Halo Stickman

KL appears to enjoy her privacy and to the best of my knowledge has no interest in football. Prior to 2010 her only connection to SFC was that her father had adopted the club as a pastime and distraction as he fought and lost his battle with liver disease. Now, I’m sure that KL loved her father every bit as much as I loved mine. My father’s pastime and distraction as he fought and lost his battle with liver disease was darts. When he died, I didn’t take up darts as some sort of tribute to him, but I did polish up a set of his arrows and a couple of his trophies and left them on a shelf. But, as we all know, you can’t polish up a football club and just leave it on a shelf – without continuous investment a football club soon falls to pieces. KL is also a business woman. Business people rarely end up owning football clubs unless they are passionate supporters, limelight addicts, money burners, half mad, or distraction seekers. To the best of my knowledge KL is none of these. Consider the above and ask yourself the following question: could there really have been a more inappropriate inheritance for KL than that of SFC? The surprising thing to me is that KL didn’t sell SFC immediately she took control, and I suspect the reason she didn’t is that Cortese convinced her of the club’s potential. That potential has now largely been realised, but not without substantial further investment – few club’s stock has risen as much as SFC’s in the last few years, but few clubs have spent as much. Has that investment come from KL or from a fund set aside by her father for the sole use of SFC? I suspect the latter, and I also suspect that source of investment has been exhausted. Last March someone with connections in the business world told me that SFC had been discretely sounding out potential buyers; I have no reason to doubt what he said. All things considered, I shall be extremely surprised if KL is still in control of SFC next season.

This

Just cause they’re a hen doesn’t mean they love cock – Clare Balding loves horses

News has broke that Bearsy's a woman, apart from that it's very quiet.

Some good news!! 17 pages and still no sign of Dalek talking about Hoddle

Try taking it on to the main board, bletch – appears to be plenty of menstruating women on there today!

:scared: BEARSY’S A WOMAN??!!!!! Bloody hell!.. What?!!!…When?!!!…Why?!!!!...How the **** did that happen?!!!! BTW Did someone say something about Cortese might be leaving?

Although the fertility of breast-feeding mothers is often reduced, as many women from time immemorial have found out, it is certainly not a reliable form of contraception! Tragically, especially in former times, the arrival of new-born babies to mothers still breast-feeding an older child sometimes had fatal consequences. I shall preface what I say next by clearly stating that I’m not suggesting the following in any way explains the reason for the 2 year gap between your ancestors’ children. Any anthropologist will confirm that infanticide has been practiced, on every continent and by every kind of society, from stateless tribes-people to advanced civilisations, throughout the ages – in some places, up to and including the present day. There are many reasons for infanticide; the arrival of new-born babies to mothers still breast-feeding an older child is one of them. A mother finding herself in this situation faced a difficult conundrum: how to share scarce resources between two young babies? Sometimes the evitable answer was that something or someone had to be sacrificed; invariably it was the new born baby. From our cosy 21st century modern Britain perspective, this seems abhorrent and unnatural; the latter adjective is, however, a misnomer: in the natural state, faced with a lack of resources, animals commonly sacrifice one or more of their offspring. Like I said, WG, I’m not implying that any of this applies to your ancestors! I’m sure there’s a much more mundane reason for the 2 year age gap; for instance, perhaps the parents didn’t feel like having sex because they already had to put up with one screaming baby.

Just when I’m beginning to quite like the bloke, looks like he’s decided to leave – bloody typical

Disingenuous emotive language, again.

I’m quite a fan of statistics myself – that’s an interesting link, thanks for posting. The main gripe I have about the population debate is people resorting to disingenuously emotive language, as GM did yesterday when he talked about Chris Packham and others wishing to ‘cull’ Africans. Sadly, I see Rosling uses phrases such as ‘holocaust’ and preparing ‘the intellectual ground for killing people.’ No right-minded person is advocating eugenics or social-Darwinism to address rising population! They are simply suggesting ways to limit its growth by ensuring reliable contraception is readily available to anyone who wants it.

Will I get an infraction for turning Japanese?

Whilst I agree this is a factor, I’m not convinced it’s an overriding one. There seems to have been only two factors limiting the number of my ancestors’ children: 1) death of a parent; 2) menopause of the mother. My ancestors shelled out children at an alarming rate, regardless of how many lived or died. The only thing that changed this was the introduction of readily available and reliable birth control. Unlike 1.2 billion of today’s population, they were not Catholics. On a broader point, Britain’s population remained fairly static for several centuries, rising and falling from about 3.5 million to 6 million – limiting factors included disease, famine, wars and infanticide. From about 1750, enhanced food production, medical advancements and increasing industrialisation helped fuel a population explosion in Britain – 10 million in 1800, 37 million in 1900, 63 million in 2011. Might not something similar happen in developing countries?

A very interesting and moving article. I visited St Peterhof, a former imperial palace near St Petersbourg. During the war it had been destroyed by the Germans; but after the war, the Soviets beautifully rebuilt it. I mentioned to my Russian guide that I was surprised that the Soviets had restored this former symbol of imperial power. She seemed slightly offended, and replied something like: “this palace is part of our nation’s history, we were proud to restore it.” Seems incongruous that the rebuilding of this palace took place, whilst, all around, the bodies of those soldiers still lay where they fell.

Cull – to reduce the population by selective slaughter.

“Optimum Population Trust (Opt) stresses that birth control will be provided only to those who have no access to it, and only unwanted births would be avoided. Opt estimates that 80 million pregnancies each year are unwanted.” - Guardian Not really a cull, is it?

After eating a nice meal, my new girlfriend and I were making love when the WARNING: Danger-Of-Coming-Too-Quickly alarm suddenly rang in my head. I applied the brakes by silently recounting the entire Saints 1979 League Cup Final team – but, sadly, to no avail: I shot my load, blurting out “Number Eleven – Terry Curran OOOOoooo ooo oo o”… she made me leave shortly afterwards.

Took my son and his mate to see Kings of Leon at Plymouth Pavilions. Mrs Stickman and I stood at the back and watched a succession of people withdrawing from the seething mass in front of us with bloody noses and other such injuries. Mrs Stickman then got it into her head that our son was probably being trampled to death in the mosh-pit, and that I would have to go and rescue him, so I dutifully fought my way through the crowd and into the mosh-pit. It was like a scene from Dante’s inferno in there, I’d never been in the midst of so many writhing, sweaty, semi-naked bodies before. Sadly, the vast majority of them were men, and, weirdly, quite a few of them were my age.

Yeah, I couldn’t believe the amount of alcohol consumed at my son’s 18th – and that was just the pre-loading at our house, before they went to the club we hired. The girls were the heaviest drinkers. Mrs Stickman and I found the whole experience pretty stressful to be honest, and we didn’t even go to the club! Goodness only knows what went on there.

I recommend goldfish for pets. They all look the same – when one dies, replace it with another; no one knows the difference. I ‘resurrected’ so many, the kids thought I was Jesus.

When my eldest lad was about ten, he persuaded me to take him on one of those pendulum swings at a travelling fair-ground. Now, normally, I haven’t got a problem with fair-ground rides, nor, indeed, with fair-ground operatives – I’m sure most of them are very conscientious chaps. It was just that the operatives on this particular ride struck me as not the type to bother too much with health and safety issues. Anyway, as soon as the pendulum started to swing, I became convinced we weren’t strapped in properly, and that we were both going to fall out. The further up its arc the pendulum swung, the tighter I gripped my son, and the tighter sheer terror gripped me. And when we got to the top of the arc, the bloody thing stopped, and when I say stopped, I don’t mean pause for a while, I mean STOPPED – stopped dead for several minutes, which seemed more like several lifetimes. From my upside down position, I could see a frantic Mrs Stickman several metres below me. I would like to be able to say that my thoughts at the time were something like, “darling, I’m gonna miss you and the kids very much”; but, in truth, my overriding thought was, “if our nipper ever wants to go on another fair-ground ride after this, you can damn well take him your ****ing self!”

One’s a few years older than you, the other’s a few years younger. And, yes you do seem to be in similar boats; unfortunately, my sons seem to be rowing around in circles at the moment.

I’ve been a homeowner (mortgage payer) since the early 80s; back then, buying a house, as opposed to renting, seemed a no-brainer. Like many others, I’ve benefited financially from being a homeowner, although possibly not as much as my parents, who bought their first house in the late 50s. Of course, contrary to many people’s expectations, it’s not a god-given right for house prices to continually rise, and I did lose money on a property that I purchased in 1988 and sold in 1996 – this at a time when interest repayments were astronomical. I’m sure I would have been better off renting during that period. My sons are now starting careers that look likely to involve a lot of moving from one place to another (partly from choice, partly from necessity), and I can’t really see them buying into the same homeownership-at-all-costs mentally of previous generations. It seems to me that renting does have some advantages. For one thing, it does away with all the hassle of selling your house if you want to move from one place to another quickly. Another thing is house maintenance. Now, I’m quite handy at DIY, and I don’t like paying people to do something that I can do myself; but there are times when keeping my house up together feels like one long struggle against the second law of thermodynamics (i.e. everything turns to ratshi t). At such times, I find myself wondering whether I’d be better off renting a place and letting the landlord worry about it falling down. And, at the end of the day, my sons will probably have to sell my house to pay for my care-home costs! Do people nowadays aspire to homeownership in the same way as previous generations? Is it still a no-brainer?

I’m sure it’s no consolation, but people with mortgages don’t really own their houses – they need only default on their repayments for 6 months or so to find out who does.

For one horrible moment I thought that Mrs Stickman had found her way onto SWF