Seaford Saint

I've been sitting here all day thinking RIP

Abba are ****.

You mean Bearsy has read the whole book and he won't get to that bit? Bearsy, I hope you can overcome your disappointment.

Doesn't sound like much of a book, does it people? Bearsy should get a knighthood for reading this for us.

I am still angry after last night...I came away on Sunday hopeful......didn't the prospect of making the last 8 mean anything?

Alpine you are the limit.....against Reading we lost to a better team. Blackpool away was a shocker. I still think Reading are better than us even now I don't think we bullied anyone.....

Absolutely agree with you.."...

Juvenile comment by retard.....come on we should have fielded a stronger side...

I couldn't agree more.....let's see if it can change second half, it's just the one goal but there isn't much on the bench.

Reading 4 Arsenal 0 now.........

Reading 3 Arsenal 0

What happened to that thread?

I'm off out to dinner with friends and I won't raise the topic of this thread. I will let my inner god laugh though. I had to stop reading parts of your chapters to my wife, she had never been overly impressed with any of it. Anyway keep going mate and at the end I hope one of the mods takes all the chapters and concatenates them.......

A good question...can anyone answer this?

this is great stuff...don't think that we are not taking this in Bearsy, we are.

Sad news for Southampton....

Lord Bichard is a genuine, fully paid-up Sir Humphrey - a career mandarin. Bichard was a permanent secretary in Whitehall, until his retirement at the age of 53 in 2001. His entire career has been spent in local Government and Whitehall as a civil servant, and then among the fat-cat quangoistas. He is one of the lucky recipients of a scam whereby circa 16,000 of his ilk had their pension entitlement doubled....but nobody was told, and thus there is no budget to fund it. Lord Bichard's index-linked pension is in excess of £120,000 per annum. Last night, this man told the BBC that retired people should be encouraged to do community work....or face losing some of their pension. While the official government estimate of public sector pension liabilities is £530 billion, an estimate using more realistic assumptions than the government would be £1,025 billion. This sum is over 80 per cent of GDP and over twice the size of the official national debt. These commitments must be honoured by government, and thus pension liabilities should be regarded in the same way as the official national debt. What’s more, each year the Government makes £41 billion of new pension commitments. These are funded by you and me at twice the rate required for employers in the private sector. The figures for Mandarin pension liabilities (about which I’ve blogged endlessly – see link above from 2010) are deliberately understated, because by ‘government’ in this case, what we mean is Sir Humphreys . There are really only five lumps of income, spend, and liability that matter when it comes to sorting out Britain’s problems: our trade balance, civil service waste & overmanning, the welfare system, 2008 bank bailouts, and public sector pensions applied to local government and Whitehall civil servants. Now along comes Lord Bichard with this to say from the comfort of his State-feathered nest: “Imaginative ideas are needed to meet the cost of an ageing society. It is quite possible, for example, to envisage a world where civil society is making a greater contribution to the care of the very old, and older people who are not very old could be making a useful contribution to civil society in that respect, if they were given some incentive or some recognition for doing so. We are now prepared to say to people who are not looking for work, if you don't look for work you don't get benefits, so if you are old and you are not contributing in some way or another maybe there is some penalty attached to that. Are we using all of the incentives at our disposal to encourage older people not just to be a negative burden on the state but actually be a positive part of society?" I have myself encountered young people (and comment threaders at The Slog) who would support this hypocritical and muddled view of the retired. And like some kind of robotically covetous leveller, Bichard goes on to point out that "the transfer of wealth in this country from the young to the old is one of the highest in Europe". Bichard's 'imaginative ideas' represent some of the worst apples=pears analyses I've encountered in a long time. For starters, wealth is primarily concerned with assets, not income. Old people have had sixty years to build them up, young people ten. And it isn't a transfer of wealth at all: it's a simple reflection of the 1946-48 baby boom coming through to retirement. No Lord Bichard, the stats say it all: the real transfer of wealth in this country has been from the middle class wealth producers to the elite: from the Squeezed Middle to the bankers and senior civil servants who between them (a) account for 64% of all Britain's national debt liabilities and (b) have screwed up everything they were given to do. Next, look at his Birtesque comparison of people without work (thanks largely to government overspends, bank losses, a daft economic balance and neocon drivel) with the retired. Here I am aged 64 - declaring an interest - with a 100% self-funded private pension. In the last twelve years I have seen this drawn-down, market-exposed pot and a small capital sum saved over the years (1) reduce by 60% thanks to QE (2) lose 90% of its income thanks to Zirp (3) have the drawn-down income capped by the DSS and (4) offer the lowest annuity rates in living memory. Most older people have paid taxes all their lives on income, taxes on their pension savings, and now pay taxes on their pension income. I become entitled to the State pension next February - and that too will be taxed at the rate applicable when one adds my private pension. Lord Bichard is 100% cushioned from the four factors squeezing me, and millions like me. But he can't resist poking a fat functionary's head over the parapet to tell the peasants it's time to work harder...otherwise we might have to throw you on the fire. This is Lord Bichard getting over-excited about something. And let's face it, his noble Peerness has had a rollercoaster of a life with some stunning judgements to his name. While serving as the ghastly David Blunkett's PermSec, for example, he at one point intervened personally to ensure that details of an affair that Blunkett was conducting with his Private Secretary should not become public. Nothing like a bit of open Government, eh? He has consistently voted in the Lords for greater EU integration. In 1990, he was appointed CEO of the Benefits Agency with a brief to 'deliver an active modern social security service, which encourages and enables independence and aims to pay the right money at the right time'. It didn't do any of these things, and in 2001 it was folded into the Job Centres. From 1995 to 2001 he ran the merged Education & Employment departments, presiding over an appalling record of dumbed-down standards and risible employee training - plus, of course, a spurt in the numbers of pinstripes he employed. On his watch, the Learning & Skills Council quango was born and, sadly, allowed to live. It was thrown on the 2011 bonfire, and all its functions transferred to local government - along with all the pen-pushers who worked there. After his retirement on full pension aged 53 in September 2001, Bichard was appointed Chairman of The Design Council. Another nice little Quango-stipend, but why? Apart from designing things that didn't work, WTF has he ever had to do with Design in this country? In his spare time, he carried on ensuring that the interests and emoluments of his Class would be protected: he remained a vice-President of the Local Government Association, and a Director of the Institute of Government. (This latter is basically a manual for senior Mandarins wishing to learn how to more fully manipulate their Ministers, and hide things from the public.) A man who, all his life - from age five into free education and thence on to University with a free grant and then 30 years in the Useless Brigade with a free pension followed by quango-troughing - had everything at the expense of the taxpayer, now wants to tell the rest of us that we get far too many freebies, and nothing is for nothing any more. "Just be sure to close the gate after me" and all that. There is, when you think about it, an obvious reason why the Lord Bichards and Bob Diamonds of this world are responsible for two-thirds of the debt liability run up by Britain since 1990: they share exactly the same brand of arrogant insouciance, within which it's not just important that they come first: everyone else must come equal last. One could fit a brass neck on a rampaging rhinoceros, and get more sensitivity than these people emit. For myself, I think Lord Bichard should take some of his own medicine. And the social contribution I recommend for this very lucky, unproductive man is for him to retrain as a plumber (thanks to his education ideas, you can never find one anyway) and then use his new skills to go to the homes of struggling pensioners....there to stick his head down the lavatory, while the occupant flushes the chain.

Hi Team.....I did ask you guys for some help on how and where to put my own songs and I have just successfully done it. http://soundcloud.com/lancemaleski/sets/more-songs gets you there Have a listen....I have nothing to be ashemed of, I am actually really chuffed!!! I thoroughly recommend Lou of Studio 4 near Southampton if you feel inspired to do the same, as the guy is a one off character of immense talent.

What's done is done and we are in the bottom 3 now. We either underestimated our need for central defenders or were unable to obtain target players. So the question it seems to me is a simple one...and you can bet your ******** the club is asking this as well. What will it take for us to get out out of the bottom 3 and stay up this season? 2 central defenders, a left back? More positions than this? I don't think we need a change of manager. What do you guys think? Which players could come in and steady us in defence? How much would these cost the club to buy? Is it a coaching issue? I am out of my depth here but my conclusion is simple...the spine of the team is too weak. I dread the next game againat Spurs...I really do. Could we nick a result against them? How? How about intelligent responses? In the meantime I will continue to listen to George Harrison's All Things will Pass and resist the temptation to sneak into the summer house where there are 36 bottles of red wine and drink myself stupid.

Shocking Revelations - After Saville, Tony Hart!!! Alledgedly Morph complained he was a Play-Doh-phile

A man has been shot with a starting pistol; police say it's definitely race related.

Thank you bearsy.....

Without doubt my favourite thread ever apart from the the thread which I think was called the Soul Cellar.

My mate worked on top of the pops years ago and he told me abck then about a lot of similar behaviours taking place. The thing is was the sex consensual? ...guess its still a crime if the young lady was under the age of consent. At a guess, at Radio and some ITV and BBC TV stations, this behaviour was widespread...then we have pop concerts.

I also go there and paid for the privilege. Would I have joined if there was the hot food on offer last week, no I wouldn't.... Anyway I am reliably informed by my sister who manages it currently, that hot food is being re-introduced. I asked about tea and coffee and tables but she had heard nothing on these. We travel from Newbury and it's great for us to go there rather than freeze our nuts off in our seats.