CHAPEL END CHARLIE

Did the first babe play the girlfriend in John Carpenter's horror film 'Christine' SOG?

Your comparison with Liverpool seems not very useful given that their transfer business this summer is (with one obvious exception) clearly an attempt to improve their squad while ours on the other hand is equally clearly being driven by the need to replace departing players we had probably not planned on losing in many cases. You are attempting to compare apples with oranges in other words. Nevertheless I will repeat that it seems to me that football squads are invariably better strengthened by a policy of evolution rather than by one of violent revolution. On that basis I would be more than a little surprised to see Liverpool repeat a top two finish again this season. Time will tell of course. As for our club there are only 3 possibilities: we either maintain a top eight position, improve on that performance, or deteriorate. To be frank about it I'll back my judgement the of those three possibilities the latter is by far the most likely outcome over you and NickG's relentless 'sunnyside up' drivel seven days a week and twice on Sunday shipmate.

Debating which particular strategy this club is pursuing may well be a exercise formulated on a false premise. To adopt a maritime analogy, far from being a ship steering a steady course towards some planned landfall it seems to me we appear to be rather more akin to a rudderless hulk at the mercy of every passing wind and wave. At least that is how the situation strikes this fan. Those claiming to be able to detect some sort of underlying plan hidden beneath this summer's seemingly bizarre 'sell sell sell' transfer activity are I fear deluding themselves. In this type of situation the simplest explanation is more often that not the best one is it not? That simple explanation being that without NC at the helm our owner, Les Reed and the rest of the board don't have the first clue what they are doing. As for those who on place little or no value in the benefits of stability and squad building via a policy of gradual evolution rather than one of brutal revolution ... well their confidence that some hastily thrown together ad hoc squad of strangers we are set to field this coming season will not be troubled by any relegation fears seems misplaced to put it mildly. Indeed, you might say that if our staff and players share in that same level of contempt for the rigours of competing in a division quite as tough as the Premier League certainly is then we almost deserve to go down.

I see no evidence that the scale of this clubs reputed financial difficulties are of a seriousness that even remotely explains, let alone justifies, the virtual dismantling of a talented young squad. For that matter I can think of no precedent for another successful (on and off the field) PL club suffering a summer quite as disastrous as the one SFC is now undergoing. Very obviously the board needed to draw a metaphorical 'line in the sand' months ago to prove to both our players, and to the predator clubs circling around us, that SFC was a serious Premier League football club and not some soft touch there to be exploited by any tom d1ck or harriet who happens to fancy our players. For some reason (rank incompetence?) they failed spectacularly to do that and the resultant mess is there for all to see. Therefore unless our new manager is some kind of genius at throwing a squad together overnight we look set fair to end up being quite the wealthiest club ever to be relegated from the Premier League.

I watched this old thing for the first time this morning: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7mbCPbc2vNk A fairly run of the mill 'Noir' I suppose but it kept me entertained for a hour or so - which is all I asked of it. Glenn Ford plays a (very) straight-laced police detective investigating the apparently straightforward suicide of a fellow officer. However our hero discovers that there is more to this case than meets the eye and he finds himself up against a web of violence, intimidation and corruption emanating from the local 'Mr Big' and his villainous gang (led by a young Lee Marvin). To break this case he will learn, in the most painful way imaginable, that nothing worthwhile is ever achieved without sacrifice ... The male cast members performances don't really stand out as anything special, but Gloria Grahame (playing what they used to call a 'lush') is very good I thought. The record shows that her movie career was destined to go into terminal decline shortly afterwards as Hollywood age prejudice kicked in, but in her prime here she displays a level of old fashioned 'star quality' that is perfectly evident.

Has science ever explained just how Suzi Quatro managed to get into those leather trousers ?

Good thinking!

'Rape' seems a strong perhaps but fitting enough term to describe what our squad is going through now, just as 'the rape of Poland' was an utterly appropriate phrase to describe what happened to that poor unfortunate nation during 1939. The dictionary defines 'rape' not only as a act of sexual violence but also as a act of plunder - to seize, take or carry off by force.

You can't lose a good manager and (in effect) break up a successful young team, replace them with new/foreign players who let's face it are unlikely to be anywhere near as effective in the short term, and then expect to prosper again in this viciously competitive league. This game seldom tolerates that kind of recklessness. Les Reed told us the other day that player transfer policy would be a matter of doing what is best for Southampton Football Club. Well Les please explain how allowing predator clubs to rape our squad is in any sense a beneficial thing for this club? If players are under contract then you don't have to let them go if you don't want to - even 'player power' has its limits. We'll have a lorry load of cash to spend I suppose so if the new manger and his hastily assembled squad gel together and adapt to the extreme demands of competing in this tough division in record time then we may just survive next season - with a bit of luck and the wind behind us. To be frank about it that looks to me to a 50/50 bet at this time. What a way to run a railway ...

'Fargo' fans on here will not need me to tell them that guessing where this enigmatic - but quit wonderful - series is going is becoming a increasing problematic task. Lester Nygaard's chance encounter with Lorne Malvo, and the veritable bloodbath this fateful meeting has unleashed, seems to have transformed this mild mannered loser stereotype into the ruthless, amoral and self confident 'alpha male' he always wanted to be ... and they say crime doesn't pay. I can't help but think its all going to come crashing down around his ears before too long, but our Lester is riding the crest of a wave at the moment. Unlike Lester I doubt somehow that Malvo was ever much troubled by the problems of low self esteem and timidity. For those who have not seen this series Malvo is clearly a recyled version of the memorable 'Anton Chigurh' character from No Country for Old Men, a unstoppable force of nature in other words, and while this character may lack something in originality I doubt that many Coen fans will be objecting too strongly because Billy Bob Thornton is having a whale of a time playing him. Malvo's hair alone deservers its own best supporting actor award. Providing just as much fun as the bad guys are the various 'nice but dim' police officers depicted here, of whom (with the notable exception of the atypically intelligent Molly) it could be said that if brains were dynamite the lot of them combined couldn't blow a toddler's nose! After enduring the tedium of seeing cops lauded so often on TV having them ruthlessly ridiculed like this is a delightfully subversive experience. Long may it continue.

This would have been a splendid idea were it not for the fact that Mother Nature (bless her) is already 'on the job' if you know what I mean.

I'll have you know Sir that I have never, ever, been accused of looking 'cool' in my entire life.

I find this post to be deeply offensive - true - but deeply offensive anyway. The mere fact that some of us on here choose to waste our pointless lives watching 40 year old Doctor Who serials and wondering why 24th century science still can't cure Jean-Luc Picard of male pattern baldness is not necessarily proof of inoperable nerdness ... ... okay this may be strong circumstantial evidence, but it's not strictly proof in the legal sense you understand.

The short answer to your question is no he didn't get much of a chance here, at least not in the first team. Presumably the reason for that lack of opportunity is that not only did MP not sign him, he didn't really rate him either. However, with MP now gone and the club down to just one inexperienced young striker - at this time anyway - only the rash would claim there is no chance of this player getting a second bite at the Premier League. Time will tell.

Indeed, although there was a utterly impracticable plan to invade France in 1942 ('Operation Sledgehammer') 'Operation Roundup', the plan for a Allied invasion of occupied France in 1943, is one of those fascinating 'what-ifs' that have excited the interest of both amateur and professional historians alike ever since the war ended. The problem with this idea is that much of the specialised amphibious shipping required to mount this operation successfully was just not available in 1943 as allied shipbuilding resources were still concentrated on winning the key Battle of the Atlantic. This factor alone would surely have forced allied planners to scale back on the size of the attacking force they had been originally contemplating. I don't believe this factor was properly understood in early invasion planning. Other major problems associated with 'Roundup' include the fact that the German Luftwaffe and U-Boat arms were far from the (virtually) defeated forces they were in 1944 a year earlier. The fact that the US Army was still at a comparatively early stage of its vast wartime expansion programme is also true. Taking all this into account I can't help but think that 'Roundup' would have been a much riskier operation of war to mount than 'Overlord' was to be - and the consequences of a Allied defeat here would have been profound of course. But sometimes fortune does favour the brave. It is also worth noting that the defending German army, and the condition of the 'Atlantikwall' it stood behind, were certainly much weaker in 1943 too because the Nazi war machine was focused very much that summer of 1943 on its final attempt to destroy the Red Army at Kursk. Taken in the whole however I can't help but think that Churchill and Allenbrooke were probably right and that delaying the cross channel invasion of France until 1944 was the correct decision - indeed this display of strategic wisdom may have been the single most important contribution this nation made to winning the war after 1943. But we'll never know for sure ...

I'm toying with the idea of a new Ben Turpin avatar, although truth be told I'm not quite so hansom ...

The problem I have with this 'Hollywooding' business is that Spielberg's 'Saving Private Ryan' for instance did not pretend to be a comprehensive overview of Operation Overlord in all its vast complexity, it was rather a (largely fictional) account of one US infantry squad at war. On that basis I see no reason to object to that. If you really want to see a D-Day film that looks at the events of the day from a more comprehensive perspective then Hollywood also produced 'The Longest Day' back in 1962 - a huge epic film that may lack the extraordinary visceral impact of 'Ryan' but certainly doesn't lack in ambition. A more persuasive charge of 'Hollywooding' could be levelled at the movie 'U-571' - a truly risible effort that portrayed the US Navy capturing the German 'Enigma' coding machine (in a completely unbelievable manner) when any fool knows it was in fact our Royal Navy that actually first did that.

Moving on from the famous tea clipper 'Cutty Sark', to the rather less well know cable ship 'Mackay-Bennett' did not prevent the new shipping series 'Clydebank' (BBC4 Thursday) from proving to be any less fascinating viewing this week. After dealing with the the back story of the transoceanic telegraph cable network this country did so much to develop in the late 19th/early 20th century, and the important role the this particular ship played in that endeavour, the programme went to to explore the grim part she played in the Titanic disaster of 1912 - for it was the CS Mackay-Bennett that was tasked with going to the scene of the disaster and recovering the bodies of those who had died. A wise man once wrote that 'the past is a foreign country, they do things differently there'. When the ship got to the area the crew were confronted with so many bodies they adopted a ruthless, social class based, criteria on which bodies were to be recovered, and those who were not to be so fortunate. The remains of wealthy 1st Class passengers were placed in coffins for a dignified return to there family's. 2nd Class passengers were wrapped in canvas for a rather less respectful transit back to shore. As for the 'Steerage' class passengers and Titanic's crew ... well not to put too fine a point on it they were cast back into the sea they'd just been pulled from. Even in death there was no sense of equality in the way people were treated. The crew of the Mackay-Bennett made just one exception to this harsh rule, for the sight of one little boy (unidentified but probably from Steerage judging from his poor quality coat) moved these hard men so much they decided to save his body from the sea and they even went so far as to pay for a decent burial for the lad. This small act of humanity in the face of so much tragedy has led to a unexpected consequence for now nearly a century later DNA matching technology has enable us to identify him and give this lost boy his name back. I must admit I found this quite moving. Super series this.

It turned out that I was (finally) made redundant from my job this week, so my decision not to renew has been justified by events I suppose - not that this is much of a consultation. I know the renewal window is now closed but I'd urge any Saints fan reading this to stop worrying about who the next manager might be or whether this or that player is leaving. Too hell with all that, if you can afford it then get yourself a season ticket, or at least come as often as you can, because life is short and there is nothing quite like actually going to a football match is there - an experience this sorry fan is going to miss terribly.

I starting to suspect that there are some on here who'll only be happy when they see the dreaded sight of Peter Ridsdale at the helm at St Marys steering the club back onto the financial rocks yet again What we really need of course is to strike a happy medium between the near chaos the club seems to be in today and the spend-spend-spend madness that has seen so many financially irresponsible football clubs crash and burn in recent years. But as we seem to be doomed to wander forever between these two extremes I can only assume that finding that middle course must be a harder feat to accomplish that you'd think it should be ...

Having an abiding interest in all things related to the sea and shipping I much enjoyed the first instalment of BBC4's new series 'Clydebuilt: The Ships That Made The Commonwealth' broadcast last week. The first programme dealt the famous 19th century tea clipper 'Cutty Sark' and her surprising eventful history. An informative and unusually well researched programme this, but I was left more than a little irritated by the BBC choosing to employ the term 'Commonwealth' when surely the correct term to be employed in this context would have been 'Empire'. Now please understand I'm not attempting to argue here that the British Empire was a institution with a record unblemished by racism or what we would now call Human Rights abuses - far from it. But whatever we happen to think about the pros and cons of imperialism the very existence of the British Empire as a historical fact cannot be denied. However, it would seem the BBC - in their desire not to cause offence presumably - have seemingly become so afraid now of our history that they dare not even employ the word 'empire' any longer. Now I'm rather less fearful of language than the faceless numpty in BBC management who made this cowardly decision is, so the word I would choose to describe this attitude is 'pathetic'.

The question of why a building not directly hit by either of the hijacked 9-11 airliners should also collapse is a interesting one. Needless to say I'm no structural engineer, but I wonder if (in combination with the observed fire) the impact of two 500,000 ton towers violently collapsing into their foundations nearby might have mimicked the devastating effect of Barnes Wallis's so called 'Earthquake' bomb of WWII and weakened WTC7 sufficiently to cause its failure? I can't imagine that any architect would be expected to pay such a seemingly bizarre possibility much attention during the design process. If conspiracy theorists are correct however and this building was demolished on purpose then you have to ask yourself why on earth would anyone want to do that? If 9-11 was a incredibly sinister attempt to manipulate the US public into supporting this 'neacon' war as claimed then the destruction of the competitively mundane little WTC7 building doesn't seem to add very much compared to the unprecedented drama of seeing the twin towers fall with such a huge loss of life. On the other hand if we are to believe that there were in fact two conspiracy's at play here and that WTC7 was destroyed in order to hide some (unspecified) secrets it may have contained, then with this building both ablaze and evacuated this situation would seem to offer all the opportunity any conspirator could possibly have asked for to remove anything they wanted without having to necessarily destroy the entire building in the process! This is just one of the key weaknesses of this conspiracy theory explanation for 9-11 - there is just so much overkill implicit in this 'plot' that the more you think about it the more risible the idea becomes. For example, why bother also attacking the Pentagon because that outrage too doesn't seem to increase the effect very much does it? If 'Flight 93' was indeed intended to attack the heart of American democracy at the White House (as suspected) then it seems to me the notion that is was not a group of fanatical terrorists responsible for this attack but rather a group of right wing, but fervently patriotic, Americans behind it all surely stretches this theory's credibility way beyond its breaking point. Are what we might call 'dark forces' sometimes at play at the heart of American Government? Well anyone with even a passing understanding of the Iran-Contra scandal should know that this possibility cannot be entirely discounted. The 9-11 atrocity was however so grievously damaging to the US and its reputation in the world that it seems to me this outrage was surely committed by those who hate America and all that it stands for - rather than by those who love it too much.

Ha! Black humour really is the only sane response to this mess.

Taken in isolation each of the issues effecting this club need not been seen as a crisis - any financial difficulties effecting the club seem eminently manageable given the scale of guaranteed income on offer from the PL, managers have long come and go like the tide here, good players will always attract the attention of bigger clubs ... However, the cumulative effect of all the negative stories swirling around SFC now are clearly damaging this club and its prospects for next season. I can only agree with those who think that the new board are not handling public relations at all well (or even competently) at this time and dragging the club out of what is starting to look like a crisis situation some meaningful statement of intent has to be made pretty damn quick - for instance putting in a serious bid to sign a quality replacement for SRL or issuing a statement that Adam Lallana and/or Luke Shaw are not for sale at any price might do the trick. Something along these lines needs to happen pretty damn quick if you ask me. As for the theory that KL is 'asset stripping' the club, well this makes no sense as this asset of hers is going to be worth a hell of lot less back in the Championship in 12 months time.

Nearly 3 weeks on and my employer still has not informed staff who is to be made redundant, this despite my explaining to them that the season ticket renewal deadline is now imminent and I really need to know. Apparently they are planning to let people know next week - too late for me of course. So farewell then to a seat I have had for 8 seasons now and all the good friends I've made in Block 18. To say that I'm more than a little '****ed off' about this situation hardly does my feelings justice.