I've been watching a lot of television this week.

I stayed up on Sunday night to see Ronnie O'Sullivan carry off a closely contested Wembley Masters snooker final playing some magnificent shots with a brand new cue. A new cue - so what you may say. I knew that players valued their cues but didn't realise that most of them use the same cue throughout their careers. So much of the commentary was astonishment at what he was doing with a cue he had picked up for the first time only days before the competition.

Not like tennis players who can get through half a dozen racquets in one match. That's been the other TV treat, the Australian Open. Scotland's other player Elena Baltacha (born in Kiev, lives in England but claimed by us for good reasons - check it out) kept me up till 2.30 this morning. Winning the first set with the best drop shot I've seen so far in the tournament wasn't enough and despite frequently being two or more points ahead in a game she couldn't do quite enough to topple Amelie Mauresmo.

I got out of bed about 9.30 expecting to see Andy Murray limbering up but Carla Suarez Navarro and Venus Williams were still slugging it out. Navarro was busy taking the second set against expectations having been well beaten in the first. When she was 2 games to 5 down in the third I went off to make a cup of tea in anticipation of Murray's imminent arrival on court. But she went on to take 5 games in a row and send Venus Williams home in economy class.

So then there was Murray. He didn't bounce out and sweep his opponent away in the first set as Nadal and Federer tend to do. He plodded his way through a straight sets victory over a player almost 50 places below him in the rankings. But he won. Fingers crossed for the next round.