When I met Lara yesterday from her Eurostar train at Waterloo station, I asked her what she would like to do on her only full day in England. I’d already asked her by Pmail and she’d said ‘surprise me’. So, I offered her a choice – either we could all go to the Spurs match (3rd round of the FA Cup against Brighton) or we could go sightseeing. Guess what? She chose the former!!!

We got up and Lara said she would like to wear a shirt so I found her one of mine from the cupboard – here she is on the train into London modelling it……well, actually, deep in a camera conversation with DM but we’ll pretend she was modelling it especially for my PotD.

A strange incident occurred at Liverpool Street, while we were killing time before our train in a pub. A chap said to Bondy on the way out ‘I hope you don’t get a Seagull come on your head’. Now that’s a very strange expression, even when you realise that Brighton’s nickname is the Seagulls for what I like to think are fairly obvious reasons. Bondy spent the entire day worrying about seagulls fornicating on his head. Thankfully, he was worrying for nothing.

The game wasn’t a great game by any means and Brighton and their fans did themselves proud – in fact, we only got our winning goal a few minutes before the end. We tried (with varying degrees of success) to explain the offside trap, the reason why sometimes the ball came over the line in front of us and it would go to the corner to get kicked towards the goal and on other occasions it got wellied up the field by the goalie and much more besides. Her observations were ‘it’s smaller than I expected’ (the stadium), ‘it’s bigger than I expected’ (the pitch), ‘it’s so exciting’ (shortly after Spurs scored their first), ‘it’s so stressful’ (after Brighton scored), ‘why’s it called wife-beater?’ (when she was handed a pint of Stella after the game) and ‘yum, these chips are great’ (as we tucked into steaming hot bags of chips on the station platform at WHL station).

Our friend Al got kicked out of the stadium for standing up and had his season ticket taken from him - hhhmmmm - those stewards need to have a rethink - the man is the nicest, kindest, most gentle person you could hope to meet and he is 'Spurs through and through' - all in all a credit to the club, not a hooligan.

We’d planned to only go into the B&H for a swiftie then home yet somehow we were the last in the pub and only got home at 11pm. We chatted to two lots of Brighton fans – a great day out was their verdict as they happily left to pub-crawl back to Seven Sisters station on their way home. We chatted to two actors from the TV (well, Al did anyway). We chatted to a couple of Man Utd fans (from Esher) who’d only gone to the game because they had free tickets. We discovered that Phil and Phil are not just Phil and Phil but they share the same surname too and it’s quite an unusual name so that was a weird experience. Sarah went home early (she was proven to be very wise) and the next thing we knew it was late.

On the train we chatted to fans of other teams and for some strange reason I leaned out of our train and kissed a Chelsea fan – don’t ask me why! We chatted to a West Ham fan who told us of his team’s woes all the way home.

Poor Lara got no supper other than the chips because we got home so late and had spent her only day in London being dragged across from one side of the city to the other, sat in a cold stadium with 36,000 people shouting and cheering, then three hours in a dark, crowded pub. She said she enjoyed it…….I hope she did!!!

For all the Spurs who pop by.....take a look at the latest in my Bell and Hare gallery - the Phils and Lara!

Last year, I had a wonderful surprise in the post from Jill and Jeanne.