colehillsaint

To be honest, would have taken this after the Chelsea game. Thought we were dead then and I’m not so sure now. Think we are showing much more and Swansea will be very worried.

Aren’t we a point behind Swansea, and need 1 more point than them to draw level?

Fernandes was much better than Boufal.

If this team avoided this relegation, I think I would be more surprised than anything else I’ve witnessed from a Saints team. They have had so many good opportunities to avoid this situation. Why would anything now be different?

Pride at competing at the highest level. Customers having any interest in corporate tickets. I’m also sad about the jobs that will be lost at the club. Generally gutted.

We won’t be getting £30m.

Undoubtedly, someone of both sound mind, and an honourable business motive would have probably paid her less for it. I’m too soft for some, but I would bet that she is genuinely regretting it, or will be as the Gao’s begin to optimise their new found situation. Gutted!

Usually agree with you. No right to expect her to put her own money into the club, as you say. Fair to expect her to sell to someone legitimate, and half sensible though? It’s not as though the club didn’t serve her family well, and provide them with some good times to be honest. I do genuinely wonder how she feels, if she is checking the table tonight. We will find out what the Goa’s are about fairly shortly.

Arrogance in the extreme to think we will be attractive to the best upcoming managers on the momentum curve we will be on this summer. We will be lucky if MH stays.

In a heart beat. I’ve had the best times following Saints with my oldest son. His first season as a 7 year old was our last relegation from the top flight. I remember him sobbing after the final whistle at the Utd game, and feeling so bad for him, but he has taken so much from that, and the fall and rise since. Knows his football, and treats triumph and disaster just the same. The whole packaging of football now is sheer unmitigated bull****, but our shared experience, and the laughs and fun we’ve had, are anything but. Find something to share with each of your kids. That is my advice.

He never looks fit enough to me. What do I know.

Drove out of Vegas, to Death Valley, several years ago. 54 degrees so pretty hot, and amazing terrain, but the most striking thing was that people crossed near that way in the nineteenth century to get to a new life in California. For me, very inspiring.

I don’t know why I looked because I’ve got much better things to do. Again, to clarify; I think he is spot on in his assessment of the issues. On taking away or applying factors to votes, I think he is being controversial to raise debate, and does not in fact really mean it. That has pretty much always been his style. I certainly wouldn’t agree if I thought he was being serious about any modification of one person, one vote.

I would never, ever, ever, actually advocate taking the vote from the old, or any other demographic. I’m going to hope that next time you converse with said brother in law, you cast your enquiring mind as to whether he appreciates the breaks he got, and whether the best interests of his nephew are at the forefront of his mind as he enters the polling booth. I’m going to stop beating my head against a brick wall on here, and return to working energetically, like any 53 year old should, against the forces waged against my business. If things go well, I won’t particularly need any of the accumulated fortune that will drop into my lap when my, industrious, but self confessed very lucky, father dies, within the next ten or fifteen years.

My point and many others on this thread are good ones. Entire is not a word I have or would have used. In fact, if I was in my late 60s and had missed out on property, had my pension fund raided by unscrupulous directors, and was now making ends meet with a nightshift in the local Texaco, I would be pretty ****ed off as well. For the record I have absolutely nothing in particular against retired teachers.

Honestly, I get the joke, and that’s fine, but places like Wimborne and Purbeck, where I live and work, are awash with older people that have migrated from London and the Home Counties, sometimes funded by generous occupational pensions, and always with big property windfalls, from moving out to the sticks. It isn’t just here. Where my father and two of my siblings now live, in the Scottish Borders, they are surrounded by retired teachers and similar, with health and lifestyles that their ancestors could never have aspired to. In itself that is good news, as we will all be old one day, but they push out young families by making housing unaffordable, and seek to shut down anything remotely noisy, smelly or dusty, damaging local employment. They also campaign against any housing development, exacerbating the local populations problems.

Vast majority I suppose could be questioned. “Vast” wealth, in terms of the individual, is a stretch too, I guess. Taking the general sentiment though, it is pretty difficult to argue that a lot of people haven’t become very affluent. I won’t bore you with lots of personal examples, but I could.

Hasn’t highlighted on my phone screen.

I’m being driven back from a meeting in Kent, so have a little time to devote to pointless debate. My curiosity leads me to ask; which paragraph do you particularly take issue with?

You have my sympathy. IMHO, yours is a generation where some have worked the property market, the career ladder, and the system generally, to great effect. East Dorset is full of them. Those that haven’t, for whatever reason, have actually ended up with quite a ****ty deal.

It is crap. In particular Russell Brand should be deeply ashamed of his stance from a few years ago, that young people should not vote. Everyone who has ever discussed this with me gets a very clear treatise on the importance of voting. People have died for that and you won’t catch me forgetting it.

Is he an idiot making a very valid point about the current imbalance in our society between the young and old?

Where is there any evidence whatsoever that older people recognise this, expressed through there voting for governments and their respective manifestos? The only thing governments can do is fiddle with the stuff that older people will vote for, like medaling with stamp duty, which then results in an immediate adjustment of the market, which guess what - raises property values? Can they tax buy to let hard? Nope, landlords won’t vote for it. Can they tax second homes? Nope, too close to the grey vote again. Drop property as an investment by going after inheritance? Don’t think so. Ramp up development by relaxing planning? Nope, those nimbys won’t be having that. My oldest, studying in Reading, was living in a house with 10 other students last year. Reasonable size place, with every room converted to modest bedrooms, bar the kitchen and bathroom. The landlord was collecting £5k per month for that. Seriously, £5K per month for a very crappy detached house in Reading. That is how messed up our student accommodation and general housing policy have got. And trust me, it is all in my vested interest, but at some point you have to say this is madness, if you are decent. Fortunately, as the old timers nominated representative, you have reassured those young that you are all on their side, and by the way it’s time they jolly well woke up to it.

I don’t think anyone on the thread is actually advocating that. If you read Paxman’s piece he is talking about “weighting”, and I would imagine he is only stimulating debate. No-one, in their right mind, is going to want to ban old people from voting, or devalue their vote.

I wouldn’t begrudge your vote, or your luck, at all. The point about your life, and mine, my Dads, and for that matter my grandparents, is that life is about getting to feel just a little optimistic, that it might be a struggle, but you are moving forward. The struggle actually makes it better if you can get somewhere in the end, expressed through your obvious pride in your journey. The toxin of debt, unaffordable and scarce housing, infrastructure development hampered by vested interests, the encroaching automation of lots of well paid work, the gig economy, all seems to conspire against the under 30’s in our society currently. All you can ask for is a chance, and I don’t think, purely on a generational level, they are getting a fair crack at it. The baby boomers on the other hand would serve themselves well if they consulted the young about the choices they want for the future, rather than populating social media with crap about “fighting nazis for your future, you ungrateful little....” and blaming everything on immigration, that the young are generally very comfortable with. Not necessarily individually, but as a generation. Meanwhile many politicians are scrabbling around to appeal with populist crap, that particularly older people should not be falling for! The political class should be forgetting the old arguments and thinking hard about how to make systems that share the benefits of globalisation, rather than calling the young, and poor, lazy or whatever.