String fellow

Also, the link between 'right wing lunatics' and football hooliganism is somewhat tenuous, according to this report. https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/5a7a39b8ed915d1fb3cd6590/1539-disorder-football.pdf

If Putin wanted to test NATO's resolve, he'd probably attempt a minor incursion into a neighbouring NATO country such as Latvia. This would be 'justified' on the basis that its relatively high ethnic Russian population needed to be 'protected' from malign western influences. NATO's response might be that triggering Article 5 would only escalate the situation, and therefore NATO allies of Latvia wouldn't get actively involved. Russia would see this as weakness, and slowly but surely advance on Riga. Eventually, all three Baltic States would end up back within Moscow's sphere of influence, and so conscription in the UK wouldn't be factor at play whatsoever. It would probably end up being seen as a knee-jerk decision in the face of Russian aggression elsewhere in Europe, with many on the left of UK politics regarding it as a form of social control rather than being a legitimate attempt to bolster the UK's defences.

China is not good at winning wars - their last attempt to take Taiwan was defeated by poisonous snails!

Have we ever played Bournemouth in the FA Cup before? I don't think so.

I had one too. Nice cars, although I didn't like having the spare wheel mounted directly above the engine.

I've still got some here - great for playing MS-DOS based games like Duke Nukem on very old pcs equipped with floppy drives and operating on Win 3.1 or Win 95.

If the USA pursues an isolationist policy, the whole of Europe could be in big trouble.

Tbh, I don't fully understand either of the points made above. However, I do note with interest the use of the word shown in bold.

Yesterday, we had the 'random men-with-opinions on the internet'. Today, we have the 'man on the Clapham omnibus'. I'm looking forward to learning a few more wonderfully condescending and sexist phrases before this debate is finished!

It was qualified medical professionals who four years earlier had decided that in their opinion, the accused was psychotic, but not a threat to others. This verdict of guilty of manslaughter has effectively equated someone who killed three innocent people in vicious, pre-meditated knife attacks, who then sought to evade capture and nearly killed three others in the process with anyone who helps an elderly terminally-ill relative to fly over to Switzerland to end their life painlessly in a euthanasia clinic. If the law can't distinguish between those two scenarios in terms of the conviction, there's something wrong with our legal system. Having said that, I'm merely 'some random man-with-opinions on the internet', so my opinions count for nothing - except when I'm called up for jury service.

If someone has diminished responsibility, how a court of law can take any plea they make of guilty or otherwise seriously? Presumably, in this case, the accused mental faculties were up to the job of pre-planning his deadly assaults, without realising what he was doing was wrong. Then, his mental faculties were good enough to enter a plea of guilty to manslaughter, knowing that that would help him get off the murder charge. I can only conclude that his alleged schizophrenia was very selective in what it chose to understand.

Also marbles - less seasonal than conkers. Then later on in the sixties, football in the playground using a tennis ball, with jumpers for goalposts.

The 40mph speed limit on the A46 for several miles north of Six Hills, on both carriageways. At the weekend, some the signs said that the cameras were not in use, but nobody risked going any faster, even so. There were no workmen anywhere and no lane closures, and other signs helpfully explained that it was for the safety of drivers. Turning off this dead-straight dual carriageway onto narrow, winding country lanes meant one was then legally able to drive 20mph faster. So on my return journey, I took the fast route - using the narrow, winding country lanes.

The Post Horn Gallop itself, composed by Hermann Koenig in about 1850, is associated with fox-hunting. So maybe it's not an ideal choice of music for the Foxes!

Mercury-in-glass thermometers. Whether or not the boys in blue would come knocking at the door if I tried to sell my old max--min thermometer is unclear!

In industry up until about 1980, work study, method study and time-and-motion, all related to piecework, were the things that management used to wet their trousers over. Then the Japanese came along with their flowcharts, kanban, kaizen and just-in-time ideologies - the kind of stuff that causes you to lose the will to live. Then David Brent arrived, and we all had to push the envelope with blue-sky thinking and get all our ducks in a row, before going out to pick the low-hanging fruit, then touching base again. It's all bollox. Motivation comes from within.

X-ray machines aka pedoscopes or fluoroscopes in shoe shops. Those were the days when you could bare your sole!

City won it twice in the mid-naughties, but Sky later killed it off.

Quiz Ball on the BBC. City participated on several occasions, with John Sjoberg, Graham Cross, Derek Dougan, Club Secretary Eddie Plumley and Lady Isobel Barnett all playing for us in some of the series, then later on Mighty Mike Stringfellow and Nicholas Parsons were in the team. Lady Isobel scored 5 goals in one game, although even she couldn't match the scoring feats of Arsenal's Ian Ure. Annoyingly, we lost the last ever inter-club final to Dunfermline Athletic in Autumn 1971, after the Mighty String had scored a hat-trick in the semi-final win against Blackpool. Lady Isobel, of course, lost her life in tragic circumstances in 1980, following a conviction for shop-lifting.

Someone other than Gary Lineker presenting MOTD.

Star Soccer on ATV (Midlands ITV) on Sunday afternoons. They wouldn't dare to refer to football as 'soccer' now. Hugh Johns commentated and Billy Wright did the analysis.

It was usually on Grandstand before David Coleman's or Frank Bough's presentation of the football results. Watching the teleprinter typing out the results was always very entertaining, especially if it paused in the middle of a line.

The wonderfully-named Eunice Newton Foote did some experiments in 1856 which lead her to predict the possibility of global warming even then. So literature on this subject goes back nearly 170 years.

Plugging the electric iron into a light socket. (You can't even buy the plugs that fit into light sockets anymore.)

Snooker coverage on black and white televisions. As Ted Lowe helpfully said on one occasion, 'for those in black and white, the pink is next to the green'.