Andy's Glasses

I think I may be over-reacting but the world seems to be in the control of mad men. Not necessarily because of their actions, but because of their justifications. Maybe its simply a perspective issue on my part. Something I’ve always struggled with. As you’ll know if you’re a regular reader.

Putin invades Ukraine. Spent months building up an army of 200,000 Cossaks on the border before crossing the line and ‘going in’. Yet Putin has only ever spoken of ‘defending’, of being the victim. As do all his state-run tv channels and all his horrible Russian lackeys, like Sergey Lavrov. Perhaps I’ve missed something?

Then there’s the mad-man’s mad man, currently sitting in the White House. Who looks at an innocent woman being murdered by a bunch of uniformed thugs, and blames her, defending their actions as ‘self defence’. Which then becomes the battle cry of his entire team. As the poor victim becomes vilified as a ‘communist’ and a ‘terrorist’ just because she was part of a protest.

At which point I can’t help but think: ‘this is what dictators do’. They alter the ‘truth’, they shift the perspective. Tragically, because I really hate to drop the ‘H-bomb’, its how the Germans acted and reacted to Hitler’s nonsense. As the brown shirts went round committing murder unsanctioned. With complete impunity. Like those lovely guys from ICE. The spin guys and gels then come in to mop up the mess. By telling everyone that they didn’t in fact see what they saw with their own eyes.

The fact is: I don’t mind what Trump does. Its his country. If he wants to ’round up the immigrants’, that ain’t my business. I disagree with his methods, but he’s the Prez and I don’t even get a vote. But when he tells us to disbelieve what we’ve all seen, I get a bit scared.

This coming in the same week that he threatened to invade Iceland. Which wouldn’t be hard as it is completely undefended. Relying on its ‘mother country’, Denmark, and the rest of NATO to protect it, should any shit hit that arctic fan. Ah, but ‘NATO’ is pretty much ‘America’. Hmmmmm…

I get the strategic importance of Iceland. Its the bridge between Russia and the US. Which is why the US has a military base there. So put in another one. A bigger one. Put four new bases, 100 more aircraft, 300 ships. Big ones. But to invade an allied nation??? Who the fuck does that? Well, someone who is intent on security but who is perhaps also… ‘aware’ that Iceland contains a shitload of fabulously desirable natural resources just waiting to be dug out the ground.

That’s why I posted this cruel and heartless photo on a day which is dark, cold and horribly wet. Remembering the finer times. Ahhhh…

Happy Friday

A xxxx

The world is fucked; we’re heading to war, Trump is becoming ‘the great peacemaker’ he’s always wanted to be by attacking, invading, kidnapping and being aggressive and military towards anyone he can provoke.

The football is worse.

So I can’t be doing any of that now. Instead, my mind drifts. To ‘happier times’…

Funny; I hadn’t thought of Mr Byrite until I wrote the other day about Saturday jobs. Because they were all the rage last Sunday, now it’s all about Greenland. I never had a job in Greenland. Nor Iceland.

My Saturdays were fab. PLUS: we got, like, 30%, maybe 40% off clothes we bought. And that brought the stuff down to what is was just about worth. It looked great. Once.

One week, the word went round that David Bowie was playing gigs. In 1971 we all loved Hunky Dory and played it all the time. Bowie was not a big star. He was an ‘oddity’. And then Ziggy Stardust came out. And that was a massive ‘wow’. Probably because it was Bowie’s rock phase, so it was all much louder, less ballady that his previous. Personally, I hadn’t made up my mind about Le (or, as it sometimes was, La) Bowie. All that make-up? Dressin’ up silly? But what the hell, gig’s a gig, right? So we got tickets. About 20 us. And went to Romford Odeon to see the Ziggy set. Which is probably the best gig I ever saw. Then at the end of that tour, he ‘killed’ Ziggy, became the ‘Thin White Duke’ and it all went downhill.

I had a… friend. Called Jackie. She wasn’t a girlfriend, but a girl friend. And for about a year, we just kind’a hooked up every few weeks, with my dear, departed best mate, Stan and her mate Suzanne, and went wild. Jackie was a wild child. She was also 6 foot tall, stick thin and incredibly, stunningly beautiful. Olive skin, long dark wavy hair, she’d been a ‘Colgate girl’, on adverts as a kid, for toothpaste. She walked like a supermodel, even though they hadn’t been invented yet. Everywhere we went people stared at her. And therefore, they would see me too. The little guy next to her. And as ‘it’s all about me’, that was great.

Jackie had a Saturday job in Chelsea Girl, just down the high road from me. And in her lunch break, virtually every week, we had a ritual. She would saunter into Mr Byrite, which would be rammed with shoppers, as it was all day, and heads would turn. Because she had an air of both incredible confidence and fun about her. The crowds would part and she would find me, grab hold of my head and kiss me. But we’re not talking, ‘mwah’, how ya doin’?, kind’a kiss. We’re talking Bardot-movie, slow, passionate, grinding, 4-minute snogging. Then she’d just turn around and walk out with that killer smile on her face.

Ahhhh, the things you remember from the past when the present is so consistently horrible.

Happy Thursday

A xxxx

I read this headline this morning and immediately thought: I totally believe that. And I reckon everyone who drives electric, to save the planet, like me, well, like Mel, would totally believe that such a claim is true. ‘The car did it!’ Because EVs have, quite literally, a mind of their own. You think you’ve shut the boot but, like Mel this morning who got paged after her swim, the car decided to open it a bit. One day it decides to lock itself up. Totally. I’m not saying all EVs are out to kill people but I think its time to re-visit the Terminator movies and make sure we’re not creating a class which can think for itself and take over totally, start a war against humanity, possibly take control of Venezuela and reduce the size of my pension!

Ahhhh, Venezuela. Trump doesn’t need AI. He probably can’t spell it. But he knows how to build an empire. Its easy. You just invade smaller countries, take them over, strip them of their assets and resources and then leave them lawless, defenceless and hopeless (Afghanistan, Iraq, Vietnam…). Or you can enslave the population, but that’s a bit ‘Caesar’ for modern times. And leaves you open to reparations claims 800 years later.

The Maduro kidnapping (what else would you call it?) was a militarily brilliant exercise. It was too slick for Americans really. Too ‘Mossad’. Sharp, concise, thorough and successful. Just a few dead, but they’re only Venezuelans so they’re probably linked to the drug trade somehow anyway. And Americans are familiar with killing Venezuelans as they’ve been using their small boats as target practice for the last year or so.

Our main concern is…

Well, according to our lacklustre, fence-sitting, terminally ambivalent Prime Minister, we don’t have any concerns we’re prepared to speak about. In case offence is taken by anyone at all. He can’t upset Trump; we have a ‘special relationship’, which means we have a decent trade deal. And he can’t upset the left of his party who are, as always, up in arms against everything America does, particularly against communist countries, with whom they sympathise. Hence Corbyn becoming the de facto spokesperson for ‘Maduro Venezuelans’. Not the vast majority of ‘non-Maduros’ who voted him out, but he cheated his way back in, who hate him and whose lives and livelihoods have been ruined by him. Corbyn doesn’t speak for them.

Trump did what he did to prevent the Chinese getting the oil and because he wanted it. And although the largest untapped oil resource in the world (!!!), Venezuelan oil is poor quality and hence will need much more expensive refining that the upmarket stuff pumped out of Arabia and Texas.

Does the US action create a ‘wild west’ type ‘grab it while you can’ world view, in which China feels free to storm into Taiwan? Or is China now in fear of the newfound American aggression?

I don’t know. And neither does Kier Starmer. Difference being: he’s paid to know. Or at least voice a fucking opinion.

Happy Tuesday

A xxxx

All I can say is: thank God for the ‘ammers.

Because otherwise I’d have absolutely nothing at all to be happy about in the entire world of football. Yet those ‘chirpy cockneys’ put a smile on my face with every game they lose, and every move they make downwards in the table.

I think when Donald Trump sends ‘the boys’ over to get Kier Starmer, I might ask him to take Thomas Frank as well. If there’s room on the plane with all those soldiers and guns and stuff. That way we won’t have to make yet another obscene payment for sacking yet another failed manager.

But I watched yesterday’s match through my analytical eyes. I studied the stats. I calculated every move, pass and run of my team. I performed several statistical tests on the results, then cross-checked them on a multiple chai-squared distribution matrix. And the result that the computer came out with was rather surprising. It was “15.9814”.

Oh, you’re not familiar with advanced multi-dimensional mathematics then. Well, a score of 15.9814 means… they were shit. That intersected on the vertical axis with ‘boring as fuck’. To be honest, you don’t have to be an actuary to know that. It was so plainly obvious. We lack… pretty much everything except defence. Our back four I’m quite happy with. At the moment they seem to score most of our goals as well. The rest? Ok, Bentancur is ‘solid’, Gray shows ‘promise’, Pahlinha is strong, but that really bolsters the defence. It does nothing to make us look ‘pretty’. Look ‘exiting’. Look even ‘good’. We’re just tragically mediocre in the attacking half of the field. Barely competent.

Ok, we have injuries. But we’ve bought a lot of players. All tragically underwhelming or, to be fair (something I try to avoid), ‘works in progress’. Like Lucas Bergvald and Archie Gray. Our most exiting player is Kudus, and he’s declined massively since he joined us not very long ago. Its called ‘Madison syndrome’. Though there are many symptoms in common with ‘Spurs syndrome’.

To make matters (much) worse, Arsenal undeservedly won against simply awesome Bournemouth. A team who never look ‘scared’, are never intimidated, who are always ‘up for it’. However all that’s great, but winning would have been possibly better. With Manchester City squandering 2 points at the death against Chelsea, that leaves the Arse sitting pretty. And no-one wants that. Let some horrible northern team sit at the crest of the league, let them give joy in areas where, quite frankly, they have NOTHING else going for them. Like Liverpool. And now they’ve lost their footballing glory too.

Man United sacked their manager today. Be Liverpool next. Well, he’s only won ONE league title in… well, a year, but is that good enough? Really?

Sam Allardyce can only be in one place at one time.

Happy Monday

A xxxx

The youth of today…

Well, let’s face it, they’re fucked. If AI doesn’t get them, they’ve suffered covid and are all addicted to ‘devices’. Most are more ‘hardware’ than human. But apparently the problem is because they don’t take ‘Saturday jobs’. So they get no experience of the discipline and basic interactional skills which work entails and engenders. Otherwise you get sacked.

My brother got himself a Saturday job when he was about 14. He went into a local electrical repair shop to buy components to build a nuclear launch facility or a new amplifier or something no-one else had a clue about, and they offered him a job there and then, which he took. And loved it. Because he could spend all day Saturday being much cleverer than everyone else and getting paid for it.

So I wanted a job. Even though I had no skills off the football pitch. But at 14 my dad’s mate, a bespoke tailor, needed a ‘gofer’ on Saturdays, at his shop in Soho. This was 1970. Soho didn’t look like it does today, all poncey and corporate and filled with generic stores. Back then there were no ‘multiples’ in Soho. There were fantastic music shops, clothes shops, Carnaby Street was for shopping, not the horrible ‘tourist attraction’ it has evolved into. And there was sex. Sleazy ‘sex shops’ selling all manner of deviant stuff. Above half the stores were brothels. Hookers were everywhere, along with other valuable society members like pimps and drug dealers. It was something of an ‘eye opener’ for me. As I walked around picking up cloth and buttons and tailory stuff, as that was another big thing in Soho. I had my first ever cappuccino, as the Italian cafes there were the only places where such things existed.

But I’d have to meet Paul, da boss, very early on Saturday, to whizz up to the West End in his Lotus (loved that), so after a year or so I quit. And moved more locally. To a clothes store in Ilford High Street (I avoided ‘upmarket’ wherever possible, on principle) called Mr Byrite. They had about 30 stores in and around London. Owned by ‘the Levy brothers’, one of whom was the daddy of Daniel Levy, the recently retired chairman of Spurs.

Mr Byrite sold shit. Cheap shit. You bought a shirt, wore it that night to go out, then threw it away. Washing their clothing was never really recommended. But no-one minded, they just bought another one next week. It was so busy, in addition to the full-time staff, there were at least 10 Saturday-boys. Standing around, smoking, (we all smoked, it was a job requirement), messing around, looking for any stray girls who were brave enough to enter what was probably a rather forbidding environment. But selling shit-loads of clothes. Every week we all put in a few bob (small amount of money, ffs) to buy any new albums that appealed. No rubbish. No ‘pop’. Just great music. Played all day at volume 11. Whilst we smoked, lolled around, attacked girls and sold a truck load of crappy clothing. A win-win.

Because this was a very ‘cash purchase’ time, and the eastern parts of our fair City have always favoured bundles of the stuff passed down alleyways to avoid the prying eyes of HMRC, at the end of a Saturday we’d have thousands of pounds in cash. Which we took the bank in a little leather pouch-thing and deposited into the ‘night safe’, attached to the bank’s wall. Obviously, with gangsters and robbers and armed thieves all over the High Street, you have two options. Bury the pouch in a bag and take it discreetly to the bank with all due nonchalance. Or get a gang of 12 and march down to the bank singing, screaming and pushing innocent bystanders out of the way (especially old and infirm ones), normally whilst carrying large blunt instruments. Due to a lack of subtlety in my youth, we opted for the second.

So go now; get a Saturday job. You could become a proper thug.

Happy Sunday

A xxxx

PS. If I drop Donald Trump a fifty, do you think he’d come for Kier Starmer, like he did Maduro?

The joys of electric cars.

We took Mel’s to Gatwick because it’s big enough. Mine is functionally useless. That’s not what it’s for. But heh, even with the manufacturers blocking the charge capacity to 80% about a year ago (don’t worry, I’m on it. Mis-selling, innit) we left home with ‘280 miles’ on the car. But having travelled just 60 of them to Gatwick, we had just 145 left. Ok, I know, maffs is not normal in EV-world. By the time the meet’n’greeters had taken it away and brought it back, we had 90. And that ain’t enough for a 60 mile journey. Nothing like enough. Unless you want to ride at 45mph with the heaters and radio off.

So after retrieving the vehicle after our delayed flight, we went to the local charging station. The good news being, it was fantastic. They’re called ‘gridserve’ and it is brilliant. About 25 fast-charging stations, 10 for Teslas, the rest for proper cars not driven by tossers. And you just wave your card, plug’n’play. They do have a (fucking) app, but you don’t need it. So I didn’t.

What do you do at Gatwick when it’s midnight and you need to kill 20 minutes? Clue: there’s a McDonalds next door. We hadn’t eaten since a very light lunch and BA don’t feed the cheap-seat rabble. Therefore, all the boxes were ticked which are essential to justify dicing with death in my favourite store in the world. And they sell coffee. Hence today’s pic; my excitement after ordering!!! We eventually made it home by 2 o’clock.

And as we were then coming home, America invaded Venezuela. The bombed bits of it, not the bits with the oil, obviously, just other bits. And then, incredibly, they kidnapped Nicolas Maduro and his wife. Flew him… somewhere. No idea where. Only Trump knows that.

There’s no question that Maduro is a total motherfucker. He’s disgustingly corrupt, has no control over his country’s drug lords, nor the safety of innocent Venezuelans. The country has the largest oil reserves in the world. More than Saudi Arabia. And yet, under this ultra-socialist (phah!) leader, most of the population live near to starvation. Which is why he’s a mate of Corbyn. To show us how such people run an economy.

And yet…

Is it right for a nation to invade another and rip the president out of his life? Even if he’s only still president because of rigged elections and elimination of opposition. Is it ‘right’ for one man (basically) to decide and orchestrate ‘regime change’ in a foreign country? If so; why aren’t we in Iran? There’s never been a better time to shaft the Ayatollahs. It would be like a ‘buy one, get one free’ kind of deal. And how about China? I know, they’re a bit nuclear which makes it more difficult. As with Russia.

If you start with ‘bad leaders’ and removing them, where does it end?

Happy welcome home Saturday

A xxxx

“British Airways would like to apologise to travellers on flight BA666 (all BA flights now carry the devil’s number) for the 2 hour, possibly 3 hour, maybe more, delay. This is due to a shitstorm over Gatwick/Heathrow/City. We hope this will not inconvenience you too much. Don’t think of complaining, you’ll be wasting your breath. British Airways would like to wish you all the Happiest of New Years.”

So we arrived at Tenerife airport. And we arrived early. Because we’re clever. And read about how passport control at this airport is horrendous. So even with the traffic jam on what they loosely call ‘the motorway’ over here, we still arrived 3 hours before our flight. In part because it was pissing down, again, so what we gonna hang round for? The pool?

But being Tenerife airport, BA don’t have their own check-in desks. No-one does. They kind’a ’hot desk’ across the arrivals area. So you can’t drop your bags until they’ve assigned a desk number to the flight. And we’re so clever, we sat there for 45 minutes before that happened. Huh! How’s that for clever?

Then we learned that our flight is delayed. An hour. And 3 minutes, to be precise. At this precise moment.

The good news was; passport control was a doddle. No queue. No hassle. Unfortunately, the rest was all bad news. And when we finally make it back to Gatwick, we’re gonna need to charge Mel’s car before the ride home. At Midnight. In Gatwick.

Fuuuuuuccckkkkkk

A xxxx

I’d just like to reaffirm that I make no judgments. As sentence with similar usage as MPs saying ‘let me make this perfectly clear’ telling you they’re going to avoid answering in as many ways as possible. And in this particular instance, I’m making no judgments about accents. Regional accents. The reason for which I can assume a position of impartiality is that I growed up in East Luundun, dinn’I? And some say I still have the lingering vestiges of that horrendous sub-Estuary Mockney. To which I reply: FAARK ORFFF YA NOB-END OR I’LL CHIN YA!!!!

So if I even notice accents, it’s from a completely neutral standpoint. It’s not about implied superiority for those with BBC, ‘received pronunciation’ type speech. You really don’t have to sound like a cross between a 1937 radio broadcaster and a Wing Commander from RAF Dambusters to get along in the world.

But here, in Tenerife, we have a whole range of accents to pick on. Sorry, to choose from. Obviously there’s a Spanish one. Don’t mind that. At least they’re making an effort. Unlike the Northern Irish. Who sound like they’re not making any kind of effort to be understood by anyone from outside the Province. And we do have a rather large contingent of those from Belfast here. No idea why, maybe there’s some kind of pact going on, maybe Spain’s the only country which will admit those from NI? I could understand a blanket ban.

But the ‘cream of the crop’, accent-wise. Or perhaps the ‘bottom-of-the-barrel’ more appropriately, is the Liverpudlians. With accents so thick that they can’t even be understood by other Liverpudlians. It’s not English. as we know it. It’s not anything, as anyone knows it. I don’t extrapolate this complete lack of communication ability with some kind of delayed evolution. (Communication being a virtual apex of evolutionary progress). But the scientific evidence does lean strongly to such a conclusion. If these people weren’t wearing Liverpool football shirts you’d think they came from some pre-lingual outpost of a lesser known planet on the edges of the Milky Way. Also, having a Liver-bird tattooed on their faces is a bit of a giveaway.

It’s raining here today. Not in an English, grey, drizzly kind’a way, but in a more sub-Saharan African kind’a way, where you know its raining because it hasn’t stopped since they dragged me and Lila out of the pool (because we were getting wet???) and there’s six inches of water across everything. Proper rain. Though unfortunately it’s not really much less wet that the type we get at home.

I expect no sympathy.

Happy New Year everybody; let’s hope it’s a good one. Ok, a better one.

A xxxx

I just can’t understand how, for the 57th consecutive year, I’ve missed out in the New Year’s honours list. It just makes no sense whatsoever. I mean, just look at me, ffs, I’m worth a CBE just for being gorgeous. But when you take into consideration all my wonderful benevolence and my vital assistance to ‘the community’ (that vague and meaningless conglomeration of worthless freeloaders and tax avoiders), it is an actual crime against humanity, against morality, against… against me! I should be a Lord, no question about it. I’d take a knighthood. Shit, I’d take ‘Dame’ in front of my name if there was one begging. But no. Iris Elba gets one for earning 225 million quid a year making Luther and rubbing up against Ruth Wilson. I’d do that for nothing. Daniel Levy gets a CBE or OBE or some other useless set of letters which come AFTER your name, so are of no value whatsoever, and as some joker pointed out; another who has to get his rewards by leaving Spurs. They awarded some useless woman an OBE for getting sacked by the BBC for showing the Gaza documentary which was produced by Hamas, FFS.

So getting sacked by the Beeb is worthy of an ‘honour’, whereas being a perfect human being gets you fuck all. Again.

I give to charity. Ok, I bunged a pound coin at a homeless man, but only to distract him so I could nick his can of Tenants Extra. Which would cost 2.47 in Tescos, so that shows great ingenuity as well. Yet I remain honour-free. I’ve done more to sustain the black economy than all the market traders in Bethnal Green. But get no recognition.

When I was at ‘number 10’, many years ago, for a Chanukah party, I shook hands with David Cameron. I palmed him a £50 note, with a big wink, assured that I’d be Lord Conway before the week was out. All I got was note thanking me for my donation to the Conservative Party and price list for honours, starting at 22,000 for a CBE.

So I’ve decided to adopt a more egalitarian approach. I’ve become ‘anti-honours’ as they exist to sustain the horrible class system in our nation. To exemplify all that is wrong with Britain. That ‘entitlement’ comes from the word ‘title’ and we can all live without them. Happily. Or, in my case, miserably. We can live without aspirations to Little Lord Fortleroy, we no longer have to ‘doff our caps’ at some poncey tosser because his grandfather’s uncle was given a back garden by Henry VII’s third cousin. We are a nation free from the malevolent class system which has ruled here since King Canute pulled the sword out of the lake. Or someone did something like that, anyway.

I’m free from worry. Free from title. Free from destructive and anachronistic class system in our land.

Happy Tuesday

(Sir) A xxxx

Before I get started on the football, in which I intend to focus on every single second of Spurs remarkable and outstanding victory at Crystal Palace, I just want to offer my words of support and…. in fact, adoration, for Alaa Abdel Fattah, and welcome him back to HIS home nation. Where he belongs. Among his brethren. Both conceptual brethren and by virtue of his British mother, brethren. He became a British citizen in 2021, arriving symbolically at the same time as the second wave of covid, and then was in prison in his other favourite nation, Egypt. Where he’s languished for a decade. But ‘we’ got him released and freed and managed to return him to… the nation he… well, there’s the question.

Kier Starmer, the bandwagon-jumper’s, bandwagon jumper, jumped in before even one of his 724 advisors, researchers, helpers, image consultants, hair-dressers, rabbis (for when he’s ‘Jewish’) or lawyers, had the chance to stop him, to consider his words, to edit him, and basically declared that if he (Starmer) was gay, then Alaa would be chosen to father his children. The was simply no level of praise too strong, to passionate and too uninformed for our PM to gush with over our returning ‘hero’. And he is a hero. Fighting for gay rights in Egypt is never going to endear you to the authorities, but he did that. And fought for democracy. Great guy. Right.

So the posts Alaa made in 2010, 11 and 12, stating that he’d like all zionists murdered, that all ‘colonialists’ should die (interpret his definition of ‘colonialist’ how you wish) and that he’s a racist who ‘hates white people’, they got somehow missed by Starmer’s dedicated team designated: ‘we must try absolutely ANYTHING to try and make this pathetic man appear good or desirable in any possible way’.

But it’s ok! Starmer’s saved!! Because Alaa has said that his posts were ‘taken out of context’ and he apologises unequivocally for them. Oh. So that’s ok then. Phew. The PM dodged one there.

Whereas Crystal Palace dodged 2. Spurs won the game 3 nil. But the actual score was: Palace 0, Spurs 1, VAR 2. As once again those total bastard scumbags in VAR central conspired to rob us of 2 perfectly good goals. Other than the offsidey bits. Yet my team came through anyway. Worthy victors of a rather odd game. Very open, very flowing, but both sides faltering in the final third. Where VAR comes into its own.

It was a brilliant victory. Because it was a victory. And we are soooooo short on those this season that we can only see this as ‘the turning point’. We’ve so far had 17 ‘turning points’ this season, all of which proved to either not ‘turn’ enough, or to carry on turning until they come back full circle. Thus not turning at all. But we remain confident. Positive. Forward-thinking. And probably deluded. It’s how we cope.

Happy, post-victorious, Monday

A xxxx

And this photo: could they be related???