Thursday was an interesting day.

The morning time was taken up with an annual event which is put on by Councillor Alan Dowden and his wife Councillor Celia Dowden.

All around their constituencies each year they get local schoolchildren to come along and this year they planted 4,000 daffodils.

Alan is Welsh and has been doing this for more than 20 years now and daffodils, as he explained to the children, are the national flower of Wales.

There was another Welsh theme with one of the Rotary gentlemen there from Cardiff, who wanted to talk about John Toshack most of the time, while it was also the birthday of the Prince of Wales and Alan hopes to invite him for next year’s planting which will be interesting if he does turn up.

In the evening I joined up with some of the Saints players for first of all a signing session at the club shop in WestQuay followed by the honour of switching on the Christmas lights in Southampton.

It was accompanied by lots of music and entertainment so if people hadn’t realised Christmas is getting nearer they do now.

I suppose the next thing to think about is which managers in the Premier League this week will still be here at Christmas.

Quite honestly I cannot believe how many changes are made in such a short space of time.

I read recently about a manager in the German league whose team won the title and the cup there last year and this season after ten games having only won twice with the club fourth top was sacked.

If we look at Saints’ fixture next Saturday up at Arsenal both managers have only been here a short time but are under pressure.

Ralph is approaching one year and Unai Emery just a bit longer than that.

Ralph started as a hero but is now being questioned by the media in general. As we know it hasn’t helped that Saints haven’t won at home and were booed off at half time and at the final whistle against Everton.

Similar things are happening at Arsenal.

When I look back to the old days when I joined up at Saints, my predecessor, the legend Ted Bates, had been manager for 18 years and could have stayed on if he wanted.

In those days managers used to think that 65 was the time to retire.

But also in that period Ted was given 11 years to move the team from the Third to the First Division.

These days they probably would have had five or six mangers in that time.

I took over and of course was guilty of the team getting relegated at the end of my first season.

The only slight consolation was that it wouldn’t have happened before because it was the first time the third bottom team went down and that’s where we were having collected more points than a fair few of the previous seasons in the top flight.

These days of course I would be out the door.

The chairman then said ‘manager, sort it out,’ and I was there for another 11 years and I think repaid their loyalty.

Like Ted, I could have stayed on, but I thought it was right time to move, which of course history will tell you was the wrong decision, but that’s another story.

Also, it was vital that we kept our jobs because quite simply it wasn’t easy to get another one.

Now there is so much movement.

It might be because the foreign gentlemen don’t expect to stay here as long as Mr Wenger, for example, did and expect to move on every three or four years.

But it doesn’t help a club to have regular changes because it takes a while for the new manager to get his feet under the table and find out what the players he has are like, not just on the field where he has probably seen them a lot but off the field, which was we have seen with the England set-up these week can be a challenge.

It's a bigger problem at club level because you are with each other day after day but short term management is not something I think is right.