I WAS at the Rose Road Centre recently to help Southampton Council Care Department award certificates to about 50 of their men and women - mainly Down's Syndrome - who'd completed courses ranging from communication to learning to play computer games.

It's always good to talk to the lads and lasses and the carers deserve so much credit for the time and effort they put in, bearing in mind that the majority are volunteers.

It wouldn't do any harm for a few of our wayward footballers to mix and mingle now and again.

Later in the same day, I was taken along by Jeremy Wilson, one of our young Echo reporters, to meet Richard Prosser and his family.

He's a lifelong Saints supporter whose wife Jean has allowed him to take over the whole of the basement of their lovely new house near Andover and turn it into a shrine to Saints.

One room is completely dominated by the old dug-outs which he bought from The Dell, and to get into the second room, you have to go through one of the old turnstiles. Fortunately, there was no charge.

But I was flattered to see it was named the Lawrie McMenemy Suite.

The walls are adorned with pictures and programmes from over the years and his friends join him in the dug-outs to watch old games projected on to a large screen on the wall.

A great reminder of the love supporters have for their football club.