Andy's Glasses

So you go to a doctor, listen to what he says (or even ‘what SHE says’!!), have scans, take bloods, prod around a bit, wait for results, which say: yeah, you’ve got a problem with your hips. Not sure what it is, but probably…

And they tell you to stop playing tennis for 6 months. A year. Forever!!!

So me and Spurs Paul have adopted a more ‘pragmatic’ approach to orthopaedic medicine. Something along the lines of reciprocal co-diagnosis, using only ‘holistic’ and ‘homeopathic’ (its not an ‘LGBT-etc type thing, honest) methodologies, we’ve created our own ‘cure’.

We played tennis 2 weeks ago, possessing, between us, just one fully functional hip. It was not a beautiful game. Lacked the normal ‘stylish elegance’ (yeah; right) associated with players of such a high calibre. After an unprecedented hiatus of 8 weeks!!

But in playing, against, possibly, some of vague and wooly advice given to us collectively by doctors, physios, bone-cutters and assorted nursing sundries, our 3 errant hips have been much better than they were before. But, like, no problem at all!!

So we played this morning with our usual ‘gay abandon’ (see: LGBT- above), despite any direction or implication by any so-called ‘medical professionals’ not to do so, and we played just fine. None of the trepidation of last time, no holding back, no ‘protecting’ dodgy joints, just tennis, pure and simple, as it should be. By two people, as purely simple as you can be without getting a grant for a carer, who feel that your general well-being is just as important as some specific, old-age type joint issues and their injury prevention.

Doubtless I’ll get a bollocking on Tuesday when I see my orthopod for scan results (hip joint 4, bursitis 3; heart(s)1, knees 2…) or on Saturday when my physio returns from his hols, but I don’t care. We don’t care. We’re that ‘ard; and, possibly, twice as stupid.

Happy Saturday

A xxxx

Open the champagne, send up the rockets… NO!!!, not those ‘rockets’, the fireworks, FFS, and say a prayer of thanks. The war is over. There’s peace in the Middle East. Donald Trump should be awarded not just the Nobel prize for peace but for physics too, and literature, any others they have begging. And how appropriate would it be that the reward for ending the destruction and demolition be given with money earned from dynamite? Nobel’s legacy to the world; money and the power for unlimited explosions.

The ‘Peace Plan’ has been signed. In Egypt, this very morning. Phew. Its over. What could possibly go wrong…

The answer, of course, is ‘everything’. The 2 sides in the agreement are… short on trust for each other. But with help from the Egyptians and Qataris on one side and Donald Trump on the other, there is every possibility of the peace lasting 37 hours. Possible even more!!!

The hostage exchange I’m hoping beyond hope will happen before it all goes tits up. Because that’s the most important thing. 48 Israelis, half of them now dead, in return for a few thousand… Well, the very nature of how to describe them depends on your first bias. Calling them ‘prisoners’ is fairly neutral. Netenyahu calls them ‘terrorists’. Many call them ‘detainees’. Which is to dignify them and create an aura of unfairness over their being held in the first place. Like they got a parking ticket and were imprisoned because they were Arabs. Whereas the reality is that these ‘detainees’ are people who have murdered, maimed and sought to inflict grievous harm on Israeli citizens. Some of them the Israelis won’t release. They’re Hamas hierarchy and have so much blood on their hands that to release them would be foolish.

Hamas disarming is another… sticking point? They must, according to the plan, but they won’t, on principle or for any reason on earth. Saving ‘innocent Palestinians’ really has never been on their agenda.

And there’s the Israeli hard-liners. Netenyahu’s political ‘allies’ who have been the cause of massive unrest in Israel since long before the October 7 massacre. They won’t sign off on the peace agreement. So it’ll still get signed, by Bibi, but it won’t have the full backing of government. Because the likes of Smotrich and Ben Gvir are extremists who should never have a say in matters of peace because it’s not on their agenda.

There’s a big deal being made about the Israeli strike in Qatar. That it was a ‘turning point’ because it upset Trump to the extent that he has forced Netenyahu’s hand after acting without the President’s blessing and attacking the nation who’d just given the Trumpster a $400million airplane. I can’t buy that. It’s simply impossible that Israel could have flown fighter jets over America’s largest air base in the Middle East without them knowing and thus consenting. In which case, I say ‘good for Trump’. He ‘plays’ everyone.

Let’s just hope that the peace lasts long enough for people to realise that getting rid of Hamas is simply essential for any continuation of that peace.

Happy Thursday… so far.

A xxxx

So what’s happening in the world of UK politics? Its sooooo exciting. Because nothing is happening. We’re sort of ‘in limbo’, just waiting for the current government to go, preferably before the chancellor’s next budget because it will make me poorer. No idea what she’s going to do (I don’t think she has much idea either) but it will hurt. Because she’s still banging on about ‘black holes’, but not in a ‘physics’ kind’a way. Its getting bigger, by the day, started by the rotten Tory government, and HIDDEN!!!, because the incoming government used the TGWU instead of KPMG to calculate the nation’s finances. Then she increased taxes to virtually guarantee that the ‘economic growth’ she can’t stop talking about, hasn’t happened and is unlikely to happen under this bunch of leaders. So nasty Rachel is personally coming to MY house to demand I pay the 30 billion quid; that being the approximate, average, almost mythical, size of that ‘hole’. Fair enough.

I can’t wait for them to go.

But who to replace them with?

The Tories are currently engaged in Conference, in Manchester. Apparently with a ‘do not disturb’ sign on the door because attendances have been awful. When Mel Stride made his fabulous shadow-chancellory speech on Monday, there were 17 people there. Including his mum and his dog. As he spoke about ‘scrapping business rates’. Wow! That would be fantastic for us City rates-payers burdened with that massively punitive ‘tax’. And I’m sure the Corporation of London would survive just fine with… errrr… like… no income whatsoever. But a great plan, nonetheless, and one I heartily approve of. His ‘leader’ speaks today. Even though 47% of the population (I may have used a degree of flexibility with that) don’t know her name. So ‘Whassername’ Badenoch will address Conference and tell us all her plans for…

It doesn’t matter. The election is sadly a long way off and the Tories now have only one party member in the entire nation under the age of 54. His name is Rupert Hedgehog-Hayes and he lives Worcestershire. With his mummy and daddy, even though he’s 42 years old and only slightly ‘learning impaired’.

The Liberal Democrats may or may not still be a political party but no-one knows for sure, nor gives a damn. I think their best course of action would be to cut Ed Davey’s bungee cord next time he’s up Big Ben, or Mount Snowdon, with his canoe.

Which leaves Reform UK. The problem? The solution???

All the major parties are running scared of Reform. We were blessed with Brexit because David Cameron was running scared of Nigel Farage last time he headed up a party. And now we’re in ‘Brexit-re-do’, part 2: The Immigrants!!! Nigel Farage, for what anyone says to the contrary, wants to ‘re-whiten’ Britain. He’s very clever and, obviously, like Jeremy Corbyn, like Tommy Robinson, like Robert Jenrick, like Adolph Hitler, claims to have ‘no prejudice at all’. So he plants the images. Shows the pictures of boat-people arriving. And, let’s face it, no-one likes a group of complete unknowns arriving uninvited to our shores. Are they rapists? Terrorists?? Do they have ‘cultural issues’, possibly about women? OUR women?? Farage is the ultimate populist. He can ‘push buttons’ like no-one before. But could we really trust him with running the country?? I’m not sure I could.

So, all things considered, as a glorious and proud nation: we’re fucked.

Happy Wednesday

A xxxx

Protesting has become the UK’s main industry. All other work ceases at the opportunity to get your keffiyeh and take to the streets waving your Palestinian flag, to sing a few songs which sound nice, at an ISIS convention, but are in fact calls for a (proper) genocide. So to ‘stop the babies dying’, it’s perfectly fine to call for the death of all Jews. Yeah, I get that. Totally on board. That’s not ‘antisemitism’, it’s to ‘stop the genocide’ (the other genocide, the metaphorical one).

And today, October 7th, the 2nd anniversary of the Hamas massacre, not one of those people described above will give but one thought to the 48 people still held hostage in the tunnels of Gaza after 2 fucking year. Half of whom are dead. But in fact that’s probably not true. The protesters are thinking of those hostages, because by taking to the streets today, a Tuesday, it makes a statement. That they’re prepared to take action on a working day specifically for the upset it will cause for all people who sympathise with the captives. There is no actual thoughts for the kids murdered and kidnapped at a rock festival. No consideration that women were raped, burned alive, babies shot, whole families annihilated among the 1250 deaths and 500 taken captive. They are no longer ‘the issue’. Not that these good, moral, caring, considerate souls left their Hampshire knitting circles and their Surrey book-clubs to go out on October the 8th that year to have perhaps a vigil? A march of compassion? An understanding of the suffering endured after such a horrendous massacre. No, on that day they left it to their ‘brothers’, who rode up and down the Edgware Road and the Finchley Road waving Hamas flags and celebrating the slaughter of innocents.

The Prime Minister himself(!!!) has asked people NOT to protest today, but to show some compassion, sympathy, decency. He said to protest would be ‘un-British’. Whatever the fuck that means. In all honesty, Kier Starmer trying to stop today’s protest almost had me reaching for my keffiyeh.

I saw a video yesterday. One of several I’ve seen in which someone is cutting down the rows of yellow ribbons put up to support the hostages. They’re not there to show support for bombings or the IDF. Nor arms sales or invasions of the West Bank. The yellow ribbon is about the hostages. And this heartless or moronic bitch was cutting them down. Probably not even aware of their significance other than ‘its something to do with Israel’. I’m not sure what that says, but it ain’t good.

For God’s sake, free the hostages. What’s left of them.

A xxxx

Having a ‘rant’ is good for the soul. Just don’t let anyone else hear. Not anyone who might be offended. I ‘rant’ often. Then I read it through (sometimes) and check that what I’ve written will only deeply offend those I want to deeply offend. But writing such things gives you the wonderful, face-saving, ‘power of the edit!’ You can delete whole passages and its as if they were never there.

Gary Neville can’t edit his gob. Ok, there’s a good argument that as his ‘rant’ was on video, he could have watched it through and taken out the offensive bits, the ‘racist’ (we’ll get to that) bits and the downright stupid bits. But that’s basically the entire thing. And Gary is really not the sort of person who doesn’t think that the whole world eagerly awaits and digests every wonderful word that comes from his superlative brain and out of his horrible Mancunian gob. If he’s thought it; THE WORLD NEEDS TO KNOW IT!!!

Its an arrogance. Born out of being lucky enough to be a slightly-above-average right back in a team festooned with superstars. Giving him a status as a footballer he didn’t really deserve. And wealth he could never have dreamed of. But Gary is much brighter than your average football player. And is a really good pundit of the game.

However; underneath it all he’s just a gobby northerner with a chip on his shoulder, from always living in the shadow cast by best mate AND team-mate, David Beckham.

So Gary started his rant, talking nicely about the terrible murders in the Synagogue near where he lives. (Its all ‘up north’, how far can it be?) But within seconds he segued into Union Jacks and cross of St George flags. Being hi-jacked by ‘middle-aged white men’. The bit that’s ‘racist’. Its not racist at all. How can it be? Gary Neville IS a middle-aged white man, ffs. What it is is stupid stereotyping, not entirely off the mark, it must be said, but one of those truisms that ‘mustn’t be said’.

He blamed the rise of ‘the right wing’, the rise of ‘the left wing’ (to which he is strongly attached) and, pretty much, the rise of ‘everyone in the middle’.

The bits he got almost right are that the flying flags are offensive to some. Mainly due to previous association with neo-Nazis. So a week after the Labour conference ‘reclaimed the flag’, en masse, in the most cringe-worthy moment in UK political history, Gary has decided that his party failed to do so and anyone flying a flag is a right-wing, Farage supporting, racist Brexiteer. He calls out the divisiveness in our society, which eventually led to the murders in the synagogue.

And to a degree, that is correct. He just got the particular ‘divisions’ in the wrong place. Flag flyers didn’t attack Heaton Road. That was due to other ‘divisions’ in our society, creating ‘open season on Jews’. Divisions caused or enabled by our hapless government, our prejudiced press and the increasing tolerance of the police in dealing with messages of hate and genocidal intent at protests.

So Gary Neville will soon be an ‘ex-pundit’ on Sky, one feels. The uproar from Sky subscribers, many of whom are probably middle-aged white men, will render him unemployable in his current role. Oddly, it took the BBC about 3 years of vile outbursts from Gary Lineker to get rid of him.

Happy Monday

A xxxx

I went out for dinner last night. I’m an omnivore. I can even do ‘vegetarian’, if I have to. And if it’s at Bubala, I don’t even complain. But it wasn’t about me. We were going out with me mate Mark. And he’s a different kettle of lettuce leaves altogether. Mark eats meat. Ok, he also eats… beef… errrrr… lamb… Ah!, chicken. That’s not meat. Sometimes even fish!!! Definitely not meat. When he went on a cruise round the Far East he sent me a photo. Ah, I thought, this will be Angkor Wat, the fabulous old temple in Cambodia. It wasn’t. It was a steak. Massive one. On the ship. When he sailed round Patagonia, I received no pics of icebergs, just meat. There’s no point getting off the ship for wonders of geology or fabulous historical artefacts when there’s so much meat to eat.

So we went to a local Turkish last night. Where we ordered a trough of meat. All fabulously charred from its short but meaningful life on an ocakbasi. It came with a gorgeous salad, which I ate. Other than half a piece of shredded red cabbage which was 4 of Mark’s ‘5 a day’. We had some chips, which was the 5th. And rice. But that doesn’t count. Chilli sauce, by my reckoning, made that 6!!! A bumper day for vegetables and vitamins. Oh, the meat was ok too. And we finished it. In case there was any doubt.

No doubts in the football yesterday. Spurs went to Elland Road and beat Leeds for their first home defeat in over a year. Welcome to the Premiership, Leeds. It was as convincing as all Spurs wins. Meaning: we won. Thank God. Arsenal also won, taking them top of the league as Liverpool lost their third match in a row. The first time that’s happened since 1853. Well, it feels like it. But in worse news, it was Chelsea who beat them. And no-one wants that. Manchester United won, which is terrible for the bookies as no-one ever expects them to win. And City beat Brentford who created a whole bus depot to try and ‘keep them out’, but no-one told them that Erling Haaland eats buses for breakfast.

Spurs are third. Just ‘where we want to be’. Because Liverpool are obviously a spent force now and Arsenal are on the verge of a total collapse. Why? Because I believe in the power of good over evil and in justice. Yin and yang. Astrology. Any fucking thing that works.

Happy Sunday

A xxxx

Why do we read books? Ok, or ebooks, for those literalists who can’t possibly be so unprecise as to equate the two. We read, same as watching a movie, to ‘take us away’. From reality. From ‘life’. From all the shit rushing round our minds. We detach. We take a time out and visit Slow Horses land. Or we take a trip to Wuthering Heights (if we really fucking have to). Or we temporarily place ourselves at the mercy of Stephen King’s imaginary dark world. And with reading, probably more than movies, definitely more than watching stuff on tv, you are completely absorbed. There’s no ‘room’ for stray thoughts of the outside world disturbing the… story. So because ‘the outside world’ is getting a bit obsessive at the moment, I FUCKING NEED AN ESCAPE!

I just finished ‘The last chair lift’ by John Irving. He’s my favourite author in the world. Along with Stephen King and Mick Herron, obviously. But unlike those two, his offerings to the literary world are way less frequent. Way, way less. You get about one every five years. But Oh. My. God. Are they worth waiting for. His books never relate in any way to each other, but they do have constant themes. Mainly, people who are a bit ‘odd’. Not in any grotesque way, just ‘a bit not normal’. He likes to write about small people. (He is not a big man). His characters often wrestle at school/college. (He wrestled at school/college). There’s lots of seduction of underage people by adults. Normally of boys but not in his latest. (I make no judgments). And as his books have progressed through the years, a degree of… non-hetero-ism has entered his fiction. (I can only wonder). Taken all the way to non-binaries in his latest. But the characters are rich. You ‘know’ them. And they’re wonderful. I read ‘the world according to Garp’ in about 1982. That was my first Irving. Its brilliant. Unusual. Then Hotel New Hampshire. Cider House Rules (like ‘Garp’, made into a fantastic movie). A Prayer for Owen Meany (one of his weirdest and best characters). And then everything else. Up to ‘chair lift’, in which all the weirdness of all his previous characters and storylines are distilled into a never-ending spiral of perfectly logical strangeness in the world he creates. I loved it. But I’m an ‘Irving-y’. Like a Swift-y, but for the literary classes. (In my other ‘class’, I’m a Swifty too, by the way, and love her dearly).

And now I’m reading a fab book by John Sandford. Who? Exactly. I’d never heard of him until a few weeks ago in the Sunday Times, they asked authors who they read. And Mick Herron (all kneel) said he loved John Sandford. I immediately bought 3. And they’re good. Great, in fact.

So go read a book. Because after a truly diabolical week, it’s the only way to escape the grim realities we need to consider.

Happy Saturday

A xxxx

I heard someone on the radio this morning saying the Manchester Murders were Kier Starmer’s fault. Because of his obvious failure to address rising antisemitism in our (once) fine land of freedoms for all and sundry, but possibly not for Jews. My initial thought was ‘well, steady on, the man’s a worthless robot who can’t think for himself, but we can’t hang yesterday’s attack on him’. And then I thought: actually, we can. And should.

When Nick Ferrari questioned the PM this week about his ‘recognition of the Palestinian State’, he asked why release of the hostages was not a PRE-condition of recognition. Starmer just spewed his normal line about getting the hostages out is paramount concern. Just not, obviously, important enough to prevent The Recognition. Because that was a matter of UK political expediency by obsessively bleating the current press-bias, like a media-driven sheep, to ‘say the right thing’. But then he expanded, for Nick, and said how its all about ‘a 2-state solution’ and NOT rewarding Hamas, because Hamas won’t be there for ‘the peace process’; it’ll all be in the wonderful absence of Hamas.

This morning on Nick Ferrari, the Israeli President stated what I’ve been banging on about for ages: THIS IS WHAT GETTING RID OF HAMAS LOOKS LIKE, ffs. Yet Starmer and all the international ‘liberals’, like vile Macron and hateful Mark Carney over in Canada, simply don’t get that. They think they’re ‘negotiating’ with some form of morally observant democrats who care about the people they allegedly represent. Rather than the murderous jihadis who know only death and ARE willingly starving, murdering and hiding behind their ‘own people’ to perpetuate the stupid narrative that world fucking leaders are falling for. Driven by all those voters who are also blind to reality and always eager to ‘blame the Jews’.

As one very clever lady pointed out this morning that yesterday’s murders were not ‘the start of something horrible’ but in fact the end of a continuum, which includes the ‘pro-Palestinian’ marches degenerating into Hamas love-fests and genocidal singalongs. Which includes failing to protect the very small and ‘vote-lite’ Jewish community, and obviously, the ridiculous and futile ‘recognition’ of a state which doesn’t exist, rewarding terrorism. All alienating the Jewish Community and isolating us into a place which feels a million miles from ‘safe’.

Kier Starmer ‘rushed back from Switzerland’ yesterday, as he had to, then ‘went to a synagogue’ for the end of the Yom Kippur service. Because he had to.

What he fails to realise is that I would estimate that at least 95% of Jews view him as an enemy. If that figure was less before yesterday, its probably now an understatement.

So YES, Kier Starmer, that atrocity is on YOU.

Happy Friday

A xxxx

Yom Kippur is a happy day. Ok, you don’t eat, but instead you’re elevated to a truly angelic plane, and you’ve never seen an angel in Burger King, have you, so for 25 hours, it ain’t gonna kill you to fast (STARVE!!!). And it’s happy because, if you take working and eating out of the equation, all that’s left is ‘rest’. And on a spiritual level (where you just KNOW is where I belong), I keep being told that the ‘atonement’ bit of the ‘day of atonement’ is not in the Christian/Catholic sense of the word with confessions and penalties and flagellation and crucifixion, but is about recognising your bad things and deciding to try harder next year. It’s an ‘internal’ thing. But the reality is that you do kind of ‘confess’ and ‘atone’, but all in one day. No need to go visit some pervy old priest in a little box every week. And then, at the end of the day, you get to eat. And it all tastes soooooo much better. And that’s Yom Kippur; starvation, absolution, feasting. What’s not happy about that?

But today was different. I was waiting my chance to absolve my sins when my mate The Legend came in. He’d just seen a video. Someone had attacked a synagogue in Manchester. Killed 2 people. Wounded others. Then shot by police. He was wearing what looked like a suicide vest. And that event, to say the least, took away a significant part of my happiness.

This… jihadi? Murdering fuckwit? Moronic extremist?, had not made a stance for Gaza. He wasn’t attacking the IDF. He didn’t take any action against Israel. He just set out to kill Jews. In this case, rather old (it’s that sort of synagogue, apparently) Mancunian Jews, on the holiest day of the Hebrew calendar. The fucker drove his car into the security guard at the gate, then stabbed him, and a few others. The synagogue had gone into ‘lockdown’ so he couldn’t enter. The police arrived very quickly and, because of the suicide vest, shot him dead. I’d have shot him slowly, but I wasn’t invited.

The security at my synagogue is always quite strict. When I went on my ‘shift’ they were on a different protocol from usual, even stricter. More people. Extra barriers. Regular police patrols. Armed?

But attacks on Jews concerns me. And concerns my children. And would concern my grandchildren but they’re more worried about watching YouTube and playing with Transformers at the moment. But what is their future like in this country? I know that sounds dramatic but there’s a horrible prevailing thought in our community (shared in Canada, France and probably many other countries) at the moment in light of the massive increase in antisemitism. As we sit in our comfortable homes with our lovely lifestyles, you can’t help but ponder: is this how the Jews in Berlin felt in 1933?

Not such a happy Thursday

A xxxx

I haven’t taken the tube to work for 2 weeks!!! I am now officially… a biker!!! Although you get less ‘!!!’ for an e-bike because there’s no real kind’a effort involved. But we can still enjoy the same levels of smugness as the boys in Lycra. (And gels in Lycra, who are much nicer to follow.) Because that comes from overtaking a row of 120 cars stuck in gridlock and taking the trouble to slow down next to every one to smile and give a ‘thumbs up’ to the seething drivers. The smugness going up three levels with drivers of… petrol!!, and diesel!!!! cars. Going through red lights generally endears you to everyone; drivers, pedestrians and, obviously, police. But when you arrive at the lights and there’s four-way pedestrian crossing flashing away, then cyclists are at complete liberty, legally and morally, to ‘become a pedestrian’, for tax purposes, and crossing purposes. Which further entitles us to intimidate the shit out of ‘other’ pedestrians, the ones, kind’a walking, if they get in the way.

However, all this biking into town is only because our nation is devoid of rainfall. If its gonna rain, I ain’t gettin’ on me bike. That’s the rule. Yet every day, there’s no rain forecast, none coming, none arriving. Which is a bit weird but shall be enjoyed while its (not) here. Because the cycle lanes have become the last, lawless wild-west wilderness. Enjoy it while you can.

Donald Trump has saved the world. Again. By his accounting, should the war end in Gaza, it will be the 8th war ‘he has stopped’. By anyone else’s counting, it might be the third. But give the man credit; he’s trying and at least succeeding in getting the 2 sides to talk. To a degree. But ‘The Big Beautiful Plan’, as its known, to instal the ‘Board of Peace’, (a beautiful name… really beautiful), has been given to Hamas, (not beautiful at all), with four beautiful days to agree. If they don’t agree, Netanyahu then has carte blanche to complete the destruction of Hamas, totally, whatever the cost. Which is a sizeable deterrent. Although if they agree to the terms, they get Tony Blair moving into a tent in Khan Yunis to act as de facto Emperor. I think I might go for the bombing.

Happy Wednesday

A xxxx