FTOF

I see Neill Collins of Wolves (formerly of Dumbarton and Sunderland) has been put up for transfer. 6 foot 3 centre half. Might be worth inquiring about a season's length loan. Wolves bought him for £150K in 2007.Salary will probably be a major stumbling block though.

It was too far to walk/stagger to in comparison.

Used to drink in there regularly and then on to Backchat. IIRC Cannes was a favourite haunt of a certain Mr.McAvennie.

He's probably got a trial for the green bigots. I hear they've got a free weekend around that time.

I used to be able to see the floodlights from my house about a mile and a half away in an elevated part (i.e.up a hill) of Meiklegriggs/Corsebar.I wondered if I could see the new ground's too. However, even though there's the big Woodside crematorium hill in the way I thought I'd be able to see their glare in the sky. Howver, coincidentally, as I was reading the latest B&W magazine in the cludgie, there was an article by GLS stating that the new floodlights, being state of the art and despite being much brighter than the ones at the old ground, would emit no upward glare at all, as all the light was focussed onto the pitch.

I have. The phenomenon is generally associated with hailstones and we get plenty of them in winter. The hailstones rub together inside the clouds where warm and cool air meet, producing a shitload of static electricity which forms the lightning. The fact that hailstorms are so localised meant that the one last night was probably directly above Paisley/Barrhead, so the lightning was almost instantaneously followed by the clap of thunder. Anyway, I'm holiday for two weeks, so enough of the unpaid scientific explanations, I'm away to get pished.

Not that I'm an expert on plane explosions, but surely an exploding plane (or even a building) would emit a light of an orange hue? Therefore when I saw the white flash of light and heard a rather loud noise that sounded remarkably like thunder, albeit that it was very loud and resonant, I sort of assumed that it was thunder and lightning.

That's the one.

My mistake.It was actually wee paper cones you collected the peanuts in. It's remarkable that we have progresed from paper cones to cans in 20 years.

I seem to remember traipsing up there from Shuttle Street [in it's Shuttles, Earl of Cranby, Latin Quarter days], because it had a late licence until one, unlike some of the pubs in shuttle street. You could get wee bags of peanuts from a machine, which invariably ended up in each other's pints.How childish.

It was 1983 when we were chancing our collective arms. Old bastard that I am.

Favourite ever. Not favourites. What an indecisive lot you are.

Did that used to be The Cellar before that? When we were in 6th year we used to walk up from the JNHS remove our ties and have a couple of pints in there.

That was also a favourite haunt of mine.Especially since we knew one of the barmaids. Cheap beer? Let's just say a button got us round on one occasion. However due to such blatant acts of fraud she didn't last too long in that job. I seem to remember Schlitz and latterly Red Stripe being the beers of choice.

Those were indeed the days! Although once it went off the boil, so to speak, we virtually lived in Corkers for about six years.I used to give my address as "The round table",Corkers. FFS I even "worked" in it for a short time, until they tried to make us wear red and white stripey waistcoats.

Over the years (some of us more thab others) you will all have undoubtedly experienced the delights of the many drinking establishments in our beloved town. As it says at the top, which one was/is your favourite ever pub? Feel free to give reasons why. Mine was The Wine Bar [of Laverty's fame] at the bottom of New Street. Two bars of a very different nature, good beer and good looking birds.Followed by the bus to the cotton club if one wasn't too pished. Oh and I was young and carefree then.

A club which several of these directors put in that excellent financial position in the first place.Sadly, as previously mentioned bad managerial appointments etc. led to the erosion of our sizeable bank account. Also, they did spend money that they had.It wasn't spent too wisely though. It was the building of the Caley stand that inflicted by far our greatest debt not our overpaying of duds, as has been pointed out previously. I'm not bitter about it at all, although I'd much prefer that it hadn't happened in this way.I live in the present. Almost every football club of a similar size to us has been in a similar state to us financially [some a lot worse who are to this day still in a hopeless financial state].Some have managed to drag themselves out of it by creative accounting/loans or by plain cheating or by having a millionaire white knight to bail them out. We've been fortunate enough not to have had to go down either of the first two of those routes and nobody has put themselves forward to be the third option. It wasn't crime of the century.It was bad financial misjudgement, but then again shit happens. It was part and parcel of football in the nineties. We've now got a modern stadium which meets our fanbase requirements and will for several years.

Of course we spent stupid amounts of money that in hindsight we shouldn't have on a succession of wasters and quite correctly the directors at the time should shoulder the responsibility.Although to be fair I'm sure the fans at the time were quite happy to accept our big money spending, something that we constantly deride fans of Dundee and Motherwell for doing. The directors didn't shirk their responsibility for their financial mismanagement. Once they realised that they had fucked up the finances, they did things like remortgaging(100%) their houses to try and bail the club out.In fact this tactic might have worked if it wasn't for the construction of the Caley stand, as has been stated previously. However the board, which included certain members being derided on here also got rid of a succession of very average players for ridiculous amounts of money. i.e. Cameron, Winnie and Hamilton went for a total of around £750K.Sheer genius if you ask me. Also, the core of the board in the 80's, again which included certain aforementioned members, ensured that throughout the 80's St.Mirren were [apart from Dundee United] the best run team financially in Scotland.This as some of you will remember allowed us to outbid the old scum for certain players.We were always well in the black in those days in terms of finance. People tend to forget these bits though in order to suit their own bitter and pathetic little agenda. If you speak to some of these board members they will hold their hands up about their poor managerial appointments and their desperate attempts (Archibald and Victor for example) at the time to keep us in the top league. It was a horrible time for the club and the fans, which many clubs have been through and some are still well enshrined in the debt culture.We should be big enough to move on from this and be positive about the future, instead of whining like a spoilt little brat because they don't like the colour of their new dummy.

Getting any of his "facts" right would be a start.

4 -0 now. Broadfoot gave away a penalty.

Of course Dorman will [if he is indeed seriously injured] be a big miss for us, but could you all stop wetting your knickers until we find out the full extent of his injury? People who have been carried off on stretchers have been known to recover from the intial injury and play in the next game. Let's hope this is the case with Dorman and Dargo [if he's injured too].

It did indeed "go on fire" . It was called "The videoplex" at one point.

Indeed. Backchat (or Backstab as it was affectionately known) was about 20 yards from Cannes towards Causeyside Street.You had to go up a relatively steep flight of stairs to get in to the club itself. Cannes was indeed right on the corner of Forbes place.

I think our resident local hostelry expert (HSS) mentioned something along those lines when O'Neill's announced it was shutting.