Verbal

All facts are pony, right?

If you read other posts on this thread you might learn something.

So you're a 'bit wary'. I wonder why.

Thanks!

Not quite. An American sportsman has bought a minority stake in the company that now owns Burnley. As for actual investment, my understanding is that Burnley has gone from a club with cash in the bank to one that has been taken over with debt finance, with at least some of that debt being taken on by the club. Happy to be corrected if that's not the case

Honestly, they might as well wall off Norwich from the rest of the country. No one would notice. Even with the trains running it takes me longer to get there from London than to York and Leeds

We have a winner

Reported.

And as is the case with most of MLG's 'pedantic posts', he's right

Quite. If Howe is the answer, fuck only knows what the question is.

Looks like Ralph is going with one up top - Broja.

I'm afraid that as soon as I see this particular character's name pop up with a reasonably well-written post, I check to see where it was plagiarised from.

I got to know David Amess pretty well after he won his Southend seat in 1983 - probably met him three or four times a year until the late eighties. Never liked his politics - he was a committed Eurosceptic even then - but he was an immensely amiable man who was happy to hear strongly held views different to his, and to discuss them at length. He was also almost totally lacking in conventional political ambition - for him, winning his seat was like winning the lottery, and he revelled in the mundane and time-consuming work of being a constituency MP. He wasn't unique - there are a number of MPs in the Commons quite like him in temperament and calling, which makes recently heard the 'scum' label all the worse. But a talent for being genuinely nice - and I mean Ted Lasso-level nice - was something he clearly never lost. What a depressing day.

To be fair (as the saying goes), he didn't say whether that level was up or down

Too right! With bells on.

Apropos nothing of course, but listening to people trying to justify the many downsides of Brexit makes them sound like someone trying to convince an A&E doctor that there's a perfectly good reason for their cock to be stuck in a hoover.

You'd have been hopeless working for the Third Reich SOG

Google 'west pier'

If all that's left of him is an end-of-the-pier entertainer, I know a good one in Brighton

Calm down dear. And how the hell did you get through that hissy fit without uttering the only rhyming slang word you've ever learned?

Where is he? I particularly miss his Jew-baiting and Arab-bashing. Everyone needs to hear from a bigot every now and again...

sydney, you have the patience of Job trying to deal rationally and knowledgeably with this desiccated lemon. But you eventually got to where the rest of us already were: see buctootim for details

I tried, but realised it would mean inventing a new language, like the one my two-year-old niece uses

If you're looking for an alternative to fuel (and everything else) chaos in Brexitland, and fancy a detour, a friend tells me that petrol stations are fine and running smoothly in Kabul.

Yep, as you correctly predicted, you misinterpreted. Freedom of movement within the EU is freedom of labour movement, not of people in general. Hence, in Belgium, for example, it's incredibly difficult to stay in the country if you're a non-Belgian and your lose your job. So 'supply and demand' in action under FOM. There always were controls - and most other EU countries use them. It's perhaps a tiny example of self-awareness that British politicians knew that their incompetent governance meant that such EU controls could never work successfully in the UK, not least because of the absence of an ID card system - but mostly because, even in good times, the Home Office was 'not fit for purpose' (think what it is now!). What we have instead is not controlled movement. There's nothing 'controlled' about it. The massive labour shortages - not just HGV drivers delivering fuel - mean that economic output is suffering, and the economy is massively under-performing. This quickly translates into company collapses - even, as we're seeing, companies that are at the sharp end of distribution, where you'd think they'd be minting it. And this in turn translates into faltering growth, which we're already starting to see. But you knew all that, right?