Cor Blimey Trousers

Why do football managers have their initials on their track suit tops? I've never been able to work it out. Surely everyone else knows who they are. Perhaps it's for the laundry staff so they can hand them back but then why doesn't everyone have their initials on their training kit?
And the Fulham staff, for instance, have got to realise which king-sized zip up top belongs to Martin Jol without needing the letters MJ on it.
Which leads to the obvious conclusion that it's either vanity or perhaps one manager started it all off many years ago and the others have simply followed.
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The government wants to step up the old Thatcherite policy of buy-your-own council homes after a few years of Labour trying to discourage it.
It was, of course, introduced in order to get more Tory votes in working class areas and succeeded, in particular in the kind of towns built to cope with the overflow from major cities - the British version of white flight. Here in the south it helped the Conservatives to win seats like Basildon and Harlow for instance.
But with an estimated 74,000 council flats and houses a year going private, it does create an enormous shortfall of public housing. That, in turn, lets in enterprising private landlords who can secure a decent and guaranteed rental income from a local authority.
It also leads to six bedroomed houses in Hampstead being rented out to a family of 11 Eastern European benefits claimants which in turn sparks the kind of Daily Mail protest that so worries the Tories.
Now I'm not against working class people moving from council to private. I did it, when my parents went from an East End council house to their first home for instance. It was the first time any of us had lived in a house that wasn't owned either by a council or a brewery.
But how about some kind of rule that for every council house bought by its tenants, the local authority has to provide another one of its own to replace it?
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What's the point of the Halifax? Apart from its ability to make the worst adverts on television, is there really any need for this High Street chain of banks?
The Halifax is owned by the pisspoor HBOS group which in turn was foisted onto the much better-run Lloyds TSB (and the name TSB might as well be ditched too, come to think of it.)
This means the group that owns Lloyds Banks in the High Street also owns Halifax Banks in the High Street.
So you have the ridiculous site of a Lloyds Bank just a few doors down from a Halifax with both offering pretty much the same products to the same kind of customers.
It might be different if the Halifax was still a good old northern run building society which put its customers first.
And that's what Lloyds thinks. It reckons the Halifax has a bit more of a working class image which attracts a different set of customers that Lloyds itself.
This comes from the days when it was mutually run for the benefit of cloth cap northerners who wanted a safe haven for what little they could save in order to build up a nestegg.
Old style building societies - when we had the Abbey and the Halifax and the Woolwich and all those others that are now banks - used to have something like 15 times as much money in savings as it had in loans. Which of course makes it far harder to suddenly go bust owing billions of pounds in failed Ponzi-style mortgage schemes.
But it's not like that any more. The Halifax is nows a greedy, run of the mill bank famous for making crap adverts, overweight staff and tacky interiors.
Having a Bank of Scotland chain makes a bit more sense, if only to satisfy the sweaties and have some kind of historic, national identity north of the border. Though the days when having the word 'Scotland' in a bank's title meant trustworthy and good with money went out the window around the time Fred Goodwin did to the country what he did to that pretty, female worker in his department.
But Lloyds now has a whopping great chunk of our money helping it get through these difficult times (don't mention it lads). And a lot of that is now spent on a chain of banks, expensive promotions and the multimillion pound marketing and advertising budget that no longer has a purpose.
So scrap the Halifax, switch the accounts to Lloyds (or one of it's many other trading names) and spend the money saved on paying off the debt to the taxpayer.
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Talking of adverts, there is a long running commercial for the Ford Focus which you can't avoid. It shows some Germanic sort called Mattheus wasting his time driving around Europe visiting the sites of 'his favourite book' on two tanks of fuel.
His favourite book happens to be The Da Vinci Code, which suggests Mattheus is one of those people who finds it hard to read without his mouth moving at the same time.
Or perhaps he's only ever had three books and he's already coloured in the other two.
Anyhoo, the point is that when the advert was first shown, the voiceover said, quite clearly 'his favourite book, The Da Vinci Code'. But within a couple of weeks they had edited this down to 'his favourite book' without ever saying what it was.
Were Ford embarrassed by the fact it couldn't find a Focus owner who had ever read a decent novel? Or did Dan Brown feel he was not a Ford-type of guy and order the name of the book to be removed.
So I rang Ford. And they said that the reason they edited the advert was because having too much information in it distracted the viewers from the overall product and message.
Yes, that's right. Potential Ford Focus buyers are so distracted by hearing the words 'The Da Vinci Code' that they plum forget what car was being advertised.
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On the programme Room 101 (a phrase from the book 1984 which has inspired me to buy a Ford Focus and try and visit all the places named in the novel) guests were asked to choose something that really annoys them they could banish forever. Predictably, celebrity chefs were picked. They were picked by the panel show fixture Micky Flanagan who has only got to appear on Deal or No Deal and Question Time and then we can have him on the our screens on a permanent 24-hour loop.
And the reason he picked them? Because, in his words, every time you turn on the TV there's a celebrity chef. No. Every time you turn on the TV there's Micky 'I'm a geezer' Flanagan.
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If Catholics are against having gay marriages in church because they can invent a biblical reason why it's God wouldn't approve, then should they not have a medical examination for every bride to make sure she's a virgin and a criminal records check on every prospective bride and groom to make sure they have never been convicted of any crime that is specifically mentioned in the bible?
Of course, they could start with their own priests.
Thus endeth the rant....cheers, Solly