String fellow

Car dealers who persuade you to pay a returnable £100 reservation fee on a car that you're tempted to buy, and then are extremely reluctant to pay back the fee, if you decide not to go ahead with the purchase. Don't they understand that things like that virtually guarantee that the customer will go elsewhere next time round? Maybe that's what they want - to dissuade what they regard as time-wasters coming back!

We won 5 successive away games in the Championship in 2013/14. That was in late December and January, and like this current run of league wins, it was interrupted by an away defeat in a cup competition. Btw, it's not often that all 7 Lancashire clubs in the top two divisions lose over one weekend.

... or when Liverpool survived a very late 'winner' by Wolves, which was ruled offside by VAR in the FA Cup at Anfield in January. (All five Lancashire clubs losing today is quite rare.)

Tbh, I don't recall that situation. Yes, in what was possibly the only game ever where there were more official goalscorers than goals scored! It was at Stamford Bridge in 1954, when Jack Froggatt and Stan Milburn (relative of Jackie and the Charlton brothers) were jointly credited with one of Chelsea's goals. City lost 3-1.

We all know which City defender scored two own goals in one league game last season, but which two City defenders (jointly) scored one own goal, and when?

Burnley against Wolves and vice versa is almost certainly the only fixture of former winners currently in the PL that has also been played in the fourth tier. Sheffield Utd were in the bottom division for only one season, but didn't play any other club that had previously won the title that year (apart from Arsenal in the League Cup).

Huddersfield against Portsmouth in the seventies? Burnley against Preston in the eighties? Burnley against Wolves in the eighties? Preston against Wolves, also in the eighties? I suspect there are also quite a few other examples.

With a big gap where the tree used to be, there is now less than what used to meet the eye!

Perhaps I've misunderstood, but the implication here seems to be that Maddy Cusack took her own life. I wasn't aware that her cause of death had been made public.

It's a tricky one. Maybe you could switch off the invertor's dc input or its ac ouput and use electricity only from the grid for a month to see how it impacts the bill. However, if the equipment is owned by the company, even that may be impossible, both from a technical and legal standpoint. For what it's worth, if my roof space were locked into a 25yr lease with a solar power company which wasn't entirely trustworthy, I'd be looking at the small print to see if there were any ways to terminate it prematurely, even if it were expensive to do so. There are also conveyancing solicitors who specialise in this type of thing. Another complication could arise if the company itself disappeared within the next 25yrs, and that's another reason why I'd try to extricate myself from the arrangement.

Yesterday, I went along to the rapidly-emptying and sadly very-soon-to-close branch of Wilko in Syston. Got some fantastic bargains, including a pair of good quality garden scissors. They were wrapped in thick cellophane with cardboard backing. There was a health and safety warning on the back of the packaging, warning about keeping them away from children, because they were potentially dangerous. Okay, fine. Unfortunately, the packaging itself was so good that it required the use of another very sharp impliment to undo it. Unfortunately, the knife I used slipped, causing a really deep and painful cut to my hand, which left blood eveywhere. So much for health and safety!

The excellent way that the channel's presenter, Nelson Lopez, explains chess tactics. Having said that, to the best of my knowledge, he's never covered the topic of shoving something up one's rear end as a way of gaining an advantage in chess!

Maybe Niemann was inspired by watching the Chess Vibes YouTube channel! Btw, I mentioned it in the Chess thread recently, and recommend it.

As a way of communicating, it certainly beats coughing, as employed by Charles Ingram on 'Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?'.

For anyone tempted to buy an HDMI to VGA adaptor from Amazon, I'd advise caution. I've bought two different types from them recently, and neither works. They'll both extract the audio just fine, but the video outputs produce blank screens. Having checked elsewhere on the internet, it seems that the process of converting digital signals back to analogue isn't straightforward and there are also other issues at play, including copyright protection and getting the correct screen settings. Ultimately, all I want to do is use a couple of old computer monitors as televisions, one attached to a DVD player and one to a satellite receiver. But it seems that that process is fraught with difficulties - something that Amazon fails to mention.

HM Land Registry. Apparently, it can take up to 18 months or more to complete first registration of an old property not previously entered onto the register, by which time the new owner could already have moved elsewhere or maybe even died. In an age of electronic communication, where business can often be done almost instantly, such incredibly long delays seem hard to understand.

We've now got 21 times as many points as we had this time last year!

With the surname Brand, there's probably plenty of scope for limericks to be written about him. This is my feeble attempt, but I'd love to read any others out lurking there.... There once was a fellow called Brand, Who oft took his manhood in hand, Then showed it to ladies, In order to make babies, But things did not work out as planned!

A couple of other things I recommend. Firstly, at the end of each day, note down on paper (or mentally) the various jobs done successfully during that day, no matter how minor they were. This provides a sense of well-being and a feeling that the day just gone wasn't entirely wasted. Secondly, in order to have something to look forward to, indulge in a bit of deferred retail therapy, by ordering something online, but with a longish delivery time. I often order something fairly small from Amazon, and deliberately go for the longest delivery time, not to save money but to extend the period of anticipation as long as possible.

The phrase 'to be fair'. Earlier this week, I had a meeting with someone who used it in every sentence. To be fair, by the end of the meeting, I was ready to lamp him, to be fair.

An anagram of 'Russell Brand' is 'blurs slander', which is what he seems to be doing with the allegations being made against him.

I just happened to notice your previous message about one minute before I replied to it, and I actually agreed with your point about the word 'unironic'. The second line of my reply was made ironically, to highlight the fact that everyone uses turns of phrase that might be irksome to others, but perhaps that point was missed.

Undeniably, this is undoubtedly an unashamed and understandably unabashed underlining of an unfortunate, unnecessary and unedifyingly unnatural adverb. What grinds my gears, apart from the use of 'massively' instead of 'greatly', are tautologies, which are entirely superfluous, redundant and pointless.

Owners of large dogs in the Greater London area beware - they might be Sadiq Khan's next target! https://phys.org/news/2021-03-carbon-pawprint-friend-planet-enemy.html

Former football coach Barry Bennell has died in the same prison where Max Clifford died 6 years ago. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-manchester-66847569