Advertising on line can land you in deep horseshit if you don't have your wits about you and also there are some solid gold nuggets out there .

Estate agent in Kent we rented off said " I shouldn't tell you this because you are very good tenants but interest rates are low at the moment ; if I were you I would take out a loan and buy ....he organised an interview with a friend he knew in the mortgage business .

We got the loan , bought a house three doors away from our original renter .

We paid 21,000 three years later we decided to move back to NZ ... went back to the same guy he said " I reckon I can get 46, 000 .

We had offers of 39 ,000 42,000 but he stood firm and got the 46 .

So having paid bugger all off the principle we pocketed 25 grand minus his small fee .

The Kiwi dollar was on a downward spiral at the time , think we exchanged at 3. 02 so we ended up with about $ 72,000 all but paying in total for a house in the poxy little country .

I'll be for ever grateful for his advice

In answer to your early question John ...... No he hasn't been sacked .. he is a trustee and entwined into the fabric , he owns the a steam engine which runs and also the model train .

At least you can satisfy yourself you tried your best ..... " didn't reach the standards expected of consultants " what you didn't stitch them up for a two grand fee for an hours advice .

Years back ... bloke I know was chuckling a woman's car wouldn't start near his house ... he offers to help lifts the bonnet sees the coil wire had come off rather than replace that he dicked around made a show , wiping this and that , finally replaced the wire ..... it started and he charged her $ 20 .

Me ...... " God you sleazy low life pr**ck , you can't just help someone in need for nothing ....unbelievable ? Took the shine off his coup .

Beautiful can't wait to slip some of this antipodean demotic into the general hubbub of conversation the next time I'm tarting around with the media luvvies.

You'll have to run that past me again, KP, I fell asleep at "got the loan...".

a bushel of comfrey , milk thistle , dandelion and two grammes of sheep sheight will help with both the narcolepsy and attention defecit .

Hello ..little GrantyBoy logs on ... slow day ... no directives from Malcolm Turnbull pouring in ...?

Surely, deliberately ignoring the rules in the name of 'theatre' can be classed as match-fixing.

Just so I'm clear. The estate agent you spoke to provided advice that you remain in his gratitude to right up to this very day and that was that house prices in Kent were likely to go up over the next few years and he knew a mortgage consultant.

I'll try and avoid the temptation to be sarcastic and ask if you feel such advice could be provided elsewhere by other means and if this couldn't have been foreseen anyway.

"Buy land, AJ, 'cause God ain't making any more of it" -Tony Soprano

Laughable really given that being 15 points from the top also means we're almost the same amount of points away from the relegation zone.

Now expecting a bit of a run of results which leaves us in the hunt for 4th, followed by a collapse in results around Jan / Feb and another run to push for 4th and the end of the season.

I don't think you will find me being a bit over the top about this. The Australian team have the mental fragility of a Wenger built team. A Bangladesh game is always one session away.

There is not much talk about him in my house.

Sorry if this has been covered already but why am I seeing articles on line that are borderline blaming Bellerin for pogba’s red card!? Yes it is an unorthodox way of tackling and yes pogba will miss the Manchester derby but surely the press aren’t that one eyed and desperate for a title race that they can’t see only pogba is to blame for an over the ball tackle?

The bad news is that the press are that bad. They are trying to curry favour with Mourinho. I think we should find out which newspapers publish anything or if it is online if we can connect the author to a paper we should refuse to answer questions at press conferences from them. Time to start taking no prisoners & being a total bunch of c’s at our club. Us against them is always much more fun than bending over & taking it from the press.

Seen Koscielny blamed as well.

Anyway, time to move on and not dwell on that disappointing defeat. We were let down by the defence and poor finishing.

Emirates Stadium is now quite a fortress - hope we can put on another undefeated run of home games again.

Was he a consultant? Sounds like what lots of them would do - not just to make money, but to make themselves look good.

Emirates Stadium a 'fortress'?????? Well if that's the case it's just been overrun by a few Red Devils.

If you need to know how long it takes for Wenger accept he is totally wrong - it is over ten years. Ten years of total and absolute waste.

http://metro.co.uk/2017/12/04/arsene-we ... y-7132445/

At last - my offer to drive him wherever he wants still stands.

Interesting this happens at the same time as the arrival of Mislintat and Sanllehi (sp?) - I wonder if it is a sign of more challenge to Wenger within the club?

Being one of Walcotts biggest critics I have trouble identifying how he has been dramatically worse this year than many other years. Why has Wenger changed his attitude? You may very well be correct. The Walcott position is difficult for Wenger to defend and indeed he may now have one foot in a bunker and have decided to surrender Walcott to start his defence.

I don't know what Walcott's figures are on all these computer models but I suspect they may not be great so even on those Walcott may have been found out. Interesting days.

He had a stretch of three years where he averaged 10 goals per season from a wing position, before injuries slowed him down and our new formation made him redundant. Never world class by any stretch of the imagination, but hardly a waste of space either.

Genius

It is terrible but probably not surprising. It is not easy to referee a game but there are decisions made by referees in the PL that can really only be explained by a reluctance to enforce the rules. Tottenham should have had two or three players sent off in that game. The game is rotten as a sport.

Well I sure as hell didn't think of it ; we were happily paying rent .

He gave us what turned out to be sound advice and we ended up pocketing $70 , 000 grand ... fail to see what there is to be cynical about there .

Prior to the MU defeat, we were last beaten at home in the league by Watford in Jan 2017. Following that Watford game, we went on to win 13 and draw 1 our home league games. Not too shabby.

And just last season he got 19 goals in all comps. I can't think of many squaddies that can do that.

Don't be silly how can we play Walcott when according to some both Welbeck and Iwobi are both more productive?
Has AW given Walcott the chance to prove his worth this season? Answer NO. Should he be given a chance to make the right wing at least his own? Answer YES.

Read a few rumours about Nzonzi being allowed to come to London to seal a January move. Doesn’t say which team but the suspicion is Arsenal. I’ve long advocated his signing - not that he would be the answer to all our prayers but I’m not a football scout so it was more a player with his skill set from my limited knowledge of players

I'm sure that sort of flamboyance will knock them out down at the bingo hall, but at the risk of being being churlish (or truculent), I would say that "rebarbative"* is redundant in this case, because "truculent" (which is a beaut) already has that Kevin Pietersenish connotation, and that "human perfectibility' is a tired cliche.

*OK, I admit that rebarbative is delicious.

What you are missing is that a lot of people are clueless. My sister's husband bought a house in Eire just before the crash, despite this being obviously stupid.

So estate agents operate in this environment, either giving people sage advice and saving people money (as in Kiwi's example) or earning their bad reputation.

Where I live estate agents have a bad reputation, but that is mostly because of their activities in the rental market, which is a tough one, especially when most of the tenants are students.

Should we be more cynical about estate agents than the Kmyr Rouge? Certainly not. But very few people have had their deposits witheld by the Kmyr Rouge.

Ha ha the risk you really run is being wrong as rebarbative and truculent are words with two separate albeit related meanings.

In what sense is "human perfectibility" a cliche? From Lenin's New Soviet Man to the repulsive Che Guevara's Hombre Nuevo it has been a dominant strand in Communist ideology.

Or do you simply mean you've heard it levelled as a criticism a lot and don't agree with it in which case sorry but that's the penalty for subscribing to an ideology that places the interests of the "revolution" or the "party" over the lives or rights of any particular human beings.

Fully automated luxury communism - that's an entirely different kettle of makey-uppy nonsense. I also had some sympathy for Lenin's proposal to make bogs out of gold after the revolution. Just a shame Stalin came along and turned the murderous Cheka into the mass-murderous NKVD.

Prices are soaring again so your sis might yet be euros in if she still has the property.

Hi Niall

Good to see that the "Ulster says No" mantra is alive and well.

There's only the one word in their vocabulary.

So we now have a situation where a party that represents 28% of the vote in the last NI assembly election and 1% of the UK population effectively have a veto over an agreement that everybody else on these islands (bar the Brexiteers loons) and in Europe could sign up to. What is May going to do now? What can May do now?

Will the latest line that the UK as a whole will be seeking to be in the "RA" in phase 2 be enough to push this over the line?

My point is such

If you buy property anywhere in the south of England and keep it for a sustained period. You are going to make serious wedge and you don't need some Pratt in a shiny suit and Audi TT from an estate agent to tell you this. It's blatantly obvious

Its one of the few American online news/business mediums I like but I couldn't help but laugh at the obvious error. It isn't that hard to find out who owns us.

http://www.businessinsider.com/wedding- ... ce-2017-12
The Russian billionaire owner of Arsenal reportedly paid for his niece to wed in a lavish Disney-style wedding — take a look inside

That she is. Her husband ran off with another women. He then promptly died and his life insurance paid off the bond.

She didn't see it as poetic justice but I must confess that I did.

What you say is true. Tony Soprano knew his stuff.

The first part of your post went right over my head. What on earth is Fully automated Luxury communism and what does it have to do with Lenin? 'Make bogs out of gold' is new to me. I presume Lenin meant bogs as in 'crappers', because 'swamps' wouldn't make sense. It is an odd one, because it's hard to reconcile with Lenin's ascetic nature and seems more the style of oligarchs or EPL footballers. (As I side note, I would categorise both of these classes as as more worthy of cynicism that Bolsheviks ... and even, on my new grading, estate agents.)

As for the Cheka (you could add the suppression of the Kronstadt rebellion amongst other things) what can one say? How do revolutions deal with counter-revolutionaries? This is always going to be controversial even when intentions are pure (what do you do with the AWB or fascists or royalists who simply won't abide by the rules, for example?). And of course it is going to open up the danger of reigns of terror and/or stiffing bureaucracy (in the Soviet case, politburos, central committees, etc.)

Where you seem to be wrong (I am going from what you say) is that you seem to be characterising Lenin as some combination of an old-fashioned strongman (not much different from Uncle Joe) and wide-eyed, half-mad idealist. From what I have read of Lenin (and I am no expert--as my ignorance of his views on crappers shows) he was a pragmatist par excellence. There was a kind of mad optimism about the whole Soviet experiment, but it was the madness of the unique historical opportunity and the awareness something has to be done. Apart form that madness and the idealism of the belief in progress (if not the perfectibility of human society), Lenin was uncannily aware of what he was facing and the odds against success, including the grave dangers of vanguarism, bureaucracy, reaction, etc.. So I would say that Lenin and Trotsky were quite remarkable figures, both in their thoughts and deeds. Lenin may well have been a bit too ruthless, but I don't see how that makes his writings any less interesting or relevant.

" some Pratt in a shiny suit and an Audi TT " fairly broad brush strokes .: you seem to be going to great lengths to get your point across while missing the blatantly obvious .........it's horses for courses .

Here's an example ... my mates wife took their $12,000 car for a Warrant of Fitness [ MOT in Pom language ] it failed because of rust in the chassis . Mechanic painted an end of the world picture , next stop the scrapyard .
Doom and gloom they are up for a new car .

I had a look and said I can weld that . Got some 3mm plate , shaped it , weld .... it passed .

The point I'm making [ and reinforced by the learned Decaf ] is what might seem blatently obvious to you is not neccessarily the same to the next cookie .

I can agree with that generally but if you can't see house prices going up in Kent or the south of England you haven't been paying enough attention.

As for the rest of the stuff, What the *%^@ are you talking about Bro? Has AG nicked your laptop ?