I don't think that any numbers were disclosed, but you, who obviously wasn't there, said there were 4, which as Duston points out, was more than the NTFC AGM. If you can read that into " Clearly the people are with them after all", what can you read into the NTFC AGM ?
 I see you failed to answer the 2 other points that I raised about your post, any comments ?

I didn't think either of them needed answering again, to be honest, but if you insist...

1) No, I don't think they could, not without compromising the integrity of the sale process. Had the club walked away from the deal and Cildarra said no, not if we have to pay for a stand too then the council would have been left without a buyer for a piece of land that they want to dispose of. And a piece of land with a sitting tenant at that.

2) One lives in Dubai, the other in Florida. That's common knowledge. We have posters on this site who live in the US, Switzerland, Australia, Thailand.... I don't see the relevance of where someone is based in the debate and yet it's something that is repeatedly weaponised and used to bash the owners over the head with. There's an insinuation there that "overseas bidders" are up to no good. Why not just say "the owners" or even "the people who've been propping up our football club for the last 7 or 8 years"? Nah, better to make it sound like a couple of fly by night chancers.

On the club AGM point... this is a genuine question, I don't know the answer so I'm not asking it rhetorically... don't you have to be a shareholder to attend the AGM? That's always been my understanding but it's not something I've ever thought to look into.

My apologies, I misread that - it was 3 at the Trust AGM, wasn't it? 4 if you include the Trust legal advisor/secretary. Clearly the people are with them after all!

In my experience, there are two reasons that people don't turn up to meetings; they are either happy with the status quo or are so disillusioned that they can't see the point. I think the open forums and the Trust AGM are examples of each.

On the "no stand no land" clause disappearing, can you guys honestly not see that commercially and contractually it would be grossly unfair to impose a condition on one bidder when the same condition wouldn't be applicable to the other bidders? We'd all like to see that clause included but you have to be able to take a step back at times and take a pragmatic view.

Then there's this:

The Trust do want to move forward and would be delighted to work in a positive manner towards an ambitious goal for NTFC with fans, club and council, perhaps those who keep calling for a reset, will do the same themselves.

Talk is cheap. This statement is what we'd all like to see, but it would carry more weight if it didn't come in the wake of the Trust rebutting all of the council's points and appear at the end of a post in which the owners of NTFC are repeatedly and pointedly referred to as "overseas bidders", the council are implied to be incompetent at best and corrupt at worst and supporters are referred to as sheep!

You say yourself that one fan turned up to your AGM. I was surprised last year to find so few people there and there were 27! Surely you guys can't keep up the stance of everyone else being to blame for everything (even Nat West are in the crosshairs now! ) while the Trust are seemingly infallible?

There must come a time when you look at yourselves and ask "What are we doing so wrong?"

When I read some of the correspondence and characters involved I can't help picturing these two.
"Neeehh, GOOD!"

Scenes from the Obelisk Centre....

Wow! I thought they were irrelevant but I didn’t realise just how bad it was. Did the Board look across the (almost) empty room and think ‘we’re on the right lines here?’ I guess not.

On a technical point, how did they conduct any business at this meeting? Their own rules on their own website state they need 20 members or 5% of the membership present to make a meeting valid. If they operate like this, all I can say is thank god they are nowhere near our club.

It gets worse as one of the 4 was John Morgan, everyone's favourite shadow director!

When you consider just the number of known galaxies each with countless suns and countless planets the idea that we are alone seems preposterous. However this is a leap of faith just the same as believing in a supreme being is. Brain Cox actually hit the nail on the head. He said and I paraphrase that no scientist could hand on heart claim that there was no supreme being just as much as a believer cannot claim that there is one. He went on to say that the only answer a scientist can give when asked is there a god is "We don't know".

As to whether we have been visited, I believe we have, there are things on the planet that do not have a clear explanation and one of the possibilities is extraterrestrial interference. The issue is how do they get here? Are they so long lived that a thousand years is the blink of an eye so travelling huge distances is nothing to them, or have they found a way to bend space and time?
We wont know until they make themselves known to us.

Good post. The part about bending space and time is entirely plausible, it's just that we as a species are constrained by our perception of reality as we see everything in rigid 3 dimensions (4 if you count time).

If you draw two dots on a piece of paper and ask most people what the shortest route between the two is they will draw a straight line between them, but the real answer is to fold the paper to bring the two points into contact with each other. According to Einstein and Hawking the same might just be possible with spacetime.

The Trust announced its membership numbers grew in 2022 v 2021.
Could we get an update as to what the growth or decline was in 2023 please?
Straw poll of relevance and popularity.

Last years Treasurer's report said:

Membership Fees were down to £707 from £1,133 after a reduction in member numbers to 725 from 744.  

I seem to remember there being something said about there being an uplift in numbers since the report was compiled but I'm not 100% on that.

This year's report says:

The Trust’s current membership stands at 681

They haven't quoted membership fees this year so it's difficult to interpret what financial impact this drop in numbers has had. Income has dropped from £8,513 to £2,897, but I think that coincided with the travel club jumping ship so again it's not really comparing apples with apples.

Edit: actually, if membership fees were £707 last year and I think fees were £5 on average, then you could extrapolate that there were about 140 paying members and 585 life members (an unknown  amount of whom must be dead).

You'd assume the drop in members is primarily down to annual members not renewing rather than life members going out of their way to surrender their membership, which means there must be approximately 96 paying members left, but with an uplift in fees they would have seen an increase in membership fees to around £960 (I know there are different members levels but that can't be far out as a back of a fag packet calculation).

Do you remember apologising for this before?

BTW. Can you answer the question regarding how many people attended the AGM. That will give us all a clear insight into the relevance/irrelevance of the Trust.

I'm reliably informed the answer is the board +4.

They were very sure what it was - it was a hairy little Frenchman!

[be like a few years to them]

I 'll tell you what we need, Aliens to turn up. Tell us they seeded this planet millions of years ago (be like a few years to them) as an experiment and they've come back to see how things have worked out. I wonder what the god worshippers would say then? 

Well, time is relative... that bit blew my mind when I read Brian Cox's book

It's like when Einstein came up with the theory of relativity; it was largely based around things he theorised to fill in the gaps between what could be observed. As it goes, we're still finding ways to observe some of those theories and finding them to be correct. If they were found to be wrong then science would adjust its stance on the matter.

The same is true of dark matter. We can see what's around it and know there must be something there, so the theory of dark matter is used as a placeholder until we find a way to observe it and either prove or disprove the theory.

Religion was also formed as a way to explain away things we didn't know. The difference between science and faith is that once the answers are found, faith doesn't adjust its position while science does.

You don't have to prove a physical existence of something to believe in it.

Ummm...

What time today are the Council and NTFC announcing the signing of the land contracts?

We were told during February...........weren't we?

We were told they were hopeful it would be in February.

Yeah, but say you've got some blabbering bible basher on your doorstep who you’ve unwittingly opened the door to, who fully believes there's a higher power and is trying to get you to read their literature and side with them. Short of poking them in the eye, producing a syringe with the offer of blood, or just telling them to fcuk off, how do you prove to them God don't exist, not just in your world but their world and everyone else's too?
Tricky/impossible from both sides.
Bit like trying to prove/disprove KT's stated intention of finishing the East Stand 😂 They both need to start laying a few bricks in my book.

We hardly ever get them but I love it when they come knocking on your door. I had a fascinating chat about evolution with the last one we got...

Me and my wife are pretty much card carrying atheists but we're trying not to impose our views on our little one, so when she asks any questions about religion, as she does occasionally, we explain what we think and why and also what religious people think and why and leave her to make her own mind up.

Christ on a bike, she's like a 6 year old hybrid of Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens at times... as I was dropping her at school this morning she was bemoaning that they had RE today.
Then she went on to complain that three of her friends believe that God is real.

"I am so bored of telling them they are wrong" she added with a roll of her eyes.

Granted, inside this made me quite proud but I didn't show it and said that it didn't really matter what they thought and it didn't really affect her either way, so she didn't need to get involved in an argument or upset them.

Then she went on to say that they keep ganging up and telling her some nasty stuff about what will happen to her if she doesn't believe in God and my inner militant atheist broke cover, so I said the next time they start on about that to ask them the one thing they have no answer to: "prove it".

Faggots....the best justification for vegans everywhere.
I bet the stench gave the 'Sixfields burger' a run for its money.

They look nice though! On a few occasions I've been tempted to try them again and it's always been accomplished by a gag reflex and a swift reminder of why it's been years since I last tried them.

I think Louis has suffered in comparison to Bowie, as most strikers would at this level. He's also had his chances limited by Bowie's form. Next year, unless something amazing happens, we won't have Bowie so I'd renew Appere's contract because I think he has enough about him to do well at this level when he's more regularly in the side.

This is all heavy going for a Sunday morning.

Agreed! I just wanted to clarify my original post because I hadn't worded it very well and it ran the risk of sounding a bit EDF-y, going on about them there foreigners coming into our country, which wasn't my intent.

I think you've just covered the distinction I was trying to make though - there are two pots of people amongst those arriving "illegally", and some are far more deserving than others.

It cuts both ways of course; an old family friend of ours was living and working illegally in America for decades and has only fairly recently become a legal resident thanks to some sort of amnesty scheme they ran. She really shouldn't have been there though and wouldn't have had any complaint if they'd ever caught up with her!

Sorry, should have clarified that - I wasn't particularly thinking about people that have arrived through legal channels and have a right to work. Yes, even they provide a further stretch on resources but that is offset to a degree by them (generally) paying taxes and filling gaps in the workforce.
I was talking much more about those who turn up illegally and as such have no right to work, at which point we (as a country) end up footing the bill to house, feed, clothe, treat, police and educate them while their application and potential subsequent appeals are processed, all of which also carries a significant cost.

https://youtu.be/OqqbM1B-mPY?feature=shared

I've watched this clip quite a few times and it gets me every time. A wonderful moment of television.