Hello and welcome to another ARSBLOG ARSCAST right here on ARSBLOG.OLA.COM.

I think everything's in good shape. We're good to go. I've got the wine and you have got the ears, which is about all either of us need to enjoy this whole experience.

It has been a rather slow week for Arsenal and for Arsenal bloggers and ARSBLOG as well.

And you get used to the interlals, pre-Christmas, you know the breaks that you have and you have two weeks without a game, but I can't remember before that this part of the season being quite so dull and quiet.

Maybe it's because we had those four games against United Chelsea, Villa and Liverpool and after that and after the tension and drama and horribleness of a couple of those games.

Everything seems to be a little bit of an anticlimax. Maybe that's what it is, but it seems interminably dull considering we're heading into the business end of the season.

There's very little going on. Normally, when I sit down to do the ARSCAST, I look at the blog, you know, to see what's been going on all week. It's because my memory is poor.

That has nothing to do with the wine, I should say. I just, in general, I'm not a very memorific person. I have to write stuff down and put stuff on Post-its and then I have to put stuff on Post-its to remind me to look at the Post-its.

In general, I'm not good with remembering things like names and facts and details and bills and all that kind of stuff.

So I look back at the blog and I look at the stories that have been capturing the imagination, so to speak, for the five days, four or five days leading up to the ARSCAST and then obviously you base what's going on around that.

This week, having read back over everything, the main talking points on the blog have been testicular injuries and the lack of them, footballers with beards or moustaches like the guy in the Big Lebowski,

which he comments on the mirror website, calling Stan Cullymore a wife-beater, which I never gets old, that kind of thing, odd dreams featuring Paul Mariner, and let me tell you.

In terms of people you want to be dreaming about, he's not the worst in the world, but nor is he the most exciting, Paul Mariner. He had a kind of waxy texture or something in my dream, which I didn't like.

I don't like that waxiness on people, you know, you see those people and they don't look real, and that's what he looked like, almost like a wax work dummy come to life.

We had Andrea Chavin's website and his, rather, brosk answering of questions, Graham Paul being a huge cunt, simply because he is, of course, Graham Paul.

And while all those things over the course of a week might seem reasonably okay and reasonably entertaining, as they go, you might notice there's not a great deal of actual football in there.

And as we try and focus as much as possible on the football and the goings on surrounding the football, this has not caused the problem, but obviously leaves one a little bit short in terms of material, because we haven't had a game in midweek.

We might have had an FA Cup replay if we will not in the FA Cup, but it just seems odd to me that this stage of the season is so quiet.

And of course next week we have the, can you say the tedium, the dullness of an interlull, a mini interlull coming up, because at first I thought,

oh, Christ, an interlull, they're going to be away and the players are come back and blah blah. But then I realized, of course, this is February.

So when it said March the 6th or whatever is our next fixture, I was thinking that was a bit further down the line.

February, of course, having fewer days. I told you, I'm not very good at this remembering things and facts and, you know, what year it is and how old I am and all that kind of jazz.

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