Rain, dark, gloam: the part of my brain that recognises pleasant sunshine and summer warmth has locked up its office for the winter and headed south with its ‘Viva Espana’ straw hat on. Come the end of the month it’ll be dark when we get up and dark when we come home. Unless that is you’re lucky enough to be living somewhere marginally less godforesaken in the weather department than England, in which case I don’t want to know anyway.

There’s nothing like picking things up of a morning on a high note.

It’s international week and there’s suitably little going on. Sunday’s win was crucial for keeping our mini lead and our momentum intact and we need to repeat the performance (less the two goals conceded and the general slacking off) when Bolton come on 20th. Amazingly, that will be our sixth home game out of the nine we have played – two thirds of our games at home. I can’t recall a season where the start has been skewed so much towards our home games, but we can only win what’s put in front of us. What goes round comes round though; in December we have twice as many away games as we do home games, and the two home games we do have are against our London brethren in N17 and SW6.

So tougher months than this lie ahead.