So, for the first time in 14 years, there will be no country from Britain or Ireland at a major football tournament.

Boo hoo.

From a personal standpoint, and this is something I never thought I would be saying, I think that the order of home nations who deserved to get to the finals given the way they have performed in the qualifiers is:

1.  Scotland
2.  Northern Ireland
3.  England
4.  Wales

Supporters may not agree on the exact order, but I think only the most ardent England supporter could argue against the fact that Scotland have performed much better than anyone expected - including us Scots it has to be said.

It’s inevitable, I think at least, that how we perceive things by all 5 senses add up to how we perceive a certain item overall.

I’ll explain.  A film, for example, is aimed at our sight, but if you watch a film where the sound is dodgy or the cinema doesn’t have their speaker setup properly then you will leave with a worse impression of the film than you would have had you seen it in all it’s glory with the soundtrack as the director intended.

Sport - why on earth do we watch it?!

No matter what the sport is, the order that results happen is of paramount importance to how we feel and react as supporters - for example a goal scored against our favourite football team in the first minute isn’t greeted with as much dismay as one scored in the final minute.

Of course tonight, us Scotland supporters had to endure both of those scenarios!
What a rollercoaster of a game - I hate that cliche, but if every it applied to a game of football, it was this one.

What should an advert do?

To me, it should inform the viewer about the product and inspire or encourage them to go out and buy it.  So many ads these days do neither, yet companies are obviously willing to spend thousands of pounds on their advertising budget on these nonsense ads and I don’t understand how they can justify it.

Ads on TV at the moment are broken down into 3 categories - for me at least.  First there are those which do inform me about the product, but are simply wrong for some other reason - mainly because they are plainly just ridiculous.

Years ago, people lived in the past - that sounds stupid, but what I mean is that they found out today what had happened yesterday and so on.

Newspapers were printed to inform them of the events going on in the world in the days or even weeks previously, then these were overtaken by TV news which could tell you at night what had happened across the country that day - and soon they informed of what had happened all around the world that day.