Whitey Grandad

You don't 'win' a penalty. Unless you're cheating of course.

Yes, if you like. So a player who has taken no part in the move leading to the penalty should be awarded a goal in his lifetime statistics just for kicking a ball into the net from 12 yards? Any professional player should be able to do that 19 times outside of twenty.

For Holland the Stena Line via Harwich is a good route. For France there are plenty of alternatives.

Goals from the spot are team goals and should not be attributed to a goalscorer, in my opinion.

What if you don't like or want Twitter?

Nothing clear about it, it was a knife-edge. So close that if there were a re-run (not going to happen) then the result could very easily go the other way but close enough that there is a very large lump of almost half those who voted who will not accept a total withdrawal from the economic aspects of Europe. So when I say 'that's democracy' I don't mean the vote itself, rather the process of determining its implementation. We know the result of the vote but not its outcome. Apart from that what was the actual 'decision'? The only question on the ballot paper was 'should the UK leave the EU?' Nothing about stopping immigration or leaving the a Single Market. Too many people are interpreting the result to suit their own ends.

And what you don't get is that most of the country does not agree with you, by a long way. The country just cannot afford to get completely out of the Single Market and there just aren't enough of you die-hard leavers to have any political influence, nowhere near as many as you'd like to think. If we don't end up with an acceptable mid-ground accommodation then there will be plenty of tears all round. That's how democracy works.

I'm not too bothered about replacing players like for like, especially now that we have a different manager. But I do feel that we are short of a quality goal-scoring attacker or two.

I agree, especially for an overcrowded country such as the UK. It is actually free movement of 'workers' at the moment. Free movement of people is different in Schengen and non-Schengen countries (as I understand it). An EU citizen can can come to the UK for three months and then must be either economically active, studying or self-sufficient or they can be made to leave, although I don't think it has happened to more than a handful. They are also supposed to have sickness insurance and those studying must be able to support themselves. The right to social security varies by individual country: http://ec.europa.eu/social/main.jsp?catId=858&langId=en We seem to be quite generous on this aspect. In short, it seems that we can control EU immigration but choose not to. It seems to me that we don't control immigration from the rest of the world either.

I think you overestimate the effectiveness of the Internet, especially amongst the elderly. I lost count of the number of people that I spoke to who said that they were confused about the options and that they didn't have enough information to make a decision. I don't consider the BBC to have been biased in any shape or form. Also by giving air time to buffoons like Farage they gave credibility to his arguments.

Gets better as the video progresses. At the beginning it just looked as if he was good at getting saves out of goalkeepers.

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It doesn't stipulate connecting doors???

There was precious little information from either side. The TV treated the referendum the same way as they do a general election with strict rules on not favouring any particular side. Not very long after the vote there was a programme on BBC about 'what Brexit means for us'. Shouldn't we have had these discussions before?

Indeed. So how are we going to sort out what sort of Brexit we can all live with? (Serious question)

True, it might actually be more than that.

You seem to have missed an important point. It is precisely because there isn't a plan, or if there is that nobody has communicated what it involves, that is causing the uncertainty and turbulence at the moment. I'm reminded of that quote from Band of Brothers: “He wasn’t a bad leader because he made bad decisions. He was a bad leader because he made no decisions.”

Britain was actually doing quite well and had prospered relatively well inside the EU. The plan was 'steady as she goes'.

Confidence is a very fragile object. It takes years to build it up yet it cab be shattered in a few moments. I see no signs at the moment that any of this recalcitrance is merely down to negative talk and no amount of talking up is going to persuade businesses to part with their hard-earned money for new ventures in the current climate. This uncertainty could very well pertain for the next five or six years.

Yes, everywhere seems to be very quiet at the moment and has been for a couple of months or so. Eventually it should begin to pick up once inventories are exhausted but any form of discretionary spending is likely to struggle.

And how do they look in Dollar terms?

They can afford to work less and have more leisure time. Their productivity is way beyond ours. https://www.theguardian.com/business/2016/feb/18/uk-productivity-gap-widens-to-worst-level-since-records-began

Too much money involved. The whole business is one big overhype.

I don't think it's the absence of trade deals that is restricting either deals or trade. There are many other aspects such as contract laws, terms of payment, anti-corruption laws. In dealing with Europe there is a common legal framework which underpins confidence.

Whilst wer'e at it, what is it about our membership of the EU that prevents businesses from 'building closer trade relationships' with China and India that we can't do already? Could it be, perhaps, that one market is on our doorstep and the other is on the opposite side of the world? But this is beside the point. We need as much trade as possible in order to pay our way in the world. To talk about relative percentages is meaningless except to illustrate the relative importance of each sector. We cannot survivce without the customers who live alongside us, me old china (do you see what I did there? )