CHAPEL END CHARLIE

For one brief moment I thought that Joan Sims had just signed for us ...

Wrong. This type of language means next to nothing, it is in effect little more than a bland holding statement. If he is minded to leave he's hardly going to shout "adios muchahos" and make a run for the hills at this stage of the season is he? On the other hand if he does see his future here then saying that publicly might weaken his hand when it comes to negotiating any new contract with the board. Personally I think its 60/40 on that he's planing to leave, but only time will tell.

He sounds about as non-committal as he could possibly be frankly. Why some on here are interpreting this statement as some sort of indication that MP wants to stay here past the end of his current contract is beyond me.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NYkuYg5qvPI#t=11 While obviously this accident is clearly the fault of the car driver - car v bike smashes always are apparently - could it be that just this once the biker concerned may just have played a small part in his own downfall?

It's lucky I didn't say that then.

The Royal Navy nuclear submarine HMS Tireless joins in the search for MH370: http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2014/04/01/missing-malaysian-plane-submarine-hms-tireless_n_5071208.html Before we get our hopes up too highly the search area is a 98,000 sq mile box and I understand the submarine has to be with 5 miles (or so) of the locator beacon in order for the subs sonar system to detect it .... oh and just to make the task more difficult still the locator batteries are rapidly becoming exhausted.

What does KL want to do with this club? We're going to finish this season in a very creditable 8th or 9th place most probably and (with the possible exception of Everton) all the clubs above us are to be frank about it inherently bigger/better financed business's than we are. To break through that invisible 'glass ceiling' and regularly compete with these bigger clubs might require a level of further investment in the squad that would rival Spurs huge spending last summer. Tonight for all that money spent the table shows that Tottenham Hotspur are exactly two places and 8 points better off than we are and reduced now to the dubious prospect of a Europa League qualification at best. Well if the Europa League is the reward ... well a fan has to ask if the 'game's worth the candle' as they used to say. I want to see my club run in a prudent manner with a eye to its long term future rather than chasing some mad dream that's probably out of our reach anyway.

Agree. Whatever they did you can bet that the Malaysian authorities would have come in for criticism because no one can answer the one question that really needs answering - IE what happened to this aircraft. However they have handled the situation very poorly, as this story illustrates. I saw on TV last night the possibility raised that MH370 might have been subject to a 'cyber attack' - a theory that proposes that the aircraft's navigational/ flight control systems were hacked into from on-board, or even from the ground perhaps. A interesting idea this but I don't see how this explains the lack of communication or the fact that the aircrew would have had a (more than one) compass available to them to navigate from in the last resort. This event remains today quite as mysterious as it was on day one.

Well it seems Mercedes have overtaken Red Bull as the dominant force in F1 for the time being, and while today's race is yet more evidence that this doesn't necessarily make the racing any more exciting per se, this may be a case of a change being as good as a rest I suppose. However years of following this sport has taught me that F1 seasons are more often about how a team finishes a season, rather than how they start it. So it will be interesting to see who ultimately wins this season's 'development battle'. On a much more important note, observing the state of Lewis Hamilton's (and indeed Wayne Rooney's) new hair it seems that mankind has at last conquered the threat of male pattern baldness - science marches on!

3 good, 1 bad: Good - Smashing entertainment this game and what a joy it is to see our players sweating blood to win a game that didn't matter Good - What fun I had taking the mick out of my NUFC supporting mate yesterday - all the way back to Poole. Good - Adam Lallana did something with a football yesterday that I've never seen before - it happened so quickly I can't even describe it properly - but trust me it was Cruyff brilliant. Bad - I Tried a new car park yesterday after waiting a hour to get out of West Park Rd last time. At £7.70 for 4 hours this is not a mistake I will be repeating anytime soon!

Yep he's never going to get any quicker I'm afraid, but anyone can see that SRL is a intelligent footballer and he still has loads to offer this team. But the real reason why (on our day) our forwards can be so devastatingly effective is the innate understanding of each other's games the 'holy trinity' of Lambert, JRod and Lallana have developed over time. We may, or may not, lose some good players this summer, and obviously the defence and midfield are important too. But as long as we keep these three together then we'll do well I think.

I love MOTD. As a Saints fan it goes without saying that I would have put our game higher up the running order. However with my neutral 'hat' on a perfectly logical case can be made for all the editor's decisions. More important than any of that partisan nonsense, the banter between the boy Lineker, Hanson, and Alan Shearer was (yet again) last night quite superb. Surely you'd either need to possess a heart of stone, or indeed be the world's most fanatical Toon fan, not to have experienced one of those genuine 'laugh out loud' moments last night when Alan Hanson described JRods first goal yesterday as: "the worst goal ever conceded" and that Newcastle couldn't have made it any easier for us if they hadn't turned up at all. MOTD is not just another sports programme, it's a national institution like the Royal Family or Steven Fry.

If my understanding of the established timeline of events is in fact correct - IE data transmission systems were being deactivated aboard this aircraft before the co-pilot's final radio communication with Malaysian ATC - then the fact that the aircrew did not report any problem at that time strongly suggests to me that the loss of MH370 is more likely be the result of some form of Human action, rather than any sudden (and catastrophic) technical failure aboard this hitherto reliable aircraft design. Additionally, the distinctly informal and non regulation nature of that final brief conversation: "all right, good night" is also suggestive of something untoward occurring in the cockpit of this aircraft.

I'm just loving the BBC's latest mini season of medieval programming. To hell with the Tudors and all that renaissance tomfoolery I say, the Middle Ages have long seemed a equally important (if not to say dramatic) period in our long history to my way of thinking. The Plantagenets (BBC2 Monday) I much enjoyed his earlier history of the Normans, but those who know their Scharma might say that Professor Robert Bartlett's new 3 part history of the Plantagenets was in grave danger of covering some familiar ground I suppose. However in his skilled hands the innate interest of the subject ('great and terrible' rulers such as Henry II and Edward Longshanks) makes such compelling story that a historian of his calibre can hardly go wrong - and indeed Bartlett doesn't here. Highly recommended. The Greatest Knight: William the Marshal (BBC2 Wednesday) However perhaps because it set off down a 'road less travelled' Robert Asbridge's documentary of the life of William Marshal proved to be even more fascinating television if anything. I must admit my historical knowledge of the period is quite sketchy enough to mean I had hardly heard of this once famous Knight, but after watching this programme I now certainly want to learn more. What a man, what a life! Marshal is perhaps as important a figure in our history as any king was. Indeed more so than most I dare say. Seemingly fearless both in battle and at the joust, loyal beyond measure almost, Marshal was the very epitome of that impossible chivalric ideal. When as a old man he pledged what little remained of his long life to the service of a vulnerable 9 year old King Henry, during a desperate time for England ... well it brought a tear to the eye of not only those there at the time - but to mine also. Unmissable.

We are still looking for the 'haystack' as it were. As for locating the 'needle' it contains ... well that would appear to remain very much a longer term ambition I'm afraid. You have to ask what did all those satellite and aircraft images actually show anyway? It seems to me there were merely low resolution unidentifiable shapes of varying sizes that could have been nothing more substantial than common flotsam or even sea ice for all I know. Observe any photograph of airliner wreckage and you will see that the internal surfaces of a aircraft's structure often appear a very distinct greenish/brown in colour - I saw no evidence of that. None of this is any criticism of the international search effort by the way. The Southern Ocean is both a vast and a notoriously stormy place. So the difficulties of finding the site of a plane crash, weeks after it happened, when you don't even have a known 'datum point' to start the search from are severe. Obviously the action of the sea will result in whatever evidence there is inevitably being dissipated further over time. Therefore this near impossible task is becoming more difficult still with every passing day. I understand the passive sonar of a French 'Marine Nationale' submarine played a key role in locating the wreck of the Air France Airbus A330 that disappeared over the Atlantic a few years ago. That type of naval assistance may be required again if any (slim?) hope of locating MH370 is to be realised.

A new outer plant beyond the orbit of Pluto perhaps - which is itself no longer categorised officially as a 'planet' I understand. This should keep QI busy for a while.

I'm thinking back two weeks ago now to the employee who claimed he personally witnessed a large aircraft crashing in flames near his oil rig off the coast of Vietnam, and indeed of other similiar accounts that have emerged since. If in reality MH370 did crash into the remote Southern Ocean far away from any possible Human witness for some unknown reason - and I see no reason at all to doubt that at this time - then all those reports must therefore be wrong. Perhaps at least some of these people innocently misinterpreted something they had genuinely observed, or perhaps they are suffering from a mild mental illness and have trouble telling the difference between reality and what is a mere fantasy. But it is hard to escape the depressing conclusion that people deliberately lie more often, and much more profoundly, than might at first be considered likely. Remember the remarkably large percentage of the US population that apparently claim to have been subject to a so called 'Alien Abduction Experience' and other such nonsense? Anyone old enough to remember the TV series the 'X Files' will recall that this entertaining series would regularly open with the sage advice that its audience should 'Trust No One'. I for one took that to mean that we should question what we are told by those in authority over us more closely, and methinks that's not bad advice actually. But 'Trust No One' works both ways because lies don't just come down to us from the powerful lording it over us - they emerge all too readily from the 'little people' surrounding us too. The truth is out there somewhere, but whether we will ever find it is quite another matter.

A few thoughts: Thinking on the difficulty the international SAR effort is having locating the unidentified objects seen on satellite imagery, how embarrassing it would be for our Government if a similiar incident were to occur in the North Atlantic tomorrow. Since the 2010 decision to scarp the RAF's Nimrod MRA4 project without replacement this island nation finds itself in the extraordinary position of having no proper maritime patrol aircraft at its disposal. A scandal waiting to happen perhaps. As for those who consider that the failure to find this aircraft amounts to proof of a conspiracy to hide it, I'm not so sure I can go along with that. I'm just another 'landlubber' but ask anyone who has been to sea and the first thing they will tell you is how truly vast the oceans are. I'm not qualified to comment on the nitty gritty of how GPS etc works but it may well be that if someone who knows what he's doing really wants to lose his plane in the remoteness and enormity of the Southern Ocean then he may be able to succeed in doing just that. A 'needle in a haystack' situation. I understand the aircraft's 'black box's' are fitted with a sonar beacon that will 'ping' for perhaps two months or so before the battery becomes exhausted. If we don't find this 777 within that timeframe then the possibility exists that we never will.

The Battle of Hamburg - by Martin Middlebrook Nearly 70 years after the bombing finally stopped both the morality and the effectiveness of the Allied Strategic Bombing Offensive against Nazi Germany during WWII remains as intensely a controversial subject as it ever was. Needless to say people are entitled to hold any view they like, but perhaps in order to express an truly informed opinion it is desirable to first learn at least something of the matter you are talking about. With that in mind I can think of no better guide to the bomber offensive than Martin Middlebrook because this author takes the trouble to examine the subject in all its innate complexity and from all perspectives, whether that be the viewpoint of the allied bomber crews, the Luftwaffe's efforts to counter them, or even what it was like for those civilians unfortunate enough to find themselves underneath the bombing. The Battle of Hamburg (Operation Gomorrah) was just one battle among many in a long war of course, but it was fated to become a exceptional example of just how destructive allied bombing could become when a set of circumstances came together to favour the attack over defence. This particular battle also illustrates admirably the differing approaches the British and American bomber forces took, the USAAF firmly believing that the daylight precision bombing of selected military and industrial targets would win the war, while the RAF was committed to the systematic destruction of whole cites in the belief that the resulting loss of life would undermine the moral of the German people, sap their will to resist, and ultimately prove more effective. I should also add that at night it was very difficult for Bomber Command aircrews at the time to find small targets such as a factory or shipyard, therefore bombing something harder to miss, such as a large urban area, was (to a degree) forced upon the RAF by circumstance. It was to be the second RAF raid on the night of July 27th 1943 that was to raise this battle from the whelm of the ordinary into the extraordinary. It was a hot summers night, Hamburg's fire fighting resources were out of position attempting to extinguish the earlier fires. The cities radar directed night fighter and Flak defences were again badly effected by 'Window' (aluminium coated strips that rendered radar ineffective) and the bombing that night was also both unusually accurate and concentrated. Over 700 RAF bombers (most of them now heavy Lancaster, Halifax and Stirling types) pounded the densely populated residential districts of eastern Hamburg without effective opposition. I don't propose to recount in detail here the terrible effects of the 'Firestorm' that developed that night in Hamburg because Middlebrook describes it infinetly better than I ever could, and in any case the horror is almost beyond mere words. Suffice it to say that significant sections of Germany's second largest city were devastated and with temperatures reaching 800 oC some who tried to flee the inferno were incinerated alive while their hands and feet were fused to the melting asphalt of the roads - as perfect a vision of 'Hell on Earth' as this reviewer cares to imagine. A immensely thought provoking book written by a author at the very top of his game.

As a young apprentice fish slapper barely out of my short trousers I first started supporting the Saints way back in the summer of 1884. I realise now this was silly as I had to wait a whole flipping year before the club played its first game. But times were hard back then and a working man had to take what he could get. For the next three years come rain or avalanche I never missed a single game until that time I had to flee to the Outer Hebrides disguised as a Rear Admiral in the Peruvian Navy because of that 'Jack the Ripper' business. On my return I single handedly invented the steam powered internet in the hope that I might be able to contact my fellow Saints fans and regal them with tales of my in-depth football knowledge and sell them rubber goods in the process. I made a small fortune in no time at all and decided to sell up and invest everything in buying the Whelk Concession aboard a new White Star liner that was said to be unsinkable. Thinks were looking up, but I soon hit rock bottom. But 'there's nowt in this world that can keep a good man down for long' as my old Dad said just before they buried him, so I picked myself up by my boot laces and found work in a Freemantle treacle factory. The work was bloody hard and the pay only twopence ha'penny a month and all the Pile ointment you could eat, but after only thirty years I was able to save enough money to buy myself my own sheet of corrugated iron so that me, Mrs Charlie and our 23 horrible kids had a roof over our heads at last. I'd never had it so good. So to cut a long story short here I am all these years later still supporting the Saints and still spouting bullsh1t just the same as I've always done. Now someone asked me t'other day if I had my time all over again would I change a single thing, and you know what I said to him? Too bloody right I would!

We might indeed be 'banging the drum' as you put it - but it seems to me that making a noise is just about all the US and the EU will do because the so called sanctions announced yesterday are next to meaningless. The Crimea is back in the embrace of old 'Mother Russia' and its there to stay I reckon. As for my favourite subject - WWII - I agree both the fortunes and the reputation of the British Empire (especially in Asia) took a hell of a battering during the war, a beating that it never managed to recover from. But with not very much hindsight the old Empire was doomed anyway I suppose. In broader terms I think the stand we took (for a whole series of reasons) against the unparalleled evil of Fascism earned this nation a kind of of moral credit that we have traded on ever since to a degree. Our 'Victory in Europe' was a costly one all right - but the way I look at it is that is was not half as costly as defeat would have been.

Oh my God - Kathleen Taylor has really let herself go! To think I used to fancy her back in the day ... mind you I'm no oil painting these days either

There is only one candidate to play Katharina Liebherr ...

I don't at all approve of how Putin has handled this affair, I don't suppose many do. A referendum was always the obvious solution to the problem but conducting one without bipartisan agreement, on your own terms, tewnty minutes after what amounts to a invasion is clearly illegitimate. This is certainly not how responsible states are supposed to conduct themselves in this day and age. But appalling as he undoutably is Putin does have a point damn him. The facts of the matter are that the Crimea was historically a part of Russia until quite recently and I see few disputing the fact that the clear majority of the local population still consider themselves to be Russian. It's very difficult to avoid drawing comparisons with the Nazi annexation (or Anschluss) of Austria back in 1936 because the parallels are all there. However dangerous as his behaviour is I don't believe Putin is another Hitler and we can only hope is assurances today that this act is the limit of his territorial ambitions regarding the Ukraine are worth something. In any case the notion of a western military intervention to restore the status que in the Crimea remains utterly out of the question. If anyone on here wants to accuse me of appeasement and failing to learn from the mistakes of the 1930's then I'm sure there is a good answer to that charge ... I just can't quite think what that would be at the moment.

I disagree. Ryan Shawcross and Dejan Lovren would make a formidable partnership at any level.