like this, or is it just football? My first instinct was: No, football is weird. But thinking about my own group of friends, I know at least 3 people of interesting extraction (Filipino/Mauritian, Dutch/Welsh, Turkish/Armenian). The world really is a small place!

Adam sent me a text with a piccie of this sign in London this morning. Someone has added the name "Thierry" to the Henry Road sign in Manor House. It is very professionally done! Surprised I can't find it on Google. I did find that adding a random word to a Thierry Henry image search yields different piccies to normal!:)

I'm still off work. Just felt so TIRED this morning. Had weird dreams all night. Hilarious! In the first one, I was being chased by a robot from Doctor Who. I knew it was only a toy, but I was still scared! In the second one, something political was going on at Middlesex. We were having some kind of election, NUS Conference-style. It was NOTHING like actual Middlesex elections. One of my lecturers caught me handing out leaflets for a meeting against her, calling her a Zionist! A load of New Labour types were campaigning in favour of privatisation. I asked one why she supported privatisation, and she said, "Cumbria". I asked another, who was wearing a Lib Dem sticker, and she said "Because everyone else here does!" I told her that was a rubbish reason, and said "What about the rail crashes?" She said those had nothing to do with privatisation. I was trying to explain why they did, but she wasn't really listening.

Suzie Wylie and I then walked in the opposite direction across Trent Park campus, where all this was taking place (except it didn't really look a lot like TP, obviously). Of course, with it being TP, I then ran into Trevor. I woke up just as it was getting really interesting!:'( Suzie wandered off and left us to it!;)

Well anyway, had better shoot off now as my gran is coming soon. Hope you all have a great weekend! And better luck than me finding Easter eggs!

God bless, Jenni xx