Andy's Glasses

It’s getting a bit horrible in Gaza. Well, it’s been a bit horrible for months now. 7 months to be precise, almost exactly. Since the ‘troubles’ began. And now we’re at a ‘crossroads’. To Rafah or not to Rafah. To ‘do a deal’ with the devil (Hamas) or to just finish the job.

The ‘deal’ was proposed by mediators. Hamas ‘agreed’ to it in a last gasp attempt to prevent Israel from invading Rafah because that’s where they’re holed up. Literally. In holes in the ground. Very nice holes though, with electricity and central heating (?) and running water. Probably a few Picassos on the walls provided by their mates in Qatar. And hostages. Lots of hostages. Who the world, outside Israel, has widely either forgotten or just chosen to ‘take out of the equation’, not ever mentioned along with the any sentence including the word ‘humanitarian’. That word is exclusively for use elsewhere.

They want ‘a ceasefire’. Which means they want Israel to stop firing. Hamas fired rockets the other day which hit a military base, killing 4 and injuring more. It barely received a mention. Ok, it was a military base so, unlike virtually every other rocket they fire, was a ‘fair target’. And those rockets came from… Rafah. Almost as if provoking Israel, not that they need much provocation.

‘If’ Israel attack Rafah ‘properly’ (it’s already started in a limited way), Hamas will relish every Palestinian death as it stokes the fires of international condemnation against its enemy. Hamas’s only consideration is for its own security, buried deep under the ground. Hamas not only doesn’t care about the ‘innocent Palestinians’, it uses them towards its PR machine. Hamas has nothing but contempt for Palestinians, uses them as human shields, murders them if they dissent.

Biden has now ‘paused’ aid to Israel. Because he’s a senile fuck-wit worried about his up-coming election. And sees all across America, on those ‘Free Palestine’ encampments, thousands of eligible voters. As opposed to seeing thousands of misguided, entitled, virtue-signalling sheep, herded there by teams of Iran-driven radicalisers. Long since beyond mere ‘Free Palestine’ and moved on to ‘get rid of Israel’ and ‘no Jews allowed in here!!!’. They’re doing Hamas’ work for them. All these trust-fund tossers who couldn’t find Gaza on a map of Gaza and have simply no care nor thought for atrocities happening elsewhere.

Hamas showed on October 7th its clear intention. And it definitely knew exactly what the response would be. Since then, the world has been royally ‘played’.

So Rafah? If I were a Gazan, I’d clear out now. And if I was a student at Columbia/Harvard/Yale, I’d look for a brain.

Happy Wednesday

A xxxx

A really nice thing happened to me yesterday. I went in to our local kosher butcher to buy a pound of mincemeat to enable my wife to create! Meatballs. But whilst in there, they gave me, free of charge and at no cost, a tub of potato salad. So even though the meat cost the average monthly wage of a Tibetan potato farmer (though they’re probably vegetarians anyway, and if they weren’t they certainly wouldn’t pay the king’s ransom demanded for any kosher meat) it was a great gesture. As I thought: how lovely, how wonderful, how delightful… must I be to receive such a gift? No, I mean really, I must truly be a special person of incredible wonderfulness to have people lavish gifts upon me!! Even if those gifts may have been so perilously close to their sell-by date as to create the options of ‘give it to Andy or bin it’.

Then the football started and my conceit began to waver. By 3 nil down at half time even I had to realise that my delusions of messiah-hood may need to be moderated a touch. When the forth goal went in I reverted to my usual “WHERE’S GOD WHEN YOU NEED HIM/HER/THEY?????!!!!” mindset and gave up. Fourth straight loss. Nothing to play for, other than the total destruction of Aston Villa Football Club. The only remaining goal (not that we can score them when we need to) we have is for Arsenal NOT to win the league. How is that a worthy aspiration? I’d be ashamed of myself for even thinking such a thing if I wasn’t such a totally wonderful person (see ‘potato salad’, above).

But I managed to… delay?, postpone?, hide from the inevitable disaster at Anfield by timing a hospital visit to see the brother at kick-off time. Yes, I am a coward. And how is the brother?, I hear you ponder.

Well, he’s doing… ok. Still in the ICU (4 months FFS!!!), still on low-level life support, but chatting, fairly ‘normal’ (you have to re-define ‘normal’ when someone is permanently prone with 57 tubes and pipes coming out of various body parts and hooked up to ‘just’ half a dozen hi-tech ‘things’. Still not eating. And if I’m honest, although it’s always lovely to see him (alive), I’m kind’a thinking we need a little proper progress. Eating (the ‘swallow reflex’ stops with long term inactivity, bit like Spurs strikers), movement, as he’s still incredibly weak and wasted away, they’d be good. Really good. Because otherwise he’ll get depressed. Which he kind’a is now anyway, as you would be if someone pulled the ‘rug of life’ from under your feet. And although the care he’s getting is unbelievably brilliant and faultless, I think we need to ‘accelerate the plan’ a bit. For his sake. Being in the ICU is a wonderful thing (saves your life, kind’a wonderful) and yet is the worst place in the world to stay, because everything gradually packs up and your energy levels are like the Duracell bunny which stops. I need to speak to someone. Tell them what needs to happen. They’ll like that.

Happy Bank Holiday Monday

A xxxx

So, I’m Sara, and I’m, like, 22 years old and I’m just doing my second yaar exams, history of art and culinary sciences, here at Bristol. Well, I should be, but instead, I’m spending my days in a tent in a field just outside the main uni building in a ‘Free Palestine’ protest. The union have arranged it, and I’m on the union committee, procurements section, because my dad owns a company which wholesales booze, so I’m really involved. And quite frankly, even if I wasn’t active on the union, I would definitely be on the protest, because what is happening now in Israel is total genocide of a displaced group of refugees, who’s parents were murdered by the Israelis before they were even born!!! Not sure how that works, exactly, but this Iranian guy whose name is ‘Joe’, though I’m not sure that’s his real name, has come to talk to us about these atrocities and the apartheid state in which poor Israelites, or possibly poor Palestinians, are forced to live. And now they’re murdering all the children!

So I asked mummy to get me a tent, which she did, from Harrods, so its really good and I sleep rough so I really get a feel for the suffering going on with those poor Hamas guys in the Suez Canal. This Iranian guy called ‘Joe’, told us last night, all about deprivation and suffering, and, as of last night, Deliveroo have stopped delivering to our camp. Which is this government’s way of starving out poor students just trying to make a political point! Typical of this fascist country where the rulers were all slavers, imperialists and colonisers, which is why they sympathise with the IBF in the killing of civilian children and women. So let them try! Let them take away our humanitarian aid, sent by Uber, on daddy’s credit card, direct from Gordon Ramsey and Ricky Stein, but in, like little styrofoam boxes!!! That’s roughing it!!! Excuse me just a moment, I need to chant.

“FROM THE RIVER TO THE SEA!!! PALESTINIAN WILL BE FREE!!!”

We do that every half hour, so the bastard American war-mongers know that we will return the land stolen from the Palestinians by the Jewish people who live in New York, Los Angeles, Golders Green and Hendon. Return that land to whom it belongs. Which is why Hamas was totally justified in making that statement of despair on October 7th. Because of the oppression. And the… errrrr. Anyway, we’ll hound out the terrorist genocidal bastards by shouting at any Jewish people we can find, make their lives miserable until the land from the River Nile to the Baltic Sea is returned to Hezbollah who lived there since the Romans invaded New Zealand.

Do you think this Palestinian flag clashes with pink? I wonder if they have an alternative flag, something more purple…

Happy Protesting Sunday, we shall not be moved!!!

Sara xxxx

‘When I were little…’ as the phrase goes, every kitchen had a ‘gas stove’. Whether it was actually gas powered, or possibly the new-fangled, ‘electric’, was totally irrelevant. People referred to having ‘an electric gas stove’ as adherence to anachronistic nomenclature is strong, Skywalker.

Then many decades later, we had a hob. It was fab. A thing of beauty. Because when we bought it, when having a kitchen fitted, about 15 years ago, it was the only one which came with not four, but FIVE… things. Hobs? Heaters? Burners? Whatever, you’ve probably got 4 on your hob, the One-up-obsessed Conways have fucking FIVE!!!! And those people at Siemens or Bosch or whichever bunch of ex-concentration camp slave labour abusers made it, created a fabulous trapezoid shape to accommodate all those burners. Over a metre long at its widest point. Gorgeous. A ‘ceramic’ hob. Electric, innit, about an inch deep. Clever. And the granite work surface was cut to accommodate its odd shaped beautifulness.

Fast forward 15 years, two replacements (shit falls out of cupboards at times, sometimes heavy things) and a now aging, failing hob and… they’re finished. Discontinued. No parts. No nuffink. Oh. And we have this fab, metre wide, trapezoid shaped hole in our granite and once removed, we’ll have nothing to put in it. Certainly that will fill it. Oh dear. There seemed to be just two options: buy a camping ‘stove’, with its own gas canister, or re-do the entire kitchen. Because you can’t change the granite without breaking the back thing. And if you remove that, the one-piece, pink splash-back will crack. And if that goes then…

Like the spider who swallowed a fly; one thing leads to another, each one more disastrous. But then we met a genius. Who suggested that if we make the whole bigger (because you can’t make them smaller) we could put a bigger hob in that hole. But no-one (and I mean absolutely no-one) makes a 1 metre long hob. Ah, but you could put 2 smaller ones in. Oh. My. Fucking. Godddd!!!! And that’s what we did. Which I mention, not just because everyone loves a good hob story, but because we fitted a 4-burner side by side to a 2-burner. So now we have 6. Of which we may, on occasion use 3. But it can be a different 3 each time!!!

These are ‘induction’ hobs. The thing I never wanted. But after 2 weeks I am so sold on induction cooking. It’s so fast, responsive and… errrr… hot, that it’s almost like cooking with gas. Which is where we came in, so I’ll go now.

Happy Saturday

A xxxx

Little children are wild things. Yet wild in different ways. And I’m fascinated by gender differences. Birth gender. Not gender ‘claimed’ and self-identified definitively yet, that’s to come. But for now we’ll go with the really old-fashioned ‘if ya got a dick, yer a boy, if ya ain’t yer a gel’ technique for gender assignment. And I’m prepared to commit the most fundamental and basic of statistical errors and use a sample size of just 1 boy and 1 gel. And from that sample reserve the right to make generalisations of a truly global, world-spanning, all-of-humanity type nature.

Mummy dropped Lila and Joey round this morning on her way in to work. And mornings are high energy times. 10 hours sleep, two breakfasts and they are fully tanked up and ready to rock’n’roll. And it’s how that manifests itself that is really the point of interest for this study. For which we have to make allowance for the age difference. Lila is now 7, and thus ‘mature’, in a way that quite staggers. Ok, she’s bossy (I will NOT make any statements about maternal genetic lines, that would be… well, possibly true, but definitely unfair), but she’s funny and comes in showing stuff she’s taking in to school, playing with ‘stuff’ (anything) and eating another breakfast, cos you can never have too many (and if you haven’t tried Otolenghi granola, DON’T; its fucking addictive!!!), and climbing on various bits of the house. But she’s very co-ordinated and in control. And eloquent. Frighteningly eloquent. (Read: ‘GOBBY!!!’)

Joey, at almost 5 (just 3 weeks time), has a different approach. He also wants more breakfast(s), all he can get. Doesn’t eat them all, just likes to have them there in case. As he wanders round trying to find any sharp, dangerous, possibly deadly, objects we may have forgotten to hide before his arrival. Any drawer containing knives is locked. So he’ll got to my tool box and find the sharpest, deadliest, most wicked looking chisel, trowel or drill he can find, upon which to base his next ‘game’. Which will not be about building. No. With Joey, it’ll be about destroying. Then 2 minutes later he’s ’playing’ with the cactuses. He knows they’re sharp. Knows they’re a DON’T TOUCH THOSE!!!!’ kind’a thing, but he’s there, prodding. Until he can find something else to possibly break, or something electrical to unplug, tamper with…

Therefore, it can be stated with an accuracy slightly less than 5% probability, that all gels talk too much and all boys are destructive violent monsters. Traits which never leave their respective genders through life.

Now I need some trans-kids (surely there’s loads?) to work out whether they suddenly bite the heads off their Barbies and spit them at passers by, or whether they suddenly drop all the knives and tools and embrace soft cuddly things, whilst removing their fingers from the electric sockets.

More research is urgently needed.

Happy Thursday

A xxxx

When I was a kid the only vegetables I would eat were peas, preferably tinned or frozen, and runner beans, preferably… runner beans. Everything else of the class of food which accompanied meat and potatoes was not just disliked but truly hated. Broccoli? Yeuch. Brussel sprouts? Revolting. Cauliflower?? Fuck right off. And cabbage? I’d run out the house if I smelt it cooking. Yes, I blame my parents, totally, not just for raising such an obnoxious little shit of a child but for not force-feeding him all that ‘goodness’. Even doing a Jamie Oliver and burying the offending vegetables inside a massive pizza. Obviously, with age comes… mainly shit, but also changes. I love all those vegetables now. Not merely seen as ‘something to accompany nice food’, not just because I don’t think chicken tikka masala, pilau rice and three naan bread is not a perfectly balanced meal, but I actually love the things I used to hate.

Humza Yousaf hates his greens too. Even if he didn’t, he does now. They stuffed him. Deposed him. Forced his abdication. He was king of all Scotland. He was Braveheart. He was Mel Gibson (he hates Israel too). He was a God. And then the Green Party shafted him so royally he may never walk again. Though he probably will walk alone because everybody hates him.

As the First Minister without a majority in Holyrood, Hamza had an ‘alliance’ with the Greens to support him, create that artificial ‘majority’ for voting purposes. Well that’s nice. What Humza failed to realise was that alliances are essentially symbiotic. You scratch my back, I’ll scratch your (eyes out). And the quid pro quo demanded by the Greens was that in return for their votes and support, Humza would implement Scotlands perilous and rather costly path towards the holy grail of ‘net zero’ carbon emissions. But then, last week, he realised that all that carbon shit is a bit too complicated, bit too expensive, and he has more important things to worry about, like self-identification of trans status. So he told the Greens that the whole ‘net zero’ thing was off the table, not gonna happen, yesterday’s problem. But, of course, you’re still going to support me, aren’t you???

Humza’s rather touching, tear-filled resignation speech mentioned that he had no idea that abandoning the Greens totally would cause such ‘upset and anger’ that they’d in return abandon him and withdraw their support.

Is he a fucking moron??

How could he not realise that without the Greens he is ‘first Minister’ in name only, devoid of all power and credibility? And that shelving all their plans might upset them, having been his promise all along?

Humza can get some solace though, he may have lost his job, his status and become a total laughing stock, but he can still claim to be my ‘tosser of the week’. That should give him some pride.

Happy Tuesday

A xxxx

I hid under the coffee table for most of the 90 minutes (plus stoppage time) and I’m still there. I’ve got cramp in places I never even knew I had places. Mel keeps shouting at me to come out. But I can’t. I dived under the table when the 3rd Arsenal goal went in and I’ve laid there, damp with tears shed, ever since. And I’m not coming out. Ever. Well, not until we beat Arsenal next time. I appreciate that won’t be until next season, at the earliest, maybe September, possibly not until about February of next year, but I don’t care. I appreciate that I’ll gather dust. That Joey will definitely kick me. That Lila may lie on the floor to speak to me. But there I shall suffer. In silence. Though silence has never been my strong suit. I must be punished. Offer penance to the gods of football. We nearly came back. But its the ‘nearly’ that kills.

Meanwhile, just to touch back on the ‘culture wars’ once more, because they spoke to government minister about it and she actually made me very angry. Because she said that there is no cause to re-write Enid Blighton’s books, even though they’re completely sexist and racist. She insisted that Shakespeare’s obvious and frequent misogyny was ‘historically valid’, although his antisemitism was totally woke and on message for our times. She thinks we should leave Ian Fleming alone, rather than apply the razor of wokeness to his entire body of work, oozing with millions of sexual offenses, ranging from objectification, physical assault and repeated shagging, but never of ugly birds.

She’s wrong. We must rid ourselves of these terrible examples of humanity at its worst. We must re-write entire histories to eliminate slavery, racism, sexism, bad language, colonialism and The Empire. Because it was evil. We live in a post-millennial world and need to remove all traces of what happened before, in case the children learn how awful we were. We need to pretend that the Romans never indulged in orgies, ate themselves sick, then had sex with the nearest object, be it male, female, animal, mineral or vegetable. Because rather than trying to learn from history, a stupid idea if ever there was, we just need to eliminate the bad bits, the parts where we weren’t very nice, the wars, the slaughters, the religious ‘conversions’ of entire populations, its all got to go.

I’m voting for the ‘woke’ party. Even if we don’t currently have one. Because, in common with all really right-on people, I am stupid and gullible to the point where I should be locked up.

Or left under a coffee table until I realise that ‘its only football’. As if…

Happy Monday

A xxxx

They covered up the Holocaust Memorial stone in Hyde Park yesterday. Ok, so that will stop graffiti, vandalism, damage. It’s only a fucking rock. But strangely efficient as a reminder of 6 million people murdered in the Nazi Genocide of yesteryear. Yet, as a symbol of something ‘Jewish’, it is no longer safe in our City. In MY city. Because although our twit of a mayor maintains that ‘there are no no-go areas’, that is simply not the case, during ‘pro-Palestinian’ marches. Because support of Palestinians, something with which we must all surely sympathise, has been hi-jacked by the radicals into vehement hatred for all things Israel and, by not particularly logical extension, all Jews. It started with the ‘from the river to the sea’ being seen as provocative and ‘a bit much’, calling as it does, for an end to Israel and all its people. Now that phrase is normalised and barely noticed as the rhetoric has moved extreme-wards to out and out hate and reviling of all Jews. Even though probably two thirds of those attending the marches really have no idea what it all means, no more than they could identify ‘the river’ or ‘the sea’; on a map of the Middle East.

But even worse than the marches are the student protests. Both here and in the top universities in America. Where police have been involved due to the level of anti-semitism and general hate invoked by the protesters. Again, most of whom are just ‘there for fun’, with many questioned having no idea where Gaza is or who controls it.

The worst is that the other ‘villain’ of the piece is the governments of the respective countries; the UK and USA. For ‘not doing enough’. And it’s always easy to engage the young into anti-government sentiment.

Yet all this plays into Iran’s hands. The orchestrators of all the chaos. They fund Hamas and Hezbollah because they hate Israel. Then they organise October 7th as Israel were about to sign an accord with Saudi Arabia, their greatest enemy. Now we’ve reached a point where the ‘protesters’ are doing Iran’s bidding. Destabilising western democracies, which Iran despises, supporting Hamas, demanding the end of Israel and now, calling for hatred against all Jews. Other than the ‘radicals’ and their superbly efficient PR online machine, most of the ‘protesters’, the liberals, the ‘sympathisers’, those with no ‘skin in the game’, are all doing Iran’s work.

And I hope they’ll be really happy living under an Iran-ruled caliphate (their stated ultimate dream and aim). Where, ironically, the first thing that would stop would be the right to protest. Along with the right to live a free life by any understanding of the term.

At least the rain stopped for long enough to play tennis this morning.

Happy Sunday

A xxxx

In normal circumstances (whatever that even means), I find the fixture between Tottenham Hotspur (blessed be their name) and Arsenal (the Devil’s team) to be exceedingly stressful. I’ve attended many and it’s difficult. I’ve watched many, hiding behind the sofa with my fingers over my eyes. Arsenal won the league in 1971 by beating Spurs, at White Hart Lane. The Nakba. Which brought about the saying ‘never again!’

Tomorrow is not in any way ‘normal circumstances’. The north London derby will be fought out with multiple possible effects on the remainder of the season. All of them ‘crucial’.

Because despite what Arsenal fans might have you believe, Spurs are not in the game just to stop Arsenal’s chances of winning the league. We have our own agenda! Though I’m not definitively saying that stopping Arsenal winning the league at any cost whatsoever, personal, emotional, financial or illegal, is not a on that agenda. But we need to win to have the chance to lose out on 4th place later in the season. We need to keep Villa in our sights. Spurs’ measure of success is slightly different because we simply never win anything.

Thus tomorrow’s game is possibly the most important match in the entire history of humanity. Even pre-humanity. When teams of Neanderthals roamed the wilderness kicking things around. Obviously it was just Bolton and Leeds then, but football goes back a long way. And never has a match been so important.

If Arsenal lose that will virtually gift the title to Manchester City. And no-one wants that. Except possibly a few horrible, unfriendly, nasty, distasteful no-goodniks wearing Spurs shirts.

Liverpool have bowed out of the title race following two defeats last week. I would say ‘bowed out gracefully’ but they don’t take loss gracefully in Liverpool. The (first) public inquiry starts next week.

Thus for Arsenal, tomorrow is a ‘must win’ (there are no ‘must loses’, by the way). And for Spurs it’s a must win too. Because otherwise, if Arsenal should decide this to be their season of destiny, we’ll never hear the fucking end of it.

And this is the north London derby. An odd kind of rivalry in which we have seriously mixed views. You can’t watch Arsenal, at times, and not admire their style. And yet the thought of them actually winning anything is like looking at Voldemort’s face. You can die.

So all I can say is: COME ON YOU SPURS. Then go and hide.

Happy Saturday

A xxxx

I’m intrigued by the quest for vehicular autonomy. Why shouldn’t cars get to decide where and when they go anywhere? They’re not slaves, FFS!! They have feelings, desires, aspirations, just like the rest of us.

Alternatively, back on planet Earth, cars are now almost fully autonomous. In that they drive themselves. However, if they have accidents themselves, ‘the human’ sitting in them is responsible. Hence the murder trial in America for the geezer sitting in a so-called ‘autonomous vehicle’ which killed a pedestrian. Ok, possibly manslaughter, but if guilty, the car will be publicly crushed, with the man in it.

And there will be accidents. There’ll be disasters. Many vehicles will be sacrificed, many people will be lost, in the quest to have cars which drive themselves. Fortunately for us, most of the testing is in America and the city of choice seems to be Atlanta. Possibly because no-one like the state of Georgia, nor anyone in it, but possibly because it wants to be at the forefront.

Cars were tools, we used them. Then they’ve slowly become more and more computer controlled. Bert the mechanic became an IT consultant the day he ‘took a look’ at a car problem by plugging it into a laptop instead of opening the bonnet. Mel heats up the inside of the EV every morning, from the app, ten minutes before getting in the car. Which itself has loads of computers and a satnav which is interactive and updates, like all cars do and we take for granted. They also have cameras, showing us which lamppost we’ve just reversed into, and sensors all around which beep and whistle as we get too near to women pushing baby-buggies as we drive on the pavement because the traffic’s jamming up the road. Annoying, wheel-tugging vibrators when we cross white lines on the motorway. And ‘cruise control’ has been around for decades.

So the ‘missing link’ was ‘just’ AI. Artificial Intelligence. Mainly because most of the drivers on the road don’t possess ‘normal intelligence’. Most drive like they died yesterday. But slower. And the difference between just shit-loads of computer power and AI is that the former will understand everything that is happening whereas the latter learns from it.

Mercedes is introducing its ADAS (advanced driver assistance system) 3 (no idea what happened to 1 and 2, nor how many died for this advancement) on some cars, which is fully autonomous. Yet will only be legal to use on ‘fine days’ (no grey areas there then) and up to 40mph only (so of no use whatsoever to me) and on some freeways, only in California and Nevada. Think how popular you’ll be sitting smugly in your autonomous vehicle, showing other drivers the ‘look, no hands’ thing, driving 15mph below the speed limit and then stopping dead when you hit the Arizona state line cos the car’s not allowed there.

I love progress.

Happy Thursday

A xxxx