Only a few weeks ago, a complaint about money paid to certain executives drew the response that to get the best you have to pay the best wages. This apparently only applies to office staff, and not the working-class serf whose only skill is to be able to apply a curved surface (forehead or toecap) to another curved surface (ball) and get it to go exactly in the right direction.
A man can sit in an office, and, at the stroke of a pen, refuse a loan to a company, throwing people out of work, until he finally retires, and it’s perfectly fine that he should be paid millions, including bonuses, while it isn’t fair for someone whose skills will fade at 35-40, when he becomes surplus and unemployable. There aren’t many bank managers, or BBC newsreaders who risk having their career ended by a boot on the shin, either.
Footballers don’t only kick a ball around for 90 minutes, they also spend hours on a training field, in all weathers, honing their abilities in the hope of, one day, getting the chance to perform at the highest level. £300,00, for playing in front of, and entertaining, 100,000 spectators, means they are being paid £3 for each one.
They also do get paid by results; if they slow down, through age, they’re dropped, then sold off, like lumps of meat, or just given away to other teams. Funny, isn’t it, how it’s always the Rooneys of this world who’re held up as examples of the obscenity of footballers’ wages, while those in the nether regions of the Football League, who often need a second job to make ends meet, are quietly, and deliberately, forgotten.
At times I really despair at the rampant jealousy and snobbery that is displayed in this nation.

So tell me, how do they fair in the European Championship?

Winners: 1968 Manchester United; 1977 Liverpool; 1978 Liverpool; 1979 Notts Forest; 1980 Notts Forest; 1981 Liverpool; 1982 Aston Villa; 1984 Liverpool; 1999 Manchester United; 2005 Liverpool; 2008 Manchester United; 2012 Chelsea.
Runners-up: 1975 Leeds; 1985 Liverpool; 2006 Arsenal; 2007 Liverpool; 2008 Chelsea; 2009 Manchester United.
And, if you check, I’m fairly sure that you’ll find that not one of those teams was 100% made up of English players.

It’ll be interesting to see if the French start demanding (again) that we change the name of our railway station; last time, Agincourt was suggested as an alternative, and it all went quiet.

He showed a perfectly adequate knowledge, at a banquet where the guest of honour was a Communist.

As it is work in progress it has not had the satin or matt varnish applied yet,

Wartime aircraft did not have a coat of varnish; that was post-war. Squadrons had Aircraft Finishers, who were advised to do any necessary retouching, then sand smooth with wet-and-dry paper, followed by a wash over the whole airframe with clean water. The glossy patches under that aircraft have all the appearance of pools of water, which one could expect if it had been subject to a “bull” session before the VIPs arrived.
Any pilot who had his aircraft wax polished went totally against the advice of I.C.I. (who trained the Aircraft Finishers,) since the wax soaked into the paint making a retouch impossible, so that the whole paint had to be stripped off, and done again.
Early Mk.IXs, which were converted from Vc airframes, often retained the old-style walkway lines of the Vc; later aircraft had the usual “backward L” on the port wing, but also had a mirror “L” on the starboard wing.
As for getting at the fuel tank, that had always been possible from the port walkway, and groundcrew tended to lie down (thereby spreading the load) when they needed access to the wingroot fairing.

And the previous poster mentioned that this area of the wing was altered AFTER the second radiator was fitted.
Which was on the PORT side.

So they took the opportunity to make the top surface of thicker material on both sides.
On early marks it was 24 s.w.g; on the IX, and other later Marks it was 20 s.w.g.

It’s a fairly safe bet none of you live in Buckinghamshire; in the years Cilla Black lived not far from this town, she worked tirelessly with local charities, raising money to buy scanners for the local hospitals.
Anyway, normal service can now be resumed, and you small-minded people can continue with your destruction of yet another person’s reputation; she was, after all, a “celebrity,” and that makes her fair game for the great, jealous, British public.

In the 1980s, I worked, as a civilian volunteer, at Halton, when SL574 was delivered, ostensibly to be restored to flight, and, while we were stripping off the paint, we found three dents, which had been filled and sanded smooth. It does seem strange that the RAF should hammer three dents, then fill them again, on an airframe which was unlikely to ever fly again.
From outside edge to outside edge, the width of a set of stumps is 9″.
A friend, who now lives in High Wycombe, was there when the prang happened, and he told me how his mother took pity on the pilot, and led him indoors for a cup of tea; the cricket teams simply moved the pitch, and continued with their game (it was teatime, after all.) The Spitfire was treated as a “natural hazard.”

Maybe he feels that the members of his Cabinet are competent enough to do the work while he’s away. Last time I checked, they had phones in Cornwall, and it is possible, in an emergency to return by car (the horse is no longer the main means of travel, whatever Poldark said) in about 5 hours.